A Word on Caribbean Aesthetics from the Archives:
Vol. 17, No. 66 & 67, Pages 101–109 (June 1983)
(An Address to the Conference on African Diaspora in the Americas—Caribbean Expressions sponsored by Visual Arts Research and Resource Center, Relating to the Caribbean, New York City, September 1979)
The role of Africa and its New World manifestations by Caribbean artists, writers and intellectuals in the 1920s, particularly as these expressions contributed to major political and social changes.
At the start of the 1930s the anglophone Caribbean remained hostage to Great Britain under a colonial system of government. As a direct consequence of that form of political dispensation, the West Indian artistic and cultural scene was fractured three ways. One segment consisted of those few diehard expatriate groups that sought to maintain a racial exclusivity in their artistic pursuits, oblivious to the mounting evidence that the days of privilege and prestige based solely on skin colour were numbered. Those groups passed into history and would concern us no more, were it not for the legacy they left behind.
Of greater significance, because it represents a division in the blood, is the relationship between the two other segments of the West Indies cultural scene. One writer has referred to this relationship as the great cultural cleavage between fellow West Indians. On one side stood the educated middle-class, for the most part coloured and black West Indians, who had accepted the civilisation of the European colonisers as their model, and who sought by their artistic efforts to win approval of the supposed arbiters of high culture that would soon pass from their midst. On the other side were the large masses of working-class West Indians, black (and in some territories Asiatic) who had created their own customs and social institutions in order to regulate lives that were spent in miserably poor circumstances.
I said that the black populace had created their own customs and modes of social behaviour; it would be truer to say that traditional modes of behaviour brought by their forefathers from Africa had been modified and adapted by them to suit the new conditions of life in the Caribbean. For in truth it was this segment of the population that kept alive manifestations of African culture, not in the form of art products consciously produced for exhibition or commerce, but as a functional and treasured way of life that had sustained generations of black men and women through the deprivations of slavery and the ensuing struggle for human dignity and equality. While the middle-class, eyes fixed on Europe, denied the existence of an African heritage, the labouring class preserved it and passed it on. Freedom had long been won, but the would-be leaders of free people were themselves culturally enslaved. A people cannot thrive living in the shadow of an alien culture. Rejection of one’s heritage leads to hatred of the self. One can make no meaningful contribution to one’s people if one communicates with strange tongues and foreign symbols.
The problem for the West Indies at the threshold of the 1930s was (and to some extent is today) to integrate culturally the black and coloured intellectual and the black labourer, to convince the black artist that his materials lie close at hand in the experiences and expressions of the large majority of West Indians who have not assimilated the ways of the coloniser, and further, that beyond those masses lies the root source of their cultural traditions, which is Africa and not Europe or North America.
Manifestations of African-derived culture among West Indian peoples have been clearly established. As a practitioner of the theatre arts, I tend to emphasise aspects of performance in the folkways of our people, recognising that we who call ourselves artists can discover indigenous modes and styles of presentation that could give our work a validity and vitality it would otherwise lack, were we to continue always to emulate Euro-American models. Moreover, I am aware, as Addison Gayle has convincingly argued, that “form and structure, style and manipulation of language, are only vehicles for forwarding political and ideological positions”, and so I look too for meaning in these folk expressions that have helped to strengthen and elevate the human spirit over so many decades of crushing adversity.
Let me, by way of example, mention just a few areas of West Indian folk culture rooted in traditional African experience that provide rich source material for the creative and performing artist:
- i) First, religion: Shango and Rada in Trinidad; the Shango ceremony allegedly being found in its purest form in that island; Kumina and Pocomania in Jamaica; Cumfa in Guyana. All of these and other similar rituals found throughout the West Indies involve music, singing, dancing, pantomime, and ceremonial modes of presentation. As regards meaning, there are the elements of surrender of the self to a higher power, visitation by the gods, divination, sacrifice, healing and purgation.
