The month of October happened to be important for a few cultural traditions celebrated in Trinidad and Tobago, and this seemed to have inspired a popular magazine to produce a culturally rich issue. The contents of the September-October, 2011 issue of Caribbean Beat included seven short features highlighting a few interesting traditions in regional culture.
Caribbean Beat, edited by Judy Raymond is the in-flight magazine of Caribbean Airlines, produced by Media & Editorial Projects Ltd (MEP) of Port of Spain and has consistently carries the occasional article of strength in the arts. It covers a range of popular interests and has always been depended upon to include substantial contributions from time to time in literature, book reviews, music, or folk performance. The latest volume, Number 111, September-October, 2011, is special because of its collection of articles on Caribbean musical traditions, Caribbean film and performance traditions. October is Calypso History Month in Trinidad and Tobago as well as the month in 2011 for three festivals, Ramlila, the Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival which began in September, and Diwali. The magazine’s appeal deepened with its very short but significant accounts of the calypso, the rise of chutney-soca, the folk string bands of Nevis, Ramlila in Trinidad, the film festival and two of its Caribbean features, Ghett’a Life and Fire in Babylon.
These are not in-depth analyses; they are brief references, but provide useful information, contribute to continuing interest in their subjects which in some cases is critical to their growth and survival, and certainly enrich the magazine. The volume assumes greater depth and moves the volume with successive pages of interesting material. These topics are important because of the focus they allow on cultural traditions. The Ramlila, for example, is a powerful performance which has already disappeared from one territory and it is significant that it is so well sustained in another. Laura Dowrich-Phillips provides a sketch of what she calls “the oldest open air theatre in the region.” It is not. Other forms pre-date it, but it is certainly of extreme importance as an Indian theatrical tradition which has survived for more than 165 years in the same former estate villages. In what is really just a fleeting reference to this amazing play, she reproduces a few paragraphs from Derek Walcott who remarks that the Ramlila performance is for the celebrants, not theatre, but faith. “They believed in what they were playing.”
Another writer, Simon Lee, recalls the string bands of Nevis, the smaller of the two islands in the St Kitts-Nevis West Indian nation. It is another brief account of an endangered indigenous musical tradition in the region. Its combination of sounds and rhythms is described by Lee as “a plaintive bamboo fife, piping over a multiple string section of banjo, guitars, cuatro and mandolin, accompanied by loping percussion.” These “fife-led string bands of Nevis” are dated back to the nineteenth century when they began to provide musical accompaniment for most social functions in the island. European influence and class aspirations have accounted for much hybridity in instrumentation and rhythms, but this music is highly African derived, like the Big Drum which goes back further, to the seventeenth century. The instruments are indigenous to the Caribbean and locally made.
Lee’s discussion is surely a reference point for several issues concerning Caribbean folk music and its survival. At least two painters have pieces celebrating these indigenous string bands, namely Stanley Greaves and Derek Walcott (whose earliest ambition was to be a painter like his close friend Dunstan St Omer). Lee also refers to the Big Drum and this recalls the similar African-Caribbean tradition the Big Drum dance of Grenada and Cariacou. The folk string band “fife-led” music also recalls related phenomena such as the masquerade tradition with its many variations in St Kitts and the rest of the Caribbean.
“The Beat of a Different Drum” is how Kim Johnson refers to yet another musical tradition that has grown in importance in Trinidad as she discusses the rise of chutney-soca in Trinidad. This is a more substantial study as she traces aspects of the evolution of this hybrid contemporary form now given acceptance and incorporated as one of the “Monarchies” of the carnival. Although her treatment is a just a survey, she correctly locates its beginnings in the Indian folk forms practised among estate workers in the early twentieth century, sketching its evolution in contemporary times when there was fusion between soca and chutney. In fact, the most enduring theory concerning the transformation from calypso to soca itself is that which attributes soca’s development to experimentations with Indian music by calypsonian Lord Shorty. That credit is debatable and other names have been called, but Johnson goes into the history of Indian themes in calypso to Shorty’s musical experiments and comments “whether his was the main influence which introduced the new bounce that created soca, his ‘Om Shanti Om‘ set a standard which is yet to be surpassed, either lyrically or musically.”
