This afternoon I almost crashed headlong into a reverend lady's car while listening to an old calypso and remembering the interview I had with the doyen of our artists Peter Minshall. The thought of Minshall made me want to put him in a public medieval type square and make him compulsory listening to every citizen of this nation. "What were you thinking?" said the woman, as we stood sweating in the steaming afternoon sun examining the crushed steel on her back tyre for which I was undeniably responsible. I wanted to tell her Peter had me convinced that it's not Carnival that's the problem. It's us. Like sheep led by a tribal culture of political patronage we have turned crude, crass, and banal. This is reflected in our chutney and soca, in the mimic Las Vegas type costumes. Carnival, said Peter, is the "brilliant shattered reflection of who we are".
"Your phone number?" she demanded. As I handed it to her I wondered what she would have said if I told her I was trying to remember what Peter had said. That I was cursing my computer that had seized up and froze while he dug deep in his soul and offered his lyricism and honesty to his country as a devotee would flowers to the Gods. "Your drivers permit?" in clipped tones. "And what do you have to say?" I wanted to tell her I crashed into you because Peter restored some hope in me. Despite the 37 murdered in 31 days, despite a people divided over a Prime Minister touching the feet of another head of state, despite the 'Colour Me Orange' which instead of empowering them was drowning us in dependency. Despite the reckless driving, the illiteracy, and the hampers instead of books, I was able to imagine in this glorious sunlight, thanks to Peter, a country where music literacy would be taught in every school, where Laventille would shimmer with gold poui, where we would have a theatre that would accommodate orchestras of pans, a museum of Carnival and where, instead of our Miami worship, the cultures of the world would marvel at us.
"Your insurance?" she asked. I handed it over. Suddenly the lady smiled and the sun shimmered in a puddle. She drove off with a question: "But really, what were you thinking?" I was thinking I have enough for a Minshall trilogy. Starting today.
Part 1.
Peter Minshall on the pan:
"There is a little guy. Call him Jonah. In the early days, before emancipation, he is with papa doing yard duty in the master's garden and he hears a sound and looks through the jalousies and sees the mistress' hands on a long table ting and a sweet noise coming from out of her fingers. "The piano seeped into the consciousness of Jonah where it stayed just playing for the next 100 years. After emancipation he didn't want to touch a cane stalk, a whole next tribe from a next place came with a little grip. It had no TV, no radio, no record player, so whatever little story or dance, is you self had to do it. "For 70 years, people in this island would see fellers beating drums around their necks with sticks, building 30 foot tall mosques to parade through the streets. It was Victorian Trinidad. After an abdication when the king went off for the love of an American woman the island wanted to celebrate a new king and they did with a bottle, a spoon, a pot and a pan, a garbage bin, a biscuit tin. You had a band of steel a kanakalankala ting ting. Jonah put dent in the steel, made it ping pong, the early name for steelpan.
"Why did the lord put oil in this country? Mankind was travelling from city to city on horseback for centuries. Then he put oil in the wheel and the thing take off and we had a motor car. When Jonah saw the oil drum under the galvanise shed it was a miraculous revelation. Jonah did not see the oil or car. Jonah heard music, heated on oil, and pounded out crude Mary Had a Little Lamb to start and out of this came the kind of magic only this island is blessed to produce. "Jonah and his friends fashioned a tassa drum out of steel, hung it around their necks, beat it with two sticks and marched down the streets playing music with the sound of a piano. Those little boys who used to battle, the renegades and desperadoes with guns and knives and steel began to do battle with music. And if you can believe that the universe would bring the unlikely message in the form of a man saying "Love Thy Neighbour," then you have to believe the pan was brought into the world to make war with music. "While Jonah's boys tinkered with steel, in the desert of New Mexico, on July 16, 1945, the brightest light, the atom bomb exploded. They named it Trinity. You think it an accident that at the same time Jonah and his boys by now playing Bach, Beethoven, Mozart on the steel pan called their music the bomb? You see the miracle that is pan?"
Next week. Minshall on the mas
