I’m not sure exactly when I began to believe in a chimera called Caribbean civilisation, but it was some time in the middle of the turbulent ‘70s. Before that I simply lived it. Growing up in Saint Lucia – as a child in the ‘50s, a teen in the ‘60s – I absorbed it by osmosis. Radio, for instance: Radio Trinidad, Windward Islands Broadcasting Service, ZIZ St Kitts, French Caribbean radio stations, Spanish radio stations always interrupting with merengue music. Then there were the bands – Trinidad’s Duchy Brothers, Dominica’s Swinging Stars, Frankie McIntosh from St Vincent – criss-crossing the islands on holiday weekends. A natural sense of Caribbean family. My mother was a ‘speculator’, travelling between St Lucia and Martinique, sometimes Venezuela, buying goods to sell at home. Ma Moise, who sold local confectionery, was from Martinique. My father had an aunt, Chofanie, in Trinidad. My mother’s mother, Claire Adrien, lived in Cayenne. Sergeant Reece, a traffic cop, astride an impressive motorbike, was a Bajan. Mr. Providence – his car had signal lights that popped out like wings – was Vincentian. Mr. Haddaway, my father’s buddy, was from Grenada. And so on …

I never thought about Caribbean civilisation. It was the air I breathed. My sense of being Saint Lucian flowed into and out of my sense of being Caribbean. Then, living in Jamaica in the 1970s, the shock of its isolation from that natural Caribbean family feeling and the socio-political struggles raging there made me painfully aware that this Saint Lucian-Caribbean self I had taken for granted, like our weather cycles, was not a given. Caribbean identity had not always existed, it had come into being and could go out of being. That’s when it became vital to me and, paradoxically, that’s when the uniqueness of Saint Lucia became precious to me. Even as I became more integrated into Jamaican society through my job, my children, my acquaintances, my cultural activities, I knew I had to return to Saint Lucia soon and spend at least a year there to help me to decide where I was finally going to settle.

That issue was settled more by gut feeling than logic. But it was the right decision. For, given how my childhood and teen years had shaped my psyche, Saint Lucia offered me a richer, more complex experience of being Caribbean than I would have found possible in Jamaica. I don’t think this is simple reflex nationalism. Sainte Lucie is what I think of as a bridge culture. Because of the duality of its European heritage, braided in with the African, there are particular meanings, connections, futures in the shaping of Caribbean identity and civilisation which are possible here, and not in some other countries.

But what makes Sent Lisi home? Memories and visions. Streets, buildings, landscapes and faces pull me with their subtle threads from the past. At the same time, I have a stubborn belief that the visions of artists do influence the future; that my work as poet and dramatist can help to create the shape of my society. Years ago, I was struck by how poets Robert Lee and McDonald Dixon confidently, lovingly, named Saint Lucian places and persons in their work. Certain streets and scenes had a glow after reading their poetry. These became part of an internal collage, along with fragments of remembered events, swatches of conversation, a laugh, glimpses of persons crossing streets, entering  churches, houses. In ways that I only partially understand, such images are inter-connecting into a meaning, trying to tell me who I am in the time and space of this place.

I’ve long felt, in my marrow, that the Caribbean holds out for the world a hope that it needs; that we have a gift, deep down, which has to do with a way of living which prefers at least a co-existence, at best a braiding, of cultures. In Saint Lucia, Sainte Lucie, Sent Lisi, some places, events, scenes call to me precisely because they have this quality – of braiding the strands of cultural influence, past and present.

In a world economically, politically, environmentally ravaged, both in spite of and because of something called Western civilisation, I feel a need for a different idea of what civilisation is. I keep it simple. A civilised person is someone who is working to unify head, heart and hand – thought, feeling and action. A civilised society is one that enables this in every way possible, in its economics, politics, education, everything. And whatever of Caribbean civilisation we have created so far has been from a wrestling of influences which begin as a fight and end as an embrace.

I catch glimpses of this at home, mostly in the arts. A Country and Western song by Big Brother – Kweyol lyrics and accent plaited in with Nashville guitar riff. Hmmm… something coming together here.

