Kites over Jamaica
All over the West Indies, at Easter, the weather is fair and the winds are steady, the brilliant colours of poui and bougainvillea and flamboyant festoon hedges and hillsides, and boys and girls on vacation hoist kites at seaside and in savannahs. You’ll find a kite festival in most of the islands, from Trinidad to Grenada, Barbados to Antigua, but the largest is the Jamaica Kite Festival.
This year, on April 15 and 16, 25,000 kite enthusiasts will gather on the grounds of the Drax Hall sports complex and polo field, to make and launch kites and send spirits soaring in a tradition which originated long before our ancestors learned the art of aviation. You’re invited to make your own kite with bamboo, paper and string, to bring along any special-edition kite from anywhere in the world, or to buy a select Jamaican Steertown model.
Just launching your kite makes you eligible for one of many high-flying awards — Most Beautiful, Biggest, Best Flyer, Kite of the Day, and more. Do nothing, and you’ll still enjoy seeing hundreds of kites aloft. There’s even a “Kite Hospital” if you are unfortunate enough to need repairs!
No West Indian festival is complete without music and food. Over 50 local vendors offer Jamaican jerk chicken, fried fish and bammy, “run down” and curry goat. Local schools and organisations provide cultural performances organised by the Jamaica Cultural Development Commission, and an entire football field is covered with kids’ rides and games.
Drax Hall is on Jamaica’s north coast, just two miles from St Ann, originally named New Seville by Columbus when he first landed in Jamaica in 1494. The Columbus Statue can still be seen in St Ann’s Bay near the high school named for Marcus Garvey, who was born in the town. St Ann’s most famous resident, however, is Bob Marley, who was born in Nine Mile — a district in the hills south of Drax Hall — and is buried there. The polo field at Drax Hall is the oldest in the Caribbean.
Oh, and the entrance fee to the festival is J$150, or US$4. For more information, see the website, jamaicakitefestival.com.
Pat Ganase
How to Make a Kite
There are three basic kites: the flat kite, the bow kite, and the box kite. All kites are variations of one of these. Trinidad’s cheekeechong is a variation of the flat kite, made with cocoyea (the mid stem of the coconut leaf) and tissue paper.
The flat kite is the simplest to make. Start with two thin light sticks, one 24 inches long, the other 20 inches. Put them together to form a T-shape, crossing at right angles four inches from one end of the longer stick. Tie securely in place. Notch the ends of the sticks, and put a little glue in each notch. Now use a fine string fishing line to outline the kite by passing the string through each of the slits; knot firmly. Let the glue dry. Place the frame on a piece of tissue (kite) paper, gift-wrapping paper or thin plastic. Cut the paper so that it extends about an inch-and-a-half all around the frame. Fold the extended paper over the string and paste it flat.
To attach the kite string, you must make a bridle, which keeps the nose of the kite tilted up at a good angle. Tie a piece of string about 27 inches long from top to bottom of the upright stick. Tie a second piece about 23 inches long to the cross stick. Pick up the two strings at the point where they cross each other, and attach the end of your reel of kite string. After your first flight, you may need to adjust the length of the bridle string so that the kite is balanced in flight. A flat kite also needs a tail, the weight of which helps keep the nose tilted up.
Pan Progress in Trinidad
Even steelpan players and supporters often have little idea of how much research and development has been going on behind the scenes in recent years. Last October, during the World Steelband Music Festival in Trinidad, the birthplace of pan, an International Conference on the Science and Technology of the Steelpan (ICSTS) was held: it brought together pan researchers and practitioners from all over the world. They included delegates from two US universities, and colleagues from the Trinidad campus of the University of the West Indies.
There was detailed discussion of steelpan dynamics and acoustics, methods of metal treatment, instrument manufacture and preparation, stick properties, electronic and computer simulations and amplification, and the most recent innovations. Among the new ideas presented was the Rohner system of tuning by gas-nitriding, an alternative to heating pans over an open flame — a blast of liquid nitrogen increases the tensile strength of the metal.
At the end, however, the question that was in everyone’s heads, and which was posed bluntly by Michael Cooper, managing director of Trinidad and Tobago Instruments, was how the mass of information could be translated into practical solutions. Professor Thomas Rossing, Head of the Physics Department of Northern Illinois University, and Professor Uwe J. Hansen, Department of Physics, Indiana State University, were first to respond. They appealed to pan tuners to submit work in progress, so that instruments could be tested during the various stages of manufacture — though Hansen pointed out that there were major costs involved, which were not likely to be picked up by tuners.
