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CARIFESTA XI
The Ministry of Culture announced that it is about to make the final cut to constitute a 50-person delegation to CARIFESTA XI, which is going to be held in Suriname between August 16 and August 26. It also revealed that for the very first time, each delegation will be paying its own way to participate.
The Ministry has budgeted $20 million for the exercise, and this was the reason for the need to place a cap on the number of delegates to the festival.
The small number of participants, however, is sure to precipitate disgruntlement in our artistic community, which has been struggling to establish itself into a viable and sustainable entity. It is also somewhat ironic in view of the theme for CARIFESTA XI which is “culture for development” and in view of the decision after the last festival held in Guyana in 2008.
It was decided then that CARIFESTA was now a designated regional initiative to develop cultural events. Towards this end, a Task Force had been established “…to develop a comprehensive Regional Development Strategy and Action Plan for the Cultural Industries in CARICOM.”
Recommendations were supposed to have been made for an appropriate incentive regime and financing mechanism for the cultural industries, among other developmental areas to be addressed.
It would appear that like most initiatives of Caricom, this one has also died stillborn. This is very unfortunate because the culture of the Caribbean is so unique it can be the source of great attraction in a period when the region as a whole is experiencing difficulties with its tourism industry. But more fundamentally the neglect ignores the crucial role culture plays in creating and sustaining a strong society.
In 1972 when Forbes Burnham launched the first CARIFESTA in Georgetown it was done in the wake of a number of conferences and meetings of the region’s artists and intellectuals who stressed the liberating potential of our culture. It was a culture that had been formed out of resistance and struggle against unimaginable hardships. It was a culture that could teach the world much – and demonstrate that unlike what we had been taught, we had produced something of value.
The world that has grown smaller since 1972, has also grown more complex as different cultures now interacted much more intensively in a pluralistic global environment. The induction of Haiti and Suriname into Caricom during the 1990s, broadened the culture of Caricom to now include the hybrids formed by the interaction of cultures from Europe – specifically the British, Dutch and French variants and those from West Africa and Asia (China, India and Indonesia).
There are few societies that have such a breathtaking diversity on display.
CARIFESTA XI promises to be special in that it will evidently point the region in a direction that will make it even more diversified. The logo now includes the colours of UNASUR. – the Union of South American countries of which Guyana and Suriname will become associate members later this month – which signals the integration of Spanish and Portuguese heritages into our common experience.
What history has shown is that to the extent that people can identify with each other, they will cooperate and produce much more energetically. A common culture is what makes people identify with each other. In our region and in South America as a whole, for too long we have been divided by our heritages of being appendages of competing European empires. But through initiatives such as CARIFESTA we can begin to appreciate that we have more commonalities than differences.
It is only out of this recognition that we will be willing to make the effort to deepen our linkages in the economic and political spheres that will catapult all of us into living lives of dignity.
Europe pulled itself out of war and destruction by stressing a common culture: the economic and political unity followed.
CARIFESTA XI, therefore, affords us an opportunity for far more than having a good time. There will be that but there will also be the promise of so much more.
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