The Caribbean in me

The interview, which is posted online at BBC Caribbean.com went as follows:

BBC Caribbean: Tell us about your relationship with Miss Lou.

Belafonte: Louise Bennett was very, very central to my deep interest in not only the folklore and history of Jamaica but the literary and academic players in her own verse and the way she spoke with scholars and did analysis on Jamaican life and history.

Even without those limitations she had an overall view of the Caribbean, because she sang many songs which came from Trinidad, not just those which came from Jamaican lore although Jamaican folklore was central to her interest.

I found her a wealth of information, a wonderful performer, very, very clever and keen. She brought a life to so many people and she had a large influence on many things I had come to learn and to understand about the culture of the Caribbean.

BBC Caribbean: How did you come to meet Miss Lou?

Belafonte: I met her in Jamaica, not while there as a youngster but when I had returned sometime in the mid 20th century around the 1950’s when I started going back to Jamaica with some regularity, I had occasion to meet her then and visit some of her performances.

I developed this warm relationship with her. We remained close friends even after she moved to Canada.

BBC Caribbean: It has been suggested that the golden era of the Caribbean was the post-colonial period and the things coming out of that which Miss Lou represented. Do you see her death as signalling the end of that or have we found new expressions in the Caribbean that will keep us alive culturally for some time to come?

Belafonte: I think modern Caribbean culture is still in a very vibrant place although it has fallen into what I would call dark times from the intellectual perspective, from the academic perspective.

There is no question of the vitality of the music, reggae for example, and its impact on young people as popular culture, cannot be denied. The only critique I have of it is that the Caribbean voice, Caribbean people, Caribbean history has much more to say than the rather limited way hip-hop, rap music, speaks to American Black culture and the way in which the current hip-hop and reggae blend speaks to the modern voice of the Caribbean youngsters.

Its not all sexually driven, its not all violence and mindless values in life that represent Caribbean youth or Caribbean people. To that extent we have lost a bit of the edge of true creativity and great art in modern Caribbean popular culture. But one must look beneath that to find that there is still a very rich attempt by writers and by painters and others who are trying to bring a new paradigm to the 21st century image of what true culture of the Caribbean is about.

That does not mean that I dismiss Cuba, that I dismiss Haiti. What I find in Cuba for instance is the highest respect for culture and the use of culture as a social phenomenon is far more advanced than anywhere else in this hemisphere. The degree to which you put Cuba into the culture of the Caribbean, then I’d have to say that the Caribbean has a very powerful component, but if you’re only talking about the English speaking Caribbean then my previous critique stands.

BBC Caribbean: I want to take you back 50 years to the album Calypso. The album broke all records for sales at that time. Did you foresee this? Were you riding a wave or did you feel that you were breaking new ground by taking this music worldwide?

Belafonte: Here was the motive - when I had begun to become successful as a singer in the United States, dealing with most of the material of Black American folk music I had understood the power and the richness of the Caribbean culture.

I also understood the chauvinistic rather caricaturish misinformation America had and Europeans had about who we were, as a people and as a region.

They looked upon us as happy-go-lucky natives on an island, who loved our paradise and who loved the kind of simple lives we lived which almost implied across the board that we were without passion, that we were without struggle, that we were without pain, that we were without oppression and that we should just leave these natives to their gentle way of life while we had another side of us that was very resistant, to our oppression and many leaders throughout that Caribbean region and even through northern South America were powerfully representing resistance to our colonial experience.

The music that many people latched on to which was very much the calypso form. Much of the calypso music which found great popularity in America was music that spoke of the very caricaturish images that people had of us.

It was always music about our double entendre and our sexuality and in many instances songs talked about the racial divide even in and among black people so there was always songs that delineated between light-skinned creole women and black women and songs that made disparaging remarks on black women.

So this culture, aspects of which had caught favour and popularity with Eurocentric culture and Eurocentric people I was very conscious of and when I began to sing the songs I began to look at those songs which particularly painted a picture of the Caribbean that was more to the Caribbean that I understood. When I did the ‘Banana Boat Song’ for instance, that wasn’t just looking for a hit. What it did talk about was the working class struggles of the people working on the plantations.

So that when I performed the music I said let me find a presentation that will at one time reflect the essences of the deeper culture but at the same time translate it in a way that Europeans would be very easily able to grasp it and to sing it and to emulate it while stimulating great curiosity in their receptiveness to the culture to want to know in a deeper to want to know who we were and what we did.

