Kevin K. Birth is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Queens College, City University of New York. He is the author of “Any Time Is Trinidad Time”: Social Meanings and Temporal Consciousness.

BACCHANALIAN SENTIMENTS

musical experiences and political counterpoints in trinidadBy Kevin K. Birth

duke university press

Copyright © 2008 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4141-3

Contents

Preface………………………………………………………………….ixNote on Music References…………………………………………………..xiiiINTRODUCTION Initial Connections…………………………………………..1ONE Governmental Organization of Spontaneity………………………………..43TWO Bacchanalian Counterpoints to the State…………………………………69THREE Parang: Christmas in Anamat………………………………………….119FOUR Bakrnal: An Example of Changing Opinions……………………………….149FIVE “Chukaipan,” “Lootala,” and the Counterpoint of “Mix Up”…………………182SIX Concluding Relations………………………………………………….212Appendix…………………………………………………………………227References……………………………………………………………….229Index……………………………………………………………………249

Chapter One

Governmental Organization of Spontaneity

In this nationalist struggle I am confident … that the man of culture has an important role and that the political leader can only succeed by enlisting culture in the struggle and placing it in the vanguard of the nationalist movement. ERIC WILLIAMS, Nation, November 20, 1959

The international image of Trinidad and Tobago is tied to its music. This is the product of the skill and innovation of Trinidad’s musicians, and the government’s efforts to use music to define the nation locally and globally. This chapter examines the nation-building strategies adopted by the government early in the process of gaining independence. These policies emphasized the institutionalization of musical and cultural competitions in order to invoke and inspire national unity. These competitions were not only a means of celebrating national identity but were also a part of the policy of mobilizing the population to develop the country’s economic infrastructure without having to use large amounts of government resources during the early independence period. By the 1970s, as government patronage evolved, the government’s economic strategies shifted from local development toward concentrated, state-sponsored industrial development, which resulted in a separation between cultural competitions and local economic development. The competitions remained, and even proliferated, but as the subsequent chapters will show, while the showpieces of government cultural policies are still the competitions, they are only one of many influences on Trinidadian musical participation.

Forging Independence

A crucial moment in the political history of Trinidad and Tobago was the formation of the People’s National Movement (PNM) in late 1955 and early 1956 with Dr. Eric Williams at the helm. Williams had an impressive background. He had won one of the very competitive colonial Island Scholarships to study in Great Britain; he had earned a doctorate in history from Oxford and established himself as one of the leading thinkers on the political economy of slavery; he had taught at Howard University; and he had served on the Anglo-American Caribbean Commission. Williams’s participation in the decolonization process revealed his ability to transform spontaneous popular fervent into an organized political movement and to impose his will on the party, the government, and the nation. The emergence of the People’s National Movement and the leadership of Williams happened so quickly that they seemed driven more by their own effervescence than by careful planning. Williams’s effort to control the process of defining national identity linked spontaneous enthusiasm to planned policies.

The founding of the University of Woodford Square played an important role in the formation of the PNM, the political party that led Trinidad and Tobago into independence. Woodford Square is a park in the middle of Port of Spain, the capital city. The University of Woodford Square consisted of popular political meetings in which Williams, among others, gave speeches from the bandstand in the park. These political gatherings began in 1955 under the auspices of the People’s Educational Movement, an educational organization. In July of that year, Williams stated: “Somebody once said that all that was needed for a university was a book and the branch of a tree; someone else went further and said that a university should be a university in overalls. With a bandstand, a microphone, a large audience and slacks and hot shirts, a topical subject for discussion, the open air and a beautifully tropical night, we have all the essentials of a university” (quoted in Oxaal 1982, 113).

The climate of nationalist and anticolonial fervor associated with the political rallies at the University of Woodford Square was transformed into the inauguration of the People’s National Movement as a political party in January 1956. Later that year, the PNM won thirteen of the twenty-four elected seats on the Legislative Council-an advisory group to the colonial governor that, since 1946, had been increasingly allowed by the British to be in charge of Trinidad and Tobago’s domestic policies. Since the governor still nominated four members of the Legislative Council, the PNM’s thirteen elected seats were not a majority. Playing into the gradualist logic of British decolonization policies that saw the emergence of political parties as a necessary step toward independence, the PNM argued that it was a coherent political party, and that since it had won a majority of the elected seats, it should be given the power to rule. The British governor, Sir Edward Beetham, with the reluctant support of the British Colonial Office, then allowed the PNM to choose two of the four nominated members of the Legislative Council, thereby giving the PNM the majority on the council.

