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Kam Williams Interviews Colin Roach
Author of Light
the Flambeau & Son of Poet Eric Roach
Colin
Keith Roach --
born and raised in Trinidad and Tobago -- migrated to New
York City in 1970 before moving on to Los Angeles seven
years later. He attended college out West, earning an
undergraduate degree in Industrial Engineering and a
graduate degree in Public Administration from California
State Dominguez Hills and California State Los Angeles
Universities.
In the mid-Eighties, he
studied ancient Egyptian history and its related
spirituality, authoring numerous articles on the
Egyptian philosophy of MAAT, focusing on its application
to contemporary life. After recently developing an
interest in filmmaking, he wrote a screenplay, “Light
the Flambeau,” and produced a very intriguing,
professional-quality trailer for it which can be viewed
at:
Born and raised in
Trinidad and Tobago, Colin Keith Roach migrated to New
York City in 1970 before moving on to Los Angeles seven
years later. He attended college out West, earning an
undergraduate degree in Industrial Engineering and a
graduate degree in Public Administration from California
State Dominguez Hills and California State Los Angeles
Universities.
In the mid-Eighties, he
studied ancient Egyptian history and its related
spirituality, authoring numerous articles on the
Egyptian philosophy of MAAT, focusing on its application
to contemporary life. After recently developing an
interest in filmmaking, he wrote a screenplay,
Light the Flambeau
, and produced a very
intriguing, professional-quality trailer for it.
By day, he’s the
Industrial Engineering Manager of a large fireplace
manufacturing company in L.A., though he’s currently
co-writing another script called “Downside.” Colin is
divorced and has two sons but he is about to remarry
soon. Here, he talks about “Light the Flambeau,” which
he hopes to turn into a full-length feature. The movie
is about a suicidal, 21 year-old college student’s
attempt to convince the father he has just met to take
him back to their
Caribbean
roots to heal his illness.
By day, he’s the
Industrial Engineering Manager of a large fireplace
manufacturing company in L.A., though he’s currently
co-writing another script called “Downside.” Colin is
divorced and has two sons but he is about to remarry
soon. Here, he talks about “Light the Flambeau,” which
he hopes to turn into a full-length feature. The movie
is about a suicidal, 21 year-old college student’s
attempt to convince the father he has just met to take
him back to their Caribbean roots to heal his
illness.
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KW: Are you
related to the late Trinidadian poet, Eric Roach,* who
is known as the black Yeats?
CR: He was my
father.
KW:
I was a black literature major, and enjoyed his work.
Where did you come up with the idea for
Light the Flambeau?
CR:
As they say, Kam, fiction usually has some elements of
truth to it. My son entered my life when he was 21. To
find answers, I simply drifted back through the
generations and my experiences from growing up in a
family in Tobago that really didn’t want me.
KW:
Do you identify with the main character?
CR:
There are two main characters and I identify with both
of them. I’ll let the audience decide whose story it is.
KW:
How would you describe the angst that he’s going
through?
CR:
When one is battling for survival in an unorthodox way,
you either build character if you don’t have it, or else
lose your fight. Imagine a 21 year-old propelled by
forces he cannot see, and fighting his inherited demons
on a journey to save himself. Bloom or doom, human
beings teach us something either way.
KW:
What genre of film would you consider this picture and
what themes will it be exploring?
CR:
To me and those who worked on the trailer, read and
edited the script, it’s a spiritual melodrama. In
Light the Flambeau,
people are struggling with the cards they were dealt,
and with the consequences of the decisions they made.
The results are deeply transformed characters.
KW:
What is your prior experience with moviemaking?
CR:
None.
KW:
Did you study cinema in school?
CR:
Just some workshops and classes in screenplay writing.
KW:
What audience do you expect this film to find?
CR:
We are really going after spiritual communities
globally, but specifically, the African-American,
Canadian, English, African, Caribbean and Brazilian
markets are our bulls-eye targets.
KW:
Are you looking for help to turn this trailer into a
full-length feature?
CR:
Boy are we! Part of our approach is to cast actors from
each of the regions I just mentioned. We already have
bios and photos from many actors. We have a budget done
and would really like our community businesses to
participate through our corporation that’s has already
been set up.
KW:
When did you decide to take a shot at showbiz?
CR:
I have lived in Los Angeles since 1977 but I am not
employed in that industry. Living here gave me access to
training and professionals but this type of project is
independent. Hollywood studios make action thrillers and
horror movies for 18 to 24 year-old audiences. They will
have nothing to do with these types of non-white dramas,
and that’s understandable. These stories must be told
independently. To be successful, we must take risks and
have support from like-minded people across the globe.
KW:
What’s the message of the movie?
CR:
I don’t want to give away much but I’ll say the story
suggests the human capacity to grow and adapt is
limitless when we step off the beaten path.
KW:
Do you plan to bring back the same cast members from the
trailer to be in the movie?
CR:
That’s up to the fine production company, Production HQ,
and Judy Marcelline who produced it. It’s their call,
but I’ll say probably not. I think they would love to
talk with Delroy Lindo about playing Noah.
KW:
Do you have any interest in perhaps acting in it
yourself?
CR:
Oh God, none.
KW:
Who’s your favorite director?
CR:
Mira Nira, the Indian lady who made Monsoon Wedding.
KW:
Don’t worry, he’s not a stalker, but Jimmy Bayan needs
to know where in L.A. you live?
CR:
The San Fernando Valley.
KW:
What do you do to unwind?
