PROUDFLESH: A New Afrikan Journal of Culture, Politics & Consciousness

Allyson Samuel

Work on the Trinidad calypso has centered on its development as a part of a national culture. For my purposes, calypso becomes more than simply entertainment and more than simply national; it becomes a form of subversion of colonial order. In its role as art, cultural artifact and political tool, it shares some very important critical and satirical elements with picong, a form of verbal warfare that itself shares an African history with games of insult such as the African-American tradition of “the dozens.” Calypso owes its bite to this folk form. Calypso, as contemporary social commentary whose purpose is to speak to the people’s concerns about social and governmental problems, shares a tradition with earlier forms of critique such as the cariso and the lavway—two categories of song which also utilized picong’s biting wit.

Other approaches to the study of calypso can range from examining its West African roots to situating it in a framework of colonial resistance, to concentrating on its development as a “New World” microcosm. My purpose here is to locate calypso’s place in Trinidad’s Afro-Creole folk genre of picong; to see how calypso adopts the folk to make it an integral component of its production of social criticism.

Keith Warner’s The Trinidad Calypso (1985) articulates the term calypso as a product of a potentially multi-faceted origin:

a) The Carib word “carieto,” meaning a joyous song, which itself evolved into “cariso.”

b) The French patois creation “carrousseaux,” from the archaic French “cailisseaux,” an apparent attempt to give a French form to a term transmitted orally probably “kaiso,” of which this form would be an acceptable rendition in writing.

c) The Spanish word “caliso,” a term also used for a tropical song in St. Lucia.

d) “careso,” a topical song from the Virgin Islands.

e) The West African (Hausa) “kaiso,” itself a corruption of “kaito,” an expression of approval and encouragement similar to “bravo” (8).

What is remarkable about readings of this term is the connection to music and to the term “kaito!” which points to a relationship with picong—both in the public nature of the form and its interactive structure. Borne out of related oral tradition, picong and calypso both have a similarity with at least one role in West African griottage—biting critical humor addressed to an audience in song format. This emphasis on orality connects African wordsmithing with a genre of criticism that produces in Afro-Trinidadian folk culture the ritual of picong. In a New World context, this oral art becomes part of a larger re-fashioning of orality. In Griots and Griottes: Masters of Words and Music, Thomas Hale notes that the notion of the griot has transcended Africa “into the Caribbean and the United States, taking on extremely positive connotations for those who see the professional as a link to their ancestors” (1998, 15). Hale also points out that among the many social functions that are performed by griots in parts of West Africa are:

Recounting history, providing advice, serving as spokesperson, representing a ruler as a diplomat, mediating conflicts, interpreting the words of others into different languages, playing music, composing songs and tunes, teaching students, exhorting participants in wars and sports, reporting news…contributing to important life ceremonies, and praise-singing (19).

In particular, it is in its role as social commentator that calypso makes potent use of picong. The overlapping considerations of “recounting history,” speaking for a group and rallying contestants are the social sites upon which the use of picong is inscribed in this New World incarnation. Another link in the oral chain is the practice of ritualizing the performance of biting wit in the vehicle of song (2). According to Gordon Rohlehr (1990), the performance of ‘blame’ has been found in folk songs throughout the Caribbean, and became a part of the calypso tradition:

African music often served the purpose of social control, and the roots of the political calypso in Trinidad probably lie in the African custom of permitting criticism of one’s leaders at specific times, in particular contexts, through the media of song and story. The leaders of society recognized the value of such satirical songs in which the ordinary person was given the privilege of unburdening his mind while the impact of his protest was neutralized by the controlled context within which criticism was permissible (2).

In eighteenth century Trinidad, picong stretched beyond the arena of Black social rituals such as drum dances and came to influence such spectacles as chantwell singing. According to Roehlehr (1990) and Pierce (1988), these contests of song were sometimes instigated by slave owners and were always marked by the extemporaneous and pre-composed abuse of a subject. The most famous chantwell (or singer of carisos) was Gros Jean, a “slave” whose “master” Pierre Begorrat utilized the picongesque aspect of the cariso to deride his neighbors and enemies. Hence, it is in this period that the upper class acknowledged the social utility of picong. What is ironic in this instance is its ignorance of picong’s potential as a political tool of the Black lower- and under-class, a tool with which they would problematize the colonial system.

