Valerie Belgrave — art for the people

In the late 60s, Valerie and other Caribbean students occupied the computer lab at Sir George Williams University (now Concordia University), to worldwide coverage, in protest at racist discriminatory practices. A documentary film of this event entitled Ninth Floor and directed by Mina Shum was screened in 2015 at the Toronto Film Festival.

The students were allowed to return home and Valerie became secretary to the Guild of Undergraduates at the University of the West Indies, St Augustine. Her influence at this institution and in the nation as a whole is difficult to quantify.

The Trinidadian students’ involvement in the Sir George Williams affair led in great part to the Black Power revolution of 1970.

But as a woman and as a writer, Valerie always maintained that what she sought was equality and that she did not agree with those who privileged the black African race above any other. Her novels speak very specifically to this idea of equal rights for all.

Throughout her life she fought, sometimes stridently, against discrimination.

She never compromised and was always prepared to sacrifice all for what she believed to be right. Her work was the supreme expression of her radicalism and social conscience.

Her art maps the changing social and political life of the Trinidad she knew and helped break the incestuous cliquishness of the Trinidad art world. She later became part of the group, Women in Art. But she did more than this.

Through her batik and the influence of batik on her own paintings, she created a new artistic vernacular, which allowed for a truly female aesthetic.

Batik gave her a new confidence and as I noted in my 1974 Trinidad Guardian review of her first batik exhibition at the Hilton, she had found her medium. Thereafter her figures moved as rhythmically on canvas as they did on cloth. She went on to acquire an international reputation as a fabric designer and her designs are to be found on walls, on altars, on clothing and on chasubles. As an artist she spoke for the people and it is no coincidence that her memoir, which I launched in 2011, is called Art for the People. This fact also struck her friend Professor Kenneth Ramchand who was Master of Ceremonies at the event. Ramchand called her a humanist then and noted that her work was “of the people.” The colours that dominated her designs and her paintings speak of her passion and her love of life and people. She wanted her works to be loved and read by ordinary people, so she wrote popular fiction while at the same time, through her meticulous research, acknowledging the intelligence of the reader. Art she felt is for public consumption — not for an elite audience. This engagement with her audience remains a hallmark of her talent and purpose. She was so in life as well as in art. Valerie moved among crowds with the ease of a streetwalker and was quite literally a people person. Her friends became an extension of her family and her close friends loved and cared for her in her final months.

Yet while generous in her friendships, she remained shrewd and self-sufficient, and in many ways a politician’s daughter.

I re-read her novel Ti Marie just last year and marvelled at its freshness and the ways in which it engages the reader. The research and chronicling of historical events and natural environment in this novel are remarkable and the work deserves extensive academic study.

Valerie however fell victim to a school of thought in the Caribbean that sees the romance genre as somehow inferior and that minimises the value of popular fiction.

I also recently re-read her play, Night of the Wolf, which is based on the 1990 attempted coup, and commented to her that it should be made into a film. According to its author this play deals with the “state of emergency” of so many women’s lives. Valerie was a fervent advocate of women’s rights.

This is evident as well in her paintings where the female figures not only refuse stereotypes, but they also often stare back boldly at the audience. She was a firm advocate of female assertiveness. Yet her work as a whole and in particular her novels remain strangely marginalised. It is a fact that her writings received scant attention during her lifetime and this was a very sore point and one to which she referred not infrequently.

Despite a breathtaking output of paintings, batik, plays and novels she was never truly given the accolades she deserved. Perhaps as with so many other Caribbean artists of her generation she was too multifaceted. This meant that she could not be pigeonholed. This extraordinary woman was an artist in more ways than in her actual products.

She had the gift of seeing people for what they were.

W o r d s could not fool her.