The Caribbean Festival of the Arts (Carifesta) is 50 years old. Yet, at its moment of golden achievement, when it should be radiant in celebratory glory, it seems to invoke blatant denunciation, criticism and serious questioning. Outside of a strong fortress of Guyanese pride, why is there a reluctance to sing the successes of this unique festival? Has it lived up to the grand aims outlined when it was planned in 1970? Where has it failed and who has it offended? Why is it that, instead of celebrating a well-earned Golden Jubilee, the question still being asked is, Whither Carifesta?
Inaugurated in Guyana on August 25, 1972, it marked its 50th birthday two Thursdays ago and perhaps the grandest celebration was the three-day symposium, “Inaugural Caribbean Festival of Arts (CARIFESTA) as Prism: Twentieth Century Festivals in the Multilingual Caribbean” hosted by the Guyana Folk Festival of New York last month and coordinated by Vibert Cambridge. That event revisited the memorable proceedings of the first Carifesta in Georgetown in 1972 and addressed documentation and research. But what do Caribbean territories have to show half a century of expenditure and investment later?
In Georgetown, the city of its birth, there are outstanding physical monuments such as Festival City in North Ruimveldt where the houses built to accommodate the visiting participants still stand. There is a thoroughfare named Carifesta Avenue on the northern edge of the capital. Not least of them is the National Cultural Centre, the nation’s leading theatre and performing house which was originally built as a venue for that first Carifesta. But, celebrated as these are, do they stand today in memory of the glory of history, or as the disjecta membra of a great ruin?
In answer to that, the most damning critical judgement of this festival came from one of the West Indies’ greatest artists – Nobel Prize Winner Derek Walcott. In an interview with this columnist, published in 1989, Walcott had denounced Carifesta as “an elaborate and shameful waste of money”. He had called it nothing more than “a grand fete every four years after which the artists return to poverty at home”. The money splurged on Carifesta, he had declared, could be better spent on developing the arts in the various countries, on scholarships and facilities. But while funds were being squandered to show off the artists for a week or two in a superficial bash, very little was being done for them at home. “The artist is betrayed,” he had declared, “I am really very angry.”
Walcott was a guest at Carifesta X, when the festival returned to its birthplace in 2008. He spoke at the Grand Opening Symposium challenging then president Bharrat Jagdeo to put money into the arts. In the ensuing debate on the subject of political choices, Walcott had put forth the argument that investing money in the theatre was just as important as building infrastructure such as roads. It was fairly good-natured banter. The engagement with Walcott and with writer David Dabydeen ended with Jagdeo approving funding for The Caribbean Press, which can be put forward as one tangible outcome of Carifesta building infrastructure for artists at home.
The most recent critical questioning came from a Stabroek News editorial, “Legacies of Carifesta 72” (August 31, 2022), which referred to a number of scandalous controversies arising from artists’ discontentment with Carifesta leading to protest action in Trinidad in 2006 and Barbados in 2017. The editorial argued that rather than bringing about satisfactory accommodation for the arts, Carifesta tended to move in the other direction, which comes close to Walcott’s peeve. And sure enough, there have been major scandalous failures in the festival’s history. Among those most remembered are the fiascos which afflicted Carifesta IV in Barbados in 1981 when that nation’s Defence Force had to rush to the rescue to prevent a total infrastructural collapse. In Trinidad in 2006, a major breakdown in planning and publicity, perhaps also coupled with a boycott, saw empty houses for many high-profile performances. Neither did Barbados escape in 2017 when a few visiting contingents refused to go on stage because the house was empty.
Such blunders are often quite popular talking points. Are these, then, what Carifesta is to be remembered by? Will that be the lasting image of the festival, and isn’t there really anything to celebrate? Guyana takes great pride in and claims credit for creating the inaugural regional festival of the arts. Indeed, when the curtains finally opened in 1972, it was the eventual success in the staging of a major festival integrating the arts of and by West Indian people after many years of trying. There had been brief flashes and unsustained attempts before. These included a “Caribbean Festival of the Arts” in San Juan, Puerto Rico in 1952, which had no known continuation. Similar activities involving West Indians included the staging of CLR James’ play The Black Jacobins in London in 1953, but this was also only a start. Yet another event was the assembling of Caribbean artists for the ceremonial opening of the West Indian Federation in Trinidad in 1960. But neither did that go any further.
A more sustained attempt arose from the activities of the Caribbean Artists Movement, known as CAM, which was started in London by Kamau Brathwaite in 1966 and lasted till around 1972. This made a major contribution to what developed in two meetings in Guyana. The first of these meetings was at the time of Guyana’s independence in 1966 when the government invited many leading West Indian writers, dramatists, dancers, choreographers, musicians and visual artists to a conference in Georgetown. They discussed regional collaboration in the arts including a major festival, but nothing developed. Then Guyana tried again when a similar grouping of the leading creative minds were invited to a “Caribbean Writers and Artists Convention ‘’ in Georgetown when the country became a republic in February 1970. It was this series of meetings that successfully planned the first Carifesta.
