Dr Winford James
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Aiye De Fosto, Hail! Part 2

By Dr. Winford James
May 09, 2004


In the second verse of this year's Ah Paid Meh Dues, The Original De Fosto Himself laments that he has not been awarded the Calypso Monarch Crown despite having toiled and toiled in the vineyard. And then he goes on to point out that the judges turned down his good-good Cultural Icons:

Look what dey did to Cultural Icon
A gem of a calypso, they turned it down

The title of the song has been restructured (the Standard English 'icons' with the plural suffix 's' giving way to the Creole bare noun with its context-dependent flexibility of reference); the rhyme is defective, as so often happens in poetry (given the difficulty of always finding in the language exact rhymal matches for one's artistic purposes), the '-on' in 'icon' not perfectly matching the '-own' or -ong' in 'down'; but the message is that the judges should have seen in it a winning tune, indeed the winning tune since it was 'a gem of a calypso'.

Let's see if we can agree with De Fosto that Cultural Icons? is a gem.

The song questions its title and is composed of four verses and four choruses - a different chorus for every verse - followed by a lengthy tag. From verse to verse, chorus to chorus, and in the tag, it is a lamentation on the theme that it does not pay to be hero in Trinbago. In this land, the artist, especially the calypsonian, is not the hero; rather it is the American artist - the outsider. The outsider becomes the cherished, revered insider, and the insider becomes the forgotten, the despised, the outcast. De Fosto moves through the song contrasting the honour given to American cultural heroes, who are technologically kept alive in our consciousness, with the dishonour we give to our Trinbagonian ones, naming a good number of them as he goes along.

Verse 1 tells us that literally dead 'stars of gold' like Nat King Cole, Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley and Jim Reeves are immortalized not only in American culture but in ours as well, De Fosto telling us that:

Death is not the end of their contribution
But a golden beginning for generations

the rhyme unnecessarily defective, but the metaphor of death as a golden beginning of a long era perfect in its capture of handsome profitability and cross-generational honour. It is counterpointed by Chorus 1 which laments that we have already forgotten our own artists: people like Winston 'Spree' Simon, George Bailey, Sam Ghany, Lord Invader, Zandolie, and Spoiler. They are dead and forgotten, so they hardly appear on TV or radio. So De Fosto rhetoricizes, as he does at the end of all the other choruses:
In Trinbago, does it pay to be a hero?
American and local appreciation of American cultural heroes. Local disregard for local cultural heroes. High presence of American heroes on radio and TV. No presence of own heroes on the same media. Point and counterpoint.

Verse 2 continues the contrast of America's honouring of its heroes for their excellence in various fields of performance with Trinbago's indifference for its own; and some of the lines capture it well, like the following (whose rhymes, incidentally, are perfect):

The good, the bad, the ugly live again…
The legacy of their heroes always in the main
But in Trinbago, it's not so of course
Heroes dead and forgotten as any casual loss

Note the association evoked between the honour given to any kind of hero and the title of the classic western The good, the bad, and the ugly. Note the contrast between heroes who are made to 'live again' and those who remain dead, their death magnificently metaphorised as 'a casual loss'. And in respect of the latter, the chorus chimes in to remind us of some of the latter: Spitfire, Houdini, Bryner, Christo, Destroyer, Attila the Hun, Executor, Cypher, Dougla, Radio, and Killer.

The other verses and choruses give us more of the same, the metaphors changing, the list of forgotten heroes expanding. Other striking lines are as follows:

Like nobody cares a damn after we move on
From radio to TV, where all these heroes gorn?
In every school, talk to the children, tell dem who is who
We must have we own history channel for dem to look at too

Using the theme of forgotten, disregarded local cultural heroes, De Fosto gives us not only a history lesson on the contributors to our cultural experience (he names at least 100 of them!), but an education lesson as well. He makes us consider that we should be reforming our media attitude to ensure that our heroes live on in our senses. He makes us consider that we should be reforming the curriculum to ensure that their legacy is transmitted to the younger and future generations. And he makes us consider that our continuing dishonour may discourage the creation of art in Trinidad and Tobago.

In its recall of the names of so many cultural contributors, his song reminds us of that other amazing classic by Relator Foreign Radio Stations, the ability of the artist to remember all those names in rhyme frankly astounding. But the metaphors relating to death and immortality make us pause reflectively as well, the thought coming ineluctably that they were not easily arrived at.

With all these attributes, might we not call Cultural Icons a gem of artistry? Hear De Fosto croon his respect for the culture as he brings the song to an end:

Ooh la la…ooh la la…moojay…calypso
Ooh la la…ooh la la…moojay…my limbo
Ooh la la…ooh la la…moojay…my rooso
Ooh la la…ooh la la…moojay…ex tempo


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