Honor Ford-Smith is Professor Emerita, Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change, York University. She worked for many years at Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts in Jamaica and was Artistic Director for the Sistren Theatre Collective.
Above: Alwin Bully second right at the National Arena of Jamaica in December 2007 with the cast of Buss Big, a production of the Area Youth Foundation, an NGO focused on youth Empowerment through the arts.
The remarkable Alwin Bully, Dominican playwright, director and cultural activist died on Friday March 10, after a long illness. His death is another loss in a series of losses of people committed to the decolonization and reinvention of Caribbean culture and the shaping of humans able to do that work. He joins Gordon Rohlehr, Rex Nettleford, Kamau Brathwaite, Bob Marley and so many more, most recent being the Trinidadian poet, author and university lecturer Jennifer Rahim who died on March 13. Alwin Bully’s work criss-crossed the entire Caribbean but it began and ended in Dominica, the island in the Eastern Caribbean that was the last to be colonised by Europe, and one of the last to open to tourism as an industry in the present.
Alwin built opportunities and places for relationships and interconnection where there had been none. As Lennox Honeychurch shows in his tribute “The Sternest Passion: Alwin Bully and the Caribbean Cultural Rennaisance” (available on You Tube) Alwin shaped and mentored many through his teaching, his creative practice and cultural leadership. Dorbrene O’Marde, colleague, founder and director of the Harambee Open Air Theatre in Antigua and Barbuda, attests to Alwin’s leadership abilities and to his formation in regional education and in the vibrancy of the social movements of the 1970s:
Alwin and I and dozens of students primarily from the Eastern Caribbean gathered at the Cave Hill campus of the University of the West Indies (“the Hill”) during the late nineteen sixties/early nineteen seventies—the Black Power period, as it was dubbed. We were of societies emerging from a common history of enslavement and colonialism that had not been accurately told, the struggles of which had not yet been celebrated. The calls for creative thinking to inform new ways were strong.
Alwin Bully came to the Hill as teenage playwright, actor, dancer, artist and left it four years later as our inspirational leader . . . He inspired us to fill the gaps in Caribbean literature—especially Caribbean theatre—that were present after the grass roots renderings of the Errol Hill/pre-independence generation of playwrights. Not only was the gap filled but it was filled with style—an approach Alwin labelled “calypso theatre,” a rendering of theatrical performance that absorbed and integrated the attributes of other creative forms—the dance, the music, the poetry, design, the folk narratives and storytelling.
Bringing the work of islands and territories together through cultural production, Alwin became part of a whole generation of playwrights and directors who came to voice in the first decades after Independence. Like Rawle Gibbons of Trinidad, Henk Tjon of Surinam, Henry Muttoo and Eugene Williams of Guyana, David Edgecombe of Montserrat, Jamaica’s Dennis Scott and others, he transformed Caribbean theatre from colonial amateur theatrics to a place where the complexities of imagined community and nation can be envisioned and enacted. For him, as for his generation of artists, performance was a place of entertainment AND a public space for teaching and learning.
Alwin’s People’s Action Theatre (PAT) borrowed from carnival and calypso to create a forum for the everyday cultural life of Dominica. His plays combined popular realism, topicality, comedy, romance, politics and music as tactics for opening access to the stage and creating work that would appeal to everyone. He once said his goal was to create and produce plays which would be as popular in Dominica as the American films that packed in people by the hundreds every weekend. As George Lamming was fond of pointing out, these films likely colonized their tastes and desires as well. Alwin hoped that his popular drama would run some interference with this project. And he attempted this in plays like Streak and Nite Box without the enormous capital resources that fed the cultural industries of the north. This audacious theatre gave the people of Dominica a space to reflect on their lives. It reflected their community back to them and the challenges and struggles that faced them. It dignified and amplified what they had created so they could see it, recognise it and refashion it with pride.
This was needed because too often Caribbean folks denigrated their own strengths and carried deep wounds as a result of a past wrought in violence of all kinds.
Alwin extended his vision off the stage and outside of the theatre as well. He organized in and through organizations like the National Cultural Council, the Dominica Artists’ Guild, the Writers’ Guild, the Dominica National Pan Association, the Carnival Organizing Committee, the Komité Pou Etid Kwéyòl and the Nature Island Literary Festival.
