A Word on Criticism from the Archives:
Vol. 14, No. 56, Pages 227–232 (January–June 1973)
Since this [earlier] article was first published, I have received a number of comments from friends and associates. Two said that they liked the article itself much more than they did the material which it attempted to “vindicate”. Now, I wasn’t really trying to vindicate anything, and, in fact, have stated where I myself would not have chosen all of the material which appeared in the issue. What I was doing was simply an attempt to join a growing debate about the nature of the West Indian experience, and to describe the context of contemporary West Indian poetry, as I see it. This is probably why I spoke more about what was happening in reggae and in the folk-urban jazz of Jamaica than about the magazine itself. Mr. Roach’s article convinced me that a number of people in the West Indies are prepared to talk about literature without understanding much about the context out of which such writing grows. If my article was attempting to do anything, then, it was to sketch in some of the background relevant to an understanding of the material in the Savacou anthology.
Another comment which I ought to reply to has been the feedback on the last paragraph of the article, where I said that most of today’s strident youth will be little different from last generation’s once angry, now tired rebels, after twenty years have elapsed. This last paragraph was taken as a sign of my own despair. So it was. In my short life, I’ve already seen so much fraudulence and erosion of spirit through folly, absurd politics and naked dishonesty on all levels of existence, that I cannot with any honesty be anything but a pessimist. Also, I feel that a great deal of West Indian writing is pessimistic, for much the same reasons that my last paragraph seems to be particularly so.
That paragraph was meant as an answer to Mr. Roach’s question as to the future of today’s youth. What I wanted to stress was that there would be a continuity of the folly, deceit and grief which one can easily see in the people from Mr. Roach’s age. If the rest of my article stressed the fact that there was a great deal of creativity in the West Indian people, it also stressed that this creativity existed in spite of Caribbean politics. I view with particular disgust the attempts which politicians are making throughout the West Indies not to enhance but to exploit art on all levels. This sort of thing can become tragic when a folk art begins to be used solely as a tourist attraction, or to gain a few more votes for a party in office. Recently here in Trinidad, Derek Walcott has been making a similar point. If in everything I’ve written I’ve affirmed a kind of faith in our capacity for survival, I’ve never underestimated the corrosive nature of absurd politics.
This is why I’ve seen the experience of Martin Carter as a paradigm of what will be the fate of most of the rebels in the West Indies. Because, if a finer spirit emerges from the carrion of our present, it will be won at the expense of individual defeat, sacrifice, tiredness of spirit and the sickness unto death, attenuation of faith and despair. This seems to me to be the meaning of both Carter’s life and Walcott’s. It also seems to me to be the experience of many a man who walks the street. I know that young people here feel it to the bone, and that most of them will simply seek one way or another of opting out of whatever struggle presents itself. This is not to say that nothing will be created, but to stress the price at which such creativity will be achieved. In a recent article, “Calypso and Politics”, Moko No. 73, October 29, 1971, I tried to show how what is happening in Trinidad has produced a complex range of responses from a large number of calypsonians. On the other hand there is the fact that 1970 has accentuated the youth’s rejection of the calypso and of most things Trinidadian, for Lord knows what. Anyone who has lived through 1971 will recognize tiredness and despair as inalienable parts of the landscape here. My feeling is that they will increase, until the society creates new means of dealing with them, a new kind of indigenous soul equivalent to Jamaica’s reggae, recognising both the similarities and the differences of the American thing. There are signs that the calypso is trying to adjust, to inject a deeper sense of blues into its traditional gaiety, to tackle the problems of this complex generation. I don’t know, however, how long this will survive against the tourist-oriented Carnival season, onslaughts of sick Euro/American music and sicker films, the break-up of the lime, and the growing drugs racket. At present, the forces of decay seem to be so much stronger than those of creativity.
Jamaica is a different case. The forces of despair and erosion are even fiercer than those in Trinidad. But Jamaica has a more coherent people and a more continuous line of history. Hence the dismay is counterbalanced by a tremendous vitality. Contemporary pressures in Jamaica seem to me to produce two types of responses from the man on the street. The first is a rebellious urge to shatter the whole social framework, best seen in the rhetoric of Rastafarianism, the music of Rudyism, and more recently in the dread tunes of Kingston. The second is a desire to retreat into the self, and the dream of a land “Far far away where there’s no night, there’s only day”. This is best seen in the hymns of Rastafarianism, and in more secular hymns such as the reggae tunes “Jordan River”, “Selah”, “Satta Massagana”, “Mabrak”, and many others.
But these two responses are not opposites as some seem to think. They complement each other, intersecting at several points. The rebel is shot down or beaten and imprisoned. After a few years of this, his response is to retreat within himself, and search for new strength to counter this despair. The result of this retreat, this excavation in the ground of being, is a grounded music, whose basic beat, the ground-beat of survival itself, is as solid as the earth. Each new weight of pressure has its corresponding effect on the music, and the revolution is usually felt first as perceptible change in the bass, the basic rhythm, the inner pulse whose origin is in the confrontation between the despair which history and iniquitous politics inflict, and the rooted strength of the people. When such innovation takes place in the ground-beat, the whole trivial stream of popular appeasing which increases the dread and tension in the whole society, because the beat dominates the city; the rhythm of the basic bass is the grounded heartbeat of the city. So when the rhythm goes dread, the whole city feels the tension; and why not? After all it was the cruel tension which determined that the beat should go dread in the first place.
