THE SIR PHILIP SHERLOCK LECTURES || The Caribbean Artist's Presence and Education for The Third Millennium

The Caribbean Artist's Presence and Education for The Third MillenniumAuthor(s): REX NETTLEFORDSource: Caribbean Quarterly, Vol. 46, No. 3/4, THE SIR PHILIP SHERLOCK LECTURES (Sept.-Dec. 2000), pp. 82-94Published by: University of the West Indies and Caribbean QuarterlyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40654165 .

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The Caribbean Artist's Presence and Education for The Third Millennium

by

REX NETTLEFORD

I visited Sir Philip just two days ago on his birthday. It was as wonderful as ever to meet this gentleman of great age, but with the mind of a 28 year old -

very stimulating; still addressing, not so much the problems of Jamaica as the tremendous possibilities of Jamaica and the wider Caribbean. It was from that spirit so many of us gained strength as students in the early days of this University. And I remember very well how people in this University, not being able to cope orto deal with someone as strange as Sir Philip, decided that certain things that he could not lay claim to he just could not lay claim to. So when the Parry/ Sherlock History of the West Indies, came out, there were people who genuinely felt he did not write it.. .he just couldnt possibly. He is only an Anancy storyteller and a poet. Well, it is amazing how this kind of attitude has persisted in the University which itself has been called the cradle of a great deal of what can be called the Creative Arts and the development of it over the past 50 years. But so it is and I share with you something in good faith. It is funny:

First of all I did come from the country... no, not in a bus. That wasnt the time I came. I came by train, but with a grip and it is very interesting because one of our own colleagues in this University, for a very long time heard me speak on the matter of culture and the centrality of it to intellectual life and how important it is that the University should take it on, not as a suppressive element but as something which is central to its work. And my colleagues were very impressed apparently by it. But this colleague was telling me, in all seriousness, that he went out for a coffee break and said, My God, but the man is an intellectual. When I shared this with some other colleagues they laughed, just as you did, and said "But what did he think?" I said, well, he probably heard of me as a dancer, a male dancer. And of course, Extra Mural, which is double jeopardy in a Univer- sity like this.

Things, I believe have changed and it is interesting to look at where we are now.. .not just we in the Caribbean but the entire world.... That culture is now seen (and by that I do not mean a little bit of dance and a little bit of poetry, but certainly the kind of things that creative artists do) are now regarded as very important to development.

There is a world conference coming up in Stockholm next month (March 1997) which will focus on culture and development. Economists and other



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planners have been at it for three or four decades and in some ways they have

barely made a dent. But a mere dent and somehow they are going back to the individual, to the human being and putting the human being at the centre of the cosmos. The artist was always there and many people in the academy have been there for quite some time, hence this edifice (the Philip Sherlock Centre for the Creative Arts) and the work that has been going on in it for the past thirty years and even before we were able to raise funds to put this building up... And I am happy to see my old friend Noel Vaz in the audience (a Tutor in Drama at the Creative Arts

Centre) because he certainly was one of the great pioneers and one of the people hand-picked by Sir Philip along with Errol Hill in the very beginning to somehow

bring that spirit into the University and to refine the otherwise coarsened sensibili- ties. And we have come a long way, I do not think we have to be subversive any longer.

The three staff members at the Centre (Tutor Coordinator, Music Director and Drama Tutor) can be regarded as pedigreed - they are the people who run

tings and are on the academic staff of the University

Many of us have had to do things from the margin. I have never regretted that quite frankly, because it is nice to be subversive and it also gives one a birds

eye view of things. One is able to locate oneself a little easier than if one is immersed in the establishment. I have been kicked upstairs and been paying madly for it. And I sometimes envy those who are able to stay on the outside somewhat and do as they like.

Sir Philip allowed us to do as we liked and he threw us in the water and used to say swim. Well, if you drown, too bad, but he never wanted us to drown and very few of us did. And we certainly found our way and were able to, through outreach, extend our activities into the wider community all over the Caribbean and even beyond that and he must take a great deal of credit for it. He certainly is one of our icons. At this great age, he and Dr. Hazel Bennett wrote The Story of the Jamaican People, from within. One of the things that he takes great pride in is the

project he spearheaded with the help of someone like Jean Smith and with a great worker like Paulette Chevannes and a number of other people, bringing to education the example that all education should have - that you go into the learning process treating the children as stake-holders in the process and concentrating on their creative potential and also most of all on their self esteem. And this is another contribution at this great age that he is making to the society.

