Dear Editor,
Now that I’ve hopefully dealt adequately with the ad hominem issues raised in Dr Dabydeen’s latest missive, I beg permission to return to the specific issue of the Caribbean Press.
In my letter, I questioned the publication of Elly Niland’s Collected Poems, a completely new book, under the Guyana Classics Library series. Dr Dabydeen give the absurd rationale that this and other books “are in the ‘Classics’ series because they are modern Classics (eg, Penguin and other presses have modern Classics).”
Modern classics by any imprint are books which have, after previous publication, earned great merit either through critical recognition or popular impact. For example, among the Penguin Modern Classics series are books like the Great Gatsby, originally published in 1925 by Scribner’s. Printing a completely new book, as the Caribbean Press has clearly done in multiple instances, and declaring it a classic without any such critical or commercial litmus test is utterly without precedent and I challenge my learned friend to disprove this.
Dr Dabydeen mentions a republication of work by Martin Carter but curiously declines to name it. Perhaps it would help the general public greatly if the Caribbean Press were to make public a catalogue or simple list of current and upcoming publications, as is standard practice for any publishing house, including Penguin with its list of Classics available online.
Regarding the website that we were assured in January was up, it has only recently been established and is skeletal at best. It has clearly been hastily done and is not geared to do a fraction of the things the honourable editor hopes for it to do.
With regard to his tirade against local writers, as I said previously, considering his almost exclusive dealings with Freedom House, his perspective on the supposed paucity of local talent may be understandable. The unfortunate thing is that many promising writers here are clearly afraid of responding because of the atmosphere of suppression of dissent that the gloriously democratic PPP has placed upon the local literary community. To quote Carter’s famous verse, “a mouth is always muzzled by the food it eats to live.” The ironic thing is that after rabidly ranting about doggerel produced by local writers, he again does the unorthodox by offering his personal e-mail to invite submissions.
All that said, perhaps the most disturbing thing in the letter is the contention that “all the writers waive royalties and agree for 400 copies of their books to be given freely to Guyana’s libraries; an act of charity and a concern for the young readers in Guyana.” It expressly cannot by definition be charity when the Caribbean Press is completely funded by taxpayer dollars with no cost recovery or profit-making mechanism therein.
What is clear is this – the government of Guyana, having put on this grand show of magnanimity in committing to establish a publishing house, the express purpose of which was to facilitate the emergence of local writers, subsequently realized that that meant the publication of work the best of which might not paint the PPP’s rule in the most flattering light. This is the same reactive psychological mechanism that resulted in the banning of the state sponsored calypso finalists from the state radio.
The obviously ingenious solution was to hire a small core of uncritical consultants and proceed to publish the Guyana Classics, and then to continue to shift the goalposts with regard to the commitment to publish contemporary writers. When the options for Classics ran out, an ad hoc process of publication was started, one that included some legitimate scholars, some Guyana Prize winners, and new books by friends and family of those close the Press.
Notably in his interview with Stabroek News, Dr Dabydeen focused on two things – the laziness and incompetence of practising local writers, and the intention of the Press to publish the work of young children who show great promise. The purpose is basically to skip an entire generation of emerging writers who would have grown up under the PPP, and to justify that marginalization via rabid denigration – in short, give a doggerel a bad name and kick it. I find it tragic that a highly decorated scholar such as Dabydeen would debase himself in the furtherance of such myopic idiocy.
That strategy is transparent, pathetic and increasingly embarrassing for the government, particularly considering the deafening silence of the subject Minister, Dr Frank Anthony on the matter.
Yours faithfully,
Ruel Johnson
