I enjoy writing these So it go columns partly because I’m free to pick my subjects (which annoys some columnists, but who’s stopping them from doing the same?) and partly because of the feedback from readers – in online comments, in phone calls, or in face-to-face encounters in town. In these exchanges where one hears very nice compliments about this piece or that (nobody calls you to say “What crap you writing, Martins?”) people will tell you how they look forward to the column, and various big-up phrases like that, bolstering your ego, but the truth is that, as any columnist will tell you, you don’t make any significant difference by the things you write. Yes, you’re airing out the subject, people read it, many of them will compliment you on it, sometimes they’ll even send it on to other folks, but it doesn’t cause them to change their minds to any substantial degree. Essentially, readers will applaud the points they agree with, or the positions you deem good or bad that coincide with theirs, but in the end you’re not changing their positions or their interpretations of things in the society. The changes come only when people or organisations, in the government or outside it, take on the subject and get down in the trenches, fighting for legislation, fighting for enforcement, and fighting for funding to make the change; that’s when it happens. For all our cynicism about the political process, and I stand guilty, it is only through the political process that significant change happens.
Even when you see an uprising, as recently in Egypt and Libya, where a government was suddenly and dramatically put out of power, nothing really changes until the new political process is manufactured to replace the old. In effect, the population is simply in limbo until that new political creature emerges; the change, as we are seeing now in Egypt and Libya, doesn’t happen because a letter writer or a voice on television is calling for it.
The writers and creators among us like to claim responsibility for change, but they’re dreaming. All the song or the play or the essay is doing is alerting –
09 take credit for that – but the actual fix or the remedy will only come from the long, grinding, difficult political process. Yes, our artists have to keep writing and singing and filming about the ills and the defects, but it’s only when political agents, usually from outside the establishment, become involved and stay involved that the change happens; the examples of Egypt and Lybia and now Syria are the recent manifestations of it.
That condition applies even when it gets to the stage of a hit American TV series, like ‘The Wire,’ watched by millions. David Simon, the creator of the gritty scripts depicting life in the raw in the Baltimore ghetto, now into reruns, was asked if the series had had the conversational impact on American big-city life he’d hoped. He said, “Not really, but the truth is, you know, I wasn’t satisfied when I was a journalist. You would write stories, and they would go into the ether, and you would think that you had done a little something, and then they would come and argue about it and maybe pass a law that made it worse, or not. In a way, a long time ago, when I was still at the Baltimore Sun newspaper, I gave up on the idea of impact as being plausible. And I had to sort of ground myself in the idea of you’re telling stories, and if you tell a story well, and it’s executed well, and it’s the story you intended, that’s pretty much all you can do.”
Similarly, the argument that songs change the world is nonsense. For all the talk about moulding minds and forcing issues, the well-reasoned song-writer knows that his/her work, while at times uplifting, is really entertainment. If you go into that particular battle, guitar in hand, you will save yourself much disappointment if you feel you’re going to reorganise positions. I heard a young musician in Cayman years ago proclaim (probably for my benefit standing 6 feet away) that his new band was coming on the scene “to make an impact by teaching people about good music.” Twenty years later, he’s boiled down to low gravy, as we say, and makes a living playing the popular music of the day instead of the superior product he had promised – the folks didn’t buy it. My song ‘Not A Blade O’ Grass,’ for instance, was a very catchy tune with some interesting rhyme lines, and it received huge airplay in Guyana, but a large part of the success of that song owes to it being a subject on which Guyanese were joined. Similarly, several years later, when I wrote Hooper and Chanderpaul, an allegory for solving race relations in Guyana using cricket, the song was generally ignored; on both sides of that issue I wasn’t causing any reconsiderations. Bob Dylan’s ‘Blowing in the Wind’ didn’t change any attitudes in American society; Dylan was reflecting the position he was hearing from the young people around him; he was telling America what it already knew. One would assume that Bob Marley’s powerful music (‘One Love’, ‘Exodus’, ‘War’) would change the world for the better. In fact, if you turn on the television news almost any day of the week, you see that the world is worse off.
When we want change in our society, while the artist can and should raise the subject, important change will have to wait until the institutions in our country, or our politically motivated organizations, take up the fight to generate the shifts. Guyana now is a perfect example of that waiting taking place as we yearn for the better to come. The lone voice in any area of the media, even at full expression, is not going to do it. That’s the reality; so it go.
