Chanterelles to calypsonians

A new book by Rudolph Ottley, Ambataila Women: The Untold Story of Women in Calypso, Chanterelle to Calypsonian 1838- 2014, provides the back story of why women are not more dominant in the world of calypso, despite Rose’s enduring success.

There is a paradox about this reality, according to the author, since women are the reason we have calypso as we know it.

This nicely laid-out and easyto- read book takes us back to the barrack yards of the 1830s onwards, where women of African origin, freed from the yoke of slavery after abolition, were fully integrated into all aspects of life in the yard, and that included singing their own powerful songs, known as cariso.

Cariso is also what the women sang in the gayelle during the stick-fighting duels. When in 1884 our colonial masters banned the kalinda song and dance and stick-fighting, the men appropriated the cariso, which was not banned but lent itself to protest, later converting it into calypso.

With the establishment early in the 20th century of organised calypso syndicates and the calypso tents that charged an entry fee — a colonial strategy to clean up the barrack yards and sanitise the Carnival of the jamette — women got sidelined from the singing and their story fell out of the history of calypso.

This book aims to restore that history, in part by briefly but critically examining the existing literature on the subject, which Ottley argues barely tells the story and is often gender-biased when it does, focusing mainly on the male-female conflict in calypso and the male calypsonian’s repertoire on women in society.

His own new research and personal experience as the owner and manager of the world’s only all-woman calypso tent, Divas Calypso Cabaret International, bring interesting insights into that history that spans nigh on two centuries, through the early Carnival continuing through the developments of the 1920s and 30s to the present.

Ottley makes several fresh observations, including the willingness of female calypsonians to depend on male songwriters in order to better ensure a place in a tent or the national calypso competition, but the most arresting is the other irony — that the present- day female soca artistes have become as popular as the deemed “jamettes” of the barrack yard days, while the modern female calypsonians struggle to retain any status or power.

Ottley contributes this in part to the content of the calypsoes (not uplifting) and the way the groups of performers dress and present themselves. “The female calypsonians pride themselves in not revealing or promoting female sexuality, much in opposition to what the female soca artiste tends to exhibit…. (their)… mode of dress and performance style very closely approximates the attire and behaviours of the chanterelles of the barrack yard tents in the 19th century.” So, while female calypsonians try to remain true to the decency and high moral values of the traditional tent, in the choice of song and its rendition, their soca counterparts behave bad and find themselves much more marketable.

For me the pity of the calypso tent is that somehow the singers, male and female, seem to have forgotten that calypso is not only about lyrics but also about musicality.

So often, the music is tuneless, the accompanying band discordant, the entire experience jarring. Calypso Rose has probably triumphed because she can really sing, her songs, which she writes herself, are tuneful and her performances have always been “sweet.” I agree with Ottley’s recommendations, including rewriting the history of calypso to reposition women at its heart alongside the men.

Hear! Hear