Calypso Drift

By Steinberg Henry

Steinberg Henry has composed for us this magical island adventure into song. It is made up of 14 segments and 119 chapters integrating leaps in consciousness, methods and disciplines with skill surprising.
Calypso Drift passes by way of an island Parliament, Dread/Rastafari, memorable black-sand beaches, religious systems, the Kwyl language business, high-school learning remembrances, a touch of Kalinago sensibility and, American song selections on Caribbean radio in the 70s and 80s.
The text leaps to record seven years of Dominican Calypso lyrics, contributing in the process to archiving an islands history. Calypso Drift implores us to listen again to warnings of our song-poets.
This is a book for lovers of Calypso globally, one for culture enthusiasts. Those embracing entertainment education, history and the arts in general should find its methods provocative. Students in the natural and social sciences can comfortably uncover themselves herein. And most of all, musicians, song-writers, composers and performers of Calypso find space in its consuming fire. Drift, globality is inside!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jan 16, 2014
• ISBN: 9781493154661

Steinberg Henry

Steinberg Henry is originally from Waitukubuli, present-day Dominica. Currently, he resides just outside Atlanta, a city known for its music history. He is father, passionate communicologist drawn to entertainment education, healing arts and philosophy. By dint of a visual difference, he’s fast becoming advocate for persons with disabilities. Calypso Drift is his third work, the other two being As She Returns (2009 -- second edition due in 2014) and An Unassuming Love (2011). Cover Concept: Steinberg Henry Photograph: Greg John Baptiste Sketches: Darius Ettiene Sketch Management: G Seteira Henry & Z Colberg Henry

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Copyright © 2014 by Steinberg Henry.

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Library of Congress Control Number:   2013922902

ISBN:      Hardcover      978-1-4931-5465-4

                Softcover       978-1-4931-5464-7

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Rev. date: 01/04/2014

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

A Note

SEGMENT ONE

Chapter 1   This Is America

Chapter 2   The Memory Exercise

Chapter 3   Codrington College, Barbados

Chapter 4   Port Royal Radio Feature, Caribbean Institute of Media and Communication, History My Love

Chapter 5   Queen Elizabeth Visits, My Royal Father

Chapter 6   The Day I Returned, Learning Enthusiasts, Expunged from the Festival

Chapter 7   Warped and Crooked Men, Good Times

Chapter 8   Fire Spit Calypso

Chapter 9   Grace on Greyhound’s Deck, Steel

SEGMENT TWO

Chapter 10   Parliament, Rastafarians/Dreads Languaging

Chapter 11   A Word on Method

Chapter 12   Organic Ital Food, Irie, Consciousness

Chapter 13   Dread Ascends

Chapter 14   Intellectuals and Activists

Chapter 15   Derek, Tumba, Blows, Disciple Caesar, Bruney

Chapter 16   Malika

Chapter 17   World Nutrition Day, Andrew Royer

Chapter 18   Land Distribution, Beach Control Ordinance

Chapter 19   Mero Beach, Pleasures of My Known Sister

SEGMENT THREE

Chapter 20   Rasta and Resistance

Chapter 21   Caribbean Conference of Churches, Diocese of Roseau

Chapter 22   My Methodist Pastors, Descartes, the Move Factor

Chapter 23   Anglican Flock, Evangelical and Rastafarian Advocacy

Chapter 24   Pentecostals, Strange Tongues

Chapter 25   Nasio Fontaine’s Twelve Tribes, Cadence-Lypso Sings Africa, Rev. William Watty and Creole (Kwéyòl)

SEGMENT FOUR

Chapter 26   Reflections on My High School, Conteurs (Storytellers), Kwéyòl Advocates

Chapter 27   Little Black Boy, the Body

Chapter 28   Historic Separation—Boys of Science and Us of Art

Chapter 29   Speak Brother Speak, Cissie Boyd-Caudeiron, Alwin Bully’s Theater Troupe, Fred Henry on China

Chapter 30   Kalinago Business

SEGMENT FIVE

Chapter 31   Michael Jackson in Dominica, American Culture Influences

Chapter 32   DBS Broadcasters, Songs We Played,

Chapter 33   American Singers from the Soul, Beloved Joan

Chapter 34   Caribbean’s Best Song Rishis

Chapter 35   Swinging Stars

Chapter 36   Dominica’s Music Specificity

Chapter 37   Selections on a Dominican Summer Afternoon

Chapter 38   Music Sustainability Sensibility

Chapter 39   Mango Lesson, Cells

SEGMENT SIX

Chapter 40   Water Calypsos, Walter Rodney, William Demas

Chapter 41   Livingstone Spencer Cassell, Haiti, Jamaica, And Delezza

Chapter 42   Roland Spider James

Chapter 43   China’s Three Gorges, Dominica-China Friendship

Chapter 44   Taiwan’s Pleasure, Chinese Calypso

Chapter 45   The Tradewinds and Wong Ping, Research Into Black-size Business, Drum Send-off

