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Offline socachatter

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ah wasn't sure where to put this:
« on: March 14, 2007, 06:29:54 AM »
entertainment and culture or general discussion?

Friday, March 02, 2007

 What Calypso Can Do: Giving Genocide Gravitas


Well, some folks might be saying Singing Sandra is a prophetess right about now, since UNC Senator Harry Mungalsingh made his decidedly Nazi-ish remarks about using cash-incentivised sterilization and abortion to assist in the fight against crime, and that these should be offered in PNM-run communities, which contribute disproportionate numbers of people to the prison population. He did say that this should be used in conjunction with other strategies like access to land and opportunity, but the PNM prattlers picked up on the good stuff, and Rennie Dumas reportedly started shouting ‘Genocide on the UNC platform’.

Aside from the other implications, here is a small sliver of proof of the intertextual intimacy between reflexive PNM rhetoric and calypso; for this was the claim of Singing Sandra’s 2007 Dimanche Gras offering, which warned ‘Africans’ that genocide was not taking place in Sudan, but right here, by (presumably non-African) doctors in the maternity hospitals, and to ‘not bury your head in the sand/is part of they master plan’ which involved ‘winning an election’. Mungalsingh’s flash of bigotry and blaze of incredible stupidity will now clarify and amplify this claim in the underground if not mainstream, and solidify it in the minds of black working and middle classes, if it were not so already.

And here lies the problem with calypso. This was actually the subject of a CCN TV6 Morning Edition discussion on the Thursday after Carnival. (There had been one a few weeks earlier, on Feb 1, but that had only gone on for half-hr.) I had actually been trying to get on to promote my book, and got invited to be on it. The panel was comprised of Ayigero Ome (NJAC/NACC calypso apologist), calypsonians Lady Wonda, and Ras Kommanda, calypso judge, Merle Albino de Coteau, Morgan Job, Andy Johnson, and your interlocutor.

It was a, uhm, lively session, but with a panel that big, the thing got diluted. Job’s agenda was to look at the pedagogics of calypso, ie, what the lyrics said, and directed its subscribers to, and this was to have shaped the whole thing. The other panelists, though, came on with the agenda of promoting calypso, and brought with them a mountain of clichés, factoids, and tourist slogans viz, ‘kaiso is King’ (Lady Wonda), calypso as ‘an artform’ (all calypso panelists), calypso as ‘de poor man’s newspaper’ and the vanguard of the ‘people’s’ voice against authority (Ome), calypso as a ‘national artform’ (all calypso panelists), and so on.

Naturally, to remind the panelists that these were mere ethno-centred fantasies was the first task, and, it so happened, the last. Trying to explain that calypso was merely one strand of an ethnic discourse, which could not be isolated from other strands (neo-Garveyism, PNM rhetoric, African American Afrocentrism, reparations, African essentialism & traditionalism) was futile. They listened – and I have to say they were attentive – but they did nothing with the information.

I tried to bring up the issue of calypso as ventriloquism, where the brown middle classes whispered in the ears of calypsonians and it came out as calypso. I made a mistake, though, and cited Rudder’s ‘Rally Round the West Indies’ as an example of inane middle class pabulum, an easy sloganistic alibi for real action.

I despise cricket, and sometimes forget there are many people who don’t. In retrospect, Rudder’s Haiti and High Mas’ might have been better. I remember High Mas in particular, in, was it 1998? Which I heard and thought it was a really nice, creative song. The brown classes, represented in this instance by Wayne Brown & Keith Smith thought it was much more.

Incidentally, around this time (1998) I was writing editorials for the Express (and other things), and Keith Smith and Lenny Grant simply refused to entertain any discussion on this. & if you look at Brown’s columns in the Independent and the rhetoric surrounding the song, you see why: it was a kind of rallying cry linking Christian virtue, Romantic art, public morality & ‘Creolism’ into a kind of moral discourse that made sense when you considered the times: the Indian/Hindu barbarians were in power; decent god-fearing Christians were searching for straws to grab on to. Ditto for Rudder’s Ganges & the Nile; a nice song, but certainly not a recipe for resolving a complex and potentially malevolent situation (which malevolence has since been fully realized). Indeed, it was little more than an effective distraction from the complexity of the issue.

Similarly, Three Canal’s offerings: Talk your Talk, Revolution Coming, Sing a Happy Song are, like Rudders works after 1996, mere posturing about some undefined revolution which seeks to maintain the status quo: ‘talk your talk, you mocking pretender…far too long you deceiving the children… [feeding the] roots of the vampire system’. The songs all lead back, non-too subtly, to ‘nationalism’, ‘de creator’ or some such political cultural device that derives from the archetypal ‘we ting’.

