As creeping democratization takes hold in the Middle East, some curious Westerners have combed through the region’s literature for clues to the turbulence. Cairo’s most famous modern chronicler, the Nobel Prize winner Naguib Mahfouz – himself deeply influenced by childhood memories of watching the British firing on demonstrations in Egypt’s 1919 Revolution – has been much discussed, as has the work the author and poet Sayyid Qutb, whose writing shaped the philosophical core of modern Islamism.
A lack of translations and other hindrances to publication and distribution has deprived most Middle Eastern writers of English-speaking audiences. The resulting ignorance is a drawback at the best of times but it becomes particularly noticeable, and harmful, when outsiders start to assess something as complex as the recent pro-democracy protests. It has been excruciating to watch the ignorant hesitations of Western diplomats during the last two weeks, especially their timid drift from tacit support of Mubarak towards terse hints that maybe, finally, it might be time for him to go.
In 1981, the literary scholar and political commentator Edward Said ruefully observed that “it is only a slight overstatement to say the Muslims and Arabs are essentially covered, discussed, apprehended, either as oil suppliers or as potential terrorists. Very little of the detail, the human density, the passion of Arab Muslim life has entered the awareness of even those people whose profession it is to report the Islamic World.” The West’s ambiguous response to the widening Middle East crisis – especially its unseemly reluctance to confront a repressive but predictably ‘stable’ regime in Egypt – have shown that Said’s pessimism was fully justified.
In the Caribbean, mercifully, we have been spared the revolutionary excitement of Tunisia, Lebanon, Syria, the Palestinian territories, Egypt and Iran. But in our tranquillity we might well ask ourselves how successfully, in more than 50 years as independent nations, have we conveyed “the detail, the human density, the passion” of our daily lives to the outside world? Or even to ourselves.
More often than not our failure is rooted in a profound indifference to what writers are trying to say. Most of us probably know a line of Martin Carter’s, but few can recite an entire poem. We often hear that the work of Wilson Harris, Denis Williams or Edgar Mittelholzer is salted with genius, but who among us has read more than a page of their fictions? Regional heavyweights like V S Naipaul and George Lamming are more talked about than read. Even The Black Jacobins, CLR James’s imperishable history of Toussaint L’Ouverture and the Haitian revolution, is virtually unknown. Who, nowadays, apart from students or ageing culture vultures, bothers to read Edward Kamau Braithwaite, Aimé Césaire or Derek Walcott?
Contemporary writers fare little better. Despite an obvious hunger for good writing – and no apparent shortage of available talent – the few literary periodicals and festivals which try to maintain an interest in Caribbean writing are always living from hand to mouth. In 2008, Jamaica’s Calabash festival was rescued from a funding crisis by eleventh-hour government intervention. Last month, however, programming director Kwame Dawes told the Gleaner that: “The festival as people know it, the literary festival, it’s over. Last year was the final year.” More recently, as if to underscore our loss of literary moxie, not a single West Indian made it into the shortlists for this year’s Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. (Canada and the Caribbean are judged together.) Last year, perhaps just as sadly, just one West Indian was a contender for the region’s “Best First Book.”
And yet our writers thrive in the diaspora. In London writers like Andrea Levy, Caryl Philips and Zadie Smith – British but born to West Indian parents – have achieved both critical and commercial success. Dionne Brand, a Trinidadian, is poet laureate of Toronto, (officially designated as “an advocate for poetry, language and the arts”); Lorna Goodison lives there too, as does Olive Senior, and the Barbadian novelist Austin Clarke. A full list for New York and elsewhere would run to several pages.
If our neglect of local talent was a recent development, the trend towards emigration might be halted and reversed. But the publishing history of nearly all of our established writers suggests otherwise. We routinely ignore our most creative and insightful writers and little suggests this will change. Consequently, many West Indian authors end up publishing primarily for foreign audiences and, with few exceptions, their stories dwell in a past which most of us have forgotten, or never knew. Only a handful remain behind to watch our societies change. In Naipaul’s arresting phrase, to much of the wider world the contemporary Caribbean is still an “area of darkness” – but it is a darkness for which we are largely to blame.