Chapter 46   Two Is Better Than Too Many, Bois Bandé

Chapter 47   Dr. Philip Potter, Dominica’s Educated Silent

Chapter 48   Uncovering a Curse

Chapter 49   Cultural Performances Unrecognized as Integral, Mountains Once Obstructions

Chapter 50   Island Culture Continuity, New York: A Recent Arrivant

Chapter 51   Spider Laid to Rest

SEGMENT SEVEN

Chapter 52   Stepping Out on Merrick

Chapter 53   Hucksters My Women, Global

Chapter 54   Village Stories to Tell

Chapter 55   Avondale Jolly, Haitian Market, Reagan and Gorbachev, Creole Interconnectivities

Chapter 56   Creole Day

Chapter 57   Glimpses of Freedom Days

Chapter 58   1980s Politics, WCK, First Serenade, Country Booki

SEGMENT EIGHT

Chapter 59   1962–1990 Calypso Kings, Road March Kings

Chapter 60   1991–1992 Lagoom Spirit, Scrunter

Chapter 61   1993 Hurricane, Sour Sour, Yes I, Picky’s Doll

Chapter 62   Positive Women in Politics and Calypso, Juliana Jah Lee Alfred

Chapter 63   1994 Hurricane’s Tiwé Yo, Scrunter’s Hold On

Chapter 64   1995 United Workers Wins, 1996 Hurricane’s One Party State

Chapter 65   1997 De Brakes Maléwé, Pull String, Workers, and Freedom

Chapter 66   1998 Hunter Carib Bacchanal, 1999 De Brakes Keep the Candles Burning, Syle Durand On West Indies Cricket, Queen Vanessa Isles, Ghost and Black Starliner, Hunter One Flag, Hurricane /Wounded Lion

Chapter 67   Roosevelt Douglas, Pierre Charles, Roosevelt Skerrit

Chapter 68   2001 Chess, 2002 Observer, Pawol, Queen Minerve Lewis, 2003 Observer, De Bobb, Wild, Wild West, Dice’s Tarzan and Beyond

Chapter 69   2005 Grammacks New Generation in Brooklyn

Chapter 70   Dame Mary Eugenia Charles Transitions

Chapter 71   Mighty Sparrow in Brooklyn

SEGMENT NINE

Chapter 72   Stone Mountain, Georgia

Chapter 73   2006 Calypso Finalists

Chapter 74   Morne Trois Pitons—the Holy Mountain

Chapter 75   2006 Greyhound Returns Hunter’s Amazing Grace, Observer’s Wretched of the Earth, Dice, the Oracle Et Al

Chapter 76   2006 Daddy Chess, My Ship Metaphor

Chapter 77   Vavalian Thought

Chapter 78   Wiltshire’s Trail, 2007 Calypso: an Archaeology of Sorts

SEGMENT TEN

Chapter 79   Another Enigma in Diasporic Space

Chapter 80   2007 Sandy, Ras Kelly’s Nonappearance, and Alex Bruno

Chapter 81   Atherton Martin

Chapter 82   2007 Rabbit, the Coming Back Factor, Composing in the Diaspora

Chapter 83   2007 Denison Dice Joseph Speaks with Alex Bruno

Chapter 84   Lady from Zion

Chapter 85   2007 Semifinalists

Chapter 86   Maurice Rupert Bishop, Peter Tosh

Chapter 87   Woye Rosita, Nikita, Bird Island

Chapter 88   Note on Standards, Props

SEGMENT ELEVEN

Chapter 89   February 16, 2007—Hugo Chavez Visits Dominica

Chapter 90   2007 Queens

Chapter 91   2007 Leandra Lander Wins and Wins

Chapter 92   February 17, 2007, Saturday—Calypso Finals, Kairi Women

Chapter 93   2007 Monarch Results

Chapter 94   Glimpses of Pat Aaron’s Calypso Vitae

95   2007 The Road, Proversation between Leandra and Hunter

Chapter 96   2007 Ash Wednesday DJ, Ash Wednesday Priests

Chapter 97   Myrtle Bruno

SEGMENT TWELVE

Chapter 98   2008 Reunion Year Launched, Cross at the Morne, Dominica’s Cool Friends

Chapter 99   2008 Eliminations

Chapter 100   2008 Quarterfinals

Chapter 101   2008 Finals, Queen Mara, the Carnivalesque

Chapter 102   2009 Quarterfinals

Chapter 103   February 21, 2009, Saturday—Finals, Gregory Karessa Riviere, Queen Kayan, Sheldon De Professor Alfred

Chapter 104   2010 Quarterfinals, Road March Kings, Karessa’s Dogs

Chapter 105   2010 Queen Marcia

SEGMENT THIRTEEN

Chapter 106   2011 Princess Takenya, Carlyn Xavier, Nicole Rodriguez, Vibration in Junior Calypsonians Names, Queen Jacintha

Chapter 107   March 5, 2011, Finals, Tasha Tasha P Peltier Tim Durand’s King Maker

Chapter 108   2011 Costumed Winners, Grandbay Excels

Chapter 109   2011 Ian Jackson’s Internet Children

Chapter 110   2011 Gina Letang’s Let Children Be Children.

