November 19, 2008 issue
Arts & Entertainment
As the fans crowded to the stage, a few “security” men moved up front to try and keep “merry mania” under control.
This excitement surrounding Emile Straker and the Merrymen goes back to their early days in the 1960’s when they played the Caribbean including Guyana, and Trinidad Carnival, where some of the band almost had their shirts stripped from their backs.
In Oshawa, on a cool November night, the group rocked the crowd, moving us up and down like we were on the Jolly Roger pirate ship, cruising the Caribbean, off the St. James coast of Barbados. The rum was there, together with flying fish cutters, fish cakes, coconut bread and a strong Bajun contingent.
Yours truly was there too, some say looking crazier than ever, in a pirate outfit this time (no visible sword), shaking dat t’ing like he was a possessed man! It’s amazing that after 46 years of playing and singing, these great musical ambassadors of Barbados and the Caribbean can still work a crowd.
Their repertoire of calypso melodies and island songs never seem to lose its enduring appeal. Like “never-done-sweetie” the songs linger on. Like a spinning buck-top, the Merrymen keep coming back with an after call, going down memory lane and bringing back lots of musical memories.
I heard the back beat and Chris Gibb’s big bass slip into the rhythm of the jam, Willie Kerr’s lead guitar started to wail, Roett rattled the drums, Robin’s fingers uttered a whine, and Emile set the tone. I spun on the floor, almost out of control, moving these old legs like they have never moved before.
Dressed smartly in white with their identifiable, colourful Merrymen outfit, they moved and grooved infectiously in a manner that belied their vintage years.
Be it ‘Archie’, ‘She Want Pan’, ‘Matilda’, ‘Hot! Hot! Hot!’, ‘Yellow Bird’, ‘Beautiful Barbados’, or the ‘Big Bamboo’, the crowd was right behind them shouting “More! More!” But how much more could they really take?
There were some in the hall who unfortunately could not really stand to shake a leg but they did shake a stick! At the end of two sets, I was dripping wet, with sweat pouring off me. Any more of this action I thought and I could end up flat on the floor.
The Merrymen have come a long way from playing for US $18 a night at the Driftwood Inn on St. Lawrence Gap in Barbados where I heard them in 1962, to becoming one of the Caribbean’s most famous and enduring musical groups.
They have appeared at major concert halls and stages around the world including Madison Square Garden, Royal Festival Hall (London), Carnegie Hall, Trafalgar Square, the Half Time Super Bowl Show in Miami, Blackpool Opera House, London’s Albert Hall, the Queen Elizabeth liner and at Expo ’67 in Montreal, Canada. They recorded at EMI studios in London when the Beatles were recording there in the 1960’s.
They appeared with famous entertainers such as Frank Sinatra, Bob Hope, Tom Jones, Ken Dodd, Chuck Berry, Air Supply, Rich Little, Count Basie and more. They were on the Easter Parade of Stars with Bob Hope and Gordon Lightfoot, whom I had the good fortune to interview in Toronto a few years ago for the Toronto Star. My brothers and I even made an appearance in Chris Gibbs’ backyard in Barbados in the early 60’s and played country music with him, in a shed, where he practised his guitar.
Probably for me, the highlight of the evening was meeting Emile Straker and the Merrymen backstage after the show. Together with my wife Vivienne, my brother Raymond and his wife Helen, we rapped with the group for a while reminiscing about the old days in Barbados. They even autographed a copy of my 45 rpm disc – ‘Big Bamboo/Island Woman’ on a WIRL label.
‘The Big Bamboo’ was the record that changed their lives, becoming a chart stopper in the Caribbean and reportedly a number one hit on the musical charts of Holland, Germany and Belgium for 18 weeks.
As Robin Hunte, one of the members of the group and the son of the late Sir Kenneth Hunte reportedly said “It has been an unbelievable dream”.
Chris Gibbs, the bass guitarist, has been breaking records of his own over the years. An island swimmer, he became the first and only person from the Caribbean to swim the English Channel in August 2003, at the sprightly age of 59!
I hope the band will come back and play at least one more time. The sweet island music, moves me to my feet – the caribbeat, the soca beat, the calypso beat, make me sway sway, swing swing, spin spin, like I’m young again and in a carnival band, jamming in the sun, in the beautiful Caribbean. If the creeks don’t rise and the sun still shines, I’ll be talking to you.
