Good maps are important. They give you an idea of where things are in relation to other things. If someone wants to know where Trinidad is, my singing the national anthem will not help. If I say the island is 61 degrees west and 11 degrees north, or just north-west of Venezuela, or the southernmost island in the Caribbean chain, the picture becomes clearer. Maps, importantly, do not deal in the abstract. Calypso and Society in Pre-Independence Trinidad, Gordon Rohlehr’s first book of essays on calypso, is a cartographic study of the social and historic landscape out of which the art-form emerged. Now A Scuffling of Islands covers the spaces into which calypso has grown in the period from around Trinidad and Tobago’s Independence in 1962 to the present.
Though published only in 1990, Calypso and Society feels like a book that has been with us a lot longer. It has become the definitive guide to the growth of calypso from its pre-emancipation days up to the watershed era of Sparrow and the founding of the People’s National Movement by Eric Williams in the 1950s. In Calypso and Society, Rohlehr identifies and examines the rhythmic and oratorical traditions that would shape themselves into the voice of an otherwise silenced and powerless society. It is dense with the details of development: the influences of dominant and subordinate cultures; crises of history, including the two world wars; the rise in African consciousness and the naming of its pantheon. Add to these layers the author’s incomparable talent for identifying similarities and parallels from other traditions, and his patient close reading of every text. But the remarkable thing about Calypso and Society, any chapter of which might be the subject of a book-length interrogation, is how readable it is. The enormous quantity of material and analysis is so adroitly managed that there is room for asides, humour, and plenty of wit.
Of the years after Independence, there is a shocking dearth of critical material on calypso. Researchers have, for the most part, been concerned to show the value of the social commentary or political calypso, or continued to probe the music’s varied and dramatic past. Some small amount of work of a biographical nature also exists (often in the form of undergraduate theses), and enthusiasts like Alaskan Ray Funk have delved into some of the more unlikely tributaries, like calypso’s brief post-war Hollywood heyday. In this atmosphere of want, A Scuffling of Islands is a most welcome and authoritative voice.
It was always Rohlehr’s intention to produce a follow-up to Calypso and Society; in that book’s final chapter he is already indicating some of the scope of the proposed volume that would become Scuffling. The books differ somewhat in tone and treatment but, 14 years later, Rohlehr has made good on his promise. Once again he applies the tools of the literary researcher to the popular music of Trinidad and Tobago; here too the essays are fairly bursting with detail, examples, evidence, and inside jokes, so that, despite their length, they seem compact. Never missing an opportunity for a good pun or a bit of wordplay, Rohlehr makes nearly 500 pages of calypso scholarship as entertaining, insightful, and sharp as the best traditional kaiso, and clever and amusing as the songs credited with greater levity. He gets to the heart of things not by nitpicking but by being able to step back, stand on a wall outside of the city, like Walcott’s Spoiler (in the poem “The Spoiler’s Return”), and see the whole thing. Not just the trees and the forest, but the loggers, the mountains, the picnickers, and the floods. At a time when the average academic finds it possible to deconstruct the label on a tin of soup, Rohlehr’s analysis and narrative style are refreshingly sensible and jargon-free.
If Calypso and Society is a history lesson — or an old story well told — Scuffling is a series of contemporary documentaries. It does not deliver the kind of linear perspective offered by its predecessor, treating time and circumstance as a succession of phases leading up to the state of the music at a specific moment. Instead, this collection focuses on a number of pervasive and enduring themes and issues, and considers how these themes are defined by and redefining their contexts, as well as the external factors that impinge on them. These essays describe (both in the sense of presenting an image and also in the sense of giving the parameters) how calypso has continued to perform its traditional roles. Roles, Rohlehr itemises in Calypso and Society, of “praise, blame, satire, moralising, instruction, social control, celebration, cut-arse, and catharsis”.
Scuffling performs one re-tracing exercise. The title essay, sub-headed “The Dream and Reality of Caribbean Unity in Poetry and Song”, takes us pre-Independence to the rise and fall of the Federation of the West Indies, examining both the internal and inter-island quandaries of a handful of small nations on the verge of being set adrift from their colonial patrons:
The title . . . is meant to suggest the link between economic necessity, the desperate struggle to survive (“scuffling”) and the insular conflicts (“scuffling” in another sense of the word) that have attended all efforts at Caribbean Integration.
