How about festival to honour Naipaul also

THE EDITOR: St Lucia observes an annual Nobel Laureate Festival in honour of its two Nobel laureates, Arthur Lewis and Derek Walcott. Their birth dates respectively are on January 23,1915 and January 23, 1930. This year, the 27th festival began on January 10 and will continue until February 6.

Why won’t we honour our Nobel laureate Vidia Naipaul as extensively as the St Lucians are doing?

The lives of those two international personalities tell us much about ourselves as a people because both were grounded in the Caribbean. Lewis was of Antiguan parentage. Walcott lived in Trinidad for a long time.

Their upbringing is familiar to many of us. They lost their fathers at tender ages so their mothers had to raise them single-handedly, just as women do in many other Caribbean families. They both distinguished themselves very early in St Lucia but had to face the peculiarities of life as in every Caribbean colony.

Lewis graduated from secondary school at 14. He wrote, “In 1932 I sat the examination and won the scholarship…The British government imposed a colour bar in its colonies, so young blacks went in only for law or medicine where they could make a living without government support. I did not want to be a lawyer or a doctor. I wanted to be an engineer, but this seemed pointless since neither the government nor the white firms would employ a black engineer.”

After his first degree in 1937, he lectured while researching various aspects of economics.

In 1963, he was, in turn, UN economic adviser to the prime minister of Ghana, deputy managing director of the UN Special Fund, and vice-chancellor of the University of the West Indies. He also set up the Caribbean Development Bank.

One of his earliest books, Labour in the West Indies – The Birth of a Workers’ Movement, has meaning for the reparations movement.

Prof Hilary Beckles, current UWI vice-chancellor and chairman of the Caribbean Reparations Commission, revealed that Lewis’ book contained a statement about the debt owed by the British government for the unpaid labour of enslaved Africans in the Caribbean. Lewis wrote that the payment of reparations should have been forthcoming to fund our economies.

Walcott studied art and wrote poetry. By age 14 he published his first poem in The Voice of St Lucia. However he had to face the dilemma of being a Methodist in a Catholic island. A Catholic priest from England condemned the Methodist-inspired poem as blasphemous in the same paper. Five years later Walcott self-published two books of poetry.

He won a scholarship to go to UWI, graduated in 1953 and later moved to Trinidad where he continued his work as journalist, critic, poet and playwright. From 1959 to 1971 Walcott was the founding director of the Little Carib Theatre, now the Trinidad Theatre Workshop.

He enlightened and entertained TT through his production of local and foreign plays under the auspices of the workshop. He reviewed our arts which included incisive critiques of the calypso tents, opening our eyes to the nuances of these indigeneous institutions, now in such a lamentable state.

And there was were his poems like Laventille resonate well with the current situation among our troubled communities.

Compare the St Lucian festival with the UWI/Caricom Reparations Commission symposium held on November 13 and 14, 2019, in commemoration of the 75th anniversary of the publication of Dr Eric Williams’ Capitalism and Slavery. Minister of State Lovell Francis spoke in a private capacity and not as a representative of the Cabinet or the PNM.

As head of the TT Committee on Reparations I recommended the involvement of secondary schools. History students from ten schools were present. In the near future, maybe one student who attended might be inspired to establish an annual TT festival for our Nobel laureate and other achievers.

AIYEGORO OME

Mt Lambert