The creation of Carifesta is to be seen as a triumph for decolonisation among Caribbean nations. It had great geopolitical significance. Newly independent Guyana was charting its own course as a nation through republicanism. It was no accident that the Non-Aligned Movement had a conference in Guyana in 1972 for which the famous Umana Yana (meeting place) was built. That is because four independent nations – Guyana, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago and Barbados – were leading the region in insisting on a post-colonial identity. They were responding to the Cold War and western pressure. Their foreign policy included relations with China and Cuba in defiance of American isolation. They were also charting a Caribbean identity in a spirit of regionalism which underlay the signing of the Treaty of Chaguaramas to establish Caricom in July, 1973.
This Caribbean regionalism included an approach to the non-English territories. It is to be noted that Suriname, Haiti, Dominican Republic, Cuba, Venezuela, Colombia, Martinique, Guadeloupe and French Guiana were invited to the first two Carifestas – Guyana, 1972 and Jamaica 1976. Cuba returned the gesture by hosting Carifesta III in 1979, conscious of culture as a weapon against US isolationist policy. Haiti hosted Carifesta in 2015 in a similar return of fraternity to make a major statement in spite of recent poverty and catastrophe through natural disasters. Suriname hosted it twice (2003 and 2013) in the same spirit, embracing a Caribbean destiny as against the Dutch orientation that it had before independence in 1975.
So then, Carifesta can count regional integration among its successes. Caricom embraces that spirit of a multicultural, multilingual Caribbean and this policy has been emphatically demonstrated through the arts. It is definitely reflected in the literature. All the Carifesta publications have deliberately included the writing of the non-Anglophone territories to have Caribbean literature as comparative literature. This is the case in the very first collection New Writing in the Caribbean: Carifesta 1972 edited by AJ Seymour, as well as in the second, which is a special issue of the journal published by Guyana’s History and Arts Council. Kaei 11, August, 1973 is titled “The Literary Vision of Carifesta 1972” edited by Lynette Dolphin.
The cross-cultural vision was discussed in the conference in 1970, and full details of the proceedings and of the series of meetings and the personalities involved are documented by Jamaican novelist Andrew Salkey in Georgetown Journal (1971). Two publications emerged from Carifesta II in Jamaica, one of prose and one of drama. The prose collection Forum (1976) was edited by John Hearne and the collection of plays, A Time and A Season (1976) edited by Errol Hill. These publications stand as further monuments of the tangible outcome of Carifesta.
Ironically, these successes are also reminders of the failures of Carifesta after 50 years. Salkey (1971) narrated the aims of the planners regarding the literature. It was intended that there was to be a Carifesta anthology after each festival. Yet successive festivals have failed to keep that promise and there have only been five anthologies: Seymour (1972), Dolphin (1973), Hearne (1976) and Hill (1976). Of interest, it was not until Carifesta returned to Guyana in 2008 that the fifth was produced: Anthology of Carifesta Poetry (2008), edited by Petamber Persaud.
Over the 50-year period Carifesta has been sporadic. There have only been 14 festivals with huge gaps of several years. Between 1972 and 1981 there were 5 festivals, which was very good. Then there was a gap of 11 years before Trinidad took it up in 1992, and hosted again in 1995. Another 6 years elapsed before it found a home in St Kitts and Nevis in 2001.
There was another 5-year absence from 2003 till 2008. The Bahamas had offered to host, but in 2007 announced it could not keep that commitment. Guyana filled in. There was another promise from the Bahamas to host in 2010, but again Nassau did not deliver, resulting in another 5-year gap. Suriname stepped up in 2013. Since then, there was a Carifesta every two years – 2015, 2017 and 2019. COVID-19 caused Antigua to cancel the offer to host in 2021.
Carifesta has had a continuing problem with finding nations willing to host it. The practice is that governments volunteer, but that has not been happening. Among the inhibiting factors are the high costs and administrative burdens usually borne by each host.
From the outset the idea was a rotating festival every two years. Eight countries have done it so far. One of them is Cuba, but of 15 full members of Caricom, only 7 countries have hosted Carifesta. To break that down further, two of them are Suriname (twice) and Haiti, leaving only 5 English-speaking countries. Of these, Trinidad and Tobago has hosted four times.
Significantly, the Stabroek News editorial suggested that Carifesta should try a new format or structure which might solve some of its woes. However, that has been tried already without success. In 2003 Carifesta was examined with a view to solving these very problems. The decision was to embark on a project to “Reinvent Carifesta” and a Task Force was appointed, led by a Consultant, Keith Nurse. The reinvented Carifesta was presented to the Caricom Ministerial Committee on Human and Social Development and approved in 2005.
The amended set of arrangements included a permanent secretariat with a business management and tourism approach, where governments would bid to be Carifesta hosts (along similar lines as the football world cup or the Olympics), the financial burden would be removed from host nations and income would be earned from the festival. It would be held every two years and the next venue would be announced at the end of each festival.
Since then, there have been 6 Carifestas hosted by 5 governments, and none of them chose to use the new formula. Every one opted to manage the festival on their own terms and every one chose to forego the opportunities for earning money. The system of volunteers has not changed and the burdens on host governments remain the same.
There has been no Carifesta since 2019. The expectation is that it will return as soon as a country is willing to take it on in post-pandemic conditions. But the fundamental issues have not changed. The same problems that have plagued it for 50 years are basically still there, leaving the recurring question – Whither Carifesta?
