Two Caribbean writers have won the Nobel Prize in Literature which has been awarded 115 times to 119 Nobel Prize laureates since 1901.
As the clock ticks on announcement of the 2023 Nobel Prize for Literature, I think of the Caribbean writer who could have been the Caribbean’s third Nobel Laureate for Literature, as we remember the two Nobel Laureates Sir Vidia Naipaul, 2001 and Derek Walcott, 1992. Would the Caribbean have its third Nobel Laureate for Literature, this time a woman as her name surfaces among possible awardees?
Up Close with Two Nobel Laureates for Literature
Only Caribbean Tribute to and praise from Sir Vidia
I also coordinated, along with Professor Ken Ramchand -as we tried to retrieve and restore the Naipaul family home immortalised in his epic novel A House for Mr Biswas – what may have been the only Caribbean tribute to Sir Vidia on his winning the Nobel, a writer many love to hate. Years later, My first book Finding a Place, an adaptation of my doctoral dissertation was actually praised – yes I said praised – by Sir Vidia during a visit to Trinidad and Tobago for insights into ‘revealing things about my father I did not know.’
Legacies of Learning
I count myself fortunate to have been closely involved with promoting the works of both of the Caribbean’s Nobel Laureates for Literature. I worked closely with Derek Walcott in promoting his musical Steel and in introducing the Prizes for Literature, Drama and Film through a dedicated Year of Derek Walcott that inspired currently running film and literary festivals in the Caribbean!
Sir Vidia and Walcott are part of the legacies of learning celebrated in LiTTscapes and its associated LiTTributes, LiTTours, LiTTevents and LiTTeas.
These take Caribbean thought out of the textbooks as taught in the classroom (that is when and if they are taught!) – and out to the landscapes, life and lifestyles of our Caribbean experience.
Evolution of Caribbean Literary Sensibility
Finding a Place, which captures a century of evolution of the Caribbean literary sensibility, taps into evolving forms and formats from journalism through fiction, and is almost a precursor to LiTTscapes – Landscapes of Fiction which delves in pictorial snapshots into the landscapes and mindscapes of more than 100 writers and works of fiction. Finding a Place and LiTTscapes are now being digitised into interactive multimedia forms of living and would welcome your support (Make contact to find out how you can support development of Caribbean intellectual landscape.
Listen to Review of LiTTscapes by Head of the Guyana Prize for Literature here. Or scroll down to end to view directly.
Would this woman become the Caribbean’s 3rd Nobel Laureate?
This year the name of another Caribbean writer is being touted. Her name is Jamaica but she is from the smaller Caribbean sister, Antigua and Barbuda Born Elaine Potter Richardson in St John’s Antigua, she took the pen name, Jamaica Kincaid to write for first the Village Voice and later the New Yorker. She migrated to the USA to work as an au pair, enrolled in community college and began recreating, thinly disguised autobiographical fiction, the life of a girl escaping her mother, gender discrimination embedded in family and social practices and the convoluted colonial patriarchal colonial legacy of the Caribbean in her works. She has a repertoire of novels, short stories, non fiction, essays. Her raw simplistic tone of the Caribbean village lures readers into her unfolding of subtle female sensibilities that has her often described as a feminist novelist. I would delve deeper into Kincaid’s contribution to the Caribbean literary canon at another stage, as i share now one simple sentence from her novel Annie John:
At the time I was born, the moon was going down on one end of the sky and the sun was coming up at the other
Jamaica Kincaid, Annie John
Other names being called as possibilities for the 2023 Nobel Prize for Literature are Chinese writer, Xue, Japanese, Haruki Murakami, Canadian Margaret Atwood and Indian Salman Rushdie.
Guyanese Who Should Have Won Nobel
The real inspiration of this piece comes from now re-reading the enigmatic works of Guyanese writer, Wilson Harris, who was several times nominated but never won the Nobel Prize for Literature. That puts him among others in the globally acknowledge literary canon who never won Nobel as Chekhov, Conrad, Greene, Ibsen, Joyce, Kafka, Lawrence, Nabokov, Orwell, Proust and Tolstoy.
Not being recognised internationally, Harris suffers from a double degree of ignominy that plagues Caribbean writers and creative thinkers as a whole – which inspired my various LiTT-endeavours.
Liquid Imagination combines music, art, poetry and prose
With one of the sharpest and most original imaginations I have encountered across the spectrum of art, music, poetry, prose, I savour Harris’ profound insights and artistic reconciliation of the fractured Caribbean heritage and legacy and think of how much different the current race-based debates and directions of our development dialogue such as what has surfaced around the Gladstone recent apology at the University of Guyana might have been were the LiTTscapes model of engagement and interpretations of works like his and their legacies of learning imbued into the learning environment and our learning institutions at all levels – ways that make seemingly obscure and inaccessible writing styles like Harris’ easy to digest for readers and learners of nay age or interest!
Stay tuned for more about how we should be transforming the learning and education landscapes and the opportunities missed in those Gladstone moments soon, I promise. For now, ‘standing on the threshold of the known world and on the selfsame threshold of the unknown,’ I leave you with a morsel of the liquid imagination of Wilson Harris’ that can be gleaned from fragments of any sentence, from his seminal Guyana Quartet, especially to those who admire the timeless landscapes of Kaieteur and Mount Roraima:
About Dr Kris Rampersad.
Dubbed the Caribbean Queen of Culture, Dr Kris Rampersad is an award winning journalist and multimedia innovator in form and technique and creator of the newest creative genre, the Multimedia Microepic which adapts the classical long form epic for short form new media.
She holds PhD in Humanities – Literatures in English (with sociology, economics and politics); encompassing developmental studies of post colonial societies with a diploma in Mass Communications from the Jawaharlal University/Indian Institute of Mass Communications, is a Fellow of Foreign Press Centre of Japan, University of Cambridge and a Commonwealth Professional Fellow who laid the foundation for Commonwealth civil society transition from conventional to New Media.
Merging emerging spheres of Media, Education Culture
She straddles the spheres of academia and journalism and communications, outreach and advocacy to redefine developmental challenges of post colonial societies, SIDS, the Global South and Developing World and bridge developmental gaps for equity and equality of participation and access through solution-driven research, analyses and communications for gender mainstreaming, equality and equity.