Once the PNM gained control, consolidating its grip on power clearly was an important goal, made all the more pressing when the PNM lost the elections for the parliament of the Federation of the West Indies in 1958. During this time, the vision was not for Trinidad and Tobago to be an independent nation, but for it to form part of a regional federation. Based on the recommendations of the Moyne Commission (West India Royal Commission 1945), the British Colonial Office’s plan was for the colonies in the West Indies to gain independence under a single, federal government. During the 1950s, this led to fragmented systems of governance in which individual colonies formed their own governments while, at the same time, they participated in the creation of the federal government. Daniel Segal notes that as Trinidad and Tobago moved toward independence, “‘the nation’ was referentially ambiguous” because it referred to both the British colonial unit “Trinidad and Tobago” and the proposed Federation of the West Indies that included all of the British colonial possessions in the Caribbean (1989, 158). In Trinidad and Tobago, the 1958 elections were for the Federal Parliament and did not influence the composition of the Legislative Council. While the PNM’s affiliated federal party, the West Indian Federal Labour Party, lost the federal elections, the PNM retained control over the government of Trinidad and Tobago. This created a situation in which the group that lost the federal elections consisted of those who were in charge of negotiating Trinidad and Tobago’s political relationship to the Federation (see Mordecai 1968).

Even though a West Indian Federation would presumably craft a pan-Caribbean identity, the PNM consolidated its position by shaping a policy of national identity for Trinidad and Tobago that was inextricably linked to the PNM, and not to the Federal West Indian Federal Labour Party, of which the PNM was part (Oxaal 1982; Ryan 1972). A subtle indication of the choice to promote local identity over pan-Caribbean identity was the PNM’s emphasis on the organization and promotion of national “culture,” by which it meant, specifically, musical, folkloric, and Carnival traditions distinctive to Trinidad (and not even Tobago).

The version of nationalism found in the work of several prominent Caribbean thinkers indicates that some perspectives viewed nationalism as a constructed, even contrived effort of political elites from the middle class. Long before Benedict Anderson’s emphasis on the nation as imagined (1983), Csaire situated its imagination in terms of class by stating “the nation is a bourgeois phenomenon” ([1972] 2000, 74), and Fanon described efforts to create sentimental support for a national consciousness as “the result of the intellectual laziness of the national middle-class, of its spiritual penury, and of the profoundly cosmopolitan mould that its mind is set in” (1963, 149). The words Walcott puts into the mouth of the spectral calypsonian the Mighty Spoiler strikes a similar tone, by suggesting that independence did not end colonial-style domination, but that it only changed the “colour and attire” of those locally implementing systems of domination ([1980] 1986, 433). Rohlehr says that Walcott “noted how after Independence, folk culture had been exploited politically by both the local bourgeoisie come to power and their fake-radical opponents of Black Nationalist persuasion” (1992b, 172).

The association of nationalism with a particular class position had some credence based on the network of ties between nationalist leaders. In the 1950s and 1960s, other colonies were also moving toward independence, and the personal relationships cultivated between many colonial scholarship winners in England became the foundations for diplomatic and consultant relationships. James recalls that, during his youth, there were three such scholarships awarded in Trinidad and Tobago every year (1993, 22). The scholarship winners often became connected to extraordinary networks of immigrants in Great Britain. A 1959 edition of the Nation newspaper printed an article titled “The Doctor Says: My University Generation” (March 27, 1959, 3), in which Williams mentions people with whom he associated during his years in England: W. Arthur Lewis (the noted development economist), Patrick Solomon (a medical doctor who served in several cabinet posts for the PNM), Hugh Springer (Governor-General of Barbados, 1984-90), Learie Constantine (a famous cricketer and the first chairman of the PNM), Jawaharlal Nehru (first Prime Minister of India, 1947-64), Kwame Nkrumah (the first head of state of Ghana, 1957-66), Nnamdi Azikiwe (the first premier of Nigeria, 1963-66), George Padmore (a noted Pan-African leader), Jomo Kenyatta (Prime Minister of Kenya, 1963-78), Amy Ashwood Garvey (Marcus Garvey’s first wife), and C. L. R. James. In the case of Trinidad and Tobago, the PNM leadership boasted several scholarship winners, including Eric Williams, Patrick Solomon, and A. N. R. Robinson. As early as 1956, Williams used his educational background to legitimize himself and the PNM by arguing that the new leadership of many countries consisted of well-educated scholar-politicians. He contrasted such qualifications to those of one of his opponents, T. U. B. Butler, one of the leaders of the 1937 labor strikes in Trinidad and an elected member of the Legislative Council. About Butler, Williams said that “agitation, militancy and graduation from jail do not equip a man for the tasks of government, legislation and planning” (quoted in Rohlehr 1997, 866). This attitude is consistent with what Lloyd Braithwaite described as the “illusion of greatness” shared by scholarship winners: “The student knew and conceived of himself as exceptional. The emergent nationalism which resulted from the personal identification with the West Indies did not prevent an exaggerated opinion of the social role he would play on his return home” (2001, 67).

