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Kamau Brathwaite: My Emmerton 2005

Please circulate as wade as possible - let it wide in the water
Kamau Brathwaite, CowPastor, Christ Church, Barabados
see also Hambone 17 (2004), 126-173

15 Mar 05/(!!) The Ides of March (!!)/CP 2:43am rev NYC Good Friday 23 March 05: 6:37am

The lass days of KB and CowPastor Vandal: My Emmerton 2005

Dear AndreaNation and all Caribbean artists intellectuals cultural workers & environmentalists w/in the sound of Marina

I sharing a letter i juss write to a wo at OUP who deals w/permissions payments to authors who want to quote yr work etc. This wo and me - we don't kno each other - share a wonderful sense of weather and the environment and at the end of my business w/her this midnight, I describe and refer to (un)developments in my life i thot you shd kno

w/the dust choking me from the destruction so that I can hardly eat - the water that we drink returning to like its limestone white residual - and have these DS(3s) and Beverley has already had to go the doc w/a dreadful cough of corridor -

I've tried - in vain - to get an appointment w/the PS of the Housing & Lands - a man i long respec & kno. . . and a letter of premonition & desperation I senn in to yr NATION tho promise publication. . . has nvr in fact appeared. . . I try contact Liz Thompson who when she was in NYC sometime ago at an X/hibition of BaJam Wo artists, at which we share both spoke, said yes i shd send her the details of my evident concern. Nuffen of course followed from that. . . I tried lifelines to Dame Billie and Mia - nuffen there neetha. And I note that whenever you respond to me on this, you ask a whole series of Qs about 'what am I doing' - as if I doin nothin!!

All I can in the end do - w/out community support - is set afire to myself, as I've said before, on this very namsetoura pasture become the criminal. and I don't really want to do dat, because my spirit flies so high - so many dreamstories and ideas seem to flow & flow - altho of course who's to kno if they gods not punishing mwe But I don't think so, or lets say I arrogant enuff to think that I don't think so - which of course is whe the danger lies. . .

I write to you now as I write earlier to that stranger. but w/the difference that I have faith that as a wo of soul, there is something I sure you can do, if is nothing more than persuade one of yr colleagues who's still free and fearless - is there any such? - to come out to CP and see whats happening. . . is there no voices in BaJam that can raise can rise? It will be a shame if i hear people saying AFTER I GONE - that Kamau use to talk about these things and no one lissen not a soul do a ting. trapped - SURELY NOT FOR EVER - in our Metal Mental Slavery

The plight of one person. the flight of one sparrow . is worth more than all the kingdooms of this world. But very frew people can live this

What I saying is that my micro case here, is the macro case of us all. The little done unto mwe, is the burden down upon us all upon us all

All night long, the trucks trundle & boom. Two mornings ago, to destroy more duncks trees, so they cd swathe more space for the tractors, they set fire to the slope under Thyme Bottom. if the Fire Beegrade didn't come, that fire might have swept down into our yard and run all the way down west to Parish Lands. It was a clear day and a high wind

The destruction of CowPasture to put in an unnecessary and unethical road - when there are two perfectly good xisting road in this quadrant - for some new unxplained access to the airport, involves -

(1) the death of the three dozen cows and flocks of blackbelly sheep that use to ruminate CowPasture

(2) the loss of rumination marks the end of peace & serengetti beauty here and marks the arrival of vandalism. Abandoned houses further pillage, and w/the blood up, even the duncks trees on the pasture under pressure - their limbs & branches torn down this harmattan for their plunder, not picked picked picked between the thorns, as happily traditional

(3) the loss of pasture - here and all over Barbados and all over the CARICOM Caribbean = also the closing down of the last sugar production in St Kitts, and the verge of ditto in Barabados

(4) the loss of pasture - here and all over the island and all over the CARICOM Caribbean = the decline of cricket. Sir Viv and Gary S come from BayLands not from roundabouts, hotels and clogged up death-mark highways

(5) the road here is unethical because of this and because it is an offence not only to the people who choose to live here, who are/were so fortunate to live here to love here - and dispossessed of pristine coral; thru no fault of their own, but via a willful remote control decision by Authorities too arrogant & high & mighty to discuss plans that involve all our futures fortunes w/us 'out here', who are still seen - MENTAL PLANTATION MENTAL SLAVERY - as chattel anti-heroes have no voice - cannot afford to be admitted to our voice

(6) even as I write this, therefore, destruction going on - this old plantation well, the little Lake (or Pond) of Thorns - the natural water catchment for this area - filled in and flattened - hence future floods. And near the well, a fledgling BEARDED FIG-TREE (shrine of ancient African & Amerindian spirits) its cinnamon beards just showing. a dear endangered species. cruelly unethically soon to gone . i cd go on an gone . like all the people of Thyme Bottom already gone gone gone. . .

