Last Thursday, August 25, marked the 50th anniversary of the opening of Carifesta ’72, in Georgetown, the inaugural festival of Caribbean artists, writers, painters, sculptors, dancers and playwrights. The gathering, created by the second Convention of Caribbean Writers and Artists, also held in Georgetown, to coincide with the celebration of Guyana becoming a Co-operative Republic, has become a staple in the Caribbean Arts calendar, a legacy to which we can all be very proud of.
The opening of the festival held in the National Park was a grand spectacle, with much pomp and ceremony, as representatives from the 25 participating nations and territories paraded in front of the grand stage, behind which rose a large sculpture of a hand reaching towards the sky, the festival logo. In addition to the English-speaking territories of the Caribbean, invitations were extended to our neighbors Brazil, Venezuela, Suriname, French Guiana, Colombia, Peru, Puerto Rico and other Caribbean countries, including the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Guadeloupe and Martinique.
The celebrations followed closely on the heels of the Non-Aligned Movement Foreign Ministers’ Conference (August 8 – 12), and our nation’s capital, once again a center of international focus, was a cauldron of energy and activity. The fleet of GUY license plate cars, previously used to pick up ministers, now ferried visiting artists to the various shows, performances, readings, exhibitions and displays scattered around the city.
Today, in addition to the palette of holiday memories that serve the older generation, there are two enduring infrastructural legacies from the holiday; one may wonder if the younger generation is aware of them. Firstly, there is the National Cultural Centre, which was built for the occasion, but unfortunately it was not completed as planned and the events organized there, including the Legend of Kaieteur, an ortario composed by the late Philip Pilgrim, were took place under a temporary roof consisting of rubber and scaffolding. Today, its location is near the epicenter of Greater Georgetown, at the time, the then sprawling city seemed to be on the edge of nowhere.
Second, there is Festival City, a subdivision of Ruimveldt North, or in local street parlance “the southern part” – an area that includes Ruimveldt Gardens South, Ruimveldt Park South and Ruimveldt North. Festival City, was a government sponsored project executed for the artist jamboree. Barbadian poet Kamau Brathwaite, reflecting on the festival soon after in a series of articles in the Barbados Advocate, wrote: “Many of the twelve hundred participating artists settled in Festival City, a hastily built gated community of 250 houses with green hearts on foot . located on the outskirts of Georgetown, complete with a ‘security guard’ (you needed a pass or Carifesta ID card to enter). The artists received round-trip airfare, a salary of G$7 a day and a chauffeured car to take them around town (Brathwaite’s fellow Barbadian Austin Clarke called them GUY-cars, after their official government license plates of Guyana).
Festival City’s lasting legacy is the nomenclature of street names. There are two streets named for two local art painters. ER Burrowes Street, was named after the great painter and art teacher, a Barbadian by birth who came to the then British Guiana as a child. The Mittelholzer Road (misspelled on the road sign and on most maps as Mittleholzer) acknowledges the first true novelist of West Indian fiction, our very own Edgar Mittelholzer. Other road names pay tribute to our Caribbean neighbours, including: Blue Mountain Road (Jamaica), Hummingbird Road (Trinidad and Tobago), Flying Fish Road (Barbados), Nevis Road, Boggy Peak (Antigua), Nutmeg Road (Grenada), and Soufriere Street (volcanoes in Dominica, Guadeloupe, Montserrat, St Vincent and St Lucia).
As we bask in the euphoria of this important milestone in the festival’s history and with the 15th edition on the horizon, we must reflect on the current state of the event. Has the festival evolved in the general direction that the initial group of artists and writers envisioned? Or has it become too big and powerless and stifled by bureaucracy? Is it worth staging this now very expensive issue? Are the festivals serving as a launch pad for new and emerging artists? Or are they forced to look for other ways?
Two festivals in recent memory suffered from limited participation of local artists. In 2006, Carifesta IX, the third edition of the festival in Trinidad, found itself competing for an audience with a parallel event called “Galvanise” organized by local artists in response to their perceived exclusion from the country’s cultural narrative and the region by controlling bureaucrats with political muscle. . In 2017, host Carifesta XIII Barbados was embarrassed by a boycott by local artists who perceived the authorities’ lack of interest in their work.
After Carifesta III, held in Cuba in August 1979, an extremely large affair, our renowned artist, writer and anthropologist (now late), Denis Williams expressed the opinion that Carifesta was moving away from its original conception. He floated the idea that the festival should become an annual single-discipline event with rotating host countries. For example, Jamaica will host the drama one year, with St Lucia as the venue for the painters the following year, and so on. In this way, it can focus more on the original concept of the festival to serve as a gathering for artists to meet, discuss and exchange ideas, display their work and engage with the local population. As such, it would be removed from a number of different events competing for the public’s attention.
Fifty years later, the political and cultural landscape has changed significantly; territories are no longer independent recently and cultural tastes have changed, mostly in the field of music. The time to rethink the Carifesta concept is now, before it becomes just a lost legacy. Williams’ suggestion could be a start.
