We each have our culture, our identity, our story...To me, being different is beautiful and I embrace my indigenous identity more and more everyday.
Shina Novalinga, throat singer
Have you ever heard of throat singing? It is a beautiful tradition of the Inuit indigenous community in Canada that uses the throat and diaphragm to make noises that mirror sounds from nature.
Usually, two women face each other and embrace, matching each other’s song and movement. Throat singing techniques, passed down orally through generations, were almost completely destroyed by colonialism.
However young people like Shina Novalinga are sharing this ancient tradition on social media, ensuring that throat singing will live on in the consciousness of their people.
On the surface, the culture and heritage of TT seems safe from extinction.
For the most part this is true, although many of our traditions suffer from misinformation or mixed up information. Additionally, there are folk traditions that are almost entirely alien to our young people. For instance, in our organisation we consistently encounter children who do not know the names of calypsonians (not even the more famous ones), have no concept of Gatka or Kalinda, nor are they interested in traditional carnival masquerades beyond the costuming.
So, what then is the mandate of a ministry of culture, regardless of what name we call it?
Despite having a national policy on culture, we are still faced with a growing phenomenon of children who have never left our shores speaking with American accents and limited cultural literacy. We should regard this as a budding crisis of nation-building, one that requires closer collaboration between ministries of culture, education and other relevant entities.
Closer collaboration between ministries is critical for other reasons. It is disgraceful that after global independence struggles and the gains of several civil rights movements, we still have an issue with teachers who discriminate against students based on religion and race.
There continue to be serious gaps between what our society needs and the people tasked with educating our children.
Oral culture is notably fragile. As we are seeing with Patois, colonial attitudes and values could have caused our nation language to be completely extinct. Today, the persistence of some concerned citizens means that there are a few places where the language may still be learnt and experienced.
Unfortunately, the reality is that Patois is no longer a lived language as when my mother and grandmother’s generations were growing up. Kamau Brathwaite, who first created the term nation language, describes the languages that evolved in the Caribbean as evolving from our oral tradition.
“The poetry, the culture itself, exists not in a dictionary but in the tradition of the spoken word. It is based on as much about sound as it is on song.”
As such, one of the main functions of a ministry of culture should be to distil this knowledge, break it down and transform it into easily understoo
