 Welcome to Celebrating Excellence. This year's Nobel Laureate Festival has, as its theme, celebrating excellence, facing new realities, creating new modalities. The festival showcases lectures, exhibitions, award ceremonies, drama productions, and creole and literary workshops. Our guest today is Jeanine Julevik, a global sculpture of the Woodwell Ambassador and Caribbean Laureate. As a local sculpture from a family of artists, we asked him what he felt about the Derrick Walcott's impact on the visual arts. Well, first of all, I must say that Derrick Walcott is an absolute giant, right? And really have such an epic figure infuse your genre of arts, which is visual arts, you know? That in itself has a domino effect on how you perceive everything in that world. Because there is no Nobel Prize for visual arts. But when you have somebody who has received the highest honor, partaking in the same genre of creativity as you, you know? That is tremendous, you know, that just revitalizes every cell in your being. And I could remember as a young kid, Derrick Walcott will very often visit my dad's studio, you know, and he was quite in love with my father's work, and he was a patron of my dad. You know, so that in itself had a very profound impact on me, seeing Derrick Walcott around art and also experiencing his particular art work. I mean, he was very, you know, profuse with his watercolors. He was a consumer professional when it comes to the watercolor in particular. But he also dabble in acrylic and oils as well, you know? And what I did is that made me realize that, you know, the creativity is a universe. You know, expression, one form of expression to the other is basically the same thing. You know, there's nothing in that universe that is mutually exclusive. You know, everything is inclusive. When I do my work now, you know, there's a very powerful conceptual side of my work as well. It's not just about imagery. It's not just about the materialization of an image or form. There's a much deeper component. You know, I see the poetry, I see the more intangible aspects of it. You know, I think Derrick Walcott sometimes when I create my work, you know? And Derrick sought to make regal the mandin. You know, he once said in an interview that there's a penance that comes with living in the Caribbean, or being a Caribbean person. And that penance is that everything is deemed inferior to that of the outside world. You know, especially that of the colonial powers, if you're going to take it in the context of colonialism. And so he said that, for example, the mango tree was never as great as the oak tree. Right? So what he did as a writer, as a poet, is he sought to give the mango tree that regality, you know, that the oak tree had simply because Shakespeare spoke about the oak tree and great writers from Europe spoke about the oak tree. They endowed it with that kind of regality, that kind of importance and prominence. So when I do my art work today, I have that same kind of philosophy where I want to make regal what is perceived ordinary. You know, so I call it a design philosophy. You know, that's my philosophy and something that I got from Derek Wolcott. Also my dad as well, but you know, but Derek put it very profoundly. You know, so his words had a very deep, deep impact on me. And this is my prize progression. This is Derek Wolcott. This is the way he stored quite a few of his minion brushes. And I was gifted this brush chest, I call it, you know. When I'm there working there, I was gifted one of his brush cabinets by his spouse, Sigrid Nam Wolcott, you know. And it's one of my prize possessions and it still has a lot of his brushes and his instruments in it. Derek Wolcott for me is the catalyst that made me realize that you know that this thing is huge, it is epic, right? That you can do it on a global scale. You know, because if a solution from this 244 square mile area can, you know, reach that level of excellence in his art form, there's so can I. You know, there's so can I. To receive a program of events, visit the Facebook page at Nobel Laureate Festival St. Lucia or call 758-717-7979. The festival runs until the 31st of January 2022. Goodbye. Welcome to Celebrating Excellence. For the last 29 years, St. Lucia has been celebrating its two Nobel Laureates, Sir William Arthur Lewis and Sir Derek Alton Wolcott. Every year the festival has a sub-theme and this year it's facing new realities, creating new modalities. Natalie Laporte is an actress and poet who performed in many of Sir Derek Wolcott's plays. She tells us of her memories of Sir Derek and a special phrase he coined. One of the things I really loved about Derek was he had certain insight and a sort of sage awareness about St. Lucia, his native land and the people who live in it. And I remember he said once, it matters where you come from. And I'm not being struck by that because it was so simple yet so profound and it matters where you come from. Because I think normally we are encouraged maybe even to program to a certain degree to look beyond toward the future, what's in front, what lies ahead, what school are you going to, what job are you going to get, who will you marry, how many kids do you have. But not so trendy is looking back sort of taking the roots of your past, your ancestry, your ethnicity and bringing that forward into your present and then into your future. And I feel that maybe that quote had something to do with that. Derek was very, very fascinated by our creative process. You know, the drums, the violin, you know, he thrived in it. It was almost his heartbeat. It has a sort of longing in it. It matters where you come from. See yourself, let's see ourselves as the island nation that we are, as the regional people that we are, what we represent. And there's a sort of, I don't know, philosophical spin I like to put on it. Like, what do we represent as a people? What do we represent as people, as human individuals and by extension, everywhere we go, everyone we meet, who we talk to, what we say. What do we want to represent? You know, I think these are things that Derek took very, very seriously. He carried them in his heart always. He spoke of them and it manifested in his work, you know, beautifully. I think also of the sort of intrinsic, almost endemic beauty of being St. Lucian, of being Caribbean. It's in the way we walk. It's in what we cook. It's in the way we welcome strangers into our homes. It's the speed with which we help people who need a helping hand. Those are things that you find more easily in the Caribbean than you would find in other places, what we like to call the bigger countries. You know, because they live by different systems. And I think also what that phrase might represent, that quote might represent is there's an intangible beauty about being Caribbean. In my work with him, I would see that happen often because he might have something scripted a certain way and then all of a sudden he would have a feeling and it would be, no, scratch that. Let's do it this way instead. And he was very expectant of you as an artist to be able to move maybe like the ocean, ebb and flow easily with that sort of process. It wasn't everything he did, it wasn't everything he said. And I think one of the most beautiful things, even though it may not be that obvious was that even as he passed he left that with us was that we can be even greater than we already are. You know, he used to sit in his patio and look out at the ocean always. He always needed to be sitting facing the ocean. And I think it was not just to see the ocean, to hear the waves breaking on the shore but to feel the ocean. He didn't want to be locked up inside, he never liked that. He liked outdoors, he liked nature. And even when he would speak he wasn't always very talkative but when he did speak that came through in his language. So the honesty of that quote, the simplicity of it to me just redirects to us as a people, individuals how we continue to treat ourselves and then how we treat each other especially in the decades to come. You know, I think Derek was trying to create a long-term vision for us so that we can continue to build on that entrance in beauty and be the greatest that we can be. It's a beautiful thing, it's a beautiful sentiment. The Cedric Walcott Memorial Lecture, The Demand of Beauty will be delivered by St. Lucian Poet, Mr. Kendall Hippolitt and takes place on Tuesday the 18th of January at 7.30pm at the Finance Administrative Centre. The Nobel Laureate Festival Committee thanks the Library Co-operative Credit Union for its sponsorship of the Cedric Walcott Memorial Lecture. There is limited in-person attendance with COVID-19 protocols in place but the lecture will also be recorded by the National Television Network. Visit the Facebook page at Nobel Laureate Festival St. Lucia for more information. The festival runs until the 31st of January 2022. I'd like to see you commenting online. Ladies and gentlemen, the Nobel Laureate Festival Committee and the Cultural Development Foundation welcomes you to the 2022 Cedric Walcott Memorial Lecture. Please stand for the National Anthem of St. Lucia. And now, ladies and gentlemen, we please join me in welcoming tonight's Master of Ceremony, Mr. Phil Hamberson. And you may have your seat. Good night. Establishing protocol for the evening. Her Excellency exemplar, Dame Poet-Louise, Chairperson for the Nobel Laureate Committee. The Honourable Philip J. Pierre, Minister for Finance, Economic Development and Youth Economy. The Honourable Dr. Ernest Hiller, Minister for Tourism, Investment, Creative Industries, Culture and Information. His Excellency, Peter Chen, Ambassador, Embassy for the Republic of China, Taiwan. Mr. Claudius Francis, Speaker of the House of Assembly. Dr. Kedela Lane-Ambrose, Permanent Secretary in the Office of the Prime Minister with Responsibility for Housing and Local Government. Ms. Solage Belize, Deputy Permanent Secretary, Ministry of Tourism, Investment, Creative Industries, Culture and Information. Her Worship, Geraldine Lendor, Gabriel, Mayor of Castries. Ms. Monde-Louis, Press Secretary to the Prime Minister. Ms. Ramona Henry-Wine, Executive Director of the Cultural Development Foundation. Mr. Lyndon Honol, Deputy Managing Director for the Bank of St. Lucia. Sigrid Namo, and the family of Sir Derek Walcott. I would like to welcome everyone to the 2022 Sir Derek Walcott Memorial Lecture. Welcome everybody. I would like to thank everyone for being here this evening. We understand that the protocols are quite difficult to adhere to at all corners of this life. However, you have made a very special attempt to recognize the late, the great Sir Derek Walcott. And for that you should give yourself a round of applause. Sir Derek Walcott has written about every square inch of St. Lucia. From Montfortuin to Moulashik. And the surrounding islands. From Santa Cruz in Trinidad to St. Croix. And he's been able to describe in such articulate detail in a way that we have not seen since. His mastery of the language has gone. In a way that no St. Lucia and possibly no one else in the world so far has been able to compete with. For this reason, the Cultural Development Foundation and the Nobel Laureate Association has decided to honor him this evening with this lecture and these presentations by the artists that you have seen earlier. I would now call your attention to the screens as we have an audio video presentation by Mr. Kendall Hippolit who would later be giving tonight's lecture. Take your attention to the screens please. Born in St. Lucia in 1952, retired lecturer in literature and drama, Kendall Hippolit, studied and lived in Jamaica in the 1970s where he explored his talents as a poet, playwright and director. His writing explores the spectrum of standard and Caribbean English, working with traditional forms, free verse and forms influenced by popular culture as well as poems written in Quayol, his native language. He has published seven books of poetry. The latest being Word of Planting, Peepal Tree Press 2019 and his poems have appeared internationally in various journals such as The Greenfield Review, The Massachusetts Review and in anthologies like Caribbean Poetry Now, Voice Print, West Indian Poetry and others. In 2007, he won the Bridget Jones Travel