I WOULD regret being a columnist after I have stopped writing, I looked over my work and found out that I would have ended my columnist career without pontificating on one of the great Caribbean icons whom I grew up with – the Mighty Sparrow. What do you tell Guyana about Sparrow when over 80 per cent of the nation belonged to an age beyond the 1960s?
I think it is best to address the Guyanese people about Sparrow using the comparative methodology. I will use four Caribbean phenomena – West Indian cricket, reggae, Bob Marley and Brian Lara. The CARICOM family didn’t invent cricket, but the West Indian team was such a global magician that West Indian cricket became part of the psyche of Caribbean people.
In the Caribbean from the 60s, when you talk about the West Indies, you were talking about a Caribbean achievement that the world respected us for – cricket. Jamaica gave us three musical genres from the 1960s that penetrated the CARICOM region – ska, rock-steady, and they merged into reggae. What cricket was to Caribbean sport, reggae was to music.
Reggae took hold of the Caribbean before Bob Marley made it a global phenomenon. What Marley did was to use music to teach Caribbean people the philosophical purpose for them being on Planet Earth and how human existence can be liberating. I don’t know if Marley read the existentialist text of the great philosopher, Martin Heidegger, but what Heidegger wrote about Marley sang about. In the 1970s, Bob Marley was the Caribbean and the Caribbean was Bob Marley.
If cricket existed in the Caribbean psyche, then imagine how that psyche would react to a Caribbean man being Mr Cricket himself. That was Brian Lara. He did for batting what no human did before and it will take a long time for another human to surpass Lara. These four motifs were not just ordinary imprints of the CARICOM region. Put the Mighty Sparrow right in the middle of those four phenomena.
What Bob Marley was, what Brian Lara was, what Garfield Sobers was, the Mighty Sparrow was. It is up to the imagination of Guyanese under 50 years of age to think about what the Caribbean looked like when Sparrow was dominating the cultural world of the Caribbean. It is my analytical take that Sparrow occupies the same unique, incomparable space that Marley, Sobers and Lara currently sit in.
If the historian is going to do a holistic portrait of Caribbean heroes, it is doubtful Sparrow will be somewhere in the middle. Nah! Sparrow was too penetrating a voice in the Caribbean to be in the middle of that pantheon. Which West Indian person did not know who Sparrow was in the 1960s and early 70s? He was simply a household name in the Caribbean.
It is interesting to note that there is an uncanny connection in the work of Marley and Sparrow. Marley appealed to the post-colonial Caribbean to look deep into their psyche and they will see that they were Pavlovian children. He showed them how they can be agents of humane change.
Sparrow’s public intellectualism came in a different shape. He used calypso to inform the Caribbean about what the Caribbean was like, what was the reality of the Caribbean and what we Caribbean people need to know about our societies. Yes, his calypsos were rhythmic and fascinating. They told us about Caribbean sub-cultures and all its attendant vices and comicalities. But the calypsos spread a message about the reality of life in the Caribbean.
When I was a student at the University of Guyana, the calypsos of Sparrow were taught in many literature classes, especially the courses of Caribbean sociology. The reason being that Sparrow was a social commentator. To remind the young Guyanese population that just how they saw the dominance of Lara and Marley, Sparrow was equally dominating.
There is a dimension of his music that I don’t think is appreciated. Now what I am about to write will make you smile and say that Freddie is pushing in one. Here is an interesting personal story about Sparrow that happened three days before his death (he died yesterday, Sunday).
I had a CD playing in my car titled “Classic Oldies, Volume 25: The Soul Date.” The jacket is in red with a woman with Afro-hairstyle and large bangle earrings. The first cut on the CD was: “A girl like you” sung by the Might Sparrow. Listen to this soul rendition, and the voice comes within the tradition of any great soul singer. That was how talented Sparrow was. I would never believe he would have died three days after loving his soul voice in my car.
DISCLAIMER: The views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Guyana National Newspapers Limited.