Hence the retreat to Ethiopias of the spirit returns to the sufferer the image of his own bleeding face. The inner journey takes him back to the outer hardship. It is this that the music of dread reflects. Hence in “Jordan River” we have first the dream of final release from horror:
I saw Selassie—I stretch forth his hand
to take I cross
Jordan River
I’m on my way to Zion.
Then there is the other side of this dream.
The man that hear the word of Jah
and harden his heart
shall burn with fire….
The dream of a final journey of the spirit is counterpointed by a dream that the wicked shall one day burn with fire. The same thing is true for “Let the Power Fall on I for I”, which is prayer for inner and outer strength. A later stanza begins “Let the wicked burn in flames for I.” The apocalyptic sense of the Jewish psalmist and his intense yearning for a final justice, a final vengeance, and ultimately transcendence of the whole sorry scheme, informs today’s dread sounds from Kingston.
The image of a refining fire recurs in Jamaican music with a frequency which cannot but alarm those whose aim it is to preserve the historic scheme of things. One hears tunes with names like “Blood and Fire”, “Brimstone and Fire”, successors to “What a Fire” and “Babylon Burning”. Incidentally, “Babylon Burning” is the same tune as “Woman a Hebby Load”, and recently “Nyah Man Story” carries the tune of this traditional folk song again. In other words, a folk song is carrying the burden of the folk-urban rebellion. This is an important point because it underlines the difference between Trinidad and Jamaica. It would be almost unthinkable for a calypsonian to attempt to use a folk-song in order to convey his message. Calypso departed from those folk roots about three decades ago. While there was a sort of lime going in the towns, while legendary.people like Polycar [Policar] met in groups all over the city and created a style and a rhetoric all their own, the calypso retained its basic roots, or such basic roots as a small town is capable of providing. Today, however, Port-of-Spain is wide open to the world, and the character of the lime has changed. A lot of the rhetoric is imported, and the calypso, which depends on the richness of local idiom, imagination and gesture, and on the sense of a vital urban spirit in the lime, is suffering.
In Jamaica, the phenomenon has been one of urbanisation, a shift from the country to the towns. In Trinidad it has been more one of immigration, and almost automatic squatting in the towns, automatic unemployment, and loss of original roots in the process of becoming not so much Trinidadian as a citizen of Port-of-Spain. This is why although there are so many roots in Trinidad, it is difficult to get to them. French eroded much of the Spanish influence, though evidence of it remains in the Parang. English education was first aimed at destroying the French substructure of language and the African basis of folklore and religion. The Church played a major role in destroying continuity in Trinidad culture, though the loss of the original language of Creole culture, that is French Patois, has had a lot to do with the sense of void and discontinuity in Trinidad culture. This accounts in part for why the calypso has today moved so far away from what were regarded as its roots. In so doing, it has simply conformed to the general drift of things in Trinidad. Discontinuity is part of the national experience.
Jamaica, however, because of the greater integrity of its population, has begun to lay the foundations of a vital folk-urban culture. This is why Afro-Jamaican religion, mythology, rhythms rhetoric and music have begun to saturate the whole consciousness of the place. This accounts for the sound of Savacou 3/4, which I can see is simply a beginning. The folk-jazz group called The Mystical Revelation of Rastafar–I is another such beginning. When I heard the group in December 1970, they sounded like the most frightening awesome energy that I had ever heard in music. Marrying the agony of Coltrane and Sanders to the rooted cool and menace of Rastafarian drums, the Mystics, as they were then called, constructed the bridge between tropical and temperate zones. It was good to hear that Marina Maxwell was able to include them in her Bongo Man a Come programme of poetry and music. All sorts of things are jelling in Jamaica, which one needs to understand before he can begin to speak intelligently about consciousness or art.
All of these folk-urban manifestations have their roots in the syncretic Afro-Protestantism of Pukkumina, Bedwardism, Garveyism and Rastafarianism. At all times in the history of Black Jamaica, culture has had a religious basis. So also have politics, and the reaction of people to the depredations of politics and politicians has always had a nearly mystical basis. This is why it is difficult today to separate religious music from the music of open rebellion.
Take, for example, Bob Marley’s “Duppy Conqueror” which was popular late in 1970. The singer begins by describing his release from prison:
Yes, me fren,
Dem set me free again
Yes, me fren, me fren,
Me deh pan street again.
The next few lines are a statement both of defiance and religious affirmation:
The bars could not hold me
Walls could not control me
They tried to keep me down
But God is still around.
He goes on to say that he has to make a journey to “Mount Zion” and that no force either material or supernatural is going to stop him. “If you’re a bull-bucker, well let me tell you I’m a duppy-conqueror.” Normally, people in using the phrase “duppy-con- queror” deny that they are themselves “duppy-conquerors”. Duppy- conqueror, which today simply implies “hooligan”, used to have a much stronger meaning, which Bob Marley seems to be trying to recapture in his song of defiance and faith.
