The list of National Awards for 2014 made for interesting reading. The list like any other text reveals as much by what it contains as what it omits. Given that national awards come like endorsements from a grateful nation-state, we would expect to find public servants figuring prominently. No problem there, or with the awards for the development of women, although we might need to do more to protect women, from age zero, so that most actually get the chance to develop.
Digression apart, I want to focus on the Chaconia and Hummingbird medal categories, which allow for a greater range of choice. While education (Prof Brinsley Samaroo) and business (Issa Nicholas) were represented in the Chaconia Gold category, not one representative of culture or the arts made the top flight.
From gold down to bronze, the only awardee was a dead man–Rudolph "The Hammer" Charles, who scraped into the Chaconia Silver section nearly 30 years after his demise. One out of 11 awardees–less than ten per cent.
Of the 16 Hummingbird awardees, only two were cultural figures, who could only make the bronze category: Rudolph Sitahal (a music teacher and one of the last instructors of the Leper Orchestra on Chacachacare which he tutored in the 1950s and 1960s) and classical Indian singer Jameer Hosein. In significant contrast, in the Gold category we see that three out of four awardees are businessmen. Does this tell us anything about the State's priorities and values?–I'm going to ask my students.
I understand awards for gallantry, even if saving lives is less fashionable than taking them, in our current mode, but without any prejudice I'm genuinely mystified by a cosmetologist getting a Hummingbird bronze. Did she get this for all the faces she's saved, the blemishes, warts and all, she's dexterously concealed?
Here I apologise unreservedly to the woman in question, whom I do not know. I'm sure she's an excellent cosmetologist and I know how important first and every subsequent impression is. I'm not querying her award per se, but merely observing trends and absences in the award criteria.
If I were a total cynic, I'd contextualise these 2014 awards, because, of course, we're now entering general election time and I imagine that the upcoming campaign is going to be more expensive than any preceding it. Even a simplistic reading of the awards alerts the average reader to the bare fact that business is a state priority.
You'll say I'm being naive, that how de hell de country go survive without business? Correct, but surely we must be something more than merely a nation of shopkeepers (or businessmen and women)–as Napoleon used to say of the English.
Interestingly enough, the English themselves, who we could blame for the culture of commercialism which came with their colonial rule (the colony only really featured in the metropolitan mind as a source of raw materials and their collateral revenue: sugar and then oil) have long since realised the value–both in hard cash terms and also intangibly–of that same category which barely figures in our national awards: culture.
During my recent brief visit to the capital of the old British Empire I was intrigued to read that London's West End theatres had generated some 690 million pounds (almost seven billion Trini dollars) in revenue in the last year, beating back New York's Broadway in profits and attracting 22 million patrons, more than the incredibly popular Barclays Premier (football) league.
Theatre is usually perceived as "high culture," although I'm sure many of the 22 million London theatre-goers would have been tourists, eager for the latest musical, rather than a performance at the replica of Shakespeare's open-air Globe (a project conceived by the American actor/director Sam Wanamaker). Football, however beautiful and lucrative, belongs to the realm of popular culture.
So here we have an instance in the Old (developed) World of high culture earning serious revenue. Besides this one instance, it's long been admitted by the State itself that culture in all its forms plays a major role in the UK's tourism industry, which runs a close second in generating GDP.
So where am I heading with all this? I think quite simply, just in economic terms, the State's system of values is fundamentally flawed. Here is not the place or space to widen the discussion to inquire about the intangible value of culture, its role in developing and sustaining a nascent nation-state. Building an economy and diversifying it is not simply a matter of "business," or that grossly abused and vacuous concept of entrepreneurship.
We continue, as we're so good at doing, in talking ceaselessly about "we culture," about diversifying our energy-bound economy, about developing "cultural industries." But in reality, that's all we do. And talk is cheap.
We have pan, Carnival, calypso, Ramleela, the oldest Amerindian site in the southern Caribbean, Phagwa, tassa, Hosay, parang. How many visitors do we attract annually for any of these? How many citizens live by their art? Why does the State refuse obdurately to recognise culture in its national awards?