Glynis E. N. Salmon, Publishing Executive and Communications Specialist

Salmon

It is with deep pride and great pleasure that I use the occasion of World Literacy Day to 'big up' and celebrate all our writers in an open address to them as follows:

Dear writers,

I celebrate with you the literary accomplishments of some of Jamaica's 'immortals', for immortals you have become. You who have been given an uncommon gift of creative expression ... you who have claimed that gift and moulded and crafted it into something special ... that special something that will continue to live long after life has shed its mortal encasements, and all that lives ... is spirit.

Your spirit ... captured in words, transcending mere mortality of time and space and ordinary understanding, to continue to live and grow and flourish in the minds of others, from generationto generation, taking on new meaning, new value to each person who will read your words. And your name will live on like Claude Mckay, Andrew Salkey, Roger Mais, Louise Bennett, Olive Senior, Dianne Brown, Hazel Campbell, Mervyn Morris, Dorothy Noel, Vilma McClenan, Merle Hodges, and many more - past and present - of that select band of great literary geniuses, whose gift of literature enrich the world.

I am particularly proud of all writers, especially those who have won awards in the Book Industry Association of Jamaica (BIAJ) Book Awards, the Jamaica Cultural Development Commission (JCDC) Creative Writers Award, and other such literary competitions. But, while an award may serve to recognise your ability, it cannot define your worth, your value as a writer. For many are the talents that go unrecognised by awards or other gestures of distinction, but rise triumphant, nontheless, in the minds and souls of readers everywhere - inspiring, guiding, exciting, humouring ... just sharing words that bring special meaning to someone.

Creative writers

I am in awe of all who write, especially creative writers. For it is not so much the talent that singles them out as being exceptional, but the unusual compulsion that drives them to give expression to their creative energy; the discipline to keep at it and follow-through to completion; the boldness, the fearlessness, the sheer 'don't cya-ness' that demand that one way or the other, their work must be published and their space assured in the catalogue of literary history.

I think of persons who seem so firmly entrenched in another discipline, or who appear to be giving full expression to what appears to be their 'real' talent in other areas of the arts, only to emerge as creative writers, unable to still the quill, unable to quell the urge to write. I think of Marcus Mosiah Garvey - brilliant philosopher, leader of men, but also a great poet; Mervyn Morris, Eddie Baugh, Velma Pollard, Brian Meeks, just to name a few of our many academics with a yen for the creative pen. Barrington Watson, renowned artist, but lesser known as a writer - (Shades of Grey); Joan Andrea Hutchinson, multi-talented, richly-gifted with so many skills, but distinguishing herself, nontheless, as a serious but humorous chronicler of our 'Jamaican way'.

Insight

I think especially of Jean Goulbourne, educator, prolific writer and author of one of Carlong Publisher's Sand Pebbles Pleasure Series Books - Freedom Come, whose piece entitled - Why I Write captures the very essence of everything that we are celebrating about literature and West Indian literature in particular. The depth of insight, the feeling it evokes and the inspiration of the overall composition is worth sharing with you ... if only a brief excerpt, as follows:

"Women stonebreakers hammers and rocks tired child makers haphazard frocks."

These lines changed my mind about poetry because it addressed people that I knew and with whom I could identify. Many years before that, I learnt poems like Godfrey Gordon Gustavus Gore who wouldn't shut the door or The Daffodils which I had never seen.

So when my principal came into my class one day and read George Campbell's History Makers, it changed my life. Fo I love Robert Louis Stevenson and Wordsworth, they had little I could relate to. Winter was alien, so I couldn't understand why Gustavus Gore had to learn to shut the door. It was that principal who introduced West Indian literature to all of us in that school and it was that same principal who was asked to leave, because he encouraged us to read Naipaul's Miguel Street and George Lamming's In The Castle of my Skin.

We have got to get our children and our adults reading, so that like myself so many years ago, they can see themselves as worthwhile, important, with a right to exist anywhere in the world, with a history, a present, however fleeting, a future and a mission.

Identity

So I thank George Campbell for Women Stonebreakers and I thank my headmaster for helping to show me who I am. Fo he was British himself, he knew the need for all of us to have an identity, so that instead of learning that Dan is the man in the van and that the cow jumped over the moon, we can learn to laugh at it, as Sparrow did many years ago and we can enjoy the many Caribbean books which tell us and show our real selves ...

[Excerpt from Jean Goulbourne's Why I Write. Jean Goulbourne is an educator and award-winning author]

Let us all who support literacy and the reading habit join in celebrating the creativity and literary genius of all who write. Let us endeavour to celebrate our Jamaican Authors more fulsomely by buying their books and reading them! ... especially our children.