As intimated in the last instalment, the Government's seeking innovative projects from an "expert" panel is almost designed to fail. The "committee" approach creates a bottleneck and gatekeepers: the usual suspects, doing business as usual. The best recent example of a government bottleneck is (it cannot be repeated enough) UTT's Academy. It got piles of money, leeway, and produced a UWI retirement community, steel pan research, Ramleela research, and projects whose collective character seems to be anti-innovative. (Thanks, Ken Ramchand.) That aside, the State has traditionally funded arts and culture directly, through ministries, whose pace is that of mud, and who often interpret their function as handing money to friends, as in the PNM "scholarships" during the last regime. Of the State's present funding priorities there's no doubt. A couple of weeks before emancipation, the head of the Emancipation Support Committee complained publicly they had not received their subvention. They had $1 million plus within two days. The Indian Arrival people also got (but were not satisfied with the amount). There was the $100 million cheque for Carnival, and the PNM bankrolled the research that ended up in the G-Pan, and the PHI. Benefits to population? Zero, unless you count the warm fuzzy feeling.
What the Government's priorities exclude is large and shameful. The PP's attitude to art and artists was summarised by Rubadiri "Le Duc" Victor, head of the Artists' Coalition: before the election, aspiring ministers were all over him. Now, in office, they won't answer his calls. The sciences fare no better. On the CNC3 News on July 10, UWI lecturer Dr Indra Haracksingh spoke about the T&T math team, which routinely wins medals at the world Olympiad, but had never been recognised locally. However, the importance of public arts funding is recognised in more successful societies. Ironically, Trinidadian writers and artists who are published and shown abroad benefit from foreign government-assisted publishers and institutions. For all the fiscal austerity in the US and UK, arts funding is still a priority. For all the hundreds of billions that passed through Trinidad, it never was. This is one of the more egregious, and deliberate, atrocities of the State-to fail to nurture a creative class, and to attempt to use Carnival as a proxy for creativity. Things have actually gotten worse with the funding issue over time. No data for public arts funding are available, so I have to go on experience here. Around the late 1990s, and in the first couple of years of the PNM regime, you could get small amounts (a few thousand per year) out of the government.
There were also the Beryl McBurnie Foundation (one grant per year), the TASA fund, a couple of the banks had education foundations, and some big companies were good for small grants-usually a few thousand dollars. Cumulatively, this was a small quantum of resources, haphazardly distributed. And some recipients were more favoured than others. For example, CCA7 managed to get funding from many local companies and international institutions, like car companies, banks, manufacturing companies, the Ford Foundation and Triangle Trust. (What did she do with it? I don't know.) One of CCA7's funders, the Prince Claus Fund of Holland, continues to fund the same clique who infested CCA7, despite their proven ineptitude. (Go ahead, call me out on this.) Consequences? A few people make off like bandits, and there is a small, highly untalented, number of producers and works of literature, film and visual art. More importantly, public consciousness of them is restricted to a small clique in Port- of-Spain. The media have no interest in (or knowledge of) the arts, except when Leroy "the Master" Clarke does something and ends up in the papers.
I've been relatively lucky in terms of funding. Minister Penelope Beckles (in 2003), based on a project I proposed, gave me a decent grant ($12,000). The Trini-dad Theatre Workshop and the Beryl McBurnie Foundation also co-funded a fellowship ($30,000) to the US in 2000.
Two grants between 2000-2007 is not wild success, but many deserving people could not get funded at all. And around 2005 government grants to anyone but PNM supporters dried up. I have gotten more resources from foreign sources than local in the last five years. As this is published, I am at a small US college on fellowship. Looking at my co-fellows in the US, by comparison, my own grant history is puny. Many more-than-deserving people in Trini-dad have no grant history. Foreign fellowships enabled my research into areas (of local culture) about which no knowledge exists in the region. That research is now stalled. I was offered a partial fellowship last year, and applied to the (PP) Ministry of Com- munity Development in July 2010. I have yet to hear from them. Early this year, I applied to the Prime Minister's Fund for Culture for a grant to complete two projects. They replied, frankomen: No. I assume this is the official atti-tude. It also cannot be repeated enough that this state failure encourages self-serving cliques to take over, and "lock up" the arts enterprise, and the production of knowledge. The Caribbean Review of Books, Alice Yard, the T&T Film Festival, what used to be CCA7, and a few others seem to be everywhere now. My experience with them is that the discourse they produce actually does damage to art and artists.
Let me close with Stephon Alexander, a Trinidadian, one of the leading young scientists in the US today. He was recognised as a National Geographic Emerging Explorer in 2006, and is a Fellow of the US National Academy of Sciences. Alexander was educated in the US, and wants to come back to start a Caribbean Institute of Advanced Studies. Will he be taken on?