Write and wrong

A story, probably apocryphal, about the Guyanese poet Martin Carter aptly illustrates the typical Caribbean attitude towards writers. Carter was going through Guyanese Customs when the officer noticed that his passport listed his profession as “Writer.” The officer brought this to Carter’s attention and asked him what his job was. “I’m a writer,” Carter answered.

The Customs officer sighed. “All ah we does write,” he said. “What you does DO?” Now in a place like Trinidad it should be axiomatic — but is not — that every newspaper have one to three writers on its staff. There are three reasons why this would be good practice. Firstly, newspapers depend on a reading public. If the average person’s reading skills drop below a certain level, then newspaper sales are also going to plummet. In a developed society, reading skills are replenished by book publishers. But ours is a newspaper-reading society, not a book-reading one. So newspaper writers, through example, help keep the workman prose of reporters from dropping below the level where complex information can’t be handled in a clear and accurate manner. In this way, journalists also help readers to maintain the literacy levels needed to cope with the modern world. It is not coincidental that every single columnist in the TNT Mirror, whose prose is pitched to the grassroots reader, spouts only superstitious nonsense from a religious or racial perspective.

The second reason for having writers in a newspaper is that good writers usually have an independent voice and a catholic range of interests.  This makes a writer an essential presence on any newspaper’s slate of columnists, because the majority of columnists usually represent an interest group or have expertise in a specific area. Such columnists have niche appeal but are often perceived as having a political agenda. A writer, by being independent and wide-ranging, helps solidify a newspaper’s reputation for integrity, balance and depth — i.e. trust, which is as crucial for a newspaper as it is for a bank. The third reason for hiring writers is that they lend status to the newspaper and so help sales. A writer or intellectual, though he may appeal to a very select readership, raises a newspaper’s profile even among average readers. And consumers always prefer a product which lends them status by association.

So the question then is: why do newspapers not hire writers as a matter of course? The first reason is that Caribbean people generally see writers as persons with a bucolic prose style, who use obscure words like “bucolic.” (It means “in relation to pastoral or rural life” and refers to overly descriptive or flowery prose.) Let me confess that much of the fault for this perception lies with Caribbean novelists. But the prose of good writers is expressive or evocative or elegant: none of which, as newspaper writers like Keith Smith and Denis Solomon prove, is at odds with clarity or even simplicity. In respect to writers’ independence, newspaper publishers (though not usually editors) don’t always favour a genuinely critical voice in their paper: for this invariably means offending influential groups and persons. It is also, let me admit, because publishers and editors correctly perceive that writers can be just as fatuous as the average person: the only difference is that writers are able to defend their dotishness more eloquently. And, in respect to the connection between status and sales, the people who sit on the newspaper Boards don’t always appreciate such subtle economic reasoning.

This covert contempt for writers was most recently expressed, quite ironically, in an editorial in the Trinidad Express headlined “A regional bow to our writers,” written to promote that newspaper’s serialisation of Earl Lovelace’s novel The Dragon Can’t Dance. In listing notable writers, the editorial left out everybody under 50, called the Caribbean’s greatest novelist Ann Rhys instead of Jean, included Canadian Neil Bissoondath who has written little about Trinidad but ignored novelist Rabindranath Maharaj, also Canadian-based but an authentic Caribbean voice, and listed a mediocre writer like Valerie Belgrave just to be politically correct. (Despite my three published novels and my actually living here, I wasn’t mentioned either, but this didn’t surprise me. A few years ago, my name was also omitted in a book about Indo-Trinidadian writers written by a UWI academic, although even dead persons who had only written two or three short stories were listed.)

Moreover, despite the Express asserting that its decision to serialise The Dragon Can’t Dance was motivated mainly by a desire to get people to read books, it is apparent that racial concerns have played a major part in this initiative. Cultural critic Raymond Ramcharitar, who no longer writes in the newspapers, has argued that the PNM has deliberately fostered Afro-Creole culture as part of its political agenda, and that the media is an accomplice in this racial project. I mistrust most of Ramcharitar’s polemic, but this serialisation lends some support to the latter part of his argument.

If the Express’s intent was solely to get people to read books, it would have backed its rhetoric with hard cash: by running a competition wherein aspiring writers would submit a detailed outline and sample chapters, with the winner being commissioned to write weekly installments of a novel. Instead, it seems that the Express is really seeking to use Lovelace’s book as a tool for racial healing and, a dreadlocked partner of mine suggested when I raised the issue with him, to help CCN recoup its investment in Jobell and America.

The publicity articles made it clear that the focus of this effort was Laventille: that political centre of murderous ignorance. In promotion interviews, editor Keith Smith admitted that he and Lovelace “continued to be alarmed by the ongoing violence in certain parts of Laventille,” while Brother Resistance opined that “People who don’t know about Laventille need to learn about the real Laventille, besides all the negative things in the media.” But that The Dragon Can’t Dance can be co-opted for such a project is a devastating critique of the book. It suggests that, well-written though the novel undoubtedly is, its ideology is suspect: and that the novelist, like the calypsonian, is only a mouthpiece for his group.

E-maim: kbaldeosingh@hotmail.com
Website:www.caribscape.com/baldeosingh