Or Ras Isley doing one of his inimitable spoken-word pieces, accompanying himself on drum. I think: 400 years for this combination of elements to come together.

A flicker of a unique civilisation in this. I feel a deep-down calm excitement. Walcott wrote in an essay of cities ‘devoted neither to money nor to power but to art.’ I keep thinking that Sainte Lucie, still a comparative newcomer to the whole ‘progress’ thing, has a chance to do this. That’s the chance I keep glimpsing in those interstices of culture where, for instance, Luther’s music swirls, leaving new patterns in the soundscape. Or, paradoxically, in a forgotten side-street looking almost exactly as I knew it fifty years ago, where I think: ‘Now, how can this street become part of the 21st century while still keeping our memories for us? How do we build with the hand without severing head and heart?’

Sent Lisi is deeply fascinating to me because although it looks like we will inevitably fall into all the usual traps of ‘progress’, I see small countersigns and I wonder: ‘Will we…?’ It’s exciting and frustrating, the glimpses of this Caribbean civilisation that we can so uniquely contribute to. It’s fascinating how easily we keep missing the path. But I keep believing. I stand on my verandah at sunset, light softening the hills and even the hard angular edges of buildings, and I feel: the promise is still there, still there.

The Arts in Saint Lucia
The arts in Saint Lucia? Like kites on a day of variable wind – soaring beautifully, resting motionless, plummeting suddenly, zigzagging ridiculously, swooping up again... Should you admire or pity the kite-flyers? You do both - the normal ambivalent response to artists.

It’s always been like this. The kites image is apt because different kites do differently in the same wind. So if you imagine a sky of kites, each representing different genres within each art-form –  soca kites, spoken word kites, contemporary dance kites etc. – then some are soaring, some plummeting, some zigzagging and some are on the ground, not responding to anything.

Arts? It depends on which kite-flyer you talk to and when. Yet overall there’s a strong arts tradition and each art-form can point to periods when it was going upward. Popular music is in just such a period now, especially soca and dancehall. Some artistes have already achieved regional, even international, status and a number have a strong local following. R&B style love music also is picking up, some streaked with an original flavour. The proliferation of small, well-equipped studios has made a big difference to the popular music scene and some producers are household names here and abroad. Other music genres – jazz, folk, gospel – have their exponents and devoted fans and are steadily gaining audience.

Dance and drama aren’t such high flyers right now. Sometimes the brilliant flash of an individual dance or drama production will show what’s possible, but the flashes aren’t regular. Folk dance, though, has sustained a decades-old revival, sometimes with interesting tweakings of the original forms, and now with even some pre-schoolers involved, it’s in safe hands – and feet.

The visual arts scene doesn’t have the same obvious appearance of struggling that drama and dance have (I can hear artists chewpsing) – perhaps because galleries and craft studios open all year round. National exhibitions, though, have become all too rare, and the feel of a growing connection with a wider public isn’t as strong as before. Ironic, because, perhaps even more thoroughly than popular music, a lot of the art is uncompromisingly Saint Lucian in content. At the same time there are more artistic cross-currents to and from the wider world. My sense as a gawking outsider is of something poised, fluttering, and the next direction unpredictable. Hopefully, that’s an exciting state to be in.

Literature, my first love, always has a rich secret life, but it’s been coming out these last few years. The spoken word kite is really flying – in cafes, clubs, competitions – and that has stimulated interest in the word generally. ‘The writer’ is more part of the socialscape now; more books, book launchings, poems in newspapers. It’s great in Walcottland to see the growing interest, to see literature helping us to see ourselves. Now, if some of us could make a living from it…

Vincent Eudovic, master sculptor, told me once: “The gold of the Caribbean is the artist.” The statement has a number of meanings and ramifications for me – economic, moral, spiritual. One aspect of its meaning is this: you never just find gold lying around. You have to dig for it, then refine it. It takes effort. But everyone understands the value of the effort in the case of this mysterious element.