The treatment of federation is but one example of how calypsonians, from the early 1930s right up to the present, have not just kept an eye on the goings-on of the region, but used their medium to demystify these issues for their audiences and champion causes. Debates or debacles about the increasingly rabid political and racist calypsos of the past two decades might lead one to imagine a more impartial past. That would certainly be a creative exercise — the calypsonian has never been a dispassionate commentator.
Even as the calypsos of the late 50s and early 60s show the tremendous optimism that accompanied the dream of federation, they simultaneously expose a level of racial and nationalist discomfort. The philosophical and cultural schizophrenia to which we have grown accustomed comes from a strong tradition. The Caribbean has long been able to preach unity in diversity while parading an African consciousness as a regional one, paying only superficial attention to the other ethnic groups of the region. Carnival and calypso, both essentially rooted in African traditions and in black working-class communities, emerging as the flag-bearers of the would-be Caribbean nation, nudged this propensity further along. Here, as with other perilous topics of Caribbean discourse, Rohlehr sees the big picture. It saves him from both the virulent, if moronic, rhetoric of the more partisan writers and, just as bad, the oafish stumbling of the self-consciously politically correct.
The detailed study of the legacy of Eric Williams suggested in Calypso and Society is useful in establishing the context of growth of the Trinidad calypso in the post-Independence era. An awareness of the political atmosphere at this time is also key to understanding the spread of pan-Africanism, as well as the deepening of the ethnic divide, particularly between Trinidad’s African and Indian communities:
Dr Williams was understood to be the black leader of black people who had defeated the Portuguese leader of white, Portuguese, and off-white businessmen and the rival Indo-Trinidadian ethnicity.
The enigmatic Williams and his policies may have come in for their share of picong (best of all the variations to Trinidad and Tobago’s official motto, “Together we aspire, together we achieve”: Together we perspire, together we conceive, or Together we conspire, together we deceive), but the celebration of Williams’s intellect and his representation of the “folk” prevailed. Against this current, Rohlehr identifies two of the Doctor’s less laudatory bequests. One is the patron-client syndrome, where “every greed and race has learned to demand of the regime in office its ‘piece of the action’ and to view every other creed and race as a rival in the competition for space and spoils”, playing on the lines from the national anthem that allude to some notion of ethnic equality. The other he refers to as “adhocracy”, that is, the random and often pointless creation of state departments and units to handle specific interests — in this instance, culture — that may overlap with, replicate, infringe upon, or otherwise frustrate the activities of already existing units. “Adhocracy” and “every greed and race”? Perhaps Professor Rohlehr’s real talent is being frittered away on the wrong side of the calypso discourse.
Like politics, sexuality and the construction and deconstruction of gender have always been predominant themes in calypso. In Calypso and Society, Rohlehr offered a detailed analysis of the tensions, prejudices, and predilections of male-female relations in their many permutations (young/old, rich/poor, inter-racial, inter-religious, inter-species). In Scuffling, he separates masculinity and femininity and considers their very divergent evolutions. In the ominously titled essay “Towards and Then Beyond a Balance of Terror”, Rohlehr examines cultures of misogyny and the series of revenge-fantasy calypsos that have begun to respond to the violence and degradation to which women are subjected. Far more eloquently than any political campaigner or minister of security has ever been able to articulate it, this essay understands the powerlessness and fear, not just of women, but of a society increasingly terrorised by crime.
The calypsos described, seeking justice through the torture and humiliation of criminals, are born, Rohlehr says, “out of the belief that the traditional agencies of justice and equity had failed or proven inadequate to contain crime and violence. There was a profound sense of foolishness and dotishness pervading the corridors of power; a feeling that no one was in charge and that things had gone out of control.” An admirable summary of national sentiment at a time when the citizenry was supposed to be reassured of their safety by increased numbers of police bicycle-patrols and comforted by the fact that the rise in murders was attributable merely to crimes of passion. While these responses or retaliations are directed, for the most part, at sexual offenders and domestic infractors, the essay also looks at the manipulation of race and sexuality by politicos for the furtherance of their own divisive agendas: for example, the batch of “Hulsie” calypsos in 1994 and 1995, denouncing Chaguanas MP Hulsie Bhaggan’s claim that African men were undertaking an “organised assault . . . to humiliate Indian women”, and the vigilante groups that she encouraged to deal with the situation.
