?It is not a little ironic that the 3canal Show 2010 JAM-IT! is an ode to the jamette. Night after night it packed Queen's Hall with patrons who applauded the performances enthusiastically. Does that enthusiasm signal the acclaim of jamette culture? Perhaps not. The show, as usual, was a rapso concert by the singers and their band framed within a theatrical structure, featuring elements of mas and dance. The difference was that the theatrical element is more prominent this year; instead of a Greek chorus, the ensemble/ cast tells a two-part narrative about the evolution and devolution of jamette culture. If I recall Ken Crichlow's lectures correctly from my days as his student in the UWI course Art and the Caribbean Imagination, the jamette was a post-emancipation figure on the fringes of society. The jamette takes his name from "diametre," a French patois word that speaks to the jamette's otherness, his refusal to conform to middle class expectations of propriety. An unattributed article on Nalis.gov.tt says jamettes "occupied the barrack yards of East Port-of-Spain. They were the stickfighters, prostitutes, chantuelles, matadors and dustmen."
JAM-IT! uses the jamette in the original context in the first half. The characters are oppressed poor people who want to be free to play their stick, drink their grog and dance their dance in spite of the authorities' ban on Canboulay activities. The second half is a bawdy parody of our current national circumstance: a petty despot tries to stop his subjects from wining and otherwise displaying any common behaviour at his ball. In the show, the jamettes win. And wine. In real life, this tableau is staged at a price of $250 in Queen's Hall, symbolism not lost on those audience members who themselves wanted to wine. You could watch the jamettes, but you were not encouraged, in those pristine surroundings, to be one. The 3canal Show brilliantly fuses several indigenous jamette arts into a production palatable to the patrons who can afford the price of the ticket. High production values, professionalism and artistic vision take 3canal's stagings consistently over par.
This year's ambitious attempt arguably goes even further, by medium and message, ramming home the idea that jamette culture is no longer of the diametre, but of the centre. And yet the jamette still has no place in decent society. Panorama was saddening. The glittering National Academy for the Performing Arts (Napa) was visible behind a high fence as pan side after pan side rolled by on filthy streets on the other side of the paling. Never was it clearer that the country has not resolved its issues about jamette culture: on the streets thousands of people massed for their festival, after their democratically elected government had poured money and resources into building a facility largely unsuitable for the majority of their indigenous arts. There will be no Panorama in the Napa, no Ramleela, and no Hosay. Carnival will come in a couple days and hordes of jamettes-for-a-day will wine enthusiastically for the cameras but they will do so on the road, not in any legitimate venue. Maybe that is what Carnival should be, palancing on the road (to borrow from the song almost certain to be Road March).
But even that contrasts unfavourably with the reality that these would-be jamettes have paid thousands of dollars, in most cases, to wear fashionable costumes and drink premium liquor behind a security cordon of large guards. Woe be unto any real jamette attempting to take a wine on those refined bambams. What good is jamette culture? JAM-IT! positions the jamette as the resistance against oppression, the voice of the people shown as mores, music, the arts. In the show, jamette equals freedom, not merely "to wine and have a good time... looking for a lime," as Rudder says in his song High Mas, but to express a cultural authenticity that cannot be found in the works of the Echoes Divine and the emperor's white-gloved manners. On the whole, historically, the jamette was the progenitor of mas as we knew it, pan, kaiso, limbo and stickfight. And then, somewhere down the road, the jamette took a bank job and the next thing you know he earned respectability. The culture he created has become a stagnant pool. Mas is a wasteland of recycled ideas and costumes. Calypso is near dead.
(Rapso is not calypso, in the same way soca is not calypso, though they stem from a common root.) The development of pan is being co-opted by the Japanese and we, the jamette's children, are helpless to stop it. Meanwhile, what has risen from us? Our new forms are few and far between and mostly struggle for audience in the cacophony of the cultures we seem content to import. Looking at it all, from the stage to the streets to the panyards and the made-in-China mas camps, one comes to a dreadful conclusion about the mas that we all are playing. Jamette culture has not won. It is just another costume we have put on in this Carnival called Trinidad and Tobago.
