The following are random notes I made during Saturday's panel discussion. I didn't really have time to make detailed notes; the hour of discussion was lively and as all lively discourses go, it flew by rather quickly. Plus, I was busy talking and listening keenly to what others had to say. But I knew I had to jot down some things to share with you here. So in no particular order, here goes...
-- (Huh!?) How could you call Marlon James's Night Women misogynist (in a rather dismissive tone) and insist on quoting Naipaul repeatedly in glowing recognition of his work and theories, with no attempt to reconcile his admitted abuse of women IN REAL LIFE with what you appear to like about his work and theories? What you think? We don't know about Naipaul?
-- (Groan) If I hear one more enthusiastic description of a book as the "eye-opening" story of a boy / girl growing up in the islands....
-- (Now tell the truth folks) Didn't we all become Caribbean (West Indian first) when we left Jamaica, Guyana, Trinidad? Did you really feel this fierce attachment to the term "Caribbean" when you lived in your particular country? And what about "West Indian?" Have we abandoned that and the literary theories concerning "West Indian Literature?" Or are we simply to replace all textual references to "West Indian" with "Caribbean?"
-- (Utter nonsense!) I too don't waste one minute of my precious angst worrying about being an "authentic" anything, much less an "authentic" representative of the region we call Caribbean.
-- (Good luck) Self-publishing may give you autonomy, but I think some of that autonomy is worth the price of a well-edited book by someone who knows the marketplace. Or, you can peddle your book to friends and family members who are too kind to tell you it's less than stellar.... far less than stellar.
-- (Good to see him here!) E. Wayne McDonald of the Caribbean Cultural Theatre is indeed doing a fantastic job of bringing writers from various parts of the Caribbean to us here in the NY/NJ area. On Wednesday December 8th, Andrene Bonner and Elizabeth Nunez will be reading at the Bronx location, and on Thursday December 9th Christian Campbell and Jacinth Henry-Martin will be reading at the Brooklyn location.
-- (Yes!) There definitely is a growing number of writers from various parts of the Caribbean who are doing recognizably good writing. And there is lots of room for more.
-- (Grey heads in the room) Maybe the audience here is telling of one of the challenges some Caribbean writers face. At a guess (cause some people could be younger than they look) I'd say except for a few people, this audience (somewhere between 70 and 80 in number) is aged 50 and older. They are the major supporters of Caribbean writers so I can understand the need to entertain them rather than strike out to find a new, younger audience. They tend to like nostalgic writing (writing that reminds them of home); they tend to like "proper" English; and they tend to be very conservative. They like their Island stories clean and sickly-sweet, for the most part, and if writers have anything to be angry about, it should be about "licks" they used to get, the "white" people who used to sit in front of the church while they had to sit at the back, or the jumbie that used to haunt them at night. And they don't really respect the opinions of people younger than them.
-- (This moderator is working!) Hugh Hamilton, producer and host of WBAI's "Talkback," is a true professional. He is asking questions tailored to each specific person's strengths as well as questions to encourage exchanges between and among panelists. I like his style and his preparedness. (And I'm not just saying that because he's Guyanese and from Plaisance.)
-- (I had to say it) I can't begin to wrap my mind around the entire Caribbean and its various peoples. I haven't even visited many of the countries in the Caribbean. So it would be rather presumptuous of me to consider myself a representative of the Caribbean in any true form. On this blog, I speak of the Caribbean mostly as a Geographic region (though I do acknowledge common cultural ties among us), but the definition of Caribbean under which I operate here is very basic: The writers I feature are either from (born in, live in, migrated from, or children of people born in, lived in, migrated from) countries in the Caribbean, or their writing is about that region.
I may not truly represent the Caribbean, but I probably represent a generation of readers from various parts of the Caribbean who no longer live there and who are interested in reading books by writers from the Caribbean. As a representative reader then, I can say this: I am encouraged and proud of what I see, but I want more variety. I completely agree with sentiments like Irish writer Colum McCann's, for instance. McCann recently said, "The writer's proper destiny is to know where he or she comes from, confront his conscience, draw the border line, then step beyond it." He was talking about the concept of the "global" writer who can carry (carries) the weight of many countries. Writers who happen to be immigrants and who have substantive knowledge of the country (countries) from which they and their ancestors came have a rich source for their writing. Many of the Caribbean writers I read have inherited these "multinational" riches, but you can't tell from their writing. They seem stuck in one time period...one set of characters...one set of attitudes towards place...
-- (Note to self) Wear pants next time. We each had all the amenities for people who were going to be talking and listening to others talk for an hour--water, paper, comfortable seats...but the table had no "skirt." So I had to be careful how I moved my legs every time I shifted my butt in the seat. I hope I remained decent throughout the hour. But at the end when a few men made a beeline to me for my card, I had to wonder :)
