'FLUX IS CULTURE. Culture is flux.' Kwame Dawes held us enthralled with his refrain. We were on the island of St Martin, contemplating the state and future of Caribbean and global literature. Dawes, a Ghanaian who grew up in Jamaica, has lived in Britain, Canada and now the US. He's an internationally acclaimed poet, playwright, essayist, literary critic, fiction writer and educator.
The occasion was the third annual St Martin book fair and literary festival, to which I'd been invited to speak on 'writing home from foreign'. This tantalisingly poetic topic was set for me by Lasana Sekou, St Martin's irrepressible literary impresario who's a remarkable poet and writer and was recently writer-in-residence at Baptist University.
This year's theme for the three-day event was 'the national book is universal'. Around me were poets, writers and thinkers from all over the English- and French-speaking Caribbean. I was being invited to rethink flux, a condition that epitomises our global existence. Dawes' naming of flux as culture rang true.
What could I, a writer in English from Hong Kong, possibly have to say to these people? The Caribbean gave the world two Nobel laureates, Derek Walcott and V.S. Naipaul, as well as a significant literary tradition in English and other languages - not to mention Bob Marley. Hong Kong's literary status in Chinese or English is hardly as stellar. And I represent a minority-language literature by a minority people of China in the post-colonial tradition. 'National' I'm not.
My best starting point, I decided, would be St Martin itself. This is the smallest island in the world to be divided between two colonisers, the Netherlands and France, and remains a territory of both nations. It covers only about 96sqkm, and the population numbers about 70,000 - although it comprises more than 80 nationalities. You can use euros in the French north and Antillean guilders in the Dutch south. But US dollars, which people seem to prefer, are freely used island-wide. The economy is stable, fuelled by tourism. The 'putonghua' is, surprisingly, English, although everyone appears to speak multiple tongues, including Dutch, French, various Caribbean dialects and other languages. St Martin has a university, several newspapers and radio stations, and a literary press that publishes Caribbean literature and promotes a nascent and growing national literature. All of the above function primarily or partly in English. Its literature is informed by the literary and linguistic traditions of the Caribbean and Africa. This political and cultural anomaly is another Hong Kong, with Caribbean characteristics.
My city, I finally declared - to what proved a gracious, attentive, intellectually curious and receptive audience - was as anomalous and hybrid as St Martin appeared to be. Few of the majority people of African descent were born in Africa, just as much of our Chinese population was born in Hong Kong and not on the mainland. Their cosmopolitan culture bore similarities to ours, and surely informs their literature, as ours does. And their odd, political situation might mean a national identity that could be in flux for a long time, just as ours is.
What struck me most was that the inhabitants think of themselves as belonging to St Martin, as opposed to considering themselves Dutch or French, which is their nationality. Locals here have long qualified Chinese identity as Hong Kong Chinese and continue to do so.