BOOKS-COLOMBIA: Celebration of Caribbean Culture

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Yadira Ferrer

BARRANQUILLA, Colombia, Apr 30 2002 (IPS) - Writers, musicians and publishers from 10 countries will gather next week in this northern Colombian city for a cultural exchange in the guise of the second Caribbean Basin Book Fair, with Nicaraguan author Sergio Ramírez as the honoured guest.

Delegations from Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Haiti, Jamaica, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Trinidad and Tobago, and Venezuela are to join their counterparts in Colombia for a variety of cultural and academic events May 9-15.

The Book Fair is being promoted by the Colombian vice-president’s office, the National Planning Department and by the privately-run University of the North, and is backed by the Colombian Institute of Higher Education, Ministry of Culture and the Colombian Chamber of Books.

The luminary chosen for a special tribute in this second year of the fair is Ramírez, winner of the Alfaguara International Prize for the Novel in 1998, France’s Laure-Bataillon award for best foreign novel in 1998, and the José María Arguedas prize of Cuba’s Casa de las Américas in 2000.

The best known works by Ramírez, professor at the New Journalism School presided by Nobel Literature laureate Gabriel García Márquez, include “Margarita está linda la mar” (Margarita, The Sea Is Lovely), “Adiós muchachos” (Farewell, Boys: Memoir of the Sandinista Revolution), “Un baile de máscaras” (Masked Ball) and “Mentiras verdaderas” (True Lies).

The writer also served as Nicaragua’s vice-president during the government of the leftist Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) from 1984 to 1990.

The first year of the Caribbean Basin Book Fair was also held in Barranquilla, the principal city of Colombia’s Caribbean coast and the country’s fourth largest city, with 1.8 million residents.

The publishing director at the University of the North, Zoila Sotomayor, told IPS that 50 national and international publishers participated in last year’s fair. All told, with conferences and panel discussions, the event drew 80,000 visitors.

Sotomayor said the aim of the Book Fair is to promote Colombia’s cultural integration with the rest of the countries of the Caribbean Basin through the exchange of published material, contacts between editors and among writers.

The guest of honour last year was Derek Walcott, a writer from Santa Lucia who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992 and is considered one of the greatest living English-language poets.

Among the activities this year are a roundtable titled “Constructing the Caribbean”, with the participation of writers from throughout the region, a conference on Caribbean music research, and a workshop to foment reading among children and adolescents.

The fair is also an opportunity to encourage people, particularly youth – who represent half of the event’s visitors -, to read more and to love books, says Sotomayor, adding that the reading habit is not very ingrained in Colombian culture.

The Colombian Chamber of Reading reports that each Colombian voluntarily reads an average of one and a half books each year, a rate that rises to three a year if books required by schools are included.

Experts consider this average low in comparison with those of Spain and the United States, where each person reads an average of 10 books each year, or Argentina, where the rate reaches six books per person.

Nevertheless, the current figure for Colombia is higher than it was in the early 1980s, when the yearly reading average just was half a book.

What has remained constant, according to a study by the non-governmental Reading Promotion Foundation, are the places most Colombians choose to read their books: in bed or in the dining room.

Colombia exports some 150 million dollars in books each year, 24.4 percent of which go to the United States, 20.5 percent to Mexico, 19.5 percent to Argentina, 13 percent to Venezuela, and 7.5 percent to Ecuador. The country’s total exports in all sectors total nearly 10 billion dollars annually.