Reading a friend’s draft introduction to his book on Chekhov, I made this note:

Once Garth St. Omer and I were comparing favorite writers and discovered that we both were keen on the Russians and Faulkner. I was surprised. He said, “It’s understandable because we also come from a pre-industrial society moving quickly  and late from nearly feudal agriculture into industrialization.” Pavel Chekhov is like people I knew growing up who had escaped from the land and the condition of servility but (and colonialism was also a big part of this) hadn’t quite “emancipated themselves from mental slavery.” Every small indicator of a little bit of wealth and respect was earned hard and jealously protected. You didn’t use some things, you simply displayed them. “Don’t touch that!” It is so interesting that Chekhov chose in his fiction to dive into that reality of Russian life instead of opting for the kind of hifalutin academic literariness like what was happening in Russian painting at the time. Caribbean fiction and painting still suffer from this. The authors and painters create heroic romances (oh, look, surprise! here’s another uplifting person), but do not turn the lens on themselves in their own lives—and that is the very high art in Chekhov.

For a very very very small minority of Caribbean people art is a middle class occupation, funded by a tiny number of opportunities to “represent the region” at various international venues or an even tinier number of opportunities for employment in arts infrastructure, and these become subject to the political spoils system and cronyism, and also to a pervading mental fog, emitted by the large multinational institutions mainly, in the form of the conviction that the arts must prove all the time that they serve a very narrowly defined range of social purposes, mainly economic and upliftingly and solemnly didactic. JMW Turner painted for money, he was as serious about money as any painter has ever been; but he didn’t have to paint that well for money. See the difference? One does not become Lee “Scratch” Perry via a business model or competent grantsmanship. At some level there has to be magic and sacrifice and risk and more than sufficient, or there is nothing.