Amina Blackwood Meeks
RIGHT! WHERE were we just before Ivan? Yes, celebrating what someone referred to as 'A mystery to the unbelievers'. That's us. Jamaicans. Examplified in everything we do but today we mean mostly the positive. Like how Tony Robinson and his karate team clean up all the top prizes at the recent competition in South Africa and the whole stadium chanting 'Jamaica, Jamaica!' and how the Jamaican Team in Athens in the Summer of 2004 was the Olympics. Well, that's how I feel anyway. The spectacle that accompanied the Olympics was something else. Lawd de people dem show-off.
Imagine 72,000 people inside the Olympic Stadium and four billion more across the world watched the Opening Ceremony alone that was deliberately crafted to bridge 3,000 years of Olympic Games history, that's just in case anybody really was deluded into thinking that the games were a mere 100
years old.
They included salutes to their mythological figures like the Centaur and others like Pythagoras, who we think should be written up in a great big book called Stolen Legacy. Alas, somebody done write dat arreddi, so let us just stay with the Opening Ceremony that I could watch again and again and again.
I have been asking myself, just suppose Jamaica had a chance to stage something like the Olympics what kind of spectacle could we mount that would adequately represent our history and culture to the rest of the world. And the looting and price gouging ala Ivan do not count.
Well, to my certain knowledge nobody has yet invented any spectacle to permanently cure the short-sightedness of lack of serious investment in the positive aspects of our culture.
BRIAN LARA
We invest in prisons, bullet-proof vests, invest in bringing Brian Lara come see what Ivan did in Caribbean Terrace and so on. And then the money run out on the part of the marketing strategy that was to do the research on how we use to grow weself into people that we loved, properly document it, even using old-fashioned technology, make it accessible, teach it so that people will have pride in it, tell our children that they had running hot water, libraries and universities before Columbus nearly drowned. Or, before Pythagorus inveigle himself into an African University. In fact that Africa had universities when the place that put on the Olympics was so-so wilderness without a name.
I posed the question to a group of Caribbean performing artists in training. Much to their credit they said we could stage 'something like Carifesta'. To our collective dismay, they stumbled on the assessment about how much of who we are and have given to the world resides in Carifesta. The Festival was not seen as representing a bridge or a link to anything, it was 'just a show' with transient aesthetic appeal. Woe is we to be confronted thus by the discontinuites we continue to carelessly engender in our being.
CARIBBEAN SHOWPIECE
Okay, jump to World Cup Cricket 2007. Suppose you had the task to devise a ceremony appropriate to the famous and treasured Colour Package that goes with the World Cup. I have to tell you here that some famous and wonderful people also interface with these budding artists, so I cannot bear the 'birding' alone for their representation. Really, I would not have dreamed of them comprising a hypothetical planning committee chaired by a purely fictional Minister of Cruise Ships and Visitor Arrivals, having a party with just one dance move and the task to ensure that "every tourist at home and abroad, present and in the future, in person or in front of the screen know that it is our party that planned this spectacle."
Well, I had to agree that that was a most appropriate link to a kind of political culture spanning generations from the British beat off Columbus and meck treaty with the Maroons to return all runaway slaves to the plantations thus enshrining a divide and rule tribalism into everything we attempt in this country. A mystery to unbelievers. Yet the artistic talents born and bred here have been described by no less a person than Chris Blackwell as 'extraodinary' and our contribution to modern civilisation has been compared by National Geographic to that of Crete, whose 'ancient' cultural achievement is sometimes said to rival that of contemporary Egypt.
Till the Romans conquered it and all and sundry come fight over it till if Homer reincarnate into another Odyssey maybe he would not recognise it. But it featured in the 2004 Olympic Opening Ceremony in Athens in the section about all the atrocities the Greeks overcame and survived. Maybe I should have asked my students to assess the appropriateness of including the struggle for Emancipation, the global impact of Garvey's Philosophies and Opinions, the role of Lucille Mathurin in the declaration of 1975 as International Women's Year or the significance of Haiti's Declaration of Independence in a pageant connected to World Cup Cricket. Heheheh, Amina lose har head and har job right deh so! Das why I did not say which other upstanding citizens also interface with the students. For all a we cudden get seized under the Terrorism Act for nothing more dangerous than the fact that I knew their names and their place on the plantation. Heheheh. Misery have company. What a cultural prekkeh of Olympic proportions!
BEING JAMAICAN
Ah and there's the rub! Do we really want to confront what it means to 'be Jamaican', to stage a 'Jamaican spectacle' befitting an interantional ocassion with diverse foreign press in attendance? What are the parametres of the various 'committees' that arise from time to time in search of 'a spectacle' that they could 'put on to enhance the tourism product' such as World Cup Cricket? What are we proud to show to the world? Anything that we have that is truly extraordinary is so for few other reasons than that it produced itself Bob Marley, Jimmy Cliff, Third World and all the recipients of the Prime Minsiter's Awards for Excellence, our athletes who train on inadequate diets and facilities and suffer martyrdom in search of the right coach, our playwrights who mortgage dem likkle tattoo to build theatres, our poets and storytellers who do not have the connections to be heard where it matters, our streetside artists, in short all the reasons why tourists come to Jamaica to feel alright, just happen, in
spite of.
The official lack of attention to what is really important is a monumental poppyshow and the talk about building cultural industries, will remain just that - hampered by a destructive archaic partisan culture, a shortsighted view of what development is all about and a lack of courage and will to invest in the richness which caused National Geographic to proclaim that: "Not since Crete has an island nation had such profound impact on civilisation."
In my head that means that we have the potential to stage a pageant of Olympic proportions and implications, but we have to consciously decide to disprove Jan Carew that the cemeteries of our people are filled with unrealised potentials, even if it means spending some of our hard earned money in ways that do not find favour with the International Monetary Fund.
