bigdrumnation

Reading Time 8 minsFebruary 20, 2020 Preface In the year 1976, being a History teacher employed with the Ministry of Education in my own Trinidad and Tobago, I was posted to Couva Secondary school in Central Trinidad to teach Caribbean History. At the same time, my friend and teaching colleague, Lance Heath, was posted to Tranquility Secondary school in Port of Spain to do likewise. One cool afternoon, in 1976, after drinking a few beers on Prince Street in Port of Spain, Lance informed me that he was taking his class to meet Tubal Uriah Butler at Filtration Road in… Read More »God, The Press and Uriah Butler – Hollis ‘’Chalkdust’’ Liverpool

Reading Time 2 minsFebruary 20, 2020 Feb 20th, 2020 marks the 43rd anniversary of the passing of Grenadian born Tubal Uriah Butler, central to the founding of the Oilfields Workers’ Trade Union and leader of the 1937 workers uprising in Trinidad and Tobago. Feb (26th) 2020 also marks the 50th anniversary of the 1970 ‘Black Power’ uprising in T&T. 2020 also happens to be a national elections year in T&T.  So, especially for T&T, it is entirely appropriate to reflect on where it all came from, where things are, and are headed. A direct continuum connects 1937, Independence in 1962, the 1970… Read More »Is Tubal Uriah Butler Relevant Today?–Roger Toussaint

Reading Time 3 minsFebruary 28, 2020. Peter Bate (Director). Congo: White King, Red Rubber, Black Death (2004, English/French/Dutch with English subtitles). Congo: White King, Red Rubber, Black Death documentary brings to the silver screen the unspeakable horrors of Belgian colonialism in the Congo. It begins with scenes of terror; Congolese children, men, and women without hands. Their hands were cut off by the colonizers and their puppet troops in a macabre system of accounting. Hands were severed because ‘workers’ didn’t work fast enough. Even children’s hands were chopped off as punishment for late deliveries of rubber. Units of mangled hands… Read More »Congo: Mangled, Severed, and Mined for Profits -Martin P. Felix

Reading Time 1 minsExcerpt of a February 5th cyber chat, on the meaning of independence, with Merle Collins,  the renowned Grenadian writer, in which she reflects on Kamau Brathwaite’s seminal work on ‘nation language.’  BDN: If the advancement of literacy was a key goal of the revo–and even today– why then should authors privilege creole/nation language in their writing?  MC: This is a great question to think about just at the point when one of the great advocates of nation language (Kamau Brathwaite), has passed on.  Brathwaite, a revered and thought-provoking Barbadian writer, died today, February 5, 2020.  Of what he termed “nation… Read More »Valuing Self and Celebrating our Own Creativity… (Excerpt)–Merle Collins

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Reading Time 3 minsThe great Lord Burgess (July 28, 1924 – November 29, 2019), real name Irving Louis Burgie, is a champion in the calypso arena and a person of great historical significance in this esoteric artform. Mr. Burgie played a major role in the popularization of calypso music in the 1950s, when he wrote eight of the 11 songs on Harry Belafonte’s 1956 album called Calypso; the first album to sell one million copies, which included the Irving Burgie’s interpretation of the Jamaican banana boat folk song, Day-O Irving Burgie was born in Brooklyn, New York on July 28, 1924.… Read More »The Great Lord Burgess*–Clevil James

Reading Time 5 minsFebruary 10, 2020* “We lived in a society which denied itself heroes” – V.S. Naipaul in the Middle Passage. Rejoice; Kamau is 80 –years- old today. We wish him a happy eightieth as we hasten to proclaim our filial indebtedness to this outstanding Caribbean scholar, who has tutored both our self-image and our self-knowledge during his more than fifty years of heavy intellectual toil. In a half-century of fierce intellectual exertions, Kamau has been at once poet, philosopher, playwright, literary critic and theorist, surveyor of the Caribbean spirit (in space and in time),  teacher, student of Caribbean… Read More »BEAT EIGHTY DRUMS FOR KAMAU – Caldwell Taylor

Reading Time 3 minsIn a performance of his poem,  Kumina, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, counts consecutively and deliberately, the days and the activities encompassed in this spectacle of loss.  Grief is laid bare, in words that are hauntingly plain and emotive, as the speaker comes to terms with the death of a beloved.  The poem ends in an African chant that is at once an invocation of the ancestral spirits and a profound benediction of mourning.  Since Brathwaite’s passing on February 4, eulogists, in their grandiloquence, have spoken of his intellectual prowess and his contributions to the arts, the fashioning of a… Read More »Kamau Brathwaite Revisited – Margaret Prescod-Cissé

Reading Time 4 minsFebruary 7th, 1974, the date Grenada, was given independence by Britain, is not one that I celebrate. We are not a free people. Hence my reason for not being particularly interested in celebrating the event of being granted political independence. Independence, as I see it, is a work in progress. And quite frankly we have a mighty long way to go to attain sovereignty; when we can chart our own course. We are not self-defining people: far from it. It would be more fitting to celebrate a National Heroes Day the way we go about celebrating independence… Read More »Grenadians in the Diaspora Reflect on the Meaning of Independence

Reading Time 6 minsFebruary 7, 2019 “The whole of nature”, wrote William Ralph Inge, “is a conjugation of the verb to eat, in the active and passive” .  We eat to live and if Brillat-Savarin the eighteenth century French gastronome is to be  believed, “we are what we eat”. Of course the idea that there exists a relation between food and character did not originate with Brillat-Savarin: the Old Testament anticipated him by more than 3,000 years. Now in addition to being what we eat, can it also be said that we are how we eat, the how calling attention… Read More »NATION FOOD AND NATIONHOOD: A REVIEW OF MERLE COLLINS’S “SARACCA AND NATION” – Caldwell Taylor