Monday, December 31, 2007

Interview with Derek Walcott on VS Naipaul, Carnival, West Indian Culture & Politics
[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.

What it means is that, in a miniscule way, the example of the support of the foundation for a project like this, in which you can get help for rehearsal space, for casting, transportation … that’s an immense load off one’s back. Now you could say it’s me, so they’re doing it for me, but that’s OK, if they are doing it for me.
So I get sometimes the possibility of what could happen, that does happen. For an independence celebration, I did a play called The Haytian Earth here, and I got complete support. But what happens is that it gets cut off…what I write about is not that you don’t get help, what I write about is that it’s not a simultaneous, synonymous concept, as art is not synonymous, it’s something that needs help. So it’s an attitude to something that is considered crippled, virtually.

RR: I don’t know how applicable what I’m about to ask is to the Caribbean, but it is applicable to Trinidad. You wrote in “What the Twilight Says” about the government’s appropriation of the “folk forms” which meant Carnival and so on. So there is state support, it’s not enormous, but it’s there; it’s popularized and promoted and was recently called by the Prime Minister, “the national culture” of Trinidad and Tobago.

Meanwhile, formal art, by that I mean painting, sculpture, theatre, and so on seems to have been contracted out to foreign foundations. I’m talking about CCA7 in Trinidad, wherein one organization gets an enormous amount of (foreign foundation) money to make decisions for AngloCaribbean art. Do you see any negative consequences to that, or any consequences?

DW: Well this is such an old subject. It’s the subject all the time. That the governments think that they always have to lean towards the popular because they get votes, they think, from that. They think. That’s not the truth, necessarily. So I think you have to be blunt…the people who get into power in the Caribbean, they can recognize popular forms, music, reggae, and Carnival and all that. But they are not educated to the point where they can or have the system that can isolate and assist an individual artist, that’s not there, because…I used to think all the time, when I was younger, that it’s a matter of money.

Money is only how you use is, because the money is there. It’s not like ‘we don’t have money for that’. It’s ‘you have money, and you have to use it in a certain direction’. The paucity of scholarships not given to terrific artists, I mean I know so many people who deserve some help, and it’s not that the help is towards a cripple; the help, as I’m saying, should be synonymous with the achievement of what somebody does.
As a parallel, which is an example of how conservative and how maimed we are: West Indian cricketers get knighted, athletes, Sir Viv Richards, Sir Gary Sobers, Sir Everton Weekes, Sir Frank Worrell—knighted. I don’t want a knighthood, I’ve been offered, I can’t have Sir Derek Walcott. That’s, to me, absurd. But I don’t mind other people being knighted.

Mick Jagger is knighted, Paul McCartney is knighted, Michael Caine is knighted.
So abroad, they confer knighthoods on artists. Now, why doesn’t the Caribbean think that way? Why is it only cricketers who deserve to be knighted? Really, then what are you saying? And I said who should be knighted here: knight Dunstan St Omer. Sir Dunstan St Omer. I mean I would be so proud of that, and he would be proud of that. But you don’t have a society….and if you tell that to any- any- anybody, in positions of authority here, or even your friends, they shake their heads and think ‘Oh really?’ But it’s ok if Viv Richards gets knighted, or somebody else gets knighted. So what you’re looking at is a serious, serious deprivation of recognition for something like that. If anybody deserves to be honoured by his country, it’s Dunstan St Omer. What I’m pointing out is that it’s not the knighthood that’s the achievement, the achievement is in the recognition of the country for somebody’s work. We don’t have that.


RR: If we could shift a little; what do you see, art-related or not, as the crucial issues facing the AngloCaribbean right now? There are the economic crises, the racial things in Guyana and Trinidad, Guyana is already in a state of racial civil war.

DW: I think all those racial things will settle. All of them. People are too close to each other. There’s too much exchange for it not to settle. Even if it has a very violent irruption, it will settle. I really think so. I think it’s in its nature to settle, to resolve itself that way. What has to be emphasized, and at the cost of being cussed and being wounded, physically, even, is to tell people here, that the West Indian experience is not only African, that’s the thing. That can become maddening. It is maddening to an extent, and then if you object to the Indian saying it, then you know…but that will resolve itself, and it will resolve itself because the art will resolve itself, the same way Chutney [music] and thing[s] mix….if the music mixes, the society will mix.

RR: There’s been some talk recently of Caribbean integration. Patrick Manning has said he wants to integrate, Jamaica and Barbados have said they’re not doing it. Do you have a position on that?