(ii) Secondly, ceremonies associated with rites of passage, i.e., birth, puberty, marriage and death. While many of these ceremonies have been vitiated with the passing of time, death rituals continue to be most pronounced, doubtless because of the strong African belief in ancestor-worship. Again music, special dances, traditional games, role playing and speechifying accompany these rituals, with a general air of rejoicing even in death. For the departed person, having lived a long and useful life, goes to the realm of spirits where he/she joins those honoured forbears who continue to serve as protectors of the community. Thus the traditional African way places the communal welfare above that of the individual; reward for the good life is not a crown in heaven but the respect and homage of one’s countrymen and the opportunity to continue service to them.
(iii) Thirdly, associated with ancestor-worship and the worship of nature spirits (denoting a reverence for all living things and standing as a corrective against the wanton destruction and pollution of our natural resources in the pursuit of profit) are, of course, the masquerade and masquerade performances. Use of the mask to represent the essence of the departed spirit still prevails in many parts of Africa today. Here again, though much of the primal meaning has been lost, new significances have emerged in masquerade exhibitions in the West Indies. The Trinidad carnival is the best known of these festivals, but there are also the John Canoe of Jamaica, Belize and the Virgins, the Speech Mas’ of Tobago and the Leeward Islands, the Tramping Bands of Guyana. These with their concomitant ritual combats in the form of song, dance, word or deed represent traditional festive enactments that, notwithstanding transformations in time and as a result of severe repression from hostile authorities, have endured as ways of celebrating the triumph of the human spirit, in harmony with nature, over the forces of evil. I include in this category the crop over festivals still practised on some estates that closely parallel the yam festivals of Nigeria.
These are but a few general examples of popular West Indian cultural expressions that represent in greater or less degree continuities of the African experience. The list could be lengthened considerably but time does not permit. I have not mentioned the vast array of folk songs and folk tales to be found throughout the region nor their manner of performance; the penchant for improvising songs of praise or of satire when merited; the African tradition of the griot or oral historian who held a titled place next to the king and his chief warrior—a position reserved today in the popular mind for the king calypsonian. I do not suggest that West Indian folk (with the possible exception of members of the Ras Tafari cult) who indulged in these cultural manifestations were consciously preserving the African traditions. Africa was a long way away in the 1930s: her destiny and the destiny of West Indians, even those who did not reject her heritage, seemed unalterably severed.
The man who shattered the complacency of West Indians regarding Africa was the Jamaican Marcus Garvey. He did it not merely by transplanting the headquarters of his Universal Negro Improvement Association from New York to Kingston, by publishing The Blackman newspaper, and by holding two international conventions in Kingston, but also by recruiting the theatre in support of his campaign for black liberation. As is well known, Garvey intended his movement to embrace black people worldwide, the central goal being the creation of an independent black nation state in Africa that would become the spiritual home and protector of all African and African-derived peoples.
In 1930, as part of a regular series of dramatic presentations at his open-air theatre at Edelweiss Park, Kingston, he produced three great dramas, written by himself, depicting the experiences and aspirations of the black man as he saw them. The first play, entitled The Coronation of an African King, crystallised Garvey’s world struggle for a free African nation and reached its climax in the enthronement of a black monarch in a new African kingdom. The second play, Roaming Jamaicans, portrayed the conditions under which migrant Jamaicans worked in foreign lands. The third play, Slavery from Hut to Mansion, described the horrors of slavery and the slave traffic, the agitation for and winning of freedom, and the progress of the race thereafter. Garvey was astute enough in his polemical writings and speeches to avoid the call to violence, but in his dramas it is clear that he saw bloodshed as an inevitable occurrence in the march towards black liberation. [A] newspaper review of the first play described a battle between imperialist armies and liberation fighters under African generals:
“guns belching flame, thunder and sudden death; the voices of black orators sounding above the thunder of the guns, inspiring their countrymen on to victory over the dead bodies of their comrades; and the screaming voices of women and children as the bleeding bodies of their relatives passed them on the bloodstained streets.”
