AH BLASTED GRENADIAN TOO! – Caldwell Taylor

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Reading Time 6 mins

January 11, 2022 (First published January 30, 2012)

(Celebrating Bomber’s 84^th birthday anniversary;

 Bomber [Clifton Ryan] was  born on January 30, 1928)

 Ah go make the damn immigration

Send you back you blasted Grenadian

Me ent goin no way wid you, Mister

Ah come down to stay by me sister

So do way you want to,

But Ah know you is ah Grenadian too

–From a 1961 Bomber calypso

Bomber had secured two important wins and he was in the hunt for a third -the Boboloops one! By the way, it’s well worth pointing out that Bomber’s winners one and two did not seduce him into complacent swell-headedness. That said, this writer will allow that Bomber’s vaunted humility could no more restrain his ambition. But this was not a “brigah” (from the French briguer meaning to scheme, to try to obtain stuff by intrigue) sort of ambition. No, this was an ambition of the su-sued kind-the kind which was totally bashful, a one of the covered your mouth (hee hee) variety.

Following in the footfalls of his soft-spoken ambition, Bomber figured out “the mention thing” he needed to do in order to cop calypso’s most prestigious prize: He determined he had to boost his compositional techniques, polish his diction, (he needed to sound less Grenadian and more Trinie, for example); and also he needed to put a dollop of flamme (this needs no translation) in his stage presence.

Bomber’s to-do list was a veritable invitation to pass hours and hours in the company of his hero and mentor, the inimitable Mighty Spoiler (1926-1960). Bomber wanted to drink up Spoiler’s cutting wit and steep in the semi-demi of the Spoiler’s satire: A hard-working Bomber succeeded in doing all of these things, and to this day he remains Spoiler’s most dutiful disciple even though the two men’s friendship was an affair of a mere three years. The brightest of the Spoiler students Bomber will eventually win the Trinidad and Tobago calypso crown (1964), doing in part with a Spoileresque tribute to the Spoiler:

Ah was dreaming in me dream and bounce up Spoiler

Telling im how I am a bad luck fella

Aha, Ah was dreaming in me dream and bounce up wid Spoilo!

Telling im how ah bad luck in calypso.

Some of us will remember dem antediluvian days when it was characteristic for the calypsonian to repeat the first line of each verse of a song- a practice that was probably meant to give the singer a moment to brace his nerves. Perhaps it was a maneuver meant to regroup the audience’s attention, especially when a song’s chorus elicited lots of laughter, thus dispersing the tent’s focus. There was also the fact that the microphone did not come to the calypso tent until the fifties- a matter which meant that the singer had to project his “naked voice”- and a born naked voice into the bargain!

Ah wanna fall!

BACK TO BOMBER AND TEACHER SPOILER

Bomber probably had the first meeting with the Spoiler on the occasion of an introduction facilitated by another Trinidadian-based Grenadian calypsonian, the head-headed Sir Galba (George McSween, 1919–1957). Galba, who hailed from Birchgrove, was Spoiler’s “riding B”, an association which caused the whole world to wonder how it was that the mild-mannered and jokified Spoiler could enjoy the company of the loud, quick-tempered Galba- a “tess” who never passed up an opportunity to brawl. Galba came to a terrible end; dying by suicide.

DEATH AND RETURN OF THE BOMBER

“Teacher Spoiler” died on December 24 (Christmas Eve), 1960 soon after he crept out of his hospital bed in order to take up another of his rum-drenched sprees: Spoiler was well-known for these rum sprees and, indeed, the historian remembers how Spoiler stopped in Panama, drinking rum and spreading joy- forgetting that he needed to come back to Trinidad to defend in the 1956 calypso competition. Spoiler’s absence opened the way for a new star-the Sparrow- taking the crown on a song that flirted with a quartet of good-time girls, namely Jean and Dinah, Rosita and Clementina”.

Spoiler’s premature death rushed the calypsonian into a new life as the art form’s dominant Immortal, leaving a swarm of calypso students, including poet Derek Walcott- to deconstruct the Spoilerian poetics.  Walcott, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1992, celebrates calypso’s Holy Ghost in a poem titled “The Return of the Spoiler”.

