GREAT BAY, St. Martin (March 17, 2003) — The Caribbean tour of the Winternachten (Winternights) literature festival will open in St. Martin on April 4, 2003, with authors, poets and jazz musicians from St. Martin, Aruba, Curacao, Surinam, the Netherlands, South Africa and Indonesia.
The Caribbean leg of the tour “takes the band of artists in troubadour fashion from St. Martin, where the caravan of words, lyrics and sound will pick up the St. Martin poet Changa and move on to Aruba, Bonaire and Curacao,” said Lasana M. Sekou of the House of Nehesi Publishers. The publishing foundation, the island government and Philipsburg Jubilee Library make up the team hosting the festival here.
“The people of St. Martin are in for a unique concert, the island’s first hosting of a literature festival that gathers poets, authors and performance artists from the four corners of the world,” added Sekou. Leading dramatist Ian Valz and poet Lyzanne Charles will also represent St. Martin during the Winternights recital here.
Under the banner theme of “Crossing the Seas/Crusa Lama/Krusa Laman” Winternights left its cold Netherlands base and began its international tour on March 10 in South Africa, where it is still going on. Following the Caribbean tour, another set of artists will take off for Indonesia, where Winternachten 2003 will conclude what the Haagsche Courant newspaper is already calling “One of the best editions of Winternachten.” The festival’s home-base opening in The Hague was in January and included a national tour of three cities.
Winternights is one of Netherlands’s most creative literature festivals, often including film, conferences on topics ranging from images of heaven and hell, cultural iconoclasm, the Dutch in the Arab world to copyrighting, and music from Ghana, South Africa, India, Indonesia and Cuba.
A key festival feature is to highlight national writers and writings from areas with Dutch language, political, colonial and historical ties. Guest writers often read in their national language with Dutch and English translations of their work projected on theater screens. Winternachten was itself launched in 1995, often taking place between January and February, and has virtually become part of the country’s opening cultural calendar in The Hague each year.