The primary purpose of the Caribbean Festival of Arts (CARIFESTA) we are told, is to assemble artists, musicians, authors, and the various other strands of creative people and to display the folkloric, artistic and other creative manifestations of the Caribbean.
Up until now and notwithstanding the fact that there has been an ebb and flow in the energy levels evinced from one staging of CARIFESTA to the other, we have more or less kept it going, recognising that the manifestation of the event, even given its periodic organisational hiccups, serves as a symbol of our regional oneness in much the same manner that other clutches of countries recognise and embrace their common features.
In some sense CARIFESTA has evolved. For example, one gets the impression that while the artistic and creative dimensions to the event are still very much alive there has been, increasingly, a focus on other dimensions. CARIFESTA has come to be seen as a marketplace for the trading or vending of art and craft-related goods produced in the various countries in the region in the single marketplace that the event provides. Certainly, here in Guyana, the movement of fairly significant consignments of art and craft-related cargo to the various CARIFESTA events elsewhere in the region and the attendant jockeying of our local creative people to offer their goods to a wider market, has become a common feature of the CARIFESTA season.
One hastens to add that there is nothing wrong with the use of the CARIFESTA event as the locale for the trading of goods by the regional creative industries. In fact, one may well ask whether, over what is now fast approaching half a century of its existence, CARIFESTA has done enough to create a regional and more particularly, international market for our art, our craft and our theatre and if the answer is no, then another legitimate question arises. Why not? Apart from putting money into the pockets of the people who work so hard and invest so much into what they produce, what the trading also does is to allow for a sharing of cultures through the exchange of clothing, craft and condiments, never mind the fact that the regional market is pretty modest, a circumstance that compels the creative people to seek markets beyond the region.
It has been said before, elsewhere, that perhaps the Caribbean Community as a regional organisation ‘missed a trick’ so to speak, by neglecting over the years, to focus on the extra-regional marketing of CARIFESTA to target those larger numbers of Caribbean people in the diaspora whose presence in greater numbers at the various stagings of the event would do both them and CARIFESTA a power of good. In the first instance it would provide them with the ‘taste of the region’ that many of them have left so long ago and allow them to get a sense of both what has changed and what may have remained unchanged in terms of Caribbean culture. On the other hand, the region and the individual member countries of CARICOM would benefit from what, potentially, would be the considerable patronage of those who ‘come home’ for CARIFESTA.
If there can be no question that CARIFESTA remains, in a host of ways, relevant to us asserting our legitimacy as a Caribbean people, the truth is that we have not, over the years, worked hard enough for its continued consolidation, internationalisation and growth. One gets a sense that it has simply not grown into the kind of multi-dimensional event that it really ought to be, that it remains important but only in a symbolic and mundane sort of manner. CARIFESTA, after all, is the turf of the region’s creative people and creativity is about change, newness and different dimensions. Creativity, these days, whether we like it or not, is about creating business opportunity for those whose talents and whose market appeal are deserving of material rewards. There has been far too little of this up until now.
