In a series of short interviews leading up to this year’s Commonwealth Games in Glasgow, the BBC World Service has been asking athletes, their supporters and cultural personalities from around the Commonwealth, to choose a piece of music that inspires them. Earlier this month, the programme, ‘Commonwealth Connections,’ featured Dr David Dabydeen, poet, novelist, academic and Guyana’s ambassador to China, who chose to talk about ‘Not a Blade of Grass’ by Dave Martins and the Tradewinds.
The podcast is available at http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/comwealth and only lasts four minutes. One’s delight in hearing a Guyanese voice and a much-loved song on the venerable BBC World Service soon turns to perplexity, however, as Dr Dabydeen presents a unique take on the song.
Dr Dabydeen begins reasonably enough, placing the song in the tradition of calypso and social and political commentary but, almost immediately, there is a jarring note: “This calypso, on the surface, is about the independence of Guyana and a resistance to a particular border dispute we had with Venezuela.”
Perhaps Dr Dabydeen did not fully grasp the import of his briefings at Takuba Lodge when he was appointed ambassador, but let us be clear: we did not and do not have a “border dispute” with Venezuela. What we have is a controversy arising from Venezuela’s illegitimate claim to our Essequibo region, a long-standing irritant and still very much a live issue. The difference between a dispute and a controversy may be a legal nicety for some but it is an important distinction in international law and has considerable bearing on the preservation of our territorial integrity. Dr Dabydeen, as a scholar of the language and literature of the English-speaking world, should not be so cavalier with his terminology or, for that matter, his tenses. As a Guyanese ambassador, his language should be even more circumspect.
Then, having casually dispensed with the raison d’être of this patriotic song, composed in the late 1970s when the Venezuelans were indulging in one of their periodic bouts of sabre rattling, Dr Dabydeen goes on, quite inexplicably, to state that the song is “really a song sung for Britain because it’s about our independence, it’s about the centuries of resistance and collisions we had with Britain before we could become independent in 1966. It’s about how, as an independent people, we have to start valuing our landscape, our local habits, our local speech, so that all that shame that we had as a colonised people, as a people who are descendants of slaves and coolie labour, we have to purge ourselves of and really recover our self esteem and self confidence and to create out of that sense of freedom something positive. When this song addresses Britain, at depth, it really is the empire singing back and saying, look, we are now independent, we will never go back, and we will create new and creative links with Britain…” There is a bit more post-colonial waffle about “the obligation to revalue ourselves” but by now anyone familiar with ‘Not a Blade of Grass’ would be wondering if Dr Dabydeen is speaking about the same song.
Mr Martins himself, one of our Sunday columnists, has written about the genesis of the song which, with its catchy tune and evocative lyrics, once enjoyed the status of unofficial second national anthem, explaining that it is at heart about “Guyanese love for Guyana,” set against the backdrop of Venezuelan intimidation (So It Go, July 29, 2012). Of course, our native bard can always set the record straight if he believes that Dr Dabydeen has unearthed hitherto hidden truths about the song but most Guyanese would seem to have missed the subliminal message that Dr Dabydeen discerns.
Now, Dr Dabydeen, as a garlanded man of letters is certainly entitled to some poetic licence. And as a distinguished academic, he is surely allowed – expected even – to come up with insights that might seem outlandish to the rest of us. But even if we accept Dr Dabydeen’s attempt to explain the Guyanese psyche as the musings of a fertile intellect, we fail to see anything amusing in his historical revisionism. Perhaps this was unintended but, as an ambassador of Guyana, even if he is not a career diplomat, his throwaway remarks about the spurious Venezuelan claim are totally unacceptable.
