Lennie Little-White makes his début as author in ‘Pathways’
Intimate Sunday morning launch of poetry book at S Hotel Kingston
Published:Tuesday | September 9, 2025 | 12:09 AMYasmine Peru/Senior Gleaner Writer
Independent film-maker Lennie Little-White recently “gave birth”, as he calls it, and he is as excited as any new mother. On Sunday morning, an intimate group of mainly longtime friends heeded the call to be marked present at the S Hotel Kingston for what could very well have the christening. It actually was the launch of Little-White’s first book, an offering titled Pathways, which is part photos and part poetry.
In the foreword, former Prime Minster P.J. Patterson states: “ The publication of Pathways provides a kaleidoscopic landscape of Jamaica’s rich flora and fauna which this and future generations will regard as being among his best creative accomplishments.”
Patterson also commended Little-White’s “ unique blend of the photographer’s eye and the poet’s elegant use of the English vocabulary, interspersed with the local idiom” in the creation of Pathways.
Little-White, who “has done thousands of scripts for movies, documentaries, commercials and television, has never considered ever doing a book”. He is the first person to point out that he is no poet; he said it on Sunday and he also shouts it out, ironically, in the first poem in Pathways. It is titled Full Disclosure (I’m not a poet).
However, after listening to the readings of some of the poems in Pathways on Sunday, the reality is that Little-White “doth protest too much”. He name checks Shakespeare, TS Elliot and “the erudite Walcott” as examples of those who “had little resonance with me” and concludes — after enjoying a bellyful of sweet, purple star apples — that “a simple storyteller is what I have come to be”.
The journey to the film-maker’s book started on a hospital bed while recuperating from surgery for a condition called partial facial muscular paralysis, which still limits his speech somewhat. He shared that between 2018 and 2019, he was hospitalised four different times.
“Hospital days on my back became very boring. At nights, I had one-on-one sessions with my mythical Muse, which prompted me to start writing very short pieces. I sent a few of them to the late Dr Freddie Hickling, psychiatrist, who challenged me to write something every day as callisthenics for my brain. The rest is history. This was the start of ‘Lennie seh so’,” Little-White said in his opening.
He would send these pieces — which now amounts to 2,000 — to close friends. Host Janet Silvera was one of the persons who would receive these “musings”, and when she did a quick check of hands in the air of those who were also recipients, it seemed like 80 per cent did. They all found it amusing.
Little-White is justifiably proud of his labour of love and how his community assisted with bringing Pathways to life. He was generous in his praise and spoke highly of his guest speaker, Leachim Semaj, who opened up his home to him when he needed eye surgery in Florida, going more than the extra mile by accompanying him to and from Florida, and then instructing his son to ensure that Pathways would be published through Amazon in paperback and ebooks.
“This is as exciting as when I did Children of Babylon in 1980. Seeing the movie at Carib, and then going to New York and seeing it on Broadway, it’s the same kind of fullness,” Little-White told The Gleaner.
“These pictures were all taken during my sickness. Being able to capture this, put it together and write the words was wonderful. These ideas, they come to me at 2 o’clock in the morning. The marriage of the visuals, the words and the ideas wasn’t planned,” he added.
He freely admitted that had it not been for his illness, Pathways would never have been a reality.
“There would have been a movie,” he said, laughing. “ Children of Babylon, Glorianna ... never thought of a book. It was the furthest thing from my mind.”