[Published in the Trinidad & Tobago Review, April 2003. [Redacted]]
RR: You’ve repeatedly said that West Indian governments are indifferent, or apathetic to, art and artists, but could you talk a little bit about the connection of West Indian art to West Indian life. Does it, can it affect the life of the everyday man?
DW: This may sound like a contradiction, but yesterday I went to the [St Lucian] Cultural Foundation here and spoke to the guy in charge and his staff, all of them artists, and it was terrific, they help that they’re going to give—I’m going to try to do Ti Jean—and each one of them...is an individual artist employed with the government, and doing work that is relevant to the government. It isn’t that you don’t find that kind of endeavour, even in a place like Trinidad, although Trinidad is very, very bad. I don’t know why yet. But you can’t get what is generalized as support—you don’t support the arts…the conception is that you support the arts because they’ve fallen down. So the concept is that art is sick, and it needs help.
That’s how you talk about art in the Caribbean. This person needs help or this particular thing needs help, like a hospital, right, a certain section, what is wrong, and I don’t know how you get it inside the minds of Caribbean generations unless you do it in the schools, maybe, is this simultaneity of saying, it is obvious that you need to help, it should be synonymous. It is not synonymous. It is either desperate or it’s a complaint, it’s negative. Even the help, the attitude of the help is negative. Now my experience was not negative, but by contrast…I thought, ‘I’m going to be wasting my time, if I go talk to these people’—complete opposite.
