With a Tassa Blending: Calypso and Cultural Identity in Indo-Caribbean Fiction (original) (raw)

2005, Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal

It is only in the calypso that the Trinidadian touches reality. V. S. Naipaul, The Middle Passage Calypso occupies a privileged position in the Trinidadian cultural imagination. Given its enormous popularity within the island, regional and diasporic populations, Calypso retains strong associations with home and with "the Trini mentality." Indeed calypso, along with Carnival, is often cited as possessing the power to convey the Trinidadian "spirit" and worldview in the way that few other cultural practices can. Associated with lower-strata Afro-Trinidadian cultural identity, calypso is a hybrid form, the origin of which has been the subject of much contestation and debate. 1 The peculiar creation of the Afro Caribbean urban folk, the calypso has been traditionally regarded as the lash of the small man who deploys picong and wit for boastful selfassertion and for sustained counter discourse with the hegemonic worldview, in the protected arena of the performance space. Drawing from the African tradition of the praise and blame song, 2 calypsonians have, by dint of struggle, created and maintained a relatively permissive platform for stinging, incisive humor, cutting criticism and for simultaneously airing and masking fear and antipathy through verbal power play and excess. Over time, calypso has drawn from and fertilized myriad crossover music forms and has risen to prominence in the contemporary commoditization and globalization of local sound. In terms of its content and significance as a cultural practice, this shape-shifting nation-music occupies pivotal interface with literary and other textual discourses on gender, ethnicity and nation. Contextualizing a reading of the calypso in Indo-Trinidadian literature against a broader framework of gender and ethnic identity politics, this paper examines a range of symbolic associations, which attend the calypso as pointers to evolving gender constructions and as metaphors for cultural hybridity. It argues that the calypso with its cohesive links with Afro-Creole cultural assertion and identity also functions predominantly as an ambivalent trope for freedom and belonging for Indo-Trinidadian writers and protagonists. Scholars have carefully documented the process by which a shared history of enforced labor through slavery and indentureship-with common legacies of anomie, institutionalized poverties, social and cultural dislocation, loss of ancestral heritages, and traumatic gender relations-has been transmuted into interethnic hostility and rivalry. 3 The tenuous nature of the nation state in the resultant, fragile, island societies is reflected in the contestation over markers of rootedness and belonging. Citing Calypso and Carnival as manifestation of both "the theatres and metaphors through which Trinidad's social history is encoded and enacted," cultural critic Gordon Rohlehr argues in "Calypso Reinvents Itself:" The Trinidad experience has involved an intense expenditure of energy in a process of continuous indigenization, enacted on ground stolen from the terribly reduced though not totally erased Amerindian presence, committed to create out 1 Morgan: With a Tassa Blending: Calypso and Cultural Identity in...