Reclaiming the Heritage Trail: ‘Caribbean Accent’

CHAPTER 8 different origins: the soca ‘Dollar’ became a commercial success for the Trinidadian singer Taxi and, in the early 1990s was a dance favourite all over the region and beyond, while ‘Don’t Worry, Be Happy’ with its calypso rhythms comes, in fact, from the 1988 film Cocktail, and was written by Bobby McFetin, the black American singer, and sung with a Reclaiming the Heritage Trail: ‘Caribbean accent’. The tin&, with its holiday atmosphere and references to beaches, Culture and Identity nudity and fun, used the banana (no joke in the region) and the cruise ship as the emblems of the Caribbean as well as the music. Of the dxxrrs, more than halfwere local, including the dancer who introduced ‘Island in the Sun’ was the first number featured in the finale of ‘our Bahamian culture’ number and the Junkanoo musicians. One ofthe Jubilation, the nightly show at the Crystal Palace Resort and Casino at male dancers played the ‘mammy’, the market woman, a comforting Nassau’s ‘fabled’ Cable Beach where white America is urged to ‘sway to black figure of unthreatening fun, with a feeling more of white folk Caribbean rhythms as our Las Vegas-style revue takes on a tropical twist’. Innmories of the American south than of the Caribbean. The backdrop, which had been changed for the finale, was a stretch of Into that culturally deracinated progr-e came the Junkanoo waitrrs blue sea with a cruise ship on the horizon. in their working unifwms (appropriately enough because to dress up On came the male dancers in striped trousers, one on roller-skates, the bcforc Junkanoo violates tradition). As if ‘rushing’ on the streets of prelude to the arrival of a topless female dancer, who was wheeled on to Nassau, their performance was rooted in their own experience and the stage lounging on a large plastic banana, waving merrily. After the history. They even managed to upstage the main performance. gentle melody of ‘Island in the Sun’, the music changed to the soca Jubilation illustrated the two polarities of cultural expression as number ‘Dollar’, and finally to ‘Don’t Worry, Be Happy’, with the ‘shown to tourists in the Caribbean. The first was the formal, expensive, dancers in jaunty holiday hats and flowing chiffon scarves. A ‘pantomime foreign-driven performance which is put on to please visitors, to dame’ waddled across the stage dressed as a large-breasted, big-bottomed reinforce the tourists’ perceptions of the Caribbean and to give them black woman in a faded cotton frock, sneakers and wig. what the Caribbean thinks they want. The second was the informal (if The last number was announced by a blonde-haired singer as an not spontaneous) display of local creativity by the waiters which in form expression of ‘out Bahamian culture’. Musicians paraded, drumming and represents the fusion of cultural influences (in this case from Africa and blowing cowbells, horns and whistles, while dancers appeared in costume Europe) and in content remains a function of rebellion, of resistance in a stage recreation of the Bahamas’ great post-Christmas festival, against authority. Junkanoo. Meanwhile, because it was December and Junkanoo fever was Jubilation (and similar representations) threaten, at many levels, to at its height, a group of waiters came down the aisle, also dancing, overwhelm the Caribbean with its slick otherness and metropolitan blowing on whistles, sounding cowbells and beating drums, to great tastes. In many instances, tourism has bred cultural decline despite the applause. efforts of those who are attempting to reclaim control. ‘We are busy Like the Crystal Palace Resort itself, Jubilation may be in the Carib- .’ fighting the mentality that says that if it’s not required by tourists or liked bean but it is.not of the Caribbean. It was two hours of high-class by them then it’s not needed. Because if we don’t stop it, we don’t have American kirsch, its gesture to the Bahamas taking place in those final anything left to give our children,’ says Kim Outten of the Pompey minutes. Museum, Nassau. The most recent struggle for the Caribbean has been The icons of the Caribbean were the songs, which were labelled ‘a ,jg~ both to nurture its indigenous art forms, to create and perform for its medley of island songs’. There was ‘Island in the Sun’, written by the & own peoples, amid the demands of tourism, while at the same time Jamaican singer Harry Belafonte as the title song of the film of the same ;gy finding imaginative ways of ‘using’ tourists as patrons rather than being name in 1957. It is now an instantly recognizable anthem played to ‘% urrd by them. Indeed, there are now significant points at which the ,,& tourists all over the Anglophone Caribbean. The other two songs have ,:>*$ interaction between tourism and Caribbean culture has created a new ;;*z dynamic. 