BBC Caribbean: In a lot of people’s eyes you represent that first sense of cross-over success, coming from one culture and succeeding in another. Did you at any point feel as if you had to negate your Caribbeaness to succeed?

Belafonte: As a matter of fact, the more I pushed my Caribbeaness the more my image and my own art was enhanced. Never! Never have I stood embarrassed or distanced myself from anything that has come out of the Caribbean! I think it is a rich, remarkable place.

The people who have survived slavery and have been able to endure are some of the most gifted and certainly show the power of our anthropological and biological capacity to survive.

BBC Caribbean: You worked quite closely with Irving Burgie on the Calypso album. How valuable was his contribution?

Belafonte: He was extremely valuable. We started off this conversation by talking about Miss Lou

INTERVIEW from Page 8B

and I would say next to Louise Bennett nobody had a repertoire of understanding of Caribbean culture, especially the English speaking Caribbean than Burgie.

What he brought to me was a wealth of material that he had collected and had been pursuing for many years. He became a facility, having access to songs and ideas that really made a big difference.

What he did was to take most of the traditional music of the region and rework the material and I participated in that reconstruction of it. We took songs that had lines, certain things that would have been misunderstood or not understood at all and we shaped those verses in ways that would be easily understood by non-Caribbean listeners, in other words a white American audience and even black Americans.

To that extent I felt that Burgie brought a huge skill as a poet in being able to write these translations.

People often talk about “Well man they take the art and they diminished it, or stole it, or they didn’t give any recognition.” First of all I think that anybody that holds that position holds it in a rather unfortunate and uninstructed way.

First of all there is no such thing as stolen art, unless you are laying claim to having originated something which you did not, or you have stolen a work of art from a museum, that is theft!

All other art throughout the course of human history has been instruments of expression or objects of expression that have gone on to influence the next round of generations of people who went on to express art and ideas and thoughts in different dimensions and more current dimensions.

So art as a force has always been there to be harvested, to influence others, to help poets write, to help painters paint.

The great impressionist period in painting had many painters looking like one another experimenting with the style.

(In) modern art everyone had similar styles...what Picasso did. Jazz...many different jazz artists used similar influences. So that the broad influence of an art or a culture cannot be ever viewed as being stolen because other artists are influenced by it and seek to use it some way to express their point of view or express their experience or express their drama or express their painting so I just reject this whole notion that somebody ‘tief yuh ting.’

That’s just not honest to history nor is it honest to what I think is very important to the whole essence of art which is to influence people, to give them new thoughts and perhaps inspire them and that certainly is what all the great calypsonians did to me. Kitchener, Lord Melody, Sparrow, you can just go on with the list of them.

Everyone of those artists I listened to and loved what they did and was so influenced by them I tried to do what they did very often capturing their essences rather as a tribute to them not so much as an act of denying who they are.

Whenever I stood on a stage I always accredited the Trinidadian writers and artists.

The ‘King of Calypso was done by RCA (record label) because they were too lazy to do the kind of research they should have done when they started to market the album.

They put that King of Calypso brand out there and I spent a long time saying well I’m a little saddened by that title because there is a cultural pattern and ritual which gives that honour and you must go through at least the tradition to earn that title and I never went to Trinidad, I never competed in any calypso competition in any tent or any jump-up. So I have always refused to stay anointed without criticism to the idea that I was called the ‘King of Calypso’.

BBC Caribbean: You have been in the news recently with your views on the region. How closely do you follow the happenings in the Caribbean?

Belafonte: I am closer than anybody. I follow the politics of the Caribbean on a daily basis.

I have worked with the politics of the Caribbean. I have worked with great leaders, I have worked in helping to shape agenda politically.

I have brought external influences to the region, brought money, brought academicians, I negotiate between islands. I do an annual convening for economic development along with Carib News (New York based media house), we have an annual convention for regional development, we bring prime ministers together. I sit on the board of the University of the West Indies and we have annual celebrations in the United States to raise money for the university.

I work with the United Nations and UNICEF on the plight of the children with HIV/AIDS in the Caribbean. I visit with the people of the Caribbean all the time. I take leaders from the Caribbean to meet with leaders in Latin America, I bring Latin American leaders to meet with leaders in the Caribbean. I have a huge, huge Rolodex of activity in the region and I’m shooting a film there as we speak.

BBC Caribbean: It’s a documentary that you’re doing?

Belafonte: That’s right. A documentary on my life, the whole length and breadth of my existence and huge and significant part of that is the influence of the Caribbean, in particular Jamaica.