Pan as renewable resource

So, Budget Day and recent stormy winds have passed (for now), and the clean-up has presumably begun. To be sure, we’re not yet in the clear; as if we ever can be – small, exogenously vulnerable, and partially incapacitated by an instinct for self-destruction.

It therefore seems apt at this time to return to the steelpan – a singularly valuable yet elusive route out of current ruts. Pan, not only as music, but as a model for social organisation, prospective route to new forms of economic value, and as national metaphor for the triumph of ingenuity over despair.

To be sure, there is nothing else like it in our space. Such an assertion is beyond rational contestation, notwithstanding prevailing nonsenses in the public space.

For, whatever the vague details of early years and related cultural antecedents, the not disassociated emergence of pan remains an achievement of greater durability than even Walter Darwent’s bold excavations that struck the non-renewable resource of oil in the 1860s.

The steelpan and the official, informal, and other institutions it has produced, find in their human interface, vast value beyond even the beauty of music, steelbands, and industry, which have proven to be renewable assets at each epochal pass.

Others have recorded development and innovation emerging from disciplines such as pan manufacturing, tuning/blending, composing, arranging, performing, and the unmatched social influence of steelbands. Today, however, the prospects for capturing value have grown but are yet to be realised.

I stood in wait of a bake and shark at the Exodus Pan Theatre last Saturday and through the oppressive heat was able to witness young pan students rehearse a closing flourish.

In that moment, there was a promise of tomorrow that’s too easily missed, belying the myth of youth disinterest – measured by too many in measures of mere ticket sales.

Then, on Sunday, at the Birdsong Academy in celebration of his national award, Prof. Clem Imbert stood before a small, invited gathering and testified to his own development as a practitioner of science and engineering and the value such intellectual assets brought and bring to the steelpan as national instrument.

It was the kind of exposition from which books can be composed, and hope may be found amidst compendia of fear about the future.

On Sunday, there was also Birdsong director/manager, Dennis Phillip proposing a time when the music arranger in China would score orchestral parts for pan among the numerous other instruments. Not Bach or Handel or Beethoven in pan, but pan in Tan Dun, Chen Yi, and Qigang Chen, I suppose. Steelpan as a universal instrument.

And why not? Look up the duet of Josanne Francis and Chao Tian – pan and the Chinese dulcimer live from the Mansion Concert Series in 2020. There are folks reading this who can also cite, from memory, any other number of instances where pan occurs in the music of Asia, Europe, and the Americas.

Not that any of this is required validation. What appears needed, at this time, is for tangible expression – official edict or not – of the national status of this remarkable instrument.

It is often mistakenly identified as “the only musical instrument created in the 20^th Century”, but which was actually (and even more significantly, I believe) the only new “percussive” instrument developed during that period.

Let the musicologists argue the fine points and also discuss innovations in traditional instruments that benefited from new technologies that amplified and modified the sounds produced.

Among the current, important challenges of pan remains its untapped intellectual property (IP) value. This is not a unique task, since people everywhere exploring creative industries as a viable economic sector, are engaged in dissecting the potential for “value capture.”

This goes way beyond the instinct to grasp for state largesse or coercive, regulated preference – a contention that resides so heavily behind lobbying for official proclamation.

Ask what is really meant when many rally around the call for official, codified “recognition” and you will find the heavy suggestion of regulated taste and even greater gratuitous official financial flows.

To follow such a path would be to ignore what pan can mean as a renewable, national resource, and how it contains virtually everything needed to transition us from where we are to a new reality led by digital technologies that are increasingly defining parameters between social and economic success and failure.

There was more than a hint of this when Imbert and Phillip spoke on Sunday. They are not the only ones, but they are on to something big here.

When you see the rain coming (2019)

Take it from me. There is never a dull moment in these here West Indies. Most of it the wonders of a new people from different places in an old land. Some of it unwashed self-destructive chupidness, and a lot of it improvised survival measures – fidgety fingers in the dyke.

In order to survive, you need to keep your eyes wide open, so you can tell the vital differences. So you can see the rain that is coming.

I swear though, you only really appreciate this small place teeming with creativity and resilience, when you consider it as a single space; knowing that the breath you take at the Marché en Fer in Port-au-Prince has the scent (and sometimes stench) of Tunapuna and Stabroek in Guyana and Coronation in downtown Kingston on a Saturday morning.

All of this comes to light around this time every year when, for instance, a TS Karen sails through, sweeping T&T and delivering glancing blows on her way en route to oblivion in the Western Atlantic. Or worse, a Hurricane Dorian that early on hurried the journeys of small craft off our own coasts, as it prepped for a single-minded campaign of destruction in The Bahamas.

But there are other storms that hover like dark, low-hanging clouds and hang before us at eye level. No alerts. No warnings. No official dicta to ease pain and suffering. They are storms of our own doing, you see.

There are storm clouds, for instance, when you apply quintessentially racist values to restrict access to education to our children and jobs for adults. Few things like this to establish a penchant for self-destruction.

Even as we debate the point in T&T, there are ludicrous “grooming guidelines” for school children in Jamaica which, in my view, credit some hairstyles and punish the manner in which certain hair-types grow naturally.

In Barbados, teachers are known to blow the cover on boys who “pat down” their natural hair to what is considered to be an “acceptable” height. I am not sure what is correspondingly done to measure and to remediate the length of other hair types which run in a different direction.

Here, in T&T we have had more recent examples of such racist official behaviour in the form of acceptable and unacceptable “hairstyles” in our schools. Has it occurred to anyone that this is discriminatory to the extent that the “hairstyles” ritualistically under examination are not available as a stylistic option for people with other hair types? That school officials are implicitly drawn in the direction of only one group of people to extend censure and punishment?

Self-hating chupidness is what it is. Self-hate as a companion emotion to racism can be as destructive as the real ting self.

Take, as well, the so-called dress codes at public institutions. What is this issue with people’s shoulders? Why, in 38 degree heat, people cannot use comfortable clothes and footwear? Isn’t this some kind of self-hate? How can this be explained? What kind of collective pathological condition does this reflect?

During my brief assignment in Fiji some years ago, I joined in the sandal, sulu-wearing bunch around town and at public functions and wondered when we in the Caribbean would ever join the club of tropical island people who have learned to love their natural environment … and by extension, themselves.

Then comes one of the darkest clouds around – the looming storm of the theocratic state. The reality that so many of us would prefer personal religious conviction become coercive policy, rule and law. The dominance of supposedly sacred rites over otherwise acknowledged human rights.

This is not delinked from the self-hatred and lack of self-esteem and confidence witnessed with so many other issues. How could it be that one of the most oppressive instruments of our history as an under-class could arise as a singularly influential indicator of our value as humans?

Through this, discriminatory hate agendas are normalised and coercion becomes the norm. Put my name down in the book where it is recorded that some people here resisted racism, the theocracy and the self-hate. Put my name down among those who saw the dark clouds and shouted “Rain is coming!” The rain is coming.

 (First Published in the T&T Guardian on October 2, 2019)