Audiences, we are told, came in their thousands to these productions, but they were drawn from the working classes only since the literate Jamaicans spurned the Garvey movement and would not be seen fraternising with his followers. One of the rare members of the coloured Jamaican middle class who attended Garvey’s theatre was Archie Lindo, playwright and critic, who in the next decade would score a popular success with his dramatisation of Herbert de Lisser’s well-known novel on Annie Palmer, the white witch of Rose Hall estate. In this play, perhaps for the first time on the Jamaican stage, Lindo gave dignity and authority to a black slave, speaking the Jamaican dialect, who with a fatal blow struck down the white witch in the name of freedom and justice for his people. Lindo has gone on record stating that the class bar that existed in the Jamaican theatre of those days was broken in the months following Garvey’s productions when Ernest Cupidon, a celebrated comedian and one of Garvey’s protégés, adapted and performed another of de Lisser’s novels in the prestigious Ward Theatre in Kingston. Crowds of all classes flocked to see the show and “thereafter”, quotes Lindo, “the stage was open to all”.
Another important theatrical event of the 30s was designed to make West Indians aware of their true position as black communities in the Western world. Toussaint L’Ouverture, a drama by the Trinidad writer and scholar CLR James, was produced in 1936. Material for the play was drawn from the author’s considerable researchers into the epic story of the San Domingo slave revolution of 1801 [1791-1804]. Despite an impressive cast that included Paul Robeson, the Guyanese Robert Adams, and Orlando Martins of Nigeria, the play had minimal impact since it was presented in London in a special showing by the Stage Society, and not picked up by the commercial producers. It was, however, presented in a revised version of Nigeria in 1967, while bitter civil war still raged in one part of that nation. The spectacle of black leaders struggling for power over the bodies of their bleeding countrymen on the stage of the Ibadan University Arts Theatre must have provided a grim parallel to the unhappy situation then current in Nigeria. James’ historical book, The Black Jacobins, published in 1938, remains an outstanding work of scholarship that continues to serve both as a warning and an inspiration for black people who seek to control their own destiny in a world increasingly controlled by the great military powers.
To turn from drama to music and song, we must pay tribute first to the pioneering work of Walter Jekyll, an English clergyman, who migrated to Jamaica in the early [part] of this century, and began the first systematic collection of folk songs and stories which he published in 1907. His book contained lyrics and melodic scores of a wide variety of folk tunes for singing and dancing, as well as a number of Anancy stories which are still great favourites among young people in and out of the West Indies today. In his verbal transcriptions, Jekyll attempted to capture characteristic Jamaican speech idioms, an approach that gives his work the ring of authenticity. Doubtless Jekyll’s book inspired the Jamaican musician Astley Clerke, who in 1910 published a monograph [titled] The Music and Musical Instruments of Jamaica, being a compilation of three lectures he had given in the city, illustrating them with lantern slides and musical renditions. Among the types of music he discussed were African tribal music and the music and musical instruments of the Maroons, that community of blacks who escaped enslavement and set up their own government in the mountain redoubts of Jamaica.
These seminal studies of the native music, combined with a 1929 book on Jamaican folk life by the American Martha Beckwith, caught the imaginations of a number of accomplished West Indians. By the 1930s, lectures and concerts of indigenous music and folktale[s] were not uncommon, the Cudjoe Minstrels had been organised in Kingston, and even a band of Maroons was invited to demonstrate their musical talents on the stage of the Ward Theatre. I am satisfied that these pioneering studies and the propagation of Jamaican music that followed upon them are responsible for the important place that indigenous music and story hold in Jamaican cultural life today. Indeed, appreciation of the native music, song and folktale clearly influenced the growing nationalism among black Jamaicans in the decade under review.