So I join with you in celebrating the spirit and the life of one of our great West Indians who is a Founding Father of this University - which I've often referred to as probably the greatest gift that we have given to ourselves - and the impact that it has had on the entire Caribbean in determining the quality of intellectual life and helping to nurture the arts.



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I have been told that I am a denizen of Jurassic Park. I do not mind that too much, but to be told that one is a denizen of an intellectual ghetto at Mona is

something we have to think seriously about.

Sir Philip deserves better than that. He is a great contributor and has made a seminal one to the development of this region, which in itself is a seminal contributor to human development. And much of this has taken place through the work of the artists. Please, those who may not regard themselves as

belonging to that category - let not your heart be troubled. We are all artists and, in fact it is creativity which underpins much of this. And, in fact, if you live in this

part of the world one has to be creative for ones survival. The creativity takes us in directions, incidentally which are not infrequently questionable but creative nonetheless. Some of us are praying that sometimes that energy and that

creativity were all put to constructive work but it is not so. And, as a great friend of mine says - our hearts are laced with larceny, meaning we 'thief bad1. But even in that we have tremendous abilities to figure out how to thief, and we know

traditionally that it is so. One will spend a whole night figuring how to beat the

gate at the stadium at a football match, only to discover when one gets there that it is free. And this kind of ingenuity of course happily finds expression in other things, things which are very positive and wherever I go and see this, feel this, participate in this, I will remember Philip Sherlock. So I dedicate this to him and hope that he will have a good deal of time left with us.

We in the Caribbean have more artists per square inch than is probably good for us. It is an affliction we should however welcome since that Presence speaks to some fundamentals about our history and existential reality and continues to inform the fact of our survival and beyond in a society that still finds strength in struggle and in resistance to the systemic oppressiveness of a lopsided social order founded on the dehumanisation of the majority of its tenants starting with chattel slavery, followed by indentureship and persisting in the alienation and marginalisation of the majority within a lopsided enterprise and outside of it in the so-called globalisation of a world economy.

This new dispensation perpetuates economic dependency on the part of the two-thirds world and reinforces the mental slavery, which Garvey spoke about as far back as 1937 and which the great reggae artist Bob Marley echoed in what must be one of the most powerful couplets that is often cited as reminder of our responsibility to self and society.

The economists and planners notwithstanding, it is the artist who has plumbed the depths of our anguish and our possibilities, producing words and music, movement and myths, syntax and satire. With these have come hard cash or precious foreign exchange to the monetarists and bottom-line advocates who are yet to view them as productive variables in the development equation rather than self-indulgent exercises that cannot contribute to the per capita income, the GNP and the GDP.



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Where heritage tourism has entered the development planning of bureau- crats and political leaders, the products from the creative imagination of our

popular artists (calypsonians and reggae composers), of our festival arts (especially Carnival, Goombay-Jonkonnu, (as you find in the Bahamas) Carifesta, Crop-over (in Barbados), Reggae Sumfest, (in Jamaica) and of individual artists of world renown (as in Nobel Laureates and pop music superstars) are at last being taken seriously.

All this must be music to the ears of a people who have had to cultivate inner landscapes of creative action and innate structures manifest in language, religion, artistic creation forged in the crucible of resistance to oppression and all that would deprive one of ones personhood and the contradictory omens of a

society that is in constant flow having us all jumping from one foot to the other

knowing that we can stand on neither.

This lecture, hosted by the Centre for the Creative Arts could not have come at a better time. It comes at end of century when Planet Earth needs the lessons which our artists (individual and collective) have taught for the journey into the new millennium.

For nothing short of an expansiveness of thought embracing a new vision of a groping rainbow world, a new sense of self and new ways of knowing to

underpin new ways of living, can guarantee us safe conduct.

