Tweet
'Welcome to Jamrock!'
Published: Sunday | May 30, 2010 0 Comments and 0 Reactions
Cooper
Carolyn Cooper, Contributor
A few years ago, I visited the world- famous Tivoli Gardens amusement park in Copenhagen and brought back one of the beautiful brochures for Eddie Seaga. He had recently been installed as distinguished fellow at the University of the West Indies (UWI) Mona, and was now much more accessible (and sympathetic) to UWI academics than in his former life as a politician. He used regularly to make disparaging comments about the irrelevance of much of the scholarship produced by the university.
It seems as if Seaga's former disdain for the institution went back a long way to 1956 when he came home from Harvard wanting to do graduate research on revival. He tells a familiar story about the way in which those of us academics who focus on 'low class' projects like revival, then, and now dancehall, are often marginalised.
This is how Seaga puts it in his autobiography, My Life and Leadership: "I found it shocking that when I asked for a small grant towards the revival study, the director of the Institute for (sic) Social and Economic Research, Dr Dudley Higgins, explained to me that 'this university is too young to get involved with something like Pocomania. The public might think badly of us.'"
Here's the sting in Seaga's tale: "While I was in the field, an American professor, George Simpson, came to Jamaica and pursued exactly the same study in which I was engaged, and with recognition by the ISER." To be fair to Higgins, this could be a case of "it takes cash to care," as Seaga, himself, would later famously declare. Understandably, ISER would accommodate Simpson if he came with his own research funding - whatever his project.
The serpent in the garden
Last week, as the smoke billowed up from west Kingston, I kept wondering how is it that Tivoli Gardens, named so optimistically by Seaga, degenerated from his visionary Eden to Paradise Lost. Who was the serpent in the garden?
I turned to Seaga's autobiography in search of answers. Surprisingly, the index to the 367-page book yielded only one entry on 'Tivoli Gardens'. There were far more for 'West Kingston'. All the same, the single entry led me down an intriguing path.
In four brief pages, Seaga gives a compressed account of the history of his model community from Genesis to Revelations; from end to end. Rather graphically, Seaga describes his Back o' Wall political constituency as "the rectum of the city." West Kingston, he elaborates, is "the location of the morgue, the abattoir, a large sewerage plant, the largest garbage dump, 'Dungle', and the biggest cemetery in the country, May Pen."
Seaga conceived his divine mission as literally cultivating a garden out of a neglected wasteland that "dealt with all things that had no further use in life". Seaga does concede that his west Kingston constituency was not just pauperised; it was also "the most noto-rious criminal den of the country, an image which the residents encouraged because the police were afraid to enter its fearful environs. There was absolutely no way this situation could be allowed to continue".
How successful was Seaga in his epic battle to transform the lawless, godforsaken Back o' Wall into Tivoli Gardens? Did the criminal elements simply disappear? Or were they incorporated into the new power structures of the seemingly reformed community? Questions such as these are neither raised nor answered directly in the abbreviated Gospel of Tivoli, according to Seaga. He does acknowledge that "(t)he expectations of young people were increasing, but the delivery of benefits in the past had been slow. Frustration was growing".
Art and Politics
In a most peculiar way, Seaga's Tivoli and the Copenhagen Gardens are both rooted in politics, though quite differently so. According to Wikipedia, Georg Carstensen, "obtained a five-year charter to create Tivoli by telling King Christian VIII that 'when the people are amusing themselves, they do not think about politics'". That may have worked for the Danes, but not for us.
Our arts of entertainment are decidedly political. Back o' Wall's glamorous new name was taken from the local cinema, Tivoli, which itself paid homage to the foreign original. The role of imported American films in shaping mass-produced identity in Jamaica, particularly macho masculinity, is undeniable. Young men saw on the screen the possibility of power, no matter how fantastic. In the words of Derek Morgan: "tougher than tough/ Rudies don't fear."
Jimmy Cliff's The Harder They Come, the title track of the 1972 Perry Henzell/Trevor Rhone film of the same name, confirms the mood of the times: "I'd rather be a free man in my grave/Than living like a puppet or a slave." More than three decades later, Damien 'Junior Gong' Marley's Welcome to Jamrock tells the familiar story of the failure of politicians to create long-term opportunities for youth whose backs are against the wall:
Welcome to Jamrock, Welcome to Jamrock
Out in the streets, they call it murther!
Welcome to Jamdown, poor people a
dead at random
Political violence, can't done! Pure
ghost and phantom,
The youth dem get blind by stardom
Now the Kings Of Kings a call
Old man to pickney,
So wave unnu hand if you with me
To see the sufferation sick me
Dem suit no fit me, to win election dem
trick we
Den dem don't do nuttin at all
Seaga did try to do something. But it was certainly not enough. Or, perhaps, it was too much. Seduced by the serpent who promised absolute power, Seaga seems to have thought he could do it all on his own. Whatever it was. Blinded by stardom, and appropriating a kind of rude boy persona, he ended up presiding over the mother of all garrisons.
Last year, Seaga read from his autobiography at the Calabash International Literary Festival. My sister, Donnette, observed the irony that the festival, which ends today, has certainly felt the impact of the pointlessly murderous hunt for our 21st century Rhygin don man. Nobody I know thought for a minute that 'Prezi' was going to be found in Tivoli Gardens: 'Im was here but im disappear'. He's quite safe who knows where mockingly singing, "the harder they come, the harder they fall."
