By Amina Blackwood Meeks, Contributor 
Blackwood Meeks
Do you know Denzel Washington?
Yes, that fine specimen, talented actor, born and bred in the United States of America; who visits our region occasionally as guest of his highly placed Hollywood friends from these parts. Good.
Now did you know that Denzel Washington is or was or would like to be, a storyteller, specialising in Anansi stories?
See yah. Call up Miss Vivien Morris Brown, she of the Handbook of Jamaican Proverbs fame, 100 per cent Jamaican and resident in the cool hills of Mandeville.
Miss Viv nearly drop down when on passing through the Smithsonian, that world famous centre of everything cultural up there in Washington DC, she was to stumble upon an audio tape with accompanying book with a Jamaican story, Ananse and the Bananas.
Well guess who was the storyteller? Jamaican accent and all - Mr. Denzel Washington.
And did you know that "pan is alive and well in Finland?"
Ask Gregory Rabess, cultural development specialist from Dominica.
Well he didn't know this either until he chanced upon some in-flight magazine while on some trip to Europe.
The people set out article in the magazine to boast how well they were doing with the steel band and encouraging visitors to come see for themselves.
Well, at least they did not patent it like the Americans have done. Or haven't you heard about the two Americans who teck out patent on the steel pan and claim it as their own.
According to how I understand how they could have made such a claim, it has to do with how the drum is actually cut and sunk to be made into an musical instrument and in their way of thinking, the Trinidadians really don't have the cutting right so the steel pan is theirs. See yah again.
The patty story
It puts me in the mind of a story I had read few years ago about some Jews in the same America trying to ban Jamaicans from making and selling patties up there.
In the reasoning, a patty is a small thing. The product which comes out of Jamaica is so large it had to be designated a pie as patty is supposed to be a rather delicate thing. Somebody greedy and is not we. Somebody somewhere have a real interest in appropriating onto themselves what we produce and making it their own by fair means or foul.
Two years ago, for example, a few of us had cause to take steps to ensure that a certain storyteller from Europe would never again set foot into any story telling festival in the region as a participant.
And some of us even wanted to set up guards at the gates to prevent him from paying his money to enter should he have the gall to turn up.
Dear people, this man, let us just call him Mr. Tape and Carry, has published numerous books entitled, for example, An Ethiopian Tale Retold by Mr. Tape and Carry.
He has a liking for tales from Africa and the Caribbean. So somebody recommend him for the festival.
For nearly two whole weeks, Mr. Tape and Carry had a little bag that somehow always had to sit by itself in the front row or under the stage of wherever was the festival venue for that night.
One night, a certain Jamaican female story teller who shall remain nameless, got suspicious and watched him and the bag. What you think Mr. Tape and Carry was doing?
Surreptitiously taping stories. As you might well imagine this Jamaican storyteller challenge him and call dung crowd and Mr. Tape and Carry found himself having to explain to a bunch of irate Caribbean storytellers who give him permission to tape their performance and furthermore what did he plan to do with it.
Well, he had already done it. Furthermore, he was bold-faced enough to declare that the stories he had taped before he was caught had been shipped off to his European base to be fed into a radio programme and then he had planned to redo them and publish them as "Retold by..."
To add insult to injury, he declared that we only work in the oralities, when he puts our stories into books he would have "created literature".
Yu see facetiness! The man accuse us of not creating anything but talk which he then create into something tangible. But liberty come through carelessness.
'Give me credit'
Come in like a certain gentleman from England who come to Jamaica and marry a lady from Hanover, who tell him a ton-load of stories. He then published these stories into a book of duppy stories with copyright and all, and at the launch he was to grace me with this: "I would have no objections if you would tell these stories. Just remember to give me credit".
Give him credit! For my parents stories! Liberty and carelessness again. And didn't my friend Cecil Gutzmore tell me not so long ago about finding the word "overstand" in some Russian publication?
My next friend Gabby, the calpysonian from Barbados says "Caribbean people know how to beat weself". We send our best cricketers off to join other teams and then we beat we self when the other teams get the winning score.
We take very little care of our best athletes so they migrate and join teams or compete for countries that we beat we self with when we meet in international competitions.
Furthermore, Caribbean people pay big money to travel to the locations of these competitions to watch how we beat weself.
And we beat weself when we buy back the products which we have created but left unprotected so that others can repackage them and make them attractive to us.
It cannot continue. It should not be allowed to continue. In the last 100 years, this Caribbean has given the world reggae music, calypso and soca, Rastafari and the steel band.
We have watched the world repackage and resold us some of these and we have watched them produce epics like 'Pocahontas' and 'Lion King' and resold them to their rightful owners. We have a wealth of cultural products, stories, poems, plays etc. which they have not yet discovered. We need to discover what to do with them and do it before we beat weself again in this age of grabberlisation.
Amina Blackwood Meeks is a communications consultant and story teller.
