If poetry affords us a microscopic view of the essential human condition, journalism offers the often-necessary macroscopic perspective.

There may be many descriptions for the work Wesley has done in his 40 years as a journalist – “hack’s hired prose” is not one of them.ĭespite Walcott’s cynicism, for the person who is a poet at heart, journalism is perhaps the best possible exile, certainly better than the often arid, barren wasteland that is government policy. Today, he is one of the Caribbean’s most recognised and most decorated journalists, and an unparalleled leader when it comes to press rights and freedom of expression. It has been, obviously, not an unrewarding path. Where Walcott had a decade or so earlier chosen the primary path of poetry, Gibbings in the early 1980s chose the primary path of prose. It is one that a young Wesley Gibbings would face in the late 1970s, his first collection of poetry already under his belt and with the “new world, naked” of independent, post-independence Trinidadian journalism open before him. For those of us stricken with that most horrific of conditions, cacaothes scribendi, this schizophrenia is one that is easily recognisable. That was the St Lucian poet Derek Walcott’s meditation upon his time spent as a journalist in TT in one of his better-known poems, Codicil.

The Humming-Bird Tree by Ian McDonald