Dr. Winston ‘Shadow’ Bailey’s ‘Evolution’: ‘Write That Down In History’!* — Winthrop R. Holder

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Reading Time 14 mins

(II of V)

Big Dum Nation’s Introduction

 

“I was kidnapped by strong Imagination… I tumble down and wind up in a dungeon.”
Shadow, “Animal Kingdom”

“Boy ah glad Shadow didn’t go
He woulda break from dey waist right down to dey toe
You know why — dey call him a Comedian.”
Julien (The Mighty Unknown) Pierre, ‘Prick For Judges’ quoted in Short Pants,’ Things Going Thru Mih Mind, 1984.

“It is therefore important that in the Caribbean we, who are deluged by Euro-centric
history and literature, document our true history…”
Hollis “Chalkdust” Liverpool, From The Horse’s Mouth.

The power of Shadow’s imagination, insight, and grounding with indigenous forms/knowledge is awesome flowing, no doubt, not just from a student of nature but his being nurtured by nature and enriched by reflections on, and interactions with, deep ecology. These elements may well represent what Gordon Rohlehr (Pathfinder) alluded to as Derek Walcott imagining “a new kind of Adamic man emerging from the wilderness.”  This would make one wonder if Shadow’s surfacing, perhaps from the “Hills Over Yonder” — in which he offers, “The trees on the hills more wonderful still/The clouds in the sky/the birds flying high” — weren’t a journey of ethical citizenship illuminated by a deep, critical fascination, and interaction with the environment and a keen sense of an organic interconnection to the cosmos.

Perhaps this strand is best encapsulated in his defiant and engrossing “My Belief” with its post, even anti-religious refrain: “Man could change my destination/ Man could keep me in suffocation, Man could treat me very evil/ Man could get me into trouble/ Man could take my wife/ Change my life/ Leave me in grief/ But no one could take my belief. Chorus: “For I believe in the stars in the dark night/I believe in the sun in the daylight/I believe in the little children/I believe in life and its problems….” Here Shadow displays what may be considered otherworldly credence flowing from forces and laws of the universe rather than parroting Western religious dogma. Indeed, in “My Belief,” one discerns verbal echoes — and may well be read as an unwitting extension of “1944”, the first published poem of the then fourteen-year-old Derek Walcott.  A verse that was condemned, at the time, by a Catholic priest for its questioning of church dogma. Reflecting on the poem 63 years later, Derek Walcott affirms… “one could learn about God from nature and not necessarily from the church,” reflecting a theme that runs through Shadow’s work. One wonders further if our mystic can also be viewed, in Burton Sankeralli’s terms, as “Dancing at the intersection…” of Afro-Asian and Non-Asian-Afro (European) thought. (1)

Who, then, is this ‘new kinda man’ but someone like Winston Bailey who transcends time by plumbing the archaeology of his dangerous memory to uncover and recover iterations of his childhood immersed in the folklore and “traditional spiritualities” of Tobago where otherworldly forms reigned Supreme? Parodying his persona in “Obeah” he signs: “I know you singing nonsense/but yet I love your nonsense / Is obeah, you working obeah/ You looking like a boo boo but all the women love you / Is Obeah, you working Obeah.” This profound influence quivering thru his soul is reflected in his work which fuses elements of folklore and a deep appreciation of the physical and cultural landscape into a serene cultural lab in which he does not just dance with jumbies but interacts with them seamlessly as in “Jumbies” where “in the middle of the night/Jumbies came out in the bright/They heard the melody/ So they come to jump with me” as Shadow feigns opposition to being made into “A Jumbie man.” Still, Shadow’s reverence for traditional spiritualities may well underscore that “the recognition of African religion is the ultimate step in the reclamation of self for the diaspora African.”(2)

Shadow’s Roots…

But before we tease out a conception of Shadow, let’s for a minute visualize something different… Imagine in the 1970s or 1980s, Shadow or “genuine Rastafarians,” who Earl McKenzie suggests are “among the best examples of [philosophers] to be found in the Caribbean,” were to show up at a university to apply for a position in the philosophy department, how do you think the resident aristocrats of knowledge would react?  Don’t you think those erudite scholars would most definitely think the applicants were out-of-place and run them out of the academy while asking if they ever produced any ‘papers’?