Chapter 111   Jeff Joseph

SEGMENT FOURTEEN

Chapter 112   January 8, 2012, Sunday—Eliminations

Chapter 113   January 21, 2012, Saturday—Quarterfinals

Chapter 114   February 4, 2012, Saturday—Semifinals

Chapter 115   2012 Princesses, Junior Monarchs, Mister Dominica, Miss Teen Dominica, Stardom King, Mas Camp King

Chapter 116   February 17, 2012, Friday—Miss Dominica Pageant

Chapter 117   February 18, 2012, Saturday, Calypso Monarch

Chapter 118   Personal Moments

Chapter 119   Luan to Carissa

For Glendora, Jeanne, Joycelyn, Roberta, and Pearl.

For Zamir, ever so strong as you stretch.

For Malika, my constant friend.

For Sharlyn Massicott, who surfaced and moved in my psyche throughout the writing of this book, though I have not seen Shalyn in years. We must be literary soul mates.

For Vince Henderson and his wife, Brhane A. Haile-Henderson a.k.a. Brexi. We three just loved attending quarterfinals.

For Dominica’s composers and writers who are gone, those living, and those to come.

For Dominica’s calypsonians who are gone, those living, and those to come.

For Dominica’s sound shapers, its musicians at home, and abroad

For the spirit of Fred Alpheus Colberg Henry, my father.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Norman Ency Cyrille, Cleve Hurricane Jean-Jacques, Merlin Wizard St. Hilaire, Levi Super L Loblack, Ian Black Starliner Jackson, Alex King Pawol Bruno, Andrew Scrunter Basil, Pat Aaron, Gordon Henderson, Patrick John, Felix Henderson, Tim Durand, Rayburn Blackmore, Ursula Victorine, Kelly Ras Kelly Williams, Nadine Edmond, Tamara Miskovic-Ukwu, Bella Leatham, Maximin Powell, Dominica News Online, Velly Abraham, Gina Letang, DBS Radio, Kairi FM, and Wice QFM commentators. Roberta Henry-Smith proofread this entire document. Darius Earl Ettiene produced its magnificent sketches! Thanks to Berge Felix, Zev, Glendora, and Jeannne Felix-Henry.

A Note

The material presented in Calypso Drift is the responsibility of Steinberg Henry.

Calypso lyrics in this book appear mainly as cultural and historic material designed to make Dominican song popular and serve as part of an entertainment education project emerging in the Caribbean community.

I thank Dominicans Gina Letang, Ian Jackson, and Tim Durand for making their entire 2011 calypsos available to me. They are remarkable records.

I thank Pat Aaron, Dominica’s most prolific calypso writer, for allowing me to use his lyrics throughout this book. As he told me, no Dominican, or in fact, no Caribbean calypsonian would be angry with me for putting bits of his or her work in a book developed as archival and educational.

All other lyrics from song poets—be they calypso, zouk, cadence-lypso, R & B, compas, reggae, soca, bouyon—are used generally in amounts sufficient to capture context.

Other textual material is sourced, i.e., I say where it is drawn from. I therefore invite any calypso lyricist or composer or any person wanting to use anything in this book to do so freely, only say that it was drawn from Steinberg Henry’s Calypso Drift.

Our song lyrics in the Caribbean constitute abundant springs of philosophy and guidance for our people and generations to come. How our people gain access to wisdom between their lines—a tremendous learning resource—is a matter that needs to engage us urgently.

Stone Mountain, Georgia

April 2013

For I, the Lord, love justice; I hate robbery and iniquity.

—Isaiah 61:8

Let our children thrive as children should.

—Tasha Tasha P Peltier,

Let the Children Be Children, 2011

Have no respect for corrupt politicians.

—Cleve Hurricane Jean-Jacques,

I Owe It All to You, 2000

How many grains of rice is in a pound?

—Derrick Hunter

St. Rose, Carib Bacchanal, 1998

Imagine me as a farmer in my Dominica/on my own.

—Denison Dice Joseph,

On My Own, 2008

Segment One

1 From a humble seat in a New York house, I am haunted still by thoughts of an island left by thousands of skilled people like me. Our stories are almost the same. One Waitukubuli Harvard-trained professor, knowing rivers there flood, abandoned his last set of clothes on a river stone, changed into another, and headed for the island’s airport. It hurts leaving. But hurting is soon gone, dissipated in the opiate of this novel city rapture, its challenges, struggles, opportunities, dangers, anxieties, and narcissism. We hear island music and gracefully reminisce.

In this advanced social milieu, we may forget; and when we remember, you should hear the things we talk about. It’s all about the leaders, the ’70s, the music, the foods, the water, the sea and rivers, the incompetencies, the hurtful experiences, the discrimination in such small societies, the school days, who’s loving, sexing who, who left who, who’s divorced, who’s dead, the social change movements, the weather, each other, when the last one visited, and the next trip home. Truly, Nature Island’s topography haunts over distance. Still, I’ve met islanders who have nothing to do with their country of birth. They lock it off, or so it seems to them, whose dreams as they age in freezing temperatures manifested in placid bays, country shops, long-lost friends’ images, and surreal floral settings. Some ran from persecution, debt, broken relations, and political victimization to finally settle in the world’s leading cities and towns. Seldom arbitrary, we launch into the business of productivity with a passion. We carry in us gifts of industry and insight. We are global as any other. Indeed, we who live in exile may well be defining global exile—toward an understanding of migrant hordes, moving, shifting, and blending Earth’s energized population. I mean, we teach, nurse, doctor, construct, direct, guide, legislate, create, lead, fight, and pay taxes. Many even wear ignorance as a badge of honor and clothing brand to quote Pierre Charles, Nature Island’s sixth prime minister.