The significance of the Presence in our midst of the Derek Walcott's, the

George Lamming's, the Earl Lovelace's, the Vidia NaipauPs, the Kamau Brath- waite's, the Lorna Goodison's and the Martin Carter's, the Mighty Sparrow's, Lord Kitchener's, Chalkdust, David Rudder's, and Peter MinshalPs, the Bob Marley's, the

Jimmy Cliff's, the Peter Tosh's and the myriad dancehall legatees, the Edna

Manley's and the Aubrey William's.... the Beryl McBurnie's and Ivy Baxter's, the Pat

Bishop's.

The Presence of all such treasured ones amongst us rest precisely on the seminal contribution that they have made and are making to the quest. In the words of Sir Philip himself, For richer forms of collective self-knowledge, that someone like Derek Walcott, Nobel Laureate, playwright, essayist, painter, Carib- bean man from St. Lucia, man of wicked wit and perceptive eye is a major contributor to this now global quest is impatient of debate ... a fact that should not elude any Commonwealth Caribbean youth in acquiring an education from primary school to university.

Like all our artists who work their soul, Walcott defines history, it is said, not as records of monuments and empires in habitual celebration of domination and the humiliation of large hordes of humanity but rather as a self-redeeming, self-accepting story of one's person, culture and of one's ultimate significance in the order of things". What an excellent mission-statement for the planners and deliverers of education to the generation that will inherit the 21st century!



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The significance of the Presence of the artistic genius of Walcott and others at self-perceiving resides in the constant reminder, by his words and works, of the richness of our turbulence, the creativity in our chaos, the priceless elements of a deep knowledge and deeper understanding of our history and lived

reality which constitutes the irreducible kernel of our humanity.

The Nobel Prize which Walcott won in 1992 predictably brought pride and joy to all our Caribbean hearts; but it is the inner strength and lasting impact of the artists' poetic vision that survive the 'roar of the greasepaint and the smell of the crowd'. Long after the national anthems have been played, the jump-up has ended and the applause dies down, the man and his vision live on in the

significance of a compelling enduring Presence.

That Presence like that of all seminal contributions to our several pom- pous acts of becoming, continues to celebrate the individual and collective creative will of the Caribbean people. It continues to eke out of their complex, hopeful yet despairing, caring yet wearying, challenging yet frustrating existence, products of artistic excellence, habits of tolerance and delicately balanced sensi- bilities.

The Presence rates character over skin and talent over origin in the effort to shape civil society made habitable for all who treasure the great freedoms that

underpin the fragmented, tortured progress of his Antillean kith and kin.

It is that Presence of the creative artist and of kindred souls who exercise creatively their imagination and intellect that enable what was once Áfricas, Asias and Europes encounters on foreign soil to further forge in the crucible of the Caribbean heritage, a viable plural society where people will live not just side by side but together.

For that Caribbean heritage has been long given to racial tolerance, (however flawed), to freedom (for which slaves fought so relentlessly in ways not

totally alien to contemporary artists) and to a creative ecumenism in maintaining the integrity of differing belief systems, making the Caribbean Basin into a vibrant

laboratory of explorations in spirituality as it has been in the crafting of Creole

languages. For these religions and linguistic expressions are quite powerful manifestations of the newness of cross-fertilised souls following on the now historic contacts since 1492.

It is largely through the arts that we have come to understand the

dynamics of these 500 years of becoming, producing in all of the Americas

(including our own Caribbean) genuinely new peoples, and a new sense and

sensibility of sufficient substance and uniqueness to make a difference in the

development of humankind.

The Nobel Prize for Literature to a West Indian, as well as the world-wide acclaim of the regions music and music-makers may well serve as a wake-up call to all of Planet Earth to heed the significance of the reality of a part of the



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world once felt to be tenanted by non-people but which is capable of unlocking great truths about the human condition. It does this through the exercise of its

creativity in the crossroads of a global village which the Americas in general and the Caribbean in particular have always been, and which a so-called globalised world of the 21st century is on the way to becoming. If we, indeed, heed the best among our artists, we are not likely to go wrong in coping with the 21st century, when it finally blooms full-flowered. The plant is, indeed, already with us.