As indigenous artisans, tuners have always kept details of special techniques close to their chests, and are suspicious of too much sharing. Dr Derek Gay, of the University of the West Indies at St Augustine, argued that pro-active cooperation with the scientists would, in the long run, make the jobs of tuners and players a lot simpler.
The proceedings of the three-day conference are available in print and electronic formats. A further conference is planned for 2002.
Terry Joseph
Linking the Islands with Books
The Caribbean has produced more than its fair share of world-class writers. But if you look carefully at their books, you will find the imprint of publishers from New York, London and other metropolitan capitals. No major Caribbean author is yet publishing in the Caribbean.
It’s not that the Caribbean has no publishing houses of its own. But each one is struggling with the same problems — tiny domestic markets, under-capitalisation, the fragmentation of the Caribbean into four different language areas, the scarcity of professional skills, the challenges of international distribution and marketing. Regular readers of Caribbean Beat will have seen that one or two Caribbean publishers are now making real inroads into international markets, one of them being Ian Randle Publishers in Jamaica. But for most, there’s still a good way to go.
Ian Randle is the moving force behind a new initiative to break this deadlock. A Caribbean Publishers’ Network (CAPNET) was formed in Trinidad last June, with Randle as president, and in November it finalised a challenging first-year action plan. This covers professional training, mechanisms for joint promotion and marketing, trading and co-publishing among regional publishing houses, representation at major international book fairs, and plans for a Caribbean Book Fair to be launched in 2003.
The action plan was put together at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Conference and Study Centre in Bellagio, on Lake Como in northern Italy. Rockefeller took an early interest in CAPNET, and hosted the November planning meeting. Representatives from the African Publishers’ Network, which has already confronted many of the same problems, were also there. One Caribbean participant told Caribbean Beat: “We were expecting glorious Italian autumn sunshine, but it turned out to be cold, wet and misty. Just as well. There was nothing to do but work.”
Jeremy Taylor
Cuba sees Red
Last November, the Callaloo Company from Trinidad and Tobago performed The Dance of the Cloth for the seventh Bienal de la Habana in Cuba. Created by Trinidad and Tobago’s mas artist Peter Minshall and his Callaloo Company, the work is performed by three dancers to Albinoni’s Adagio: white silk canopies suspended above the dancers’ heads become slowly suffused with red.
The performances in Cuba took place in the courtyard of the palace of the Captains General, in the shadow of a statue of Christopher Columbus. It was a sombre and moving event. Minshall’s first showing in Cuba included an exhibition of artefacts from his Carnival 1998 band Red.
Pat Ganase
Making Music with the Wai Wai
Should you find yourself wandering in the jungles of Guyana and hear the unmistakable tinkle of a piano playing, don’t be alarmed. It is the Wai Wai tribe making music.
Last year, explorer Colonel John Blashford-Snell led an expedition to the remote Amerindian Wai Wai tribe of Guyana, and promised to bring them back a piano. During that visit, the explorer and his team brought medical supplies to the 190-strong Wai Wai, who live in the forest on the edge of the Essequibo River in the far south of the country.
So why did the explorer agree to bring them, of all things, a grand piano? Bizarrely, as the Colonel was leaving the village, Elessa the priest asked him to bring back a grand piano for the tiny church. Blashford-Snell raised his eyebrows and exclaimed that it would be a near impossible task, but Elessa just smiled and said that God would find a way.
Back in the UK, the explorer found a sponsor for the grand piano in Millennium Hotels & Resorts, and contacted BWIA, which generously offered to transport the piano as far as Trinidad. From there, the explorer and his team would take small planes into the Guyanese interior, and would continue the journey on foot, with the piano, to the Wai Wai settlement.
Just as the team was about to leave London, word came from the Guyanese government that the Wai Wai villagers had been flooded and had to relocate from their settlement in Akou, upriver to Masekenari. They urgently needed medical supplies, books for the school, and tools to help build a new village.
So, in late October, the Colonel set off with seven expedition members, a huge cache of supplies, and a grand piano. The team landed at the small landing strip in Guyana’s interior, 350 miles from Georgetown. For three days, they carried the grand piano in searing heat through dense jungle, across rope bridges, and by canoe on the Essequibo River, to the Wai Wai’s new settlement.
Fears grew that on arrival in the village the piano would have lost some strings or would be out of tune; but to everyone’s amazement, nothing was amiss. As the piano was unpacked and found to be intact, the villagers let out a huge cry of delight.
One of the members of the expedition team taught the Wai Wai how to play and care for their new gift, and a magnificent open-air concert was held, at which the Wai Wai performed songs and played their own compositions.
