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.
No one is immune to Calypso, not even the Calypsonian. In the true spirit of openness and transparency, this view of Calypso comes from my unpublished book: Historical Perspectives of Calypso & Soca Music in Dominican Culture. This book will now be released in 2020.
I have read comments geared at undoing of Calypso which is simply laughable. To seek to undo Calypso is to seek to undo you. Calypso was built on the people’s struggle, and as long as there are systems of authority in place, there will be struggle and it is Calypso which provides a medium for the ventilation of such struggles in Caribbean societies.
Calypso is inherently Caribbean and it is generally domestic. Of course, the same may be exported but any exported form of Calypso has to be diluted to suite such export ambitions. With that stated, Calypso can also be universal, but such universality has its place and time and particular genius.
The Mighty Sparrow, the creators’ gift to Calypso, is probably the lone connoisseur of the art that imbues the sort of permeable quality of universality in the Kaiso. The lesser mortals can only try, but as Norman Cyrille ‘The NC’ states: why sing on an issue when those concerned can’t hear me at all? I would like to add, even if they hear you now, they may not be concerned because your issues might not be on their list of priorities.
This article is copyright © 2019 DOM767
