Old-time Jamaica
Storytelling, Queen Victoria and Anansi
ANYONE LEAVING the storytelling session at the Bank of Jamaica last Friday afternoon, and walking west to the book launch at the National Gallery, might have experienced déjà vu. Both functions took their audiences back to old-time Jamaica.
The BOJ’s monthly lunch-hour concert, featured Amina Blackwood Meeks, and two other members of her storytelling society — Sister Yahmin (Hazel Williams-Vaz) and Leon South, a St Ann-based storyteller. A young Dominic Wade assisted Sister Yahmin with drumming for some of the stories.
CROWD ENTHRALLED
They kept the 100-plus members of the audience enthralled for the hourlong session, during which there was quite a bit of feedback in the form of laughter, singalong and applause. Whether by design or accident, a common theme ran
theme ran through the stories – the importance of cooperation.
South told a tale of ants in a family who could not inherit their father’s estate from their father until they learnt to work together; Sister Yahmin told of the trouble that befell members of an Ashanti tribe when they failed to listen to their chief; and Blackwood Meeks told one about how the combined efforts of Anansai’s sons saved his life.
LAUNCH OF VICTORIAN JAMAICA
The book Victorian Jamaica, launched at the National Gallery, is a tome of 23 chapters by numerous authors, edited by Wayne Modest and Tim Barringer. Many years in the making, Modest explained that it grew continually as time passed, ending up with 744 pages and over 270 images.
Some of the topics covered, in the context of the Victorian era (Queen Victoria was Queen of Great Britain and Ireland from 1837 to 1901, and empress of India from 1876 to1901), are music; performances; Kumina;
race; class and the politics of dress; the rise of the ‘brown identity’; sanitary reform; the creation of ‘good colonial citizens’; botany; sport and imperial histories.
Eight of the authors spoke at the launch. They were Modest (exhibitions); Tim Barringer (illustrating post-Emancipation activity); Shani Roper (the use of education to create good
citizens); James Robertson (architecture); Julian Cresser (classism, racism, and sexism in sport); Elizabeth Pigou-Dennis (creole architecture); Petrina Dacres (the complex relationship Jamaica had with the Queen); and Rivke Jaffe (about the cholera epidemic on the island).
Modest noted that a lot of discussion went into choosing the book’s title, as the juxtaposition of the two words of the title was controversial. The title was selected to show Jamaica as a site for “troubling (critiquing) the idea” of the Victorian ethos on the island.
Barringer said that the process of editing the book expanded his idea of the world, and helped him correct his view of the history of the period he was taught, and in fact, that he, himself, taught. Though published in the Art History category, Barringer said, the book is “really a cultural history.”
“You can’t understand Victorian England and Europe without thinking of Jamaica,” he told the audience.
Modest called Victorian Jamaica, “a book for future generations,” and it was clear from the two presentations that for good or ill, both Anansai and Queen Victoria still cast long shadows over Jamaica today.