Over in Trinidad, the line of demarcation between the coloured middle class and the black working class—such as obtained in Jamaica and Barbados, in the 1930s—was blurred by several factors. First, the heterogeneity of the population, instanced most notably in the replacement of black labour by indentured East Indians on the sugar estates. There was an even greater racial admixture among the small group of artists and intellectuals, which included people of African, Portuguese, Chinese, French and English extraction (James, Gomes, Achong, de Boissière, Minshall, Mendes). The annual masquerade festival brought all these classes and colours together temporarily to celebrate their survival according to their separate inclinations. Curiously enough, despite its multiracial character, Trinidad probably felt the African presence stronger than its sister islands. This was due in part to its comparatively recent colonisation and the fact that free Africans had been brought to the island after emancipation to supply the need for cheap field labour. An English visitor to Port-of-Spain, in 1928, heard “songs and dances of African origin introduced by Yorubas” in different sections of the city; the Shango religion continued to flourish underground, the calypso, “an African retention of the purest type”, in the opinion of the noted anthropologist Melville Herskovits, still preserved its traditional right to speak out fearlessly on current affairs, defying government attempts to stamp out its trenchant criticism by the imposition of police censorship.
It was in the 1930s that the calypsonian made his first great stride from the status of folk singer to that of a national artist. He began to travel annually to the United States for recording sessions, and sang in the classy night clubs of the metropolis. Some went to Hollywood. Calypso topics moved from the parochial to the global. More and more the calypsonian was regarded as the authentic mouthpiece of the people whose views were seldom aired in official councils. Eventually his support would prove crucial in bringing the present government to power in 1956, and keeping it entrenched for many years.
In 1933, the centennial year of emancipation, Atilla the Hun, dubbed by one writer “the Shakespeare of Calypso”, asked the
“Sons and daughters of Africa
What are you doing for your future?
And he reminded
Every coloured man in this colony
No matter what his position may be
Whether lawyer, doctor or minister
His ancestors he should remember
And offer love, homage and eulogy
To those who fought for their liberty.”
Solidarity with Africa against imperial aggression was expressed in a number of calypsoes condemning Italy for its invasion of Ethiopia in 1935. Of these, the Growling Tiger’s composition remains a classic with its exalting melody whose opening measures have been compared with Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. (See Appendix A for calypso lyric.) It was Tiger again, in 1936, who gave the most cogent warning of imminent labour unrest in the Caribbean region. His “Workers’ Appeal” can stand repetition in full. (See Appendix B for calypso lyric).
Tiger’s entreaty went unheeded; or perhaps it was already too late for palliatives. The year following disturbances erupted spontaneously throughout the West Indies resulting in several deaths and over a hundred wounded. The nationalist movement was on the march, as Eric Williams concluded. The 1930s also witnessed the birth of the steelband which was destined to revolutionise musical participation and appreciation among West Indian peoples. It created a new musical form; it enlarged the melodic structure of the calypso; and it directly promoted the total integration of the population at the annual carnival street parades. In addition, the struggle to gain acceptance of the steelband forced a number of people to take a closer look at its origins and won many adherents to the cause of an African heritage.
Under the threatening workers’ revolt of 1937-38, Norman Manley of Jamaica, then attorney for the Banana Producers’ Association, was able to extract from the United Fruit Company one cent for every bunch of bananas exported from the island. The money was used to found a welfare organisation aimed at social and economic reconstruction in rural communities, with self-help being a guiding philosophy. The benefits derived from this broad development programme, which was later funded by the British government, were incalculable. Cultural officers attached to Jamaica Welfare, as the organisation was called, encouraged the formation of singing, dancing, and play-acting groups in the countryside. The traditional lore of the rural areas began to surface in abundance, was shaped and exhibited on urban stages and at nationwide festivals. Finally, the cultural gap between peasant and sophisticate was narrowed as Jamaicans of all classes began consciously to take command of what had always been their birthright—an African cultural heritage. I am pleased to acknowledge that Miss Louise Bennett, who is here tonight, played a significant role in that cultural renaissance.