I met a group of Dominican men sitting on a step outside their Brooklyn residence on a warm Friday night. They asked whether I wanted a drink. I hesitated. I was warned quite quickly by one of the men that this is America, and I better doh play pwéjijé—pré-jugé in French. In that short space of time, this gentleman was telling me—and the dictionary is cited—don’t be prejudiced by pre-conceived notions of class distinction because in America all of us is the same. They earned wages; I didn’t.

2 I understand what Bill Clinton meant when he said that he began to remember so many events in his life, things he never thought he would remember, when he embarked on the long journey to writing his big book titled My Life . Forgotten people, places, and events return. I, I do not resist their time of arrival nor do I choose to hold them for another time. Herein, they’re knotty, to be knitted immediately into the whole fabric. There’s an urgency about this practice. I move. From that Dominican template to this spot in New York, stories flow like calypso. As a first movement, I hear intimation in the autobiographical traces in early education opportunities. This is, in part, a memory exercise. I and it bring to mind. I present here thoughts about this global drawing on calypso’s representation of those thoughts, basking in ecological metaphors, suggesting moral pieces, like pieces of imported madras that we wrap our dreams and heritage in. Like a musical composition, this cool lyric tenses and releases rhythm, swinging with b è l è drums, the pan-man, and a Koubouyon bass line. Emotions need to be intelligent hereby.

3 I recall being a mass communication student in 1980 at the historic Codrington College, Barbados. The institution comes to mind, I believe, since its learning environment marked my introduction to critical thinking and critical reflection. This was a place where I stopped awhile—a theological college where my colleagues and I were certainly not studying theology. But for six months in eternity, I was thinking beyond edit, splice, the fades, etc.—you know, the basic language of radios doing what I had left a while after three years in the field. Why now in New York, twenty-three years later? Its return signifies a culture of robust critique and fresh beginnings within a community of diverse and parallel interests.

If you don’t mind, I now picture the faces of Dominicans such as Clement Baba Richards, the cooperative candle-making industrialist; Patricia Pat Bynoe, who, for many years, managed Cable and Wireless Public Relations managers in the Caribbean and later served briefly as corporate communications manager at Cayman Airways Limited; Grenadian George Worme, whose cutting-edge journalism brought him into constant conflict with his island’s government; Jamaican Jeff Brown, an exceptionally gifted sound engineer who led us to our first alien-invasion reggae concert put on by third-world band in Barbados; Barbadian Mich Trotman, whose sibilant voice thrilled radio listeners; Antiguan Anthony Mamba Liverpool, who became Antigua’s ambassador to Japan re the Whaling Commission; Guyanese Walter Carter, who, according to Mamba, is now a headmaster in a primary school in Antigua; Denis Seon, who, like Walter Carter, never went back to Guyana after going to Barbados in 1980. Seon excelled in the field of broadcast journalism from his base in St. John’s. I think of Montserratian Leah Johnson, who probably went into journalism long before her island’s volcano began its rumble; Grenadian Vivian Philbert, who was supposed to have gone on to do a PhD in the then-Soviet Union; Dominican Romeo, who may be writing somewhere in St. Maarten, having forgotten his Barbadian inamorata; and a tall, dark, and beautiful Grenadian woman named Joyce, who may still be organizing grass roots people and shooting photographs!

I hear the calm brilliance of Dr. Neville Duncan cautioning all present not to underestimate the abundant natural resources of what we called the Soviet Union and its gradual undressing—revelation in this twenty-first century. I resided in the company of geniuses.

By the time I returned to Dominica in July 1980, the political and broadcasting system had changed. Dominica’s second prime minister, O. J. Seraphin, and his Democratic Labor Party (DEMLAB) had lost general elections to Eugenia Charles’s Dominica Freedom Party (DFP). With O. J. Seraphin’s appointed manager, Gordon Henderson, gone, the incoming party would change acting or real managers of the Dominica Broadcasting Corporation, from Alvin Knight to Alwin Bully, Reginald St. Havis Shillingford to Myrtle Solomon, Barnet Defoe to Julietta Pascal and Charles James. James would be gone when the United Workers Party (UWP) came to office in 1995 only to be replaced by Dennis Joseph, who was the manager I met in 1977 when I entered DBS Radio to begin my long road through communications. How cyclic.