DW: I’m tired of hearing that lie that they protract, they keep lying, and giving bad excuses for not joining together. Of course they should all join together. If you see the immigration form to come into Trinidad…it’s two pages “when were you last in the island?” “what is the date…?” Who cares? Think of all the paper that’s wasted by those forms being filled out. What does it do to have that kind of bureaucracy which cripples this island as an inheritance from the British system of things. So when somebody from Barbados says ‘we don’t want to join St Vincent’, I really get furious. Because it’s absurd, it’s so self-evident, just economically necessary to do it, from the Federation on I’ve just gotten very bitter about all of them ever talking about ‘yes we need to be federated or something…’

RR: Lloyd Best (among others) has repeatedly called UWI a “morgue” and said it has failed in its mission and function in the Caribbean, to educate a clique, a class of….

DW: I’ll have to give you an anecdote about that. I met a young lady at the airport. She said: “You’re Derek Walcott?” I said: “Yes.” She said: “We study your work.” I said: “That’s good.” She said: “And you know Pat Ismond?” I said: “Yes, I know Pat Ismond.” And she said: “OK, very nice to have met you,” and she goes away. Good-looking woman. Then she comes back: “May I say something?” I said “Sure.” She said: “Listen. Can I say that I find that, one, all your work is too colonial. Number two, it’s not of the 21st Century, and three, it has very little to do with women.” So I done. That’s it for me. (Laughing.) If this is a product of UWI, the thing I find astonishing is, if you’re meeting a writer you think you used to admire, for the first time, I think you could be a little more polite. So I don’t know what I have left. But I don’t know UWI’s situation. My daughter teaches there, she doesn’t have too much complaint about her students. I’m not sure, I don’t know it well enough to say…I would’ve imagined that by now, they would have produced at least a body of criticism. At least that, that could be respected. I don’t see that.

RR: Which brings us to the next generation of West Indian writers. Is there anybody out there that you’ve noticed? Anybody coming up?

DW: By generation you mean….that’s such a gap, I’m 73, so I don’t know…

RR: Ok, let’s say under 50

DW: Fifty is not old for a writer. No, I look at the poetry that I see published sometimes, and it’s atrocious. So you wonder who is telling them…Oh, I know what the damage is: the damage is old, the damage has come from this idea of asserting your race. Racial assertion, and forget form, forget shape, you know? And that, I think has been the curse of a lot of bad writing, that comes from this nationalistic, sometimes over-African, in inverted commas, or anti-feminist, or some label that they write under, and they’re not supervised.

RR: Is there a Caribbean or just a few million people hoping to get to America someday?

DW: If there’s a Caribbean? Oh, absolutely. But it’s not where people look for it. It’s not in the towns. It’s not in the cities, it’s not in the offices. It is up in the country. And it’s by the sea.

RR: Let’s talk about you in all this: I would label you as an Insider/Outsider, because you live here, but you don’t live here…

DW: No, no. Sometimes I’m not here. But I really live here.

[…]

RR: Do you have any idea about some of the concrete things you’d like to see West Indian governments do…you’ve talked about the attitude toward supporting art, any suggestions?

DW: If you think you should be a sage at 73, then I will say some sage things. Everything in terms of helping West Indian art is phenomenally easy. Scholarships is the answer to help young artists, or even older artists, because the amount of money you would spend, giving help or direction to say, every year, and if you’re talking about the Caribbean, well more than that, but if you’re talking about Trinidad alone, if there is a policy toward art that was not cut up like other people’s attitudes to art…the curse of imitation and so on that’s there in Naipaul it’s not just imitation in a way that you’d be recrea…you’d be creating something if you created a society that had that kind of responsibility.
Let us say you had a million dollars. One million dollars in one country. You take three or four artists, young ones, let them go away and learn the same thing and come back. You can even leave them, abandon them and let them make their own way. You don’t have to provide necessarily, to feed them from the time they leave school until they die. I’m just saying that for what is needed, it’s so simple to say, out of that, give four scholarships worth, 30- 40- 50,000 dollars a year for two years for somebody to do something. And in the scale of where you’re helping people, let’s say you’re in Trinidad, and you have…in four years, every year you’re doing it, suddenly you have, 25 writers and painters. For something that cost you under a million dollars. You’re not spoon-feeding them, you’re not saying ‘ok, when you come back we’ll find a job for you; if you want to stay away, stay away.’ But it’s just policy.

