The right writes

But being a writer is no easy task. For one thing, there’s a great risk of carpal tunnel syndrome, plus which the long hours bent over a computer screen can make you look like a cobo with glasses. But that’s still not the hard part. No, the hard part is to understand your role as a writer in the Caribbean. In order to do this, you have to pay attention to the older novelists, like Lovelace. But, as literature professor emeritus Ken Ramchand lamented last week, there is a disconnection between the older and newer generations of West Indian writers. "They don’t even know there’s an influence to influence them," he complained at the UWI conference to honour Lovelace. And he’s right. I myself haven’t been under the influence since my early 20s, which is probably why I can’t write like Sam Selvon.

An aspiring writer must also be clear about his literary goals. Lovelace himself talked about that last month. "My task is to help make us confident and to help us discover the first-class human beings that in our hearts we are," he remarked at the Orisa Rain Festival. There was even some talk of him holding a self-esteem workshop later with newspaper columnist, AP Toussaint, but that apparently fell through when Lovelace discovered that she wasn’t Haitian or even a news service.

Now it’s true that VS Naipaul has a different take on the writer’s task. "Living in a borrowed culture, the West Indian, more than most, needs writers to tell him who he is and where he stands," he wrote in The Middle Passage. "Here the West Indian writers have failed. Most have so far only reflected and flattered the prejudices of their race or colour groups...The insecure wish to be heroically portrayed. Irony and satire, which might help more, are not acceptable; and no writer wishes to let down his group."

Me, I don’t have a group, not even for sex. That’s probably why literary consultant Krishendaye Rampersad, who’s organising Derek Walcott’s writing competition, didn’t list me in her book on Indo-Trinidadian writers. Aspiring writers had therefore better learn their lesson. If you want to be a well-known novelist, don’t waste years learning the craft of story-telling, characterisation, and solid prose. Spend your time learning to be a race instead. If you don’t, not only will you not be invited to parties with shrimp pate, but you’ll completely fail to grasp some of Lovelace’s deep insights. At the same Orisa Rain festival, he asserted, "The seeming lack of a sense of purpose, in particular among the African youth of this nation, is to be accounted for by the fact that we have not, as a nation, addressed the consequences of our history."

Faced with such profundity, any writer not under the influence and lacking a group would probably ask dumb questions. I certainly did. Who are these Africans in Trinidad Lovelace speaks of? It couldn’t be his amanuensis Funso Aiyejina’s son, because he’s a bright boy who won a National Mathematics scholarship some years ago. And what are the historical consequences that haven’t been addressed? Have they at least been stamped? A person au courant with Lovelace’s work might think that the historical downslide of Afro-Trini youths began after 1956, since Lovelace himself refers to that decline in The Dragon Can’t Dance. But why not say so, instead of talking vaguely about historical consequences? But I think I knew the answer to that one. If Lovelace had blamed the PNM in 2005 for the defects of Afro-Trinis, Culture Minister Joan Yuille-Williams might not have come to the Best Village Community event and praised him for his "contribution to community development and preservation, protection, and development of our cultural heritage." Lovelace had waited over 40 years to hear those wonderful words and, except for some Christian authors, no local writer had ever been so fulsomely praised by a Culture Minister in the history of Trinidad and Tobago.

In fact, at the conference, literature professor Gordon Rohlehr spoke of Lovelace’s "chronic optimism." And, indeed, just a few weeks before Lovelace had demonstrated this when he told the students of the Russell Latapy Secondary School that he found it "nonsensical" that people were now fearful to walk the street. Of course, this was before the July 11 dustbin bomb, but bear in mind that Lovelace wasn’t talking about Frederick Street. My own view is that a writer should be neither optimistic nor pessimistic, but should just accept that even maxi taxi drivers will get more sex than him. I freely admit, though, that my view is mistaken.

It seems that, if you want to scale the heady heights of the literary mountain-top, then you must ensure that you are chronically optimistic. UWI principal Bhoe Tewarie said last week that Lovelace is a "great writer," and Tewarie has a PhD in Literature so he must know what he’s talking about. My own feeling is that a "great writer" is, by definition, a genius, and therefore only Jean Rhys, CLR James, and Derek Walcott qualify as great Caribbean writers. Also, in Origins of Genius, psychologist Dean Keith Simonton notes that geniuses are very prolific, by which criterion Naipaul’s 25 books trumps Lovelace’s eight. Simonton also says, "The more eminent creators...are nonconforming and independent-minded...They have the capacity to expose themselves to a full range of cultural variants available in their milieu, and then to put together that unique subset that contributes most to the development of their talent." But I doubt that Simonton has ever been to Trinidad. Here, in order to be successful, the aspiring writer must join GOPIO or NAEAP and start praising their ancestors. If they do that, then perhaps one day their writing will be half as good as Earl Lovelace’s.

E-mail: kbaldeosingh@hotmail.com

Website: www.caribscape.com/baldeosingh