Upscale Guyana Restaurant on Friday facilitated a Literature Workshop for students of city schools with Trinidadian Literature and Music Group Freetown Collective.
The event, which was held in the Queen’s College auditorium, had as its main focus re-inspiring youths to take an interest in poetry and literature. It was part of the commemorative activities of Upscale’s ‘Night of Poems’ 10th anniversary.
“You need to tap into your life experiences and for you to get the life experience you have to get to yourself,” Freetown Collective member Muhammad Muwakil, told the students.
Sharing his own experience, Muwakil said that growing up he was very temperamental and always wanted to be dominant in everything he did. But then he started writing and through his writing he saw what he was and had the chance to change that person. He urged the students to be creative and to be themselves, while adding that creativity is the expression of one’s individuality, which is the most important thing in writing.
Throughout the 90 minutes they spent with the students, they placed real life scenarios before them to grasp the students’ attention and motivate them to take an interest in the arts.
The group displayed several instruments that they had created themselves and the one that stood out was the ‘Kalipa’ or Thumb Piano; students were carried away by the melody of such a small instrument.
Stating that persistence is a major ingredient in determining one’s destiny, the group explained that without it one can achieve nothing and it is the same persistence that defines someone and their purpose and the goal they want to achieve.
Freetown Collective is a tribe of highly passionate young people, at the core of which stand Muwakil, Keegan Maharaj, Lou Lyons, and KJ Griffith. Poets, lyricists, musicians, they are seeking through their work to continue the great heritage left to them by calypsonians, storytellers, poets and chantuelles who came before; to put their own spin on it, to share the stories of a generation that has yet to properly articulate its position in this very shifting world.
The Freetown concept follows on the notion that every man and woman has a personal responsibility to free him and herself, respectively, from negative mental and social chains so as to free families, neighbourhoods, nations and by extension, the world. The group will perform at the Upscale Restaurant on February 7, alongside Def Jam recording poet Black Ice, from the United States, for the ‘Night of Poems’ 10th Anniversary.