Let’s take some space to introduce Plato’s Cave Allegory to help locate Shadow, the seeker/mystic, in the school where he rightfully belongs, not only among ancient philosophers of ancient India and Africa but also with the early “Greek?” philosophers of whom George James in Stolen Legacy, and Bernall, Black Athena, documented merely extended/stole African philosophy and wrote it down.

Little wonder, then, that Chalkdust’s prescient call to “write that down in history” is epitomized and has always been a central element in Shadow’s dramatic re-presentation of the folklore, cultural landscape, and everyday social activity of ordinary folk as he did in “Pay De Devil Pac Pac,” “Poverty Is Hell,” “Goumangala,” “Winston,” “Soucouvant” and a host of memorable calypso dissertations that foster upliftment while illuminating the community of the marginalized and downtrodden. As such, Shadow’s focus reflects Kamau Brathwaite’s affirmation in Roots that “folk poets are the spokesmen whose whole concern is to express the experiences of the people rather than the experiences of the elite.”

In “Children’s Thing,” speaking from a space that can be characterized as ‘time outside time,’ Shadow asserts, “They would say I like to boast/ But they cannot stop a ghost.” By embracing the immediacy of his lived experiences while capturing the spirit of our times, our organic philosopher helps us see value in the margins, even as he proclaims, in “D’Hardest,” “My aim is high, close to the sky / I cannot fly, but I have to try / To reach my goal, to hit the world / With music like fire, that is my desire / I’m the hardest!” Shadow, then, doesn’t sing with his back to the audience but compels his listeners/students to join in on his wandering thru space and time with his haunting melody that steadies the soul and tempers the spirit while unclouding vision.

Indeed, a key feature of Shadow’s method and craft is an uncanny ability to foster an inter-generational dialogue between himself and his audience by creating a discourse community over time, yet, one that’s timeless. As “‘Don’t’ put no big stone in front of my home / to make me stumble or skip and tumble” (1977) is underscored by his resistance to those who’d “want [us] to tumble down in the gutter” (1985) foreshadowed in “Treat Me Nice” on his 1977 album.  Thus, the audience is a witness in his musical laboratory to an up-close encounter with Shadow’s creative spirit at work as he navigates and problematizes life’s travails while probing its continuities, possibilities, and discontinuities.

                                                                             

In deed, up to today, only Shadow and Russia, founder and first president of the Beggars Association of T&T — maybe John Craig also — in embodying philosophy which derives from deep within their experience and soul, may have trumped Socrates/Plato. While Russia had no Plato-like student — except perhaps Davis Rudder with his shout-out to ‘Russia’ in “The Hammer” — and apparently no one engaged Chalkie’s plea, “I want to read in my own history, letters of John Craig that we never see,” Shadow’s ‘fanatics’ at Shadowlingo and Convois like this, may yet expose and preserve the sagacity of our Sage’s work.

Solid As Oak!

“I stand like an oak tree,” Shadow, “Evolution.”

What, then, was the story of Plato’s The Cave Allegory?  Can someone give a brief explanation? Burton Sankeralli (one of the panelists and co-founder of the Trinidad and Tobago Philosophical Society) responded.

Let’s listen to Shadow’s “Evolution”; rather, let’s follow Calypsonian Short Pants, a pioneer in Talakalypso, render a dramatic reading of this Shadow classic as we talk back to the song through the seeker’s text by creating a chain of speech performances in-between his lyrics.

‘Evolution’ 1979

Winston (Shadow) Bailey (12’ Single 1979, Charlies Records)

I’m caught in a struggle / in a world of energy
Moving too fast for me / No one could set me free
When I call out for a helper  / I cannot hear an answer
Every inch of every human / is in the same position…

I was born just like you / I did not even know,
the question is why / was I born just to die
I don’t want to grow old / to be feeble and cold
But I am trapped like an ape  / I just cannot escape.

Here one wonders if Shadow provides us with a view of an internal dialogue surrounding his  “We Live To Die” (1976) while laying tracks for the “Aging System” (1985) in which he implores: ‘I want to rap to Mother Nature / I want to tell her how I feel… / Don’t like how things moving / Growing older every day / I don’t like the aging system… /Don’t want to stick around to be as old as Farmer Brown/Can’t put on my pajamas…/ Could hardly comb my hair / Just watching pretty ladies could hardly try Something/Existing on memories like a bee without a sting.’