As I conclude this address, I must confess to a feeling of unease. In a short presentation such as this, there are inevitably many omissions, but one in particular leaves me troubled. I have spoken of West Indian drama and music, song and folk tale, masquerade and ritual, but I have not mentioned the dance as an art form. To do so I must seek your permission to peek just beyond the decade of the 30s with which we are primarily concerned; but it would be a disservice to a courageous, talented and noble-spirited West Indian artist to end this lecture without reference to Miss Beryl McBurnie of Trinidad. Trained in this country, where she appeared professionally for a short time under the stage name of La Belle Rosette, Beryl (as she is familiarly known all through the Caribbean) returned to Trinidad in 1940, and timidly presented her first programme of dance theatre entitled A Trip Through the Tropics. Timidly, because this was the first time that a trained dancer/choreographer had dared to put West Indian dance movements on the stage. It was fine for the King Sailor to exhibit his graceful convolutions on the masquerade streets, but it would surely offend aesthetic sensibilities to put him on the concert stage. So Beryl was forewarned that she risked becoming a laughing stock of city audiences. Instead, the audience at that first performance greeted her work with resounding cheers. From that moment on Beryl’s life has been dedicated with missionary zeal to spreading the gospel of Caribbean dance at home and abroad. She has labouriously researched Caribbean and Latin American dance forms with appropriate music and rhythms, has choreographed dances from many regions, producing in the process a number of talented young performers who have graduated to successful professional careers. (Geoffrey Holder, director/choreographer of the Broadway musicals The Wiz and Timbuktu!, is only one of many.) Beryl has built the Little Carib Theatre in Port-of-Spain brick by brick and heartbreak upon heartbreak, and is now in semi-retirement. All dancers in the West Indian idiom stand in her debt.
Africa is still many thousands of miles away but a good deal closer to us in spirit because of the work of those pioneering artists of the 1930s. I can think of no more appropriate way to end these remarks than with the lyrics of the Jamaican reggae singer Bob Marley:
Oh, natty, natty,
Natty 21,000 miles away from home,
Oh, natty, natty,
And that’s a long way
Don’t care what the world seh,
I and I couldn’t never go astray,
Just like a bright and sunny day
Oh, we’re gonna have things our way,
Natty dread, natty dreadlock
Dreadlock congo, bongo I,
Don’t care what the world seh,
I and I gonna have things our way,
If a egg natty, ina the red.
Appendix A
THE GOLD IN AFRICA (calypso)
by The Growling Tiger
Chorus:
The gold, the gold, the gold, the gold
The gold in Africa
Mussolini want from the Emperor.
Verses:
Abyssinia appealed to the league for peace
Mussolini’s actions were like a beast
A villain, a thief, a highway robber
And a shameless dog or a dictator.
He crossed the boarders and added more
The Emperor had no intention for war
That man I call a criminal
The man destroyed church and hospital.
He said expansion he really need
He has 45 million head to feed
Why he don’t attack the Japanese
England, France, or hang on ’pon Germany.
The man want to kill Haile Selassie
To invade his territory
They begin to cry for food and water
In that burning desert of Africa.
We have diamond, ruby and pearl
Platinum, silver, and even gold
I don’t know why the man making so much strife
I now believe he want Selassie wife.
If he want gold as a dictator
Try—in Demerara
Venezuela, or Canada
Russia, or else in America.
Appendix B
WORKERS’ APPEAL (calypso)
by The Growling Tiger
Anywhere you go you must meet people sad
They search for employment, none can be had (repeat)
They start to drop down dead in the street
Nothing to eat and nowhere to sleep
Our kind-hearted employers, I appeal now to you
Give us some work to do.
We are not asking for equality
To rank with the rich in society
To visit their homes in their motorcars
Or to go to their clubs and smoke their cigars
We are asking for a living wage
To exist now and provide for old age
Our kind-hearted employers, I appeal now to you
Give us some work to do.
Many a day people haven’t a meal
They too decent to beg, too honest to steal
They go looking for work mostly everywhere
But see signboard marked “no hands wanted here”
The government should work the wastelands and hills
Build houses, factories and mills
Reduce taxation and then we would be
Really emancipated from slavery.
The legislators only quarrel and fret
About unemployment, but don’t relieve us yet
There is no vision that we can see
To take us out from tribulation and misery
We can’t fight physically, for we wouldn’t prevail
On account of ammunition, cruel laws and jail
But every man was born to be free
From this oppression and tyrannic slavery.