A duppy is the spirit of the dead, whose burial rites have been incomplete. The spirit then wanders in a sort of limbo, and cannot take its place as an ancestral voice or protector of the group, but rather, if caught by an evil obeah-man, can be used against the group. In other words, duppies exist because one has failed to make amends with the past. In Marley’s song, the whole oppressive system, which remains intact because of corrupt justice, becomes a duppy, a malignant spirit of the unplacated dead. This duppy of history has been captured by the judge and the politician, evil obeah-men, necromancers (or, to use Sparrow’s word, negromancers) who employ their energies to destroy and gain personal power, rather than to make amends with the past, to heal history’s wounds, or to increase the strength and coherence of the community.
The perverted leaders of the society, then, become the duppy which the man in the street must overcome. The duppy-conqueror is in this instance more than hooligan. He is the myal-man, the folk-priest who always appeared at critical moments in Jamaica’s history. He usually claimed to have power over life and death, to be the true houngan, whose function had been perverted by the corrupt obeah-men. In Marley’s song, then, the man on the street is prisoner, sufferer, but also shaman, myal-resurrected victim, who, because he lives within the grace or the Most-I (Most-High), cannot be suppressed by the gates, the bars and the prison walls which the privileged are compelled to raise up against him. In “Duppy Conqueror”, the common man assumes the role of healer, defender of faith and consciousness, conscience, in a society which still consists of masters and slaves, judges and prisoners. In “Small Axe” the same spirit can be seen. I’ll just quote a few lines to illustrate this point:
Why beasteth thyself, Oh evil men?
Playing smart without being clever
So you working iniquity to achieve vanity
But the goodness of Jah Jah I-ndureth for I-ver.
Now, this attempt to see the “criminal” as redeemer, as measure of the society’s wound and power to transcend, is by now a commonplace occurrence in West Indian literature. It is there in Mais, in Lamming’s Season of Adventure, in Harris, too, and appears as major element of Savacou 3/4. The Guyanese Marc Matthews’ For Cuffy is addressed not only to the slave rebel of 1763 but to Clement Cuffy, a convict whose jailbreak in the late Fifties resulted in a relentless manhunt in Guyana’s backlands. Moreover, both Cuffys, the rebel and the convict (same thing in the West In- dies), are associated with the common man, the eccentric, the grotesque.... “Bald head Barney”, Top Hat, Charley, Banja Mary. In addition, all these people are seen as the true preservers of conscience and sacrifice, the real revolutionaries; and they are associated with their counterparts in Jamaica or Harlem.
It is with these that the poet, himself going mad, identifies, because he can recognise the fraudulence of those who lead the society, the degree to which they preserve the inhumane values of the original slave masters, whom Cuffy of 1763 made the fatal mistake of trusting, as Toussaint was to do later on.
This desire to reclaim the “criminal” on the part of middle-class writers is partly an attempt to exercise a guilt at having grown away from roots, or an emptiness at having never known them. It is also a positive attempt to create and deepen conscience in sections of society whose traditional response has been an automatic impulse to repress, beat up, execute and imprison. As such it is to be welcomed. Half in guilt and half in self-vindication, the West Indian writer is declaring his identity with the West Indian people; in their shame, in their degradation, in their in-search, in their mythical eternal journeying, which so many Pukkumina hymns, Baptist hymns in Trinidad, and popular music in Jamaica are today celebrating.
Finally, then, this self-acceptance is the important thing. It is what Césaire’s return really meant, a terrible affirmation in the face of an almost total despair, which, however, is how Kierkegaard would have defined real faith. Real faith, for the West Indian, will continue to grow out of despair, and in spite of the eternal recurrence of the betrayer, the bossman, all those bald- bald-headed attorneys general of repression. Césaire’s great act of affirmation will continue to be made, even when it changes little or nothing:
I accept…I accept…entirely, without reservation ....
my race which no absolution of hyssop
mingled with lilies can ever purify.
my race gnawed with blemishes
my race ripe grapes from drunken feet
my queen of spit and leprosies
my queen of whips and scrofulae
(80)
At the end of the small hours, lost pols,
stray smells, stranded hurricanes, dismasted
boats, old wounds, rotten bones, buoys,
chained volcanoes, ill-rooted deaths, bitter cries.
I accept! (83)
It is this which is beginning to sound in the poetry of the “Commonwealth” Caribbean. Not surprisingly, some of us cannot recognise or accept the sound. On the political level, all over the West Indies, the laws of censorship are being invoked, or, as in Trinidad, grim laws of sedition are being passed to kill this acceptance. On the level of literary criticism, one can still find the critic who believes that a thorough grounding in F. R. Leavis, an understanding of how he rescued English criticism from Bradleyan doldrums in the Thirties, will save us here, and help us to understand why Bongo Jerry writes as he does. · But one will have to study the Caribbean people and to listen to them, before one can learn to make important or relevant critical statements on the new writers. The critic’s business is first to understand the contexts out of which the work that he is examining grows. Our context is simply not Leavis’s. The critic, like the writer, will have to learn the meaning of self-acceptance.