The T&T Guardian spoke to three T&T practitioners of oral performance arts, from different generations. Last Thursday we spoke with storyteller Paul Keens-Douglas, active since the 1970s. Today we hear from rapso singer Wendell Manwarren, singing with 3Canal since the '90s.
"We have a strong culture of rich oral tradition," says Wendell Manwarren, an actor, rapso artiste, music producer, masman, Carnival bandleader and children's theatre teacher. Underlying all these roles is his role as a performance storyteller, whether visually, theatrically or musically.
With Manwarren's experience in visual Carnival arts and theatre performance, the walls between genres are sometimes blurred: so that rapso chants, songs and music become simply different expressive media, different ways of storytelling, which can borrow from each other.
Manwarren was one of the judges at last Sunday's dynamic First Citizens National Poetry Slam competition, the closing event of a very successful nine-day Bocas Lit Fest which included several examples of oral performance arts, including Black Indian chants, live storytelling, spoken word poetry and even literature read aloud in arresting Jamaican creole by Marlon James, author of A Brief History of Seven Killings.
Manwarren, who sings as part of the well-known rapso band 3Canal, spoke about rapso, his influences, and the power of the word (spoken, chanted or sung) in a Guardian interview at the Big Black Box in Woodbrook recently.
"Just retelling a story has an inherently performative quality," he comments about Trinidad culture:
"...In the yard, on an evening, we will bounce up three-four people liming, and somebody's telling a story, with their hands moving, and dramatic pauses, and although it's not for the stage, it may as well be. It's a part of who we are....We just have a way of telling a story, and we've captured it in different ways–novels, calypsoes."
He observes that all cultures enjoy storytelling. And he comments that storytelling is so much a part of us, we in T&T often don't examine it: we take it for granted.
"Because storytelling is so prevalent and available, it's also not really regarded as valuable in some instances. I think we appreciate it, but we don't truly value what it is. If you value something, then you're able to "mine" it AND "mind" it–take care of it, nurture it, develop it–and then we can get back to the first "mine"–exploit it, creating different kinds of cultural product. There's still a gap there, partly because everybody is an inherent storyteller."
Influences towards rapso
Manwarren says words have the power to create or destroy; they are the transport of meaning, the deliverer of knowledge, so you must be careful how you use them. Rapso's marriage of words with harmonic rhythms lends it a visceral immediacy, appealing to urban youth and other audiences.
Rapso has strong melodic lines, he says; it's neither just words nor song; it's like talking in key. In rapso you have many more words, and shorter lines, he says, as opposed to calypso or the lavway form, where there are fewer words, and longer lines.
Rapso and hip hop all evolved around the same time, notes Manwarren. And hip hop owes a lot to Caribbean influences, he says, retelling an anecdote about a member of the 1980s hip hop group Whodini who was the grandson of Lord Houdini the calypsonian (Frederick Wilmoth Hendricks, 1885-1973), who emigrated to New York and recorded early calypso in Harlem back in the late 1920s and 1930s, spreading his influence there.
What drew Wendell Manwarren to rapso music?
"The rapso urge comes from deep within. It took a while for me to realise in that form. My grounding was growing up in Belmont, in a family steeped in the Carnival arts and traditions, a big extended family, very rambunctious. I remember growing up in Belmont hearing stories like the 'No-head man' or Lagahoo and La Diablesse and Dwen...Belmont is an urban place but those folk stories were very much alive, and they were told.
"I was an avid reader as well, going down to the Belmont Library and finding books (like Enid Blyton!) that are not about you but that become part of your imaginative landscape, and part of your cultural legacy.
"That coming into fullness took a while, and for me it came via theatre, and doing Broadway shows. And via Minshall, working on the mas, still having to read and distil and put it into presentations. Then bouncing up Walcott and his verse. That was my schooling: working (and learning) with the best.
"Then, in the attempt to do J'Ouvert, I put words to the ideas and concepts, putting them in verse form. I wasalso using my theatrical performing experience to work with other rapso practitioners, so there was a give and take process there.