4 Three years after Codrington, I was again selected to attend a one-month training at the Caribbean Institute of Mass Communication, now the Caribbean Institute of Media and Communication (CARIMAC). Pat Bynoe was there, so were Margaret Francis and Cheryl Fletcher of Grenada and Theresa Daniel of St. Vincent and the Grenadines. Interestingly, I remembered Richard Simon, but he came to mind as being at Codrington. I was not sure. From Georgia, I called Richard in Grenada, and he confirmed—he was at CARIMAC along with Pat, Margaret, Cheryl, Theresa, and others attending that one-month program. Both Fletcher and Daniel would go on to work with the Eastern Caribbean Central Bank and Simon with Cable and Wireless and later as press secretary to Grenada’s prime minister Tillman Thomas.

During that summer project of 1983, a Barbadian colleague and I read about a Nicaraguan ship secretly anchored at Port Royal, Jamaica, having fled from that Central American country. The battle between those so-called freedom fighters and the Sandinistas was raging under Ronald Reagan’s cinematographic tutelage. We decided to produce a feature on those men. Since Kingston would not permit those Nicaraguans to land, we rented what we call in Dominica a shaloop or a small rowboat to take us to their tug, and they agreed to speak with us.

The interview was moving. A young boy, one of the five-man crew, cried throughout. While speaking of how he missed his parents, another picked up an acoustic guitar and began strumming a solemn tune. It served as ground to the interviewee’s poignant voice. My Barbadian colleague suddenly stopped the tape recorder when the guitar was in its first ten or so seconds. He did not think the guitar had a place in the interview. Though I was disappointed, we had the conversation. The story would have ended with heart, with us at the production end fading up the guitar following their last words. What greater actuality could there be if only he had allowed the guitar to hold under. When we got back to base, our teacher listened intently. She heard the guitar and whispered, How beautiful. Then that beauty stopped. Alma Mockyen screamed angrily, Why did you stop it? Thinking about it now, we should’ve taken five minutes of the guitar separately. My Barbadian colleague had deprived us of significant context. Instructive.

Little did I know, the 1983 summer tutor had scanned my competence in documentary production and identified a potential. Alma Mockyen, on a training stint in Dominica that year, asked DBS Radio manager Myrtle Solomon and the island’s prime minister, then-minister for broadcasting, to have me return to Jamaica in the beginning of September 1983. I was given the opportunity to pursue a diploma in mass communication focusing on advanced radio/documentary production. Whom did I meet again? My colleague from the Codrington days, Patricia Bynoe and her dark, attractive friend from Trinidad and Tobago, Ann-Marie Douglas. Cheryl Fletcher was there too, reading George Orwell’s 1984.

In addition to the practicum, we were asked to read politics with Rex Nettelford, language with writer John Hearne, West Indian history with the awesome Roy Augier, and economics with Richard Bernal, who would go on later to lead most Caribbean delegations at World Trade Organization talks. We looked into communication theory with Aggrey Brown, sociology with Wenty Bowen, and practiced radio with Alma Mockyen—the best tutor in the Caribbean then. We were privileged to speak with Leoma Forbes, whom I would describe as a mythological Jamaican actress, commanding speech from Shakespeare to Louise Simone Bennett-Coverley. We had the unique pleasure of working in speech with Bev Manley, wife of former Jamaican prime minister Michael Manley.

By way of communication theory and Dr. Aggrey Brown’s insightful mind, I became acquainted with the sociology of knowledge and select branches of critical theory, citing at that time Stuart Hall, Jurgen Habermas, Theodore Adorno, Walter Benjamin, John Fiske, Cees Hamelink, James Carey, and others. Communication theory enthused me. I am still well pleased with a definition offered by Dr. Aggrey Brown. Communication is the transference/exchange of meaning between intelligences. Steven Pemberton describes meaning as the ineluctable modality of the web. Meaning is a social product irrespective, I believe, of whether it finds its manifest content in processes of human interaction using language, painting, sculpture, information technology, graffiti, sports, storytelling, dance, scientific methodologies, mythology, braille, architecture, drama, Internet, and silence! The definition runs the spectrum from satellites to plants, animals, and human intelligence. In fact, even cell intelligence, the one in plants, animals, and a human body communicates. This reminds me of Dominican ’70s activist Nathalie Charles saying that the aloe plant, when efficiently and effectively used, can knit injured human tissue. Today, it’s the information field, epigenetics, awareness, and energy within the cell membrane, its receptor environment responding to one’s perception of oneself—communication within the practice of energy, psychology, and medicine.

At CARIMAC too emerged the concept of a trace in West Indian history as taught by Dr. Roy Augier. It was at the Institute for Media and Communication I fell in love with history, a discipline so seminal to communication, so central to epistemology, ontology, conceptualization, and media production. Like any beloved, history warmed my head, soul-mating my intellect. By way of real and respected scholarship, the discipline, as one movement, points us to our past. It is one that is rich, abundant knowledge depicting a phenomenal will to struggle and survive at the heights of physical and intellectual engagement and overcome. Calypso, our people taught the world, maybe not how to build structures (although they did), but by God we taught those who enslaved how to think to know themselves. Always running, they never listen to face wild blood’s truth rising in their dark-age hearts moving from mercantilism to monopoly capitalism to today’s globalism. It is a wonderful idea, isn’t it? But those who economized it can no longer define its fantastic dimensions, neither does it itself recognize beauty hidden in its future expansion, encounter, and absorption.

