Lisa Allen-Agos­ti­ni

I was deeply ho­n­oured to read at An Evening with the NGC Bo­cas Lit Fest in Mi­a­mi, which took place at the gor­geous Books & Books store in Coral Gables, on Oc­to­ber 13. Bo­cas host­ed the read­ing as the clos­ing event of the 31st An­nu­al West In­di­an Lit­er­a­ture Con­fer­ence: Imag­ined Na­tions, a gath­er­ing of schol­ars, book­sellers, writ­ers and stu­dents at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Mi­a­mi.

The read­ing fea­tured 2012 OCM Bo­cas Prize win­ner Earl Lovelace, Ed­ward Baugh, Ed­widge Dan­ti­cat, and Fred D'Aguiar. Each of these oth­er writ­ers was some­one I have read and whose work I have ad­mired, and some of them I have al­so stud­ied at sec­ondary school and uni­ver­si­ty. It was a priv­i­lege to be in such com­pa­ny, and I was keen­ly aware of how their work has fed in­to my own as a writer and my con­cep­tion of my­self as a Caribbean per­son.

This was a run­ning theme in the con­fer­ence, the abil­i­ty of to­day's Caribbean writ­ers to stand on the shoul­ders of the Caribbean writ­ers of the pre­vi­ous gen­er­a­tions. Kei Miller brought it up in a keynote con­ver­sa­tion with Olive Se­nior, mod­er­at­ed by West In­di­an lit­er­a­ture schol­ar Pa­tri­cia Saun­ders, one of the con­fer­ence's or­gan­is­ers, on the open­ing day of the con­fer­ence.

Ad­mit­ting that he had drawn from the char­ac­ter­i­sa­tions in the works of old­er Ja­maican writ­ers, Miller talked about the debt he owed to Se­nior and her peers who have writ­ten the canon he stud­ied. It al­so came up in the fi­nal keynote con­ver­sa­tion of the con­fer­ence, a pan­el dis­cus­sion, mod­er­at­ed by schol­ar and con­fer­ence or­gan­is­er Donette Fran­cis, that in­clud­ed a who's who of Caribbean lit­er­a­ture crit­ics: Baugh, Michael Buc­knor, Car­olyn Coop­er, Eve­lyn O'Callaghan, San­dra Pouchet Pa­quet and Faith Smith. Many of them not­ed that Prof Baugh had taught them as stu­dents. (Though, as Baugh point­ed out, he nev­er taught WI lit­er­a­ture but Vic­to­ri­an lit­er­a­ture. As a crit­ic, how­ev­er, he has been a sem­i­nal Wal­cott schol­ar.)

It was fit­ting, then, that the taxi that took Earl Lovelace and me home from the air­port was filled with the mu­sic of Ras Shorty I, giv­ing rise to a live­ly dis­cus­sion on the need for the doc­u­men­ta­tion of Shorty I's life and mu­sic. We have our own uni­ver­si­ty now, and I think it would be a wor­thy en­deav­our for UTT to fos­ter the writ­ing of a se­ries of bi­ogra­phies of peo­ple like Shorty I–a man whose life was dra­mat­ic and in­ter­est­ing in it­self, but al­so a man whose mu­sic is the very bedrock up­on which so much of our con­tem­po­rary mu­sic is built. That his mu­sic is ne­glect­ed is a na­tion­al shame; lyri­cal­ly and mu­si­cal­ly it is very fine and cer­tain­ly de­serves to be analysed, pre­served, doc­u­ment­ed for the ben­e­fit of our so­ci­ety and our fu­ture gen­er­a­tions.

This is work that we must do and pub­lish. It is part of any ma­ture na­tion's task to ex­am­ine the path it took to where it is now. Shorty I sang in his song Mon­ey Eh No Prob­lem in 1978, "Black dirty wa­ter we have to drink/WASA say it clean but it smelling stink/And my friend/ They bawl­ing/Mon­ey eh no prob­lem."

What has changed? And if noth­ing has changed, why hasn't it? Why is it that his words "So much old peo­ple on the streets to­day/And we can't build a home for them to stay" are still as cur­rent to­day as they were 34 years ago? It's al­most em­bar­rass­ing now to quote his lines "When it rain, Port-of-Spain in pain/Them drain un­der strain so is flood again"; true then, true now.

With­out a project to cap­ture and pre­serve Shorty I's life and mu­sic, it is near­ly guar­an­teed that they will be lost to fu­ture gen­er­a­tions, and along with them the sense that a mu­si­cian could be pop­u­lar and still be an­a­lyt­i­cal, the knowl­edge that what we call so­cial com­men­tary and what we call so­ca could ever be as skil­ful­ly in­ter­twined as they were in Shorty I's hands.

Al­bert Ein­stein is quot­ed as say­ing, "Many times a day I re­alise how much my own out­er and in­ner life is built up­on the labours of my fel­low men, both liv­ing and dead, and how earnest­ly I must ex­ert my­self in or­der to give in re­turn as much as I have re­ceived." With­out know­ing more about those labour­ers in our past, the foun­da­tion they built, the foun­da­tion on which we stand, we ham­string our­selves.