Stone by bloody stone
On November 1, 2022, as the Poet Laureate of the British Virgin Islands, Richard delivered the 2022 Laureate Lecture at Maria’s by the Sea, Road Town, as part of the annual Culture and Tourism Month. The following is the full text of that address, which was first published at The BVI Beacon.
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I begin this, my penultimate address as your poet laureate, with a brief epigraph written in 1864 by the Reverend Edward Hartley Dewart, an Irish-Canadian Methodist minister, editor and author.
“A national literature is an essential element in the formation of national character. It is not merely the record of a country’s mental progress: It is the expression of its intellectual life, the bond of national unity, and the guide of national energy. It may be fairly questioned, whether the whole range of history presents the spectacle of a people firmly united politically, without the subtle but powerful cement of a patriotic literature.”
More than a century later, the eminent Canadian scholar David Taras wrote, “Canadian nationhood has been slow to evolve and Canadians slow to find collective symbols, standards and ideals. Many observers still regard the Canadian identity as incomplete and fragile. … Fear remains about Canada’s cohesiveness, integrity and existence.”
These statements bookend 120 years of Canadian writing, yet a clear desire persists for Canadian writers to affirm a national Canadian identity through their work. Somewhat ironically similar to the Virgin Islands, Canadian self-image is largely constructed between the poles of Britain and the United States. These two imperial metropoles continue to tug, along with Canada to a lesser extent, on the canon of Caribbean literature. It is worth noting that with little exception, most seriously considered Caribbean writing is published between London, New York and Toronto.
TOWARDS A NATIONAL LITERATURE?
As the world retreats from the experiment of globalism, what then does it mean to have a literature within which we imbue so much a la Dewart — our collective intellect, our energies, our very essence and ideals — produced en masse for audiences who are not us?
That is a question wrought with more than I can possibly extract for today’s purposes because I fear it is a problem we have not yet created for ourselves in the Virgin Islands. The American-Argentinian critic William Henry Hudson distills that problem in clear and brutal terms: Literature is “the progressive revelation, age by age, of nation’s mind and character.” It is, he adds, “the record of the unfolding of that nation’s genius and character.” The problem, as framed, is unescapable. Inevitable.
For now we must ask ourselves: Is there yet such a thing as a Virgin Islands literature? The question causes me great discomfort and frustration. In the trilogy of plays The Coast of Utopia by the acclaimed Czech-British playwright Tom Stoppard, the Russian literary figure Vissarion Belinsky is made to proclaim the words, “As a nation we have no literature.” The proclamation seems mad, that a country with such a rich tradition of letters as Russia could be accused of being void of a literary tradition. But Belinsky is not belabouring an absence of writing, but rather the direction or purpose of it. As he famously told the writer Nikolai Gogol, the reader “is always ready to forgive a writer for a bad book, but never a pernicious one.” My friends, with such a paucity of books being produced by and for Virgin Islanders, we cannot abide a bad one. How can we have a literature if we are not actively creating one?