Tony Rakhal-Fraser
"Music in the atmosphere, music everywhere…even in the dark, a blind man can find a melody…" Shadow.
"Through calypsoes, our stories are told," so sing the bards of our times. During this Calypso History month of October, those who opened their ears and eyes heard and saw and were able to enjoy and reflect on, sometimes painfully so, how the bards have told the story of our recent past: "how we lived, loved and sinned", said Bertie Gomes, the shopkeeper's son from Belmont who defended the calypsonian, the pan-man, and the Shouter Baptist like no other leader has done before or after.
Listening to the calypsoes, the calypsonians, their stories broadcast on the radio, and recounted on Facebook, the voices, the stories, the language, the analyses, I reflected on how the calypsonians have covered the flow of our lives in this century; how they recorded the struggles against colonial rule, the deprivations, even dehumanisation. Growling Tiger—Money is King 1939—sings, "If ah man have money today people do not care if he have cocoabay," based on material and social values, values which continue in our lives.
Our nationalist ambitions which followed the struggles of labour in the 1930s: "Leave de damn Doctor", chronicled through Sparrow’s admonition of those who would want to stand in the way of the nationalist movement of the 1950s. To have heard anew the account of the calypsonian of the conflict that reverberated during the 1960s into the 1970s as Afro-Trini consciousness and pride ("Black is Beautiful"—Duke) began to reveal itself; and the initiative taken by Indo-Trinidad to turn inwards (La Guerre) to recollect its own cultural strength, and to begin to "uprise" from the degradation of indentureship.
The conflict, at times brutal, was reflected upon and even instigated by the calypsonians (Regis) in the struggle for recognition and cultural and political dominance one group over the other, that struggle often engineered for self-centred interests by politicians and their parties. The list of calypsoes is long, reaching back to Young Killer’s unkind characterisation of the "Indian".
The period when the OPEC-stimulated wealth spread through the economy and with it avarice, acquisitiveness, corruption, and poverty all at the same time was captured by Black Stalin seeking to secure "Piece of the Action" for the "Sufferers" "who doh care bout race".
But blessed country that we are, just when we were being swallowed up by consumerism, material displacing all and creating havoc amongst tribes and classes of people, just when we needed something to thrill the soul and set us dancing again, Shorty gave us the Soca (Endless Vibrations) to dance to; fact is we have not stopped dancing and another generation has taken the music to ends unforeseen. Indeed, the generation of the 21st century, decidedly not taking responsibility, "if the Treasury bun down, We Jamming still", MX Prime and the Ultimate Rejects.
The pain and disbelief of 1990: "Not in this house, not in this garden of Eden, oh how we danced to the beat of this lovely lie until a man opened the door to our mega illusions," all of it reported on and analysed by the calypsonian.
So too the uplifting ideology, RastaFari (Black Stalin); the slide of the Little Black Boy (Gypsy); The Negro Man (Smiley), his drift painfully away from education, scholarship, enterprise and into criminality have been documented by the calypsonian. Our confused political "jack in the box" behaviours were well documented by Maestro–"Mr Trinidadian".
Cultural resurgence and the ability to interpret and fashion its own statement resulted in chutney soca, as Indo-Trinidad made space for itself on the musical and dance platforms of expressiveness, to announce that young Indo-Trinidad was creating and playing on its own stage.
