By Raymond Ramcharitar
Raymond Ramcharitar is a Trinidadian journalist. He has written about art and culture for 20 years. He works as a communications consultant for the Anthony N. Sabga Caribbean Awards for Excellence.
At a forum at the University of the West Indies (UWI) in Trinidad recently (February) to discuss Carnival and multiculturalism, it seemed that conventional wisdom is now that Trinidad’s defining festival, Carnival, could be deployed to solve economic and developmental problems. The “Carnival complex”, said Dr Susan Burke, was a “magic mirror” which allowed us to integrate our way of life, our survival needs, and our dreams – social, economic, and intellectual.
What was most remarkable is that these ideas have been repeated for more than two decades, have failed to be vindicated time and again, but appear to be catching on. Carnival is spreading, has spread, through the Caribbean émigré communities in the US and UK, the Caribbean, and not least, through regional institutions like UWI, and Ministries of Culture.
The proposition that everything, or a significant part, of what we are can be contained in the Carnival is, to put it mildly, troublesome. It is no less than a self-inflicted disability that seems to confirm colonial cynicism.
There is much evidence of the region’s capacity to produce science, be innovative in the use of environmental and material resources, and produce art and ideas outside the Carnival complex. But these seem to not register in public policy and with the public. (An initiative to disseminate this alternative evidence is the Anthony N. Sabga Caribbean Awards for Excellence — which organisation I work for — which seeks out and rewards scientists, innovators, environmentalists, artists, and those who have contributed to the overall public good.)
Another way of putting this is that it seems that Trinidadians, and Caribbean people, have chosen, or been given, a very narrow range of possibilities to imagine themselves into. Who we could be seems to be now restricted to the inverse of colonial values (Prospero’s Caliban), and we’re so happy about it that we market it: the region as a place where, for tourist and business, anything goes.
But inversion is only creative if it has a well-defined orthodoxy to reflect. When orthodoxy becomes its own inverse, where does that leave us?
The prima facie assessment is not encouraging: widespread poverty; illiteracy; brutality; and all this, in the cases of Trinidad and Guyana, sitting in the middle of fantastic wealth. Trinidad’s oil and gas, and Guyana’s hinterlands of mineral resources, arable land, prodigious biodiversity.
A few people had very clear, and prophetic, ideas of where this would leave us – VS Naipaul’s Middle Passage and his novels The Mimic Men and Guerillas; Derek Walcott’s essays “The Muse of History” and “What the Twilight Says”, and poems like “The Spoiler’s Return”; Lloyd Best and the New World Group’s social science prognoses. But they could not, for various reasons, present viable solutions.
Only one person that I know of has been able to step out of history, as it were, and see it all, the way God might (if She existed or cared) — Guyanese novelist Wilson Harris. The first time I read Harris, I had the disorienting feeling that we (Caribbean people) were standing on a beach and arguing about the sand with our backs turned to the ocean.
Harris’s novels are difficult to read, and they are not what I’m talking about. His theoretical essays are lucid, and contain a knowledge lode of enormous value. Specific to the issue of what we imagine ourselves to be, his essay, “Profiles of Myth and the New World” offers a tantalizing prescription – the “numinous inexactitude”.
“Profiles” begins with the observation of the dangers of “technology being used to manipulate entire societies”, to set them on a linear trajectory of development and discourse, materialized in the definitions of what, for example, constitute learning, progress, and creativity. This linear path is no less than the course of Western society. This is a large horizon – what alternative could there be? Quite a few, apparently.
Harris’s alternative horizon begins in a place we know very little about: pre-Columbian South and Central America. He does not look in its historical narratives but in its traces, for example, in images on pottery which seem to display phenotypes Aztec artists could not have seen—an Olmec head, dated about 1000 years BCE, with African features; a figure possessing Chinese physiognomy, found in Central Mexico dating between 1150 and 550 BCE; a small clay figure dated from 550-950 CE which bears a resemblance to the British monarch, Henry VIII.
These appear to be mere curiosities, but in them (and many more, he says) Harris sees the work of artists striving to create images which resembled “a creator who could never be grasped or realized exactly”. These artists looked to their world for “traceries … cues … clues, within infinite subtleties in metaphorically alive fossil corridors and shapes within the inimitable architecture of the animal kingdom”.
They saw nature not as separate but as part of a continuum in which they, too, were located. This allowed a different relationship between reality and imagination. It allowed imagination to use as material the tenuous and diffuse to make forms and connections closer to ab initio, rather than modifying preexistent models. Harris concludes: “What we need…is an art steeped in such numinous inexactitudes. Fluid identity creates a number of windows into reality”.
These connections are not essayed with the certainty of dogma. They are non-linear, and are facilitated by the Jungian unconscious, a bridge all humanity is capable of crossing. This means (Harris suggests) relinquishing the commitment to certainties, though not committing to an ideology of “numinous inexactitude-ness”. It means that the ability to see what we believe to be Reality through numerous windows would “alert us to the fallibility of human discourse”.
And yet, a common commitment to ideology and dogma is necessary to build a society and accept one’s place with it, and these beliefs sustained over time create “fortresses of culture”, dedicated to their own preservation. But (Harris suggests) our heterogeneous societies provide a unique opportunity to see through several windows simultaneously as a matter of course. They present us with a continuous opportunity to imagine the unimaginable.
The less than comforting part of this is that there is no formula, merely an opportunity history has given to us. And it is naïve to assert that the wherewithal to grasp this opportunity is available to all – race hatred will not go away quietly, neither will roads and bridges (real or metaphorical) build themselves, and history has left formidable barriers as well. But by cultivating the widespread development of this ability to step outside of our way of life and imagine ways of being entirely unrelated, we can aspire to be much more than Caliban baying at a long-departed and apathetic Prospero.
