BOCAS LIT FEST is celebrating its 15th year, and founder and president Marina Salandy-Brown is proud of the amount of work the team has done and the tens of thousands of children it impacted.
“When we started people said, ‘A literary festival? But nobody reads in Trinidad.’ I said, ‘It’s not true! People do read and they do write but nobody’s given them permission to put their hands up.’
“So there were all these closet readers and a lot of people who wanted to write, but nobody said, ‘Let’s help you. Let’s make it possible for you to get exposure or advance your careers.’”
She said people were scared of the word “literature” or believed it was for “a certain type” of person, which was why they used “lit” in the name. She was pleased she could remove some of that stigma and help people realise literature was not elitist.
She recalled, years ago, her garbage collector rang her doorbell. He told her he wrote poetry and asked if he could read at the festival, which he did at the open mic event.
She was also glad some of those who participated in the workshops or attended other events went on to become successful writers.
Salandy-Brown said literature was not only the things people wrote in books or to study for an exam. People used words, ideas and stories in everything they did including song lyrics, tv scripts and advertisements. She said everything people wrote in a message or social media post was an idea or story.
“It’s just thinking about it differently, which is why we have all these different ways of trying to attract people to the idea.”
Which was why events at the Bocas Lit Fest included the Poetry Slam, discussions, seminars and workshops, the launch of new novels, the annual OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, extempo and ole mas competitions – which were forms of storytelling – and children were invited to write stories which were published.
She said Bocas had no money when it started and that continued for the first few years. Eventually people recognised the work it was doing and asked to join or collaborate, and since most of Bocas’ events were free, it depend on collaboration, for which she was grateful.
She explained “bocas” meant mouth in Spanish and the event was based on oral tradition. Also, The Bocas del Dragón was the waterway between TT and the rest of the world.
“It really is drawing on everything that we do. It’s about, how do we build on what we have? And how do we broaden or definition of culture?
[caption id="attachment_1153185" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Founder and president of the board of the Bocas Lit Fest Marina - Ayanna Kinsale[/caption]
“When we started Bocas, we had two living Nobel laureates in English literature from the region, Derek Walcott and VS Naipaul. Per capita, out of six million English-speaking Caribbean people, we were the highest producers of Nobel laureates in the world and we weren’t even leveraging that.
“If that were soca or dance, everybody would be jumping up and down, but we have forgotten that. It was something I was