CR:
I am energized by going after Caribbean immigrant
stories. I have three log lines in the can. My cousin
and I are working on one about a young man who rejects
his family’s deeply-held values of hard work and opted
for a very different lifestyle. He is on a journey also
but in the wrong direction
KW:
It seems like you are on a journey yourself.
CR:
Absolutely!
KW: Where to?
CR: That’s the
mystery of life. We think we know where we are going,
and what we are doing, but do we really?
posted 24 February 2007
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The Flowering Rock: Collected Poems, 1938-1974
By Eric Merton Roach
This collection brings
together for the first time the work of one of the
Caribbean's major poets. It collects the poems published
in journals between 1938-1973, Roach's early
pseudonymous work and a substantial selection of his
unpublished poems from manuscript. The collection is
edited and introduced by Professor Kenneth Ramchand.—Publisher,
Peepal Tree Press, 1992
This is an
extremely important book. Before its appearance no
literary historian or critic, let alone lover of poetry,
will have been able to measure the full richness of West
Indian poetic creation. One always suspected that Eric
Roach was one of the major West Indian poets. This book
consolidates his name in a pantheon which includes at
least Claude McKay, Derek Walcott, Louise Bennett,
Martin Carter
and Kamau Brathwaite.
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I think what I respond to most is Roach's passion for
the land and the people, both of which are so clearly
and categorically West Indian. The intense feeling that
informs his best poetry - and so much of the poetry is
good—expresses a very specific yearning for a shared
identity which will leap over island isolation and bind
together our fragmented historical consciousness into a
coherent whole.—Ian
McDonald
The most splendid voice
of the Caribbean Renaissance
(1948-1972) . . . precious confounded Yeatsian & still
utterly Caribbean statements.
—Kamau
Brathwaite
This first
publication of Roach’s poetic corpus is quite simply a
major literary event.— Laurence
Breiner
Source:
Peepal Tree Press
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Black Yeats
Eric Roach and the Politics of Caribbean Poetry
By Laurence A. Breiner
In this impressive and much-needed book, Laurence
Breiner sets out to present a study of Eric Roach “as a
publishing poet . . . concentrating on how Roach in fact
presented himself—or found himself presented—before the
world of his contemporaries.” This means that while the
work of Roach the Tobagonian playwright, fiction writer,
and journalist exists as a sort of sunk context
surrounding or permeating much within the scope of
Breiner’s consideration, by the time page 279 (or page
297, for those who read endnotes) is reached, Roach
stands forth from the crowd of named and unnamed tragic
Caribbean figures who have pre-empted their natural
time, forcing the sea to swallow them up (his suicide
was in 1974)—to be known as himself, as much more than
the author of the occasional anthologised federationist
verse or the “hurt hawk” subject of posthumous tributes
. . .It is
through his literary skill as writer and reader, working with his
historical knowledge, that Breiner establishes his interpretations
of Roach’s evolving sense of self as a federationist poet, and the
tragedy of this rural Tobagonian whose voice did not find itself
heard in time for the times according to which it launched song and
endeavoured speech.—Vahni
Capildeo,
Caribbean Review of Books |
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Laurence A. Breiner is the author of
An Introduction to West Indian Poetry and a
member of the African-American studies faculty at
Boston University, where he teaches Caribbean,
postcolonial, and 17th-century literatures. He lives
in Boston.
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Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in
America
By Melissa V.
Harris-Perry
According to the
author, this society has historically exerted
considerable pressure on black females to fit into one
of a handful of stereotypes, primarily, the Mammy, the
Matriarch or the Jezebel. The selfless
Mammy’s behavior is marked by a slavish devotion to
white folks’ domestic concerns, often at the expense of
those of her own family’s needs. By contrast, the
relatively-hedonistic Jezebel is a sexually-insatiable
temptress. And the Matriarch is generally thought of as
an emasculating figure who denigrates black men, ala the
characters Sapphire and Aunt Esther on the television
shows Amos and Andy and Sanford and Son, respectively.
Professor Perry
points out how the propagation of these harmful myths
have served the mainstream culture well. For instance,
the Mammy suggests that it is almost second nature for
black females to feel a maternal instinct towards
Caucasian babies.
As for the source
of the Jezebel, black women had no control over their
own bodies during slavery given that they were being
auctioned off and bred to maximize profits. Nonetheless,
it was in the interest of plantation owners to propagate
the lie that sisters were sluts inclined to mate
indiscriminately.
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A Wreath for Emmett Till
By Marilyn Nelson; Illustrated by
Philippe Lardy
This memorial to
the lynched teen is in the Homeric
tradition of poet-as-historian. It is a
heroic crown of sonnets in Petrarchan
rhyme scheme and, as such, is quite
formal not only in form but in language.
There are 15 poems in the cycle, the
last line of one being the first line of
the next, and each of the first lines
makes up the entirety of the 15th. This
chosen formality brings distance and
reflection to readers, but also calls
attention to the horrifically ugly
events. The language is highly
figurative in one sonnet, cruelly
graphic in the next. The illustrations
echo the representative nature of the
poetry, using images from nature and
taking advantage of the emotional
quality of color. There is an
introduction by the author, a page about
Emmett Till, and literary and poetical
footnotes to the sonnets. The artist
also gives detailed reasoning behind his
choices. This underpinning information
makes this a full experience, eminently
teachable from several aspects,
including historical and literary—School
Library Journal |
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The White Masters
of the World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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Negro Digest / Black World
Browse all issues
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Enjoy!
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The
Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding
of Haiti
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