David Dabydeen, Jonathan Morley, Brinsley Samaroo, Amar Wahab, Brigid Wells, Eds., The First Crossing: being the Diary of Theophilus Richmond ship’s surgeon aboard the Hesperus, 1837-8, Coventry, England, The Derek Walcott Press, 2007.
A review by Frank Birbalsingh
The First Crossing: being the Diary of Theophilus Richmond ship’s surgeon aboard the Hesperus, 1837-8, is the published version of “Journal of a Voyage to the Mauritius, Calcutta and Demerara in 1837-8” by Theophilus Pellat Richmond, surgeon on the Hesperus which, along with the Whitby, carried the first batches of Indian indentured workers to Guyana. Although the Whitby left Calcutta 16 days earlier, both ships reached Guyana (then called Demerara) on 5th May, 1838. Dr. Richmond succumbed to yellow fever two months after his arrival in Guyana, and the publication of his journal, nearly 170 years later, is due partly to luck that his manuscript was somehow retrieved by his family in England, and partly to the enterprise of his editors one of whom, Brigid Wells, is distantly related to him. Richmond had graduated as a doctor from the University of Edinburgh only in 1836, and at the age of 22, was setting out on the first assignment of his medical career. The tragedy of his abrupt end is visibly reflected on the last page of his Journal which consists only of the stark heading “Scenes in Demerara” and nothing else.
We may not know how Dr. Richmond’s Journal found its way from Guyana back to England, but we can be certain that the editorial enterprise of The First Crossing will help to compensate for a dearth of information about the settlement of indentured Indians in the Caribbean. In their Introduction, after all, the editors acknowledge that, between 1838 and 1917, as many as half a million indentured Indians were trans-shipped to West Indian plantations. Yet there have been few accounts so far of these voyages. One, for instance, is by Edolphus Swinton, captain of the Salsette a ship that, in 1858, carried 324 indentured Indians from Calcutta of whom 120 died while at sea, and four after they landed in Trinidad - a tragedy that provoked an inquiry and subsequent changes in regulations for such voyages. Captain Swinton’s account, along with “Remarks” from his wife, was published under the title The Other Middle Passage, edited by Ron Ramdin in 1994.
The Introduction to Captain Swinton’s journal is twice as long as the 16 pages of his text, while the Introduction to The First Crossing is more than half the length of Dr. Richmond’s much more substantial journal; but these unusually long Introductions fill in essential historical background material, for example, about the emancipation of slaves in The First Crossing, and the subsequent debate about replacing them with indentured Indians. For it was when the newly emancipated African slaves abandoned working on West Indian plantations that a need was created for fresh labourers in the region; and it was this need that led eventually to an initiative by Sir John Gladstone, father of the British Prime Minister, to ship indentured Indians as replacement workers to the West Indies. Editors of The First Crossing deserve high praise not only for their thorough research on historical and biographical matters in their Introduction, but also for their painstaking and erudite footnotes to Dr. Richmond’s Journal itself.
Despite these riches of scholarship, however, the absence of observations on Guyana, through no fault of Dr. Richmond’s own, is compounded by the shortness of his report on his voyage from Calcutta to Guyana which takes up only the final ten pages (10 percent) of his narrative. While there is no question that the Hesperus (and the Whitby) first took indentured workers from India to the Caribbean in 1837-1838, the title “First Crossing” inevitably raises expectations of a narrative entirely or chiefly focussed on the voyage from India to Guyana. This is clearly not the case since 90 pages are concerned with the journey of the Hesperus from Liverpool to Mauritius and Calcutta including descriptions of these places. But the appeal of The First Crossing still remains largely intact because of its superb scholarship and the engaging quality of Dr. Richmond’s writing.
