BARBADIANS should by now be fully assured that there will fairly soon be a serious and concerted attempt at the highest possible levels to devise a programme designed to ensure that future Crop Over festivals reflect the cultural look, sound and even taste of Barbados.
For after all, we have had no less a person than Minister of Culture Stephen Lashley declaring that there will be a national consultation on Crop Over at which “we want to talk to you on what you think about Crop Over, where it should go from here”. He pointed out that one of the things he wanted to see in the revised festival was the return to the tradition of creative costume designs reflecting Barbadian themes.
This was followed by the assertion of chairman of the National Cultural Foundation (NCF), Maureen Graham, that Barbadians must maintain Crop Over’s integrity as a national festival and not allow it to develop into a “carnival”, thereby retaining its distinguishing characteristics as the “sweetest summer festival”.
Having noticed “a lot” of Barbadian Kadooment bandleaders depending on Trinidad for ideas, the NCF head rightly called for the portrayal of more things belonging to Barbados “instead of just taking the big flowers and the feathers that we see elsewhere”.
And while Lashley and Graham had explicitly focused on the visual aspects of the adult Grand Kadooment that have attracted strong criticism from Barbadians, it is to he hoped that the consultation will pay equal attention to some features of Crop Over music. Dissatisfaction with the music, while being more recent in articulation, has nevertheless been quite intense and acute, thereby possibly betraying wider deep-seated unhappiness with the direction in which these mass cultural celebrations have in recent years been heading.
All the public can therefore hope for is that the programming resulting from the consultation will, through form, function and content, begin the urgent reversal of the growing trend of Crop Over being in real danger of becoming a poor and pathetic imitation of carnivals in Trinidad and elsewhere, thereby neglecting, abandoning and even burying the Barbadiana so essential to Crop Over retaining its standout differences.
But while culture-sensitive Barbadians can take some comfort from the fact that the staging of the national consultation on Crop Over indicates that Government has heard and listened to their protestations, there are other less glamorous and celebrated national events also crying out for the structured attention needed to encase them in the high national regard they deserve and require.
I do not believe that any attempt should be made to attach the consideration of these events to the proceedings of the forthcoming national consultation. Instead, I believe that the Day of National Significance, Emancipation Day and National Heroes Day deserve and demand their own specialised attention, simply because highlighting them is not at all bacchanalian in nature.
The truth is, these three occassions, which all attracted considerable national attention when first launched, have in their marking over the years come to be treated by the powers-that-be as virtual cultural “poor relations” when compared with their more high-profile, other equally secular celebrations such as Crop Over and Independence.
In my view, the “second-class” treatment meted out to them by officialdom does not in any way indicate their inherent secondary value, but rather a repeated failure by organisers to realise that as long as these milestones remain lofty but largely abstract ideas to people, they will never succeed in attracting the widespread popular attention and following that other events now do.
Promotion
The consequence of this abstraction is that for the most part, they are seen in the public consciousness as overwhelmingly static, since apart from the hype of their initial and early days, their celebrations have not been consistently given the structured programmes of content and promotion indispensable to their being made to resonate in the psyche of the general populace.
By this I mean that these celebrations, which presently suffer from insufficient public following, badly require that all of them be also accorded their fair share of modern promotion and marketing in the form of their own jingles, logos, music and slogans. And should these items be provided, there has to be an accompanying policy which dictates that the use of these devices and strategies must not be trotted out a mere few days before their occurrence, as has far too often been done with the majority of these three celebrations.
– Glyne Murray
