Caribbean territories have always utilised their creative industries as vehicles through which to market themselves. By far the best example of this is the manner in which Jamaica has been able to utilise the music and the visual image of Bob Marley to market the country as a whole and to sell products some of which had nothing to do with either Marley or his music. What Jamaica figured out was that the global appeal of Marley was a vehicle through which you could sell most things Jamaican, including its tourism product. The appeal of Bob Marley extended to a broader appeal for Reggae music and the two combined to create a powerful pull effect towards Jamaica which has not been matched anywhere else in the region.
The same is true—though to a lesser extent—elsewhere in the Caribbean. The Trinidad and Tobago Carnival has, over the years, been part of the appeal that has sold the twin-island republic. Trinidad and Tobago may be an oil-exporting country but ask any foreigner what he or she best remembers the country for and he or she is likely to say Carnival.
Some of the smaller islands have used their creative industries to promote themselves too.
Grenada and St Lucia have tried to do so through craft and music. Visitor arrivals and the export of these products have helped. Costs have militated against greater success.
Guyana has not fared nearly as well in the use of its creative industries to promote itself. Indeed, even now when we are going through yet another bout of huffing and puffing about tourism we still appear unable to bring the creative sector to the fore. While we have doubtless been able to produce our own fair share of creative talent, we have not, on the whole, been able to create a significant external appeal for what the sector has to offer.
2007 and Cricket World Cup (CWC) offered the region the best possible opportunity to sell its creative industry to the world. In the case of Guyana not a great deal happened for the sector beyond t-shirts and assorted small souvenir items most of which were simply imported and localised. Cricket World Cup caught the Guyana creative industries sector in a state of total and utter underdevelopment. Neither the government nor the creative bodies had done any work whatsoever to prepare the sector as a whole for the prospects and possibilities of CWC and at the end of the day the whole thing descended into individual efforts by the various creators and vendors to cash in. The whole thing failed miserably.
Perhaps the most shameful part of it all was the fact that while it had been widely said and felt that CWC would offer an important opportunity for the marketing of Amerindian craft the offerings of Amerindians just about saw the light of day through a handful of distributors.
Another thing that is surely well-remembered about the period was the manner in which the commercial banks ran a proverbial mile when the idea of lending to the craft sector for their CWC preparations arose. As one bank official later put it, “some of them were neither businesses nor did they want to be businesses. They saw quick money and banks saw trouble.” Oddly enough, it does not appear that anyone in authority has bothered to undertake an assessment of that period with a view to determining what we might learn from it.
Since 2007 there has been no discernable growth in the local creative industry. Certainly nothing meaningful has been done to try to correct the problems of the industry.
Rather than a cohesive industry it remains pockets of individual hustles. What little is laudable must be credited to the individual efforts of the artists and craftspeople. It is of course true that Go-Invest has helped to fund visits to external events by local craftspeople. Perhaps it might be a good idea to learn about the outcomes of those events and whether and how they have or have not contributed to the popularisation of our craft overseas.
One expects that our creative people have expectations of benefiting materially from their work. If that is to happen there is much more that both government and the various umbrella bodies can and must do to help the process. If we take our Amerindian craft, for example, there is no question that not nearly enough has been done to bring what is produced in the hinterland regions to urban and external markets.
Nor—at least so it appears—have we troubled ourselves to find out just what it would take to create an enabling environment: well-equipped work centres, training facilities, tools, raw materials etc) that would help them refine their skills. It is not nearly enough to talk about the beauty of our indigenous craft. Amerindian artists and craftspeople must feel that sense of recognition. Their work needs to be integrated far more into what one might call the national creative tapestry. More than that they must earn meaningfully from their skills. That is not happening at the moment. Nor is it a matter of simply patronising them. There are dimensions of quality and creativity to Amerindian art and craft that richly merit the recognition and the material returns which it is still searching for.
