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ADDRESS: The Arts and Post Colonial Certitude

The role of the arts in general and the dramatic arts in particular in post-colonialism elevates Jamaica and the rest of the English-speaking Caribbean to the status of "best case scenario". For the experience of this country and region over the past half a century endorses the notion of the centrality of the exercise of the creative imagination, of which artistic products are an iconic result, in both nation building and the quest for identity and cultural certitude. The claim to such centrality becomes even more marked when in a globalised world the efforts at cultural homogenization drives would-be victims tenanting the Two Thirds World to zones of comfort in search of particularity, specificity of life-experiences and existence and that sense of self and society which the struggle against colonial subjugation promised in any case. It is no surprise, then, that we in this part of the world arguably have more artists per square inch than is probably good for us. From the ancestral Festival Arts of masquerade or jonkonnu (strong in Jamaica, Belize on the Central American mainland, the Bahamas and Bermuda) through pre-Lenten Carnival whose locale remains Trinidad reaching out to the rest of the Eastern Caribbean and the Caribbean diaspora in Toronto, Brooklyn, Miami, and London, to Hosay the East Indian Hindu observance of a Muslim commemoration morphed into a major Caribbean festival art extant in Trinidad, Jamaica and Guyana - all of these speak to the heritage (tangible and intangible) that has been bequeathed to the region by forebears who found solace, resilience and renewal in masking, metaphor and myth. They all provided a route to redemption and certitude in coping with the obscenities of slavery, indentureship and the humiliation and dehumanization which those socio-economic systems imposed on hundreds of thousands severed from ancestral hearths - most of them involuntarily - to plough the fields and scatter what others were to regard as "good seeds" on the land. The intensification of such transgressions informing relations between masters and servants came, albeit unintentionally, with colonialism presided over by gubernatorial viceroys who embodied stubborn and lasting notions of high culture versus low culture, superior versus inferior, Caucasian versus Others and Europe over Africa in particular, with the second category in each binary equation relegated to inferior status. So our art, as in painting, had to be "primitive"; our music (as Derek Walcott once said) had to be without depth because it was created for us to enjoy; our drama to be minstrel farces; our languages creole aberrations to the norm of Standard English; our dance lascivious and groin centred; and our skin colour indicative of what was described as being the result of having groin centred; and our skin colour indicative of what was described as being the result of having been Overcooked in the womb.' On this last there were, of course, medium rare and even rare depending on the amount of melanin in the epidermis. Such were the burdens that colonials like us had to bear. Small wonder that those who were fighting for self-determination in the years preceding actual Independence tackled with resolute vigour such misconceptions of human existence. If individuals led the way in taking the arts on the road in quest of certitude, the collective consciousness had to be sensitized to the task. Norman Washington Manley, Jamaica's founding father and self-government advocate was the first political leader in the English-speaking Caribbean to give to arts-and-culture a portfolio realizing the systemic denigration of things African and the force of the Eurocentrism which frustrated native expressions and threatened the quest for that cultural certitude among the majority. As far back as 1939 he is recorded as saying: "The immediate past has attempted to destroy the influence of the glory that is Africa; it has attempted to make us condemn and mistrust the vitality, vigour, the rhythmic emotionalism that we get from our African ancestors. …