Award and traveled to England to present his one-man dramatized poetry production Kinky Blues at the annual conference of the Society for Caribbean Studies. He has twice won the Literature Prize in the Binville and Chastney Fine Arts Awards which was for years the premier arts awards scheme in St. Lucia and is the winner of the 2013 Bookhouse Festival Poetry Prize. He has performed his work in the Caribbean, Europe and America at literary festivals and events. Mr. Hippolit has also established himself as an innovative playwright and director authoring eight plays and directing scores of others including his own The Drummaker 1976, The Song of One 1995 and Triptych 2000 all of which have been published in drama anthologies. In 1984 he co-founded the Lighthouse Theatre Company in St. Lucia and has long been involved in all aspects of the dramatic arts on the island. He has toured with theatre productions in the Caribbean and the UK. At a different times he has been involved as actor, director and administrator in St. Lucia's contingents traveling to Cara Festa. Mr. Hippolit is an original and continuing member of the syllabus panel for the Caribbean Examinations Council CXC Theatre Arts Program and serves as an external examiner. In 2000 he was awarded the St. Lucia Medal of Merit Gold for his contribution to the arts. Recently retired from the Sao Pauloist Community College his present focus is to use his skills as a writer and a dramatist to raise public awareness and contribute to active solutions of critical social issues. Ladies and gentlemen I would like you to continue to put your hands together for our esteemed lecturer this evening, Mr. Kendall Hippolit. I want to thank the organisers for this very generous introduction. Protocols haven't been established and given that we're in the season of curfews and therefore time is pressing on us, my greetings will be very very short but I'm very very pleased to be here tonight and very very pleased at the range of persons who are here tonight and the feeling of support and presence that I get from you. And though we can't see them I'm very very grateful to those in cyberspace whose presence I'm sure is also supportive. The demand of beauty is something I absolutely believe. A Derek Walcott poem saved my life. There's not a metaphor, it's not a whimsical poetic way of expressing some psychological or spiritual truth. The statement is literal. A Derek Walcott poem saved my life. March 23, 1972. Thursday late afternoon. I'm sitting in the student's lounge of what was then called the teacher's training college at Morne Forteon. The room is on the lower floor of the Timestory building one of a cluster of late 19th century early 20th century colonial barracks progressively converted into educational buildings. The room is large and directly below a larger room upstairs the assembly hall. Why am I there on a Thursday afternoon with a backpack that holds a note book and a pen, a copy of Derek Walcott's The Green Knight, most likely another book or two, quite likely a fruit and you know some biscuits and juice. I was 20 years old. A habit that developed in me from years before of walking up to the morn with a backpack of food for body and soul, snacks, juice, books, pen, notebook and finding a quiet spot in one of the buildings where I could reflect and read and write. I went to the morn that Thursday in March 1972 not knowing that an event was taking place at the teacher's training college a morn complex beauty pageant and concert. Beautiful afternoon, clear sky and easy light and gentle temperature. The sounds of the event upstairs were not intrusive in that high ceiling room below with jealousied French windows opening onto the arches of the surrounding veranda, glimpses of trees, plants just outside, a green hill range in the southern distance. I have no memory of why it was Walcott's The Green Knight that I was reading then but I remember, I will always remember, Bleaker Street, summer. I had sat in a locally crafted wrought iron two-seater chair with flowered cushions and begun reading the opening lines. Summer for prose and lemons, for nakedness and longer, for the eternal idleness of the imagined return Something about these lines, a sense of airiness and wider light made me feel dissatisfied with sitting inside a room to read them. So I got up and I went out past the arches and onto the staircase of the veranda. I stood on the top step and I faced west where the sun was taking its light and I began reading again. Then I heard a sound, loud, harsh, to my right. That's all I would have been able to say in that instant. Seconds later, I knew what that sound was. It was the first cracking and splintering as the ceiling of the room upstairs, the room downstairs sorry, and the floor of the room upstairs began to split and break open. I have only the slimmest memory of the sounds of voices, although they must have been screams, wailing and shockingly loud shouts, but in memory, the sounds are dim, just a background murmur to the sight of bodies falling, moving blurs of various colored dresses, trousers, shirts, flailing through the brief distance downward to the room below where I had been. And my next memory is being inside the room with a couple of other men trying to help persons out towards the veranda. Some in a state of shock only needed guiding, others needed actual physical support. Who the two men were? I don't know. They might have been in the audience upstairs or like me, persons who happened to have been in or near the building at the time, but there's one striking memory which will always stay with me. One of these men and myself were helping Mrs. Marjorie Thomas, one of the lecturers at the training college, out of the room. Each of us was holding an arm. He had right, I had left, and walking with small steps. She was staring straight ahead, and yet not, because the stare had no focus. I was edging around an obstacle on my left with a slow care for a shuffle for Mrs. Thomas, and then my peripheral vision caught and held something, has held it to this day. It was the two-seater couch that I had been sitting in. Its cushions still haphazardly on it, but its shape buckled and twisted in a silent metallic tension. The image registered just a soundless absence, a soundless snapshot, and I continued helping Mrs. Thomas towards one of the open French windows. I've pondered many times since then. What drew me out of that room to read the Derek Walker poem in the open sunlight and air and greenery? Something demanded it. It was gentle demand, not a peremptory order, but not a vague inner suggestion either. The demand promised joy, but it also had authority, and I obeyed. And over the years I began to slowly understand that this demand also came with a responsibility folded inside the joy that it promised. It was the demand of beauty. Beauty is experienced through all our senses, but tonight I want to focus on the beauty which comes in through the sense of sight. And even more specifically, the beauty that comes when our sight experiences landscape. I believe beauty is an invitation. Every time we see something as beautiful, it's an invitation to what, though? Individual words and phrases we can use, harmony, sense of things coming together, what someone called the fitness of things, the phrase I like. The clusters of words that we could use to try to convey this experience. But honestly, if I had my way, I wouldn't speak now. Instead, I would have several jigsaw puzzles or break us all into small groups. Each group would have the task of putting its jigsaw together. That would be the first marvel. Then when each group had finished its jigsaw, all the groups would come together and in turn would have to create the larger image which emerges from bringing all the individual images together. After that, no lecture would be needed about the experience of beauty. We would know absolutely that it involves coming together various elements. We would also know that we are necessary for this coming together. We would have come together. And that would be an inextricable part of the beauty. We're not doing jigsaws, we're juggling words during the best we can of those. I said a little earlier that the experience of beauty is an invitation to... Well, for now, let's call it harmony. And in the jigsaw scenario just now, the harmony wasn't only the external one of all the elements of a beautiful image coming together. People had to interact with those elements and most crucially with each other for this harmony to come into being. The harmony is internal as well as external simultaneously. Beauty is an invitation to that harmony, external and internal, all at once. And if we accept that invitation, there is a demand. And as of this, I wish to speak. St. Lucia is staggeringly beautiful. Its painters and photographers have for generations tried to hold that beauty still in the frame of a painting or a photograph and tried to tell us, look, look, look, look, look, look at that again. Literally thousands of paintings and photographs and its poets, struggling as best they can with words, have walked alongside the visual artists and they have told us to listen and in listening, see. Let's pause and listen to the poets. Here's Derek Walcott speaking of the vocation that he and his friend Dunstan St. Thomas discovered to praise the beauty of the island. But drunkenly or secretly, we saw disciples of that astigmatic saint that we would never leave the island until we had put down in paint in words as palmists learn the network of a hand. All of its sunken leaf-choked ravines, every neglected self-pitting inlet muttering in brackish dialect, the ropes of mangroves from which old soldier crabs slipped surrendering to slush, each orchard track seeking some hilltop and losing itself in an unfinished phrase. On the sand shipyards where the burnt-out palms inverted the design of unrigged schooners entering forests, boiling with life, Gwiyav, Kosol, Pwakannoth, Shaputi. The beauty of St. Lucia kept Walcott connected here. No matter how much like a kite he sawed and swooped and tipped all over the world, he was always pulled back in. His earliest poetry as a teenager praised its landscape. And in his penultimate work, he was still praising it. This is from seven years before he died. All day I wish I was at Casaba, passing in congros cactus, which grows in the north in the chasm-deep ruts of the dry season, with the thunderous white horses that dissolve in froth and a bush that mimics them with white cotton to the strengthening smell of kale from the bright Atlantic as the road ruts level and you come upon a view that dissolves into pure description. There's a painful irony in that second line about the cactus in the north, now that it has been destroyed. And I'm glad he wasn't there to see that destruction. But we'll come back to that. Of course Derek Walcott was the only poet to move to ecstatic utterance, only the most famous. Here's McDonald Dixon. One generation later, another poet with a painter's eye. What follows is not a sequence from one specific poem. I'm pulling extracts from various poems. The fascination with landscape is palpable. I'm intrigued by landscape. How they burn, ochres, yellows and vermilion, violets creeping in lonely country cemeteries. The breeze dancing black or met with leaves on dusty country roads. Under a parasol of breadfruit leaves, a town plays leapfrog with the sun. I think Walcott stimulated a taste for bold flourishes of language in describing landscape, which some of the poets of a later generation gladly explored without trying in any way to sound like him. Here's John Robert Lee, a poet whose work organically expresses his deep Christian faith in the landscape. In cathedrals of palmists, chapels of flamboyant, shrines of banana fronds, grottoes of cocoa, groves of ripening mango, sanctuaries of anterium, holy places of fern, praise the Lord. Like some of the other poets I'll be quoting from, his descriptions sometimes are very geographically grounded in very specific Saint Lucian locations. Above Soufriere, descending early morning heels the night in sulfur baths, covers overall and fine rain and light. The influence of that language of large generous gesture continues again without any slavish imitation in the work of a