The essence of picong is its dialectical rhetoric. It is dialectical in its production of cultural contestation between Trinidad’s various colonial elites and its Afro-Creole opposition. There is no idea of progress here as found in the Hegelian notion of dialectics. Calypso is picong not simply in its use as social criticism but because of its very existence in the cauldron of cultural conflict in the colonial period. It is a projection of the politics of colonial placement and re-placement.

Picong is at work in the rhetorical structure of social criticism voiced from below. This choice to assume the use of a folk practice to effectively challenge power functions as a sharply pointed attack on the normative, hierarchical European social structure. Abandoning the conventional means of criticism, the jamettes[1] and the rest of the African community chose to bring the practice to the fore so that the audience of the elite would recognize it as one foreign to their own traditions. For the elite, the margin addressing the center using a structure and rhetoric of criticism unfamiliar to their ears was a multi-layered negation of their central authority.

This layering aspect of picong is part of Trinidad’s rural Afro-Creole oral tradition. It addresses the past, present and future in a single breath—all the while cutting through elite assumptions, slicing from top to bottom. The Black use of picong—bringing a cultural artifact whose function is to publicly expose the transgressions of an individual to bear on the ideologies of a group—is thus re-imagined to explore a meta-narrative through which the colonial elite frames its world. Disenfranchised from the recognized forms of administrative regress, the Black lower- and under-class use of picong in song introduces its own rhetorical critique. Its presence in Carnival points to beginnings in the environment of chattel slavery, suggesting its presence during a period in which Blacks were assumed to have no legitimized voice of criticism. The advent of this form of personal abuse into social arenas of the dominant culture signals, to the social and administrative elite, a subversive presence within their midst—one that has the potential to and eventually does weigh in on the subject of cultural marginalization.

James Millette’s Society and Politics in Colonial Trinidad (1985) reveals the heteroglossic nature of nineteenth-century Trinidad, illuminating the social realities of the colonial state:

The society was not so much foreign, as French, both with respect to its free coloured and white communities. In 1802, apart from the Indians and the slaves, numbering 1166 and 19,709 respectively, there were 5275 free coloured and 2261 whites. Of the whites 663 were British, 505 were Spanish and 1093 were French (105).

Despite the capitulation of the island to the British in 1783, the overwhelming colonial cultural influence was French. Thus, the dominant language of the slaves was a patois of French and African languages. As a result, the singing of cariso took place in French. So, chantwells sang their “New World” folk into existence by lacing picong into the fabric of the cariso—for themselves and the dominant French planter class. For this elite, picong would be seen as a taint on the future prospects for social debate; and, as a result, it created the possibility for the margin to assume a larger presence in the center’s future ideological discussions. From the rural environs of the plantations, the practice of picong—the tradition of songs and speeches of combat—came into the town of Port-of-Spain. From the Black underclass and up through the hierarchy of the marginalized, it worked its way into the gaze of the center.

Roger D. Abrahams examines in The Man of Words in the West Indies (1983) the place of oral performance in the anglophone Caribbean, noting that there is prestige in the mastery of various forms of oratory. Although his focus centers on the islands of St. Kitts, Nevis, Tobago and St. Vincent, his work points out that the perceived importance of wordsmithing appears to be characteristic of communities all over the African Diaspora, including Afro-American communities in the United States:

I observed a number of traditional performances and began to perceive a pattern of traits in the roles played by the performer, his relations to his material and his audience, and in the audience’s attitude toward the performer and his enactment. This pattern centered upon the acclaim given to those individuals who were good at using word…It became clear that that these performances almost always arose in contests with other men-of-words, and that such contests were a community-accepted manner of establishing and maintaining a public (or street) reputation (2).

Similarly, in his essay on halo, “the Ewe tradition of songs of abuse,” Kofi Anyidoho points out that the practice of verbal swordplay is an important part of West African culture, and is sometimes utilized to address perceived infractions. He notes: “the case of halo tells us that it is even more significant that the tradition [of abuse] prescribes the need for insult as a legitimate reaction to an individual’s disregard of society’s norms” (1982, 19). This suggests that picong’s traditional format is one refashioned from the cultural retentions of Trinidad’s enslaved community which was predominantly of West African descent.

