Dr. Hilary Brown:
Can the Arts Survive
Change? - A Response
This keynote address was delivered on June 13, 2001 at ISPA's International Congress in Sydney, Australia.
These remarks were in response to a prior presentation by Pat Kane entitled "Can the Arts Survive Change?"
Warm greetings from Jamaica and the Caribbean to you all. Let me say how pleased I am to join you for your 15th Congress and I would like to say a big thank-you to Justin Macdonnell and the team of organizers for affording me the opportunity to address such a distinguished and diverse company of managers in the performing arts from around the world.
Overview of the CARIFORUM Cultural
Centres Project
The CARIFORUM Cultural Centres Programme is a regional project of CARIFORUM
governments and the European Union, which has established offices in Jamaica,
Trinidad and Tobago, the Dominican Republic, and Barbados, as a first
phase in the creation of a network of CARIFORUM Cultural Centres. CARIFORUM
is comprised of 15 Caribbean countries that are signatories to the Lome
IV Convention, through which agreement grant funds are disbursed for projects
in the Caribbean. The 15 countries include the four language groups in
the region (French, Spanish, Dutch and English): Haiti, Dominican Republic,
Suriname, Antigua & Barbuda, The Bahamas, Belize, Dominica, Jamaica,
Grenada, Guyana, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Lucia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines,
Barbados, Trinidad & Tobago.
The objectives of the project are to promote CARIFORUM cultural integration, cultural identities, exchanges, and awareness in the region. The project also seeks to promote the development of Caribbean cultural industries in film, music, literature, fashion, art and craft, the visual and performing arts, and to bring about greater international awareness of Caribbean cultural forms. The project was designed to address the absence of adequate historical and cultural records, the inadequacy of training for cultural administrators and the constraints of language in the region.
The focus of my presentation today however, is on the question of how international changes - changes that arise from rapid innovations in technology, particularly in the technologies of media and communication, changes that arise from the greater mobility of labour, capital and images, the global expansion in the market economy, and of particular interest to us all, changes as a result of the commodification of cultural manifestations - all better known by the buzz word "globalisation," how these changes affect the way in which we work at the national and regional level, what concerns us, and what opportunities it may present.
Like everywhere else in the world, we in the Caribbean are very concerned about the implications of these trends. We are concerned about the relationship between cultural vitality and economic interests, about the tension between identity as defined by the nation-state as against how that is appropriated or transformed in the global market. We are concerned about which voices are heard, and which are silenced by the trends unfolding. We are concerned whether their will be greater homogenization of the world, epitomized for example in the "McDonaldization" of the world, or whether the global trends will allow for the proliferation of difference, where more voices, outlooks, values, and interests will be accessible.
In spite of our small size, the Caribbean has been a significant contributor to world culture. Jamaica has only 2.5 million people, the English-speaking Caribbean has 5 million and the wider English, French, Dutch, and Spanish-speaking Caribbean has approximately 40-50 million people. We are a diverse people but with common historical experiences. A region that was initially inhabited by indigenous Amerindian people who were almost obliterated by the colonization process of several European powers. People were brought to the Caribbean from Africa, Asia, and Europe (mostly against their will) to facilitate the development of a new economy for European mercantilist expansion, but out of that experience, not only a new economy emerged, but a new cultural space also developed.
Jamaica gave birth to Rastafarianism, an apocalyptic, Africa-centred perspective and religion, which eschews, Western ideals and ideologies. Rastafarian idioms in language, dreadlocks, its identifying red, green and gold colours, and the symbol of the lion have been appropriated by many around the globe. Most significantly, reggae music, one of the main vehicles for the amplification of Rastafarian philosophy, is now one of Jamaica's most distinctive, defining, and indigenous cultural manifestations given to the world. And we see similar trends in the calypso and soca music of the Eastern Caribbean countries like Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados, Antigua, and St. Lucia; and in the zouk and cadence music of Dominica, Haiti, Martinique, and Guadelope; and in merenge, salsa, and son from Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico.
We see where Bob Marley, a man from humble beginnings and poor circumstances has risen to international pop icon, is unquestionably the most famous Jamaican, and whose name recognition rivals that of any United States, British, or South African leader. Marley's Exodus album was named "Album of the Century" by Time Magazine; Bob was named "Songwriter of the Century" and his tremendously popular "One Love" named "Song of the Century" by the BBC.
The Caribbean is also the home of many other greats in the literary and performing arts - writers such as Jamaica's Claude MacKay; Trinidad's V.S Naipaul and C. L. R. James; St. Lucia's Nobel Laureate for Literature in 1993 - Derek Walcott. Trinidad also gave the world the only acoustic musical instrument to be developed in the 20th century - the steel pan, and one of Trinidad's greatest cultural manifestations in the form of carnival has been exported to metropolitan centers in the United States, Canada, and Europe, which have become the largest street festivals to be found in Toronto, New York, and Nottinghill at present.
