Grenadian Culture - The People Wants to Get Up
Kolmes, Jo-Ann
The Grenada of the New Jewel Movement is in cultural upheaval. Grenadians have begun to examine and to counter both the cultural remains of colonial days and the relentless cultural pressure...
...Whether it is the billboard saying "Women Step Forward" or the painting of Grenadian martyrs on a street wall in Gouyave, there is something palpable happening...
...With the political changes came a musical convulsion...
...The child doesn't get very far into the story before the teacher interrupts to supply the "proper English" terminology...
...George Peters was crowned calypso king in Grenada's 1980 Carnival for his song "Destabilizers...
...They rely on small portable cameras: "We can take the cameras to the people rather than have them walk into an imposing studio...
...No More Charlie's Angels One of the main groups involved in this sorting is Television Free Grenada...
...They were identifying with the struggles in Africa...
...On stage, he has presence...
...We showed them the news plus a movie...
...This is part of our psyche...
...Resistance to it did not begin, of course, with the New Jewel Movement in Grenada...
...When he walks through a crowd at a rally, one senses an appreciative rustle...
...We are trying to teach teachers to be respectful of creole, not to squash the children and make them quiet," says Merle Hodge, one of the main coordinators of the project...
...The slave first and later the black people living under the colonial system may have been outwardly Christian...
...Ross is the administrative coordinator in the Department of Culture of the People's Revolutionary Government...
...Ross remembers his secondary school years in the early seventies: "Kids were reading [Stokely] Carmichael, Malcolm X, Angela Davis...
...Now people come up to him and show him what they have written...
...We look at calypso as a messenger of the people, getting the information of the day, putting it into song and giving it back...
...What must be started, as Amilcar Cabral, one of the founders of the liberation movements in the African Portuguese colonies, said in a 1972 speech entitled "The Role of Culture in the Liberation Struggle," is a sorting out of the positive and negative elements in a culture...
...The police band dutifully produced tunes imported from England, he recounts...
...More than that, the people's cultural expressions were now encouraged...
...His poetry is direct, unambiguous, sometimes angry...
...Gairy turned to the voodoo-like tradition of obeah in his last years as a desperate way to gain some support among the older people of the island-and perhaps as a way to soothe his own fears...
...George's...
...The Black Caribbean has been deprived of dignity and has always been in search of that," says Jacob Ross-a poet, linguist, cultural anthropologist and now, with some frustration, an administrator...
...His band is, amazingly, the police band...
...Rastafarianism was one of the movements that had profound symbolic and psychological impact in Grenada...
...Television Free Grenada uses three-quarter-inch industrial equipment...
...They loved it...
...Then their repertoire expanded to include U.S...
...The cultural domination by the United States is seen in the blond smiling faces of Charlie's Angels on the T-shirt of a black man...
...Grenadians resent being told what should be going on here...
...NISTEP is trying to introduce classroom teachers to the structures of creole so that they can recognize areas of interference with English...
...To begin nation-building we must restore our pride...
...She gives an example of television at its best...
...We en want no fight, we en want no war just leave we alone let we build we own but if they continue to destabilize tell them is fire, fire, fire...
...We have to reconstruct the 38 psyche of our people," says Jacob Ross...
...the rest we retained for ourselves...
...With the New Jewel Movement, the destroying of the drums was over...
...Slaves had to learn mechanisms to live through that hell...
...We want to play our own...
...There is no tradition of poetry in Grenada, he says...
...It was on the news, but the people of that community couldn't see it because no one had a television set...
...The role of Grenada's new television, Baly continues, is to preserve traditional Grenadian culture, to Support for change comes from all age gr "allow Grenadians to speak for themselves, and to educate...
...Creole in school was definitely not acceptable...
...This is fundamental...
...Now, however, creole is beginning to be encouraged in the classroom and English treated as a second language...
...For 15 months, they withstood attacks from the British, who had regained possession of Grenada in the Treaty of Versailles...
...Now we almost don't want to play classical music...
...Eric Gairy sensed the power of the drums...
...Grandfather's story was in creole, so the child's retelling is in creole...
...He started writing in 1978, at the age of 13, inspired by an anti-Gairy cultural group and by the progressive lyrics in reggae...
...Of course, calypso has long been a political statement set to music...
...We learned just enough to communicate...
...At times an experience with a person prompts me-to write, or the experience of a people...
...The baggage of colonial days is seen in a teacher's contempt for a youngster's creole or in the stoical sweating of a man properly wearing a suit in 850 stickiness...
...One of the clearest voices now speaking openly for the Grenadian experience is poet Garvin Nantambu...
...This is a cultural issue: we have to begin looking inwards, not outwards...
...Grenadians have begun to examine and to counter both the cultural remains of colonial days and the relentless cultural pressure from the United States...
...Or they recommend a mobile unit that is too large to maneuver the roads...
...George Peters SeptlOct 1962 37update update update update for the capital, St...
...You can hear it or see it in the poetry, in the calypso, in dance or in drama...
...But something new has also begun...
...In conversation Ross refers often to Walter Rodney, the Guyanese historian and Marxist assassinated in 1980...
...The programs came from the United States and, to a lesser extent, from Great Britain...
...The television transmitter is in Gairy's old obeah room, the walls still soot-stained from offering candles...
...His own popularity started after he had read a few of his poems at public meetings...
...The rebellion of the Freedom Fighters was waged jointly by the French and free blacks...
...Grenadians want to hear from Grenadians...
...The big network advisers promote the $90,000 cameras "which can't go out into the bush where the people are...
...The poetry, the music and the drumming that had been clandestine moved out into the open...
...The other was the Black Power movement...
