Michael Reckord, Contributor
TALES of scarce resources, neglect, ignorance, and natural disasters resulting in "a nightmarish situation" across the region were told by a panel discussing the protection of Caribbean cultural material recently.
The discussion was one of 36 held during the three-day Conference on Caribbean Culture at the University of the West Indies, Mona, in honour of Professor Kamau Brathwaite. Panellists were Elizabeth Watson (Barbados National Archives), Mike Alleyne (Middle Tennessee State University and the Barbados Sound Archival Project), Maureen Webster-Prince (National Library of Jamaica), Jerry Wever (University of Iowa and the St. Lucia Folk Research Centre), and JoAnne Harris (University of Puerto Rico).
A paper on the subject by Loretta Collins (University of Puerto Rico) was also circulated. Stating that, generally, in Barbados, the organisation for the protection of sound recordings was not good, Ms. Watson told of a fire which destroyed much of one company's valuable recordings in the mid-1990s. The company "re-booted," she said, and sold the rights of the remaining recordings to a company in Miami.
Many recording artistes in the country, she said, do not understand the business aspects of the industry, including the need for proper credits on record labels. She said she had CDs by Jamaica's Sonny Bradshaw and by Jackie Opel (a Barbadian who lived and worked in Jamaica for many years) whose labels lacked some basic information. Public education of artistes and producers about the value of the spoken word had to be carried out, she said.
Mona academics Drs. Veronica Salter and Carolyn Cooper later said they were "disgusted" and "distraught" at the fact that the entire Conference was not being either video taped or audio taped.(Selected segments were, however). Ms. Watson said the Barbados National Library was mandated to collect written, spoken and visual material but it has been concentrating on written material. She spoke about the dumping of valuable recordings by when a decision was made to go digital.
Of the Barbados Sound Archival Project, Mr. Alleyne said the economic value of archival material was not realised, adding that in the matter of access to information about artists a "nightmarish situation" existed in the Caribbean. He said that attempts involving Governments and the private sector should be made to reacquire Caribbean material now in foreign hands.
Mrs. Webster-Prince echoed the point when she said that material on Jamaica's colonial past had been stored for many years in London, but at some stage Jamaica stopped paying rent for the storage and the material was discarded and is now lost to Jamaica.
Claiming "our heritage is being shackled," Mrs. Webster Prince said the National Library had no money to purchase equipment to help in preserving and documenting the "vast collection" of sound and moving images at the library.
She opined that the most interesting research material was in sound and pictures and added, "We are on a rescue mission trying to get a 'sound' idea of what our history was like from the 1960s."
Mr. Wever told the audience of the gutting of the St. Lucia Folk Research Centre by a recent fire and of the disbanding of the Culture Ministry and its replacement by a Foundation. "They're trying to find ways to resurrect things," he said.
Ms. Harris told of the University of Puerto Rico's getting a million dollars to digitise pages of a now defunct newspaper. "They went crazy with the money," she said, and "digitised like mad." But there was a mishap and now the digitised material cannot be retrieved. "It's somewhere out in cyber space," she said.
Suggestions made in the Loretta Collins paper included the creation of a Caribbean Regional Sound and Film Archive/Institute, formation of a "collective" of archivists, librarians and others interested in sound and film; the inventory of Caribbean cultural and commercial recordings housed around the world; the promotion and dissemination of scholarly research about Caribbean sound and visual recordings and the training of field researchers to properly record the material.
