WAYNE KUBLALSINGH

I AM A random man from Arima. I am always lounging about in Arima. Going by De Boss Ah Soup to buy sweetbread and soup. Used to always be there in the market joking with my “pwatique,” taking my son to the merry-go-round, going for ice cream and pizzas. Yes, I am a random man from Arima.

It was a random man from Arima, the son of a blacksmith, a pupil of the Arima Government Primary School, who, from the beat of his father’s hammer, the strum of his box guitar, migrated to Port of Spain in 1943 to regale the Victory Tent and others with the staccato of pan in his voice. Tempo, tune, timing, like a tin full of shillings rolling down Laventille Hill. Prancing and dancing in the bamboo hall, like a kerchief or flag in a flag-woman’s hand.

It was this random Arima man who travelled to England in the Empire Windrush in 1948, worked, opened a nightclub in Manchester, and returned home to bequeath us such classics as Mama Dis Is Mas, Margie, Rainorama, Tribute to Spree Simon, Miss Tourist and Flag Woman; emblazoning his name on the dazzling mint of calypso.

It was random groups of Africans, abandoning sugar estates in the middle of the 19th century, finding refuge in tenement yards in the suburbs, discovering they had no goat to kill, for membrane, to sound the trammelled music in their blood, began to ransack old scrapyards. Tin pans. Steel oil drums. No whole hog, we will take the snout, tail, feet, blood, the throwaway parts. Rummaging and rummaging and beating and beating, they invented the pan.

Random men and women, in yards, beating late into the night. Random men and women under caps, in basketball jerseys and shorts, in sneakers, the faces of the bass drums half-hidden under the canopy, sounding the ancestral drum, rhyme, rhythm and reason of Africa.

It is random men and women who kept ancestral African mask alive. The mask, of raffia, wood or copper, behind which the voice of God entered the community, and gospelled, tongue-lashed, prophesied. Random men and women walking through country roads and Belmont lanes, masked, painted – bats, robbers, devils, jab jabs, sailors, Indians, moko jumbie, baby dolls.

Random men and women walking through the streets of the city and main towns, even in hot weather, even suffering discomfort, even dehydrated, even without audience, but moving on, as if programmed by some DNA, blood, unseen historical mandate or mission. And the random wire-benders, designers, crafting every manner of bird, bat, bee, beetle, bachac, battimamselle, human being.

It is the same random men and women, who, returning from their invisibility of outta Carnival season, mount the stages to give their best wit, lines, commentaries, in extempore, kaiso, or its now popular emergent child, soca.

Random men and women carrying the voice of the ancestral West African court jester, the griot, the wandering troubadour. Panegyrics or scorn. Sacred or salacious. Humour or lament. In furious attack or defence of the court (political party), or tribe.

Random men and women, rising