Recent Carifestas have demonstrated mainly that “The Culture” has become divorced from the culture. By which I mean that the region has settled into a bland, repetitive, self-congratulatory idea of what its culture is, an idea which has nothing to do with the way life is actually lived in the Caribbean or the issues which artists ought to be addressing. It is a fossilised, safe, politically controlled culture, in which any genuine artist will find it difficult to breathe.

Georgetown 1972 was exhilarating because the artists there were addressing Caribbean reality, through writing, music, theatre, dance, visual arts — trying to make sense of the society we live in, experimenting, taking risks, actually thinking. All that has drained away in recent festivals, leaving only the usual suspects performing the usual self-satisfied rituals.

Perhaps this in itself is a reflection of Caribbean reality in the early 21st century — weariness with politics, broken ideals, lost hopes, blandness, nothing left but wining and wailing. If so, artists of all sorts need to wake up: it is not enough to ritualise the prevailing despair. An artist without anything new and provocative and challenging to say is not an artist, merely a mimic (or self-mimic).

I hope your reports from Georgetown will tell us whether anything is stirring among the region’s artists or not.

The ghost of Andrew Salkey wants a word with you.