Surprisingly, what is not addressed in this essay is the flourishing of aggressive attitudes towards women that are increasingly to be found in calypso, in keeping, no doubt, with international music trends.
Rohlehr’s commentaries on social strains — political issues, gender issues, ideas of patriotism — are important. The author shares with the calypsonian the job of holding up an image of ourselves for us to contemplate. It is an image that we may deny, deride, or embrace, just as the calypsonian may choose to operate in any of those modes. There is, however, a task that cannot be (or has not yet been) adequately handled by the calypsonian that this collection has managed: a well-reasoned assessment of the major trends in the music over the past 40 years, and a sense of where it is going.
In the essay “We Getting the Kaiso We Deserve”, Rohlehr situates the discussion of innovations in calypso and soca in style and rhythm — more often than not considered deterioration — in the context of increased commercialisation and globalisation. (Mostly, Rohlehr deals with features of rhythm and melody peripherally. A logocentric study, Scuffling resembles its predecessor in its limited treatment of the music in the music, and its discussions of soca suffer most from this lack.) Every year, there are more songs of which only a handful will make it to the frenetic fetes. The competition, always fierce, has now given the local market “all of the features of primitive capitalism. It is a grim survivalist business which feeds on energy.” What is called for, then, is a composition that is ever-faster, ever-louder, packaged and priced to go. The “command” calypsos, in which partiers are instructed to [choice of verb] while waving their [choice of apparel or other swayable accoutrement] adds to the crowds’ zombified fervour.
One might be willing to admit this as a legitimate sub-genre if it weren’t threatening to take over the entire industry. (Country and western line-dancing also features instructions issued by the singer; happily, the Americans seem to have contained it and therefore arrested its spread.) Whether “command” calypsos come in the form of soca, ragga soca, chutney soca, or any other hybridised form, the argument that they are not calypso only proves that the music is still very much in the process of defining and redefining itself. Our greatest mistake would be to attempt premature judgement, to try too soon to categorise and vilify the changes that are happening. The Mighty Sparrow, it was thought fifty years ago, was entirely responsible for the terrible changes then being wrought on the music. Not a bad thing for the Machel Montanos of this generation to keep in mind.
“Calypso Reinvents Itself” is the penultimate essay in Scuffling. Here Rohlehr takes the measure and shape of things in the past four decades. Fourteen years ago, I could have recommended listening to David Rudder’s 1987 hit “Calypso Music” if you did not feel equal to devoting your energies to the full length of Calypso and Society. There is no equivalent song encapsulating the art-form’s more recent evolution, but in “Calypso Reinvents Itself” Rohlehr sums up the last forty years with great economy and intellectual dexterity. He takes on the soca vs calypso question and isolates the period in which soca became clearly distinct from its root traditions. He looks at party music in general, and considers the effect of Baptist and Orisha influences.
In his overview of the 1980s, he locates Blue Boy at one end of things, Rudder, Chris “Tambu” Herbert, and Charlie’s Roots at the other, with Shadow and Arrow in the middle. This imagined plane, with these artistes in these positions, will prove a defining moment in the history of calypso. We can already see the inheritors of Blue Boy (who became Superblue at the end of the 80s) in the soca machines of the mid-90s to the present, the fast, brassy, glammed-up bands from Trinidad and Barbados. We await the appearance of Rudder’s heirs, and dread that Shadow, that inimitable force of darkness and deep bass, may have none.
Unlike in Calypso and Society, Rohlehr makes no promises for future volumes, but “Calypso Reinvents Itself” is an essay that wants to be a book. It feels a little like a handing over. The author, having graciously pointed in the many directions that research is still lacking, is extending the invitation for new voices to enter the conversation.
– Anu Lakhan
