Amina Blackwood MeeksTHE MIDNIGHT Robber is a figure in the culture of Trinidad and Tobago. He is best known in the context of carnival celebrations. A master boaster, artfully masked and elaborately attired, a king of the art of speechifying, he elicits the cooperation of his victims to hand over their valuables to him by terrorising with words
proclaiming the life of crime to which he was destined as the Prince of Darkness.
Staple boasts of the Midnight Robber include the fact, as he tells it, that on the day he was born "the sun refused to shine and the earth started to tremble". By the age of four his name "was written in bloodstain on every door". By the age of six he was "public enemy number one, two and three".
And perhaps, in the way in which we stereotype the poor or in which they sometimes stereotype themeselves, make them responsible for their conditions, socialise them into accepting a life of depravity and wearing criminality as a badge of honour, you might think you know
someone exactly like that, life imitating art.
A CARIBBEAN GIANT
Brian Honore, a Trinidadian calypsonian/storyteller, also known as Commentor, who played as a Midnight Robber was not just conscious of the way life imitates art. He was deliberate in his mission to speechify a different reality, to dedicate his ability with words to the collective transformation of Caribbean peoples and to
refashion an art worth imitating. Standing well below six feet tall, he was a giant. Not in the mythical sense of being fearsome to lesser creatures since Brian did not acknowledge lesser creatures in the way that some people are assumed to be children of a
lesser God, but in his ability to see above and through it all,
that bothersome, sometimes obsequious "it", to vision light and hope and betterment.
He had a special gift for
identifying the reality from which myths spring. He excelled in conflating reality into
mythical proportions that gently lead to the exploration of levels of meaning about who we are and what we should stand/have stood for. Brian was a different kind of giant who played and identified the real midnight
robbers in the lives of Caribbean peoples. Henry Muttoo, fellow Caribbean national, born in Guyana who once lived in and gave so much to Jamaican
theatre and is now the Director of the Cayman National Cultural Foundation, is particularly fond of Brian's creation and portrayal of the Satellite Robber. The Satellite Robber is the one
whose mission is "cultural
subversion ... come to dazzle you eyes till you conceptualise, that you belong to Uncle Sam all for free". It is a brilliant work in which Brian became, on behalf of all of us a dragon slayer, doing battle with fearsome
creatures with legendary claws and fiery breath.
CSME PERSONIFIED
He was clearing them from the path of the CSME long before it was so named. And long before its objectives were set out on paper, Brian knew that it first had to work to clear the salt-water divisions in the hearts and minds of the peoples of the region. He travelled backwards and forwards in time, across time, straddling time to reveal the real midnight robbers of our dreams and aspirations. Those who consciously and through acts of omission and commission, undervalue the role of the cultural forms in spiritual liberation and economic development, always searching for the right products with the correct labels for the elusive world market, for WTO approval, overlooking the world-class products that have already created themselves and defy labels.
Brain Honore was such a product. When I learned of his passing on May 18, 2005, (he was buried on May 23), I reflected on the similarities of his life with so many of our own artistes in Jamaica and certainly, elsewhere in the Caribbean. Those whose work is too often overshadowed by the attention and the glory we seem to have developed a penchant for reserving for criminals. Those whose work could help to transform the lives of criminals if only we would find the will to commit the resources to creating spaces for artistic sharing and development and that would cost far less than the increasing amounts we spend on facilities of incarceration and regular retooling of the police to equip them to "fight crime in the twenty-first century". I think the many Jamaican creative souls who gave us so much and whose contribution, like that of Brian's, was cut short because the resources for the medical intervention they required either came too late or was simply not available.
A GREAT MAN
I consider myself blessed to have occupied this Caribbean space at the same time as Brian. I am thankful to my friend, Henry Muttoo, that over the last seven years he created opportunities for Brian and I to work together. I am enriched by the selfless way that another Caribbean visionary, Christopher Laird, undertook to record and document that work which has formed part of the ever-growing Cayman annual storytelling festival. I am inspired by Christopher's reminder that in spite of the reality of the roughness of this road that we walk as artists, Brian did not whine. "He kept working and attacking and teaching and passing it on". He was also extremely generous in his constant and consistent recognition in calypso of other travellers along that road.
Brian Honore was a man of honour. We advance his work when we actively work against insularity in the region. We honour his legacy when we refuse to allow the good deeds of good people to be eclipsed by our exhaustion in the so-called fight against crime, when we commit ourselves and our resources to the provision of adequate,
accessible and affordable health care for all and when we create the environment within which
creativity flourishes and culture is facilitated to make its unhindered contribution to our becoming.
Thank you, Brian, play on.