(7) at 3 pm today, tractors break thru the last line of bush & duncks between them and our house my yard. A noise as of bombing and a great cloud of dust - FALOUJA - and now there's nothing left between ourselves and them - the slave well nxt, the bearded fig- tree nxt - today if not tomorrow. My eyes are full of grit and helpless scars, as if I am the last person in the world the lost poet, really, in the world. Rosina say this morning I shd write it down. But write it down for who for what. . .

I walked out there towards the cloud of dust - the grit - my tears - and my heart as if rebelled inside me, fit to burst w/grief & loss & helplessness & pain

(8) I had also hoped, when we found this place, to found my nation here - my maroon town, resistance palenque. Bring in my archives from their shattered world - shattered in Jamaica since the Gilbert Hurricane of 1988 - an archive stretching back now almost 100 years and covering from Bay Street/Browns Beach/Harrson College days, thru Cambridge, Ghana, SL, 30 years at Mona, the Caribbean Artists Movement (London), Bim, BBC Caribbean Voices, Savacou, Carifestas, paintings, sculpture (inc early postcolonial W Af, early Rastafari), Colly, Timmy Callender, Broodhagen, jazz records, tape recordings from almost ancient Ghana, from nearly every Caribbean voice of say or song

and all this a lament - the loss & dislocation of so much of this in Gilbert (see SHAR. see Carolivia Herron's 'SAVING THE WORD' hear ARK - these are our documents for our last our lost millennium - and still more loss from worm and Ivan (2004) and a terrible break-in (5 March 05) - VANDALL INVASION of our hopes and consciousness

(9) The dream the vision was to in-gather the scatta archives (Ja & NYC) here, try heal them and from this wound of miracle, set up a BUSSA CENTRE for us all - enough peace & space & beauty surpassing any other in the world - in a small sacred bless - to build a place to live to love, a place for the LIBRARY OF ALEXANDRIA, a conference room, performance outdoor places, chalets for writers, artists - that kind of possible dream - because we had the dream we had the space we had the means - destroyed by my own Govt - w/out DISCUSSION - and digging us down and STRANGLING the holy past & constellation flute & future of this place - the egrets gone because the cattle gone. the woo doves mourn. I itch from deconstruction cement dust

I cannot even die here now. no strength to even burn myself upon this pasture as I want to do. As I still may. Because my love, whe else is there to go, to try to build again at 75? tho I not beggin for yr sympathy - tho that good too - I askin you to LISSEN . one mo Emmerton*. xcep unlike the Mighty Gabby song which sing & say (1977) far more than any prose i prose can say, me na give up. me nvva will accept unrighteousness, If this was SandlyLane wd we be treated so? again today the tractors wheel an thump. I can't accept to so unfairly go

p/s I'm being told that all this is too late - that time & the tide has pass me by - not enuff effort too late! if that be so, let me then at least hope that you will allow at least my faint words - faintly heard now on the pasture - be at least a verbal memorial to mark the graveyard of this place

Emmerton*

in the mid 70s like Six Mens Bay & CowPasture & so many other special places in Barabados now in the late 1990s/2000,
the urban 'chattelhouse' village of Emmerton is (partly) destroy(ed)
to make way for a highway (Spring Garden) & a Water Treatment Plant
& in the case of Six Mens (it's celebrated briefly in SP) a road
& Enclave Villas & CP a road & possibly Golf Curses

The great cry out/lament about this own-native dispossession
is Gabby's 'Emmerton' which like Bob Marley's 'Redemption Song'
has become increasingly in Bdos a great cultural anthem - the oracle you play or sing when there is Crisis in the Land -
paradoxical
since the deep Crisis in the land is the very dispossession
that creates the song in the first place! But that's how
the Establishment co-opts the rebel lion(s) - either kill them
or try to tame them into a Circus, tho of course they'll nvr tame
the lion that is Gabby, who since 1995 begins to grow his locks
- his lion's name