more recent voice. Here's George Goddard, my contemporary, in fact a schoolmate, doing musical riffs in his rendition of landscape. The sea has pounded this coast since God alone can remember. It has taught the startled songs that the sea so lones high in the ripping Atlantic wind and that the lampouche it has summoned all winged things to ready the violins, sea crabs to string the quattro. Blown fish will blow the Baha, a celebration begins. In another poem, the poem, the beauties expressed in both quail and English. Give me rivers, clear runnels whose waters come from the hills and the high-peaking mountains decide wild pigeons stopping to drink water from the clouds and the high places. A poet colleague called me Dawes speaking about the flourishing in our poetic language. He told me once, boy, all these solutions are rosematic, indicating that the language is presenting things for, you know, for rose-colored glasses. It was a gentle dig, it wasn't an accusation of insincerity, but there's a solid core of truth that the landscape has to be partly responsible. There's a poet called Kendall Hippolit who seems to have been looking far more at socio-escape than landscape and even when looking at landscape he tends to focus more on what has been done to it than what it was in its original form. But even this poet relaxes his political gaze long enough to see hillside grass running lightly before a silver wind or a far slope rippling like a muscled shoulder. Hosanna is the scattering of pigeons. Hallelujah stands the tree in the noon hour. Selah, the samadhi of waves in the late afternoon. Another poet, Jane King, generally holds them all in interior gaze, looking into the minds of individuals and groups and into the collective unconscious. But she too is entranced enough by the island's topography to verbally articulate it. The perfect turquoise of the bay. A green arc of the harbor with a frilled cuff where the surf breaks on tapioe rock. A soothing breeze that shakes the trees blowing gently around my knees. Grapefruit shine yellow in dark leaves. It is enough. Like Robert Lee and McDonald Dixon a focus can be geographically quite specific. I cannot find this island's best in drought. I love it best all silver green with rain when clouds creep off la saucière and down the moan. That same geographical specificity sometimes occurs in the poetry of Edwin Auger as in the poem Comrette in the name of the bay where the poem is set. A green saddle between hills. Harbored by seas, counseled by wind, clocked by a sun burning slowly through muslin layers of drifting sky. Hair waves beat their rhythm against a wilderness of salt air. Sea grapes and accumulating sand evolving into green savannas. The final poet I'll refer to takes us beyond looking at the landscape into actively being within it. Rasa is Lee's poem Just Wandering which he performs beautifully. Takes us on a hike deep into the country where we climb hills, bathe under waterfall, pick and roast breadfruit and see all manner of wildlife from ants to parrots. Let's go with him. Now we go in through the veins of the country talking about the rivers that run to the sea. Water cold, fresh, airy, big rocks. Big rocks. Watch so dumb. Long time now, them things may not see. They'll kill them now. Watch a big lizard on a lasso tree. An iguana now. Shh! Yay! A jackal. Watch it just glide over there. Watch it, watch it, watch it. While you're just wandering deep into the country, it's incredible the delight and joy and love and veneration that these poets convey. Yet I don't want you to come away from this word journey thinking of the poets. What they're feeling and expressing is not particular to them. It's not because they're poets that they feel all this. What they're experiencing is what all of us have experienced. Some days more, some days less intensely but these experiences are common to all of us who live here. That's why we recognize them so immediately. Poets have the gift of finding and weaving together the words which describe it, but the experience they describe is ours. Spontaneously, intrinsically, ours. Each one of us. What is that experience though? What does it consist? I wanted to join me in trying to understand it. I will try to understand it as poets sometimes do by making an image. Imagine all these lines we've just heard plaited together making a rope. We begin with the first three lines of the first Walker poem. We plait them, we keep going and as we come to the end add another three lines, we plait those eventually moving on to the next poet and then the next poet. Making the rope. This rope, like any rope, is made of strands. What are these strands? One obvious one is the natural delight, the instinctive joy that spontaneously happens when one sees a beautiful landscape. But why is there joy? We take it for granted, but really why is there joy? And what does this joy do in us, to us? To try to answer this, I have to begin with an obvious truth. Born into time and space, all our experiences have to happen always somewhere, a place. Among the experiences which happen to us from childhood onwards is the experience of beauty of a landscape. The adult says to the child, wow, look at these flowers. Gosh, look at that sunset. The waves look nice. The child grows whether in the country of birth or another place and continues having these early experiences of the beauty of a landscape. These begin to create a connection, a bond really, between human being and physical environment, between the person and the green hill, the person and the waves lapping at the shore, the person and the glory see the trees flanking the road side, walked every day. They become part of the being of you, the growing child, teenager, adult. At some point in the growing, you get an ID card, perhaps a passport also. It says you're a citizen of such and such a country. You can claim that country officially of this document. That's a claim that's absolutely necessary in certain contexts. But the deeper claim happens before and beyond an ID card and passport. One crucial way it happens, I believe is through accumulated moments of beauty. Like when you begin the descent into Sofria, from the crest of the junction, which has the road to Bouton in your right, and as you descend, a first glimpse of the pitons appears through the foliage. It is at such moments that you claim the island. And yet deeper than that, it claims you. What you feel then has nothing to do with ownership in any official sense. The landscape of the island through its beauty possesses you. That feeling is one strand of the rope represented by the lines of the poets. That feeling. Another strand in the rope is an expressive celebration where it's possible to feel beauty and not express it. But in the experience that we're exploring here, there is expression. In Derek Walcott's Another Life, he gives us a narrative image of two young men trying to render one in visual line and mass and color and the other one in words trying to render the beauty of the St. Louisian landscape. Celebrating it. Why? Why were they doing this? A celebration was spontaneous, yes. But it wasn't simplistically innocent. It wasn't naive. It not just did the purely delighted expression of a child saying, wow, at a picturesque sight. Their celebration of landscape in paints in words was deliberately saying, yes, this is worthy of the highest praise as good as anything else the world out there holds up as praise worthy. The world out there in their time was very overtly colonial and imperial. And seen through its eyes bred through trees and mango trees were picturesque but not as worthy as oak trees and apple trees. So the celebration of landscape visually and verbally by Dunstan and Derek was not simple innocent delight. It was anti-colonial and anti-imperial. Two generations later it's easy to underestimate this. In fact, to not even see it. But we have to. Because they and others like them began a work that we must continue now perhaps even bring to a conclusion. Our express celebration of the beauty of our landscape which is the second strand in the rope has to be every bit as ideological as theirs was. In fact, more so. The landscape in their time was not threatened with obliteration by climate change and by so-called development as our landscape now is. Before we come to the third strand I'll make a small detail here to point out that this praise of landscape in words is not confined to poets. I mean, I've been looking at the anthems and national songs of a number of Caribbean countries beginning of ours. Many of them reference the beauty of landscape. Sons and daughters of St. Lucia love the land that gave you birth land of beaches, hills and valleys, fairest isle of all the earth. We'll come back to St. Lucia but let's look at some of the other countries. The Anthem of St. Vincent and the Grenadines has these lines. Hyrule now a fair and blessed isle your mountains are high so clear and green are home to me though I'm a stray calm serene it goes on but the landscape reference in the Barberus Anthem is brief but it overtly spells out a sentiment which is more subliminal in some of the other anthems a kind of tick charge independent spirit these fields and hills beyond recall are now our very own subjects of these lines is saying this is ours now back off recently saw an even more overt expression of that spirit on November 30th last year in the transition towards Republic status the Anthem of the Turks and Kikos islands has these lines from the east, west, north and south our banks and oceans meet surrounding sands and hills of glee our pristine beauty sea so on and so on the Anthem of the British Virgin Islands God save the queen it's moving right along the others but I won't be quoting those some countries don't reference the landscape Jamaica, Trinidad Grenada, St. Kitts I think for praise of landscape Dominica takes the prize the Anthem even has a title Isle of Beauty Isle of Beauty, Isle of Splendour Isle to all so sweet and fair almost surely gazing wonder at thy gifts so rich and rare rivers, valleys, hills and mountains all these gifts we do extol healthy lands so like all fountains giving chair that warms the soul so on and so on Dominica has been known as the nature isle for as long as I can remember so it's no surprise to find that the Anthem is so full of reference to nature in general but why have I taken us on this tour of Caribbean anthems and patriotic songs to underscore what of course we already know national identity and that's a huge term national identity is nurtured by an expressive and a celebratory love of the landscape of the nation and there's no need to go into the significance of the pitons the significance they've held for generations who've lived and who live here beginning of the Kalinago and the Arawak people continuing down to the child yesterday or this morning you sketched two adjacent triangles perhaps a little circle in between them said boom the pitons that child like other generations before is saying look look at this and continuing a tradition where the beauty of the landscape is experienced, praised, celebrated the first two words in the motto of Saint Lucia are the land that's not accidental and that brings me to an aspect of all these anthems and patriotic songs sometimes it's overtly expressed sometimes implied I noted that in the Barbados Anthem it's very plainly stated these fields and hills beyond recall are now our very own that second line are now our very own expresses an attitude there is this pride and a fierce protectiveness to whom are these words sung the two audiences one audience is the people of the country or the overwhelming majority of them who are being called on to claim the country to nurture a sense of belonging to it the other audience is almost a ghost the ghost of the former imperial master who at once claimed the landscape and people as belonging to it and I say almost a ghost because the possibility of that external claim does not miraculously vanish at political independence there are different ways in which an external power can claim and possess the landscape and people of a country and the external power is not necessarily on the nation but in those lines that second audience, that external power is being told, being warned that these