Who can doubt that the West Indian nation in relation to its tiny population and insignificant economic and military weight has been disproportionately blessed by the fruits of our extraordinary range of creative men and women.
In my own little corner in Georgetown, immersed in the day to day business of ordinary life for years just around the corner I could meet and get to know well extraordinary, world class imaginations like those of Martin Carter, Stanley Greaves, Wilson Harris and the visionary artist Philip Moore, to mention just four – and world class intellectuals and creators like Denis Williams, Mary Noel Menezes, David Dabydeen and Clem Seecharan to give just some names in a list that would be long. And I am sure my experience is no different to that of fellow citizens throughout the length and breadth of the West Indies. Caribbean creative achievements are world class at the very least in literature, music, art, economics (think of Arthur Lewis), cricket and athletics in particular but sports as a whole, and in that astonishing and spectacular popular art which is Carnival.
So I make no special plea for drastically stepped up official action or steeply increased funding, or emergency measures, to stimulate, induce or bolster our creative imaginations or creative efforts. The genius of West Indians will find its way. We have done something right in cultivating the ground where our roots have been put down and I strongly believe that the trees of our cultural and intellectual creations will continue to flourish.
Rather I wish to call urgent attention to an area in which we do indeed need much more focused official attention and greatly increased public funding. This is in preserving the record of our creative achievements and in the subsidiary area of extending the influence of these achievements.
We are certainly not world-class, indeed I fear we may be distressingly inferior, in the effort and time and attention and resources and money we put into preserving the record of our world class creators and sharing the fruits of their endeavours.
For instance, at the very basic level of establishing and maintaining really well organized and comprehensive national archives, how far in most if not all instances around the region are we from world-class? Alarmingly far I suggest.
Resources for maintaining and extending archives may well be among the lowest of low budgetary priorities. When last did a President or Prime Minister summon an aide and ask him what plans are in place to keep archives in good repair? When last did he lecture one of his Cabinet meetings on the importance of well-kept archives, which represent, after all, the historical soul, the continuity of the creative spirit of any nation?
I believe we are sadly neglecting how we preserve the record of our creative achievements.
Are we, for instance, doing enough to preserve the world of the creative and special contribution of our original peoples? I draw attention to the chapter of the West Indian Commission report on this subject. At the most fundamental of all levels, are we even preserving the record of their various languages? I think of Richard Wilbur’s moving poem, To the Etruscan Poets, as I think of the passing away forever of those slowly dying Amerindian languages.
“Dream fluently, still brothers, who when young
Took with your mother’s milk the mother tongue
In which pure matrix, joining world and mind,
You strove to leave some line of verse behind
Like a fresh track across a field of snow
Not reckoning that all could melt and go.”
Let me also cite the case of Martin Carter. Those who know his work can have little doubt that he is one of the great poets. So many of his poems are rare, rare, as Randall Jarrell said, as a meteor landing in your garden. In other countries whole industries of remembrance and scholarship have built up around poets of less worth than Martin Carter. But very little scholarship or remembrance of even the elementary infrastructure of distribution has built up so far around Martin Carter’s great poems. UNESCO funded a Spanish translation of the poems. That is good but what it means is that Martin Carter’s poems will be better known in Latin America than they are in the West Indies. That is strange. When I asked at our radio station in Guyana for records of Martin reading his own poems, I found they had lost, or at least mislaid, the tapes. How sad all this is!
Always and soon the future becomes the past. Therefore it is also essential that we should find time and space to consider how the past should be reflected as true and whole as possible in the annals we preserve for the generations coming on.