Curwen Best, Bajan's first cultural critic & commentator
(lit & music as popular xpression) captures the Gabby mo beautifully & subtly undercloses the loneliness of all us artists in the fight > Golgothia; the point being made that is not it is not it is not enough anymore, now the chips are down, to lament that I don't like it
but 'alright alright I will go'. I had to leave CowPastor
at the momentest when I think that I cd settle down at last
at the 70th year of my life in the land of my love of my birth
but have to go back to my job in New York because I have no other alternative But I have not given up the stele
& altho I have no real support in the island - most people in fact feel that one has no right to say NO to Guvvament
- Guvvament know Best etc etc etc -

one has no wish nor mandate to stand in the way of PROGRESS etc etc
and one hatchet peron on a hatchet radio programme, prime
by his Talk Host, scoff at the idea that why shd I think
that because Ize a privilege poet (I accept the poet but must reject
the privilege in the sense here uze - and in anycase is juss not so!)
- that that doan give me the right to believe that I can dispute
my own paid-for space w/neoProspero -
all all all which i reject as an insult to citizen to native & to future

Z

is Gabbywho does me the honour to compose the music
& perform it at Atlantis for my wedding (see Atlantis & Epithalàmion,
above)
and he's in New York for the K70 at which he sings, among other
offerings,

'Emmerton'



'It is at such moments that he smiles [responding to shouted requests
for 'Emmerton']
looking over his audience with guitar strapped around his slim frame
as he winces and strokes his bristly beard and smiles again
in acquiescence. Then as spontaneously as on that first time
when he composed this 'anthem of the displaced',
he is 'so sad [his] fingers [walk] on the guitar to E minor'
a semitone lower than the 1985 Grant recording, for the comfort
of a lower key and the greater flexibility for 'emotional considerations'
. . .
The greater impact of his live performance. . .over the fixed recorded text rests on the raw untamed treatment which voice and guitar
are able to create, and transmit. Unlike the sustained intensity
of the recorded version with its almost aggressive piano
and ever haunting samples and voices of the synthesized flute
and sequenced layers of synclavier strings, his live

performance
is even more 'sentimental' in mood, and in tonal colour(ation). Compared to the recorded performance, his live performances are generally more dynamic - an effect which is created by his willful non-
articulation
of items, phrases and syllables. In the live performance
we also have the benefit of. . . physical expression
- from facial squinching, to closed water prone eyes and repeated nods of disgust and disbelief. These are played out to the accompaniment
of willfully inconsistent rhythmic and metrical phrases,
underlined by a crafty, effective and effectual manipulation of voice and fingers on and off the fret board:'

you tell me tuh forget
dat my granmudah was born right here so

All right I say I shall go

yuh tell me tuh forget
it is there
I want my own children to grow

All right I say I shall go

But I hope yuh understan'
how I feel
'bout Emmerton
My home land my home land my home land

An uh hope yuh know it's true
dat I will nevuh fuhgive you
Because looka looka wha yuh do
to my Emmerton

you tell me to fuhget
dat yuh bring bull
-dozers an push-down de houses so

Alright I say I shall go

yuh tell me tuh fuhget
yuh bring bull
-dozers an push-down de houses so

Alright I say I shall go

yuh tell me tuh fuhget
dat yu uproot my people
an' scattah dem to an 'fro

Alright I say I shall go

yuh tell me tuh fuhget
dat yu did dem wrong things an
didn't let my children know

Alright I say I shall go

Alright I say I shall go
Alright I say I shall go
Alright I say I shall go
. . .

Gabby's 'Emmerton' (1977)
w/Intro by Curwen Best in Barbadian popular music
and the politics of Caribbean culture (New York 1995),p59; (1999), pp79-80/the 1999 passages correcting some areas of the earlier edition,. 'Emmerton' is the LP, One in de eye (1985) and the CD, Til Now (?1996)

Please note that the poet Tom Raworth has set-up a dedicated website - Save CowPastor - where this article also appears along with others. See: http://www.tomraworth.com/wordpress/

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Kamau Brathwaite: My Emmerton 2005

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