Four years ago Guyana hosted the Caribbean Festival of Creative Arts (Carifesta), the tenth since its premiere in 1972. Guyana had less than a year to host this mega event and surprisingly enough the country was successful and the events were well organised.
Few people knew the reason for Guyana’s sudden production of the events and even fewer followed up on the history of the soon to be ‘re-dead’ art festival. Carifesta was dormant from 1981 to 1992. Trinidad and Tobago then undertook to host the festival in 1992 and again in 1995. In 2000, St Kitts and Nevis was host, followed by Suriname in 2003. Carifesta then went back to Trinidad and Tobago in 2006.
In 2008 it was the Bahamas’s turn, but that island nation pulled out at the last minute, following a change in government, saying there was not sufficient time to pull together the events. Guyana, wanting to see the tradition and legacy live, decided to take on the challenge.
At the end of the 2008 festival, the Bahamian government undertook to host the festival in 2010. This time the island state cancelled saying it did not have sufficient funds to host the event. Though, interestingly enough, it did host the Ms Universe Pageant. The Bahamas has let down the Caribbean and other observing states in keeping with the traditions of the festivals; it would be ridiculous to ever ask the island to host again as it seems incapable of doing so.
However, it also does not seem like any other country will pick up the slack.
I am highly disappointed in the Bahamas’s decision to cancel the festival twice without a care in the world or even an attempt to ask another country to replace what it had failed to do.
That being said, it must also be recognized that the Carifesta Organisation is only as strong as the 15 Caricom states and other invitees to the festivals. To date, no other country has stepped up the way Guyana did in 2008 and unless one does, I am certain history will repeat itself in another eleven-year or perhaps even longer gap.
It is now 2012 and Carifesta again is dead. It has been rumoured that there are plans for Carifesta Suriname and even an Inter-Guiana (Guyana, Suriname and French Guiana) art festival. How well this will go and the impact it will have on the arts remain to be seen.
Carifesta was first held in 1972 in Guyana from August 25 to September 15. According to the Carifesta X website, two successive Conferences of outstanding Caribbean Writers and Artists in 1966 and 1970 recommended to then Prime Minister of Guyana, Hon LFS Burnham that they would welcome the invitation to an annual festival of the arts. Burnham had related his vision of a cultural mecca for the region’s people.
That first Carifesta saw more than 1,000 creative artists drawn from the peoples of more than 30 Caribbean and Latin American countries displaying music, dance, drama, folk art, painting, sculpture, photography and literature. Thousands of visitors were attracted by the art forms of the peoples of the wider Caribbean and reveled in the cultural cosmos of lore and legend mixed with the gay spontaneity of the Caribbean and Latin America peoples. That it has been allowed to morph into an event that appears to be a burden on Caribbean nations is a crying shame. (Jairo Rodrigues)