I sit high on this bridge in Laventille

Watching that city where I left no will

But my own conscience and rum -eaten wit

And limers passing see me where I sit,

Ghost in brown gabardine, bones in a sack,

And bawl: “Ay, Spoiler, boy! When you come back?”

 Tell Desperadoes when you reach the hill,

I decompose, but I composing still

 

And Walcott’s tribute poem is fitted with Spoiler’s inscrutable incantation “Ah wanna fall!”

In his “Return of the Spoiler”, Walcott hints that Spoiler bears a literary resemblance to John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester (1647-1680). Both men were satirists of the first order and both sought to trade places with creatures from lower orders of being.

In his “Satyr [Satire] against Reason and Mankind”, Rochester says he would rather inhabit “the case “of a lower animal:

I’d be a dog, a monkey or a bear

Or anything but that vain animal,

Who is so proud of being rational 

Feeling oppressed in the “case of a human”, as in the unfortunate position of Wilmot, Spoiler sought to trade places with the despised bed bug in what is by far the singer’s best-known composition, Bed Bug: 

Ah going to bite them young ladies, partner

Like a hot dog or hamburger

And if you thin don’t be in fright

Is only big fat woman ah goin to bite

Ah wanna fall!!

One can make the good case that the Spoiler was influenced by John Donne (1572-1631), a poet who sought to trade places with a flea.  Now, remember that the Spoiler went to school in the thirties and forties- in those high colonial days when school children had to cram poems send from the “Mother Country”. Our teachers’ penchant for such English songs and poems survived in my time in the sixties at St Mary’s R.C. School (La Fillette), when we sang (under the baton of teacher Brooklyn Grant) a song called Give Me Own With Thine Eyes. I was settled into solid manhood when I found out that that song began as a poem written by Ben Jonson (1572-1637). Until the sixties, every Grenadian infant heard this Give Me Own whilst the marrain and parrain stuck the cake in the course of the post-christening fete.

John Donne wrote:

 Mark this flea, and make in this

How little that which deny’st me is

Me it suck’d first, and now sucks thee

And in this flea our two bloods mingled bee

Confesse it, this cannot be said

A sinne, or shame or loose maidenhead

Yet this enjoyes before it wooe

 And pamper’d swells with one blood made of two   

 And this, alas, is more than we would doe. 

Look for Spolier’s influence in Vidia Naipaul’s early works. Read Miguel Street and catch Spoilerian conceits. Naipaul’s B.Worthworth (in Miguel Street) is Spoiler in a diaphanous disguise.

Wope see mama!

Spoiler’s untimely death brought great sadness and sickness to Bomber’s soul- he even thought of quitting the kaiso stage. Fortunately for the art form, the Bomber healed himself, vowing to continue Spoiler’s great mission.

Two years following Spoiler’s demise the Bomber was in the finals of the Trinidad and Tobago Independence Calypso King competition which was won by Bryner; Sparrow came in second, Nap Hepburn third, the Bomber in the fourth berth. To this day there are many who say that Bomber was the clear winner that night.

But as we all know calypso adjudication is a vexing thing, especially as the art form situates itself between the oral and written. Of course adjudication itself is a problem, for aesthetic judgment is a socially constructed thing: taste in music (or whatever) is a product of our education, our class position, ambition, aspiration, among other things.

Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002), the French sociologist and philosopher, grappled with the sociology of taste in a landmark book titled Distinction: a Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Bourdieu wrote:

 

 “Taste classifies, and it classifies the

classifier. Social subjects, classified

by their classification distinguish

themselves by the distinctions they make,

between the beautiful and the ugly, the

distinguished and the vulgar, in which

their position in the objective

classifications is expressed or betrayed”.

The International Sociological Association voted Bourdieu’s “Distinction” as one of the 10 most influential sociological texts of the 20th century.

Calypsonians have themselves spoken and sung quite eloquently on the inherent dangers of calypso competition and of adjudication; Chalkdust himself said: “No culture was meant for competition”.

Ah wanna fall!

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Caldwell Taylor was Grenada’s Ambassador to the United Nations (September 1980 to October 1983), and Deputy Minister for Foreign Affairs (1982 to October 1983). Mr. Taylor is founder and editor of Big Drum Nation.