In the process of gaining independence, then, it is not just a matter of new states, such as Trinidad and Tobago, absorbing abstract expectations of independent statehood, but it is a dynamic process in which the leaders of new states would interact with one another on a personal basis as more abstract principles of government and development emerged. In the case of Trinidad and Tobago, the contacts that Eric Williams had with the Marxist-Leninist orientation of C. L. R. James, the Pan-Africanism and Marxism of George Padmore, and the economics of W. Arthur Lewis were personal. Indeed, in his autobiography, Williams suggests that a trip to Europe while working for the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) had an additional motive related to organizing the PNM: “From Brussels I proceeded to London, where my principal concern, apart from my routine work for the ICFTU, was to discuss our draft party programme and constitution with George Padmore, C. L. R. James and Arthur Lewis” (1969, 143). Such ties and consultations clearly contributed to the sense of excitement and innovation that accompanied the emergence of the PNM, but such ties were also victims of the PNM’s attempts at consolidating its position, and Williams’s desire to be in complete control. Padmore died in 1959; C. L. R. James resigned from the party in 1960; and W. Arthur Lewis’s economic planning models were abandoned by Williams and the PNM during the 1970s, in favor of using petroleum revenues to encourage economic expansion.

The image of personal greatness built on competitive achievement gave Williams and his associates the sense of authority to define the nation. Nationalism was crucial to achieve independence and a cornerstone of early state policies. Trinidad and Tobago accrued the symbols of nationhood-a national anthem, bird, flower, seal, and currency. It even gained a written history with Dr. Eric Williams’s History of the People of Trinidad and Tobago (1964, originally published in 1962)-his gift to the people of Trinidad and Tobago upon independence.

Forging a Nation

The state’s attempts to create a sense of nationhood had to contend with sources of division between religious, class, and ethnic groups, as well as between rural and urban areas. The “culture” with which the national identity would be forged included the dynamism of Carnival and calypso. In the case of Trinidad, the link between music and political discourse was well established before independence. The popular significance of both Carnival and calypso included their ability to challenge hierarchy and criticize authority. Early calypsonians engaged in political commentary (Rohlehr 1990, 2004a, 2004d; D. Hill 1993; Regis 1999; Warner 1982), and politicians used music in their representations of Trinidad. At the same time, Trinidad and Tobago’s colonial government had tried to impose order on music for purposes of control and propaganda (Rohlehr 2004d). This took many forms: censorship of calypso, but also, less often explicitly noted, the use of music in governmental ceremonies, such as the pomp and circumstance given to the arrival of colonial dignitaries, and the singing of “God Save the King/Queen” at the beginning of the school day.

Music played a role in the formation of middle-class imaginings of the nation. For instance, Albert Gomes, one of the major power brokers in 1950s Trinidadian politics, emphasized the value of Trinidad’s music in defining its cultural contributions to the world and its creative differences from Great Britain (1974, 82-83, 95). In discussing the embracing of folklore by the Trinidadian middle class after World War II, Ivar Oxaal notes: “Before the war, from all accounts, the Trinidad middle classes, taking their cue from the European snobbery of the colonial elite, tended to view the local folk culture as something shameful. The mentality of the PNM leadership was entirely different, the product of a major transformation in social consciousness. In the post-war period the educated Trinidad middle class discovered the artistic validity and prestige of local folk culture” (1982, 151).

Gomes represents this as an important transformation in Trinidadian middle-class consciousness:

It was the illiterate and semi-illiterate Negroes who kept the ancestral fires burning … who filled the Calypso tents with song and music in the early days before this Aristophanic art form became a tourist attraction, favoured by British and American alike, and so won at long last the approbation of the middle class educated Negro; who invented the steel band and fought and died to keep it alive so that it would become eventually a status symbol proudly adorning the drawing-rooms of the same middle-class who during its embryonic period joined forces with British officialdom in the effort to stamp it out as another culturally retrogressive influence. (1974, 82)

Stephen Stuempfle notes that during this period, advocates in favor of the steelband, in particular, promoted the music as art rather than noise (1995, 82), and in 1949, the colonial government formed the Steel Band Committee to study steelbands and make recommendations to curb the violence associated with the bands, and under the leadership of Canon Farquhar, to urge public acceptance of steelbands (see Stuempfle 1995, 88-91).

(Continues…)

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