MIA > Archive > Tim Hector
Fan the Flame, Outlet, 11 April 1997.
Online here https://web.archive.org/web/20120416011318/http://www.candw.ag/~jardinea/fanflame.htm.
Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
I kept thinking and thinking, and could not stop thinking as I watched the crowds frustrated, disappointed, even wounded by three days of cricket washed out by heavy rains and a sodden outfield. They danced all day. And so the old popular ballad states they “could have danced all night.”
Not a few of my friends with whom I raised this question: Why were they dancing? claimed it was “pure escapism”. That is a phrase of which I am very suspicious. Intellectuals of all stripes, Right, Left, or Centre have all claimed that the masses are distracted from their true interests by “bread and circuses.” The presumption there is that their betters, like Malvolio in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night pursue their “true interest” at all times “without cakes and ale”. Entertainment, such argue, is diversion for the plebs – the common people. Some even argue that popular entertainment “assuages pain,” a kind of sigh of release of the oppressed. Such explanations have never satisfied me.
In Canada, a paper which I edited called Either/Or the editorial staff were always amused that I would walk long distances just to hear the single short-wave radio in the area to pick up the BBC to hear the score or some commentary in the England vs the West Indies Test Matches. My Canadian and American friends thought that “my addiction to cricket” indicated, without doubt, that I was still colonised by this English game.
One day I laughed and said, that most games owe their origin to England. Organised Boxing, Lawn Tennis, Basketball, even Volleyball, not to speak of Soccer. Are all followers of these “colonised”? I queried. They were taken aback. Around this world, it is fair to say, the overwhelming majority of people follow sports, of one kind or another. Sports perhaps more than any other activity, across all climes, and in all cultures, excite the passions of people, more than anything else. Intellectuals in their proverbial Ivory Tower may see it as “escapism.” I could not. It was a fundamental human activity – a means by which people express themselves, and therefore, their essential humanity.
But why, why were people dancing up a storm in Antigua, in the face of disappointment? OK lets take the long view and see if we come up with something.
Lets go back, say 230 years or so. When Thomas Thistlewood first landed in Jamaica in 1765 he strolled about Kingston and “to the westward of the Town, to see Negro Diversions – odd Music, Motions etc. The Negroes of each nation by themselves.”
This has always struck me with great force. In earlier times Africans in the Caribbean kept to their tribal “nations” and “each nation by itself” would express itself to the others, emphasising commonalities and differences, it may be presumed , to the others. But I will not pin a whole argument on it. It is a point, but only a point. The point is these dances defined each “Nation” to the others. The creativity distinguish.
Thistlewood then records in his diary that on July 21, 1766 he “Flogged Ambo [not Ambie] and Johnie for permitting a singing etc. at the Negro house last Saturday night.” Later, sometime later, Thistlewood was so moved to anger that he later confessed he “broke Job’s banjar [banjo] to pieces in the mill-house.”
Away from work, at their Saturday night get togethers, slaves sang and danced often to the anger of their masters who would flog them for so doing. Yet they sang and danced, flogging notwithstanding. Even in the factory – the mill-house – slaves took, and no doubt played, their musical instruments. At work and at play, always music it would seem.
OK you will say another point made and taken. Now look at this. “When in 1791 Sir William Young visited his plantation in Barbados “he met a ninety-five-year-old female slave who danced at the Negro ball last Christmas, and I am to be her partner, and dance with her next Christmas.” 95 and dancing? And Slave and Master, danced too! The rigidly erected race barrier came tumbling down before the dance, that is, in free activity.
And be it noted they danced and sang their own music. One could enslave them. Take away their names, their language, restrict and ban their customs but one could not take away that which they had incorporated into their being over centuries. Another planter, Monk Lewis, expressed amazement that wherever he went on his plantations he was greeted by “strange and sudden bursts of singing and dancing.”
Strange, no doubt, to his untuned ear.
William Codrington from Antigua at Betty’s Hope, noted “that these dances and songs were different when I was not thought to be there. They had some deeper meaning which they alone understood. Their pain was in their joy and vice versa.” Quite an acute observation from one not known for acuity of mind. The songs and dances expressed a way of being in this world. Messages were encoded in the dances.
We are a long, long way from escapism here. We are with a music that connected past to present, despite a history of discontinuity. The music and the dance reconnected, spanned the chasm, as it were.
Now let’s get to the noted early historian, Bryan Edwards, writing in 1801. He wrote, the music of the slaves “consisted of nothing but Gambys [Eboe drums], shaky shekies and kitty-katties; the latter is nothing but a flat piece of board with two sticks, the former is a bladder with a parcel of pebbles in it. But the principal part of the music to which they dance is vocal; one girl generally singing two lines to herself, and being answered by the choruses.”
Call and Response. The Individual and the Many or the Individual and the Community. Western civilisation emphasises the individual in opposition to the community. African civilisation promotes the individual in harmony with her community, while still being individual. A philosophy – a way of being in the world and interpreting the world – may be embedded or consciously expressed in this song and dance. That, to say the least, is the reverse of escapism. It, the song and dance, could well be, and probably often was, the individual and the community, getting in touch with its essence, summoned up in the symbols, movements and choreography of the dance. Can we be certain? I am not sure. At any rate the “vocals” were the thing. That is indisputable on the basis of the evidence. The vocals were a message, in and of themselves, and they were sung at festivities. It is not that we Africans in the west, were always festive. It is that, even at the worst of times, we were always affirmative. For example: “Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen” is followed by the triumphant overcoming, of “glory hallelujah.”
But watch this from Bryan Edwards again. “The singing began at about six o’clock and lasted without a moment’s pause till two in the morning.”