fields and hills are now our very own and this fierce protectiveness, so plainly declared in the Barbados Anthem is present to one degree or another in all the anthems of the Anglophone Caribbean this feeling of protectiveness is the third strand in the rope that we've been plotting with the words of the poet and that feeling is an intrinsic part of the demand of beauty one crucial way in which it expresses itself is the instinct to preserve the beauty here is where a classic problem of development surfaces, can you preserve and still progress obviously before we can begin to answer both terms in exploring what exactly are you trying to preserve what exactly are you trying to progress what questions are simply stated but the answers nations have gone to war over them but do I believe it's possible for preservation and progress to hold hands yes do I believe the answers that meet the needs of both yes and the answers I believe are not in specific external forms but in specific principles the preservation of beauty is not the preservation of specific shapes of beauty yes that's dangerous ground to be trod very carefully also the journey towards progress is not invariably towards a specific shape of progress more dangerous ground also to be trod very carefully only examining the principles underneath all this can guide us so let's begin to examine them human beings altered in natural landscapes that's inevitable we always have we always will depending on the principles that work in the type of alteration the altered landscape may in time become as natural as what was there before Senusha did not always have bread for trees and mango trees and pigeon peas he would take an ethnobotanist to explain to us how many species of trees and vegetation which we now take as part of the landscape who introduced from elsewhere why and how they were introduced how they affected the ecology existing at time and over time who and what benefited from the introduction who and what were disadvantaged by it both then and now all of these are finally considerations in fully understanding a portion of landscape that has in it a couple of bread for trees a few mango trees and some bushes of pigeon peas so yes we must alter the landscape and so the issue of preservation and progress must arise but the alteration can be a dance of two partners or it can be a wrestling match in both cases they are principles but if it's to be a dance the principles obviously are different from those of wrestling match where it has to be a winner and a loser as a starting point in all of this let's first take note that an intentional significant alteration of landscape is always part of a wider change that almost invariably involves an alteration in the socioscape sometimes the alteration is huge like the change in the middle of the 17th century in Caribbean from small and medium size tracts of Amerindian tribal lands variegated variegation and and parents to uniform fields of hundreds of hectares of sugarcane this change of landscape reflected in the change of political structure from the relatively democratic governments of a homogeneous tribe to the tyranny of a slave society from collective ownership of the land to minority ownership of a large proportion of the land by a small racial group and the land being worked by a land less majority of a different racial group and the shape of that intertwining of landscape and socioscape continued beyond emancipation into the middle of the 20th century only minor incremental changes since the second half of the 20th century that this begins to change in St. Lucia it was a switch to bananas which had begun in the 1950s and gained serious traction in the 1960s which altered both the landscape and the socioscape it created a prosperous rural middle class whose children swelled the ranks of the urban middle class who further altered the landscape through the kinds of residences that they built and the kinds of buildings that were required for the type of workspaces that they occupied and so on landscape, socioscape always an interaction the traditional rural setting human dwelling and natural landscape are more likely to be good dancing partners houses are more likely to be in spaces which have trees and plants of different kinds some of them will have been there for before houses they may be a backyard garden cultivating plants for food and medicine in the not so distant parts of St. Lucia just two generations ago even when people moved from country to town they tried to carry that ethos with them I can remember a pawpaw tree and a lime tree and some of the plants in our yard when I was a child there was a small mound of river stones for bleaching clothes on my eldest brother remembers my father growing potatoes and potatoes but of course sustaining that kind of ethos presupposes space and space is what becomes increasingly scarce in a setting that is becoming typically urbanized population expands space shrinks landscape, socioscape changing together still dancing but the dance is becoming uneasy showing signs of morphing from dancing into wrestling as a country becomes more urbanized or to be more accurate urbanized within this stereotypical western framework the connection with nature and therefore the relationship to landscape becomes more tenuous the green starts to disappear the river becomes clogged and black the botanical gardens begins to mutate into a bus terminal yet the need for a felt connection is strong it's innate traditions like gatherings of family and friends at the beach, river lines hikes, long walks, persists even as the spaces for doing those become more constrained individuals seek and find other spots from which to watch a sunrise or sunset when this free story concrete building rises and blocks the view which had been there for decades experiencing the beauty of landscape interacting with nature psychological needs I would say they are organic needs needs that our very bodies require if we have to be full human beings so since as human beings we always altered the landscape what's the first principle I would propose in any alteration of it that the beauty inherent in the original shape of it be maintained as much as possible as a case in point Serenity Park in Sussex East castries I have a great appreciation for that park it really does make a beautiful difference in the vibe of the city it serves not just the immediate geographical community it serves the wider area of castries I mean a range of people use this park for a range of reasons including free wifi and managing love affairs and so on but I remember when the park was being created there had been a magnificent poetry close to the roadside which every year sometime roughly within March to May put on magnificently bright yellow garments of flowers and then gradually shed those flowers in a wide halo on the ground around it and I'm not the only one who look forward to seeing this every year the tree was cut down and I'm still trying at a loss why the design of the park even with what I see as an excess of concrete could easily have accommodated this presence which would have been on the outside of the perimeter anyway incidentally that tree has begun to reclaim its space for which I'm very glad but this first principle of seeking to preserve if at all possible the original beauty of the landscape was not observed past was not even acknowledged you see the same insensitivity when land is being cleared for the construction of houses there's very little or no attempt to work with and within the existing landscape I'm granted it may not always be possible to but is this first principle even recognized acknowledged given due consideration before construction begins we'll come to deeper reasons why this first principle is so important but let's look at the second principle when preservation meets progress if after due consideration is determined that there must be changes in the original landscape in order for progress to take place then what considerations should guide those changes if human made structures and our new vegetation have to be brought into the space these should be ecologically harmonious working with the manifestations of nature already existing in that space I wonder sometimes watching houses under construction whether the owners or the builders first check the usual direction of wind in the area could reduce future discomfort might even reduce air condition builds or if the vetiver is being replaced because more colorful plants are desired will the more colorful plants do as effectively the work that the vetiver did holding the soil together after heavy rain so the second principle is to work with ecological harmony if you have to alter the original landscape the word harmony leads us into the deeper reasons why these principles are important I said earlier that the experience of beauty is an invitation to harmony of what what is harmony a basic way to think of it as a balancing of diverse elements a relationship among different things and forces which allows them to not simply coexist but coexist in ways that bring out the distinctive good qualities in each of them and at the same time the experience of all these individual qualities happening together is greater than the sum of all these qualities it's an experience I think of another level of being alive another order of being I can feel already that these words are not conveying the intensity of meaning intended here at this point in the lecture what really should happen is that we sing a sesen song in four part harmony and then there'd be no need to explicate anything after that and that's why I far prefer workshops to lectures but we're stuck in this lecture format and it has its uses so let's continue harmony is a balancing of diverse elements it's the opposite of uniformity uniformity is a large sugar-gain plantation harmony is a backyard garden and harmony I believe has an intrinsic inherent morality at its core a morality that's higher than the codes of social morality which vary from society to society and from era to era within a society the beauty of landscape is not only an aesthetic experience it's a moral experience it's not accidental that the spiritual traditions of all cultures in the world have always made a connection between the beauty of the earth indeed of the whole cosmos and the higher being I'm hearing my mother's voice now from my childhood intoning from the book of Psalms the heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament sure of his handiwork day on to day after a speech night on to night sure of knowledge from Psalm 19 in Psalm 104 there's the same grandeur who covers itself with light with a garment who stretches out the heavens like a curtain I'll reach for examples from the Judeo-Christian spiritual literature because this is most prevalent in our society but in the Quran we find he is the one who created the seven heavens one above the other you will never see any imperfection in the creation of the most compassionate Surah Al-Mulk verses 3 to 4 and indeed indeed in the creation of the heavens and the earth and the alternation of the night and day are signs for those of understanding Surah Al-Imran verse 190 and in Vedas the ancient sacred texts of the Hindus we find you and your sturdy strength hold fast the forests clamping the trees all firmly to the ground when rains and lightning issue your clouds the Atava Veda chapter 7 verses 2 to 4 and earth the gracious leader and protector of the world who holds in firm grasp both trees and plants the maker of the world sorted with oblations when she was shrouded in the depth of the ocean a vessel of gladness long cherished in secret the earth was revealed to mankind for their joy from the Atava Veda chapter 37 and these are examples from written texts of only three of the world religions examples from other written texts and from the oral texts of other major religions would reveal the same connection between the glory of nature and higher order of being now if experienced in the beauty of landscape has the potential to connect a person to a higher order of being then what happens to a people when something called development begins to alienate them from the beauty of landscape if development doesn't take into account deliberately make room for the