The Ones Who Made It Anyway
A reflection on artists, writers, and filmmakers who created outside the mainstream—and what it cost to have their work seen across borders.
There are people who do not wait for the conditions to be right. The bravery in them seems insurmountable. They work anyway.
Often, they are not sure of the path. Is it clear? Nope! We press ahead anyway, precisely because it is not clear. Madness?
I think of the writers and filmmakers who built their work far from the centers, from the megacities, and that what they have to say matters. There are many Caribbean authors whose voices carried across oceans before institutions knew how to categorize them. Directors from Senegal or Guadeloupe who made films without the expectation of distribution, but only the necessity of expression. I have met some of them. Work made in fragments, often funded in pieces, shot between obligations and day jobs to pay the bills, edited in time borrowed during lunch break and weekends.
They did not arrive through a system. School did not teach them. Often, they have no film production certificate. They arrived despite it. They just get to it.
What strikes me is not just that they succeeded, but how narrowly that success is often defined. A book that finds its readers years after publication. A film that circulates quietly, passed hand to hand, long before it is ever formally recognized. Visibility, when it comes, feels delayed, almost incidental to the act of making. The making was the main reward. Where is the payout?
And still, they made the work.
There is a cost to this kind of persistence. They lose money, so, yes, financial, though that is always present even for the blockbusters. There is the cost of time, years spent without confirmation that the work will land anywhere. There is the cost of translation, of shaping something deeply rooted into a form that can travel without losing itself. And there is the quieter cost: the work that never reaches us at all. There is the fear that no one will like it. No one at all?
For every voice we eventually hear, there are others that did not carry as far. There are others hidden even past their journey on earth.
This is the part that stays with me. Not the success stories themselves, but the scale of what remains unseen. The films never distributed, stuck somewhere in a storage room collecting dust. The manuscripts never published. Someone challenged their dream, and they gave up. The stories that stayed within small circles of family, friends, or sometimes, just the crew, or disappeared entirely.
And yet, something persists.
The ones who made it anyway leave more than their work behind. They leave a kind of permission, not granted, but demonstrated. The permit those of us who questioned our ability, our right to try, and maybe succeed, but to at least try. A way of moving forward without waiting to be recognized as valid first. Imagine not aiming to be number two! What a concept!
They remind us that reaching people is not always immediate, or measurable, or even guaranteed.
Only that it is possible. Get to it!