Would it be too much to see some historical continuity between this and the Recreation Grounds when play was rained out. The song and dance began in the morning before noon and ended late into the night. The “vocals” for sure would have been different. The call and response more meaningful, more authentic, in that it would have African Past and Present more deeply interfused “whose dwelling is the light of the setting-sun,” as a famous poet once wrote. At any rate though, there was the continuity in form, if not in content.
In Surinam, John Stedman, listed eighteen different varieties of home-made instruments. Note they re-created these instruments or created them using the new materials of their new environment. Stedman recorded that to these instruments “to which they dance with more spirit than we do to the best bands in Europe.” And then this: Sometimes the music lasted from Saturday night to Monday morning, and says Stedman, “thus had passed six-and-thirty hours in dancing, cheering, hallooing and clapping of hands.” If you may indulge, this was a kind of Woodstock. Did then the modern Woodstock generation discover, in its own music, the liberation of spirit which the slaves had sought in their captivity, free of the Order Giver and freed from Order-taking. Or do you think I see too much in too little? That choice, of course, is yours, and yours alone dear reader. I have no hard and fast views on the matter. We are merely exploring possibilities. And more importantly, connections. Only connect.
John Luffman in his A Brief Account of the Island of Antigua published in 1789, argued that the slaves agility and rhythmic smoothness in the dance was brought about by the “warm climate, where elasticity is more general than in the colder climates”. By this argument, black Americans do not live in cold North America and express their “elasticity”. Apparently it is always cold in cold climates, and there is never summer, with equatorial heat! (Did you laugh. So much of what the learned Eurocentrics write is laughable).
Anyway, I was astonished at the “elasticity” I saw on the Double Decker, last Saturday and Sunday. Were Africans less afraid of their sexuality, and celebrated it in dance and through the dance whereas Europeans inhibited by the restraint, the suppression, the repression of the Calvinist ethic which becomes “human nature” for the purpose, the sole purpose of the accumulation of Capital. That suppression of all essential human creative activity, as “human nature,” is transformed into a tight, humourless, sin-conscious being, who is committed to nothing, nothing but the accumulation of capital, as proof of being part of God’s elect. And therefore, a captain of industry or magnate of commerce, a multinational predator by divorce right. And with that “human nature”, it could accumulate capital in unprecedented amounts cross continents and in concords of time, visit the moon, create weapons of mass control and conquest, and subdue the peoples of the world not endowed with that particular “human nature”, leading to two World Wars, in the most blood stained century in all of human history? This I remind is purely exploratory, but not speculative.
Anyway I am going to switch from the historic past to the historic present.
“Michael Jackson’s Bad video premiered on a CBS television special that aired August 31, 1987, before a national viewing audience. It conveyed a moving message about struggling with racial identity, forms of machismo, and the problems of the underclass black men, in a potent mix of song and dance. It also testified to the national, even world-wide influence of Michael Jackson’s African-American secular spirituality.”
That quotation, to be sure, comes from Michael Eric Dyson’s remarkable book Reflecting Black. Note that we are in agreement, he and I, that there is a historical continuity between the song and dance of the slave plantation, and Michael Jackson’s “elasticity” as a modern song and dance video man, whose influence has gone beyond the national “plantation” and has become world-wide, creating I add, a new kind of internationalism. That is, making men and women otherwise unconscious, conscious of “the problems of the underclass black men”. And all this in a potent mix of song and dance.
But Michael Eric Dyson, goes on even further than I do. He says that Michael Jackson’s song and dance, represents something new, “a secular spirituality”. The secular and the spiritual, to all but the African, are supposed to be irreconcilable opposites. So “secular spirituality” is definitely an oxymoron, like burning ice. The African, be it noted, as I have proved above, has always celebrated his spirituality at play and at work in the mill-house. Remember? His spirituality and sexuality, if you prefer, “elasticity”, is not a product of hot climes, but of his being in the world. It can be as sad as the blues, as happy as soca, as poignant and moving as Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, as ecstatic as Rudder in the Double Decker stand, when there is rain no cricket today or tomorrow.
Would I be going too far to suggest that this Rudder in the Double Decker, represents Individual artist and Community rallying round the West Indies at cricket? To me, the symbolism is too obvious to be disputed. And if so, is this not a particular and astonishing “secular spirituality”? Does not David Rudder, exploit to the hilt, the Call and Response of African worship, carried over into the Catholic and Anglo Catholic High Mass, with African “clapping and hallooing” in these energetic, kinetic secular exercises of spirituality in the Double Decker at cricket? Cricket is the shrine. The song and dance are the rituals, the total communal expression, with the great artist Calling and the Crowd Responding in full voice, and full body, is the spirituality. But for the parts to exist as a whole – there must be the symbolism of rallying round the West Indies as a unit, actually existing, or as a Unity yet to be created. Thus Past, Present and Future are fused and interfused in this secular spirituality. People, it seems, in droves, come to the cricket for the cricket, and this secular spirituality. Money, or if you prefer, Capital, is inconsequential. It is but a means to an end – mass creativity – but not an end itself. Is this then a new “human nature” in embryo, but only in embryo?
At any rate, these were some of my musings, my explorations, as I reflected on those three days of cricket without cricket, rain-no-play, splendidly sunny day with wafting breeze, but yet no play – our technology way beneath our potential for a new “human nature”. A new “human nature” which goes beyond the crippling distrust, disregard, and dispossession of Dato Moody’s full employment in subservience. But our celebration, our secular spirituality transcends our technological poverty. But we cannot remain technologically dependent and pauperised. The creativity of the dance suggests the possibility of a new technology, which does not seek to subordinate humankind, but releases new human capacities as in the dance. You may or may not agree. Does it matter? The exploration was the thing!
Last updated on 30 May 2022