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Honouring Chevannes
published: Thursday | January 19, 2006
Jamaica Gleaner
Martin Henry

THIS EVENING one of our prime intellectual forums, the undercroft of the Senate Building of the UWI, comes alive with the opening of a conference in honour of Professor Barry Chevannes.

The social scientist has spent a lifetime studying Jamaican-Caribbean culture and society and now the spotlight is on him as the subject. The range of presenters and papers reflect the breadth of his own work.

The conference is titled 'The African-Caribbean World View and the making of Caribbean Society'. UWI-driven cultural scholarship, including Chevannes', has been predominantly Black reflecting the majority and its need for race/cultural pride. The theory of creolisation, the mixing and merging of multiple cultural streams of newcomers on a residual Taino base in the crucible of slavery to produce a khaki culture, in which 'white' and 'black' are only abstract extremes on a continuum, has received much less intellectual space.

TRAINING IN PHILOSOPHY

I have had a longstanding interest in pre-UWI and non-UWI Jamaican thought going back to Emancipation and even into slavery. Professor Chevannes' basic training is in philosophy and classics and we once shared a lively exchange on the ex-slaves' philosophical understanding of freedom. Something I would love to see pursued much, much further. We have Sam Sharpe's grounding of the universal right to freedom in Christian theology. But there is little else that we have examined about how the slaves and ex-slaves philosophised about their own condition in the cosmos.

Professor Chevannes in a paper delivered at A 2003 Values and Attitudes Symposium staged by the Mona School of Business quoted a sparkling passage from Hope Masterton Waddell's memoirs, 'Thirty Years of Missionary Adventures'. In it a newly freed slave responding to white complaints and threats that the 'session' noise in his yard was a nuisance boldly spoke of his right in freedom to do what he wanted in his own yard and dared them to come in there and they would see what he would do with them! How much this particular perspective of freedom may have shaped subsequent social relationships and responses to the necessary constraints of law and order is an intriguing question.

Chevannes' work on the Jamaican-Caribbean male is a counter-point to Professor Errol Miller's more popular theory of male marginalisation. Chevannes began his 1999 Grace Kennedy Foundation Lecture on 'Problems in the Cultivation of Male Identity in Jamaica' with reference to Miller's 'Marginalisation of the Black Jamaican Male'. "Are Jamaican males being marginalised? Certainly not ..."

The founder of Fathers Inc. argued that "the available data does not substantiate the charge that Jamaican men are by nature sexually irresponsible, a charge with a hidden sub-text which reads: Jamaican women are by nature sexually responsible. Neither does the data substantiate the charge that Jamaican men run from paternal obligations."

Our small space geographically and intellectually combines with excessive respect for learned authority to help constrain robust critical analysis of the work of honoured intellectual dons. There is no arrogance about Barry Chevannes either as scholar or man and we can hope that a conference honouring him and his work can be a catalyst for the critical examination of the contradictions in Jamaican-Caribbean social thought and for vigorous efforts at integration of theory.

THE WEED

Professor Chevannes has been both the 'Rasta man' and 'the ganja man' in his research and public service. He has extensively studied Rastafarianism and was the head of the National Ganja Commission with a pro-decriminalisation position. Ganja is deeply embedded in the culture. The weed has been particularly appropriated and wrapped in myth by Afro-Rastas; but it is an East Indian contribution, like curry goat. The first anti-ganja laws were designed to curb 'insubordinate and riotous' East Indian behaviour which use of the kali weed was supposed to cause. In Hinduism Kali ["the black one"] is the goddess of death and destruction who can also give life and is a consort of the white Shiva.

Professor Chevannes' wide-ranging work provides much food for thought and many points of departure for further explorations. So let's eat - and think. Chevannes' public service and family life provide commendable examples. His wife Paulette and I once worked together in the inner-city.