One must go beyond the notion of calypso as a simple representation of this conflict, as picong politicizes calypso: first, by pointing to the folk elements of which it is partly fashioned; and second, by extension, politicizing the use of the folk as a transforming force in Trinidadian popular culture. It creates the calypsonian as part “New World” griot and part contemporary chantwell.

I examine the calypsonian as a descendant of the chantwell, and explore the politics of both singing forms as a refashioning of the trope of the West African praise-singer. Gordon Rohlehr makes this link to African roots a marker of a socially controlling project. My own work proceeds from this connection by examining the West African griot, his/her role as social commentator, and refashioned groittage via the figures of the chantwell and the calypsonian. According to Hale, although there is a great variety in the profession of griottage in West Africa, it is by definition “anchored in verbal art, service to noble families, and the symbiotic relationship of word and music” (14). I see the wordsmithing and social commentary of Trinidadian calypsonians, regardless of ethnicity, as descendants of the griot/chantwell—one who inverts the social order by singing the material and ideological lives of the marginalized. This creates for the social commentary calypso a theoretical link to the subversive axis upon which it operates. I find this perspective to be particularly useful in examining the contests between the classes and against the government.

Similarly, M.M. Bakhtin saw this contest between groups as fought out in language:

…the living concrete environment in the consciousness of the verbal artists’ lives is never unitary. It is unitary only as an abstract grammatical system of normative forms, taken in isolation from the concrete, ideological conceptualizations that fill it, and in isolation from the uninterrupted process of historical becoming that is a characteristic of all living language…Although it is unitary not only in its shared, abstract, linguistic markers but also in its forms for conceptualizing these abstract markers, it is itself stratified and heteroglot in its aspect as an expressive system, that is, in the forms that carry meanings (1981, 288).

For calypso critics such as Rohlehr (1999) and Richard Burton (1997), the calypsonian is part of the diasporic trickster tradition. He is a “man- [or woman-] of-words” who “like Anancy, must use all his [or her] resources of verbal trickery to mock the powerful while entertaining and, above all, impressing both them and the powerless with his [or her] prowess as performer, mime, and master [sic] of words” (Burton, 188). This view links the calypso to the tradition of picong as well as the tradition of the griot. Because early calypsonians were of African and Creole heritage, the later developments in the form which included people from hitherto unrepresented groups, like the East-Indian community, produce a dialectical opportunity to examine how the form is refashioned to signify a dynamic change from the strictly Afro-Creole folk form to a diverse national product, part and parcel of African cultural diaspora nonetheless.

In this great history of calypso, the name Gros Jean has become synonymous with the earliest practitioners of the art. A “slave” to Pierre Beggorat, his skill in singing carisos was such that his owner made him “master” of kaiso! According to Mitto Sampson, Gros Jean’s talent as a chantwell lay in his ability to compose extemporaneous songs whose picongesque qualities lacerated opponents:

Legend has it that Begorrat…would adjourn with favourite slaves and guests on occasions and indulge in a variety of entertainments. The court was attended by African slave singers of “Cariso” or “Caiso,” which were usually sung extemporare and were of a flattering nature, or satirical or directed against unpopular neighbours or members of the plantation community, or else they were “Mepris,” a term given to a war of insults between two or more expert singers (Pearse, 147).

Thus, a practice borne of the enslaved community comes to be utilized by slave masters to attack their enemies. One wonders whether the patron’s act of calling for the performance of the mepris did not signify an attraction/repulsion process, given the potential of the ritual to be turned on the patron himself. This idea was not lost on Begorrat. For as well as he is known for his patronage of Gros Jean and others, he is also known for his cruelty. According to historian John Cowley in Carnival, Canboulay and Calypso (1996):

His attitude symptomised a singular love-hate relationship between slave and master. He sustained particular black chantwells, or lead singers, for their skills in spontaneous composition, but was instrumental in meting out macabre punishments to slaves who were believed to have transgressed (15).

I see the act of performing the song as a subversion of the imposed silence that was a part of the enslaved’s lot in early nineteenth century Trinidad. The fact that chantwells could gain renown within the plantation community for their mastery of song composition—a renown that reached beyond the folk practices of the “slaves” to the “master’s” realm—destabilized the very notion of an absence of agency.

