This article comprises of both a written and spoken component of the text. To listen to Zarna’s audio recording, please use the audio player below. A transcript is provided at the end of the article.
To listen is to radically evolve oneself and the legacies of others; it traces through my lifelong engagement with Calypso and its contemporary forms, and deepened by recent research at the British Library’s Oral History collection in London. For the Caribbean, speech is an innate part of one’s identity, as articulated by Stuart Hall, ‘there is a sort of Jamaican [Caribbean] thing about performativity and about speaking and orality and about embodying what you are saying in the voice,’ inspired by many facets of our cultural heritage, and most particularly, the influence of a Carnivalised society. Given the context of my Trinidadian background, Calypso music often comes to mind when I think about orality and expression of the voice. For as long as I can remember, Calypso has been a social staple for my predecessors— typically used as background music at family celebrations, or to reference impressionable moments of their teenage years in Trinidad. It always fascinates me how passionate Trinidadians are about Calypso, and by extension Calypsonians, regarding it as a sacred art form and representation of a people. It wasn’t until my first calypso concert at the age of thirteen (2008)— and heard a crowd of Trinidadians erupt in body and voice as David Rudder sang ‘High Mas,’ his rendition of a prayer in relation to the ecstasy of Carnival, that I truly appreciated its powerful correspondence to the Caribbeans’ lived experience.
The genre of Calypso emerged in mid-19th century Trinidad and Tobago, and was inspired by West African ‘Kaiso’ music which was originally a form of communication for enslaved persons during the 17th century. Like messengers, Calypsonians perform commentaries on the socio-political climate with the accompaniment of live acoustic and brass bands, opening the dialogue between the story-teller and (Caribbean) audience. This dialogue of memory, like the written word, contains multitudes and exists as individually as it does a collective. Calypso, therefore, as an oral tradition (re)creates a time in motion, reactivates collective memories of these times, and therefore embodies a transitory archive of a happened history. The accumulation of its story-telling recalibrates with every new memory and historical event that passes, with each pillar an integral part of the whole: the speaker (maker), the message (design), the listener (consumer), and the archive. This is what makes this particular culture so tender, for it is an all-encompassing and experiential mode of history-telling, which from its inception defies tradition and colonial systems.
As a form of post-colonial culture, Calypso, in 1970-1984, was entangled with radical and politically charged groups/individuals who transposed high jargon of social criticism to a form of language that is receptive to the suppressed audience. In the spirit of a carnivalised environment, political calypsonian lyrics are often controversial and audacious as the Calypsonians take free reign in singing how they really feel about topics such as crime, corrupt governance, sexual violence, and (in)access to education. Among these calypsonians is Dr. Hollis Liverpool, whose stage name is ‘Chalkdust’ or ‘Chalkie,’ who shares his musical career with the likes of history, writing and lecturing. Like many other calypsonians, Chalkdust’s academic background left a formative impression on the creation of his music. Known for his flagrant messages and commanding performances, political Calypso, through Chalkdust, is an amplified political recall of events and the state of being, as the emotions as well as content pose as a call to action from listeners, but more particularly authorities. One of his most memorable performances was of his song, ‘How To Sing Calypso,’ in 1982: where Chalkdust often points at the audience, interrogating them as passive spectators of the reality he sees in Trinidad. The embodiment of orality here contrasts the tone of voice in writing, as the former establishes a ritualistic relationship between performers and their medium, and opens the sluice gates for the audience to participate. Like the practice of Latin American Testimonios, Calypsos’ methods of storytelling go beyond its literal purpose, they also act as a theoretical base for its practitioners to speak on wider social topics in a way that is transferable to the ‘common-man.’ This interaction between the calypsonian as author and the audience as consumers of history, thus, asserts the bodily-ness associated in the act of post-colonial history-telling, the gravity of its reception, and the dissemination and archiving of its story: through performance, video and song.
