I MET KAMAU (I was once chided for respectfully saying, “Mr Braithwaite”) in 1978. We were invited to participate in the fifth anniversary of the New Artist Movement in St Vincent/Grenadines. I remember the trepidation of delivering a talk, “Caribbean Theatre Today,” with him in the audience. He spoke afterwards, and for this milestone celebration I quote a passage from his address that has stayed with me over the years and has helped put imagery to my understanding of culture and now reparations:
“European culture…is essentially a missile—exploratory and exploitative…. In European landscape, you see many examples of the missile from the very beginning—Gothic cathedrals, the churches, all spires. The church steeple is in fact a missile to heaven. They pray upwards to heaven…just as a missile looks up towards the moon.
“Come to the Modern Age where you get the concentration of materialism—Manhattan, you have the missile of the skyscrapers—all this ascension and the lifts in elevators. And the final image of it is at Cape Canaveral where the future rests upon the missile/the moon…. Look at the social system—you’ll see a hierarchical business, a lower, a middle and an upper. In the religious system, you have the congregation, the priest and the altar—ascending to the angels, the archangels and finally to heaven. There is always that concept of the ladder…the missile tendency.
“The culture of Africa is of an entirely different nature. This is why Africa and Europe will never meet in that sense because the culture is so different…completely opposite to the missile.
“In Africa, the huts are not in ascending order, but are round and the villages are placed in circles. The people dance in circles and consult each other in circles. The drum has a circular head. Their sense of time is not chronometric…but a sense of the season which goes from one thing to another and returns to the original. It’s a circular sense of time, a circular sense of death, a circular sense of eternity. So we are not going towards a destination…we are making a circuit around a destination.
“[A] European missile found the target of Africa…that 1492 confrontation… The slave ship becomes a peculiar device. The hole in the slave ship carried within it…up to the five hundred mark…and they are encapsulated in that hole.
“If you convert it to space, you will realize that the missile is the exploiting instrument. But usually in the missile there is a capsule, which after a time the missile sheds itself both front and back and leaves in space that capsule…which has a greater life than the missile although it is not as dramatic…for it contains an all-life element…and in order for it to reach its destination, it has to reverse itself…a very difficult manoeuvre which it has to make in order to land….
“When people are in a state of oppression, it is necessary for them to create an actual reversal of their nature in order to survive.”
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Sunshine Award winner Dorbrene E. O’Marde stokes many fires in our Caribbean cultural world—playwright/director, calypso writer/judge/analyst, essayist, novelist (Send Out You Hand, 2013) and biographer (King Short Shirt: Nobody Go Run Me, 2014). He chairs the Antigua and Barbuda Reparations Support Commission. This address in its entirety was published in Nam Speaks, Vol. 2, No. 3, Aug-Dec 1978.