At Mona, Jamaica, I was profoundly absorbed into and affected by what is known as the Apprenticeship Period in West Indian history. On numerous occasions, I would be moved to sadness reading trace accounts of torture during that period from 1834 to 1838. These four years drew out Europe’s final physical experiments with what Marx aptly referred to as black skins. A treadmill, a cruel swinging machine, was the torture instrument of choice. Women aborted at that wheel. Stipendiary magistrates appointed by the British to bring a sense of justice and mercy within that four-year period were sucked into plantation aristocracy—local planter influence—and justice evaporated. Many drifted into loneliness, scorched in West Indian heat. In the absence of a thorough magistracy and systems akin to justice, torture intensified. I think of a West Indian plantation when its shipments arrived on Barbados and Saint Kitts in the seventeenth century and beyond. Think of Europe and England developing the art of torture then, a violent, theatrical practice that Michel Foucault captured diligently in Discipline and Punish. Think of resistance to branding, the first appearance of insanity, a slave rebellion, rebels being hunted and caught. It is one thing to torture your own; it’s another to practice it as art on what was categorized as Chattel property. Imagine terror, anger, pain, resolve. Imagine who were being entertained, their drunkenness. I pray that one day, a bright Caribbean student soul uncovers for us a history of torture and punishment on West Indian slave holdings from 1550 to 1850. I pray that he and/or she traces torture’s transition through colonies and systems of education in associated states and deconstructs this precursor to today’s global ideas on punishment, trading rules, and reward. Winged calypso, it was a larger academic enterprise, wasn’t it? That body was constructed as machine—as superficially mechanical—and supposedly would become efficient over time or break into dust. We who come from a history of enslavement hear and see them hustle to establish again that superiority in duality, that control over nature, space, and, possibly, time. But timelessness, that consciousness technology we did not deliberately harness has erupted over and within them. The spirit of third millennium transformation has come to bear on them; they who enslaved face nature. I do not rejoice. They are my fellow humans. But for once in my lifetime, I choose to be a conscious spectator. We chew corn and turn on prime time’s riots.

When a community is attacked by men from another land, men who seize, chain, and transport other men because the latter are deemed inferior, we are dealing with a signifying history of disease. Here is a race that captures treasure to take it to another landmass where no one else can see its treatment of the captive. Its objective is to extract maximum labor, today, information. Captors abused to death, separated to alienation, and killed at will if not obeyed. Citing Barbados’s Edward Brathwaite, I say, slave-trading Caucasians took by force strategists, builders, dancers, artisans, diviners, makers of fine cloth, teachers, healers, and philosophers. That race, concealing its compulsion to debase, perceived no inherent value in its chained human, save that of commodity, utility, object, and economic tool. West Indian history. I cannot help; its trace elements meander through this text.

5 When I returned from Jamaica in 1984, I was asked by Dominica’s prime minister Eugenia Charles to be her press secretary. My father informed me that except under extenuating circumstances, a citizen does not reject his or her leader’s offer of a position in nation building. I conceded. One year later, in 1985—the year Dominica’s third president, Clarence Henry Augustus Seignoret, would be knighted—I, along with a team made up of Ken Richards of BBC fame; Duncan Stowe, now an attorney-at-law; and Julie Ulysses, an outstanding secretarial support, coordinated the activities of close to 250 media personnel coming to Dominica to cover a visit of Queen Elizabeth II.

Even while closely in the embraces of Washington, Dominica was hosting royalty. This might’ve attracted Margaret Thatcher’s support, though Thatcher and Reagan were too alike to suggest opposing forces and thus competition for Dominica’s allegiance after Grenada.

When plans were being made for the hosting of a luncheon for Elizabeth under the auspices of then-president Clarence Seignoret, a committee was deciding flow and sitting positions consistent with protocol. It’s amazing the things human societies do and say in constructing meaning of encounters. One member asked if the washroom at Layou River Hotel was in order just in case Queen Elizabeth wanted to use it. Layou River was site of the event and property of the island’s prime minister before she sold to Chinese in the 1990s. Calypso, another member replied that these people are trained. They can control themselves. They do not need such facilities! Powerful, isn’t it? I saw strange gesticulations, once reserved, now spread out on the deck of Elizabeth’s ship when she hosted a cocktail. People were kneeling and kissing her gloved hand with stars in their eyes when they lifted their heads to look at her big, bright ones. It was shocking, those women of light skin, those mulattos from Goodwill and Roseau whose husbands found us of a darker tone rooted in country ecology disturbing when we stood before them qualified. It was therapy for many a redneck, remembering Earl Ettiene’s flaming bouzeye and its smoke-influenced painting series highlighting blushings of an island’s bourgeoisie in ecstasy over each other’s pale looks—a long overdue catharsis.

In the midst of the excitement on deck, a gentleman came to my wife and me and informed me that Her Majesty would like to meet me to thank Government Information Service (GIS) for receiving the British media. I received my wife’s permission to leave and went down the stairs to the lower deck with the gentleman.