experience of a higher order of being harmony in what sense is it development because finally what are you developing the cliche language of politics is a nation yeah but what is a nation hopefully we know despite all the tourism public relations that is more than a destination that's a question that cannot begin outside of us from those coming in it has to be asked from within and answered from within and beginning from within we quickly find the question is too vague it's only a first step into exploring the question and that question splinters into a set of connected questions ah yes a nation is a society there are different kinds of societies are some societies overall better than others what would determine that determine it for whom is there a set of criteria we can use to begin to answer these questions is that everybody at least the majority of people there are some guidelines that can be helpful the universal declaration of human rights the curriculum chart of a civil society among others in the final analysis though the answer has to be a collective answer or it's not an answer what I would like to throw into the mix into the search for the answer is that in trying to collectively answer these questions a constant guide should be the idea of harmony with our natural environment and a litmus test for that is that we should be able to experience the beauty of the landscape of our country I'll come back to this later when I try to plot all these different strands of thought together but from now I want to engage with an urgent practical reason why the demand of beauty is so crucial for us two words climate change we don't need to go over all the grim statistics all the dire predictions for the whole world yes but especially for small island states like St. Lucia we know intellectually that if the present trends continue our future holds greater heat, rising sea water, stronger hurricanes, drought loss of plant species, loss of biodiversity in general with all the ramifying environmental consequences that come of that and all these changes in the ecological realm refract into major changes in the social realm crime including white color crime which is always more hidden more fragmenting of the society into opposing social groups and subcultures more social deviants as common standards of behavior become more diffused even the possibility of open violent civil conflict we don't need to go on the twin giants of history change of landscape change of socialscape and with climate change the change of landscape is radical so will be the change of socialscape in all of this where is the demand of beauty how does it fit in in an era of radical climate change the demand of beauty must be radical as well preserving mangrove refusing legally to allow its destruction in order to accommodate yet another hotel or factory shell is not only a matter of aesthetics being picturesque and all that it's an indispensable weapon in the battle of climate change not allowing buildings on the crest of hills is not simply a matter of maintaining the pristine beauty of the original hill range it's to help hold the soil together in heavy rainfall to secure what is left of our watershed areas in this global situation of rapid climate change the beauty of these original landscapes also constitute a bulwark for our survival let's take a regular example the original landscape accompanying the flow of the cul-de-sac river in Bexon included the flood plain it's on the old colonial maps I think progress overrode the preservation of the flood plain so now in periods of heavy rainfall the floors of houses and other buildings become the flood plain again the original landscape would have been not only an expression of natural beauty but it would have contained the temporary swelling of the river as the manifestations of climate change become more drastic the cost of violating this first principle in any proposed alteration of landscape may become too heavy to bear and then what let's take another example the issue of diminishing watershed area which is problematic even in normal times it can transmogrify into a societal nightmare as climate change infiltrates and invades the land food security which comes down to the ability to feed ourselves from our own landscape requires a reliable water supply but as the watershed areas shrink through indiscriminate clearing for buildings and other purposes the ability to provide water to grow food also shrinks water for drinking purposes also comes under threat and yet water is the second absolute necessity for our bodies our physical survival requires first air and then water it should remain constantly accessible to people physically, financially let me insert a cautionary tale here which is told to me and supported by more than one person I know that's in Vincent is able to make greater use of gravity flow in its distribution of water partly because of deliberate design of their distribution system but partly also because fewer of its watershed areas have been destroyed the pioneer conservationist Gabriel Coco Charles I'm told had consistently cautioned Sir John the father of the nation about not encroaching on watershed areas in the zeal for development Sir John was a social visionary no doubt about it but also a man who by temperament and experience pursued the path he believed in against all obstacles and it often gave wonderful results but not always the destruction of too many watershed areas in St. Lucia has meant that water distribution has had to rely heavily on the installation and the maintenance of pumps more so than in Vincent again the first principle is never possible work with nature work with the mother it's part of the demand of beauty and we ignore or overrule that demand at our peril which brings us to the crucial question why is the demand so often ignored or overruled there's a sense which I can argue that the whole disastrous phenomenon of climate change occurred partly because the demand of beauty was ignored overruled for centuries that ignoring and overruling began and it has continued because of an economic system the stresses on the environment and the emaciation of community had direct consequences of this economic system poets have chronicled these consequences from the earliest onslaughts of that system in other countries in mid-18th century England as the industrial revolution was coming into being the poet Oliver Goldsmith created a graphic word picture of the environmental and human cost and the class forces at work in his long poem, The Desuited Village the demand of wealth and pride takes up a space that many poor supplied space for his lake his parks extended bounds space for his horses ekupage and hounds the robe that wraps his limbs in a silicon sloth has rubbed the neighboring fields of half the growth these fence-less fields the sons of wealth divide and even the bare one common is denied even now the devastation has begun and half the business of destruction done even now me thinks as pondering here I stand the rural virtues leave the land Goldsmith focuses on the first phase of the process where communities are evicted or otherwise pressured away from lands and homes that have been occupied by stable families and communities for generations the mystic poet and painter William Blake brings his gaze to bear on the second phase of the process when these uprooted people struggle to make a life in the horrendous conditions of war class existence in London I wander through each chartered street near where the chartered Thames is flow and mark in every face I meet marks of weakness marks of woe in every cry of every man in every infant's cry of fear in every voice in every ban the mind forged manacles in St. Lucia as elsewhere in the Caribbean the poets raged and sorrowed as the same system trampled on the ways of nature and the ways of community let's listen again to their words this time mourning the condition of their land castigating those whom they see as responsible there are images which recur in their work bulldozers, concrete buildings especially hotels, asphalt vanishing wild life dwindling and drying rivers the voices have varied and the emotional colours in the poems range from elementing blue to withered brown to the raging red collectively they create a word mural about the destructive wrestling match of progress and preservation in our country here's McDonald Dixon they come, the giant machines threshing hearts from forest slaying mud with iron claws asphalt pours its salt into the open wound can the liplet extend that motif the dust from bulldozers years ago clearing a bypass to the industrialized south clogged the pores of plants and other things and after the machines grumbled away there was a stunned shocked silence George Goddard fills in the grim picture with distressing detail physical and psychological tractors backfill wetlands to fulfill other dreams hours sleep late to wake to a nightmare that does not end mangroves falling the high rising arrogance of condominiums machines keep on coming and time shares share none of our dreams construction of something called progress is relentless spreading everywhere in a minivan heading to a village in the south of the island along the way roadwork gangs worked in the punishing heat and dust and noise and smell of progress towards whatever it was that progress was supposed to be leading us toward not the village which as it grew larger was diminishing these various lines excerpts from poems and most of what I'll quote will be excerpts but Robert Lee has a poem from the early 1970s which I want to present in its fullness it's heart-rending to realize that this poem is nearly 50 years old yet it's so now it's set in Barbados yet it is so here Skeets Bay Barbados one always missed the turning but found in time the broken sign that pointed crookedly loath to allow another stranger here perhaps this Tom or Dick has plans for progress that will tow the boats away and make them quaint that will tame this wild coast with pale romantics who tee off where sea eggshells and fishermen now lie with unconcern Naked children and their sticks flush crabs from out their holes and the bare-legged girl dressed in wet fools wade slow towards the awakening sun the sea rose angrily it knew that freedom here was short it remembered other coasts made mud by small-eyed men in big cars it knew she'd vanish the bare-legged girl the children and their crabs would leave a better world would punish them to imitation coconut trees but those small-eyed reflecting dollar signs have not yet found the crooked finger to this piece and down the beach the women gave their sons who will never talk like pup of fishing seasons past only memory will turn down this way when some old man somewhere recalls his day on this beach where sea eggshells once lay almost 50 years ago but the poem could have been talking about less than three years ago in 2019 just before Cabot, like Columbus discovered the secret beach and Donkey Beach and the Casablanca in general George Goddard indicates that the diminishing of original landscape goes together with the diminishing of culture as a subtle inferiority complex sets in primeval bays forget their mother tongue and say marina until these ochre bays spawn yachts and the horned sound of the sea trembling on the lips of Jean-Pierre Cornelabie fades to a whimpering wind wind rumbling the brown watersheet water tonguing the white feet of strangers and more than this in these last pieces has been largely mournful as though what's happened is beyond repair or reparation as though all is possible now is elegy but that's only one reaction in other poems there's anger and accusation listen to Travis speaks on the martyred mangrove a white hotel stands giving both the millions from the bankers womb on the opening night all investors shake hands celebrating another great luxurious tomb listen to Dixon again who as a former banker understands intricately the role that the financial system plays in this degradation go tell you old woman she must sell you one room wood and shack her mother left her or break it down to make room for glass and wall the banks are hungry for profit and will lend any luck with collateral to build a mall he sums up the situation in a pithy street vibes type of line