CARIFESTA and Culture
CARIFESTA X is over. Those who have worked so hard with just one year’s notice are to be fully commended. In spite of all the organizational mishaps, it was ultimately the massive audiences who made CARIFESTA, and who demonstrated their excitement in the events.
In a presentation made at the Caricom Heads of Govern-ment Conference in July, Barbadian novelist George Lamming took Guyanese President Bharrat Jagdeo to task for the following comment “…and now we come to the lighter side, CARIFESTA in Guyana.”
There is one way to interpret these remarks, as seeing culture as entertainment to engage in when the real work is finished. It is a view that allows ‘culture’ to fall by the wayside, to be addressed only after the ‘real’ priorities of so-called development are attended to, like building roads and paying off the foreign debt. As Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott observed in his exchange with the President at the opening CARIFESTA symposium, we have heard politicians rehearse these tired arguments for years. Walcott expressed his ambivalence about a festival that asks us to celebrate the wanton disregard for our artists in a region where with few exceptions artistic endeavour is not seen as a serious vocation. Here is the ongoing lie of CARIFESTA, illustrated by the profound gap between rhetorical pronouncements and the woeful state of our institutional infrastructure supporting the arts.
But is it simply a matter of resources? This was certainly the ‘practical matter’ that David Dabydeen addressed when he asked for support for a regional publishing house, a call which the Guyana government answered when it apparently announced it will contribute $20 million to its establishment. Easy backslapping aside (as Cheryl Springer asks in her Through a Woman’s Eyes column, beyond impulsive responses, what about a well thought out and comprehensive plan?), this is an important step. Yet there is a key issue that we miss, that goes beyond the necessary matter of sustained regional public investment in cultural production.
This is where George Lamming has been making a fundamental point for years, which has to do with seeing culture as the way in which we continually define ourselves, making meaning out of our existence. It begins with the daily work we do to reproduce ourselves individually and collectively. In this respect, we are all cultural workers, from our calypsonians, referred to by The Mighty Sparrow and Brother Resistance in the highly acclaimed film documentary Calypso Dreams as concerned villagers who establish documents of history for our people, to the traders whose travels knit the Caribbean together. The transformative element of culture is crucial here, for what distinguishes us from animal and plant life is our capacity to reflect upon what we do in order to engage and change not only our surroundings, but ourselves. Culture, then, is the source of unending critique and re-invention.
And here is where we come to a more worrying interpretation of those flippant references to CARIFESTA as a light matter, if we think of light as not challenging, not critical. In this reading, ‘light’ is not just mere description, but warning to our cultural practitioners to remain firmly within acceptable limits in relation to their work. A most dangerous thing indeed. I do not agree with George Lamming when he says that “CARIFESTA is one of the most profoundly political events this region, collectively, undertakes.” While we should work to ensure this promise, what CARIFESTA is in danger of offering us (some would say it already offers us) is a biennial festival emptied of any emancipatory politics or practice.
This is the dilemma, where public investment is essential to sustain cultural production but where such funding comes with strings attached. If by culture we mean creatively re-imagining and transforming our world, how do we reconcile this with political investments in maintaining the status quo? If by culture we mean ongoing and compassionate critique, how do we nurture this where political cultures across the Caribbean insist on shoring up their legitimacy? Is it simply enough to call for Caribbean governments to resolve matters by setting up, for instance, a regional publishing house, or does this miss the point if not raised in conjunction with this more fundamental issue? What happens when, as Martin Carter poignantly observes, ‘the mouth is always muzzled by the food it eats to live?’ We need to stop thinking that public funding for the arts is a gift, something that can be doled out to secure partisan loyalty and silence criticism. It is a right that we should demand from our governments, and we need to vigorously resist efforts to sanction dissent, because it is all of us who are ultimately threatened. If culture, as Lamming notes, relates to how we define and present ourselves, then it cannot be disciplined, it has no party, it must not become a servant to the order of the day.
These are not idle observations. Last week, a story surfaced, in the middle of the CARIFESTA celebrations, that journalist Neil Marks was fired from the Guyana Times newspaper after noting, in what can only be described by those of us who read it as a mildly critical report, that the Carifesta opening ceremony was disappointing. A search for the supposedly offending article on the Times website was fruitless. This is the same newspaper that was recently launched amidst official fanfare and lofty pronouncements about free press and independent journalism, and which describes itself on its front page as ‘The beacon of truth’.
It was the online blogs that were the first to pick up on this story, livinguyanablogspot.com and the weblog of the Caribbean Review of Books (http:www.antilles.blogspot.com), with the latter calling for the regional press covering Carifesta to investigate the unofficial reports. Disappointingly (shockingly?), with the exception of Freddie Kissoon’s column in the Kaieteur News, there has been no coverage in the local mainstream press, no effort to verify this story, no letter seeking clarification or expressing outrage. Regional press coverage has not picked up the story. The Guyana Press Association has been surprisingly silent on this matter concerning one of its own members. It is a shameful comment on how far we have fallen when we no longer seem to have not just the curiosity to find out what really happened, but when we cannot even summon the outrage necessary to demand, at the very least, an explanation.
If CARIFESTA is to truly go beyond supporting a status quo that continues to marginalize the majority of the Caribbean’s people and is intolerant of challenge, we must embrace our collective responsibility to acknowledge and nurture the radical, critical political promise that is our culture. As Martin Carter reminded us over thirty years ago, “it is precisely in times of crisis that we must re-examine our lives and bring to that re-examination contempt for the trivial, and respect for the riskers who go forward boldly to participate in the building of a free community of valid persons.”