THE PETER Tosh Symposium will take on a more musical note this year. In its third instalment, the symposium will take place at the Phillip Sherlock Centre for the Creative Arts, University of the West Indies (UWI), under the theme 'The Poetics in Peter Tosh's Music'.
The words of the 'Stepping Razor' will be raised in poetry and song as a plethora of musicians and poets attempt to interpret the reggae icon's works.
The list of poets slated for the event includes Oku Onura, Mutabaruka, Cherry Natural, Neto Meeks, The I Am, Amina Blackwood-Meeks, DYCR and Professor Brian Meeks. The list of singers and musicians who will also be interpreting Tosh's works is equally long. Seretse, Ibo Cooper, Nambo Robinson, Maurice Gordon, and Marcus I will all be lending their talents to understanding the lyrics of the legend.
Clinton Hutton, a lecturer in the Department of Government at the UWI Mona Campus and one of the organisers of the symposium, noted that the exploration of the creative make-up of Tosh's work through interpretations of those work is merely another way of understanding the artist.
"In the last two years we've had scholars and people associated with Peter Tosh talking about him. That's one way of knowing about him," Hutton told The Gleaner. Having performers explore and perform Tosh's work is another, he said.
Hutton himself has been one of the presenters at past symposiums. Last year, as the keynote speaker, he looked at the continued
relevance of Peter Tosh's works, especially with his advocacy of equal rights and justice in a paper titled 'Peter Tosh's Narrative of Justice: The Dilemma of Fairness in This Global Age'.
Hutton went on to add that the change in the symposium's format had nothing to do with a sense that it was becoming monotonous. He argued that both past years were able to attract the approximately the same size crowd.
Nonetheless, he remarked that after year three (this year) it is likely that the symposium will look at the works of another artist.
