(*Not intellectual)
Tears are my friends.
I cried when I saw a family I did not know anguishing as they tried to deal with the death of a relative.
I have cried in prayer as I wrestled with someone else’s misfortune. I cried when the family cat died. I cried when a neighbour seemed to unravel.
And last week when I received an email about how a grown man is slighted because of his schooling, tears welled up in my eyes. Here they come again.
Crying is a natural, wholesome thing for me. I embrace emotion. That doesn’t make me a saint (God, my wife and several others have the contrary evidence).
Now, I have done more than the average amount of studying, so I am quite intellectual.
But I never want to be intellectualistic.
Intellectualism is the exercise of the intellect at the expense of the emotions; the doctrine that knowledge comes wholly from pure reason. So intellectual and intellectualistic are two different things. Be intellectual – you should be. But intellectualistic? No way!
So when, especially against the backdrop of our much vaunted educational system, I see certain things, I frequently think, “intellectualistic!”
A prime example of our intellectualism is our calypsos. And they should carry more of the burden of our emotional development. Why? Because calypso in Barbados is the centre of our “cultural” / “literary” universe. In fact, calypso has to be our literary catch-all since nothing else in that realm is given such wide attention.
But where are our songs that allow us to emotionally participate? Someone commits suicide; a friend gets divorced; five people die in a cave-in (Arch Cot); a father suffers with Alzheimer’s; the earth shakes all over Barbados; a teenage girl gets pregnant; a boy is beaten by a bully; people die in a horrible smash-up (Joe’s River); we fall in love; we graduate; or a thousand other emotionally significant occurrences – and calypsos are silent or simply comment. They are about “social commentary”, we are told. (I gine soon deal with that lie.) Art as comment per se is an oxymoronic idea.
With all of art’s potential to create fellow-feeling, calypso writers gone and sell their birthright, not for a mess of pottage, as Esau did in the Bible, but for a pot of message (as G. K. Chesterton said of H. G. Wells in later life).
You mean I would have to look outside my culture for emotional nourishment or settle for listening to calypsonians baying at politicians or overtly commenting on social problems?
Where is the persona with a deep personal stake? Don’t we understand that “emotional values cannot be expressed by the fact that it is raining, but in the feeling of being rained upon” (Buddy Kaye).
The stuffing of art is emotion, vicarious experience, depiction, personalness, immediacy, intimacy.
Even Kenneth Burke, not shy about involvement in social causes, came to this conclusion: “Even if a given state of affairs is found . . . to be intolerable. . . Even though we might prefer to alter radically the present structure of production and distribution . . . the fact remains that we cannot so alter it forthwith. Hence, along with our efforts to alter it, must go the demand for an imaginative equipment that helps to make it tolerable while it lasts. Much of the ‘pure’ or acquiescent art of today serves this invaluable psychological end.”
“Imaginative equipment” – art works give us that, creating experiences for us to enter into imaginatively and to explore the terrain emotionally. But not much of calypso is like that. Apparently, we think the emotional is a poor-rakey second cousin.
Look, somebody just lost a child in an accident. My culture didn’t give me a song, but I found Lisa Shaffer’s Just One:
“A young momma burst through the crowd / Pulled back that yellow sheet / Collapsed and started shaking / Uncontrollably / Searched until she found the young man with her shattered eyes / then tore a hole into his soul as she screamed and cried:
CHORUS: I only had just one and you took him away / I hope this is something you relive everyday / You could have swerved and you could have stopped / but you didn’t – now look, my God, / what have you done/ I only had just one.”
You guh long with your calypso in which somebody comments on the ills of drunk driving. I gine wid this song. I can climb into it and fellow-feel. I en half a man. I got to be able to become the other, to feel with, to cry if necessary.
Sherwyn Walters is a writer who became a teacher, a song analyst, a broadcaster and an editor. Email offwally@gmail.com.