Nicholas Laughlin is the editor of The Caribbean Review of Books. He was born and has always lived in Trinidad.
By Nicholas Laughlin
The first thing I put in my bag, as I packed for this trip to Guyana, was my copy of Georgetown Journal. I wish every Caribbean visitor arriving for Carifesta X were given a copy of Andrew Salkey’s 1972 book, along with the special Carifesta stamp in our passports. Not only because it is an undeservedly neglected classic of Caribbean travel writing, and a witty, outspoken, penetrating literary snapshot of Guyana at the moment of co-operative republic-hood; but because Georgetown Journal describes the meeting that was the very seed of Carifesta, and is key to understanding the host of events unfolding across Guyana this week.
Salkey, a Jamaican writer then living in London, was invited by the government of Guyana to attend the Caribbean Writers and Artists Conference in February 1970, to commemorate Guyana’s new status as a republic, and start the planning for the proposed Caribbean Festival of Arts (which, as we know, Guyana first hosted in 1972). Novelists, poets, critics, painters, sculptors, performing artists, and others spent two weeks in Georgetown for a programme of discussions, lectures, and informal exchanges.
Georgetown Journal is Salkey’s diary of this trip, not merely recording his impressions of Guyana, a country he had not visited before, but also transcribing, at length and in scrupulous detail, his conversations with fellow delegates, Guyanese politicians and activists, and ordinary people who crossed his path. Thirty-six years after it was published, the original New Beacon edition remains in print. It also stands as an arresting document of the historical moment when the Caribbean’s post-independence political optimism was beginning to fail, and the artists of the independence generation struggled to respond. The original Carifesta was one form of response.
The conversations Salkey records are full of references, direct and oblique, to cultural nationalism and the role of artists in scripting a national identity and narrative, ideas and questions also at the heart of Carifesta `72.
As I sat down to write this, an email arrived from a friend who witnessed Carifesta I first-hand. “Georgetown 1972 was exhilarating,” he says, “because the artists there were addressing Caribbean reality, through writing, music, theatre, dance, visual arts; trying to make sense of the society we live in, experimenting, taking risks, actually thinking.” But he adds: “All that has drained away in recent festivals, leaving only the usual suspects performing the usual self-satisfied rituals.”
And there is the crux of it: of the doubt and disenchantment that I and many colleagues of my generation feel when we contemplate Carifesta as it survives today. Whose sake is it for, this expensive, elaborate extravaganza that the Caribbean now produces biennially? Is a regional arts festival on this model still relevant to a Caribbean that has changed radically since 1972? When last did Carifesta truly include and engage with the best work being produced by our artists?
I write this on only the first full day of Carifesta X, when it is too soon to say whether this latest incarnation of the festival is a success or a failure (but how do you measure that?). And though I’ve seen ample evidence of organisational chaos since I landed in Guyana nearly a week ago, I’ve also been impressed by the real enthusiasm for the festival that many Guyanese so far seem to feel. It was a different story two years ago, when my own country, Trinidad and Tobago, hosted Carifesta IX (our third crack at it, we also did Carifesta in 1992 and 1995). With a far larger budget, and a larger pool of cultural professionals to draw on, our culture bureaucrats failed to rouse much public interest. Exhibitions went unvisited, performers played to sparse audiences, and the week-long programme was notable mostly for the generous consultancy fees earned by better-connected cultural figures. Most Trinidadians seemed to feel the festival had little to do with them, and in a way they were right.
Carifesta IX had far more to do with the culture bureaucrats who used it to flex their political muscles, to assert their continuing control of the country’s and the region’s cultural narrative.
Except they don’t control it, not any more. Here’s some evidence.
Simultaneous with Carifesta IX, a group of Trinidadian artists ran a programme called Galvanize. This was a series of artists’ projects, performances, readings, discussions, nearly two dozen in all, over a period of six weeks, from September to October 2006. It was not a Carifesta “fringe” – though inevitably many people saw it that way – but an entirely independent phenomenon that partly coincided with Carifesta week. Galvanize evolved from discussions among a group of contemporary Trinidadian artists concerned that their work was “visibly absent”, to quote the theme of the programme. “Absent”, that is, from the narrative of Trinidad’s art history maintained by the cultural authorities, and from the conservative economy of the commercial galleries. Gradually, these conversations evolved into a plan for a series of artists’ projects that would turn visible absence into visible presence, using outdoor spaces and unconventional locations: shop windows, a tattoo parlour, a backyard shed, to engage with new audiences in unexpected ways. An advisory team coalesced – I was a member – volunteers fell in, and the programme expanded to include musicians, writers, dancers, graphic artists. We raised modest funding, but no one who participated in Galvanize got a salary.
Every venue we used was generously offered rent-free.
Publicity came via email, our website, and word of mouth. There were a couple hundred people at our biggest event, maybe two dozen at our smallest, and for six weeks Galvanize provoked vigorous debates about the state of the arts in Trinidad, the whereabouts of fresh talent, and the necessity for artists to make new spaces for their work, rather than wait for official approval.
Some voices in the media contrasted the halo of energy around Galvanize with the dozy lumbering of Carifesta. A few of the eminent cultural figures driving the Carifesta machine took offence, and spoke out. Galvanize asked hard questions about the relevance of a bureaucrat-run junket like Carifesta, and showed that the official festival, “the usual suspects performing the usual self-satisfied rituals”, had ignored some of the most vital creative work actually happening under its nose. In September 2006, Carifesta seemed a relic in urgent need of rethinking.
So I arrived in Guyana with Georgetown Journal in my bag – to remind me where and when the Carifesta seed was planted – but also with the hope of discovering evidence of younger Guyanese artists engaged in real conversation with the official Carifesta apparatus. Because what might have seemed a radical effort to shape and understand our cultural identity in 1972 has become, thirty-six years later, a vehicle for perpetuating bureaucratic control of the arts, and a no longer relevant notion of `national culture’. Can we reinvent Carifesta so it once again plays a truly vital role in the Caribbean’s ongoing attempt to understand itself? I think we can. And we start by asking hard questions about why we’re still doing Carifesta, and who we are doing it for.