Those of us in the wonderful world of cricket are undoubtedly aware of the fortunes (and sometimes misfortunes) of the West Indian cricket team. Jamaica's Reggae Boyz made their debut in fine style in the World Cup in France in 1998, the first English-speaking Caribbean country to do so, and the outstanding performance of the region's athletes such as Jamaica's Merlene Ottey and Donald Quarrie; Trinidad's Ato Bolden; and Barbados' Obadele in international games - as recently as the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games, is well known.
In reflecting more critically on these Caribbean cultural manifestations, Pat Kane's useful and provocative concept of the "play ethic" and contemporary Caribbean writer, poet, and University professor, Kwame Dawes' concept of the "reggae aesthetic" are instructive. Dawes in the book Natural Mysticism: Towards a new reggae aesthetic, (Leeds, England: Peepal Tree Press, 1999) heralds reggae's arrival as a pivotal and defining historical moment in the evolution of a West Indian aesthetic, in a distinctly post-colonial framework. His exploration of this reggae aesthetic is his quest for a "voice" that will tell Jamaican/ Caribbean stories in a language and idiom that is our own, rather than in the Western literary mode.
Dawes is seeking an aesthetic in film, music, dance, literature, poetry, sculpture, and painting, that will "express the people's collective psyche and the connection of their energies to the forces of history." One that "creates a narrative out of reggae archetypes and motifs, in poetic sublimation, that gives dimension to the landscape of a country, and the pulse of a people, that is at once radical, highly localized, but internationally accessible." I think Bob Marley's work epitomizes this phenomenon.
And thus we cannot merely dismiss popular culture in a phrase as "low culture" as opposed to "high culture," as being less complex, because it is the expression of a very profound and complex ideological, historical, and contemporary manifestation of the human condition. We could expand this concept of the reggae aesthetic in the Caribbean context to include a "calypso" and "carnival aesthetic," which is also equally evident in the writings of many Caribbean authors. And as such in many ways, I can see the play ethic, the carnival and reggae aesthetic in operation in the Caribbean world view.
In this regard, I think the "more developed" or "First World" countries have a lot to learn from the "developing countries." And let me say that the typology of First, Second, and Third World is one that I reject, and like the concept of the "work ethic," is a concept that has done its time and is now redundant. Andre Gunder Frank, one of the renowned Latin American Dependency School Economists, I think has given a better explanation of the way the world capitalist system operates. He argues that there is a capitalist corps in every country in the world, a group of elites and corporate executives who are committed to world capitalism - this is the only way that capitalism could survive as the dominant economic system. The capitalist/elitist corps in different countries are more similar to each other - in their values and taste, in what they consume, in where they vacation - than to their own nationals who are poor or working class citizens. In this sense, there is a First, Second, and Third World in every country.
In some ways, we in the Caribbean could be said to live in a "carnival reality," where the lines between serious and fun are blurred, as in the social commentary that characterizes the calypso art form; where the traditional and the modern merge, as in the creation of mas'(masquerade) for carnival parades; where creativity is highly valued in our societies, as is the ability to sing, dance, tell stories, and create witty lyrics - highly valued, though taken for granted.
The play ethic is epitomized in the words of a University of the West Indies Professor and colleague of mine (Brian Meeks) who once said: "You know, buying a house, starting a family, and having a party to invite your friends over - you can't have one without the other…." I think this speaks clearly to the nature of the West Indian psyche.
The play ethic is also epitomized in the legendary work of the "The Grand Master" Lord Kitchener, a leading exponent of the Trinidadian calypso art form who wrote a popular song for carnival a few years ago entitled : "Don't ask me to work for carnival." This tells the story of a factory worker telling his boss that he is prepared to work any day of the year, but not on carnival day. The chorus goes:
Ah working Ash Wednesday,
ah working Good Friday,
Ah working Christmas Day, ah working New Year's Day,
But from jouvay morning 2 o'clock,
Don't ask me to work for carnival….
(Jouvay refers to the official start of the 2-day street theatre and party just before Ash Wednesday which begins a 2:00am on Monday morning - a French Creole word meaning "day break").
Finally, I think the play ethic is evident in the way our Prime Minister is out of office and on the cricket grounds if a team member is about to break a world record, and certainly, we would interrupt the corporate board meeting for the cricket scores.