This was not the ship I was accustomed to. That I was sure of. This barely rocks. It is palatial in feel and aroma. Its walls are covered in paintings. Its carpets are of the richest variety of Persia. I had to wait awhile before my name was announced. It’s all a work of art and presentation of selves—a dark background, side flag, soft light in the foreground overhead, adding gentleness to royalty’s face, a small stage slightly lifted, upright bodies of the fifty-nine-year-old queen and her duke husband as one approaches them. Those carpets of blue fur had to be walked on carefully. A smooth sole could slip. Elizabeth looked sensually pale herself as she handed me the typical husband-wife framed photograph and golden cuff links. Her husband, standing next to her, was aloof, seemingly enlightened by the native-royalty meet. He must’ve kept a spa on board or exposed his body on deck more often than Elizabeth’s. He was browner than her, as if wearing a tan. She stretched a hidden hand and palm in a white glove, the sequins on her baby-blue well-fitted dress sparkling. She had quite a bit of hips descending sharply from her waist and very little fat at the stomach. She must’ve been quite charming in her early youth, bearing still as she did then traces of dashing beauty and the benefits of riches.

My father, a Zion king, a student of radical French philosophy, wanted each detail, every detail of our conversation. The morning is fair to me now as its sunlight streaks through coconut trees, banana leaves, and bunches of greens hanging from their stalks with readiness and weight. See and know him now in the line of royalty, tall, slender figure, cutlass carried lightly in hand, hair never combed and kept short. We were going to pick coconuts, what we call jelly in Dominica. We called the whole nut its meat. With a bamboo extending about twenty feet and a curved banana selector’s knife tied tightly at the top, he reached for the stalk of the nut and cut it. His sight was perfect. See him now, meticulously cutting the green husk and artfully hitting its partially exposed shell at the top to shape a diamond, revealing its brimming water in white pulp we boys called meat. We are yet to tap energy potential in a coconut shell, he said, handing me the first.

While we drank, he insisted that I tell him what Elizabeth asked or told me. I told him she was concerned about behavior of the British press and was assured that they had contained themselves, staying generally within boundaries set by protocol. She wanted to know whether arrangements were in order for their travel next morning. That too, I assured her, was well coordinated. She thanked me and wished me well, her husband nodding as if wishing the same. I left the carpeted lower deck, sighting Prime Minister Eugenia Charles along the way, and headed for the upper, where his daughter-in-law was waiting among the electrified. He grew more silent as I spoke, a flashing golden light in his eyes. As press secretary, I would travel to Taiwan the following year to observe its people’s advances in education and culture. Before leaving for Taiwan, however, I was given a very steep choice by the then-cabinet secretary. I could either go to Taiwan and, on my return, return to radio. On the other hand, I could choose not to go to Taiwan and remain as press secretary. My early education opportunity, reception by Elizabeth and, of course, excellent relations with the then-Taiwanese chargé d’affaires had encountered the spirit of jealousy—a very real phenomenon in Dominica’s catalogue of hatreds. Calypso. As a young man, I opted for the trip and returned to radio to be a features editor.

I regretted not having travelled to see my father when I landed in Dominica from Taiwan. The airport is close to his village community. Knowing his contemplative tradition, it still haunts me. In a letter I remember, he wrote, Even if you did not pass to see me on your way from Taiwan, I am still alive. Steep. Yes, he came to see me and died one month later. I think, and I am convinced, that he was concerned, among other changes, about the distance I had been from Dominica. I was thirty-one, yet very much his son—his only child. My father’s memory, though running in mystic ways throughout these lines, requires and demands its separate treatment and unity.

One year after his death, I spoke with Eugenia Charles, who knew him well, telling her about my interest in pursuing a communication studies degree. I received a Canadian-funded scholarship in two weeks. When I returned to Dominica in 1992, they seemed surprised that I had come to my island to serve.

6 In 1992, I stepped off Leeward Islands Air Transport (LIAT) at Dominica’s Melville Hall Airport feeling like a liberated son. In spite of eighty or more degrees intuited, I was not consumed in heat as I am at this moment in New York’s summer. Dominica’s air was truly Eastern and clean, reminding me of Toronto’s crispness.

As the cab drove along the island’s northeastern Atlantic coast, I looked somewhat studiously at those trees bent in the direction of the ancient and prevailing wind. I observed crests and troughs of sea waves and thought of hydromorphology, an elective read at Southern Ontario’s University of Windsor as a communication studies undergraduate. I remember my friend Sammy Brathwaite, son of Nicholas Alexander Brathwaite, a one-time Grenadian leader, treading the floor of his modest student apartment, pretesting his MSc hydrogeology thesis for defense next day. Water. Rock. I hear him now noting that I was asking correct questions as a listener. How moving the instantaneous nature of interconnected traces and people streaming to mind with ocean’s breezes calming my liberation song.

