A series of chance encounters over a number of years.
- First Encounter: DON'T LOOK BACK (1967) in which a camera crew follows Bob Dylan at the height of fame, accompanied by an entourage, through a series of strange encounters with different people in the mid-60s UK. The most famous of these meetings are those with rival musicians and hostile journalists, but the value of the film is in the smaller, chance fragments that catch a moment in time, and the context of the place, around the music tour that is the intended subject.
A group of excited kids somewhere in Merseyside yell for Dylan to come out of a hotel, but when he appears they are lost for something to say. They ask the perennial question "Have you any brothers or sisters?".
Later the High Sheriff's Lady invites the entourage to stay at her mansion house in May, after she becomes the Lord Mayor.
A strange atmosphere throughout, tired out and strangely gentle, rainy landscapes glimpsed from big shiny cars, or old fashioned railway trains with the tall seats, through the glass old Northern townscapes are churned through Harold Wilson's white heat, becoming shiny and new.
Then there's a moment where Dylan meets another journalist, but there is something different about this encounter. This journalist speaks in a clipped, refined way and says he is producing a program for West African listeners for the BBC. There's something odd in his manner, using phrases like "The questions are four in number" before listing each interview question in full before actually asking them.
- Second Encounter: later, looking for images for an essay on a book by Samuel Selvon, who stands on the left of this photograph by the filmmaker Horace Ové. In fact, though he is difficult to recognise behind glasses, hat and beard, on the right is the same man from the scene in DON'T LOOK BACK. Somewhere between the second and third encounters, this link is made, and this man is Andrew Salkey.
- Third Encounter: walking into a new friend's flat which feels as though it's by the sea, though it's really at the top of a hill in South London. At the top floor of the building, it feels like being high up in a sailing boat, rolling around on the sea, you can hear the wind. On the bookshelf is a copy of HAVANA JOURNAL (1971) by Andrew Salkey. Flicking through, this book is about a trip to Castro's Cuba to attend the Cultural Congress of Havana held in 1968. Salkey goes along with C.L.R. James and the publisher John LaRose, who stands next to Selvon in the middle of the photograph from the second encounter.
According to this article on the George Padmore Institute site, the three writers were directly engaged in the debates at the international conference, questioning the ideas that formed the basis of the discussions, and even holding their own independent meeting in a theatre away from the main venue (a marked contrast to Dylan's own disengagement with straight-ahead politics? By this time the folk singer was in self-imposed exile, no longer touring and living in the countryside).
- Fourth Encounter: later, near the same flat, walking into a tiny bookshop. There's a copy of ANANCY'S SCORE (1973) by Andrew Salkey. This book features a series of linked short stories which use the folk character of Anancy, who features in West African and Caribbean folklore. The stories are collages of themes and language, combining references to old and new narratives, for instance placing references to the garden of Eden and the atom bomb in the same story, and using a writing style that contains a multitude of slang elements.
There are parallels with Bob Dylan's use of structures, characters and narratives from folk stories in combination with different sensibilities (rock music or slang or the city itself as a setting, that whole feeling of 50s/60s American underground culture). There are also some overlaps in ideas and outlook, one passage reading for instance
"It happened now one daytime when Brother Sun was stretching far up into the big blue, Brother Anancy and his wife were walking up and down the banana field in the place called The Beginning. You might think that the name of this garden is a funny coincidence of a name, but that is the personal business of all names. Names must lead people on and cause a lot of botheration. Believe me: there's no other way that names and tags can serve any purpose, particularly when people looking up to names and tags, and using them to settle affairs for all time. People trap names and treat them as final judges."
The book also features illustrations by Errol Lloyd, a Jamaican-born artist who was part of the Caribbean Artists Movement.
- Fifth Encounter: washed up, walking down the street one day, slightly lost, unsure of anything that is happening. There's suddenly a main road and another bookshop. Something about it calls out, and it produces two little artefacts. The first is an anthology for schools called Caribbean Prose, edited together by Andrew Salkey. There are stories by George Lamming and Edward Braithwaite. The second is a postcard of Victoria Square, Birmingham, 1932.
- Slowly putting together a sense of the work of Andrew Salkey. According to his obituary by Stuart Hall, he was born in Panama, went to school in Jamaica, and eventually settled in London, also working in Massachusetts. He created an enormous body of work, including an epic poem about the history of Jamaica that took two decades to write, and through working at the BBC, editing anthologies, working in publishing, and helping to start the Caribbean Artists Movement, he was instrumental in supporting and popularising work by Caribbean writers. According to the British Library, "He was jokingly labelled ‘Chief Recorder of Caribbean authors and their whereabouts’ by close friend Sam Selvon".
- What is there to say about this little journey? Encountering Salkey in all these different places, it seems like he is still travelling around and still spreading the word. Looking back at DON'T LOOK BACK, especially after looking at the great stories in ANANCY'S SCORE, the encounter between Salkey and Dylan seems a terrible waste, a missed opportunity, at best a failure of communication and circumstance, at worst something more sinister, potentially even ignorant, malicious.
- Happy times trailing around bookshops with friends, discovering all the famous and rebellious writers, but almost exactly at the same time finding by chance a copy of THE LONELY LONDONERS by Samuel Selvon, a quieter doorway into an incredible, seemingly endless constellation of writers and artists that is still quite difficult to access, slowly finding more old books by C.L.R. James, George Lamming, Joan Riley.
- travelling through texts, which travel through fictional places and representations of real places, or travel through real places as books, setting down on shelves, or travel with people, C.L.R. James losing Nan Milton's manuscript of her John Maclean biography somewhere in the underground, all the text put together is a big city full of chance encounters, encounters with histories that are overlaid back on the real city, a place to read in the park on the bus or with a friend, finding texts with friends and reading to each other, starting journeys through the places of texts and through real places that are pulled back through texts that are filtered back through places, texts begin the journey or come along and change it, and vice versa, you travel between the islands of the text and the place and the journey, all the text put together is an ocean crossed by readers and writers who crossed real oceans,