Nevertheless, the music evolved from Indian folk into chutney along quite different lines, including the work of Sundar Popo and then Sonny Man before more recent stage productions moved Indian music into the age of electronic instrumentation. This opened doors for Drupattee and her highly successful ‘Roll Up De Tassa,‘ as well as for Kanchan’s adaptations before the first Chutney Soca competition in the 1996 carnival. Yet the strength of the traditional chutney has refused to be totally subsumed into soca and has continued even into the present age of the ‘fusion.‘ A very useful account of this tradition among Indian peasants in Guyana may be found in Rakesh Rampertab’s contribution to the magazine Horizon (ed V Persaud, Georgetown, 2009).
Johnson additionally engages some of the crucial social and historical factors affecting the chutney soca transformations deserving of more dedicated treatment. The calypso itself is not given that in this volume of Caribbean Beat because of the brevity of Debbie Jacob’s entry on ‘Celebrating Calypso‘ which is merely a reference to the subject. She mentions Rohlehr (who is the main authority) and Hollis Liverpool (The Mighty Chalkdust) as sources for the origins and history of calypso, along with other inputs into the social function and calypso’s history of resistance and struggle. But at least the weighty issue of the calypso in Caribbean society has been flagged in the month devoted to it in Trinidad and Tobago.
Also bullet-pointed as its season was drawing to an end, is the Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival which was founded in 2006 and had its sixth edition in September-October, 2011. It was as much a celebration of 100 years of the cinema in Port of Spain as it was an exhibition of the Caribbean cinema and films from different parts of the region. Added to this are features on two of the films that were shown in the festival.
‘Great Balls of Fire‘ is Garry Steckles’ feature on the film Fire in Babylon, actually done by Stevan Riley for the BBC. But it is a well articulated and highly acclaimed documentary of the glory days of West Indies cricket, covering the years of total domination between 1976 and 1995. It tells the story of how, after the tour of Australia in 1975-76 when they suffered what Michael Holding called “the hardest cricket I had ever seen,” the team was moulded, largely by Clive Lloyd, into a force that “quickly became unbeatable” and took the game “to levels of intensity that no opposition could cope with.” This film has the distinction of being called by critics “one of the greatest sports movies of all time.” While it might not recreate the great pioneering work by CLR James (Beyond A Boundary), it also covers the socio-historical dimensions as well as the game itself and its political importance to the West Indies.
The other much sought-after film at the festival was Ghett’a Life by Christopher Browne who had his first resounding success with Third World Cop more than 10 years ago. The film’s title is an obvious pun on “ghetto life” and “get a life,” bringing the two concepts together in a plot in which the hero, a very gifted teenage boxer in Kingston’s inner city tries to achieve the second while struggling against the first. While growing up in one of Jamaica’s “garrison communities” he discovers his great talent as a boxer but has to fight against, not so much the opponents in the ring, but the control of his society by divisions, dons and gunmen.
Araya Crosskill provides the most thorough of these features in Caribbean Beat with his provision of some background to both the film and its director. It tells how Third World Cop (1999) set box office records in Jamaica and achieved world rating. One Hollywood veteran praised the high quality of the script, declaring “it is a human drama of the imaginary birders that are created around people, due to institutions such as government, religion and ethnicity, that is framed in a story of boxing. The human drama is what drives the film, not boxing.”
The Caribbean film, and particularly the Caribbean cinema, may be regarded as a growing area; just how fast it is growing may be judged from the fact that its first great success was The Harder They Come in 1972, yet it is still “growing.” Its greatest and most controversial documentary was Life and Debt, another title with a pun about Jamaica and the IMF in 2002. But, unlike Hollywood, the most formidable barriers to growth and success in the Caribbean are financing and the smallness of the audience.
All told, this issue of the magazine is a significant, valuable document because of the material introduced by these features.
