- NEWSDAY.CO.TT - A la Une - 31/Aug 04:32

Charan joins ranks of journalists turned writers

TT has a long history of journalists and columnists becoming fiction and non-fiction writers, honing their personal styles while incorporating the lives of those they interact with into their work. Journalist Richard Charan now joins the ranks of the likes of Seepersad Naipaul, Samuel Selvon, George Lamming, Michael Anthony, Andre Bagoo, Lisa Allen-Agostini, Bridget Brereton, Debbie Jacob, Ira Mathur, Roslyn Carrington and Judy Raymond. His book, A Village of One: Essays on Trinbago’s Past, Places, People was launched at the Central Bank Museum on August 26. He said it was a passion for writing that propelled him into journalism in 1994. “I was still in primary school when I decided I wanted to be a writer. At the time, it was pure naivete. But looking back now, I realised there was no other path for me. Books had become my escape. They opened the windows beyond the cane and rice fields of southern Trinidad, beyond the endless repetition of faces, seasons and TV programmes. Through books, I could walk through Rome, sail down the Nile, across the Australian outback and wander behind the Iron Curtain. My mind opened and it never closed.” He said it was in secondary school that he was introduced to Chaucer, Shakespeare, Selvon, Steinbeck, and “the greatest of all, Sir Vidia Naipaul. My favourite was The Mystic Masseur. It represented something of myself, a land of my ancestral passing. “So even against my father’s wishes, he who had escaped the cane fields to become a petrochemical manager, I chose the uncertainty of words and that choice led me eventually to a newspaper internship in 1994.” Charan, 52, said his life has been hard since then, balancing family, relationships, and journalism itself. [caption id="attachment_1175159" align="alignnone" width="1024"] L-R: Central Bank Governor Larry Howai, Prof Kenneth Ramchand, former independent Senator Sunity Maharaj, Education Minister Dr Michael Dowlath, journalist and author Richard Charan and One Caribbean Media CEO Dawn Thomas at the launch of Charan's book, A Village of One: Essays on Trinbago’s Past, Places, People at the Central Bank Museum on August 26.[/caption] “…which meant confronting the dark truths of our society and drinking its poison. It was weighing heavily, but through it all, I never gave up trying to tell the stories of the forgotten, the people whose lives would vanish the moment they were buried or cremated. So quietly, one story at a time, week after week, for more than a decade, I kept writing for the Trinidad Express. “The Village of One is my attempt to create a microcosm of TT. This book is my version of Miguel Street. It memorialises our finest moments. In others, it mourns what we have lost. But it does not glamourise hardship, nor does it minimise struggle. It simply lays life bare and asks the reader to draw their own conclusions.” Like other writers, Charan examines previously overlooked or underexplored aspects of TT. He said the work mattered because of the minimization of many parts of TT and the country’s history. “We must confront the truth of this geographic discrimination. Political, economic and Carnival histories are well documented, but the lives of ordinary Trinibagonians are often forgotten. So why did I call the book The Village of One? On the surface, it sounds lonely, but to me, it speaks to the truth that each of us carries a village within us, a memory of belonging, a thought of exile, a reminder that even a single person can embody the spirit of an entire place.” Charan said writing the book involved using his usual reporting methods combined with a gentler way of looking at things. “The voice of this book is intimate, like a letter or a conversation. It is a vessel of memory, a record of love, loss and presence, a preservation of lives that would otherwise slip quietly from view.” Speaking at the launch, Prof Ken Ramchand said Charan’s book came out of the author’s wanderings through the towns and villages catalogued by the late Michael Anthony, “To Charan, it is part of the job of a journalist to visit the sources and the scenes of the news of the day. In The Village of One, he does more than that. It became his mission, driven by curiosity, a sense of adventure and ecological patriotism to retrieve and to discover unconsidered histories with fresh seeing eyes and to drill down to the deep and enduring news resident in the words around him.” Ramchand said Charan’s essays critiqued the prevailing notion that Port of Spain is the news. [caption id="attachment_1175158" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Author Richard Charan speaks at the launch of his book A Village of One: Essays on Trinbago’s Past, Places, People at the Central Bank Museum on August 26.[/caption] “His stories are mainly set in the vast space of rural TT, and they challenge the imbalance between urban and rural that has hidden Trinidad from itself for centuries. Without even knowing, these stories illustrate the universality and timeliness of the life of our place, of the life of the folk and the wastelessness of our heritage, and in doing this without ideology, polemic, or political rhetoric.” Journalists are usually expected to report facts without bias, unlike columnists. Ramchand said Charan took liberties with this concept. “If you are reading fast, you might miss the fact that this book has strong feelings and strong opinions. Charan allows himself to lash out occasionally, like in the sentence ‘Before our roads began a long progression into one big pothole,’ or, as in, ‘if there was an exact location, a single address, that represented what that botched highway extension to Point Fortin did to people living in its path, it would be at the dead end of Monteil Trace.’” Ramchand said Charan’s work was powerful and gave another view of this country’s history. Former independent senator, editor, and journalist Sunity Maharaj, who wrote the foreword of the book, said it was amazing that Charan was able to carve out the space on an almost daily basis to work on his craft while at the Express. She said she was grateful to Express editor-in-chief Omatie Lyder for giving Charan the space to write his columns and to the team that encouraged and supported him in writing the book. Maharaj said Charan, along with writers like Seepersad Naipaul and Derek Walcott, had their writing forged in the newspapers. She said many writers of that time had had the support of the BBC. Maharaj also called on the media to create a space to allow writers to develop their talents. “You shouldn’t have to take an office job to get the money to pursue your passion. Journalists in TT who have literary talent often have to subsume that talent under the requirement of deadlines, to deliver work and if you have the energy, to try to pursue your gift in private. “Richard was very smart; he cottoned on to journalism as the avenue through which to access a newspaper audience on a daily basis. This is an extremely novel form of investigative journalism. The question is, how does a writer like Richard exist and survive within the construct of journalism in TT?” Maharaj said Charan had the gift of telling a story, bringing storytelling, history, and investigative journalism together to produce the book. Newsday managing director Grant Taylor said, while he was not a newsroom member of the organisation, he did not see anything wrong with journalists becoming authors once it did not compromise the person's ability to continue to be a journalist. “That would be the main thing. If they write something that is laced with opinion, or shows their own bias towards any particular subject, then they lose the moral high ground to then report on that, and it taints their reputation in other subjects. “So if it is a political thing, and they give political opinion rather than just reporting, then it affects their ability to do their job going forward. If it's at the end of their career, then it's fine, but paramount for a journalist is that they appear neutral, that they report, they don't offer opinions. You know, we don't want everyone becoming Fox News.” He said appearing unbiased did not matter as much to a columnist as it did to a journalist or reporter, who has to report on matters without being biased. Addressing Maharaj’s comments about not having the time to work on their craft, Taylor said that was true of any professional.   The post Charan joins ranks of journalists turned writers appeared first on Trinidad and Tobago Newsday.