Recapturing The (True) Spirit Of The ‘Pan Pioneers’*

Reading Time 1 mins

June 17, 2021 (Update)

“Every heart, every soul, is a drum… here’s your sanctuary.”
David Rudder, Song of the Earth

Kim Johnson’s The Illustrated Story of Pan captures and reveals so much of the Caribbean‘s essence by prompting our dangerous memory, its activation, and reclamation. By fashioning a haven for deep meditation on “the transformation of a drum into a melody maker,” the book compels cultural retrieval, not just in Trinidad and Tobago, pan’s birthplace, but in pan communities throughout the world.

Against the backdrop of panjumbies adding to Johnson’s story, in this post, “Iron Band-Steel Pan Wadadli Style,” Iyaba Mandingo initiates a discussion on the Antiguan encounter, thus extending the story by setting the stage for documenting Pan’s global spread. Indeed, now may well be the time for every Steelband to begin telling their own story.

In the third commentary in our ongoing Writers’ Symposium/Lime, Kamau Odinga, in  “What This Pan Book Did For Me–The Ancestors Are Jumping,” reconnects with and deepens his early pan memories through close reading and talking back to Johnson’s text.

And in the second offering, Monty Guy, in “Pan In All Its Glory,” maps his sixty-plus year pan journey through the images and stories unleashed in The Illustrated Story.

In the battle of interpretation, these salvos extend the discussion begun with Simone Dalton’s “Making Meaning From Memory,” as BDN facilitates a lime over our forthcoming issues. In the series, practitioners and participants in the Global Pan Movement interrogate Johnson’s illuminating text as Ashley Murray does inTropicalfete’s Authors Connecting– Cultural Reading Program for Caribbean American Heritage Month.

Read on, engage the authors, and join our community in conversation by posting comments in “Start the Discussion” at the end of each article.

*Writers’ Symposium: Kim Johnson, The Illustrated Story of Pan (Second Edition); POS, Pangea Ltd, 2021; 304 pages; ISBN 978-976-8289-62-9 (hardcover).

From BDN Editors…