Wes­ley Gib­bings

Ba­cano Book­shop’s new St Au­gus­tine lo­ca­tion along the East­ern Main Road is as much a con­ven­tion­al out­let fea­tur­ing low-cost used books as it is an oa­sis of cre­ative pos­si­bil­i­ty. It re­cent­ly moved there from its long-stand­ing Ari­ma lo­ca­tion.

An eclec­tic se­lec­tion of fic­tion and non-fic­tion fills the shelves on the third floor of Cam­pus House, but the pos­si­bil­i­ties that founder and own­er Dene­ka Thomas sees for the space ex­tend well be­yond sell­ing books.

For Thomas, a young cre­ative en­tre­pre­neur, po­et and self-de­scribed “space mak­er”, Ba­cano is part of a much larg­er project to cre­ate op­por­tu­ni­ties for writ­ers, po­ets, read­ers and oth­er cre­atives, while demon­strat­ing that a liveli­hood can be built out­side tra­di­tion­al paths of em­ploy­ment.

What keeps her com­mit­ted to a busi­ness chal­lenged by cur­rent per­cep­tions of a gen­er­a­tion sup­pos­ed­ly de­void of a de­sire to read? As a read­er her­self, she wants to make books “ac­ces­si­ble and a lit­tle bit more cool”, of­fer­ing them at rea­son­able prices while cre­at­ing an en­vi­ron­ment where read­ing can be fun and com­mu­nal.

That com­mu­ni­ty, she stress­es, need not con­form to con­ven­tion­al ideas about lit­er­ary en­gage­ment. That said, Thomas is no fan of the tra­di­tion­al book club mod­el, with fixed read­ing ma­te­r­i­al and time­lines.

In­stead, Ba­cano al­lows peo­ple to come with what­ev­er they want to read while still en­joy­ing “a com­mu­ni­ty and a space that’s a sup­port sys­tem for read­ing”.

But there is a hard com­mer­cial re­al­i­ty be­hind the ide­al­ism. “The book­shop alone in this econ­o­my,” she ac­knowl­edges, “is not very lu­cra­tive.”

This is a ma­jor rea­son why Ba­cano forms part of a wider cre­ative en­ter­prise. Thomas is a known go-get­ter in­volved in or­gan­is­ing work­shops and out­reach pro­grammes, even as she per­forms and stages tick­et­ed events, in­clud­ing po­et­ry slams.

Her Bars’ Po­et­ry Slam shows are pop­u­lar among the young lit­er­ary crowd, and the event re­turns to the Lit­tle Carib The­atre in Wood­brook on Oc­to­ber 24, fol­low­ing a month­ly run at oth­er venues through­out Port of Spain.

These dif­fer­ent strands of Thomas’s work feed in­to each oth­er, cre­at­ing what she de­scribes as a “wider com­mu­ni­ty of cre­ative space mak­ing”.

It is an ap­proach that al­so chal­lenges the no­tion that young peo­ple who choose cre­ative ca­reers are some­how wast­ing their po­ten­tial.

Thomas be­lieves T&T is filled with young peo­ple do­ing in­ter­est­ing and pro­duc­tive things, even if their ef­forts of­ten go un­no­ticed.

“I of­ten feel like peo­ple are un­aware that it have so much things that young per­sons like my­self, and even younger than me, are do­ing with­in the com­mu­ni­ty,” she says. Greater at­ten­tion and sup­port for the cre­ative in­dus­tries, she ar­gues, could help young peo­ple build lives on their own terms.

“I am not in­ter­est­ed and I know that there’s a lot of peo­ple that are not in­ter­est­ed in tra­di­tion­al ways of be­ing em­ployed and mak­ing a liv­ing,” she says. Young peo­ple, she be­lieves, are find­ing “more cre­ative ways” of do­ing so while re­main­ing true to them­selves.

For Thomas, that is not ev­i­dence of a lost gen­er­a­tion. It is ev­i­dence of a gen­er­a­tion search­ing for al­ter­na­tives.

She al­so sees no nec­es­sary con­flict be­tween old and new cul­tur­al forms. The evo­lu­tion of lit­er­ary and artis­tic ex­pres­sion, she says, is nat­ur­al – much like the evo­lu­tion of so­ca from ca­lyp­so.

“It’s just re­al­ly ac­cept­ing that this is just the nat­ur­al tran­si­tion of things,” she says.

Her own jour­ney to­wards keep­ing Ba­cano alive was helped by look­ing be­yond T&T. A vis­it to New Or­leans last year proved par­tic­u­lar­ly in­flu­en­tial. See­ing or­di­nary used-book shops op­er­at­ing suc­cess­ful­ly gave her the con­fi­dence to be­lieve that her own long-held dream was achiev­able.

“The mo­ment … I saw these reg­u­lar peo­ple have used book­shops, and I was just like, this is ac­tu­al­ly pos­si­ble,” she re­calls.

Trav­el has al­so taught her that Trinida­di­an cre­atives can ben­e­fit from see­ing how their work is val­ued else­where. She re­calls be­ing booked to per­form at a uni­ver­si­ty in Con­necti­cut and be­ing sur­prised when the or­gan­is­er told her she was un­der­charg­ing – then dou­bled her ask­ing price.

That ex­pe­ri­ence helped re­in­force a les­son she now of­fers oth­er young cre­atives: seek op­por­tu­ni­ties abroad, ap­ply for grants and fel­low­ships, at­tend con­fer­ences and build con­nec­tions be­yond the coun­try.

“Just try to trav­el and con­nect with peo­ple out­side of here,” she ad­vis­es. It can pro­vide “great per­spec­tive, great ideas and just maybe in­spi­ra­tion … to keep go­ing”.

At Ba­cano, that spir­it of pos­si­bil­i­ty has found a new phys­i­cal home – a book­shop, cre­ative hub and gath­er­ing place across the road from a uni­ver­si­ty cam­pus, where such pas­sions can be ig­nit­ed.

And in the hands of Dene­ka Thomas, it is al­so a qui­et re­but­tal to the idea that T&T’s young peo­ple have run out of hope.

Per­haps, she sug­gests, they sim­ply need more space in which to cre­ate it.