What the world of the fading 20th and the dawning 21st century must now come to terms with, is that the idea of a New World starting in 1492 is, firstly, a-historical for Native Americans (themselves admittedly changed through sustained contact with alien cultures); secondly, is particularly disturbing for people of African ancestry whose centrality to the shaping of the Caribbean ethos is still denied; and thirdly, is far too Eurocentric and mono-cultural for the comfort of persons who may be part-African, part-European, part-Asian, part-Native Ameri- can but totally Caribbean.

The best among our artists, by definition, have no problem with being the creatures of all their ancestors - the textured, complex, concentrated, offspring of the willful accidents of modem history. That this reality endows the Caribbean

person with a unique knowledge of the crafting of a new sensibility, not out of some void as in the Book of Genesis but out of the disparate elements of differing cultures, is cause for celebration rather than for self-negation, self-contempt or self doubt.

Some of these encountering cultures, one may recall, are after all rooted in the old Graeco-Roman Judaic Christian origins but also in African so-called animist belief systems, while still others are rooted in Hindu and Muslim cosmologies with the rich methodologies of aboriginal America in place. Walcott, Brathwaite, Selvon, Naipaul and Wilson Harris speak severally to these encounters in search of self.

It is that celebration of self that marks, as well, the significance of the artists Presence in this region. The celebration is by no means self-indulgent. That abiding sense of history and an uncanny realism reflecting the innate wisdom of the mass of the population permeates, indeed, all that emanates from the artists creative imagination.

The artist acknowledges the vulnerability of the tribe in bondage but

recognises that freedom lies in the knowledge of said tribe to fortify itself by cunning assimilation of the religion of the Old World so that what seems to be surrender turns out to be redemption, what seems the threat of a loss of tradition becomes a renewal to tradition, and what may appear to be the death of faith turns out to be its rebirth.

This is a powerful expression of the Caribbeans modes of survival and beyond through the invocation of hope in the midst of despair - the capacity to



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transform liabilities into assets or as a Jamaican proverb sagaciously puts it, "What spwile (spoil) mek style..."

This dialectic of hope-in-despair runs through the popular literature and other artistic expressions of our Caribbean people. The reggae artists from

Jimmy Cliff through Bob Marley to Buju Banton and the calypsonians from Kitchener through Sparrow to David Rudder demonstrate this in their lyrics; and the collective wisdom of the oral literature that is our traditional proverbs and stories speaks to this ancestral capacity for survival and beyond.

The artists Presence up and down the archipelago signifies this capacity for such invincibility against all odds. Surrender is indeed transformed into

redemption, potential loss into renewal, death into rebirth.

How many of the regions economic planners are endowed with such

perception and, as the Rastafarians say, overstanding? The appeal to a sense of self does not in any way mean for the artist a thoughtless rejection of the wisdom of ages or the intrinsic worth of the Other, least of all for an artist like Walcott who admits to his perennial apprenticeship in the Presence of masters and his

willingness to steal from the treasuries of excellence wherever they are to be found, and not least from his own richly interlaced Caribbean past.

But despite the myriad influences via the colonial conditioning of yester- year and cultural penetration in these electronic times, the human being is able to retain a capacity for self-reflection and self-realization. An earlier group of Caribbean political visionaries and educators understood this in terms of self-

government and Independence.

A clear danger is that many of their successors are now in danger of

losing a hold of our sovereignty and of the conviction that the likes of us can be the creators of our own destiny and must be if Caribbean people are to give real

meaning to the trappings of political independence decked out in national flags, anthems and national symbols. In building new nations many have understood the significance of the artistic cultural Presence not as manifestation of our

capacity to be happy in a state of primitive innocence but as the source of energy for sustaining civilization and our humanity.

That sense of self must be manifested in our capacity to distinguish through our actions what in us is autonomous from what is determined. Con-

trary, to still commonly held beliefs, the writing of poetry, the composition of a

piece of music, the creation of a play, the painting of pictures and so on are all forms of action and not modes of escape from reality. They are valid routes to

cognition which the educational system ignores at our peril.

For every true artist understands the tension that exists between becom-

ing self and having that self as part of a wider whole. All art is, after all, mediated

by social reality and the self has to reach out as well as in, if it is to appreciate the world we tenant.



