The recent Bocas Lit Fest facilitated a meeting of minds on regional publishing, to figure out how to get more "Caribbean" books published. A few serious people were involved, but like all enterprises of this kind (if past experience is a guide) it's likely that very little will come of it. The reasons are pretty clear, to me at any rate.
It starts with the most prominent thing I've noticed in events like Bocas (ie, local "cultural ventures"); the main concern is not promoting literature or art, but establishing the entitlement of certain people to produce, profit from, and control literary and artistic production, always at the expense of others. As publishing goes, the expectation of those embedded in the institution's bowels is that it is a right to be enjoyed by them. This enables many ambitious, untalented piglets to hog opportunity at the expense of talent.
There are many precedents: my favourite was CCA7, formed supposedly to promote and develop art and culture, and which devoured millions of dollars over ten years, but left nothing behind but a cadre of seasoned hustlers. Specific example: $1 million was "sourced" from a foreign foundation to publish a book on a local artist (who told me this). The money disappeared into many pockets, but no book appeared.
But this is all old news. Outside the piggy posse's agenda other issues burgeon, beginning with the question of whether "we" really want locally produced Caribbean literature. Books are of no use to people who can't read, don't want to read, and are encouraged by state and educational institutions to not read. Less than half of Tri-nidad's population is functionally literate, and a small fraction is literate enough for literary texts.
From what I've seen and heard of Guyana and Jamaica (the majority of the Anglo Caribbean population) the same applies. If local markets can't sustain a break-even business model, and governments devalue literature by glorifying illiteracy (by endorsing Carnival), the enterprise can only end one way.
For this reason, "Caribbean" writing has been traditionally published abroad, and, from inception, been the creation of a few metropolitan editors and publishers. But the metropolitan environment has changed in the last 15 years. Publishing has consolidated, leaving a few giant firms, and a uniformity of values and taste. Publishers' interests are now aligned to accountants', and a new networked, insular ethnologic prevails in the publishing culture.
Canadian publishers tell you frankomen they only care about Canadian writers. From my adventures in the US, it seems that a network of agents, publishers and MFA programmes determine much of what is published (in creative writing, anyway). The UK seems more open, but it mostly just seems so, as non-white Brit-ish writers have told me.
So metropolitan publishers are not disposed to patronise the Caribbean any more, but none-theless, some "Caribbean" books do get published in the US, UK and Canada, often written by emigrants or their children, and a few by locals who've managed to get "in."
"We" actually don't need many of these books, which present a quite repulsive view of Caribbeanness, rife with destructive metropolitan clichés: "lush," exploitable landscapes; unhealthy nostalgia; slavery; and Carnival-loving, naive, happy or entertainingly violent natives. (Examples of such books recently: Black Rock, White Woman on a Green Bicycle, the side-splitting Trinidad Noir, and Caribbean Dispatches.)
I've discussed Dispatches in this space, and remain agog that no one has been prosecuted for it. Rock and Bicycle celebrate the primitive landscape with natives as backdrop for metropolitan characters' dramas, and Noir provides much inadvertent comedy in its editors (and many contributors) not knowing what "noir" meant.
We don't need these books because a consequence of promoting "The Caribbean" as calypso-singing, weed-smoking, carnal and morally insensible is that the stereotypes affect international political, economic, and social policies which we have to live with.
Which brings us back to the initial proposition: Caribbean books -publishable or rubbish? There are publishable, talented writers here, and there is a way to mitigate much of what I've outlined above, which involves two publishers. (Disclosure: both these publishers have published me.)
The first is Jeremy Poynting of Peepal Tree Press in the UK, who (along with Hannah Bannister) has done more than any single person or institution to keep Caribbean writing alive. Peepal is now the largest publisher of Caribbean writing, with a growing reputation in the UK, and everywhere else. But for PTP, Caribbean writers like Mittelholzer, Denis Williams and early Wilson Harris novels would have disappeared, and new, talented writers, like Keith Jardim, could not emerge.
The second publisher is Ken Jaikaransingh of Lexicon Publishers in Trinidad. If Mr Jaikaran-singh had done nothing but pub- lish Gordon Rohlehr's books, he would have done enough. But Lexicon has also published many good-quality local historical, cultural, creative and non-fictional works (like Wendy Fitzwilliam's Letters to Aidan). This was for no other reason than the publisher thought it was and is valuable and backed his opinion up with his own money.
These two men are the best people to control and direct any local/regional publishing initiative. But apart from good management, money is also needed for things like these, and, fortunately, we have the money. If the Trinidad Government were to give ten per cent ($10 million) of the $100 million it annually flushes down the Carnival toilet, this would guarantee the survival of writing in the region, providing the funds were administrated by Messrs Jaika-ransingh and Poynting, and kept away from the piggy posse.
In closing, it strikes me that I might be wasting time even talking about this, since, given what is popularly promoted as "culture" in the Caribbean, promoting literature in the same environment is like promoting abstinence in a whorehouse. But what you go do?