Regionally, he was instrumental in the formation of the Theatre Information Exchange (TIE), and in Jamaica with the local chapter of the International Theatre Institute, the Jamaica Association of Dramatic Artists, the Area Youth Foundation, The Company Limited (TCL), as Artistic Director and many more. Alwin’s influence reached across the region when he worked at UNESCO where he contributed to regional cultural programmes and policy. Often invisible to the general public, his was the hand that urged innovative policy and made regional links possible, sparked synergies and animated productive discussions. At the same time he remained committed to his own practice: writing, drawing and painting; directing plays for the Brothers of the Poor and for the Area Youth Foundation, participating in the fledgeling Jamaican carnival and working with The Company Theatre.
I met Alwin when he came to Jamaica in the 1970s to lead a workshop at the Jamaica School of Drama, then under the leadership of the maverick Dennis Scott who invited him. He staged an excerpt from one of his plays in Kingston and some years later directed his production of The Ruler here. But just as importantly his presence and his cultural practice back then reminded us of the elusive dream of a Caribbean that serves all its people well—not just a few— a region that gathers strength from its common genesis in attempted genocide and slavery and indentureship, but which is at the same time able to honour its differences as it moves beyond insularity. This was a dream that seemed so near, so possible, so obvious back then, and so very far away now.
I have a memory of him that in a small way dramatizes his commitment to regional interconnectedness and his ability to problem-solve in a living and practical way:
It is the 1970s. A troupe of Martinican actors and writers have come to Jamaica in search of links with the Anglophone region. They join in a forum on “A Third World Theatre Method” at the Jamaica School of Drama. They have come to learn what is happening in Jamaica, for it is the time of the emergence of reggae and the period of unprecedented social, cultural and political change. They are dissatisfied with Papa Cesaire, their status as a province of France. To them, they are Caribbean and they share much with us and they want to talk about it with us. We in the audience want to learn from them, but the language impasse shuts us down. We speak no French and they speak no English. Alwin, who will contribute to the study and development of Kweyol in Dominica and the Kweyol speaking Caribbean and who will also support Kalinago struggles for recognition and difference, walks into the room and watches for a moment. Then he calmly stands up. He asks the actors if they speak Kweyol. “Oui,” they say. “OK then. I will translate” he says to us. They then make their improvised presentation in Kweyol and Alwin translates this and the discussion which follows. We learn a little about Martinique and Guadeloupe—about which, despite our education, we know almost nothing. We learn that there is a Kweyol bridge between many islands. We learn that boundaries built over centuries can be breached using the unrecognised resources that we have right here among us.
Alwin solved problems and built bridges in ways like that between all our solitudes. In fact Dorbrene O’Marde reminds us:
Alwin never strayed from the considered revolutionary lot of creative artistes to fill the massive void in our personal and societal beings—to not only reflect the contemporary but make sense of it through the understanding of the past and to be bold enough to project our future if the present day analyses and accompanying warnings were heeded—or unheeded. Importantly, the work tended to unearth and fan the values in society—in governments, in communities, native or foreign, that shape our livelihoods, our lives. Alwin called on us through his work to make personal decisions about the nature of our participation in this Caribbean society. “Fence-sitting” or “do-nothing” were never presented as options.
Ian Randle, the Jamaican publisher reminds us just what a generous, caring and kind human being he was. Never arrogant, always humble, he sought out common ground in a quest to serve the region and especially its poorest. He did this subtly, resisting polemic, resisting commodifying his work. His was uncompromising service grounded in community, marked by service to something bigger than himself, to that “repeating island” as the Cuban writer Benitez Rojo controversially called it.
Alwin’s passing provokes us to ask what might cultural commitment mean in a context that is in many ways quite different from the moment in which he was shaped? What does region mean now as opposed to then? What has replaced the theatre as a space of possibility and perhaps most importantly, what has replaced the value of committed volunteerism that he modelled and inspired?
Walk good Alwin. Thanks for all that work, for believing in all of us, when we often didn’t believe in ourselves; for making spaces that bringing us together to recognize and develop what is often unrecognised; for encouraging, supporting and teaching so many; for remaining committed in spite of the bumps and bangs that are part of the road we are making as we walk.