Calypsonians of the 20th century were real-time documenters of social struggles in the Caribbean, pioneering a resistance to colonial authority and reclaiming authorship of their own histories, so that they can be consumed by the masses. Not to mention, both performance and the power of orality in this form of history telling is significant as they engage the audience, or in my case, the listener, to contribute to the continuity of the discourse by means of repetitive consumption. Taking ownership of story-telling, therefore, has a domino effect in the way the histories are produced, consumed and finally multiplying the archive of music through further interrogation and contributions. However, the strife towards a more decolonial society often comes with responses by the colonial infrastructures. During the height of Calypso’s reign (1950s), the content and commentaries of popular songs provoked the colonial governance of Caribbean nations, leading to the eventual containment, censorship and disapproval of books, calypso performances and records. Containment and restriction, here, is an all-too-familiar cog in the wheel of documenting oral history, as this conflict serves as a foreshadowing to the contemporary challenges in the archiving of memory in today’s institutions.
Nestled in the buzz of North-West London, the British Library is a cultural landmark for its wide array of collections, including the United Kingdom’s national sound archive. Hosting over 6.5 million sound recordings, its involvement in the advocacy of oral history goes unnoticed. Notwithstanding its overall reputation, in speaking with one of the curators of British Library’s oral history department, it became apparent that their oral history collection includes ‘interviews with members of the Windrush Generation, but there is no dedicated project specifically on Windrush itself.’ As a result, I decided to focus on archived interviews that were conducted by external organisations/academics. With a journal and pencil, I spent two months scouring through their sound archive for oral histories dating 1998-2014, resounding themes of the voyage, nostalgia, loss, childhood, and the traumas that came with migrating. The length of time it took to dedicate towards this section of my research was unprecedented, as the majority of the recordings I wanted to listen to, in fact, needed to be transferred from their original format to their online archive— taking up to four weeks per recording, else up to ten weeks for those requiring a full digitisation. This was one of the greatest paradoxes in my research experience: the method of speech is often associated with the idea of freedom and the self, yet in this case, it was the most laborious for me to get a hold of.
Nevertheless, the close-knit and intentional experience I had with the voices’ past, evolved the research altogether. My most memorable oral history recording was of Linton Kwesi Johnson as he recalled the trinkets he brought to his mother on his journey to London: yam, rum and ginger. In his retelling of the days leading up to his departure, he explains his experience of going to an “Obeah woman” with his grandmother: seeking protective, spiritual energy for his journey ahead. I’m seated in a dark, intimate room in the library where no-one else can hear the tremble in Johnson’s voice, as he slowly makes his way through a precious memory of his childhood in Jamaica. This moment surges through me; I feel the warmth of a grandmother’s affection and shielding care, knowing that she may never see her grandson again. The hum of the voices seep through the British Library’s headphones, the only kind I can use to listen to the recordings of the Windrush generation. Each Caribbean-born speaker calls upon their listener to approach each recording with intention; to acknowledge the emotions involved in their decisions to leave the island.
Every pause, every crack, every breath is the anticipation of a new awakening and part of the performance in narrating each personal history. It was like listening to an old-time calypso; it was a conversation, where the interviewee enabled a relational and collaborative production of knowledge with me as their listener. I will not now or ever have the same lived experience as the interviewees, nor do I claim to. There is, nonetheless, an invisible bodily-ness that transcends the spoken word: the familiarity of accent, the glimmer of pride, sorrow, and general sympathy I feel as the speaker brings forth my own reckoning of what is means to be Caribbean in a more (but not completely) decolonial world. Their London is different to the experience I’ve had with mine, and still we share the desire of a better future in a city that is still recovering and repairing its dark past. The performance of the voice in post-colonial memory production, therefore, is significant in my own engagement as an active listener, and is more so emphasised by being Trinidadian. By listening, I’ve entered an inescapable cycle of histories told, lost, recovered, dwindling, fragile, waiting.
