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SO WHAT IS THIS THING CALLED ‘CULTURE’?

Aug 29, 2008 Features / Columnists

Bill has been talking and thinking. Always dangerous. Everybody is running round town talking about “Caribbean Culture’ or “Guyanese Culture’…but what exactly is it?? Who defines it? Who lives it? Is it really worth preserving and celebrating?

Bill is a democrat-militantly anti elitist on Culture. He gives short shrift to those from the salons of North Georgetown who dismiss the Super Concerts and the Sophia stuff as beneath their thinly disguised contempt. If people create something – however vulgar you might think it is – then surely that is part of their ‘culture’.

Bill is hard pushed to justify the culinary ‘arts’ and fashion ‘arts’ on show in Sophia but he thinks they have some right to be there. Some.

He goes to the sparsely attended sessions at the Convention Centre which are full of, well, whingeing artists. All asking for government money but no government control.

Surely an Oxymoron. All making special pleadings for their art, their country, their culture. Bill is a pure Thatcherite on public subsidy of the Arts – let the market rule I say.

Too often public subsidy distorts and goes to those who do not really need it. If you have created a good book, play, song, dance, whatever, people will pay to come and see it, read it or whatever. It’s how the rest of the economy operates, why should it not apply to the Arts (and Culture)?

Bill expects the Cultural bureaucrats who live the subsidized life to look askance at him at the next cocktail party…but hi ho that’s my position.

Back to Culture. What is it? Is there a Guyanese culture or is there an African Guyanese culture, an Indo Guyanese culture, an Amerindian Guyanese Culture and so on. We all share the same language –English – and the same tools – music, paint, wood or whatever.

But do we share the same culture or should we accept that we are simply multicultural? So is the Hindu night at the Providence Stadium anything more cultural than the Ragga night on Saturday or the Chutney night next Friday?

They are all “Culture’; high and low. You Guyanese and other Caribbeans tend to use the ‘C’ word instead of/as a synonym for the “R’ word-Race.

By ‘Cultural differences’ they mean racial differences that dare not speak its name. Why? So on any ‘Guyanese’ evening you have a chequerboard -African act, Indian Act, Amerindian Act.

Fusion is not the name of the game apart from very few brave individuals like Keith Waithe who is ready and willing to reach across cultural i.e racial barriers in music. But he lives in multicultural Britain.

What about ‘Caribbean Culture’? Is there really such a thing? Do the Guyanese share all with Surinamese, St Vincentians, Jamaicans, Bajans? Bill thinks not.

In any case they have all been swamped – the posh word in hegemonised – by ‘culture’ coming from the skies, courtesy of Uncle Sam.

That is all pervasive and all present. The sounds of Brooklyn swamping those of Bridgetown; those of the Bronx, any coming out of Berbice.

Bill thinks this Culture situation is much much more complicated than at first seems. ‘Our Caribbean, Our Culture’? No way! Like it or not a thousand flowers have bloomed. That’s the reality not the dream…
Pip! Pip!

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