Confessions of a judge

Image posted at Flickr under a Creative Commons license by Georg Mayer

When the Caribbean and Canada regional shortlist for the 2009 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize was announced last February, several of my friends and colleagues commented on — indeed, complained about — the fact that only one of the twelve shortlisted books was by a Caribbean author. (That was Raymond Ramcharitar’s Island Quintet, reviewed in the current CRB by Jonathan Ali.) I myself participated in a vigorous discussion of the matter initiated by a talented younger Caribbean writer (sadly, this happened behind the closed doors of Facebook).

One of this year’s CWP judges was the Guyanese critic Brendan de Caires — a friend and colleague and frequent CRB contributor. He recently published an essay called “The Winter of a Hundred Books” in the Literary Review of Canada, describing his experience of reading through the massive pile of books entered for the prize. The piece is chiefly about Brendan’s coming to terms with contemporary Canadian literature, as a recent migrant to Canada, but along the way he offers some insight into the near-absence of Caribbean books from the CWP shortlist:

The Canadian books on our shortlist (eleven out of twelve, as it happened) seemed to emerge from a culture that had learned how to look past unanswerable questions about national identity — a subject that consumes so many West Indian writers — and to deal with subjects more amenable to fiction. Ironically these lowercased, alternative concerns — widowhood, farming, village stories, minor social comedies — often wound up offering partial answers to the very riddles they were avoiding. Collectively they gave the impression of a thriving literary culture. No barbaric yawps, certainly, but intimations of a vast land, containing multitudes….

While many West Indian writers strain to gloss their scenery, speech and character traits for foreign audiences — a necessary evil in a region with hardly any local publishing — the Canadians suffer less angst. They worry less about explaining, or justifying themselves. Even in exile, West Indians tend to chase big game, while the Canadians are happy to trap whatever appears in the landscape. In more literary terms, you might say that in the tradition of A House for Mr Biswas or In the Castle of My Skin, we want to build Middlemarch, while Canadians — stereotypes notwithstanding — are often content with Cranford.

I wish more literary prize judges were bold enough to put their post-judging thoughts in writing and on the record. That might help make it clearer that all such awards are hopelessly subjective: dependent on the whims, prejudices, and idiosyncratic enthusiasms of the judges, and for that matter subject to all sorts of extra- or un-literary considerations, such as judges’ personalities, the form their deliberations take and the circumstances under which they happen, maybe even the weather. Literary prizes are an important mechanism for promoting books and supporting writers, but winning an award — even a big one, like the Nobel Prize — is no guarantee of literary excellence (assuming we can agree what that means). The real judge is Posterity, and most of us won’t be around to hear the verdict. Until then, it’s every reader for her- or himself.

(My own contribution to judgely divulgence, when I was a CWP judge last time around, was a series of “judge’s journal” notes here at Antilles: one, two, three, four.)

Tagged as: brendan de caires, commonwealth writers prize, raymond ramcharitar