Amina Blackwood Meeks, Contributor
My Esteemed Prime Minister:
I KNOW you do not respond to open letters. I only wish that this one will be brought to your attention. I must also draw your attention to the verse of that very poignant Tanya Stephens song exhorting all Ministas nuh fe badda tink sey "we a diss ya" when we point out sey "everyting nuh so criss ya."
I received my copies of the Jamaican newspapers of Sunday, September 21, 2003 while I was in Grand Cayman. Actually, I was in a meeting when someone passed me one of them with an article circled and the note "Amina, yu know bout dis?" It was the newspaper report about your recounting the achievements of your administration at the recently concluded PNP Congress. The circled section was about man having more 'gal' than at any other time.
I quietly read the article and loudly returned to the topic under discussion, "So, when is the next Carifesta?" It wasn't really the focus of the meeting. But we felt that the organisation of Carifesta had some valuable lessons for the thing that we were about: A regional pilot project on Storytelling as Parenting Education. That is, how do we honour the best of who we are as reposed in the oral tradition and use this to raise children who are centred, caring, proud, productive human beings?
Thankfully, the writer of the note did not press me into a response. When I returned to Jamaica and heard something of an apology, me say, "ah good, for tekking for granted is leading we down a very slippery path!" An den me jus reprieve de pertinent part of the Cayman meeting and say to de person who brought this to my attention, "So when is Carifesta?" Me end up laughing and dem end up very puzzled.
Well maybe the question should be: what is Carifesta?
WHAT IS CARIFESTA?
The Caribbean Festival of the Arts was born in Guyana in 1972 to utilise Caribbean Art forms to celebrate the best of Caribbean peoples, our accomplishments and aspirations. It was envisaged that this festival would be held every four years and be hosted each time by a different Caribbean territory.
It is utterly conceivable, however, that many people who were born in the region after 1972 have never heard of it. After all, that's all of 31 years ago and so much about who we are has been made irrelevant since that time. Maybe because so many people persist in their desires to make us utterly irrelevant. Take for example, Caribbean cuisine. Is there still such a thing? What would be on display in such a pavilion? Barbecued KFC? The fish and bammy breakfast at Burger King? Suppose one of those famous Carifesta forums were to focus on Caribbean manners what would we see? The pre-1972 attempts to be respectful to our women or the millennium indifference at their physical and emotional brutalisation? And if there were an attempt to identify reasons why, would the statement attributed to you factor in?
Would the generation under 30 even have a basis for participating in these discussions in a meaningful and uplifting way? I have people in my Caribbean Aesthetics class, (in which we explore Caribbean Art-forms and the values they attract) who have asked "who is that" when I so glibly uttered the name of Barry Moncrieffe. Not so long ago a student told me that it was very unfair of me to ask the class to do an essay on Peter Tosh because when he died she was only three years old so how could I expect them to know anything about him. Incidentally, the task was to do an appreciation of his song, "I am an African" within the context of the socio-political climate at the time when the song was written.
REFERENDUM
Okay, let's get off the backs of those born after 1972. What about those born before that time? The ones who want us to have a referendum to decide whether we want to come out of Missis Queen Privy Council even after she dun threaten fe lack de door an fling whey de key if we do not voluntarily evacuate weself? In fact many people socialised in self-hate and convinced that nothing of worth comes out of this region might very well have paid Carifesta no mind, paid no taxes which might have been used to support it and offered it no sponsorship, there being no parade of naked beauties at the opening and closing ceremonies. It's that easy to render anything irrelevant. And too besides, what's the value of something which has no near equivalent outside Her Majesty's chambers?
At the inaugural Carifesta the Jamaican contingent alone read like a who's who on the cutting edge of the performing arts commanding attention and respect anywhere in the world: Jimmy Cliff, Trevor Rhone, Jamaica Folk Singers, Louise Bennett, the National Dance Theatre Company among them. No less a person than Wycliffe Bennett oversaw the planning of the opening gala when Jamaica hosted the festival in 1976. At the 1992 Carifesta in Trinidad, members of Child's Play, the children's theatre group from Antigua, could not be contained when they learned that Barbara Gloudon, the writer of the Pantomime they were watching, was actually in the theatre and had to be taken to meet her during the intermission.
This was conceived as a great rallying point for producers and consumers of the Caribbean Arts. It was to be a forum for Caribbean practitioners to meet, share ideas, see, critique, learn from each other, take direct pride in Caribbean Cultural output and Caribbean Cultural icons as a reflection of Caribbean realities and teach the young all at the same time. There is nothing else like it in the Caribbean.
The festival has been hosted by Cuba, Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados and St. Kitts. Delegations have come from Venezuela, Puerto Rico, Canada and I believe Panama at one of them. Carifesta has great potential for bringing the world to our doorsteps with significant economic benefits. In 2000, it cost St. Kitts EC$6.4m to stage the festival, attracting participating contingents for Carifesta. Of this number 800 of them stayed at the official Carifesta Housing Village and spent EC$320,040,000 on accommodation alone, that is, in this area they contributed five per cent of the total budget. Their expenditure on food, transportation, festival merchandise or post-Carifesta activities has not been measured.
WHERE WAS JAMAICA?
This year, Carifesta was held in Suriname. I received an e-mail from a contact in Suriname, which she also sent to other Jamaicans in the Arts, enquiring about which of us would be coming so that she could organise something special for us. Well she assumed wrong because none of us to my certain knowledge was invited to "represent" Jamaica, or to have an input in the matter.
The week before the festival I was in Barbados. The morning show on national television ran little features on the groups and individuals who were to represent Barbados and sampled their offerings. I was also in Barbados some weeks before the previous Carifesta which was held in St. Kitts and was invited to some of the preparatory activities. There I met non-Carifesta participants who had been invited to say their yeas or nays about what was to represent them. Subsequently there was a showing of the pieces before they went off to "represent".
I've just returned from Grand Cayman where persons were preoccupied with assessing their performance at the Suriname Carifesta and strategising about the kind of training and planning required for even better representation next time. This within the context of lamentations about how little official regional attention and resources go into this event.
According to the notes I laid my hands on, at the Carifesta VIII Symposium Dr. Keith Nurse of UWI, St. Augustine, assessed that one of the major challenges to have dogged Carifesta was "too much reliance on volunteers and not enough paid, professional staff". Yet it is expected "to deepen the awareness and knowledge of the diverse aspirations within the Caribbean community and to promote the development of cultural industries and merchandising".
EXCITEMENT ABOUT CARIFESTA
Personally, I would like to see someone at a party congress whipping up excitement about a Carifesta with the international tourism response of say, Sumfest. I would like to live long enough to hear a politician declare that under their stewardship more Jamaican young people had demonstrated an unquenchable thirst for learning about the heritage on which we have survived and was eager for information about the similarities of our traditions with those of our Caribbean brothers and sisters. I would like to see a crowd go wild on being told that under someone's watchful eye more of us had come to appreciate the value of the intangibles that make us wealthy, and that cultural industries were churning out products that were anchored in and reflected the quality of a respectful, supportive relationship between men and women as equal partners.
A Ghanian proverb informs us that the ruin of a nation begins in the homes of its people. I believe that so too, does its salvation. But first we have to build the kind of society in which homes are anchored in the respectful things that flow easily off the tongue and in such profusion that there is no room for unfortunate remarks. From the abundance of the heart the tongue will speak. Both will be the result of deliberate, conscious and consistent vigilance over who we are and how we project ourselves to ourselves and the rest of the world. And all of us, from the King to the commoner, have to engage in the process.
So when is the next Carifesta and what will be Jamaica's contribution?
With continued admiration and respect,
Amina