a man named progress spread his seeds all over the place and Adrian Auger shows some of the results of this bitter seed the ravine dwindle to a drain the crayfish sipping gramaxon the craggy streams of childhood billowing blue diethene someone has built a concrete a concrete lay by where much the most pomp d'amour used to ripen summer holidays and how does he describe this progress which has cost us so much what is the shape of it only repetitious highways hyphenating towns becoming cities by default forests pride open by the prow of roads this indeed is a soul less anywhere screaming iterations a worry home before all that was is gone and we have forever changed Derek Walcott's verbal brushstrokes are large and masterful and they almost complete this word mural of our situation now these brushstrokes have as always of him the sweep of history I watched the dome the acres where yet another luxury hotel people fenced out the new makers of our history profit without guilt and are in fact prophets of a policy that will make the island a mall and the breakers grin like waiters like taxi drivers these new plantations by the sea a slavery without chains with no blood spilt just chain link fences and signs relations I said Walcott almost completes the mural why almost there's awareness of what is changing us there's a deep anger but in this mural I have to look elsewhere than Walcott for the psychological resistance to all this is Dixon again I am not for sale not a single thought not a pour of sand, not a gram of dirt I am not for sale not a pinch of flesh not a yard of wood I am not for sale not for sacks of gold not for a traitor's kiss psychological resistance I hate those lines I'm not for sale, not for sacks of gold or a traitor's kiss and I think of the recent efforts by a developer that word is a misnomer here trying to buy the goodwill of a country after ravaging its land and continuing that ravaging the psychological resistance to that has to be strengthened and if there is one burning reason why I grieve the absence of calypso tense over the last two years is because the oral literature of the calypso is a site of psychological resistance somebody needs to do that study by the way, I mean that that lecture, that book about how calypso has helped us to question and criticize simplistic notions of progress over the years but for now I want to return briefly and finally to the poets to bring us to the deeper issue of why we got into this wrestling match between progress and preservation two poets express it with the concession that's possible only in poetry George Goddard says on this ancestral ground jealousy's tractors will not remove their shoes as Moses did it's a deeply spiritual truth which goes to the heart of the matter it's a blasphemous disrespect for nature and community and Edwin Ogier wraps up this truth in a cultural garb that we will recognize because we owe a debt a loyalty to this landscape that sustain us this earth that raise you raise me that should make us ask our ancestors if it's alright to cut down a tree that is older than we because somebody navel string might be buried under there what Goddard Ogier pointing to is an attitude that's almost endemic among developers in which the earth is seen basically as tons and hectares of inert material to be pushed and pulled and scraped and dug and drilled but no other important consideration than how much money can be extracted from it and what margin of profit will it give the crew to the developer when this attitude is so deeply ingrained as to block all other considerations that is when the wrestling match begins as to why the attitude is such a fundamental part of the mindset of the typical developer we'll take more than a lecture or even a series of lectures to delve into that understanding the point is that that mindset gives rise to the scenarios that these poets witness against so eloquently the poets who have been created in this word mural that we just looked at are not consciously politically ideological to the same degree they may not even call the system by the same name but for me the system has a name it's capitalism and it has a nature omnivorousness and I'm not speaking here of the greed of individual persons although that's one of the necessary factors for the system functioning but even if an individual is not personally greedy for material things and not power hungry a decent person the system requires for its maintenance for its very survival a constant increase of goods and services regardless of their social value and if that relentless increase of goods and services which is measured in money requires the involvement of decent well-meaning people they'll be absorbed into it regardless of the good qualities in fact it will use their good qualities if it requires cannibalizing the earth eating the flesh and drinking the blood of our mother then that is what will happen it is what has happened for centuries it is what will continue to happen until either the system has changed or this cosmic being which is the earth heals itself of the cancer through it country by country now understand me here I know that capitalism is not an unmitigated evil I know that there are benefits technological, social, political etc that have come with it but I do not believe that it is the only type of social economic system which could have produced it or which can produce these benefits however the real crux of the matter is that its very nature makes it incapable of solving the monumental problems that it has brought into being with these benefits capitalism cannot stop being what it is it has had more than 400 years to help bring into being a society of justice and equal opportunity satisfaction of the basic needs of food and shelter for all and it has consistently not just failed but actively worked against these being achieved in our time the material resources to achieve these are not an issue the earth has the resources to not just support us but to enable us to thrive if we live in a certain type of society but capitalism did not come into being to create this type of society and we in the colonized world generally and in the former slave societies especially we know this this is knowledge in our DNA from generations, centuries of bitter experience every step towards a more just and humane society has been a result of unremitting struggle sometimes involving violence that tells us all we need to know about whether we can realistically work together work towards ecological and social harmony within this system the demand of beauty its invitation to harmony therefore is ultimately calling us to another kind of society one which does not demand the disfigurement of landscape and socioscape the destruction of natural beauty and community labels that we and others may use for this new society can be helpful if they push us to clarify what the features of that society should be but finally the labels are not that important first thing I think is to recognize that this new society isn't all that new it's been there in the interstices of the official main society all along during slavery during the immediate post emancipation period during the emergence of the modern Caribbean and in this era of subtle economic and cultural imperialism it's always been there some of its fundamental values and practices are a contradiction of classic western capitalism and although it has adapted it has never vanished it's never become extinct one of its distinguishing features so easily taken for granted is the philosophy and practice of what in St. Lucia we call Gudme lately I've been reading the master's thesis of someone who gives me hope that I will see at least some fuller manifestation of this new society in my lifetime a person is a political science student a teacher a social activist and I wish she could have been there tonight Raiisa Joseph and her thesis examines the principles and practice of Gudme in St. Lucia and in some of the Caribbean countries where it's known by a variety of names she sees in it a model for a new type of governance of government and therefore a new type of society one of a greater likelihood of harmony between ecology and social framework and social escape something that we can truly call development it's easy to romanticize this vision it's also easy to wrongly label this vision as romanticism at the heart of it is the urge for survival not as an individual but as a group a community what Raiisa does with painstaking scholarship is to show how the spirit of Gudme enables the formerly enslaved to create communities in post emancipation in St. Lucia and elsewhere in the Caribbean everything building a house, clearing land, growing crops meeting expenses of burying the dead starting a small business everything depended on that spirit of Gudme being kept alive practiced as a normal part of living it had different forms friendly society and different levels of complexity and structure and operations it evolved into cooperatives credit unions, even banks but one of the fascinating areas in the thesis is the thumbnail sketch that she provides of the evolution of the library cooperative credit union and the first national bank known in its infancy as a penny bank they began as self-help organizations arising from the need of ordinary people farmers and fishermen and shopkeepers to obtain loans when the colonial banking system would hardly let them through the door to even discuss a loan tracing the evolution from then to now she shows how trust and a sense of community were absolutely essential elements in the Gudme spirit and both implicitly and explicitly she raises the issue of whether that spirit has been compromised in the growth of these now formidable institutions and she raises it because the Gudme spirit is about modern economics although that's a very overt expression of it tracing its historical lineage in St. Lucia all the way back to the top key of the Haddahome people she shows that it functioned as well as it did because of a democratic mode of decision making and heartfelt collective action she shows too that in the classic manifestations of the Gudme the indigenous arts and culture are always present group singing, music, food, drink are often a natural part of classic Gudme in action as a philosophy and principles of living at work there which go beyond and outlast just to get in the job done you know I had a glorious privilege once of being present a community in Labon was planting cassava on a hill slope food was cooking on the twa wash two men were beaten on the lengths of bamboo and leading the call and answer song that the people were singing as they moved in lines along the hill slope and very precisely planting the cassava tubers you'll understand that modern cassava was being planted that day as I said it's easy to romanticize all this but it's also easy to wrongly label this as romanticism Derek Walcott says in an essay once we lose the tribal duty of help the Gudme we lose spirit then a country because if we're saying and believing that a vision of a Gudme society no matter how complex the structure is not realistic is impossible then what are we saying about the future of our society if our society Gudme in its governance as well as economic process is not to be an option then what are the options continue as we have done since adults are afraid with the Westminster model not created by us and for us and further debased by poisonous party politics continue with a centuries old economic system of winners and losers in which like elections the winner takes all and the de facto ideal is monopoly control is this the future that we pass on to our children and grandchildren if so then in that future do not expect that they will see the beauty that we saw they will be even more fenced than locked out of it they will be met with more security guards and houses they will be met with more signs and boundaries of more places that are physically in St Lucia but in every other respect alien territory I am using the future tense only to indicate a more extreme version of what is already happening in such a scenario what are the possibilities for them to experience the demand of beauty there have been times in a not so distant past when the experience of families and friends on Viji beach