Last Thursday, the 25th August, marked the 50th anniversary of the opening of Carifesta ’72, in Georgetown, the inaugural festival of Caribbean artists, writers, painters, sculptors, dancers and dramatists. The gathering, spawned from the second Caribbean Writers and Artists Convention, also hosted in Georgetown, to coincide with the celebration of Guyana becoming a Cooperative Republic has become a staple on the Caribbean Arts calendar, a legacy of which we all can be very proud.
The opening of the festival held at the National Park was a grand spectacle, with lots of pomp and ceremony, as representatives from the 25 participating nations and territories paraded past the grand stage, from behind which surged an enormous sculpture of a hand reaching for the sky, the festival logo. Aside from the English-speaking Caribbean territories, invitations had also been extended to our neighbours, Brazil, Venezuela, Suriname, French Guiana, Colombia, Peru, Puerto Rico, and other Caribbean nations, including, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Guadeloupe, and Martinique.
The festivities followed closely on the heels of the Non-Aligned Movement Foreign Ministers Conference (8th – 12th August), and our nation’s capital, once again, a centre of international focus, was a bubbling cauldron of energy and activity. The fleet of cars bearing the GUY plates, previously employed for the ministers’ meeting, now shuttled the visiting artistes to the various performances, shows, readings, displays and exhibitions scattered across the city.
Today, apart from the palette of memories of the festivities serving the older generation, there are two enduring legacies of infrastructure from the fiesta; one might wonder if the younger generation is even aware of them. Firstly, there is the National Cultural Centre, which was constructed for the occasion, but unfortunately was not completed on schedule, and events hosted there, including The Legend of Kaieteur, an oratario composed by the late Philip Pilgrim, occurred under a temporary roof consisting of tarpaulin and scaffolding. Today, its location is close to the epicentre of Greater Georgetown, at that time, of the then sprawling city, it appeared to be at the edge of nowhere.
Secondly, there is Festival City, a sub-division of North Ruimveldt, or in local street parlance ‘part of South’ – an area comprising South Ruimveldt Gardens, South Ruimveldt Park, and North Ruimveldt. Festival City, was a government sponsored project executed for the artist jamboree. Barbadian poet Kamau Brathwaite, reflecting on the festival soon after in a series of articles in the Barbados Advocate, wrote, “Many of the twelve hundred participating artists were housed in Festival City, a quickly built gated community of ‘250 greenheart houses on stilts,’ located on the outskirts of Georgetown, complete with a ‘security guard (you needed a pass or Carifesta ID card to get in).” The artists received return airfare, a living stipend of G$7 per day, and a chauffeured car to take them around the city (Brathwaite’s fellow Barbadian Austin Clarke called them GUY-cars, after their official Guyana government plates).
The everlasting legacy of Festival City is the nomenclature of the street names. There are two streets named for two local trailblazers of the arts. E R Burrowes Street, was named after the great painter and art teacher, a Barbadian by birth, who came to then British Guiana as a child. Mittelholzer Street (incorrectly spelt on the street sign and on most maps as Mittleholzer) acknowledges the first true West Indian fiction novelist, our very own Edgar Mittelholzer. Other street names pay tribute to our Caribbean neighbours including: Blue Moun-tain Road (Jamaica), Hummingbird Street (Trinidad and Tobago), Flying Fish Street (Barbados), Nevis Street, Boggy Peak (Antigua), Nutmeg Street (Grenada), and Soufriere Street (volcanoes on Dominica, Guadeloupe, Montserrat, St Vincent, and St Lucia).
Whilst we laud ourselves in the euphoria of this significant milestone in the festival’s history and with the 15th edition on the horizon, we should be contemplating the actual state of the event. Has the festival evolved in the general direction which the initial group of artists and writers envisioned? Or has it become too big and unwieldy, and stifled by bureaucracy? Is this now very expensive affair worth staging? Are the festivities serving as a launch pad for new and emerging artistes? Or are they forced to seek other avenues?
Two festivals in recent memory suffered from limited participation by local artistes. In 2006, Carifesta IX, Trinidad’s third hosting of the festival, found itself competing for an audience with a parallel event called ‘Galvanise’ organised by local artistes in response to their perceived exclusion from the country’s and region’s cultural narrative by controlling bureaucrats with political muscle. In 2017, Carifesta XIII host Barbados was embarrassed by a boycott of local artistes who perceived a lack of interest by the authorities in their work.
After Carifesta III, held in Cuba in August, 1979, an extremely large affair, our noted (now late) artist, writer and anthropologist, Denis Williams expressed the thought that Carifesta was departing from its original conception. He mooted the idea that the festival should become an annual event of just one discipline with rotating host countries. For instance, Jamaica would host drama one year, with St Lucia as the venue for painters the following year, and so on. In this way, it could focus more on the original concept of the festival to serve as a gathering for artistes to meet, discuss and exchange ideas, display their work and engage with the local population. As such, it would depart from a series of different events competing for the public’s attention.
Fifty years later, the political and cultural landscape has changed significantly; territories are no longer recently independent and cultural tastes have shifted, most notably in the area of music. The time to rethink the concept of Carifesta is now, before it becomes just another lost legacy. Williams’ suggestion could be the commencement.