...Granted, it originated in the United States, says Ross, but it found fertile ground in the Caribbean...
...The usual pattern when a developing country wants to set up a television system is that it turns to the big systems in the United States, Germany or France, she explains...
...Mighty Sparrow, born in Grenada, went to Trinidad to make his politically satirical music...
...And the same held true for religion...
...Bypassing Grenadian Music The Grenadian experience also comes through, not surprisingly, in calypso...
...The youngster stands up in class to retell Grandfather's story from the night before...
...What is happening now carries on from the Fedon Rebellion (1795-96), from Rastafarianism and from the Black Power movement...
...Jacob Ross is very much a symbol of New Jewel Grenada: highly talented, university educated abroad, and running 14 hours a day on nervous energy and political excitement...
...So many times we try to strive but obstacles just seems to rise for many years we had to scrunt for a meal and place to live well where were they to help we in them days of need no one took heed but now as the country start to strive every Tom, Dick, and Harry want to rule we life...
...For Grenada, one of the heroes of rebellion is Julien Fedon...
...They would learn the speeches of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X and recite them to drums...
...Our history is full of rebellion and of flight...
...But it is the ordinary Grenadians-office workers, teachers, accountants, farmers, students, unemployed young people-who are carrying the surge forward...
...The process Survivor speaks about is happening in popular theater, in dance, in the visual arts...
...His poetry comes from everyday living...
...Some news media in the area find great pleasure in propaganda they always spreading all sorts of bad rumors about Grenada but when it comes to speaking about the truth, they were mute but we are a united one a model to the rest of the Caribbean...
...Grenadians are voicing their anger at past domination and are piecing together a vision of the future they want...
...But its strength has been in Trinidad...
...Creole too was a form of rebellion, Ross adds...
...They were watching "Charlie's Angels" or "The Odd Couple...
...They get up tight cause we unite they want to stir us up to fight those imperialist puppets wants to see us fall back to the dogs but we are strong and no how they could keep us down, down on the ground and though some ah we may fight and die Grenada will rise no matter what they try...
...He talks about the changes in the band's music as a symbol of the changes in Grenada...
...They have outfitted the complete system for less than the cost ":ups...
...We rebelled against the language of our masters...
...Before Television Free Grenada, says Elaine Baly, until recently director of television, Grenadians watched only rebroadcasts from Trinidad or Barbados...
...It would be impossible to unbraid all the historical strands that now make up Grenada and neatly label them colonial, neocolonial and voila, Grenadian...
...When Grenadians recount schoolday stories, one prototypical memory comes up again and again...
...I write about the global struggle against the common enemy...
...Ironically and inspirationally it is located at Sans Souci-the former residence of Eric Gairy, the labor leader turned dictator overthrown in 1979...
...Rodney said that the greatest miracle is the survival of the Caribbean man-because he was in a system designed to kill...
...And they idolize violence...
...The British responded by sending out a fleet surrounding Fedon's camps, and finally defeated the exhausted rebels...
...programs are very imperialist in outlook, and some of them are very racist," Baly says...
...Many people were looking for the same thing in Rastafarianism...
...He has been with the police force for eight years-with an interruption when he was kicked out for his outspokenness during the worst of the Gairy repression, to when he was rehired by the PRG...
...We see culture as a tool for liberation-liberation doesn't just come with the gun, but with the understanding of self...
...Their verses are simple, but it is beautiful-they are trying to reflect their ordinary way of life...
...they want to do this again...
...Many Grenadians now tell of police crashing into rooms or seizing upon groups in the streets to destroy the drums...
...I find that U.S...
...Survivor put it simply: "In culture, the people wants to get up...
...The change is coming through a national teacher education project (NISTEP...
...Now Grenada listens to "Innocent Blood," "Struggle for Freedom," and "Blackman See Yourself...
...Call it revolutionary culture...
...Fedon and the rebels gained control of the entire island except Destabilizers They stirring up all kinds of strife trying to make man lose their life man we en tell them how to run their own affairs or their government but they so fresh to tell we just what we need and what friends to keep but they never want to realize it is we are the ones who fighting to survive...
...We didn't even think we were bypassing the music of our people...
...The government is helping by sponsoring exchanges, exhibitions, performances and publications...
...One of the crucial tasks of television is to let people express their opinions about whatever is going on here politically, socially, culturally or economically...
...E 0, 2e NACLA Report 36update update update update of one commercial camera...
...The community of Birch Grove completed its community center, and television went out to cover it...
...But shango and obeah, forms of spiritual beliefs brought from Africa, were very alive beneath the surface...
...The fact that a television crew was able to cover the Birch Grove event at all is because of Elaine Baly's philosophy of appropriate technology...
...A System Designed To Kill Caribbean self-contempt for language, culture and blackness is the ideological legacy of slavery, colonialism and neo-colonialism...
...It inspires me to write...
...pop tunes, "but we still didn't see our music...
...It's a new way of expressing ourselves, and it is gaining momentum...
...He will undoubtedly become a folk hero or cultural star...
...His calypso name is Survivor, "because I lived to see the revolution...
...NISTEP's goal too is to convince teachers to give creole a respected place in the language arts curriculum-especially in drama, poetry and story-telling...
...And since language is a carrier of culture, the message to the children was clear: their culture was not acceptable...
...English As A 2nd Language Cultural modification or control has been exercised in Grenada for years through the system of education...
...The Power of the Drums "We needed something to believe in and hold onto," Jacob Ross stresses...
...The emphasis is very much on the average Grenadian, the people on the street...
...So we organized an evening, let everybody know, and took a television monitor out there...
Vol. 16 • September 1982 • No. 5