How much money are we talking about? A policy of say, dealing every year with a million TT dollars, to help your artists do something. If this society wants to call itself a creative society and something that is not copying what has been done before and what has not been done before, that could be the creative government that we’re looking for, definitely, because it’s not going to be used for anything else but a humane experiment.
That’s what you’re doing. You can’t explain that you had to go and get a bomb because you have to fight Iraq. And that’s not there. And then you ask yourself ‘Why is it not there?’

Why is it that when all the critics and other people applaud you and you get this and you get that, some kind of prize then everybody’s very proud of X or Y, and you didn’t do shit to help that happen. Really. Nothing. You did nothing to make that happen.
That’s what Vidia says and he’s right too, and that’s what I can say from here, that you’re not doing anything to make it happen. I can’t tell any grandson of mine now, ‘try and be a dancer, try and be a painter’, because they will say ‘that’s a waste of time’. It’s not only what happens after the scholarship it is the fact that the governments do not have that, and the excuse, what I’m seeing at my age now, the excuse of not having money, is a total lie. Access to the money. A lie. Or denial. That’s what I hoped I would see, or would have seen.

[…]

RR: Let’s talk about Naipaul. Your essay on him, “The Garden Path” took a very hard line, you accused Naipaul of making racist comments, but you’ve just said that you thought he was right about government’s attitude to art (mimicry/copying). Do you have anything to say about Naipaul in light of the Nobel Prize; in light of his not mentioning Trinidad…has your attitude to Naipaul changed? Could you clarify your attitude to Naipaul?

DW: I recommended Vidia for the Nobel Prize. Whenever it came up and you are allowed to nominate, I nominated him, many times. So he gets it. When he gets it I’m extremely glad, for everybody, for him too. But when he denies, and to me, insults Trinidad, by ignoring it, you know, then I really get angry, because it’s wicked. You may not think so, that it’s wicked…


RR: No, I think it’s…you see if he had mentioned Trinidad it would have been easy to forget about it; by not mentioning it, he’s actually brought more attention. I’m not saying he intended, I’m just saying it’s very ironic…

DW: It’s one thing to be a satirist. It’s another thing to be a spiteful bastard. And that’s what he has been.

RR: You know in Trinidad, they were originally going to name the new national library after him…

DW: Well, that’s where Trinidad is so damn stupid. Go ahead and name it after him. That’s what he is. Name it after him. What, they saying ‘Oh ho, so you playing that game? Oh ho, so you ain’t praising us? Ok. We not giving you the thing…’ it’s immature shit. It’s like saying the British wouldn’t give Dean Swift a room in a library, the Dean Swift Room…Dean Swift, you know, cussed the shit out of everybody…or any satirist. Sure, call it the Naipaul Library.

RR: I think they were also going to name a wing after you…

DW: Well that I don’t want. (Laughing). I don’t want a part of Naipaul library.

RR: One final question: Is there hope?

DW: Hope for what, the Caribbean artist….?

RR: The Caribbean artist, the Caribbean person who wants to live here, but sees destruction, ignorance all around him, the economic crises, the corrpution…the un-livability the place is approaching. I’ve been reading your newspapers, it’s here too.

DW: The artist shouldn’t be singled out in terms of whether to be, to live in a place…I don’t like to hear the expression ‘hope’…because the opposite of that is ‘there is no hope’, right, and I can’t believe there is no hope. I can’t believe that. Once I was talking to somebody, I think it was Susan Sontag, talking about India, and she said ‘Well there’s no hope there’. And I said, ‘Well to the Indian, maybe that’s not the attitude.’ I think the question is, does the second generation or third generation after my gang of people, have they gotten any better? Have things gotten any better? In terms of the society? I think everybody is much more eloquent, even literate, in a way, than they used to be. I think there is more recognition of talent…in Trinidad.

Trinidad has always been an exciting place for me, so when I go there, the people that I meet, and the variety of people that I meet, are very stimulating. What is not stimulating is the horror of the politics.
So the hope lies in when the political stance changes and what can one do to make that happen, and whether, the rebelliousness and the dissatisfaction can come from where it should come from, which should be the young, which would be the artist saying, ‘you know, this should stop’. You know, the demand that could be made for the arts, is smothered by Carnival, the noise of Carnival, smothers that need. So there is something self-annihilating in that tone of perpetual celebration that is there. Because after Carnival, all you have left is a hangover. I’m not against Carnival, obviously, but I’m just saying that somehow, if it could have been made into a philosophy, not just a celebration.

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