bigdrumnation

Reading Time 5 minsJune 30, 2023 When I was five or six years old, my father brought home a portable record player for our home with several LPs. There were two or three by the Kingston Trio and one album by the Limelighters. They were both “folk” groups. These purchases reflected an intense and transitory popularity for a certain lusty, harmonized, guitar-driven music from 1958 to 1963. The Kingston Trio is, for me, an historically interesting group. They were started by Dave Guard, Bob Shane, and Nick Reynolds. Shane and Guard grew up in Hawaii, attending the same prep school… Read More »GROWING UP IN THE USA WITH CALYPSO!/Jeff McNish

Reading Time 8 minsMay 30, 2023 “My activism always existed. My art gave me the platform to do something about the activism.”–Harry Belafonte.  Harry was so many things but never enough, for he set his standard much higher than stardom. His legacy illuminates and inspires us in his afterlife. From music to film, Harry broke records and became the industry standard–becoming the first recording artist to go platinum with his monster album Calypso, which caused a stir in Trinidad as it was labeled “The King of Calypso.” Harry is an EGOT (Emmys, Grammys, Oscars, and Tony) recipient, a rarity even… Read More »Harry Belafonte! If Not The King Of Calypso, Then The King of Woke?/Kanene A. Holder

Reading Time 7 minsJuneteenth: A Special Case for Reparations Ain’t no stoppin’ us nowWe’re on the moveAin’t no stoppin’ us nowWe’ve got the groove There’s been so many things that’s held us downBut now it looks like things are finally comin’ aroundI know we’ve got, a long long way to goAnd where we’ll end up, I don’t know “Ain’t No Stopping Us Now.” (1979) Song by McFadden & Whitehead  The past is not past. And slavery is not just the past. African American communities are still enslaved today because many still suffer from the long-term social–economic effects of slavery, directly and… Read More »Juneteenth: A Special Case for Reparations — Martin P. Felix

Reading Time 6 mins June 30, 2023 ‘We went through a repertoire of Elvis, Beatles, and Rolling Stone songs-none of which they recognized. The first tune that caught their interest was when we did Harry’s classic, Jamaica Farewell. They knew it enough to join the chorus with their halting English, encouraging other tables to harmonize.‘ My first introduction to Harry was with his Live at Carnegie Hall album, which somehow came into my hands in the late 1950s. It wasn’t inevitable. I was weaned by the next-generation music of Alan Freed’s Rock and Roll shows, which was anathema to the… Read More »HARRY BELAFONTE: THE GREAT EMISSARY!/ KEN MURRAY*

Reading Time 1 minsMay 30, 2023 Happy Indian Arrival Day! Throughout May and early June, Caribbean nations celebrate Indian Arrival Day (IAD) as a day of deep reflection on the strides made by Indo-Caribbean people since their Arrival in 1838 to the region’s plantations as replacements for the newly-emancipated Africans. Beginning on May 1 in Grenada, the celebrations culminate on June 1 in St. Vincent and the Grenadines and June 5 in Suriname.  Today, May 30, IAD is celebrated in Trinidad and Tobago with rousing ceremonies throughout the nation, as is done to varying degrees throughout the Caribbean on particular… Read More »Happy Indian Arrival Day, 2023!

Reading Time 3 minsMay 30, 2023 It sits innocently in the Undergraduate Humanities Programmes list, alphabetically bookended by Theatre Arts and Visual Arts. Yet the University of the West Indies (UWI) Bachelor of Arts BA Theology degree is a jarring testament to the religious and ethnic discrimination that still exists in our nation’s highest education institution, paying lip service to diversity, equity, and inclusion as core values. Taught every year at St Augustine (Trinidad) campus by members of the Seminary of St John Vianney and the Ugandan Martyrs since 1970, UWI’s Theology degree is unapologetically Christian and Catholic in content. The… Read More »UWI Discrimination: Why no Hindu or Islamic BA Theology Degree?/ Dr. Kumar Mahabir

Reading Time 8 minsMay 4, 2023 Joint Statement by First Nations, Indigenous Peoples, and Advocacy Groups of 12 Countries with the British Monarch as Head of State, on the occasion of the Coronation of King Charles III, May 6 th 2023 Apology, Reparation, and Repatriation of Artefacts and Remains We, the undersigned, call on the British Monarch, King Charles III, on the date of his coronation being May 6, 2023, to acknowledge the horrific impacts on and legacy of genocide and colonisation of the indigenous and enslaved peoples of Antigua and Barbuda, Aotearoa (New Zealand), Australia, The Bahamas, Belize, Canada,… Read More »Joint Statement by First Nations, Indigenous Peoples, and Advocacy Groups of 12 Countries with the British Monarch as Head of State, on the occasion of the Coronation of King Charles III, May 6 th 2023

Reading Time 3 minsApril 30, 2023   After a long hiatus, New Perspectives Theatre Company (NPTC) is pleased to announce a return to our co-production relationship with BANANA BOAT PRODUCTIONS with a revival of MAMMA DECEMBA by noted Jamaican-British author NIGEL D. MOFFAT for a limited run May 4 – 13, 2023. Winner of the SAMUEL BECKETT AWARD in 1985 (sponsored by the Royal Court Theatre and Channel 4), Mamma Decemba is a bitter-sweet play about an older Jamaican woman living in England who finds herself widowed, jobless, and deserted by her children. Her attempts to cope involve hauntingly honest, sometimes humorous, and often painful… Read More »CARIBBEAN THEATRE RETURNS TO MANHATTAN WITH A LIMITED RUN OF “MAMMA DECEMBA!” (May 4-13)

Reading Time 2 mins April 21, 2023 “[H]istorical writing is a process of constant revision and expansion, as new sources, information and perspectives become accessible.”–Dr. Bridget Brereton In history and historical research, so much is often overlooked that, to grasp and understand contentious issues surrounding the ‘proprietorship’ of history, we must plumb the registers to unsilence previously silenced voices. Today, the 53rd Anniversary of the February Revolution and the 1970s Soldiers’ Mutiny, to more deeply appreciate and discern past lessons, we look back and sample voices that may not have factored into the post-1970 research. In this “Special Issue… Part II,”… Read More »Special Issue Marking The 53rd Anniversary Of The 1970 February Revolution in Trinidad & Tobago, Part II–BDN Editors.

Reading Time 8 mins April 4, 2023 “I later realized that [Dr. Williams’s] political interest was not in relieving the victims of capitalism and slavery but in quelling all threats to his authority and the State.” As an officer in training at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst (RMAS), in Camberley, England, from 1965 to 1967, I wrote love songs to Lorna and poetry to Claudette in the middle of the harshest winter during mock battles on the Salisbury plains. The rapid bursts of machine gun fire were music to my poetic mind. A guava flower out of season a poet trained… Read More »FROM LAVENTILLE THROUGH SANDHURST TO STAR DUST: Beyond The 1970 Mutiny*–David Brizan