With a calypso expert, Sherwyn Walters, peering across critically from the other page, I proceed with caution, but with conviction, to make a singular, but in my view socially revealing observation, arising out of the “content analysis” of the calypsos which made the Pic-O-De-Crop finals of the annual Crop Over calypso competition in Barbados.
The final was essentially an exercise in fear and cowardice. A coward is one who pretends not to see the wrong in order to avoid the responsibility of remedial action. His easiest recourse, therefore, is to “clown around” when seriousness is required or otherwise divert his attention elsewhere.
There was much clowning around and diversion from the real critical issues on the stage on the night of August 2 in Barbados. It was significant that in a historical moment when Barbados is perhaps at its lowest point in its post-Independence history (judging from credit ratings and the Human Development Index), the calypsonians, who in other parts pride themselves as the “people’s newspaper”, pretended, like ostriches, that there was nothing wrong.
With the exception of Kid Site, who was perhaps punished for his honesty, the vast majority avoided calling a spade a spade and making the Government the centre of criticism, and fed the audience a boring diet of “one love”, “come together”, “Barbados is home” songs, each lyrically indistinguishable from the other. It was a disappointing display of the emasculation of a medium of critical popular democratic intervention,
It might have been the psychology of “shame” of not washing dirty linen in public, which explains why unnecessary reminders of “let us all stick together” took the place of biting criticisms in defence of a voiceless suffering public and of calling out whoever needs to be called out. Instead, fear, shame, false pride, embarrassment and perhaps wishful thinking took hold where rational criticism was demanded by a suffering public, in a self-defeating cocktail of cowardice mixed with conservatism.
It is not as if the finalists were incapable of criticism. However, further evincing their cowardice is that they reserved their venom and criticism for each other rather than the true source of public collective misery. Of course, while De Announcer has been singled out as the main culprit of this tendency, with his The Man They Love To Hate, the gusto with which the finalists went after each other stood in stark contrast to their fearful silence in relation to the most obvious source of the country’s ongoing challenges. It was telling that in a time of gall and wormwood, the victorious calypsonian won with a karaoke “clown song” and a feel-good Barbados is home song.
Not only have our trade unionists and defeated former prime ministers lost the ability to engage in critical opposition, our calypsonians have now joined the company of the politically emasculated.
• Tennyson Joseph is a political scientist at the University of the West Indies Cave Hill Campus, specializing in regional affairs.