Читать книгу Bivouac - Kwame Dawes - Страница 15

Unpublished notes of George Ferron Morgan

A supposed poet gave me some poems to read. They are awful. He is not a poet. Again the pathos. I shall suggest that he send them to publishers. The pathos is that he thinks he is a poet. Again the arrogance, the lack of humility. The lack of a sense of scale. I do not have the spare energy to deal with this.

Financial success is unbeatable in a capitalist country and we have it, running into many millions. Just keep up the form, invent new gimmicks, and advertising will do the rest. It cannot ever be important that there are not enough readers to increase sales because readers read to nonreaders and that nonreader is our man and his ignorance must not be disturbed. Keep it that way for as long as possible. The Adult Literacy Program was and is a failure and now we are going to kill it, but delicately, not as crudely as the Jamaica Information Service. What else do we need to kill?

I must try to probe the backgrounds and working careers of the black people in here. Could it have been a straight political choosing? There was obviously no “cultural” choice; speech will tell you—and speech will suggest that Tivoli Gardens is very strong. Again, my ignorance of offices might be responsible for this. But it is appalling what an effort has to be made by them to speak English. Further resentment comes from the articles I did on the “Great West Indian Writers” in my clearly idiotic effort to let them know that we have had quite gifted writers—world-class writers and there is something of a tradition of good writing. But this fell on deaf ears. And here in the office, it annoyed the younger writers. Too much space given to these old writers, they murmured. Perhaps they are right. After all, these are new times, and that lot were all brainwashed by colonialism and it is roots time, reggae time, man time now. Ah, my Revolution has finally arrived! Revolutions are for the young. I am now, at best, an old campaigner. Well, what to do? My point has been made and as I am clearly not going to be paid separately for doing those articles, I don’t care if the others are not published. I hope the two I did will at least lead to some sales for those writers.