Anna Nicholas
Anansi Lives!
Once upon a time, before television, Caribbean children grew up with “nancy stories”. If you told a lie, you were telling a “nancy story”. Anansi was the cunning “spider man” who came from Africa. He could spin stories out of air, and extricate himself from the most difficult situations. All Caribbean story-tellers, including traditional calypsonians, use the cunning of Anansi in their craft.
The best collection of Anansi stories was compiled by Philip M. Sherlock, published in 1956, and is still read (aloud) today. Through his simple story-telling, Sir Philip kept alive for generations of Caribbean children the stories of how Anansi tricked everyone in the animal kingdom, from Tiger to Snake, Alligator and the Fishes. He even won the hand of a king’s daughter.
“Who was Anansi?” Sherlock’s slim book begins. “He was a man and he was a spider. When things went well he was a man, but when he was in great danger he became a spider, safe in his web high up on the ceiling.”
Sir Philip Manderson Sherlock died at his home in Jamaica at the age of 98 on December 3, 2000, but his voice lives on in the Anansi tales. He will be remembered as Vice-Chancellor of the University of the West Indies from 1963 to 1969, though he served the university much longer — for all of its 53 years of existence, in fact, and even before its inauguration.
In paying tribute to the man who epitomised the spirit of the University, Sir Shridath Ramphal, the current Chancellor, said: “. . . he was chosen as the University’s ambassador to the region . . . to further the mission of the University through the length and breadth of the West Indies . . . Philip Sherlock inspired a generation of West Indians to the compulsions of being true to themselves and proud of their West Indian homeland.”
Sir Shridath concluded: “Philip Sherlock was among the greatest West Indians of the 20th century.” Nowhere is this more true than in the memories of all those who read and re-read Anansi the Spider Man. Sherlock wrote much more in his long career. But nowhere is his West Indian wit more clear, placing intelligence and quick thinking above all else.
Pat Ganase
Top Scholars
Every year, the Caribbean Examinations Council (CXC), based in Barbados, names the school students who produce the best results for the Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC). This is the exam that students across the English-speaking Caribbean take at age 16, after completing five years of secondary schooling.
The top scholar for 2000 came from Grenada: Ferdisha Snagg of St Joseph’s Convent in St George’s. She received her award at a ceremony in Barbados in December. And now there’s a lot more than prestige and cash prizes involved: the University of the West Indies (UWI) is offering the winning students full tuition scholarships, tenable at any of the university’s campuses in Barbados, Jamaica and Trinidad. What’s more, for those who produce the best results in the new Caribbean Advanced Proficiency Examination (CAPE), taken at around 18 after a further two years’ study, full maintenance costs are included in the scholarship package.
In addition to being named the top student for 2000, Ferdisha Snagg also won the award for the most outstanding performance in the Humanities, while her Grenadian compatriot Suresh Rao won in the Technical and Vocational sector. There were three award winners from Trinidad and Tobago — Jehan Ghany (short story writing), Jodi-Lee O’Brian (art) and Sacha Kong (craft). The Science award went to Ahiliyia Permual of Guyana, and the Business Education award was won by Tyesha Turner of Jamaica.
Return of the Humpbacks
A circle of bubbles on the calm water was the first clue for the whale spotters. Suddenly, without warning, a humpback whale heaved into view. For US scientist Dr Steven Swartz, it proved that humpback whales are once again populating the waters of Trinidad and Tobago, after years of being hunted.
Around 20 Magaptera novaeangliae were spotted last year in the stretch of water between Trinidad and Tobago by a research group headed by Swartz, of the Southeast Fisheries Science Centre, Miami. Using specialised microphones to detect the humpbacks’ “marine songbird call”, researchers were able to plot their migration path from the north Atlantic to breeding grounds in the northern West Indies and South America.
“Humpbacks in the 1820s were commercially harvested for oil in the waters of the Lesser Antilles,” explained Swartz. “Subsequently, the population dropped and the migratory pattern changed. Research has now shown that whales are once again populating the north, east and north-east coast of Trinidad. However, there were no whales spotted in the Gulf of Paria or the Serpent’s Mouth, where we would have expected them.”
Presenting his work at the Institute of Marine Affairs in Trinidad, Swartz said that only genetic data could confirm whether the whales belonged to an old regional population or had simply swum in from the wider Caribbean.
Scientists surveyed waters around most of the Lesser Antilles, Barbados and the north coast of Venezuela from the Gordon Gunter research vessel, as part of a two-month project. According to Swartz, humpbacks were also sighted around Margarita, Grenada and Barbados, as well as St Lucia, Martinique and Guadeloupe, and the larger islands of Puerto Rico and Hispaniola.