Evolution Continues…

I’m locked in a dungeon/ in the midst of evolution
Just cannot find the key/ to escape destiny
It’s there in existence/ clean out of existence/ Some place beyond the sun
where everything is one…

I stand like an oak tree  / don’t even know my destiny
I fight for survival / not knowing my rival /
When I awake in the morning / keep hoping and praying/
For just a little piece of peace / perfect peace.

Here the sharpness and sparseness of the word choice capture the imagery by inducing dialogue and discovery, thus demonstrating a Shadowesque dilemma: less cuts deeper? Still, does the narrator’s quest for sunlight also underscore one for enlightenment? Updating the fight for survival in “Scratch Meh Back” (2000), Shadow offers, in a deadpan manner… ‘As soon as Old Age set in / Is a different story you singing / Is scratch meh back for me…/ I want some water/I want some water… / And when you drink the water? Is too much for your bladder / You got to run for the posy / Old Age has no remedy.’ Shadow’s Evolution’, then, is not just one entity but provides a platform for introspection and critical reflection on “life and its problems.”

Concluding by scatting, with what may be viewed as our mystic’s whispered asides, Short Pants captures Shadow’s distinctive language/essence thus:

Meah dada oh oh yedi  / Oha dai ahy aya  ahea dad oh oh ya
Oh, dia ah dais  / ah ahh doo oh dai ahia al aldy oh doe nadoes…
A Ohida yeodia / daos oyessoi t yasddy / Aye ahead an llay anha dahha  

Indeed, Evolution gives rise to more questions than answers. What parallels can we draw between Plato’s Cave and Shadow’s predicament in the Dungeon? Are the situations similar? Can one discern more echoes of Shadow’s verse/themes in his pre and post-Evolution calypsos and within kaiso historiography?

What does the dungeon represent/symbolize: The ghettos of Laventille and beyond, a mind space? Was his entrapment in the dungeon laying the tracks for, or envisioning civilization as a plague as speculated in De Vignes’ “Progress,” as King Austin sang, one year after ‘Evolution’? In “Evolution,” is Shadow simply singing stupidness, or is he engaged in a kind of contemplative introspection which, rather than answering questions, questions both answers and questions in life’s circles/cycles?

Though Shadow does not provide an explicit means of escape in this classic, one must remember that as a seeker on a quest to understand and possibly transform our world, Shadow is on a pilgrimage to make sense of life. As such, one wonders if “Evolution” can be envisioned as a bridge or a conduit–much as how the Renaissance is viewed as looking backward and forward–connecting his pre-1979 verse to the present (2018) while discerning the future in the present? Put differently, can Shadow be seen as the man at the crossroads and as a pointerman/sage continually in dialogue with his previous self/verse and his audiences? If Rohlehr is on point by reading Walcott as “Janus-faced, looking backward into the past, forwards into the future and perhaps sideways into the ambiguous present,” can Shadow’s work be seen — samplin’ what Selwyn Cudjoe in a different context refers to — as Sankofa or Eshu-like “affirming the co-existence of the past and the future in the present.”

Further, in “Evolution,” Shadow updates the Cave Allegory by exploring whether the role of artists/philosophers in society is to help move the wool from people’s eyes by pointing a way out of our predicament—imagined or contrived. Is Evolution asking the perennial question: Who am I, and where do I belong—if at all in the world? Is he wondering if our struggle to understand the world—its origins, forms, and our present condition and ourselves–we have first to reach from within, understand ourselves as Socrates–appropriating from Africa–says, “know thyself” first. Does one’s life have a purpose? Relatedly, what’s the meaning of our existence? Can we ever be truly free? One ponders further if Evolution can be read against the back/drop/ground of Mansa Musa and The Village Drums of Freedom’s “Tribute to Ogun” and its “yearning for a spiritual understanding and the true ecstasies of our existence.”