the beauty that has been enjoyed for generations was endangered and that endangerment is encroaching on other areas Donky beach Secret beach Kazaba Smuggler's Cove Los Depito Insultingly renamed Sugar Beach Osley Vron in the kind of apartheid tourism that is prevalent here a lasso has been flung over the island and as it tightens the coastal areas where there are no settled communities are being not so subtly cordoned off from the population and inland in various development projects the apartheid and alienation spreads over the body of the island as the kaizo writer Jati says we lose in ground the remedies and instruments for dealing with this are not far-fetched they involve among other things an end to this insane practice of hotels always being built directly on beachfront a comprehensive land zoning and use policy with a high priority on food security in this era of climate change and actualizing with most likely an upgrading of the system's plan for protected areas in St. Lucia which has been in existence since 2009 I wish I could see us getting to the stage that Bolivia has of instituting a law of mother earth which in effect sees the earth as a living being with rights and which gives greater legal strength to a vision of sustainable development however even a die-hard non-politician like myself has some sense of the difficulties and the constraints in trying to bring even basic remedies like that into a standard model capitalist society like ours straight jacketed in a Westminster model of governance so where does this leave us it's a common experience that if you look at something or someone dear to you and realize it may be for the last time then that something or someone becomes infinitely precious and then you want to do whatever is possible to make this not be the last time my task as a poet and dramatist is to try to stir the realization in you that the next time you look at the waves on a particular beach or the sun going down behind a certain hill with no buildings blocking your vision it could be the last time nearly 50 years ago Derek Walcott poem quietly demanded that I leave a room in order to experience more deeply in the open air the beauty that is being conjured in my imagination obeying that demand saved my life that demand of beauty still there it is always there can be clearly enough that individually and collectively would do what we need to do to preserve not our individual lives must end but preserve the possibility of creating communities that live more in harmony with our mother and therefore with each other and therefore at a higher order of being thank you I am looking for I am looking for the the MC or someone oh sorry I was giving you your much due time can I get another round of applause for Kendal at tonight this lecture was not just a lecture it was a sermon it was moving it was powerful it was insightful informative and beautiful and we thank you for it this evening Kendal asked the question to pursue progress or preservation for this evening I with your permission shall dub Kendal as this evening's hot gospeler who sought to level who sought not to level but venerate all including the church at sky this journey of the parameters of beauty captures all possible facets of our beauty I believe that this landscape is the essence of this illusion people emanated into the physical realm as within so without and herein our inner and outer nature takes course the significance of our recognition of beauty around us with a physical emotional, intellectual is imperative to our present and future survival do we salt our beauty with the sands of time as we seek preservation or do we march intimately hand in hand rosy eyed with a man named progress for generations Derrick Kendal and other esteemed geniuses have masterfully done both through the expressions of their work they knew we know or should know that the beauty is us we are inherently part of this omnipresent beauty around that where Senusha shows as clearly that what Senusha shows as clearly as Kendal has depicted we create beauty along with our unique Caribbean Saint Lucian culture our way of life Kendal eloquently shows us that our beauty is us is our past, is our now and what will we leave for our children a people that does not embrace its environment expressions food entertainment and of course the primary focus of this evening its landscape is perhaps a people lost this evening I would like you to thank Kendal again for enriching us with the many local vibrant examples for us to make a concerted effort to demand that we embrace ourselves and we embrace our demand for beauty put your hands together once more now after that powerful delivery by Kendal we shall have a brief discussion about the lecture so we shall be taking some questions from the audience in a typical question and answer type fashion if you have a question raise your hand I will call on you you ask your question pointed to Mr. Kendal and I will moderate this session to begin sorry if you have a question you go to the mic there's a mic pointed on either end of the crowd to my left and my right and on to the center section as well so let us begin this brief session what are the questions or perhaps concerns you may have for Kendal's delivery this evening who would like to come up first Kendal had spoken a little bit about preserving our history and he asked the question there's a question in the corner go ahead lower your mask please the name is Laura Jomo speaking to the mic we're not hearing you the name is Jomo thank you Jomo good evening everyone well Kendal was my teacher at St. Mary's College and he taught me literature he introduced me to fuckery with the world with all his worthless and senseless ambitions remember that and tonight's has been a treat so my teacher everything is new now for me after your lecture my mind is new the moon is new the sun is new tonight after your lecture the whole world looks rancid water washed in the rain I live and dance tonight in my soul inside me energy that creates and sustains the universe or the island I really really really like I was you know moved you know my teacher you put a lotion on my eyes tonight that dissolve all the cataracts and now everywhere I look I see beauty messy and shy messy and shy messy and shy a man who needs no introduction good evening everybody I don't want you to interfere with the theme the messages the lessons from Kendall, fantastic, I appreciate it Kendall blessings okay I want to heal Kendall I want to heal Kendall what we experience here tonight came from a long long long long long long way back what we experience with Kendall about ourselves experience with it there was something underneath Kendall I've been following Kendall's poetry from he's I have told him that he's my favorite Saint Lucian writer I think technically he's just amazing he's just amazing technically as a writer and from his lecture to you could see his eye his eye for observing and getting out and writing and putting it into words Kendall I want to pray for strength for you an art in Saint Lucia that it continues because it is so so so important behind the lessons and all of this in the middle of all what you were doing was appointed us to the importance of our artists in this development and preservation importance of our artists on the vanguard of it and so I want to pray for strength for you and for our artists there are a few little lines and you quoted lines from so many poets everywhere and so on I felt a little left out so I'm going to put my lines in there in your thing tonight look at social and landscape and bring it together I want to pray that your works of art and our works of art keep flowing and flowing like the Broad River which never goes except it dries and the land is thirsty and a scar runs across the people thank you Kendra good evening everybody good evening I'm proud to call myself a Saint Lucia citizen for the past 30 years I'm 48 because I came here at 18 and the very I came here a year throughout the past and the very next year I went to Derek Walker to won the Nobel Prize for Literature and as an 18 year old I promised myself that this guy whose work I studied back in Ghana I don't want to at least understand his work and probably write and then about five years later was when I first met Kendall Hippolyd he's been my mentor since Kendall started his lecture by saying Derek Walker saved his life for the past 15 or so years I've been making a living through words writing them and so on thanks to this gentleman right in front of here and thanks to Derek Walker Kendall has been a mentor for me for the past 22 years 24 years when I came here tonight I said listen for all the good advice you've been giving us all these years I never really looked forward to a lecture from you because it was good enough he's always been the kind of person I write a poem now or short story and I'd shoot it to him and I know he's a very busy man but before the day is out he'll shoot back a message and say well listen I like paragraphs 1, 2, 3 however if you start the entire thing with paragraphs 4 he's a consummate professional he pushes you to the limit I remember in 2005 we were preparing a group of poets and we were in Central Library and all the other poets are there and he's grilling us and he asked me to perform a poem and he's by the door scratching his head and I'm trying to rehearse the poem and when I'm finished he takes a long pause about 10 seconds and then he lifts his head he's like you finished? I'm like yeah he's like how do you think he do? I'm like I think I did well he's like I don't think he did I'm like alright good he's like you want to waste your time on mine? go ahead it's up to you and he goes back into that posture again and then I reach down deep inside and I recited that poem again and he came up to me and he goes like how do you think he did? I said well I think I did better he's like I think so too and he goes like by the way he's like who wrote that poem? I said me he's like you you wrote that? he's like no he's like maybe you're the best person to sell your poem I never forgot that lesson because a lot of poets might have looked at this gentleman and said well listen he's being arrogant and he's all it is but he taught me he's the best teacher to me in terms of being humble he brings out the best to you so tonight your lecture Kendall how do you think you did? I think so too good evening good evening I want to start off by of course expressing appreciation for such a masterful presentation my as you probably would know background is political science and political philosophy and what you delivered tonight was a critique of capitalism as an economic and a social system for me as a student of government and political science and of course there was the literature it was located in the literature and the poems but it was really a critique of capitalism in many many many ways but more than that it was a masterful mature critique of capitalism and I'll tell you why because very often you would see in persons of artistic orientation an extremism and you were able to examine between preservation and progress and a balanced understanding of the necessity of both and why we must find a way out to ensure the survival of ourselves as a people as a society in our developmental first and at one point I was wondering whether you're going to go to the romantic side and say preserve everything but you didn't do that but surely you would not go the other direction which is let progress you know go and rival because that's capitalism in its essence so I have a couple of questions for you because you know capitalism by its very nature is avaricious it wants to consume everything and you outlined that you said so but capitalism has also taken the institutions and serve for its own purpose so we saw the growth of trade unions political parties that really killed the revolutionary spirit of the rebellion people in the 1930s and then you mentioned Kudme the Susu the credit union they've now become agencies of capitalism so but I hear you almost saying that's what we need but for me capitalism has already taken over those institutions and made them servants of capital but we can't go back there because it's a dialectical motion you know it's the evolution that takes place