What Rudder’s and 3Canal’s offerings have in common (as the most high-profile exponents of their genres), is that when they are not inane recitations of meaningless slogans to ‘revolution’ and ‘all o we is one’ their songs are expressions of impotence against forces outside, but rallying cries to ethnic solidarity inside of Trinidad. I don’t imagine ethnic solidarity is unequivocally bad, if it benefits its constituency and harms no one else. However, this ethnic solidarity remains the subtext of calypso, and so long as calypso sells itself as the ‘national’ music, or ‘artform’ this a fundamental contradiction; unless ‘national’ means ‘Afro-descended’, which of course to many people it does.

This is actually the most fundamental issue of calypso and Carnival that needs to be ventilated: since Independence, Carnival has been constructed as an African-PNM’ thing, and as the only ‘authentic’, or dominant, culture of Trinidad. This is fundamentally false. While Carnival has been the dominant cultural form of urban Trinidad, or Port of Spain, there is a whole other Indo-derived culture that exists outside of town, and this has a more cogent claim to be the culture of Trinidad.

The reasons for this are as follows:
—Carnival could not exist without massive state subventions, which increase every year, to keep it alive;
—Carnival is not the ‘festival of the people’; if it is, then the violence from ‘the people’ that is slowly covering the whole of it is like an auto-destruct function, or it means that the people need much therapy;
—Carnival, as is popularly advertised, does not provide catharsis, ‘resistance’ or counter culture; it would be difficult to find another festival that makes these claims so completely in the embrace of state and business; the deep financial commitments of these two rapacious, conscience-less, and morally void institutions suggest that Carnival must give much more than it gets.

By contrast; Indo-Trinidadian, non-urban culture:

—Is completely self-financing, and has existed since and before independence without state support;
—Without state interference, Indo culture can stake a verifiable claim to being the ‘entertainments of the people’ and counter culture, especially since the popular amusements are patronized by thousands at a time, strongly disapproved of by the upper classes (ie, Brahmins et al) and have flourished in spite of this active disapproval;
—Mythologies about its belonging or ‘national’ status do not have to be created; Indo culture exists in a continuous spectrum from the secular to the sacred; that is, there is no separation, though there is distance, between Hindu religion, entertainment, and secular life.

The ‘problem’ is, that Indo-culture is still recognizably Indo, and generation of AfroTrinidadians ha/s/ve been conditioned to respond in a particular way to the signifiers of Indo-culture, hence but for a few isolated instances, there has been no overt influence. An exception is Lord Shorty who married Indian music to calypso, and created the one commercially successful genre: soca. The potential for cross culturalisation is enormous and untapped, and seems likely to remain so. Morgan Job reminded the audience that when Bro Marvin reminded the ‘Africans’ that if they looked back far enough, they might find a man in a dhoti, Pearl Springer and Leroy Clarke came out swinging: dem ent no Indian. Dem is African.

Which brings us back to Indian & African: Harry Mungalsingh & Singing Sandra & calypso. Calypso as practiced now is almost completely self-referential; it is little more than a conversation the black underclass has with itself and its hierarchs (the PNM and the brown classes). It is also, by mutual agreement, a weapon of the weak, designed to maintain the status quo. None of the apologists for calypso has mentioned that calypso has almost never achieved positive social change; its only motivational effects are negative (cf ‘Kidnap Dem’ and ‘Genocide’).

The great mass of calypso is inane, amateurish and puerile. There are thousands every year, and of these, fewer than 40 are worth listening to a month later. This is because the sources for calypso are not discourses of ideas, which come from technology, science, history, literature, drama, being written, produced, talked about, discussed in the public, and among the public.

These discourses do not exist in Trinidad now, and indeed this is the void calypso is being touted to fill. If the public is largely illiterate, uneducated to an incredible degree, and keeps referring to its own resources, in its own language, which becomes more and more inarticulate and narrow every year, calypso will become capable of transmitting only the most elementary messages, or, as Minister Rennie Dumas showed single, charged words: Genocide! It also shows how calypso is routinely used to allow the PNM to evade the consequences of the crime-ridden, misery-filled communities it creates and maintains to stay in power.

"Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority.  The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong.  All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who doubted current moral values, not of men who tried to enforce them."

Offline Themanfriday

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Re: ah wasn't sure where to put this:
« Reply #1 on: March 14, 2007, 07:39:17 AM »
Summarize dat nah ???
Born in SanDo
Raised in Marabella and Gasparillo
Lived in Philly
Join the US Army
Moved to Oklahoma
Deployed to Bosnia
Stayed in Hungary
Retired In Germany
Was at the WC
Cheering for Latapy
Deployed to Kosovo
Y? I don't know
Moved back to America
To live in Virginia
Retired age 44
This is my life

Offline socachatter

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Re: ah wasn't sure where to put this:
« Reply #2 on: March 14, 2007, 07:51:16 AM »
yeah ah know it long.  but ah interesting read.
"Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority.  The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong.  All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who doubted current moral values, not of men who tried to enforce them."

 

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