As that cab sped along a historic colonial strip called transinsular, the broadcast journalist in me heard and saw two extensive wind energy interviews. Time was short, but a lot could be done. I could at least earn some money to cover bursary costs over a one-year leave of absence secured from York University, Toronto, which I had moved to after completing a master’s degree at the University of Windsor in 1991. I was supposed to return to York after one year or lose my standing as a doctoral beginner in its department of sociology.

I was told that the then-living 1992 chairman of the board of Dominica Broadcasting Corporation had inquired of my whereabouts in the hope that I could give some direction to the corporation for at least one year. I welcomed the break. Dominica was home, and I longed to serve my country in an area that I believed I had excelled in theoretically, methodologically, and practically. He must’ve heard of my achievements as a student of communication policy or just remembered that I was once considered an exceptional broadcaster.

We rolled up hills of Deux Branches, where branches of two rivers meet in a land that once claimed to have 365 of those crystal-cold cleansers as property, still thrilling, still mystic under forest cover. In the next few weeks, I would be driving here and beyond again, loving each puff of wind, each succulent fruit, each drink of water, each beautiful country girl.

The island’s Morne Trois Pitons region was always cool. I love this place, this site of great wonder, its rolling hills, rugged passageways, and vegetation, hardy leaves and trees, sharp stones, water gushing here and there, the occasional bamboo spout driven into soft rock to draw from a source, a shop neat and simple at the feet of three towering, far-casted misty mountain ranges.

From Pont Cassé’s four roads, we headed west to the coastal community of St. Joseph. Little did I know as I breathe the enchanting Dominican air that I would be there for the next ten years.

I had written a master’s thesis in communication and social justice focusing on language, music, and struggle. The second came to pass for Dominica’s economy; the latter’s bitterness came to pass for me. I am not and was not the only one. The difference between me and others who suffered the same fate was that they left after a few months. I stayed. My sight grew dim. I wept. I watched my children leap with growth, and if it were not for their mother and our extended families, they might’ve died from hunger.

Having been turned away from what I came to do in Dominica, I took up a teaching job at what was then Dominica’s Clifton Dupigny Community College, preparing students for advanced level exams, college, or university. Those students of sociology were inspiring and still are, though they had barely acquired skills in qualitative methods. Neither did they know how to carefully and thoroughly apply theory. Well, teachers did not show them how. Moreover, development literature in these parts was scant if nonexistent. I had lots from both the universities of Windsor and York.

While at the College, I wrote to Cambridge in England, asking them to explain what it was they were looking for from students writing an advanced level exam in sociology. In a nutshell, Cambridge observed that Caribbean students could not apply or had not acquired the skill of applying theory, particularly critical theory, to presented cases. The practice had atrophied. A human development index chart was far from use in understanding people’s total existence, not to mention contemporary development issues. In the meantime, the college was bell-curving with confidence in its validity, deviations, and skews! But its environment was alive with youthful troublemakers. I enjoy living pedagogic spaces. It did not pay much, but debate and interaction with students brought me satisfaction. I could share knowledge, though I wish I had taken those sociology students through to their second year and final Cambridge advanced level examination and shut those red neck critics up.

Yes, I had good times. It’s natural survival skills. I had good times at all Dominica’s World Creole Music festivals—from the first in 1997—until I was pushed from backstage by a savage security man during the last one I attended in 2002. In that year, a tent I was using to sell copies of A Thick Environment: Notes On Dominica’s World Creole Music Festival was taken away by festival management. It rained that night into morning. In silent eco gushes, I wept in lightning, thunder, wind, and rain. I was being expunged from my country and the World Creole Music community surrounded by strangers.

As an original member of the World Creole Music Festival (WCMF) conceptualizing committee, I urged that in addition to its French and English graftings, the concept Creole, as it figured in the generative formation of Dominica’s World Creole Music Festival, be expanded to consider Dutch, Spanish, and Portuguese. I suggested border countries—that we tap into the musical resources of countries neighboring each other, particularly those in the so-called third world whose music embraced ecosystems.

7 Nelson Mandela told Bill Clinton he could not carry what an enemy had done to him in the past into the future. He would remain a tortured prisoner forever. I had to let go. Truth is, I was shocked. I had met others who had survived stings of rejection after education or had grieved through painful separation in exile, but I never thought it was so brutal.

I recall those who began to negate my presence from the time I returned in 1992. Most were men. One could belong to two or three boards, quasi-political institutions founded on theories of punishment and reward in one-time colonies. I recall distinctly that whenever I said people, it seemed a stumbling block. I heard the question how could you? A trained man thinking about people? The word people was synonymous to masses. In 1992, that word had a radical, nonmarket-driven, noncontrollable sound. Moreover, I did not identify stiff-neckedness in island middle class. Talk about their silence and simultaneous resistance to ideas expression. Why does he draw distinctions between information and education? He’s talking about Paulo Freire! If Dora Joseph—at one time, Dominica’s leading chief adult education officer—had said that it would be all right. I love Dora Joseph. Don’t get me wrong. In fact, I shall be prouder still when this Dominican woman is given a national award for doing a better job at mass educating than the trained middle. In truth, she struggled to make ends meet in the process of spreading the word of continuing education. And on our way to Nairobi, Kenya, to attend an international adult education