ST. MARTIN (November 2003) — Over 100 people attended the book launch for Salted Tongues – Modern Literature in St. Martin by Fabian Adekunle Badejo on the Caribbean island of St. Martin.
The book by the former Nigerian diplomatic officer was published here by House of Nehesi Publishers www.houseofnehesipublish.com . A book signing in Abuja, Nigeria, is planned for early November 2003.
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 House of Nehesi president Jacqueline Sample.
Badejo, who has made St. Martin his home since 1981, 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 new House of Nehesi title was also launched on October 29, 2003 at the 2nd Caribbean International Publishing Conference as the second leg of a book tour, said Sample. The October 28-31 conference of the Caribbean Publishers Network (CAPNET) took place on the island of Curaçao.
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 fact, the publisher has already been sending out the pre-print text for review.
n 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.”