and capitalism is exactly that it has its own contradictions but can we go back to those institutions that are now serving capital so I am thinking forward what is the synthesis because you've had the synthesis what is the synthesis now where it is that we're going to go to ensure we get a balance between preservation because that's where we want to go you spoke about the higher embodiment of our existence so I need to hear on that where do we go in terms of characteristics of this new order that we all aspire to yeah so I'm speaking over the top of my head for the time being and like I said somewhere in this the answer to this is always a collective answer otherwise it's not an answer you said that capitalism has taken over the the institutions and I think to some extent that's true but taking over an institution is not the same thing as taking over the spirit that brought the institution into being and the spirit the the vibe like that's a loose way of putting it the spirit, the particular kind of thirst for a certain type of life for a certain type of community the spirit of that if it's no longer in those institutions that doesn't mean that that spirit is not there now how to find the shapes the other types of institutions that have to be created, institutions sound like such a such a grand word I don't even want to go there because I don't want to go there but I'm a little shy of talking about creating institutions and we start to imagine like the trade union is an institution but everything starts honestly with individuals and the desire for use a loose word the desire for for better, the desire to change, to do away with what is pressing us down and I'm thinking back to if you put yourself in late late 18th century going into the middle of the 19th, into the early 19th century like in the heyday of slavery and so on and I'm trying to imagine our ancestors there and trying to figure out how do we break this, how do we break this they don't necessarily at the time have to know what the shape of what they're going to will be they don't necessarily have to have the institutions thought out through the main thing that they need to know was that this has to end one way or another and it's not that we end it and then we will see but I think when that when that desire is burning enough strong enough then the question of the question of what is the shape of this new thing that we're going to do honestly I think it becomes secondary so I don't want to sound like I'm dodging your question but for me the fact that and when ECSF says it too I mean she does say has a large cooperative credit union you know is it still an example of Koudme is the first national bank is it still an example of Koudme if it isn't then where is that spirit of Koudme because in understanding and in mind too it's not dead it cannot die and therefore where and how it's going to surface again to be honest I don't know I don't want to sound like I'm dodging how this capitalist system is going to break for me I believe for years now that the wedge the weak points in it and the wedge that can break it is a concern with the environment I think I think if we set ourselves to what choice do we have but to set ourselves to live within the principles of nature if we don't do that the one thing we literally physically mortally actually don't and to me I think there's a need for that to become so real for us that people can refuse to continue adding to their doom I wish I could be more specific than that I can't I really can't but I don't think the first concern is alright capitalism has taken over these institutions what kind of institutions are we going to set up I don't think the first concern has to be what kind of institutions are we going to set up I don't think the first concern is break this thing down it's break it down because it can't work it's doomed it's a matter of time the most impartial science is saying that it's a matter of time it's a matter of time before this planet Earth it's actual systems it's archaeological systems literally break down if chess the quest for physical survival to see your children grow and your grandchildren grow if that can motivate us to say break it down we're going to figure out the next thing then we really are doomed but I think I think that desire is strong enough I don't know and that's why I keep telling myself and I see it on Facebook all the time the impossible is impossible until it happens everything that looks as though boy, it's not going to happen there's been so many examples in the past things that people never believe would happen they see it so that's my hope that's my faith it is now 9.41 yes we will take one more question or contribution honestly I just wanted to thank you for actually fully expressing the voice of people especially young people like me who are actually having conversations about putting money together just to get alone to own a piece of the land that we have you know people say that I'm a solution but I cannot even afford with my minimum wage job to own any piece of this island so thank you thank you for fully voicing what at times seems like a rage that I have when I look out and I see all the development that I do not have access to thank you I can't keep silent about it so I just had to come and talk about it I met the late Desmond Tutu in South Africa as a student we were having a seminar and I asked him Dr. Toots I'm addressing Brother Hiller's quest about the synthesis of the whole thing and I said did you all sacrifice justice on the altar of peace because at Steve Bico's funeral he said you cannot be reconciled if you're a dog you have to be reasoning and the people you recognize when there's reasoning and people are on the same page and so forth so I asked him the question and he looked at me and he said young man what's the alternative and that is what Kendall is trying to say what is the alternative the road we go on there is doomed that's where it going that is where we tell already climate change and all of that so what's the alternative we have to try something new because that thing is working what we have there is working it is working for the youth that is why they killing one another and all of that that is going on there that is part of it that is part of the breakdown of the whole society we're going on now I said what do they get on and he said it's a war we can't eat we can't go to school we get degrees and we can't get a job we can't survive as a young lady say you can't buy a piece of land and the foreigners coming and they just giving them money to buy it what's in you now this is real talk about the fellas in the ghettos you know so we have to find a way use our creativity and our imagination to find a way and he said it wouldn't be a perfect solution nobody has all the solutions but we have to try something new it's working like South Africa it wasn't working so they have to try something new they have finished yet but we have to do something and and all of us have to come together to make it happen I think that is part of the solution thank you for your contribution before we close I would like to make two special announcements the pictures that you have seen this evening that have been on display this evening are for sale and were painted by Derek Walcott's son Peter Walcott so if you would like to purchase you can speak with the both three pictures two these two yes these two if you would like to purchase this you can speak with the CDF or the Nobel Laureate Festival Committee about your interest also Kendall has prepared a bit of a display for you to go home with were out on this banana leaf he has placed some pieces that you can observe and if you would like you can take one with you to go home with this evening so feel free to review some in our haste let us please try to ensure that we observe the social distancing protocol I just want to clarify I didn't put it together this is an art installation from my art and art friend Fynola Jennings Clark supported by and helped by Sabin Jobo there which brings together our ecology, our history our heritage shows our situation if you get a chance to come closer to it take from our heritage particularly from our from our Amerindian heritage coming on so and the feel I'm very ticked by the young ladies thing about you're raised here and you're working hard and you can't own a piece you can't own a piece of this what we're hoping what Fynola and I are hoping is that out on this front with the banana strippers these are bits of St. Lucia in this installation there's sand from the Atlantic coast, from the Caribbean coast there's Ruku that the Amerindians use there's cotton which is grown there number of different things shells, bits of rock and so on bits of our heritage and the ecology what's out on the stripper feel free to claim it take it home with you let it remind you of where you choose what you want to take on to try to make the difference but if something from here that you pick up can remind you and help you to keep faith to hold on to a resolve to do something then by all means feel free it's wide open thank you so much it's a lovely vibe with everyone I really appreciate the presence of the Prime Minister and the Minister of Tourism it's very rare for a occasion like this or any occasion involving the arts to find ministers of government I'm deeply appreciative give thanks earlier Kendall you mentioned that you had a very generous audience tonight and you are a generous artist so the CDF and the Nobel laureate festival committee would like to show our gratitude to you and present to you a token of our appreciation this token would be presented by Ms. Trania Frederick Kendall for me is also a mentor in the arts I started doing directing when I was 18 years old at the Lighthouse Theatre and he was the first person who believed in me and gave me an opportunity to direct a production as a young person then at 18 and that was my first sort of introduction and I remember sitting and blocking the play with him and from that moment my entire life changed I'm still doing directing today and doing a production with six actors and leaving Lighthouse at one o'clock in the morning and the main gate is locked and scaling over it to walk home and there's no bus no route ban and walking the first person who lives the furthest home and of course you know I lived in town it's time to see so I go home last alone for me that grounded me in an experience of community and being supported to others and helping so thank you Kendall I can't believe I'm crying in front of everybody Well Laureate Festival committee St. Lucia expresses its sincere appreciation to Kendall Hippolit for presenting the 2022 Sir Derek Walcott Memorial lecture castries today 18th January 2020 thank you Kendall Thank you again Miss Frederick As we conclude I know we are very well close to cofew I would like to give some special acknowledgements as we peruse the art display onto the left and as you make your way out I'd like to say a special thank you to the chairperson Dame Pallet-Louise and the Nobel Laureate Festival community Sigrid Nama and the family of and the family of Sir Derek Walcott Honourable Doctor Ernest Hiller Minister of Culture and Creative Industries Minister of Tourism Culture and the Creative Industries Kendall Hippolit the National Television Network Albus Media Ltd AudioWorks in Lucia Zenith Williams Designs the Library Credit Union the Finance Administrative Center for Facilitating and So Late the Library of Saint Lucia Saint Lucia Tourism Authority and the staff of the Cultural Development Foundation I would also like to thank you to our sponsors the Government of Saint Lucia the Office of the Governor General Ministry of Tourism Investment Creative Industries Culture and Information the Ministry of Finance Economic Development and Youth Empowerment Library Credit Union Bank of Saint Lucia and last but not least the Saint Lucia Electricity Services Limited as well as known as Lucia I would like to thank everybody again for coming here today to this tradition that we have started since 1997 and without fail have not missed a year even during under the pandemic times Thank you again Drive Safe Get Home Safely I was also told that there are some small refreshments to take away refreshments