Daniel & Cissy Caudeiron, Alwin Bully et al (A precious Summer Drift)

Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy Of The Oppressed was for a long time, being translated into Theater Of The Oppressed in Dominica and the Caribbean. I recall Daniel Caudeiron’s 1971 theatrical titled Speak Brother Speak doing just that. The theatrical’s title alone, its creative tension, speaks to freeing up speech and song and indicates furtive attempts even then to curtail rights to communicate.

Daniel Caudeiron, a late-1960s teacher, artist, writer, and broadcaster among other gifts, is the son of Dominican folklorist Mabel Cissie Boyd-Caudeiron. Cissie Caudeiron, as she was popularly known, was probably the island’s first ecologist.

But more than her love for island neteru, I believe, was the balance she created — a gentler critique she lodged at the base of monocrop agriculture. Her aesthetic positioned power in everyday life and Dominica’s simpler things– those fragile chains that would be the key to any kind of sustainability on this volcanic island.

While politicians were rightly concerned about production, export, and invariably deficits, the folklorist sang sonorously in Kwéyòl about birds, fishing, smiles, and calm resistance fashioned in a context of everyday living.

Dominican ethnographer Lennox Honychurch noted in Our Island Culture that she was the first to critique emerging strains of Trinidadian influences in Dominica, affecting, if not seeking to minimize, as she thought then, aggressive lapo kabwit roots in Dominican music.

Indeed, out of love, Trinidad’s Dr. Hollis “Chalkdust” Liverpool sought support among key Dominican culture figures in an effort at converting a militant Dominican composer working in calypso. But alas. It was that Dominican crude, or if you wish, that green, which gave Trinidad’s shorty kadans for his soca!

Cissie Caudeiron might not have anticipated the rise of a bouyon blitz out of kadans in the island’s traditional and historical instrumentation– a musical youth movement of the 1980s would salvage her idea of the aggressive in the lapo kabwit (goatskin drum). That youth movement steeped in a will to innovate and utilize their state of music technology produced in an unfolding free-market economy of 1986 to create a flow and fluctuation in right-wing political certainty. Drift.

Daniel respected youth. In his theatrical presentations and radio programs, he called on them to stand for their rights.

In those times, it was all about human rights and, only later, was it accompanied by its cousin, social justice.

This stand up for your rights was future and thus very much Daniel.

As a broadcaster with Dominica Broadcasting Corporation, his language typified youth-thought– being ahead of postcolonial signs. I heard him once on a recorded outside broadcast describe a carnival steel band in the days of Shell and Esso as about to “negotiate a corner.” Must’ve been on Old Street. Ha-ha.

Even Edward Leblanc, who negotiated the Beach Control Ordinance, could not deal with Daniel Caudeiron’s radical presumptions. This remains mysterious to me, given Daniel’s mother and Leblanc’s love for native culture.

At any rate, Daniel’s work and those of Alwin Bully’s People’s Action Theater presented an incomparable consciousness to Dominican audiences, musicians, and artists.

We will long remember Bully’s Good Morning, Miss Millie (1970); Streak, The Ruler, Folk Nativity (1976), The Nite Box (1977); Pio-Pio, Green Gold (1978); Winds of Change, Me Too (1979); Secrets of La Cloche (1980) among others.

Albert Williams, Dominican writer for the Chronicle of September 2003, remembered the 1977 formation of the group Aquarian Expression, drawing out the talent of Clement “Baba” Richards– my Codrington College colleague– and Minchington Israel, an environmental health specialist from my hometown.

Around that period, surely within the originative Aquarian context, the Movement for Cultural Awareness (MCA) was formed by Delmance “Ras Mo” Moise, Sobers Esprit, and Clement “Baba” Richards, all theater followers of Bully.

In 2010, Sobers Esprit served Dominica as deputy director of tourism. See how this genius has progressed from popular theater?

From his base in the city of Oakland, San Francisco, Ras Mo told me in 2008 that he was producing an album connected to his work “addressing violence, gender, masculinity, HIV/AIDS and other relevant social and behavioral issues.” Popular theater lover to the end!

In the mid- to late-’70s, Alwin’s partner, St. Lucian Robert Lee, was amazed by depth culture in Dominica and its transformative effect on participants whether they were Clement Richards, Sobers Esprit, Minchington Israel, Ras Mo, Levi Loblack, Severin McKenzie, Mark Sylvester, Raymond Lawrence, Pearl Christian, Roger Artherly, Lennox Honychurch, Benji Shillingford, Carol Severin, Dorothy Henderson, Noreen Joseph, Mikey Bruney, Ingrid Angol, Steve Hyacinth, and more.

Lee would describe works of the Peoples Action Theater as “street cadence,” that eclectic Dominican music emerging out of the primary rhythms of Africa, South America, Europe, Trinidad and Tobago, Haiti, Martinique, Guadeloupe, Grandbay, Dominica, even North America. Leap again, Dominican.

My father would’ve added, if you can say South America, I gather you’re touching banks of Venezuela’s Orinoco, the third largest river system in the world originating along the southern borders of Venezuela and Brazil in the state of Amazonas, its basin covering some one million square kilometers. Dominica is 751 square kilometers.

Fred Alpheus Colberg Henry would suggest that if you can touch harmony, peace living on banks and waterways of the Orinoco, you may wish to trace Southern China to find others who knew such a placid place.

Without doubt, our music mosaic can therefore be enriched in this millennium, cascading flute rushes, notations we do not number, rattles, one hundred drums– they do not even know what’s coming from under.

 Excerpt from Steinberg Henry’s “Calypso Drift,” Segment 4/Chapter 29, 2014. www.calypsodrift.com

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