The waters around Trinidad are typically a good breeding ground in the winter because of shallow, sheltered coral shelves. “The former population of 10,000-12,000 humpbacks in the region is thankfully in reasonably good shape,” Swartz said. “Our project was short, so we could have missed visual sightings, but historically, there were Megaptera in the Gulf of Paria. I guess we now need to know why that has changed.”
Rajendra Shepherd
Looking For Big Trees
Small Axe is a journal dedicated to art criticism in the Caribbean. It is inspired by Bob Marley’s line: “. . . if you are the big tree, we are the small axe ready to cut you down real sharp”. It is published by the UWI Press in Jamaica, but is moving soon to a prestigious American university publishing house. David Scott is the editor; the advisory board includes Rex Nettleford, George Lamming and Kamau Brathwaite.
Small Axe is published twice a year, and includes interviews, reviews, poetry, visual art, fiction and academic articles. It has ambitious ideals: its mission is to “participate both in the renewal of intellectual criticism in the Caribbean, and in the expansion of/revision of the horizons of such criticism”.
The latest issue, Number 7, focuses on Genders and Sexualities, is guest-edited by Faith Smith, and features a cover photograph of performance artist Susan Dayal from Trinidad and Tobago, portraying Miss Universe as a centrefold. It explores such issues as AIDS, masculinity, homophobia, and the representation of women in contemporary and 19th-century Trinidad Carnival.
The previous number, Debating the Contemporary in Caribbean Art, was edited by Christopher Cozier from Trinidad and Tobago and Annie Paul from Jamaica. It was dedicated entirely to the visual arts, focusing mainly on the anglophone southern Caribbean, and came replete with graphics, photographs and visual puns. For more information, see the website: www.smallaxe.net
Bruce Paddington
Messages From the Tube
Very few people in the Caribbean get to see Caribbean films and videos. Foreign television rules, from the Bahamas to Guyana; some countries receive as many as 100 North American cable stations. Scholars have argued that foreign television is a prime agent of subversion of the region’s traditional cultures, and that there is an urgent need for more local programming and far greater public exposure to indigenous material.
The main agency supporting local production has been the Caribbean Communication Office of UNESCO, which has recently undertaken two important initiatives in this area. The first was to launch in the Caribbean the newly-created UNESCO Crea TV, a programme aimed at supporting national and regional production and co-productions in developing countries. This has led to co-productions involving Earth TV in Trinidad and Tobago, Fiji TV, TVJ Jamaica, and Namibia TV. Caribbean producers Danielle Dieffenthaller and Mary Wells have been able to share their expertise with counterparts in the Pacific and Africa.
A second UNESCO project has been support for the International Public Television Screening Conference (INPUT). Hilton Jamaica, in Kingston, was the venue for the first Caribbean mini-INPUT last November, which actively sought out work that was original, controversial, innovative in form or content, and able to express a Caribbean aesthetic. Over 50 submissions were received, of which 15 were selected, including videos from Trinidad and Tobago, Dominica, Martinique, Guyana and Jamaica. The screenings and critiques followed a day of panel discussions that looked at the aesthetic, technical and marketing aspects of the Caribbean product.
The event was so encouraging that a permanent secretariat has been established to ensure that this project stimulates the production and exposure of Caribbean films and videos across the region.
Bruce Paddington
Art as a Big River
Several international artists will be taking part in the second Big River artists’ workshop in Trinidad from March 24 to April 11. Big River is organised by Charlotte Elias and the Centre for Caribbean Arts (CCA): the theme for this year’s workshop is The Dynamics of the Hinge. This is based on the thesis (in Antonio Benitez-Rojo’s essay The New Atlantis) that the cultural systems of the Caribbean archipelago share “an Atlantic complexity” which “hinges” them to each other, and allows them to become the hinge for the rest of the world.
Artists from the archipelago and the coastal rim of Central and South America, Africa and Asia have been invited to focus on the concept in Big River 2. The Grande Rivière location on Trinidad’s north coast allows the artists two weeks in a secluded and simple guest house on a beach where leatherback turtles nest, next to the mouth of a big river, with the mountains at their back.
In addition to basic tools, they will have at their disposal found objects from the land and sea, interactions with the village, and the art and music that each brings from his own country. Two weeks of collective workshop, art-making and sharing memories and experiences, are followed by an Open Day and a formal exhibition in the CCA space in Port of Spain.
How the artists represent themselves as “hinges” in 2001 will be seen at the Big River 2 exhibition which opens at CCA on April 11.
Pat Ganase
