A biographical chronicle Part II

WHAT the subvention towards cultural industries, realised by the APNU government in 2017,  translates to, has not yet registered even among those who socially and politically lament a lack of sufficient employment and opportunities in our changing world. It must not be wrongly misconstrued as a handout to artists, it is not. It was lobbied for as an earned incentive to support those who exist by their art and craft, and had -to this end- exhibited the determination and defiance by registering businesses over the past five years, against the impossible odds that such businesses would have to confront in Guyana. They had long faced disadvantages as functional groups but were determined, even though their talents were treated as side attractions in the colonial pre-independence era. Cultural Industries involves people in the business of producing unique items for the day to day commercial and specialist accoutrements, handbags,  suitcases, souvenir dolls, sculpted toys and ornaments, movies, animation, design T-shirts, graphic novels, comic books and all forms of illustrated storytelling , novels, board games and digital games, jewellery that is designed and can stand the test on its originality, dramatists, playwrights, character skit developers, leatherwork items that can compete anywhere, music in all its forms- jingles, ballads, calypso, gospel etc.

But accompanying the realisation and recommendation of cultural industries as a new fledgeling business sector, there must be the resurrection and breathe of new life into our Copyright Laws and bylaws with recommended procedures of engagement. A new school of thought has to be engaged into what is copyrightable, and what merits to be described as intellectual property because we have copied other people’s property so long.

A reawakening will have to occur to help remind us and make aware of where what came from, what has to be left in the past and what stealing other people’s creative property will cost. Copyright updated legislation with its return as an effective and enforced Law, will draw into its embrace new areas and opportunity for professionalism from investigative journalists, food producers and furniture designers etc.  This is the only way that the best of Guyana will be able to emerge to compete for a niche in the world market and provide new serious interests for our innovative natural expertise whose talents were strangled into thinking that their skills were curses rather than blessings, because we saw only suffering and destitution with fellow citizens that represented those same gifts.

The most serious area of cultural industries is that what mediocrity we indulged in for the sometimes sympathetic local market will have to cease, in the next door years coming. The competition is going to be literally next door, whether we want to accept it or not, there is a localised counter-productive language “man wuh yuh gon do, this gon got fuh wuk, cause this is wuh ah getting”. Reality check, the consumer doesn’t care, they will buy the product next door. It’s a wooden product, neatly fastened by wooden dowels and not your ugly, cheap nails already beginning to rust. Creative industries are tremendously content competitive. If your screen printer, offset printer or cobbler isn’t state of the art, then to clear investment you have to go rock bottom with your price. The flaw with that is, once your label starts there, as cheap stuff in the mind of the consumer, that’s where you will stay. Thus the standards have to be known in each area, what you’re competing with at your level, your advantages have to be coordinated to be justified as say, exotic, but not shabby to the consumer.

There’s a factor I must include: I entered the world of Hero, Folklore, Sci-Fi adventure writing and character development naive to many subliminal barriers and preferences in our country. I will draw a reference from the current aggressive letter from Gerry Gouveia directed at GECOM, and the relevant response from Desmond Trotman using real historical parallels about the attitude conveyed in the letter. Freddie Kissoon decided to construct a reproach to Trotman that attempted to dilute and reconstruct the historical references that Gerry Gouveira’s letter was accused of coming from, and term those realities, as aspects of ‘Intellectual Fraud’. I would have agreed with this deceptive, fraudulent argument had I not had experiences with social accommodation against unambiguous cultural and historical ethnic respect. The 90s was a learning decade for me. The experience I will share occurred in 1995.  With not a great coffer of finance, all of it accounted for through ‘hard work’ in 1994, I began a magazine named ‘Folk & Culture’ to be printed in Trinidad, unaware that Caribbean quotations were all issued in US$. I budgeted my ads in TT$, and when I travelled to conclude the arrangement, discovered based on that flaw that I was ‘damaged’ financially. Issue Two was cancelled, and I now owed a newspaper for ads which I had no means of paying. I, however, had creative products that I took to the newspaper. The Manager was a friend and as plain-spoken as any could be, so I presented the work to her, which if taken would contribute to easing my debt. She agreed that it was in comparison as good as what we knew from overseas. “BUT!”  she related in that friendly, no malice meant, down-to-earth way, “ The people on the board of this newspaper would never allow that creole black people ting in this paper.” I was disappointed but not shocked, because ‘The Shadow of the Jaguar’ was kicked out of Chronicle in early 1993 because as the late editor had told me, “We can’t have a black superhero, alone like that,” and before I had visited the Manager of this other paper I had also paid a courtesy call on the Sunday Editor on the very proposal who had informed me that the paper was a ‘Conservative Paper’ so they wouldn’t print my stuff that included an Afro-researched Biblical cartoon, ‘Thoth the Wandering Scribe’.

To go a little further back, before that paper was launched I had approached the owner with The JAGUAR and The MIGHTY ITANAMI strip. He looked at me and said, “Not in my newspaper”  however, some years later when his paper was up and going he had called ACDA explaining that he wanted to produce a cartoon strip about a female Afro-vender whose husband had abandoned her and was struggling to make a living on the pave to mind her numerous children. I am a founder member of ACDA and they knew the story about his earlier rejection. ACDA assured him that they would picket his paper on his choice of the Afro-Guyanese story he wanted to tell. In fact, ACDA informed him that most of the women on the vending pave had husbands and life partners; the destitute, dysfunctional story was a collective stereotype.

The shaping of cultural industries for me opened doors that exist in the undercurrents of this society that were invisible in the day to day encounters between peoples, but are known, as the political, social and cultural conversations we hear, witness and understand, and then bury the real impetus in the pretentious postures of socialising. The roots of all this, however, will make great storytelling and drama with its comedy characters, nightmare creatures and malevolent twilight shapeshifters, that will outpour and eventually neutralise the secret doctrines that haunt us, then as products, copyrighted to the ethos and the economic benefits of the nation.