THANKS TO GALLOPING technological innovation, Bajans are learning more and more from self-published work.
At different times in their lives, iconic figures such as Sir Derek Walcott, Marcel Proust, Booker T. Washington, Ezra Pound, Martin Luther, Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf have all published their work without the hands of established printers, and quite successfully.
Success is measured not simply by financial returns to the writers but how much people everywhere enjoy the authors’ literary work, style and intestinal fortitude.
That’s where some recent publications by Barbadians at home and abroad come in.
In a few weeks, a group of Bajans in America led by Evelyn Greaves, a former parliamentarian and Cabinet minister, and Colin Mayers, our consul general in Florida, will launch a biographical dictionary of profiles of Bajans entitled A Celebration Of Barbadians In The United States Of America. In the book, we will learn a lot about Barbadians who in different ways made outstanding contributions to America’s prosperity. It promises to be essential reading.
Just the other day in Toronto, Bajans in Canada, assembled by Grant Morris and Barbara Trieloff, launched a somewhat similar book on Barbadians who quietly did their thing in education, business, religion, health, academia, urban planning, literature, the media, politics, you name it.
Their coffee-table book, appropriately named Beyond Rum And Salt Fish, was the second of its kind published in Canada. The first, Some Barbadians In Canada, made its appearance in 2010 and was warmly greeted by people who never before saw their names in the lights of fame.
Coming on the heels of the private printing of a book in the United Kingdom on Errol Barrow, Fathering A Nation, word is that a dictionary on Bajan-Brits may be on the drawing board.
When added to the growing body of self-published material, including journalist Harold Hoyte’s Political Warriors Of Barbados: Generals, Lieutenants And Foot Soldiers and Eye Witness To Order And Disorder, we have a solid collection of work that should be integrated into the school curricula by the Ministry of Education, Cave Hill campus of the University of the West Indies, and the Barbados Community College. The books will enable young minds to learn more, first-hand, from people who lived through our recent past.
We must push past our prejudices which encourage us to endorse almost everything that emanate from “over and away” once it shone a light on people we never met and don’t know anything about. The new body of published adventure will teach us more about our next-door neighbours.
The Government, tertiary educational institutions and individual scholars and writers can get the ball rolling by starting a formal assessment of the published material so we can chart a course for its effective utilisation.