Because of the large influx of French planters from neighboring islands, the early social framework of Trinidad evinced a heavily Franco-African influence, this being the result of the 1783 Cedula of Popluation which encouraged immigration to the island. During this time, the “slaves” of these immigrants had societies in which ritual singing, drumming and performance served simultaneously the purposes of a connection to Africa and a projection of their material existence in the “New World.” Chantwells such as Gros Jean, Soso, Papa Cochon, Ofuba and Possum become the antecedents of the calypsonian via their connection of the marginalized world of slave societies to the public forum of singing for or to the center.

With the advent of Emancipation in 1834, chantwells became well known as the lead singers of the under-class groups of stickfighters and their supporters. Designated by society as jamettes—those beyond the realm of respectability—their purpose was to exhort their members in battle against rival bands, picongesque compositions against authority, and praise-songs for the bravery and prowess of its members. Their battle cries of “bois” (wood) were meant to acknowledge and conflate the perceptions of physical battle and verbal combat. Rohlehr conflates the popularity of these stickfighting or calinda bands, at the outset, with the social congruence of various elements of ethnic and racial groupings:

In the confused post-Emancipation period, the problems of identity and status must have been acute. How was status to be determined in a society where groups of Yorubas, say, fresh from Africa as indentured workers, or taken off slave ships were living alongside creolized Blacks of French, English or Spanish background, East Indian indentured workers and a dozen or more fragmented ethnic groups, all experiencing severe problems of language in their relation to the power structure? Clearly in that melée, the man who was recognized as a possessor of the word and as a spokesman for the group occupied a position of supreme importance. Such a man would have been the chantwell of the Calinda bands (1992, 52).

What is interesting about the presence of the calinda bands is the transference of locus for the performance of picong from slave entertainment and social gatherings to the patronage system, and finally into the unsanctioned public sphere of carnival. It is in this new arena of performance that the process of marginalization is made advantageous to the jamettes. In effect, it brings visceral hostility and the subversive nature of picong into the mainstream arena—revealing the dialogic nature of the patronage system.[2] Free now to direct their attacks against the very pillars of colonial society, and all its attendant tools of governmental repression, chantwells infused their every vocal performance with the shadow of the drum dances and slave rituals out of which their satirical use of wit is drawn. This signified and signified on the material circumstances upon which the folk form is fashioned. Although the calinda is not a song or dance form isolated to Trinidad (Rohlehr 1990), its inseparability from the jamette stickfighting bands added to its infamy.

One of the most celebrated picong songsmiths is Slinger Francisco, known by the moniker “The Mighty Sparrow.” In 1998, he released “Doh Touch Meh President.” The song, created in response to hearings on the impeachment of U.S. president William Jefferson Clinton, combined vitriol with the wicked humor of nineteenth century jamette rhetoric. Highlighted within the song is the suggestion that a white man whose cabinet placements and policies were seen to give Blacks (and other non-whites) unprecedented access to the highest office in government was inherently unsuited for his position. Sparrow’s winking salute to Clinton adopted the nose-thumbing of chantwells to the normative North American hegemony, and hypocrisy:

Sexual McCarthyism/Ken Starr Inquisition
Showed a young innocent White House intern
Not realizing Monica was a manipulator
When she exposed all her thongs without concern (1998, 19-24).

The multi-level aspect of his attack, linking the present to the hysteria of the “Red Scare” of 1950s America—with a corresponding note of defensiveness against a non-existent threat—is part and parcel of the picongesque. It creates a metanarrative about the proceedings that invokes a period in history which the country now claims to lament as wrongheaded. In effect, Sparrow exhibits a foresight potentially analogous to future revisitations of the current political and judicial situation.

This is the historical crossroads of picong—pointing to both the past and future simultaneously, commenting on diverse meeting-sites within which there are overlappings and conflations. Sparrow delineates his attack, moving back and forth between the individual and the general, between specific personages and overall intent. His invocation of the disreputability of the nineteenth century underclass links Monica Lewinsky’s supporters to the aura of violence and prostitution that was thought to be part of the jamette makeup. He says Monica was “headed by Greenberg and Linda/And she jamette mama,” suggesting the mother’s collusion in her daughter’s prostitution and her own status as madam. Attacks on background and origin are one of the foundations of picong because it presents history in an oral context—as communal, known—and its knowledge as reciprocal. Hence, in the rhetorical voice of the geographical margin criticizing the center, Sparrow revisits his own historical role as a descendant of the chantwell.