Moreover, in 1979 –three years after “Tribute to Ogun” was released — was our subject also problematizing life, especially in the ghetto, pondering: if we all are in the dark, then who/what is responsible for providing a path to harmonic enlightenment? And can that “harmony” and a deeper sense of humanity only come from first considering our flip side in “We Live to Die” by “look[ing] upon your neighbor as your picture in a mirror?” Our Philosopher-Civilian, then, champions not just restorative justice but equity as in “Greed can make you so unhappy” and proclaims, “I don’t want my conscience bother me,” which he samples and amplifies with “I could live nicer without Conscience / so I want to get rid of my conscience.” Is ethical living possible in a society that has apparently legalized wrong as right?

Indeed, wouldn’t society exist on a higher plane if we imagine ourselves as mirrors of each other? Is he also wondering if the unexamined life is not worth examining, hence his constant appreciation and pondering the interconnections of life and inanimate forms? Can this profound issue—our quest for meaning– that Shadow raises be ‘settled’ in one song? Or, was our organic philosopher merely interrogating the question through ‘Evolution’ compelling us to revisit ‘My Belief,’ ‘Story of Life,’ ‘Hills Over Yonder’ as he contemplated releasing “Survival Road,” ‘One Love,’ “Dey Sticking” and other classics to create/fashion a communicative and dialogic community over time?

Was he enjoining us to search for deeper meaning and ‘truths’ by using his outpourings from the soul to illuminate life’s path? Or would it have been easier if our mystic had done something less challenging and written a book—as most armchair/ivory shower intellectuals would have done–to tease out his message rather than provide us with nuggets in song, in an ontological journey to help in our own self-understanding and self-discovery thus adding to our knowledge of both self and society’s underbelly?

Put differently, in his treatise, was Shadow asking a question he once posed to Frankie MacIntosh – an innovative calypso/soca arranger who worked with our philosopher/artist — who repeated it at a 2009 NY Symposium thus: “Do we live in a dog eat dog world or is it the opposite?” This question compels us to consider Shadow’s use of parables as subversive speech (taken up in Part IV, ‘Adages/Parables as Subversive Speech in Shadow’s Language/Work.’)

Suppose philosophy is a reflection on the fundamental questions we can ask about ourselves and our world, and art—especially the calypso and popular culture–is a compelling way to humanize and harmonize our reflections. In that case, Shadow is preeminent among those who help us ponder Johnny King’s estimation “Nature’s Plan.”  And that’s why we must continually probe Dreadman’s work.

Little wonder that through Winston Bailey’s soundscape, we encounter subtle treatment of many philosophical questions of all time; what is life? What is beauty? Does it exist?; does life have a purpose? Understanding the import with which certain symbols are vested, Shadow centers “Evolution,” his opus, around the life-affirming oak tree — a mystical emblem of truth and bravery —  rather than the ubiquitous mango. Operating in the calypso space, then, as molder and transmitter of  (un)popular opinion, Shadow forces one to embrace CLR James’ words in “The Artists in the Caribbean” and assert that our Philosopher-Civilian “added new range and flexibility to the medium he used” thus “exercis[ing] an influence on the national consciousness which is incalculable.” And that’s why his revolutionary music is transformative not just in the calypso chambers but to our very existence and must be recorded, not suppressed, in history!

Notes:

1. Burton Sankeralli, The Post-Nihilist Manifesto: Dismantling The Liberal Consensus, (Trinidad: A publication of the Trinidad and Tobago Philosophical Society, 2018) p. 92.

2. Pearl Eintou Springer quoted in N. Fadeke Castor’s Spiritual Citizenship: Transnational Pathways from Black Power to IFA in Trinidad (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2017) p. 35.

Next: Part III: “Shadow: Tearing Away The Veil of Familiarity?”

*This is an extended version of the paper, “The Allegory of the Dungeon: Not Black Socrates, But Shadow (Winston Bailey) Learning Under An Oak Tree,” presented to the ‘Philosophizing Shadow Symposium’ at the Lloyd Best Institute of the Caribbean (Tunapuna, Trinidad), March 22, 2019. Part I was carried in BDN on August 23, 2019.
This section, Part II, draws heavily on an unpublished paper, “Shadow as Organic Philosopher,” presented at the Trinidad and Tobago Folk Arts Institute’s Symposium on Shadow’ at Medgar Evers College, City University of New York, March 27, 2009.

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W. R. (troppy) Holder, an emancipated NYC public educator, is a founding member of the Caribbean Awareness Committee (NY), co-editor of BigDrumNation, and the author of Classroom Calypso: Giving Voice to the Voiceless.