Licence revoked

When calypso goes too far

¹

Jonathan Skinner

upon national events as a poet, when to offer such opinions acting as impartial Speaker in the House of Parliament would not be appropriate (Skinner 1997: 65) Perhaps this is as to be expected for society is, after all, constituted by the coming together of such indirect communication interaction as Rapport has argued elsewhere in this volume.

Poetry and calypso are both diplomatic strategies, opportunities to present an opinion, or a ‘social commentary’ in the words of the calypsonians I inter- viewed. Indeed, on Montserrat there was a unanimous chorus amongst calypso writers, singers and audiences that calypso was a form of ‘social commentary’

itself. These social commentaries – certainly the poetic – serve the same purpose as the poetry Lila Abu-Lughod came across amongst the Beduin in Egypt (1988): it is the diplomatic veiling of sentiments in everyday life. In

‘high’ society this veiling – or ‘wrapping’ (after Hendry 1993) – of direct commentary, of direction, has become the expected norm, certainly in diplo- matic circles (see Black, Chapter 15 in this volume). These examples I consider to be ‘indirections’, a feature, one might add, of many enclosed communities such as the small islands in the Pacific and the Caribbean where indirection has become a necessary strategy for dealing with egalitarianism in a wider system of hierarchy (Brenneis 1984; 1987). In her comparative study of politeness and presentation in Japan and other societies – where the ability to distinguish between the front (omote) and the real opinions (ura/honne) is much valued as a social skill (Hendry 1993: 163) – Hendry concluded by casting indirection alongside dissimulation (1993: 162). Here, however, in the context of music and performance in the Caribbean, indirection, I shall be arguing, is less about dissimulation or deception, than deflection, veiling and masking.

On West Indian islands – where a person is often on show more than in European countries; where image, style and ‘respect’ are sought and main- tained by verbal duels, multiple sexual unions and public performance – Paula Burnett (1986) has identified a strong oral tradition of social commentary and social protest which stretches through time from the first slave work songs of Africans transplanted to work on the Caribbean plantations between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, through to her interesting inclusion of popular calypso songs with performance and dub poetry in the twentieth century (see also Markham 1989). Calypsonians both sing and perform their songs, marginal figures on centre stage during calypso competitions, creating and maintaining their own dramaturgical space. They play and project a char- acter to the audience like actors presenting their character in a social drama which can be both reflexive and therapeutic. Talking about such social drama in another context, Victor Turner argues that the theatre is a liminal place where the audience can undergo a part of the performance – ‘a redressive ritual’ – by being swept up in the communitasof the experience (1986: 41, 43).

So too for the audience of a calypso competition performance. However, in some circumstances the various audiences are lost by the performer as the performance or calypso song fails; in many cases the suspension of the

moment disappears leaving behind no chord of harmony between self and objects, but disharmony. In 1987 and 1990, for example, the Trinidadian calypsonians Mighty Trini and Denyse Plummer, respectively, were jeered and bombarded with rolls of toilet paper and orange skins by unruly crowds attending the preliminary rounds of the Trinidad Calypso Monarch Competition. Keith Warner (1993: 275) explained these reactions to the calypsonians because ‘the feeling that calypso is the exclusive province of the black section of the population’: Mighty Trini was from a Syrian family, and Denyse Plummer was a white woman born on Trinidad ‘venturing into what is virtually a black man’s territory, and [they] did not fit’. In these two situa- tions the predominantly ‘black’ audience did not identify with the calypsonians’ ethnicity; their publicly perceived ethnicity jarred with what the audience expected. Analysing such public performances as a form of rhetor- ical text (Patton 1994: 61), we might say that the usual ‘shared meaning’ failed due to a breakdown in the rhetorical signature between ‘rhetor – text – audi- ence’; or, that, as in the case with other examples, the calypsonian exceeded the accepted and expected nature of the calypso performance.