In the case of that other mysterious element, the artist …

St Lucia Must Sees
• The Castries Market If you want to feel the Sent Lisi vibe, visit the market and feel all your senses weave into a kind of mixed-madras pattern of sights, sounds, textures, smells, tastes. Conversations and laughter in Kweyol mix with the flavours of hot Creole food; beautiful women shaped like the different foods and fruits they sit behind, selling. Make your way through pathways of spices, fish, meat, straw-craft, pottery…out into a hot, clear broth of sunlight.
• Lushan Country Life Just half an hour from the city bustle is an Eden where you walk green-brown paths through original old forest and learn about not only the natural vegetation but the cultivated fruits, food, seasoning herbs, medicinal plants and flowers artfully placed in beds along the winding paths. Stop, listen – bird sounds and breezes come to you. You can buy samples of some of the products of this Eden, like the honey, before you leave. Only problem is, you won’t want to leave.
• Anse la Raye Fish Fry Friday nights, 10 miles from the capital, follow your nose into seafood heaven. It’s an easy scene: tables and chairs in the streets; families, couples and adventurers savouring enough different seafoods done enough different ways to keep you coming back for months. The music and mingling are friendly without frenzy. Kinda like visiting a good friend?
• Prio’s Country Palace Upstairs the Castries Market on a Saturday night is an incredible sight. Lucian couples of all ages doing the most intricate, flamboyant yet delicate, courtly yet swinging, fabulous dance moves to C & W songs about – the usual: she left, he left, somebody’s sad, whatever… But at Prio’s you can see Saint Lucians re-inventing the meaning of Country, starting with the feet. A friend who’s a recent fan told me that what struck her was the absence of any rough vibe whatsoever. It’s a great way to feel another part of the Lucian spirit even if you can’t dance C & W – which I can’t.
• The Pitons Listen, I’ve never known anyone to be able to describe the Pitons. I’m not going to try, I’ll just sound stupid. GO AND SEE THEM. Preferably by boat, but if not, by taxi, bicycle, horse, donkey, walk … Just go. Then come back and explain to me how to describe them!

St Lucia: The Facts
• Size 616.3 sq km (238 sq miles). 43km by 23km.
• Location  Eastern Caribbean. Part of the Lesser Antilles, it is located north/northeast of the islands of St Vincent and the Grenadines, northwest of Barbados and south of Martinique.
• Currency  EC dollar and US dollar
• Population 171,000
• Capital city Castries
• Language  English and local French patois
• Electricity 220 volts AC, 50Hz
• Country code  758
• Local beer Piton Beer
• Departure tax At both airports there is a departure tax of EC$68, US$25, for anyone over 12, except for St Lucian nationals going anywhere and Caricom nationals travelling with Caricom, for whom it is EC$45.
• Climate Temperatures range from 76F to 87F. The rainy season normally lasts for six months from June to November, but even in that time the weather is generally fair.
• Time zone GMT –4

Windows

Do people still look out of windows?
When i was growing up, it seemed
that was where some people lived.
Ma Fred, Miss Lala, Mister Walcott, there were others…
Some adults were just heads in windows, forearms on windowsills,
eyes that looked at us then beyond.
Their house interiors receded into mystery behind them,
a coloured dimness exactly right for being at home in.

They are receding now –
Ma Fred, Miss Lala, Mister Walcott and the others –
into paintings and ideas for paintings
into Wednesday afternoons when mid-week was the half-day,
walls mottling the light, leaf-shadow on the paling fences, even the asphalt
seeming to hold not too much heat or too many cars
so dogs would lie down in the street and yawn
get up in their own time and slouch away
as vehicles moved at the same pace as the afternoon
till they, along with everything, turned a sharp corner, left,
out of the deceptive lull of the mid-twentieth century
before all this.

They are becoming paintings –
Ma Fred, Miss Lala, Mister Walcott and the others
resting at windowsills, looking out of their windows
at the dogs, the cars, at a child following his fore-shadow
at something else beyond looking
– we have come to realise – at us now.
Composed, within their windows,
they are paintings that we frame, gilt-edged, in light
of all that we have come to since.

Kendel Hippolyte