CLIVE WAGNER CHECKS the light levels in the carpenter’s workshop while Matt Gray adjusts the tracks for his dolly.
Sound engineer Robert Green stands by, listening, and Jacqui Doughty, the producer, looks on, a black pen and a red plastic folder in hand.
Lights and camera are in position. Kamau Brathwaite, Barbados’ leading poet, is expected to arrive any minute.
The BBC crew flew into Barbados Sunday on BWIA just for this.
Not for a first ministers’ meeting or a major sporting event or a big concert.
Their assignment is to film an adaptation of Brathwaite’s poem “Ogun” from his classic trilogy The Arrivants.
Yes. A poem.
On Tuesday, Day Two of the four-day shoot, they were in Lionel Daniel’s workshop on Culloden Road.
The scene was a recreation of the one described in the poem, which itself was inspired by Brathwaite’s recollection of the shop his great-uncle Robert “Bob’ob” O’Neill owned and operated in Mile and a Quarter, St Peter.
Ogun in Nigerian mythology is the god of creation.
It is also the mask Bob’ob secretly sculpts representing his pride and joy in his African heritage.
Brathwaite’s work is part of a BBC series on ten Commonwealth poets from as far as New Zealand and Pakistan currently being studied by 45 000 British students.
The series will be used to help prepare 14 and 16-year-olds for the United Kingdom General Certificate Secondary Education (UKGCSE) exam.
Although the project is not the first of its kind and two other Caribbean poets take part (John Agard and his wife, Grace Nichols, both Guyanese), it is the first to include a Barbadian poet.
Filming began in April this year [1998] on the series, which costs 270 000 pounds sterling (approximately BDS$926 100). The series will be aired January next year on BBC 2 television in three half-hour episodes.
Matt is now behind the camera, and Robert is at his sound board.
Daniel, in his first starring role, works on a sculpture of Ogun, courtesy of local artist Kenneth Blackman; he is surrounded by smoke from a smoke machine. Jacqui fades into the background.
“Action,” Clive says.
And, somewhere, the words of the poet may be heard:
But he was poor and most days he was hungry.
Imported cabinets with mirrors, formica table tops, spine-curving hairs made up of tubes, with hollow steel-like bird bones that sat on rubber ploughs, thin beds, stretched not on boards, but blue high-tensioned cables, were what the world preferred.
And yet he had a block of wood that would have baffled them.
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Robert Edison Sandiford is the author of eight books, most recently the award-winning novel And Sometimes They Fly. He is a founding editor with Linda M. Deane of ArtsEtc. A recipient of Barbados’ Governor General’s Award for his fiction and the Harold Hoyte Award for newspaper editing, he has also worked as a video producer and teacher. Link here for full bio. This article first appeared in Barbados’ Daily Nation, September 24, 1998