I say all of this to say that the Caribbean is therefore a region that produces culture well and produces it in spite of itself. In spite of the fact that there are no philanthropic foundations for culture to be found in the region. In spite of the fact that government support for the arts and culture is very limited - there is certainly no concept of a National Endowment for the Arts. In spite of the fact that there is no theatre with state of the art facilities that can seat more than 1,000 people in any English-speaking Caribbean country - nothing like the world famous Sydney Opera House, nor any outdoor venue of the calibre of Wolf Trap in Washington, DC, for festivals, in spite of our great climate and plethora of cultural manifestations. Yet we have many festivals - Reggae Sunsplash and Reggae Sumfest in Jamaica, Carnival in Trinidad, St. Lucia Jazz Festival, St. Kitts Music Festival, Cuban Festival of Fire, and the Merenge Festival in the Dominican Republic.
In this way, the Caribbean can be said to have gone "beyond the boundaries, " beyond the physical and the metaphorical, conceptual or real boundaries of size, facilities, and resources, boundaries of myopic vision and poor leadership, geographic and cultural boundaries, to project ourselves on our own terms, to negotiate our own cultural space in the international arena.
It is in fact in the arena of popular culture that the global power relations may be constantly defined and redefined. It is where the powerless and virtually invisible groups have a voice, where the Bob Marleys, and Peter Toshs, have their say, where they define the parameters of the discourse, where the traditional flow from so called more to less developed countries can be reversed in the outward flow of music, art, craft, and literature, to tell their story.
Many of you gathered here today, manage some of the most reputable facilities and festivals of the performing arts. You therefore have a say in determining who is seen and who is invisible. You have a say in defining what is art, what is creativity, what is outstanding, and what deserves our attention. Today I would like you reflect on who you present. While not ignoring the fact that you may have a particular mandate or mission, the question is do you allow your audiences access to the diverse cultures and subcultures that surround us or is access restricted? Are you a gatekeeper of the "classics" or do you allow synergies of old and new, of classical and popular, of traditional and modern, of various continents, ethnicities, and cultures to flourish?
The challenge facing us all is how separately and collectively we will engage the trends in globalization, strip away the myth of cultural homogenization, and ensure that the many expressions that contribute to our various cultural identities find their rightful place. Identity we know, is not static, it is a complex and fluid state of being that is perpetually in a paradoxical state of stasis and change, appropriating and re-interpreting new influences and idioms. So we don't need to close off the channels, but we need to strengthen from within.
We also know that identity is created through discourse, through the articulation of who we think we are and what we represent. Therefore the control of the discourse on identity is important - who names the world? Who defines what is high art and what belongs in the best museums? Who called some people Third World or black or exotic, native, Hispanic, Afro-American, working class or inner city? And how do those peoples go about exploding and re-defining those stereotypes to project how they see themselves, because as long as they use those terms, they accept the perspective of being "other," they accept an ideological position that renders them second class.
We also know that identity is constructed through an acknowledgement of similarity and difference, by taking into account the many ethnicities and cultures, values and perspectives that are inevitably present in any culture. We are at a crossroads in the development of civilization where it is very clear that all we will have in the present millennium to distinguish ourselves is our culture and our cultural manifestations.
I close quoting Jamaican poet, H. D. Carberry who I was exposed to at a very early age, who helped me to understand that although there are many commonalities in the human experience, our environment and our culture has peculiarities that help to define who we are and the way we see the world. He writes in a poem entitled "Nature":
We have neither summer nor
winter, neither autumn nor spring.
We have instead the days when the gold sun shines on the lush
green canefields magnificently!
The days when the rain beats
like bullets on the roof,
And there is no sound but the swish of water in the gullies,
And trees struggling in the high Jamaica winds.
Then there are the days when
the leaves fall off guango trees and
And reaped canefields lie bare and fallow in the sun.
But best of all, are the days
when the mango and logwood blossoms,
And the air is filled the sound of bees and the scent of honey.
When the buttercups have paved the earth with yellow stars and beauty
comes suddenly, and the rains have gone.
Thank you.
BIOGRAPHY
Dr. Hilary Brown is the project co-ordinator of the Cariforum Cultural
Centre in Jamaica. Prior to her current assignment, Dr. Brown served as
Information Attaché at the Embassy of Jamaica, Washington for three
years, and has previously been a member of the teaching staff of the Caribbean
Institute of Media and Communication (CARIMAC), University of the West
Indies. Dr. Brown has traveled extensively in the Caribbean as a researcher
for regional and international organizations including UNESCO, CARICOM,
and the Fredrich Ebert Foundation. She obtained a doctoral degree in International
Communications at Temple University in Philadelphia. She has also presented
papers on Caribbean music, the effect of foreign media on the Caribbean,
and the development of Caribbean cultural industries.
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