Archival deficit
Ian on Sunday
Last week I attended the Conference on the Caribbean in the 21st Century held at the Mona campus in Jamaica and participated in the panel discussion on the Caribbean and the Creative Imagination. This week's column is an extract from a presentation I made during this discussion. I am taking Caribbean creative achievement as something given to us as a sort of extraordinary birthright, a Godsend. In a famous conversation he had with Viv Richards, C.L.R James at one point asked the rhetorical question: "What is it about these tiny islands in the Caribbean where cricketers seem to grow on trees? They drop like ripe fruit and give us such pleasure. We produce the most amazing batsmen and bowlers with very little effort." In that statement CLR could as easily have substituted writers and makers of music and artists of every kind. Who can doubt that the West Indian nation in relation to its tiny population and completely 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, rather workaday, business world of trying to safeguard and strengthen the sugar industry, there for years just around another corner I could meet extraordinary, world class imaginations like those of Martin Carter and Denis Williams and the visionary artist Philip Moore, to mention just three of many, and be inspired by their views of the world and our tumultuous times. And I am sure my experience is no different to that of all of us throughout the length and breadth of the West Indies. So I will not dwell long on the fact of Caribbean creative achievements. I consider these achievements to be world-class at the least in literature, music, art, cricket in particular but sport as a whole, and in that astonishing and spectacular popular art which is Trinidad Carnival. I make no special plea for drastically stepped up official action in the new millennium or steeply increased funding, or emergency measures, to stimulate, induce or bolster our creative imaginations or our 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 creations will continue to flourish. Resources for maintaining and extending archives may well be among the lowest of low budgetary priorities My theme is something different and it is an area in which in the new millennium we do indeed need immensely more focused official attention and hugely 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 in general 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 organised 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 Prime Minister summon an aide and ask him what plans are in place to keep archives in good repair? When last did a Prime Minister 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? And may I ask what progress we have made in even thinking about two institutions which I would have thought in the new millennium must sooner or later be established if we are truly to create a West Indian nation - that is, a West Indian National Library and a West Indian Dictionary of National Biography continually updated and amplified? Such institutions no doubt exist in individual countries but we need to think of how we can begin to build a West Indian National Library, if not a West Indian National Archive, and we need to record the lives of our great and our medium-great and even our merely distinguished achievers in a form which makes them routinely recognisable around the region. I want now simply to proceed by anecdote to illustrate my theme that we are sadly neglecting how we preserve the record of our creative achievements. Let me 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 infinitely less worth than Martin Carter. But very little scholarship or remembrance or even the most elementary infrastructure of distribution has built up so far around Martin Carter's great poems. For most young West Indians these poems are, and seem likely to remain, secrets. UNESCO is funding a Spanish translation of the poems. That is good but what it means is that soon Martin Carter's poems will be better known in Latin America than they are in the West Indies. That is strange. When lately I asked at our radio station in Guyana for recordings of Martin reading his own poems, I found they had lost, or at least mislaid, the tapes. How sad all this is! My final symbolic example of our desperate archival deficit concerns cricket where our creative achievement has been supreme in the world and in which we will remain world-class as long as we continue to care at all for that great art and craft. When I was in London a year or two ago, I visited the booksellers Hatchards and found on their bookshelves a wonderful history of the Yorkshire Cricket Club, more than 400 pages long, lavishly illustrated. Compare that with the fact that there is not even a slim booklet on the Georgetown Cricket Club, the GCC, at Bourda though the GCC is considerably older than the Yorkshire Cricket Club - the GCC will be celebrating its 150th anniversary in a few years - and certainly more significant in the history of cricket. Our great game, one of our true and deep imaginative possessions, and the oldest cricket club in the West Indies - and we do not even have a short history of it. For me it symbolises the state of neglect in which we keep the record of our achievements and our creations. This Conference is focused on how to master the extraordinary challenges of the future. It is right that it should. But, of course, always and soon the future becomes the past. Therefore I think this Conference should find some time and some space in its proceedings to consider how the past is to be reflected as true and whole as possible in the annals we preserve for the generations coming on.
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