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I have elsewhere spoken to the inward-stretch-and-outward-reach phe- nomenon as a route to Caribbean wholeness. There can be no self-indulgence at the expense of that sense of community so essential paradoxically to the realization of that very self. Walcott, himself a master in the very personal art of poetry, is also playwright engaged in that intensely communal art of theatre in which he has

participated as director as well (I wish he had been allowed that opportunity on

Broadway).

Both Lamming (the novelist) and Kamau Brathwaite (the poet) consciously share with others as lecturer, in the case of Lamming, and as performing poet, in the case of Brathwaite. Choreography and pop music creation are public/communal art forms like track, soccer and cricket, which I regard as the great performance art of sports. The artist players involved here, including the Reggae Boys know that self-absorption can be very counterproductive. The self is multi-dimensional in our pluralist Caribbean, is multifaceted in our multi-layered, multi-sourced society and highly complex in its location in the social structure.

We in the Caribbean know, and the artist reminds us by his/her Presence, that there is no place for a kind of spiritual geography which would chart an internal versus an external world as someone has put it. By living within the ambit of interactive spaces, one is likely to have a rounder understanding of something that is [admittedly] essentially elusive in other words, the acts of discovery of a stabi- lized self finding place and purpose in a complex, contrary, chaotic, schizophrenic and unruly world. The ordinary Caribbean man and woman have an uncanny feel for this challenge. From among them have come expressions from icons like

Lamming and Kaman Brathwaite, from Marley, Cliff, Tosh and Sparrow in celebration of this, after all; and the Presence of the artist signifies the sustaining values of all this in our unending quest for self and society.

Walcott warned against Carifestas becoming self-indulgent happen- stances rather than milestones on a vigorous continuing journey to self-discovery, self-definition and a sustained exercise of the creative imagination in place of intermittent outbursts of revelry. He believes that such outbursts may not be

life-giving despite the ecstasy of instant gratification. The need is clearly for sustained application to this most fundamental of developmental pursuits on the

part of governments and populace alike, even where bread and circuses are dictated by an urgent need for periodical self-affirmation. It is seldom difficult for certain governments to find money and extra budgetary funds to send a team of minstrels off to entertain somewhere. And yet it is so difficult to put a line item for a cultural policy.

A further significance of the Caribbean artistic Presence and that of all of like mind and genius turns on what may be seen as a further warning against the

adoption and promotion of touristic culture under the guise of serious cultural policy in a region where tourism has become a major foreign exchange earner -traditional

exports having fallen victim to globalisation, neoliberal market economics and the



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realigned power of the military where the North Atlantic trading blocs, is manifested in multinationals, new complexes, and transnational corporations.

Cultural tourism which is the project name given the development thrust by UNESCO is harmless enough, conceptually speaking; but in practice it is not necessarily so. Many a Caribbean artist shares the view that our inheritance (collective and individual) is a key aspect of our sense of self. It must, therefore, enjoy logical priority over the satisfaction of others in search of surface titillation though there should be a willingness to share that inheritance which will have been passed down from generation and organically assimilated by that self. What better approach than to nurture one's culture for oneself and to share it and welcome our guests in to share it with us.

We in the Caribbean know a custom. I do not know where we got it from - people tell me it is from the Welsh or Scots, but we have our little glass cases with our best china and our silver plated forks and spoons never to be touched except by the visitor. I remember rebelling against that. Why cant I drink out of that glass? Its for when the visitors come. It would be nice to have it for ones self and have our guests share it with us. The alternative is a peddling of heritage which having been manufactured, must be packaged, advertised and constantly adapted to .he changing tastes of the consumers. The implications are far- reaching for National Trusts, Tourist Boards and Hotel and Tourist Associations which are tempted to merchandise the heritage often at the expense of the inheritance of a peoples genuine myths, national heroes, native names - for native items of nature, and live traditions.

The Caribbean artist is rightly jealous of the integrity of the inheritance and of the aristocracy of spirit that abounds in the relations among people and between people and their natural landscape. Heritage tourism, however tempt- ing for those concerned with the bottom-line, must eschew minstrelsy and keep the consuming visitor - aware of the existence in these islands of heart, soul, spirit and mind independent of sun, sand and sea.

