Of potholes and protest

The reactions to this video started me thinking about creativity and protest. This woman, in an effort to get authorities to do their job, used her popularity and technology to shame them into taking action. To highlight the same issue, one artist spent her own money to create a life-sized crocodile in the centre of one of the holes to emphasise how large it was. We laugh and grumble about potholes here, but as reported in Indian online media, in “data compiled by the ministry of road transport and highways, 10,876 people were killed due to potholes in 2015 which is a slight dip from 11,106 deaths in 2014”.

At home, there is a great deal that bothers citizens every day.

What if we could fuse our creativity and technology to constantly highlight national matters, and move the focus beyond online audiences into the streets, homes, minds and consciousness of our nation? Of course, we already know about protest art in TT. From traditional Carnival Characters, to Jab Molassie, to mas portrayals, Soca, Rapso, Pichakaree, Kaiso, poetry and Spoken Word, artists use their voices to draw attention to corruption and mismanagement all the time. But are our voices loud enough, are they too seasonal and do people hear us as often as they should? I watched the moving choreography of Aisha Commissiong from Barbados recently. She used the human body to portray the plight of refugees, visually creating the effect of the ocean and of people being thrown off board and trying to climb back on. The audience held its collective breath.

Still in her twenties, Aisha understands the responsibility she carries as an artist to use her gifts to change the world. Locally, young people are using film to focus on issues like environmental degradation, and to talk about systemic inequality and its negative impact on their futures.

However, I feel that for art to have more social impact, the consciousness of “art as protest” must not be viewed as the responsibility of those who already do it, but must become part of a generational approach to activism.

The children of revolutionaries like Aisha whose father is a social and cultural activist, like Shabaka Kambon, Asha Lovelace, Nihilet Blackman, Attillah Springer and others, they have been schooled in environments of struggle, intellectual curiosity and protest. They had no choice but to confront the problems facing their nation and ultimately the world. But for young people without this background, art must be ever present, reaching into their heads, taking over the space currently occupied by Facebook fights, hypersexuality and foreign values.

The latest issue to surface on my social media news feed is that of a Social Studies text book targeted to infants, which does not include Emancipation, our First Peoples or Indian Arrival Day. After decades of Independence, talk of inclusion, national identity and transformation of our education, this is the last thing the people of TT need.

This book and the other challenges we face, serve to remind that the artist must always be vigilant, but signal that we must be more. We must be catalysts for change, and inspirations for ‘civic and social identity’ because here our ‘potholes’ also run deep. I am prepared to do more to make this possible. Who will stand with me? Dara Healy is a performance artist and founder of the NGO, the Indigenous Creative Arts Network – ICAN.