Book Review by John Robert Lee
George Goddard and Alwyn St. Omer in Kité flit-la mennen l’espwi-w/Let the flute lead your spirit, have produced unique poetry and art reflections of Saint Lucia’s older masquerade tradition. Goddard has written a number of ekphrastic poems responding to several monochromatic paintings of masquerade dancers by St. Omer. Both the poet and artist have explored through their arts representations of that folklore tradition, “borders of memory” that not only tap into their childhood remembrances of a certain authentic ritual that existed years ago, but trace the tradition to the African roots of Saint Lucians. The masqueraders are aging, the rituals sketched here are deeply remembered and recalled, though a weariness within the reality of the fading of the authentic tradition is frankly captured in the poems. Modern distractions are part of the mix that have helped to make the old masquerade culture more diluted and of less interest to new generations. Both the art and poems are a valuable record of memory of the cultural tradition. The faces of the dancers are African masks, and in the poems, the feet and strong legs of the dancers on the earth, drum of long-lost savannahs in Africa. The poems that don’t deal directly with the masqueraders of St. Omer also provide a wider context of Saint Lucian life, landscape and personal experience that encompass the meditations on the masquerade and the deeper, enduring resonances of that culture.
Goddard has been writing and publishing poems in both English and Kwéyòl. This collection contains a number with translations. St. Omer of the well-known St. Omer family of artists, has been working with various portrayals of the iconic Pitons and other local landscapes, and also developing his father’s conceptual Madonnas through his own interpretations. The art in this collaborative collection, its cover and six pieces, comes from a Saint Lucia Masquerade Series titled The Moon Dancer, recently exhibited in the UK. Of the 22 poems, ten are titled Dance and respond to St. Omer’s monochromatic art.
Masquerade traditions have been very popular in Saint Lucia for many decades, probably from the time of the arrival of Africans. They are of African origin with few European influences. Two other Saint Lucian writers have written well-known works about those unique popular theatrical street presentations: playwright Roderick Walcott’s “Papa Diable or The Devil at Christmas: a traditional masque (1957) creates a drama around the character of Papa Diable or “Toes”. The play is a popular one, often performed. This was very much a Castries phenomenon. Garth St. Omer’s novel “J-, Black Bam and the Masqueraders (Faber 1972) carries a vivid description of the masqueraders who traditionally appeared over the New Year holidays around the island. In the novel they have strong symbolic resonance.
Goddard and artist St. Omer have looked at the masquerade and masqueraders in a way that the other writers have not done. St. Omer’s art carries the strong, ritualistic movements of the dancers, their ceremonial head-dresses, the women’s dresses which the men wore, and the faces are African religious masks. Goddard, reacting ekphrastically to the art, seeks to capture the fading African memories of these displaced descendants of African enslaved people (p.1).
“They danced along the road of memory
a thin flute leading them,
the goatskin infusing tremulous soles of faith,
bodies sensing the pull of great waters,
an agitating of waves, of unrelenting rivers.”
The poems are haunted by the lost memories of these African descendants as they move “through vague remembrances,” imploring “the oversight of Ancestors,” “searching for the escape of great savannahs in a frustrated choreography.”
If the aging dancers struggle to keep the traditions alive “flung from tenuous histories, the rhythm not right, too brittle, their aging limbs…in disembodied ritual”, the younger observer, a modern neo-colonized generation,
“can’t remember when the dancer slipped away,
the kettle-drum’s shudder faded to this silence,
tongues ceased to give expression to our dreams
…the flute became a memory,
an indistinct sensation in our limbs:
children no longer captivated
by l’histoires in moonlight,
mysteries of a far-off age,
but by video games that have eclipsed the moon.”
Today, social media enthusiasts have their own sanitized, synthetic version of masqueraders, which lacks the menace, terror and power of those now long-lost androgynous masqueraders, their flutes and drums, leaping
“through history, leap (ing) across time
/dancer under the moon, dance
/beckoned by seducing flutes
/led by the elders in their wisdom..”
dancing “your spirit to memory’s edge, cusp of reflection and of hope.”
Which is not to deny the value of contemporary laudable efforts to keep these traditions alive and in our memory through the performing arts.
The old masqueraders who remembered Africa in their blood and the soles of their leaping feet, who remembered, however subconsciously, the continental savannahs and rivers in the drums and whistling flutes, are gone. But this modest collection of poems and art by Goddard and St. Omer are a contribution to honoring their memory and place in our national traditional heritage.
The booklet is published by the Msgr Patrick Anthony Folk Research Centre with the support of The Pat Charles Endowment and the Saint Lucia National Commission for UNESCO.
About John Robert Lee
John Robert Lee is a St. Lucian poet, journalist, and librarian. He reviews literature and theatre for local, regional and international print and online journals. His poetry and short stories have been widely anthologised. His latest collection of poems includes IKONS: New and Selected Poems (Mahanaim Publishing 2024), Belmont Portfolio (2023), and Pierrot (2020), both published by Peepal Tree Press. Other notable publications include Saint Lucian Writers and Writing: An Author Index of Published Works (Papillote Press 2019); and Saint Lucian Literature and Theatre: an Anthology of Reviews (compiled and edited with Kendel Hippolyte, CDF 2006). A graduate of the University of the West Indies, Lee has taught literature, creative writing and library science for many years. He has also worked as a journalist in newspapers, radio and television. He is an inaugural Jako Columnist. He lives in Saint Lucia.
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