The active Presence of the artist, Id like to feel, acts as a corrective to any view to the contrary and I include even the airport artists in this. Yet the stereotype persists among many a consumer that, as Walcott told his Nobel Prize audience in Stockholm, a culture based on joy is bound to be shallow. Sadly, rued the laureate, to sell itself, the Caribbean encourages the delights of mindlessness, of brilliant vacuity, as a place to flee not only winter but that seriousness that comes only out of a culture with four seasons. So how can there be a people there, in the true sense of the word he asks.

Necessity here becomes the mother of a sorry sort of prostitution poeti- cally described by Walcott in that same acceptance speech at the Nobel Prize ceremony, as the seasonal erosion of [our] identity, that high-pitched repetition of the same images of service that cannot distinguish one island from the other,



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with a future of polluted marinas, land deals negotiated by ministers, and all of this conducted to the music of Happy Hour and the rictus of a smile.

The wider implications for art and culture in the development process is therefore far less removed from the action of artists than first meets the eye. It is now universally recognized that the importance of culture to development has to do with the enhancement of the social capital, the sustaining of an ambiance of civility (and civilization) based on the intellectual and cultural bedrock of any social

aggregation whether it be tribe, nation or region. On his own account Walcott tuned, as a young undergraduate at the University of the West Indies (Mona), into this understanding which he found to be evident in Jamaica in the Fifties with its

honeycomb of community organizations in communion with the creative arts em- braced by founding fathers at the time. He was to make the entire region an arena of action fanning out from St. Lucia to Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago going still wider afield into the Americas. He was to further encompass the globe, a con- sciousness of which he had always had through that very colonial conditioning which he transformed into redemption and means of self-discovery, self-asserting without rancour and creating and inventing even as he broke images an approach ignored by later revolutionaries who chose to ignore this tried and tested Caribbean

modality of self-liberation.

It further exposed him, as it did all of his generation who received an education, to antiquity and that meeting point of cultures in the Mediterranean which gave to humanity not only Greece and Rome (to be hijacked by those who were to feel they had a monopoly on civilization) but also Egypt and the great monotheistic religions, thought systems and value-configurations of the Orient. Omeros, a Walcottian masterpiece, may well be speaking to the inheritance from that cross-roads civilization tenanted by kindred spirits of old. For arent we the creatures of that special creolising process of becoming? An understanding of such civilizations is not possible without knowing the cultural context in which they flourished.

The invocation of cultural values as part of the repertoire of modalities in the service of Caribbean survival-and-beyond has been insisted on in large meas- ure by our creative artists rather than by our economic planners and development gurus. And we have been the richer for it!

The idea that activity involving the exercise of the creative intellect and creative imagination being non-productive has long informed the texts of Annual Economic Reports throughout the region despite the evidence of income generation and employment-enhancement (albeit seasonally) arising from the activities of

reggae artists and carnival revellers. I daresay some of those have already earned far more money than anyone in this room will ever earn and Bob Marley probably brought more foreign exchange into this country than any single entrepreneur or

corporate mogul that I know of.



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The Presence of the artist from the nameless creators of our folk songs and proverbs through people like Walcott, Brathwaite, Selvon and Lamming to Louise Bennett, Marley and Sparrow as well as our painters and sculptors, challenges the Caribbean to a greater awareness of the creative potential of self and society without which development is well nigh impossible.

The alleviation of poverty the current buzz-phrase of the development school could well begin with the alleviation of the poverty of spirit that breeds a coarsened sensibility and saddles entire populations with a paralysis of any will to innovate and think through problems creatively.

For development, argues a 1995 UNESCO Report on Culture and De-

velopment, embraces not only access to goods and services, but also the

opportunity to choose a full, satisfying, valuable and valued way of living to-

gether, the flourishing of human existence in all its forms and as a whole."