This research was conducted between 2022 to 2023, and for the first time, accompanies an audio component. In writing about the voice and its part in history-telling, I felt it was only right that it was spoken out as well. Don’t worry, there won’t be any singing included here, maybe another time for that. Feel free to listen along as you read, or one of the other– there are no rules here. Thank you. ─ Zarna
(TRANSCRIPT) Listening in one’s own voice, written and recorded by Zarna Hart for HISTORY WORKSHOP
To listen is to radically evolve oneself and the legacies of others; it traces through my lifelong engagement with Calypso and its contemporary forms, and deepened by recent research at the British Library’s Oral History collection in London. For the Caribbean, speech is an innate part of one’s identity, as articulated by Stuart Hall, ‘there is a sort of Jamaican [Caribbean] thing about performativity and about speaking and orality and about embodying what you are saying in the voice,’ inspired by many facets of our cultural heritage, and most particularly, the influence of a Carnivalised society. Given the context of my Trinidadian background, Calypso music often comes to mind when I think about orality and expression of the voice. For as long as I can remember, Calypso has been a social staple for my predecessors— typically used as background music at family celebrations, or to reference impressionable moments of their teenage years in Trinidad. It always fascinates me how passionate Trinidadians are about Calypso, and by extension Calypsonians, regarding it as a sacred art form and representation of a people. It wasn’t until my first calypso concert at the age of thirteen (2008)— and heard a crowd of Trinidadians erupt in body and voice as David Rudder sang ‘High Mas,’ [change to high mas] his rendition of a prayer in relation to the ecstasy of Carnival, that I truly appreciated its powerful correspondence to the Caribbeans’ lived experience.
The genre of Calypso emerged in mid-19th century Trinidad and Tobago, and was inspired by West African ‘Kaiso’ music which was originally a form of communication for enslaved persons during the 17th century. Like messengers, Calypsonians perform commentaries on the socio-political climate with the accompaniment of live acoustic and brass bands, opening the dialogue between the story-teller and (Caribbean) audience. This dialogue of memory, like the written word, contains multitudes and exists as individually as it does a collective. Calypso, therefore, as an oral tradition (re)creates a time in motion, reactivates collective memories of these times, and thereby embodies a transitory archive of a happened history. The accumulation of its story-telling recalibrates with every new memory and historical event that passes, with each pillar an integral part of the whole: the speaker (maker), the message (design), the listener (consumer), and the archive. This is what makes this particular culture so tender, for it is an all-encompassing and experiential mode of history-telling, which from its inception defies tradition and colonial systems.
As a form of post-colonial culture, Calypso [pause], in 1970-1984, was entangled with radical and politically charged groups/individuals who transposed high jargon of social criticism to a form of language that is receptive to the suppressed audience. In the spirit of a carnivalised environment, political calypsonian lyrics are often controversial and audacious as the Calypsonians take free reign in singing how they really feel about topics such as crime, corrupt governance, sexual violence, and (in)access to education. Among these calypsonians is Dr. Hollis Liverpool, whose stage name is ‘Chalkdust’ or ‘Chalkie,’ who shares his musical career with the likes of history, writing and lecturing. Like many other calypsonians, Chalkdust’s academic background left a formative impression on the creation of his music. Known for his flagrant messages and commanding performances, political Calypso, through Chalkdust, is an amplified political recall of events and the state of being, as the emotions as well as content pose as a call to action from listeners, but more particularly authorities. One of his most memorable performances was of his song, ‘How To Sing Calypso,’ in 1982: where Chalkdust often points at the audience, interrogating them as passive spectators of the reality he sees in Trinidad. The embodiment of orality here contrasts the tone of voice in writing, as the former establishes a ritualistic relationship between performers and their medium, and opens the sluice gates for the audience to participate. Like the practice of Latin American Testimonios, Calypsos’ methods of storytelling go beyond its literal purpose, they also act as a theoretical base for its practitioners to speak on wider social topics in a way that is transferable to the ‘common-man.’ This interaction between the calypsonian as author and the audience as consumers of history, thus, asserts the bodily-ness associated in the act of post-colonial history-telling, the gravity of its reception, and the dissemination and archiving of its story: through performance, video and song.
