Things the people should know in defense of the vote and calypso
This article was first published at the end of the first week of the Lenten season, observed by Roman Catholics in the year two thousand and nineteen. It is meant for a Dominican audience in lieu of heightened partisan polarization and bickering coming out of the Carnival-Calypso season, a period which saw unprecedented partisan rhetoric very much common to such climate. The struggle to gain votes and to redefine Calypso away from its oversight responsibility and place it in a sort of bias partisan point of view gave rise to this response. This is an election year in Dominica and I argue that both the vote and Calypso have been paraded as scapegoats of a status quo which is unrelenting in its opposition to the people’s conscious demands for a new social order.
I now move to Calypso. Calypso can be defined as a conscious realization which is manifested in the form of musical expressions (or song) that is unleashed on the oppressive world by Africans, through the struggles of its Caribbean descendants. Calypso is unconquerable and eternal. It cannot be suppressed, lost or stolen. It cannot be reconditioned or reformed because it is a natural and absolute aspect of a people’s Africaness.
Calypso is a highly sophisticated form of intellectual expression in song, which was developed by Africans to communicate the ills of the capture and the system of forced labour or ‘enslavement’ of Africans. I believe that this adequately responds to the critics of the form, but to be totally clear, allow me to ad that Calypso comes from the nucleus of a people’s identity, and it took slavery to bring it to life in the way that it has evolved.
For those who believe that the art can be diminished or sidelined, please note that Calypso was strengthened by the hundreds of years since that brutal era of Slavery, and it will continue to strengthen every time there is injustice or oppression. Calypso was not conditioned by the societal order; it made a short cut through the onward leg of the Triangular Passage and landed in the Caribbean as its own unique entity. Calypso has remained intact, strong it has not been defiled, and it now serves as a ‘socially acceptable’ dagger in the side of the oppressor or evil doer.
This article is copyright © 2019 DOM767