It is when the calypso song and/or the performance goes too far, when it is too direct, when it is undiplomatic, when it jars the audience and judges, when it oversteps the mark, or crosses the unstated line or boundary, that I wish to consider in this chapter. It is when the ambiguous and equivocal nature of the social commentary breaks down, when it approximates everyday communication, that indirection is lost – along with ‘the licence in ritual’ to use Gluckmans’ term for the rite of protest which does more to bless social order than change it (1966: 133, 134). For it is when things go wrong that we get an indication of what is expected in a calypso song, and from a calypso performance – though ironically it is perhaps when the regularity of calypso indirections are lost that we see the true subversive potential and disordering possibilities of calypso. During the 1974–5 Calypso King Competition on Montserrat, Edgecombe reported no such untoward happenings. This was not the case during many other calypso competitions on Montserrat; calypsos and calypsonians are given a special licence to licentiousness, but on some occa- sions even they can find themselves criticised, ridiculed and even physically assaulted as their licence is revoked. Before examining some of these faux pas of social commentary in the context of indirection and calypso licence, let me first situate calypso in its social, historical and indirect context.

Licensed to licence: Carnival, canboulay and calypso I say,‘Do, do come in town Jou’vert morning;

Find yourself in a band,

Watch the way how the natives moving;

Hug up tight with ah man,

Sing along with the tunes they playing,

And now and again you shouting,

“Play mas! Carnival!”

Miss tourist, that is bacchanal’.²

This is the advice of Trinidad calypsonian Aldwin ‘Lord Kitchener’ Roberts to an imaginary young female tourist visiting his island. Cited by Burnett as a part of the oral tradition in the Caribbean (1986: 41–2), Kitchener’s song was chosen for the Road March in 1968, the catchiest calypso which will be played through town so that there can be dancing in the streets. This is a calypso chorus which encourages the tourist to join in with the local celebration, the Carnival – ‘mas’

as it is also known in Trinidad – a two-day street festival leading up to Ash Wednesday.³‘Play mas!’, join in with the free-spiritedness andbacchanal– a term which Daniel Miller translates as the ‘general level of excitement and disorder, as well as the expressive sexuality’ (1994: 24); a term which for Birth refers to the

‘violent disorder’, the ‘fights and the wild, sexual and drunken revelry of Carnival’ (1994: 167). This state of bacchanal, so Miller informs us, relates to J’Ouvert morning – the official beginning of Trinidad’s Carnival (Jour Ouvert – opening day [the local abbreviations vary]) which is followed by Mardi Gras (‘Fat Tuesday’) (Campbell 1988: 9) – when bands and dance troupes come together before dawn, dressed in mud and ashes, to reveal themselves in the first light as the ‘truth’ (Miller 1994: 112). Miller thus rightly characterises Trinidad Carnival as ‘a time of rudeness’ and profanity in opposition to the sacred time of Christmas (1994: 82, 107–33). It is a time when social rules and conventions are subverted, the pretensions of existing social orders exposed, and the formal and hierarchical structure of social relations ritually inverted.

The time following Christmas is a special time, be it the rite of passage into the new year (see Leach 1979), or the ‘betwixt and between’ (Turner 1979: 234) period between Christ’s birth at Christmas and his death and resurrection at Easter.In this way,Carnival has always been a part of the Christian calendar as the excessive lead-in to the lenten religious period of abstinence (a recreation of Christ’s fasting in the wilderness).It is thus a time when carnal behaviour is sanc- tioned by religion, described in Rabelais’ representation of medieval European Carnival as a ‘joyful hell’ (Bakhtin 1984: 133, 123). Both Carnival and calypso in their present form in Trinidad also have other symbolic associations – namely, with resistance and the subordination of domination. The European ‘religious’

Carnival was traditionally celebrated by the Spanish and British colonisers of Trinidad (c.1500–1802, 1802–1962) until post-slave emancipation in 1838 when the former slaves in Trinidad’s capital,Port of Spain,came to dominate and overturn the white colonial minority’s genteel masquerade celebrations through the streets. By the 1860s the former slaves had brought African songs and dances, instruments and customs, and far more overtly suggestive masquerades to the Carnival holiday (Campbell 1988: 18). They introduced marchers in transvestite costumes (Pissenlit) to their flaming processions (canboulays), and stick fighters (batoniers) accompanied bykalindas– men who rallied the crowds to the side of

theirbatonierby singing obscene songs and improvising insults against his oppo- nents (the early calypsonians).

The ruling colonial authorities disliked this potent cocktail of revelry and rioting, communitas, egalitarianness and ‘anti-structure’ amongst the former slaves on the streets. But when they introduced the Peace Preservation Act (1884), banning the use of the African drum on the streets, the result was a backlash as processionists improvised a beat by striking bamboo tubes, blocks of wood, strips of metal or the ground ahead. Carnival became a regular – if disorderly – festival, a social and anti-colonial protest, a class and ethnic struggle (Campbell 1988: 1) as Port of Spain’s neighbourhoods took to the streets in costumes and disguises. The role of the kalindas especially developed in the twentieth century as they took to satirising society: releasing topical songs throughout the year, popularising them for the Carnival; competing against each other in calypso tents, and attracting tourists to the island (Birth 1994).