In the famous picong duel of 1957, The Lord Melody and Sparrow reenact the venom of the famous chantwell duels of the nineteenth century. Turning on the combat tactics of the “bois” men, they perform a form of extemporaneous, verbal hand-to-hand conflict. The insults invoke, in each combatant’s arsenal of personal and social critique, the layering of personal and familial history:

Sparrow: Well, Melody, come close to me/I will tell you plain and candidly. Don’t stop in the back and smile / Because you have a face like a crocodile.

Melody: Sparrow, you shouldn’t tell me that at all/I mind you when you was small/Many of the nights I use mash you head/In crossing to go to your mother’s… [extemporaneous scatting and humming] (1957, 1-8).

In this twentieth century duel, one can see the directness and license of the insults and the attraction/repulsion that picong of the nineteenth century held for the Franco/Spanish creole elite (hence the patronage of planters such as Begorrat). The suggestion is that such duels between social equals such as “slaves” displayed a verbal violence that could easily be turned against “masters.”

Sparrow’s introduction, where he claims to speak “plainly and candidly,” recalls the rhetoric of truth-speaking, of laying a foundation of veracity as part of the ritual of the verbal duel. This is standard fare in the practice of picong. The phrase “sans humanite” (without humanity) has been a standard part of the Trinidadian oral tradition in the singing of kaiso! It denies the singers fault in their rendition of the depictions they sing, so that people may not take issue in finding themselves characterized in the song. It gives license to the performer to tell the truth, as they see fit, without the censure of the audience or subject of the song. This part of Trinidad’s oral tradition is part and parcel of the truth-telling vocation of the picongesque. In rituals of jesting, it is picong’s own herald—the case for veracity being the anticipation of a negation of the niceties of verbal exchange in the pursuit of alleged truths. So when attacking the political establishment, picong functions as a truth; and when in play, it utilizes the format of the truth-telling for the statements about to be made.

The reputation of calypsonians as “saga boys” or “ladies men” has also been a part of the myth-making associated with their gifts of oratory, satire and social commentary. Sparrow’s reference to Melody’s ugliness pokes fun at this image and “unmakes” his personal mythology. In response, Melody’s recounts his earlier relationship with Sparrow—supposedly “minding him when he was small” in a declaration of his elder status—as like that of a father, or more scandalously, a lover to Sparrow’s mother. In theory, Melody is suggesting that his opponent’s mother is a woman of questionable judgment if she formed romantic attachment to a calypsonian.

The mood of the song becomes more bitingly humorous as the opponents verbally circle each other in combat:

Sparrow: I know you think you looking sweet / You posing here in your own false teeth / Is a lucky thing your uncle kick out/For you to get the false teeth to put in your mouth.

Melody That is all you can say/In every angle and every way/But the way how you watching at me/I go bust a right hook in your belly (1957).

Again, the response is a foundational one: Sparrow attacks Melody’s age and possible decrepitude. The use of the image of false teeth points to decay, suggesting that Melody is already past his prime; and, therefore, that he is not a fitting challenger for his younger opponent. Not only is he old, according to Sparrow, but he is also so low socially that he would wear a dead man’s castoffs. The threatening reply that this engenders in Melody reiterates the chantwell’s role as instigator of physical combat. Further referenced is its powerful nature, both as a ritual of insult and as a tool of verbal warfare.

While the face-to-face duel takes for granted the participation and laughter of the audience, calling for listeners to make a judgment about the winner’s skill in humor, wit and extemporaneous composition, other songs with an individual subject use picong as personal account. “Teresa,” Sparrow’s 1959 calypso, tells the tale of a manipulative woman who uses the singer as her dupe:

You worse than a dog, Teresa /Girl, you break my heart
This morning you take my dollar/Now you playing smart
This morning you come, we talk we business quiet and soft
Every time I come, you making excuses and trying to put it off (1959, 1-6).

