Trinidad Express
Jamaicans being Jamaicans, one of my Jamaican journalistic colleagues was telling me up to two years ago that Chris Gayle was going to break all of Brian Lara's batting records. Not for the first time I was forced to recognise the national feistiness of Jamaicans, the first time being when I was living in the Bahamas and held a party in my apartment for some of the West Indian community there.
Reggae was just about breaking out then and the Jamaican contingent, as it were, walked with a batch of the latest records which they played non-stop on my record player. At some point I got fed up and moved to play some of the calypso records (I had lugged my whole repertoire, which was considerable, from Trinidad), remarking as I did so that:
"This reggae thing is boring!"
Well, who tell me to say that because, as if to a man (and woman!) programmed, the Jamaicans upped and, having collected their records, stalked out with a final:
"The Jamaicans are leaving!"
I was reminded of this salutary Jamaicans-for-Jamaica spirit in Barbados three years ago when as part of the Bajan's "Crop Over" festival, the tourist board there (and, boy, does that board there take its tourism seriously) had a discussion on why calypso/soca was not making the international inroads that reggae/dancehall was doing.
There was the usual talk and cross-talk until krosfyah's Edwin Yearwood put in that the world success of Jamaican music had to do at least in part (the other big part being, of course, the emergence of Bob Marley, arguably the greatest conscious composer the world has ever known) with Jamaica's amazing acculturisation of the world.
"The experience is," he said, "that you land in an airport anywhere in the world. The airport workers see you wearing dreadlocks and react immediately:
"Jah Rastafari," as if every black man with dreadlocks bound to be both Jamaican and rastafarian and even that "black man" there has to be taken in context since Jamaica has been able to seduce into dreadlocks, rastafarianism or both all kinds of white, yellow and brown people, itinerant journalist Nazma Muller telling me just the other day of the Cuban rastafarian experience missing only the "holy herb", hated and hunted down, I am given to understand, by Fidel and now, no doubt, Raul.
Lloyd Best, languishing these days but with a reputation of rebounding, used to tantalise me with his take on Jamaica's export of itself, how these dreadlocked rastafarians had managed not only to take on the world by flinging their blackness in its face but how positively at least a slice of the world had responded, Stalin able to sing now, if he would, about there being rastas now in Albania, for God's sake.
All of which brings to mind "Germany by Bus" when this country's national cultural contingent was being "bussed" from city to city during the World Cup, all kinds of music being played to make the long distances seem shorter, reggae and dancehall definitely on the liberal Trinbagonian playlist, leading one of Phase II's pannists to complain:
"That is the trouble with Trinidadians. You think when the Jamaicans were moving around in France in the 1998 World Cup they played any soca, calypso or steelband on their bus"!!!???
He had a point...well, maybe, because maybe it is this very Trinbagonian openness that makes us best placed to push the Caribbean's integration movement, Jamaica's dancehall singers a dime a dozen here these days, with Beenie Man actually making forays into soca (in more ways than one. "Beenie", you'll remember, castigating the judges for giving Shurwayne Winchester the Soca Monarch win over Bunji Garlin, such a scenario being impossible to imagine in Kingston with Sparrow on stage berating Jamaican judges for giving Elephant Man win over Yellow Man or whoever over whoever).
But, yes, you have to salute that Jamaican spirit, bold-facedness, to call a patty a patty, even when the patty falls flat as in the case of Chris Gayle who has come nowhere near to breaking any, far more all of Brian Lara's records but who has been beating up Bangladesh and Zimbabwean bowlers, the regional hope being that he will move on up to beat the better bowlers in the main draw of the Champions Trophy, Chris too often chafing at the bit for my liking but the cricket world liking it when he does come off-the Jamaican, not surprisingly committed to his own entertaining way, hell bent for leather and damn the consequences.
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