Fresh Milk is pleased to share a reflection by one of our inaugural Bocas Lit Fest Scholarship awardees, Connor Harris, who alongside fellow Barbadian writer  Cyndi Celeste attended the 2026 edition of the festival in Trinidad & Tobago from April 30th – May 3rd.

This scholarship was made possible with the generous support of Peter Lewis as part of our 2026 Slow Reading Programme. This programme serves to activate Fresh Milk’s Colleen Lewis Reading Room (CLRR), and commemorate Colleen Lewis’s legacy on the 20th anniversary of her passing.

Read Connor’s reflection below!

(Un)Moored: A Reflection on Leviathans, Hope and Bocas Literature Festival.

By Connor Harris

In times as dystopic as these, it is not hard to find oneself drifting in a sea of fear. Every day, it seems that some new leviathan rises from the deep to upset the waters and send us further adrift from hope. In the final semester of my Literature degree, I found myself unmoored from visions of a promising future for the arts and the world at large. It seemed that I could only moor myself to that which I feared, and fear is the most unsteady of anchors.

I feared that the small classroom settings I had come to find comfort in would continue to dwindle in numbers as the work of the humanities is devalued across the globe. I feared living within and graduating into a landscape where the thrill of inhuman optimisation has infected everything:

The workplace, the writing room, the war room and even the water.

I feared that as soon as I wrote and published my magnum opus, it would be siphoned into an A.I. chat box, and that my work would become fodder for what has been heralded as the end of the world as we know it.

When I received the email from the Fresh Milk team congratulating me on being selected for the Bocas Literature Festival scholarship, I was deep in this dizzying state of graduation anxiety, fear and existential dread. Being offered the scholarship signified a great many things for me. It meant that I had crossed a milestone in my career and that I would be travelling to a festival I had only dreamed of attending.

It also felt like being granted a moment of respite from the endless drift; like being given a chance to find my bearings, once again.

—

As we sit in the departure lounge getting to know one another, Cyndi and I talk endlessly. Our synapses fire rapidly at each other as we bounce from topic to topic, bonding over our least favourite foods, the peculiarities of our brain chemistries, and our approaches to craft. As a spoken word poet, Cyndi finds the realm of stagelight and live audiences more approachable than the nakedness of the page, and as a fiction writer, the cloak of the page soothes me.

Though Cyndi is far along in her career and I am at the beginning of mine, it is comforting to know that at our core, we are more similar than we are different.

Later that night, when we reach Trinidad and check into our rooms at the Kapok, I wave Cyndi off wistfully before she is spirited away to perform at a Festival event called Backchat. When I win the scholarship, I commit myself to living in a Jekyll-Hyde state of being for the duration of the four-day trip. Caught between the worlds of a writer-on-scholarship and a literature student in the midst of finals, I know that with the turn of each new day, I must metamorphose.

By day, I would be a budding Barbadian writer and literary academic, ready to drink in all that Bocas had to offer, and by night, I would revert to an anxious student meeting midnight deadlines and studying for exams that awaited me back home. So, I spend my first night in Trinidad alone at the desk in my dimly lit hotel room, face aglow from the light of my laptop.

At the festival welcome, the rafters of Old Fire Station are strung up with festive, technicoloured bunting. The buzzing crowd overflows from the seats to the door as Nicholas Laughlin stands on the podium, delivering his opening remarks.

“As you may know, our 2026 festival theme is ‘All Together Now’. It proclaims our belief that literature in all its forms is about community.”

This theme, printed on the festival booklets, brochures and banners, becomes a good omen and a manner of foreshadowing for my experiences at the festival. When I am not attending workshops or seminars, my time is spent basking in the presence of like-minded people. On the shuttle from the Kapok to the Library, I meet Ayesha Gibson-Gill, a fellow Barbadian who works with the Frank Collymore Literary Endowment. We talk about the importance of cultural conservation in tones of urgency and enthusiasm. When I tell her about my research interest in the conservation of Diasporic Symbols, she asks:

“Did you know that Adinkra symbols are embedded in wrought ironworks across the Caribbean?”

And just like that, I find another strain of research to consider.

This happens again and again throughout my experience at the festival. This kind of exchange and spontaneous collaborative thought. When speaking to Felesha, a festival volunteer, avid reader and a friend of a friend from back home, her eyes light up behind her glasses as she tells me:

“There’s a book about the Ti Kai’s of Dominica that I might relate to your interest in symbols!”

In the lobby of the Kapok, a guest of the festival, whom I had spoken to the day before, waves me over.

“I saw this article in the newspaper on the power of the symbol, and it reminded me of your research,” he says while pointing to a picture on his phone.

I come to see that the beauty of the Bocas lies not only in its invaluable offerings of writerly and scholarly events, but in the way it becomes an epicentre of the Anglophone Caribbean literary world. Here, like-minds across the region gather to be in community and coalesce thoughts, if only for a few blissful days.

However, these moments of bliss and respite were not without twinges of the same worries I harboured long before travelling to Trinidad. While the festival had offered me moments of repose in the presence of community, I knew better than to cast Bocas as some sort of utopia in my mind. At the Festival Welcome, I am reminded that utopia cannot exist without dystopia and that the shadow of a leviathan can stretch for miles.

“I want to be frank with you,” Nicholas Laughlin says, looking out to the crowd intently. “There were moments in the past year when we weren’t sure of what kind of festival we could stage. The arts and culture sector is under financial pressure these days and fundraising was truly an uphill battle. Yet here we are once again, performing a miracle.”

When I attend the workshops of Tessa McWatt and Justin Haynes, they distil years of wisdom into two golden hours. In their presence, concepts I have wrestled with in my work for months become untangled with sophisticated ease. I leave Tessa McWatt’s workshop, armed with notes on how to treat a setting like a character rather than a passive backdrop.

“The landscape is never neutral,” she says.

In Justin Hayne’s workshop, I create a tapestry of notes that anatomise the well-written antagonist. I transcribe his words as best I can, scribbling down on my notepad:

‘Good’ antagonists help the protagonists recognise things within themselves.’

I find use for each author’s wisdom in the worlds of my making and the world I am trying to make sense of. At night, when I return to the dark chrysalis of my hotel room, I become, once again, a student on the cusp of graduating into a landscape written as antagonist by the powers that be. I think about how fear and hopelessness are real and true in times like these, but I know that they must not be the only things I recognise within myself.

On my final night in Trinidad, I abandon my chrysalis for another dimly lit room. One that is not still and silent but murmuring and quaking in wait for the National Poetry Slam to begin. In the dark of the NAPA theatre, we, the audience, disappear into the shadows to become one breath, one deep belly laugh, one cry of delight; one entity in bated silence as the spoken word poets performed. The poets spewed metaphors, similes and scalding statistics that confronted the antagonism written into their own landscapes. Antagonism: brutal and fearsome. But anchored together by words echoing to and fro, in call and response, their fears and ours transform into catharsis.

At the end of the night, before the lights in the theatre are switched on and we return ourselves as singular bodies shuffling out of the theatre doors, Marrielle Forbes, the Programming and Hospitality Manager at Bocas, makes the night’s final remarks.

“In uncertainty, the arts continue to endure,” she says. “Culture survives when the community chooses to stand together.”

—

In times like these, when leviathans roam the earth and tyranny runs rampant, I am blessed with choice. As an anxious graduate of the arts, fearful and trying her best to hold onto hope, I am given the impetus to make the right choice through the encouragement and invaluable efforts of Fresh Milk’s CLRR Slow Reading Programme. Through an experience made possible by their Bocas Festival Literature Scholarship, I have found a way to moor myself, once again.