From the time the Hesperus leaves Liverpool, Dr. Richmond regales us with a wealth of observations, descriptions, opinions and insights on every subject under the sun: the weather, the sea, land, storms, animals, birds, vegetation, fruits, foods, buildings, people, customs and manners, all in elegantly fluent English decorated with an effortless profusion of references not only to acknowledged masters of English literature like Shakespeare, Coleridge or Sir Walter Scott, but to less well-known contemporaries such as James Montgomery, Mrs. C.B. Wilson and Bryan Waller Procter, even an American author James Gates Percival, and a host of classical writers such as Virgil, Ovid and Catullus. All this, in addition to the author’s chief literary source - the Bible - which he appears to know almost by heart.
It seems that nothing escapes either Dr. Richmond’s insatiable curiosity or informed commentary. Nor do powers of physical description fail him when, for example, he captures the blood-soaked drama of killing a shark on page 77, or the chaotic destructiveness of a storm on page 87 and the colourful liveliness of a Mauritian market on page 100. His description of his treatment of cholera aboard the Hesperus is also both informative and eye-opening. As for more delicate subjects, our author’s keen eye for female beauty regularly moves him to some quite lyrical portraits of several women he meets. Best of all, his humour, wit and irony combine to produce writing that foreshadows the work of distinguished British travel writers like Patrick Leigh Fermor and William Dalrymple. What a pity then that Dr. Richmond betrays Eurocentric attitudes on race and culture, for instance, when he regards native Mauritians as “a combination of Orang Outang and Nigger, a crossbreed as it were between Man and Monkey”! For such racist attitudes are simply repugnant however common they might have been in Victorian times.
Two award-winning Caribbean-born authors Neil Bissoondath of Trinidad and Tobago and Austin Clarke of Barbados now have new literary contributions that mirror aspects of their communities here in the Greater Toronto Area.
Both prominent authors appeared at the 29th International Festival of Authors at Harbourfront, which concluded at the beginning of the month.
Neil Bissoondath writes about a love story, The Soul of All Great Designs which takes place between a young man Alec who recreates himself as an interior designer or decorator and Sue or Sumintra, just out of high school and college from an Indian immigrant family living in Brampton.
In Clarke’s case, he first wrote a novel about six white women who lived in Rosedale and their relationship to their domestic servants. He eventually changed it and killed off five of the six women from the story and remained with Barbadian domestic Idora, her Canadian girl friend Josephine, Idora’s son and her husband Bertram whom she instinctively called “that man” which is typically West Indian.
Talking about the eventual product “More” Clarke told Indo Caribbean World he had to decide whether the book was going to be written from the point of view of 18-year-old Black men or whether he would tell the story of an 18 year old Black man through the lips of his mother and the white community.
The principal characters in Bissoondath’s book have their own secrets that propel their lives as they try desperately to be themselves while functioning in two distinctive Toronto communities. It is difficult not to conclude that Sue or Sumintra was not fashioned around the tragic circumstances of that Mississauga student who died tragically and whose father now faces a murder charge in connection with the act.
Bissoondath tries to help Sue come alive during a Round Table event at the festival by explaining how the character strides two worlds. “It is the kind of thing that I think people in a city like Toronto and Vancouver – great immigrant cities – have to contend with,” he observed.
Born to parents who are immigrants from India, she grows up in a world of traditional Hindu values. She goes to school outside of that community in a large Canadian city with other values and she is drawn to both. Sue is trying to negotiate the frontier between the two worlds. “It is never an easy thing to do,” he concluded. With her family the young woman’s name is Sumintra. When she goes to the university or to a restaurant with her friend Kelly she is Sue. “Sue and Sumintra aren’t the same people. And dealing with that frontier is the great challenge of her life and she says at one point that what she would really like, what she is looking for is a place where she can be just herself. She can’t be herself fully in either space and that’s a struggle that I think a lot of people deal with. That is another aspect of course of what Alec is going through – the different aspects of yourself that you highlight, depending on the context,” the author remarked.
In writing The Soul of All Great Designs, Bissoondath discover as he wrote diligently these were two people who had built lives based on secrets, who had invented identities for themselves. Alec had wilfully constructed an identity and as Neil discovered his characters’ lives he realised that the book was in fact looking at the possibility that Canadians have today more so than ever of re-inventing themselves.
“Alec starts off as one kind of person and for reasons of his own decides to make himself into a completely different kind of person. And we live in a world where that can be done and so it is looking at identity in those terms, the flexibility of identity, the malleability of identity and the wilful construction of identity,” he concluded.