Outside of Trinidad, elsewhere in the English-speaking Caribbean and in West Indian migrant communities such as New York or London, present-day exam- ples of Carnival and calypso are just as much techniques for mass mobilisation and ways of expressing cultural power in the people: both Chris Searle and Gail Pool have demonstrated the insurgent role of calypso and poetry in the Grenada Revolution (1979–83) (Searle 1984: 199; see also Pool 1994), an example which suggests that Carnival and calypso indirections can be more than the ‘ceremonials of rebellion’ which Gluckman identified in African rituals of licence (1966: 134, 135); and, generalising from the Notting Hill Carnival, Abner Cohen has noted that ‘Carnival is … politics masquerading behind cultural forms’, an activity which has retained its traditional symbolic capital of emancipation and protest, protest and triumph (1993: 132, 27).

As sexually direct as many aspects of Carnival are, so too are many of the calypso songs, ‘the music of the masses’ (Rohlehr 1970: 87). As both the medium and mode of social expression, of social situations, social issues, ills and opinions, calypso is explicitly a form of social commentary, and calypso as social commentary can be very explicit in its content. Mighty Sparrow, an international calypsonian from Trinidad, is accepted as one of the interna- tional Kings of Calypso, notorious for his songs of carnivalesque ill repute:

‘Wood in the Fire’⁴for example plays upon a shared understanding that refer- ences to ‘wood’ can in fact be slang references to the penis; and his ‘Sell de Pussy’⁵ can be interpreted either as a song about a cat, or as a clever parable about prostitution that is only disambiguated at the very end of the song.

Historically, such songs on Trinidad in the nineteenth century would have ended with the words ‘sans humanité’to absolve the singer from responsibility for their risqué remarks (Lewin 1980; see also Campbell 1988: 20); such was the desire of the calypsonian to maintain as much of his performative indirec- tion as possible by drawing disapprobation to the song rather than the singer.

Similarly, the calysonians’ titles which they create for themselves, like the writer’s nom de plume, also act as techniques of indirection by protecting the

calypsonians’ character from public criticism. These techniques still persist as unacknowledged – and sometimes unknown – parts of the traditional calypso licence, whether on Trinidad or Montserrat.

Calypso as Montserrat culture People think that it’s wrong

To talk real Montserratian

They say it ain’t right – grammatically Day can’t find them words in no dictionary Call it bad language

Despising we heritage

But don’t care if dey call we foolish Dis is Montserrat English⁶

Calypso – capoeira with the kick in the song rather than the foot – and Carnival came to vary slightly from island to island in the English-speaking Caribbean as each island adopted and adapted their own distinctive hybrid version often using it as a ‘symbol of national culture’ (Young 1993: 172–9).

On Montserrat, both calypso and Carnival have become an integral part of the islanders’ cultural and national consciousness. ‘Calypso, the commonest song-form of the Caribbean’, so Montserratian cultural artist Ann Marie Dewar states, ‘is one of the most communicative forms of music, enabling the composer to comment on any situation with a freedom of expression and language’ (Dewar 1977: 75). It thus has revolutionary potential (Pool 1994:

84). In the above extract, the Montserratian calypsonian Arrow is drawing attention to the hybrid mixture of Montserratian and English – to what Edgecombe refers to as ‘Monglish’ (1987e: 4) – suggesting that it is a ‘nation language’ in its own right rather than a pidgin English⁷ or debased dialect⁸ which retains a sense of identity in relation with the colonial metropole (Angrosino 1993: 74). Arrow continues in his calypso ‘Montserrat English’:⁹ Gee me lee – wha you ah yete dey (Give me a little – of what you are

eating there)

Dat ah wa we just say (That is what we just said) Pick um up – han um gee me (Pick it up – hand it to me) Dats de Montserratian way (That’s the Montserratian way) Com – ma sisah – fetch me de poh (Come here – my sister – fetch

me the potty)

Wan pain na me belly yah so so (I have a pain in my belly right here)

Dis is Montserrat culture We’ll be proud of it forever ¹⁰