TRINIDADIAN WRITING: a dying artform?

NO PUBLISHERS AND FEW LOCAL INFLUENCES: prominent Trinidadian authors discuss the state and fate of Trinidadian writing

“History is built around achievement and creation, and nothing was created in the West Indies.”

These are the words of Trinidad’s most famous author, Nobel Prize laureate V.S. Naipaul – famous, perhaps, not so much for the accolades behind his name, but for his refusal to attribute his success to his home country ever since migrating to England in 1950.

Yet Trinidad still boasts his brilliance as a writer, tacking him onto the scanty list of literary successes.

After all, beggars cannot be choosers – The Writers’ Union of Trinidad & Tobago, established in 1979, has only 20 “ongoing working active members”, according to its president and founder Dr. Marina ama omowale Maxwell.

But as two prominent Trinidadian authors point out, Naipaul’s statement is far from the truth – and so are the documented statistics.

“I don’t know about those figures, and I myself am not in the Writers’ Union,” says Lisa Allen-Agostini, co-editor of ‘Trinidad Noir’, which launched in the UK in April. She also published her first novel, ‘The Chalice Project’, last December.

Roslyn Carrington, whose thirteenth novel is due out from Harlequin Kimani in September, does not belong to the Writers’ Union either.

“I see their ads in the papers once a month or so, but they meet in Port-of-Spain at 3pm and I usually have my children then, so it’s impossible to attend. I keep planning to go,” she adds as an afterthought. “I really must find the time.”

It is difficult to get a real grasp of Trinidadian talent when it has been so misrepresented from the outset.

Many Trinidadian writers have gained success in the UK, US and Canada – Earl Lovelace, the late Sam Selvon, Rabindranath Maharaj, Robert Antoni, Shani Mootoo, and Lawrence Scott, to name a few. But it is difficult to estimate how many writers Trinidad has actually produced.

Migrate to survive

Trinidadians often leave the country to gain success – and, like Naipaul, many never come back for much more than a quick holiday.

“You can’t sustain a literary career when you have to scrabble, and that’s what many writers who stay in the region end up doing,” says Lisa. “Metropoles offer more jobs in teaching, writing fellowships, grants and endowments that allow a writer to write.”

Even if writers stay in the region, they are at the mercy of foreign publishers.

As Lisa explains, the Caribbean has no fiction or poetry press of its own, only a few ‘Caribbean interest’ publishers located outside the region: Faber, Peepal Tree Press, Akashic Books [publisher of ‘Trinidad Noir’], and her own publisher Macmillan Caribbean.

“What is the use of writing if you can’t publish?” she asks.

Lisa also points out that when a publisher is not from the region, the work is viewed from an outsider’s perspective.

“They choose to publish what appeals to them,” she says. “So you’re really putting your worldview at the mercy of
someone else.”

Just as the Europeans rewrote Caribbean history hundreds of years ago, Trinidad is still subject to that ‘outsider’s influence’ – tainting both its culture within the country as well as cultural exports to worldwide audiences.

A Trini novel?

Both writers hesitate to define exactly what is a ‘Trinidadian novel’.

“Trinidad is so ethnically and culturally diverse,” says Roslyn. “Merle Hodge, Sam Selvon and Olga Maynard are all ethnically different but have all written very Trinidadian books. I don’t even think setting a book in Trinidad makes it a Trinidadian novel – Selvon wrote about Trinis in London very successfully.”

She continues: “Ultimately, it’s the way the book feels, and the way it resonates with us as a people. We Trinis just know a Trinidadian novel when we see it.”

Roslyn also acknowledges that the meaning of ‘Trinidadian writing’ has changed throughout the past few decades.

“When I was a literature student, the prevailing theme of Trinidadian novels was the negritude movement, the impact of slavery on West Indian societies, poverty, and rebelling,” she says.

“That was a necessary phase in our development, but Trinidadian writers now feel free to write about a much wider range of topics.”

Lisa adds: “Good writing is good writing though, and that has not changed. We have a very strong oral tradition – we are storytellers as a people – and there is definitely something we have that pushes us out there disproportionately.”

But, storytellers or not, Trinidadian writing is extremely vulnerable to cultural influences from outside the country.

In 2004, the UK exported over £5m books to Trinidad, and the US exported almost $1.5m – which was an increase of 24 per cent from in 2003.

Trinidad continues to be inundated by US and UK media today.

“I feel very sad to know that younger generations will never have the kind of childhood I had,” says Roslyn. “Playing barefoot down by the river, catching wabine [a small fish] in a bottle, and generally enjoying every ounce of life.

“But I think that despite foreign influences, we still have enough of an identity to create a literature that is uniquely ours.”

Lisa, on the other hand, sees nothing wrong with being exposed to foreign influences, as long as there is some local influence as well.

She cites Pulitzer Prize-winning author Junot Diaz, a Dominican-American writer who has used everything from Star Trek to anime to various pop-culture references in his novel ‘The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao’.

“His is still a deeply Caribbean novel,” she points out. “So that’s a good argument for lapping up all you can, whatever their origin.”

Future generations

The real problem, Roslyn argues, is that children often do not ‘lap up’ anything at all.

“In Trinidad, reading is still used by parents as a punishment: ‘come inside, go in a corner, and read a book’,” she says.

“From my experience working at UWI [University of the West Indies], children are leaving secondary schools without a basic understanding of the English language. I’ve marked papers of 18-year-olds who can’t conjugate a verb. It breaks my heart.”

She strongly believes that it is up to the writers themselves to change things.

“We should have writing camps and local forums for people who want to write to discover what it takes,” says Roslyn.

“Those of us who have been successful, we need to get off our high horse and pass it forward. We can’t do like Naipaul and say stupid things like ‘literature is not for children’.”

But, as Lisa points out, most initiatives tend to be one-off or soon fade away.

She herself has recently started an NGO called The Allen Prize for Young Writers, which aims to foster the talents of teenaged writers in fiction, poetry and drama.

At the very least, it is a step in the right direction – nurturing the possibility for achievement and creation in Trinidad and throughout the West Indies.