ST. MARTIN (October 2003) — The new book, Salted Tongues – Modern Literature in St. Martin by Fabian Adekunle Badejo is now available in St. Martin at Van Dorp, Arnia’s Bookstore, Shipwreck and the Jubilee Library.
The book was launched in St. Martin and Curacao in October 2003, said Jacqueline Sample, president of House of Nehesi Publishers. Salted Tongues is the St. Martin publisher’s sixth publication for the year.
In Salted Tongues, Badejo, an able writer himself, dares a tough look at St. Martin’s developing “national literature.” He knows the writers and calls names; he does not hold back his tongue or his pen in putting forward the crucial need for literary criticism and compares what’s happening in St. Martin to the serious literatures and book publishing in the wider Caribbean past and present, said Sample.
Badejo is probably best known for his long-running Sunday radio magazine Culture Time and as one of the island’s senior newspaper editors. In Salted Tongues the author comments on and goes light years beyond Wycliffe Smith’s important 1981 pioneer “survey of poetry in the Dutch Windward Islands.”
Badejo also touches on Saba and Statia, but his focus is St. Martin, attending to a “modern” classification of the published writers from Camille Baly to Lasana M. Sekou; from literature-related activities in the 1960s to 2003. Badejo then brings in the element of the island’s “language question” with a refreshing cross-reference to music that might make the sharpest Trinidadian scholar of literary and music criticisms raise an eyebrow.
With the very name of the book of essays cueing into what author Lasana M. Sekou calls “the cultural centrality of the Great Salt Pond,” Salted Tongues will probably more than surprise St. Martiners about their own literary and music production.
The topics covered and the quality of Badejo’s writing means that it will be impossible for the book to circulate only in St. Martin.
In his review of Salted Tongues, literary historian Dr. Wim Rutgers at the University of Aruba stated that, “Fabian Adekunle Badejo has contributed significantly to filling a gap in Caribbean literature and widen the scope about the authors of modern writing and the role of language, publishing and literary criticism in St. Martin.”