What has St. Lucia Done to Deserve Her Artists?

Over the weekend I received two reviews of my most recent contribution to this column; one solicited, the other courtesy an overseas-based friend for whom the Saint Lucian postings on Facebook are “scribbled porn,” to be indulged when there’s no one else around. We need not reproduce the latest sample here. Suffice it to say that all its producer gleaned from my pointed references to John Pilger, Tom Wolfe and other journalists whose work continues to inspire my own was that I was “just showing off,” yet again engaging in  “self-promotion,” blahblahblah.

The proffered anonymous critique reminded me of the following from V.S. Naipaul’s The Middle Passage: “I knew Trinidad to be unimportant, uncreative, cynical. The only professions were those of law and medicine, because there was no need for any other; and the most successful people were commission agents, bank managers and members of the distributive trades. Power was recognized, but dignity was allowed to no one. Every person of eminence was held to be crooked and contemptible. We lived in a society which denied itself heroes . . . It was a place where the stories were never stories of success but of failure: brilliant men, scholarship winners, who had died young, gone mad, or taken to drink; cricketers of promise whose careers had been ruined by disagreements with the authorities. We lived in a society which denied itself heroes.”

Ring bells? This might: “It was also a place where a recurring word of abuse was ‘conceited’—an expression of the resentment felt of anyone who possessed unusual skills. Such skills were not required of a society which produced nothing, never had to prove its worth, and was never called upon to be efficient. And such people had to be cut down to size . . . Generosity, the admiration of equal for equal, was therefore unknown; it was a quality I knew only from books, and found only in England.”

Yes indeed, harsh. Rough stuff. But is it truth? Is it true of Saint Lucia? Today’s Saint Lucia, where Derek Walcott’s ostensible aloofness and intolerance of fools live after him, not his universally lauded oeuvre? Where George Odlum is at once a saint and “the Great Satan?” Where native son Sir Arthur Lewis was “a black Anglo Saxon” who deserted his country? Where . . . oh, but already the point is made, hopefully.

Now for the other review, requested of a home-based Saint Lucian who actually reads books—a rara avis: “What was the point you sought to make?” she queried, who knows whether out of professional curiosity or plain bitchiness? I said her opinion would better serve my purpose without my salt. She wrote back: “Sorry to say. I literally thought the words in my head. ‘I’ve read Rick write this before. Why is he writing such a love letter to Claudius?’ The writing is always good but the content this time was meh . . . for me. What was the insight? What was the elucidation?”

I’d hoped she might’ve challenged—at the very least—the advertised virtues of the so-called “New Journalism” techniques cited in the column offered for review. Nevertheless I took the opportunity to remind her that the degree of “elucidation” and “enlightenment” received from any writing depended on the reader. As someone much wiser than I had noted a long time ago: “What you take away from a book is largely determined by what you take to it.” Or something like that. Meaning: it’s unlikely a book on sprinting, say, by Kenny Anthony, will deliver much elucidation to Usain Bolt. Or, for that matter, enlightenment.  

As for my “love letter to Claudius,” I assured my invited reviewer that it had little to do with the radio presenter, despite his loaded recent comment that “when Rick was Rick he wrote articles that affected the country. Now he . . .” The lady fired back: “It wasn’t about Claudius per se but it was sparked by his comment that rankled. Or you used it as a writing prompt.” On that score the lady was right. At any rate, half right!

For purposes of enlightenment and elucidation (not to say underscoring underappreciated past-present connections) I offer some more Naipaul, still referencing himself as a young man (and Saint Lucia, inadvertently): “Though we knew that something was wrong with our society, we made no attempt to assess it. Trinidad was too unimportant and we could never be convinced of the value of reading the history of a place which was, as everyone said, only a dot on the map of the world. Our interest was all in the world outside, the remoter the better. Australia was more important than Venezuela . . . Our own past was buried and no one cared to dig it up.”  

More food for thought, this time courtesy Anthony Trollope from his The English in the West Indies: “Had I not seen Grenada, if I had not known what I was about to see in Dominica, I should have thought it the most exquisite place which nature had ever made, so perfect were the forms of the forest-clothed hills, the glens dividing them and the high mountain ranges in the interior still draped in the white mist of morning . . .”

Who’s to blame if the above is no more? In 1992 Derek Walcott offered a hint: “The Caribbean is not an idyll, not to its natives . . . Its peasantry and its fishermen are not there to be loved or even photographed; they are the trees who sweat, and whose bark is filmed with salt, but every day on some island, rootless trees in suits are signing favorable tax breaks with entrepreneurs, poisoning the sea almond and the spice laurel of the mountains to their roots.

A morning could come in which governments might ask what happened not merely to the forests and the bays but to a whole people.” How many times had our legendary native son delivered the particular sermon? Just two years before his passing, frustration from years of addressing eyes and ears that would not (could not?) see and hear had made him angry enough to say to a gathering of media practitioners, among them two Facebook giants: “There are times when I think Saint Lucia does not deserve her artists . . .” The Nobel winner took the opportunity to mourn: “Must I, like my brother Roddy, also die before this country provides a home for the arts?”  

Every other day another “boring story” is retold. It may be about child abuse; it may be about our countless unresolved homicides; the random rapes with impunity; blatant official corruption; the scores of homicides turned cold cases hours after discovery; police officers gone rogue . . . All
had been heard before, over and over and over. What we yearn for is fresh meat to chew on for a few hours—that is, fresh as imported iced fish is fresh. 

Better to redirect our attention to the nubile sweating secretaries gyrating naked in our streets, inviting random shirtless males to bury their noses in the nearest oscillating lady parts—all in the name of our African roots. Not altogether new, but a lot closer to Senator Kentry JnPierre’s expressed desire to see “people no longer embarrassed to make love in public!” 

Meanwhile Walcott’s “rootless trees in suits” are singing the same old song: “Best carnival ever . . . it’ll be even better next year . . .” The poet’s “sometimes I think Saint Lucia does not deserve her artists” has been turned on its head, even as his nightmare morning fast approaches!