"Then because we were singing in Walcott's productions, we got an invitation to do backups in the studio...So everything happened in an evolutionary way."
Manwarren says he admired Andre Tanker, whose music was often hard to pin down by genre, but was simply "Trinidad soul music."Brother Resistance's Network Riddim Band, Shadow, Black Stalin, Sparrow, and Rudder are also some of his many musical and oral performance influences.
And as a youth, he, like many teenagers, was influenced by foreign popular music, including Top 100, rave and punk; one Carnival Tuesday, he admits, instead of jumping up in a band, he found himself listening to Rock Lobster.
"But my saving grace was my grounding in my own culture. You appreciate those things later.
We still have some of this "grounding", he thinks, with the caveat that "many of our inspirations, tastes, and aspirations are sold to us from abroad."
Today's changing culture
"We are at an incredible turning point. The hegemony of American culture is everywhere–cable, online–so what's your grounding? Where do you locate yourself culturally?" asks Manwarren.
He notes that often, people don't value something until it is re-presented to them, packaged and conveyed. But now, here in T&T, we are consuming many stories about others–like the Kardashians.
"I've been teaching children (theatre) for more than 20 years and I've seen changes...This generation is not speaking like we used to speak, they have slightly-inflected American accents, they have shorter attention spans, their regard for authority is not as ours was. There's a sea-change in the culture. And you could trace it back to what they're exposed to."
Does oral culture blossom better with literacy, fertilised by an educated imagination? Arguably, people in T&T do not read as much, or engage with issues as much as they once did. Can this cause a "dumbing down" of the quality of our oral cultures?
Manwarren concedes this can happen: "It can become more glib and superficial."
He says our mass media in T&T has failed in important ways: "We are losing a generation of expression because we are not using our media to connect, to get out there, to push the evolution of forms, to give it a space to be and make mistakes and learn from itself and evolve in a conscious way. One of the failures of the society is that we have failed to use our media to tell our story."
"All we get on the media is the news: who dead, who did what..." He says one or two local shows is not enough; because soon, we become exotic, even to ourselves. We suffer from a lack of exposure in our own media of our own selves and culture.
Manwarren refers to American mythologist, writer and lecturer Joseph Campbell (1904-1987), who was also a witty, gifted storyteller. Campbell worked in comparative mythology and religion and wrote the book The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949). Campbell believed every culture had its own stories and mythologies. He theorised that all myths are the creative products of the human psyche, that artists are a culture's mythmakers, and that mythologies are creative manifestations of humankind's universal need to explain various psychological, spiritual and other realities.
"He codified (stories and mythologies), perceived similarities. Campbell said, if you really want to influence someone, tell them a story.
"Don't give them the facts. So why do we tell stories? Why do we have tales of La Diablesse? If we want our children to stay inside at night, we can just tell them: 'Don't go outside, the bandits will get you.' No; we say: 'Dwen gonna get you.' It will impact on them more.
"Part of the human brain is triggered by storytelling. The ancestors and the ancients understood that, and they always found ways to transmit stories through time. It's our duty to understand that and perpetuate it."
TIPS AND IDEAS
Manwarren–Ideas to nurturea vibrant oral performance culture:
�2 Have programmes to rediscover the richness of our own culture–many simply don't know about the richness and uniqueness of our old songs and other oral traditions because they simply don't hear them. They are unaware.
�2 Consciously build tourism by committing to develop a good quality, diverse cultural product, including oral traditions. Then investigate what that can mean. Create well funded and staffed agencies to nurture quality cultural development, including oral traditions. Underfunded agencies in the past have spent most of their money on staff, with little left over for consistent programmes to actually nurture development, notes Manwarren.
�2 Local television could produce short, well-edited, well-crafted productions on local artistes, weaving good visual, oral and musical storytelling technique, as the BBC does.
�2 Put local content quotas in place.