The faithless or manipulative woman is a popular theme in calypso, and part and parcel of the male-dominated nature of both the genre of music and the society at large.[3] The introduction of this song provides an assessment of Teresa’s character. Henceforth, it will seem a foregone conclusion. What is left to the commentator is to present the evidence of the subject’s treachery. By linking the image of “business” with that of secrecy, the singer allows his audience to make conclusions about the nature of a transaction between a man and woman conducted under such circumstances. The suggestion that intimacy is being bought reinforces his earlier designation of the woman linking her behavior with that of a prostitute. However, since the arrangement was not concluded satisfactorily, it is obvious that Teresa is not. Thus, one gets the idea that she is really a manipulator. Teresa’s protestation, “Sparrow let me go/Boy, don’t hold me so/My mother go know,” gives more currency to the idea that she, on Sparrow’s view, is using dissembling tactics to get money while keeping her aspiring lover at a distance (7-9). The singer then reinforces his evidence by saying:

Never me again, Teresa, to give you a cent/I rather to give a beggar up on the pavement/I try all my best, but girl I know and I see/You will never, never love anybody… (1959, 13-16).

Comparing the lover from whom he’s becoming estranged to a beggar, Sparrow brings into question the caste status to which he believes her behavior belongs. This attack on the social aspect of a person’s actions becomes, in picong, one of the outer layers of the critique. Since an individual’s movements in society are part of his/her identity, a criticism of those very movements is indirect commentary on the public perception of his/her character.

Because the assessment comes in the form of a personal account, the provision of evidence aligns support for the listener. Yet, part of the nature of that support is trickery: the calypsonian as trickster figure sometimes draws the audience’s sympathy in order to reverse his course, hence making both him- or herself and the listeners the object of the joke:

Don’t make so much noise, Teresa/Darling, have a care
There is nothing irregular going on in here
This morning, you take my dollar to buy tickets for the show
Now I come to take you out to the theatre, you bluntly refuse to go (1959, 18-21).

Thus it is learned that the attack on Teresa was the unwarranted result of an act of kindness. The listener has been the dupe of the singer and of his/her own imagination. The placating phrase, “don’t make so much noise…darling,” hilariously presents the image of a wronged woman responding with a stream of verbal abuse to rival the picong of the singer. The fact that the purpose of the request for money was to pay for a treat for the lovers negates the former impression so venomously articulated by the teller of the tale. Teresa’s anger and refusal to go on the outing effectively creates a reversal of subject positions—the singer plays the fool and is now himself not worthy of her affection. What’s more, the revelation that the “currency” in question, a mere dollar, has been the cause of such a vicious reproach, reveals the aspiring lover as a miserly fraud. The humor of the situation lies in Teresa’s imagined, and unrecounted, reply. One envisions a spirited and violent verbal attack and is, hence, allowed to share in the newly gained humility of the taleteller. This form of entertainment recreates for listeners the proximity and commonality of minute community drama. It reinforces the idea of the connectedness of experience and the shared responses imbedded in cultural forms.

The link between the wordsmithing insults of the chantwell and the calypsonian lies in the possibilities of their tools. Contests of abuse, drawn from West Africa and remade in a site of diasporic dynamism, create both rituals of diversion and of political reading. The work of Gordon Rohlehr shows how this tradition transforms itself, diffused and disguised, such that the singer plays commentator, provocateur as well as trickster. The chantwell’s skill in exhorting listeners to combat reaches beyond to suggest a similar political usage: hence the history of more than an attempt by the authorities to ban certain songs; to try to circumscribe the public spaces in which these songs could be performed. The calypsonian as the melodic and compositional offspring of the griot-cum-chantwell inherits the genre both as a communion with past oral tradition and as a retention of its potential in the present, for the future.

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References

[1] A group functioning as an under-class, existing outside of even the society of the Black lower-class.

[2] I am reading this as dialogic in the Bakhtinian sense—an awarenesss of the double-voicedness existing in each utterance; and the jamettes’ conversant interaction with the privileged utterance.

[3] The situation in calypso has changed over time and, today, many more female singers now give tit for tat.

Copyright © 2004 Africa Resource Center, Inc.

Citation Format

PROUDFLESH: A New Afrikan Journal of Culture, Politics & Consciousness: Issue 3, 2004