Amina Blackwood Meeks, Contributor
A FEW YEARS ago one of my friends and colleagues went to the North Coast in search of a few real dollars. Which is to say he went to work as an "Entertainment Manager" at a swanky little resort.
I remember his excitement about this opportunity to expose the visitors to "some real Jamaican culture" beyond the omnipresent yellow bird.
Over the years I watched his enthusiasm wane. If I could have seen into the future I would have told him about the hotel executive who was to declare to me many years later that he had been struggling with how to include more things Jamaican into his facility "without corrupting the product." That of course, is the subject of a whole treatise.
However, in less than a year, my friend had made a decision to exit the swanky little place on the North Coast. Here is the straw which broke his little back. It was coming on to Halloween. He saw duppies, web, cobwebs, creatures that live in webs like spider, like Anancy, and he imagined some Jamaican similarities.
So he planned a Halloween party around Anancy. Well the head man at the hotel was having none of it. The visitors were not coming to learn about Anancy and that slavery connection, they wished to celebrate Halloween, full stop!
So my friend kept his mouth shut about his plan to corrupt the product with a Jonkunnu band as part of the Christmas festivities, packed his bags and headed back to Kingston and into the classroom where he should have been in the first place, helping our children to appreciate more about our own culture in the hope that one day some of them might end up owning a little hotel somewhere with confidence in the fact that a little more of things Jamaican could only embrace the product and not harm it.
He would still love to put Jonkunnu band in that same hotel one Christmas and have the students do a study of the interchanges, exchanges and responses. In fact, as a participant-observer strategy, he would like the students to go as the Jonkunnu band.
The Jamaica Cultural Development Commission (JCDC), would probably love this little Anancy Scheme. In a few weeks they will be overseeing the second staging of the Jonkunnu competition which they have designed for prep and primary school and the first forms of secondary schools. The competition was conceived as a one way of contributing to the continuities which more and more of us are beginning to appreciate for their ability to foster and develop the attitudes and values which are important to who we are and our potentials for becoming perhaps one of the most critical by-products of the aims of this competition is that it targets our boys and seeks to involve them in a fun, learning experience which at one level confronts the whole business of marginalisation of our men-folk.
Did you know that most of the Jonkunnu characters are men? And that in the once upon a time as well as in the modern dispensation of some of these bands the female characters are also played by men? But once upon a time too, Jonkunnu bands, along with all things African, were banned, declared illegal. Over time, someone had to put up himself as captain of the band. His job was to seek permission from the police to take the band onto the streets.
My informant, the captain of the Grange Hill Band, and who had been leading Jonkunnu bands for more than 40 years, told me that he had to present himself to the police with good character references as part of his application. The police would then visit him at the bandyard to see for themselves not only how many band members there were but also to check out their police records and then interview the band leader in order to be assured that he was capable of controlling them on the road.
It adds up to a great many social and personal development lessons that our children could learn through participating in the JCDC competition. There are other lessons of course like maths and measurements, budgeting, design, fabric choice and co-ordination and the endless others which our children and their teachers could discover in the process.
The JCDC has prepared a lively, colourful informative kit with illustrations and profiles of the Jonkunnu characters in order to assist the schools to participate. I hope they will be overwhelmed by applications and I look forward to having a grand time with all the bands at the Ranny Williams Entertainment Centre. And one day maybe my friend will be able to stage a Jonkunnu Mask-A-Raid on a little Halloween party on the North Coast.
Amina Blackwood Meeks is a communications consultant and storyteller.
