Getting 'the head' right!

August 06, 2001

How can an artist propose to tackle any subject without first grasping the quintessential character or essence of that subject? For Madan Gopaul to have done justice to sculpting a bust or a monument in honour of the Mighty Sparrow he would have had to answer in his own mind the following questions: Who is Sparrow? What does Sparrow represent to this society and region that gave birth to him and nurtured him? Madan Gopaul worked merely from a picture that was presented to him.

The result of such an approach could never be ART. Art and Mindlessness could never be bedfellows.

"Thought" requires study and time. Suddenly there seems to have developed overnight in this place a culture of haste. In the anxiety to lay claim to "accomplishments" we seem to be encouraging disregard for dialogue and engagement which we now describe as "ole talk" and "red-tape" and at every turn the end-result is bedlam as process, "due-process" , and logic and coherency are thrown out the window. More haste, less speed, the old folks in their wisdom used to say.

What was the reason for this rush to produce a monument to Sparrow? Couldn't we have talked about it? Shouldn't CLICO and the interested individuals not have engaged the society on this issue? There are numerous artists and non-artists in this country who would have loved to have had an input in the conceptualising of such a monument. In the end, what Clico and company did was hand out a $70,000 job. That is very typical of what obtains today. The following analogy is certainly not far-fetched: "gangsters" hand out jobs and contracts together with pictures of the target, right-thinking people provide "work' which involves the engaging and contending of minds to achieve, if not the sublime, then as close to that as is possible. "Work" to an artist of substance is about registering material and spiritual iconic statements.

Look, if the thing had been handled intelligently, we may have ended up utilising the entire space with a composite representation, rather than a single structure, to encompass the "essence" of Sparrow.

In our view such an essence, such largeness, is not easy to capture. "Sparrow" as we said elsewhere came to the fore in 1956 with his rendering of the calypso "Jean and Dinah" that was in fact a more potent rallying call to T&T's political and economic nationalism than even the manifesto of the PNM, then the vanguard nationalist political party. And this was followed by a host of songs which in toto suggested that indeed a Social Rebel had emerged to symbolically tear down the established structures of Officialdom, to shake up the constipated conservatives and drive fear into the hearts of the class and colour-minded elites who ran the society.

But it was not simply a case of mouthing anti-colonial and anti-imperialist platitudes as do the message-boys and girls of today, instead it was the social significance of his posture, his stance as Man, no longer "boy", freed from all the mental shackles of Euro-centric Victorian mannerisms, his rakish behaviour with "Lance and Jobell in Janet gang", his licentious fashionableness, the "oh-ya!" cries between verses, the crooning of the melodic lines, the laugh, the outrageous burgundy Opel Kapitan and the sideways Muff.

How we could forget that Muff? Together, these things symbolised his rebellious stance and the power of his social significance.

Eventually those things served to make him an icon to the point that it became proverbial that if "Sparrow say so is so". And more than that, he was the consummate "rebel'' in context of calypso itself, one who would transform the Art-form in terms of structure, melodic patterns and rhythm, and modernise it infusing all the musical influences from all around the world.

And, to top all that, he was sweet like a "Birdie" and his voice rang out with bell-like clarity. The challenge then to any serious artist would have been how to capture all this in Sparrow's monument. But we are not surprised that Clico and the monument designers blundered badly. They are without question all very shallow people. Sparrow himself must take some blame. His period of social significance lasted from1956 to 1970 just like the then PNM.

When he sang "We passed that Stage" he inadvertently was signalling his own demise as an artist of major social significance. It is then that he became just another of those calypsonians mouthing words, whereas in the past he lived those words and it all poured out of his every demeanour and out of his every pore. He was every bit of what he sang about.

Since then he seems to have been on a campaign to "sanitise" himself, to wipe his slate squeaky clean, and to make himself 100% socially acceptable to the higher echelons and the status-quo. Sparrow has been transformed into his very opposite. Errol Pilgrim recently informed us that when he was doing his documentary on "Bad Johns" of yesteryear, he approached Sparrow , who had rubbed shoulders with them in his earlier life, to have an input in that piece of social history, but Sparrow refused to have anything to do with such an exercise.

No one expects Sparrow to once again go back to living like he once did, no one wants to glorify what many may see as negative.

The point is that through the life he lived and about which he sang Sparrow engaged the society in significant ways and served through this medium to transform the general level of social and political consciousness, and for this he must be paid due homage. It serves no purpose to hide the past or to gloss over it in any way. '

It is about all that was done then to change the human condition. To have chosen the foreign Madan Gopaul,who is ignorant of our history, and to have given him a sanitised picture of the present Sparrow with which to do the work, or more precisely, do the job, only served to expose the prevailing shallowness and cultural malaise. Furthermore it will stymie the nurturing of new "Sparrows".

The old Sparrow on hearing Eric Williams threaten those who did not like his choice of Solomon as Ambassador to England "to get outa here", sang his now famous satire on the subject. Is there a "new" Sparrow out there to satirise the latest political invective: "Yuh want to resign, resign!" We shall see.