A matter of respect

The threatened boycott of Panorama and the decision by TUCO have generated a debate about the relevance of calypso today and the status of steelpan music. Many will agree indeed that the difference between vintage calypso and calypso today is vast. In fact they are two quite different species. On the one hand old time calypso was entertaining, catchy, stayed in your head and soul while still being up-to-date and providing relevant social critique. In fact many incisive calypsos analyzed our situation as postcolonial mimic men in ways that our writers might still envy and have remained indelibly carved on our communal consciousness. But calypsos today almost lead us to think that they, the calypsonians, take themselves as social critics so seriously that they forget that they are also both poets and entertainers. No wonder audience numbers are falling and the question is being asked about relevance .

So does this signal the end of calypso or that there is a need to recognise that everything changes and we have to adapt? It seems obvious that spending four hours listening to lack lustre calypsos is not the way to go. It also seems to make sense that the trinity of pan, calypso and mas needs to be reunited .

It seems undeniable that calypso is far from a dying art. It has influenced both novelists and other poets and we need only refer for proof to our own Earl Lovelace whose star boy in the most recent of his works, Is Just a Movie, is a calypsonian and commentator, or even Walcott’s very famous poem, “Spoiler’s Return”, which was set to music by the students of the Department of Creative and Festival Arts in 2010. And writers continue to use calypso as an example of what Brathwaite called “nation language”, that is a music and a rhythm that have emerged out of our experience of history and circumstance .

So if our calypsonians are our poets, then where is our respect for their art? After all if the influence has been so widespread and if calypso has already spawned new forms, then it is deserving of respect in the same way that we in literature pay homage to Homer or Shakespeare or even Langland as individual artists who created what we now consider to be contemporary art .

Strangely the word “respect” has cropped up several times in the past week. Pan musician Dane Gulston, a member of Trinidad All Stars Steel Orchestra, accused Pan Trinbago of “total disrespect all the way around to band members.” So precisely what does respect mean in these contexts? First of all it signifies an attitude that we seem to all share in TT that the past or what has happened in the past has little relevance to today .

After all, why must panmen suffer the indignity of having to beg and to wait for their well-earned money? Would any other sector allow this? But most of us know at some level that artists do what they do because they have a passion for what they do. This has led to the exploitation of the long-suffering artist who traditionally may starve .

But pan is something that is basic to our understanding of who we are, as Rawle Gibbons pointed out in his 2008 play Ogun Iyan as in Pan. Pan connects us to our roots. This does not mean that it is African, but that it locates part of our origins in Africa and pays tribute to the evolution of something called a national culture from multiple roots, as opposed to one .

But it does more than this as an indigenous art form; it manages, in a way that few of us can understand, to provide the motivation for hard work, endurance, persistence and continuity that nothing else has, to my knowledge, succeeded in generating amongst many of our young men and women .

As one activist colleague noted as we listened to a band practicing, if only we could figure out how to channel that energy into other spheres of existence .

It is to the credit of our UWI that the Department of Creative and Festival Arts under Rawle Gibbons made the steelpan the principal instrument of instruction, recognising that this was in itself a revolutionary move .

Our own Terry Noel, leader of Melodians Steel Orchestra, has been recognized in the United Kingdom for his use of pan as an instrument of instruction and as a way of mobilizing young people and equally for creating a forum for diversity. So maybe that lack of respect has more to do once again with our failure to pay tribute to those who have shaped our society and who continue to use artistic forms to create change within our society. Or maybe it is simply that we still lack self respect .