One of the things I find most rewarding as editor of Bim is my exposure to some of the best in Caribbean thinking and imagination. This coming issue is another such example.
Several of us older folks will remember Casablanca, a film starring the famous Hollywood actors Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman.
Isn’t it intriguing, though, what each individual will take away from a book or a film? In the case of Jamaican poet Edward Baugh, it is Ingrid Bergman’s hat brim (part title of his poem as well) which leaves a lasting impression.
The parting scene of the film is one of heightened intensity: two lovers caught between desire and duty. Baugh captures the moment in verse: the fine diagonal /of Bergman’s hat-brim across the oval/of her face. It balances everything,/its certainty against the obscuring/mist: the twin astonishments/of love and loss that light her face;/the weight of the tears that refuse to fall/the line that closes an epoch, that/encloses the one grief of the world.
From a human perspective, it seems entirely possible to empathize with this loss of love, this rupture that might be irreparable, the nobility of a sacrifice that places duty over love.
Noted Trinidadian scholar Lloyd King is able to appreciate the aesthetic context of this poetic moment, but takes a different and wider approach. King believes that rather than conveying memory honestly as Baugh’s poem does, “we [Caribbean people] are in a mode of anti-colonial disenchantment [and therefore] memory has tended to be revised”.
King refers to an occasion some years ago when Lord Kitchener was interviewed by two academics. Having been asked to name his favourite female singer, Kitchener replied that it was Doris Day, the blonde movie star. In King’s words, Kitchener’s answer “shocked them so much that I guarantee that interview will never be replayed”.
In other words, the interviewers would have been much happier if Kitchener’s answer had been “revised”, more rooted in a localized context: Trinidadian, Caribbean or in any case, non-Caucasian.
I find this whole notion of the revised memory intriguing. The fact is that with the present anti-colonial stance taken (with good reason), it is no longer politically correct to remember our experiences as they happened. I think, for example, of the game Cowboy And Crook played by young boys in the village years ago.
No matter what joy or sense of adventure these boys may have experienced then, they are required now as adults to reconfigure these memories in light of imperialist propaganda.
To put it more simply, we who grew up under a colonial education are required by post-colonial thinking to redefine our childhood experiences or at least, make a good show of pretending to do so.
Forget about the impressions made on us by daffodils, meadows, brooks, streams and the nightingale’s song. Focus instead on the callousness of a Wordsworth who would immerse us in the music of Lines Written Above Tintern Abbey, while black people remained enslaved.
In later years I understood the political and social implications of colonialism of which many like myself were innocent while growing up.
But I am yet to figure out how it is possible to change images, impressions and feelings already set in the psyche and recorded in the nervous system.
How does one change what really is so as to impose what should be, according to current thinking?
What new permutations of thought and feeling will be required of us Caribbean people 50 years hence? Should Lord Kitchener have lied so as to appear in keeping with more acceptable academic and political trends?
Of all humans, we Caribbean people must surely be among the most complex, contradictory and ambivalent. To deny this obvious fact is simply to add even further to the complexity.
