Every story, some people say, has three sides. Some issues have even more.
This truth recently came home quite forcefully as calypsonians and others cried foul after the National Cultural Foundation (NCF) instructed some calypsonians to make changes to the lyrics of their songs for the Pic-O-De-Crop competition.
There is the side of the NCF: songs must be vetted and, if necessary, shorn of anything that trespasses into the territory of bad taste or defamation.
And there is the side of some calypsonians and culture warriors: censorship is an attack on the freedom of the artiste, especially the calypso artiste, who speaks uncomfortable truth to power.
Their argument is, we guess, that although a man is not normally free to call you a (socially-disapproved-word-for-a-male-homosexual deleted) on the radio or television or in the newspaper, he should be allowed to do so under cover of the sobriquet Mighty Don’t Give A Damn and as an entrant in a national, Government-run calypso competition.
And they rail against the NCF.
But attorney Cecil McCarthy, writing in his column Everyday Law in Wednesday’s MIDWEEK NATION, clinically laid it out for us: the NCF must protect itself; like other publishers, it has no special protection under the law (no “special privilege”) – and has “incurred significant costs either defending or settling legal proceedings”.
Whose money is used to pay these defamation expenses? The taxpayers’!
The opposers of calypso censorship in Barbados also advance this argument: in Trinidad the calypsonians can say much harsher things. Yes, and in the Philippines they eat dog meat; and in France they eat snails. The point being – and this we understand in relation to dogs and snails – that complex factors contribute to different practices.
Perhaps the relative stringency of censorship here has something to do with the fact that Barbados has not, like Trinidad, had a long and vibrant calypso tradition creating, bit by bit, a virtual “force of law” for the acceptance of statements that are, in fact, unlawful. We have for a long time walked another road. We are not Trinidad.
Sometimes a calypsonian argues: my lawyer did not see anything wrong with my lyrics. Now, the law doesn’t work like that. Otherwise, why would we have a situation where one judge rules in one way, another judge rules in another, or nine judges (the United States Supreme Court) make a virtually engraved determination, only for there to be another engraving by another nine judges some years later.
(So if ever you think the law is an ass – as Dickens’ Mr Bumble in Oliver Twist suggests might sometimes be the case – think again. You really should be thinking about more than one member of that family.)
The plain fact is that the “culprit” in the matter of calypso censorship in Barbados is the law – and its interpretation(s). If the fight is worth it, this type of censorship has to be run into the ground by action that targets the law.
Our artistes cannot be unshackled from this bondage, if such it is, by tilting at windmills, pillorying the NCF or otherwise taking potshots at vague shadows like the “ruling class”.
But where are the boots on the ground? The battle probably cannot be won by words alone.
Note this, though: any such campaign will have as an ironic backdrop the fact that Barbadians generally accept censorship as a necessary part of life in relation to the media, the cinema and public behaviour.
This issue has several sides.