Published: Sunday | May 30, 2010 0 Comments and 0 Reactions
Cooper
Carolyn Cooper, Contributor
A few years ago, I visited the world- famous Tivoli Gardens amusement park in Copenhagen and brought back one of the beautiful brochures for Eddie Seaga. He had recently been installed as distinguished fellow at the University of the West Indies (UWI) Mona, and was now much more accessible (and sympathetic) to UWI academics than in his former life as a politician. He used regularly to make disparaging comments about the irrelevance of much of the scholarship produced by the university.
It seems as if Seaga's former disdain for the institution went back a long way to 1956 when he came home from Harvard wanting to do graduate research on revival. He tells a familiar story about the way in which those of us academics who focus on 'low class' projects like revival, then, and now dancehall, are often marginalised.
This is how Seaga puts it in his autobiography, My Life and Leadership: "I found it shocking that when I asked for a small grant towards the revival study, the director of the Institute for (sic) Social and Economic Research, Dr Dudley Higgins, explained to me that 'this university is too young to get involved with something like Pocomania. The public might think badly of us.'"
Here's the sting in Seaga's tale: "While I was in the field, an American professor, George Simpson, came to Jamaica and pursued exactly the same study in which I was engaged, and with recognition by the ISER." To be fair to Higgins, this could be a case of "it takes cash to care," as Seaga, himself, would later famously declare. Understandably, ISER would accommodate Simpson if he came with his own research funding - whatever his project.
The serpent in the garden
Last week, as the smoke billowed up from west Kingston, I kept wondering how is it that Tivoli Gardens, named so optimistically by Seaga, degenerated from his visionary Eden to Paradise Lost. Who was the serpent in the garden?
I turned to Seaga's autobiography in search of answers. Surprisingly, the index to the 367-page book yielded only one entry on 'Tivoli Gardens'. There were far more for 'West Kingston'. All the same, the single entry led me down an intriguing path.
In four brief pages, Seaga gives a compressed account of the history of his model community from Genesis to Revelations; from end to end. Rather graphically, Seaga describes his Back o' Wall political constituency as "the rectum of the city." West Kingston, he elaborates, is "the location of the morgue, the abattoir, a large sewerage plant, the largest garbage dump, 'Dungle', and the biggest cemetery in the country, May Pen."
Seaga conceived his divine mission as literally cultivating a garden out of a neglected wasteland that "dealt with all things that had no further use in life". Seaga does concede that his west Kingston constituency was not just pauperised; it was also "the most noto-rious criminal den of the country, an image which the residents encouraged because the police were afraid to enter its fearful environs. There was absolutely no way this situation could be allowed to continue".
How successful was Seaga in his epic battle to transform the lawless, godforsaken Back o' Wall into Tivoli Gardens? Did the criminal elements simply disappear? Or were they incorporated into the new power structures of the seemingly reformed community? Questions such as these are neither raised nor answered directly in the abbreviated Gospel of Tivoli, according to Seaga. He does acknowledge that "(t)he expectations of young people were increasing, but the delivery of benefits in the past had been slow. Frustration was growing".
Art and Politics
In a most peculiar way, Seaga's Tivoli and the Copenhagen Gardens are both rooted in politics, though quite differently so. According to Wikipedia, Georg Carstensen, "obtained a five-year charter to create Tivoli by telling King Christian VIII that 'when the people are amusing themselves, they do not think about politics'". That may have worked for the Danes, but not for us.
Our arts of entertainment are decidedly political. Back o' Wall's glamorous new name was taken from the local cinema, Tivoli, which itself paid homage to the foreign original. The role of imported American films in shaping mass-produced identity in Jamaica, particularly macho masculinity, is undeniable. Young men saw on the screen the possibility of power, no matter how fantastic. In the words of Derek Morgan: "tougher than tough/ Rudies don't fear."
Jimmy Cliff's The Harder They Come, the title track of the 1972 Perry Henzell/Trevor Rhone film of the same name, confirms the mood of the times: "I'd rather be a free man in my grave/Than living like a puppet or a slave." More than three decades later, Damien 'Junior Gong' Marley's Welcome to Jamrock tells the familiar story of the failure of politicians to create long-term opportunities for youth whose backs are against the wall:
Welcome to Jamrock, Welcome to Jamrock
Out in the streets, they call it murther!
Welcome to Jamdown, poor people a
dead at random
Political violence, can't done! Pure
ghost and phantom,
The youth dem get blind by stardom
Now the Kings Of Kings a call
Old man to pickney,
So wave unnu hand if you with me
To see the sufferation sick me
Dem suit no fit me, to win election dem
trick we
Den dem don't do nuttin at all
Seaga did try to do something. But it was certainly not enough. Or, perhaps, it was too much. Seduced by the serpent who promised absolute power, Seaga seems to have thought he could do it all on his own. Whatever it was. Blinded by stardom, and appropriating a kind of rude boy persona, he ended up presiding over the mother of all garrisons.
Last year, Seaga read from his autobiography at the Calabash International Literary Festival. My sister, Donnette, observed the irony that the festival, which ends today, has certainly felt the impact of the pointlessly murderous hunt for our 21st century Rhygin don man. Nobody I know thought for a minute that 'Prezi' was going to be found in Tivoli Gardens: 'Im was here but im disappear'. He's quite safe who knows where mockingly singing, "the harder they come, the harder they fall."
