WEST INDIA from Maximilian Forte on Vimeo.
A production of “West India,” a musical spoken
poem of my late friend and collaborator,
Dr. Roi Kwabena,
from his collection of poems,
Whether or Not, which was also
recorded on his Y42K CD, from where the audio
came for the video above. This video plays on
the weight of Eurocentric constructions of
Caribbean history and identity, a zone where
hegemonic European and American fantasies were
played out. In response, Roi Kwabena called for
a reclamation of an alternative identity, a
localized and indigenous one, that emerges from
within the region’s primordial self.
Seeking to counteract the Eurocentric
construction of Caribbean indigenes as
cannibals, Roi Kwabena chose to place a
transcription of the poem in his post, “OUR
Indigenous ancestors were NEVER CANNIBALS”:
here is not west india
here is not west india
here is not west india
(refrain)
so how dare you
baptise our emerald isles,
Home to canabales…
these mountain tops of Atlantis….
aquamarine basin of unclaimed
shipwrecked treasures, soothing
drunken dreams of criminals,
pirates, buccaneers an’ slave traders…
here still live
humming-bird,
bacchac
golden-frog,
manatee
cayman an’ agouti
look,
take back these identities
you gave my wind swept
Volcanic rocks
st croix…
st kitts,
st eustatius
st vincent
st thomas
these names of saints
made hallow by some
Christian praise… yet
who have never, ever trod
our shores, bitten by sand-flies
nor mosquitoes,
dem never even feel a hurricane
or even sucked mango or sugar-cane
look.., we reclaim
ataitij
xyamaca
ayay
wadadli,
liamaiga
aloi
yuluma
playground of julica
our rainbow….
anguilla, that eel
remains my sacred retreat…
malliouhana
with reverence to jocahu
in rainy season..
salouiga..
the salt of our tears…
get thee hence sint maarten
patron of tourism
spending us (US) dollars
yet not half French
not half dutch
but plenty cruise ship
look. …Look..
look raleigh on fire,
cancer an’ legal hysteria
multi-national tobacconists
running for cover….
Oh tobago
aloubera
was never home
to man Friday
Or robinson crusoe…
neither can
la isla de la trinidad
replace my paradise
kairi
home of ya’ay’a
here is not west india
here is not west india
nor the taino
mistaken sarawak
Or dare you call the
Gallabi a carib
Warrahu an karfuna children
Still eating pone…
Ya’ay’a
ya’ay’a ya’ay’a
Dr.
Lauri Ramey, Professor of Creative Writing and
English in the Department of English at
California State University in Los Angeles, and
Director of the Center for Contemporary Poetry
and Poetics, offered readers her
appreciation of the use of language
in Roi’s poetry:
“in ‘westindia’, cultural identity is
reclaimed through the careful repetitive
construction of the negative case. The poem
is framed with the opening and closing
couplet: ‘here is not west india/here is not
west india’. Names, our most primal
linguistic emblem of identity, are shown to
be symptomatic of the problems of the
colonial legacy. The list of place names is
solemnly intoned
st croix
st kitts
st eustatius
st vincent
st thomas
as the poem echoes the litany of saint names
for locales where the namers ‘never, ever
trod’. The word ‘look’ is repeated, a plea
and demand in one, as the poet begs and
insists that the irony of the situation be
recognised and acknowledged. This drumming
of an intoned and highly significant word
becomes in this collection what is what is
commonly known as leitworter (Martin Buber)—a
frequent device in biblical narrative as
well as the earliest African American
poetry, notably spirituals (which so
strongly influenced much of later Black
American verse) — where single words or
phrases accrue the weight of a central
theme, beyond what an individual word can
ordinarily bear”.
In Roi Kwabena’s work,
Ramey explains, “language is used
aesthetically and politically—for purposes of
appropriation, disenfranchisement, construction
(and deprivation) of identity, the agony of
erasure and marginalisation, the insistent shout
for recognition, and the exuberant joys of
sensuosity”.
Roi Kwabena’s political and aesthetic project is
one of decolonization, and in this work he
anchored the counterweight to Eurocentrism in
the histories and lived memories of the
indigenous peoples, as well as the everyday
practices of common folk, their foods, and their
names for elements of the local ecology. Roi
Kwabena’s project was, explicitly as you heard
in the poem, one of rewriting and reclamation.
He himself reclaimed his indigenous ancestry, as
well as indigeneity in a deeper philosophical
and spiritual sense. There can be neither “fake
Indians” nor “wannabes”—no room at all for any
such vulgar calibrations and certifications of
quantifiable data of interest to the
oppressor—in a decolonized cosmovision.
Roi Kwabena noted what the alternative to
indigeneity has been, the “fantasies of the
master race” (to borrow a line from Ward
Churchill): Man Friday, Robinson Crusoe,
Cannibals, stories of hidden treasure and
legends of buccaneers and wanderers in search of
gold like Sir Walter Raleigh. A contemporary
political economy continues that story of
European wanderlust and exoticism, featured in
the form of the cruise ship, producing a
deformed economy of half-witted identities, “not
half French, not half Dutch, but plenty cruise
ship”. Plenty cruise ships spending “US dollars”
(pronounced “us,” as if to echo local ways of
speaking jokingly, with a double meaning
suggesting that the dollars spent are really
“ours,” a legacy of wealth extracted from the
Caribbean). The sea which was a vehicle for the
indigenous peoples to commune, and combat, now
becomes a mere conveyor belt for foreign
impositions, for various criminals landing in
their planes, establishing their palaces and
their churches (now referring to the images that
I chose to accompany Roi Kwabena’s words). The
video, as with
Sour Chutney, ends on a note of
transcendence and ascendance, symbolized in the
previous instance by birds, in this instance by
an open sky seen closely from below the clouds.
I am aware that Roi was conscious of the
dichotomies that history handed him, and of the
constant tension played out in his work as a
result.
Producing a visual expression for Roi Kwabena’s
work is not all that easy, as much as his work
evokes a visual script. Given the depth of the
marks left by history, older archival footage
seemed most appropriate. I choose archival film
on Haiti, the bulk of the video, from 1942, with
short clips from Jamaica (1933), and the closing
title from Martinique (1946). I began the video
with segments of “classic” ways that the
Caribbean was produced for American consumption:
a documentary from the United Fruit Company on
the “new Caribbean gold” (bananas); Judy Garland
playing “Minnie from Trinidad;” Rita Hayworth as
the “Trinidad lady”; and this was followed by
the Andrews Sister’s famous
appropriation of a Trinidadian
calypso, sung with faux Trini accents: “Rum and
Coca-Cola” by Lord Invader and Lionel Belasco.
From an American perspective this celebrated the
prostitution of local girls to American sailors
who were based in Trinidad (hence, scenes of the
US naval base at Chaguaramas, and the painting
of a sailor chatting up a local girl, under a
Coca-Cola sign):
“Since the Yankee come to Trinidad
They got the young girls all goin’ mad
Young girls say they treat ‘em nice
Make Trinidad like paradise”.
I end without a conclusion, because this story
still does not have one.