178 179 Nearly a quarter of a century on from Demas’ warnings and Poitier’s lament, much nation-building has been done and achievements in all art forms have been recognized, not just regionally but internationally. There are the visual arts of Jamaica, Haiti, Cuba, Guyana; the great cultural festivals, non known as the festival am, of Carnival and Junk- moo; the internationally acclaimed music of reggae, calypso, s&a, ma- ague and zouk; a fine body of literature (including St Lucia’s Derek Walcott, the Nobel Prize winner); and a vibrant folk culture and custonx that are recognized and encouraged. The eltpression of all this cultural activity has, since 1971, found an outlet in the regional festival, Carifesta, pioneered by Guyana’s former President, Forbes Burnham, and held, at intervals, in different countries of the Caribbean. Yet, despite such achievement, the shadow of dependency remains. Much of what is admired within the Caribbean and is seen to be ‘better’ remains foreign (usually North American), whether in design, technology, food or the visual arts. And while the tourists continue to flock in, the leaders of the tourist industry, whether local or foreign, have seemed generally unconcerned to protect the authenticity of Caribbean dance forms, carvings or architectural detail. A fundamental reason for such neglect is that the Caribbean tourist industry does not depend on castles, ancient buildings, art galleries and museums. The Caribbean’s cultural forms are not on display as they are m Venice or Prague, Delhi or Cairo. Such formal, urban environments arc not the common currency of the Caribbean tourist industry. The heritage business has been a late arrival and only recently a tool for tourism. Meanwhile the ‘people’s culture’, more vulnerable and diffuse, has been at risk, sometimes appearing to be flattened into the all-purpose caticature: a smiling guitarist in a Hawaiian shirt crooning ‘Jamaica Farewell’, with its chorus line ‘I Left My Little Girl in Kingston Town’ (to be adapted to Nassau town or Castties town or whatever town is r&xxx). As Professor Elliott Parris, of Howard Univetxity, noted in 181 L AST RESORTS : TOURISM IN THE CARIBBEAN $,:t RECLAIMING THE HERITAGE TRAIL: CULTURE AND IDENTITV ,$ 1983: ‘If we ignore our history and the cultural legacy that it has leff us, their own (often uninformed) images of the Catibbean. The whole we run the risk of developing tourism as an industry which puts the qion thus becomes a homogenized whole, its contrasts and distinctive dollar first and our people last. We are saying to ourselves, perhaps lmitages either neglected or lost. unconsciously: we are the field labourers on the modem plantation ofthe The successful e.uport of calypso, salsa and reggae to the USA and tourist industry.” Europe has meant that those musical forms have become standard- A decade later the ‘modern plantation’ continues. Reg Samuel is the 1 bearen of Caribbean culture. The negative effect of this achievement has research officer in Antigua’s Ministry of Culture. His is one of the voices :,,‘i been to put at risk the lesser known and more fragile forms of regional raised agdlnst the impact of the tourist industry on his island, blaming it ,y music, such as Antigua’s iron band and the big drums of Carriacou. On for the loss and degradation of what is unique to Antigua and its history. .:i Grenada’s tiny sister island Carriacou, Big Drum, three lapearr cabrit (goat ‘Tourism has impacted on us very seriously,’ he says. ‘Our total lifestyle - :i skin) drums, is the traditional musical form. Yet when the cruise ships art, food, music, dress, architecture, celebrations - has been altered. We ? cdl, it is a steel band which goes on board to entertain: the steel band ,I have lost our character.’ He argues that Antigua tries to please tourists by ‘$ rather than the unique Big Drum has become the sound of Carriacou. giving them what they know. ‘We try to imitate Americans and their 1 Using ‘culture’ as an ingredient of a tourist industry means work for ways. We give the impression that what tourists want is what they have ,i performen and artists. Much of the entertainment is in hotels which put and not what we have. Let the tourist know what we have’. ;! on musical evenings and floor shows and sometimes buy local paintings In music, for example, Samuel points out that the steel band, which ::I and catings. Once on cruise ships or in hotels, music, dance and art tend arrived in Antigua early on with returning oil workers from Trinidad, has ,‘i to become pan of a safe suburban environment. Like the licensed street been neglected or lost its way, while other musical forms have virtually 3 vendors, the performers who work the hotels have to respond to the disappeared.

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