Yess allyuh, Calypsonians of the 20th century were real-time documenters of social struggles in the Caribbean, pioneering a resistance to colonial authority and reclaiming authorship of their own histories, so that they can be consumed by the masses. Not to mention, both performance and the power of orality in this form of history telling is significant as they engage the audience, or in my case, the listener, to contribute to the continuity of the discourse by means of repetitive consumption. Taking ownership of story-telling, therefore, has a domino effect in the way the histories are produced, consumed and finally multiplying the archive of music through further interrogation and contributions. However, the strife towards a more decolonial society often comes with responses by the colonial infrastructures. During the height of Calypso’s reign in the 1950s, the content and commentaries of popular songs provoked the colonial governance of Caribbean nations, leading to the eventual containment, censorship and disapproval of books, calypso performances and records. Containment and restriction, here, is an all-too-familiar cog in the wheel of documenting oral history, as this conflict serves as a foreshadowing to the contemporary challenges in the archiving of memory in today’s institutions.
[almost a whisper] Nestled in the buzz of North-West London, the British Library is a cultural landmark for its wide array of collections, including the United Kingdom’s national sound archive. Hosting over 6.5 million sound recordings, its involvement in the advocacy of oral history goes unnoticed. Notwithstanding its overall reputation, in speaking with one of the curators of British Library’s oral history department, it became apparent that their oral history collection includes ‘interviews with members of the Windrush Generation, but there is no dedicated project specifically on Windrush itself.’ As a result, I decided to focus on archived interviews that were conducted by external organisations/academics. [crescendo] With a journal and pencil, I spent two months scouring through their sound archive for oral histories dating 1998-2014, resounding themes of the voyage, nostalgia, loss, childhood, and the traumas that came with migrating. The length of time it took to dedicate towards this section of my research was unprecedented, as the majority of the recordings I wanted to listen to, in fact, needed to be transferred from their original format to their online archive— taking up to four weeks per recording, else up to ten weeks for those requiring a full digitisation. This was one of the greatest paradoxes in my research experience: the method of speech is often associated with the idea of freedom and the self, yet in this case, it was the most laborious for me to get a hold of.
Nevertheless, the close-knit and intentional experience I had with the voices’ past, evolved the research altogether. My most memorable oral history recording was of Linton Kwesi Johnson as he recalled the trinkets he brought to his mother on his journey to London: yam, rum and ginger. In his retelling of the days leading up to his departure, he explains his experience of going to an “Obeah woman” with his grandmother: seeking protective, spiritual energy for his journey ahead. I’m seated in a dark, intimate room in the library where no-one else can hear the tremble in Johnson’s voice, as he slowly makes his way through a precious memory of his childhood in Jamaica. This moment surges through me; I-I feel the warmth of a grandmother’s affection and shielding care, knowing that she may never see her grandson again. The hum of the voices seep through the British Library’s headphones, the only kind I can use to listen to the recordings of the Windrush generation. Each Caribbean-born speaker calls upon their listener to approach each recording with intention; to acknowledge the emotions involved in their decisions to leave the island.
[slow and emotion-driven] Every pause, every crack, every breath is the anticipation of a new awakening and part of the performance in narrating each personal history. It was like listening to an old-time calypso; it was a conversation, where the interviewee enabled a relational and collaborative production of knowledge with me as their listener. I will not now or ever have the same lived experience as the interviewees, nor do I claim to. There is, nonetheless, an invisible bodily-ness that transcends the spoken word: the familiarity of accent, the glimmer of pride, sorrow, and general sympathy I feel as the speaker brings forth my own reckoning of what it means to be Caribbean in a more but not completely decolonial world. Their London is different to the experience I’ve had with mine, and still we share the desire of a better future in a city that is still recovering and repairing its dark past. The performance of the voice in post-colonial memory production, therefore, is significant in my own engagement as an active listener, and is more so emphasised by being Trinidadian. By listening, I’ve entered an inescapable cycle of histories told, lost, recovered, dwindling, fragile, waiting.