Development entails material improvement but no less so spiritual upliftment which is more than superstructure

Our artists understand why ones like themselves who include Lamming's people from below and Norman Manley's the real people, have been able to achieve, because of their capacity to create. History and elemental awe are

always our early beginning because the fate of poetry [and maybe all that is art] is to fall in love with the world, in spite of History. There is a form of exultation, declares Walcott again, "a celebration of luck, when a writer finds himself a witness to the early morning of a culture that is defining itself, branch by branch, leaf by leaf, in that self-defining dawn, which is why, especially at the edge of the sea, it is good to make a ritual of the sunrise. Then the noun, the Antilles ripples like brightening water, and the sounds of leaves, palm fronds, and birds are the sounds of a fresh dialect, the native tongue. The personal vocabulary, the individual melody, whose metre is one's biography, joins in that sound, with any luck, and the body moves like a walking - a walking island".

Despite all that I have said the neglect of culture as integral to education

persists among many in the public bureaucracy and even in the teaching profes- sion throughout the Caribbean. But a child learns the meaning oí process and is better able to relate outcome to effort, if he/she encouraged to create a poem or a song, act in a play, make up a dance, sing in a choir or play an instrument in an orchestra -(including the steelpan and the drum which are regarded by some

people as unsuitable instruments). One should hope that these would become a normal part of his/her education.

The pluses for character formation are legion. The discipline that under-

pins the mastery of a craft through which all art finds expression, the demands made on continuous re-creation of effort and application, the challenges encoun- tered on the journey to excellence, habits of realistic self-evaluation, the capacity for dealing with diversity and the dilemma of difference, whether in the perform-



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ing arts or in the key branches of sports, themselves for me part of the performing arts, constitute excellent preparation for learning to be (which is the stuff of

ontology), learning to know (the substance of epistemology), and learning to live

together (the essence of the creative diversity which characterizes Caribbean existence and is about to overtake the entire world). Educations role must not only teach people to make a living, it must also teach them how to live, otherwise we are

likely to produce for ourselves cadres of Mike Tysons and O. J. Simpsons.

Adaptability, flexibility, ready code-switching, innovativeness and a capacity to deal with the complexity of complexity, are all attributes of the creative

imagination which provide yet anpther route to cognition other than the Cartesian rationalism we have inherited. For if we are because we think, we also exist because we feel.

The strengthening of bonds between education and the community and both with culture makes eminent sense for it speaks to the basics of civil society rooted in trust, mutual respect, the harnessing of collective will and a fostering of that sense of fellowship without which sociability and the capacity to join forces to achieve greater ends for the good of all cannot be attained.

An education which does not inculcate and foster this, is not likely to be of much use, however brilliant one might be on the computer or is able to collect an abundance of 0 and A levels in the examination system, or later on, degrees at

university.

The giving of self through coordinated social action is possible only when we are able to discover and to keep re-discovering who we really are, how our lives have been forged from that textured history of the past half a millennium and how our place is determined in the world - a complex, mosaic of a groping world, itself in search of certitude and ways of coming to terms with the physical environment

long despoiled and much degraded, and with the environment of power littered with

politicians of various visages.

It was Dame Neita Barrow, that thoroughbred of a West Indian public servant who, on the occasion of the United Nations 50th Anniversary Commemo- ration, pleaded for recognition from the world for those who function in the area of the creative imagination (artists) and those who must grapple with the hard bread and butter facts on issues of everyday life (politicians) who are in her words not

polls apart. And I quote:

The artist reminds us of our relationship to the earth and the order and unity which manifests in its animate and inanimate forms. Art is perhaps the true foundation of law and it is to the artist that the legislatures should look. It is the artist who instructs me of what I am and what is around me



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As I have had reason to say repeatedly to a few politicians and their bureaucratic supports, teachers and the institutions of learning are the major contributors to, and principal facilitators of, the cultivation of that kingdom of the mind capable of interdisciplinary contemplation, with rank shoots of creativity sprouting from the exercise of both intellect and imagination, and these in turn working in tandem to produce a self-reliant, self-respecting, tolerant more fully peaceful and far less violence-prone, enterprising and productive community of souls. Such a community is in turn strategically placed at a point of the compass that is education, charting the course round the cycle of civilization which is the cycle of creativity, the artists trajectory.

The task for artists then, and for educators in all this is self-evident, although awesome, frightening, challenging and, for someone like myself, irritat- ingly satisfying.



Documents

THE SIR PHILIP SHERLOCK LECTURES || The Caribbean Artist's Presence and Education for The Third Millennium