By Claude Mills, Staff ReporterWITH THE Maroon Town Community Enterprise being declared the winner of this year's Michael Manley Award for Community Self-Reliance, August 1, 2003 will be remembered as the day when the presentation of the Award became a platform for competing agendas.
Outside the Little Theatre, Tom Redcam Drive in St. Andrew, a small but vociferous group of supporters from the lobby group, Families Against State Terrorism (FAST) outlined their agenda of 'state-sponsored terrorism' by police officers against residents of the country with placards and 'freedom songs'.
However, it was Miss Lou's 'cultural platform' that highlighted the morning's proceedings. During the LTM Pantomime Company's rendition of Long Time Gal, cultural icon Louise Bennett-Coverley (Miss Lou), a guest of the Government at
this year's Emancipation and Independence celebrations, stood up and with the assistance of a few persons, made her way to the front of the stage. A murmur of excitement ran through the crowd like an electric current.
ANXIOUS
They began to clap rhythmically, anxious now that they were about to witness something special. By the time she took the microphone and sang the last few bars of the song, most persons in the audience were already standing. They applauded her when the song ended, and the group began to exit stage left.
"Howdy and tenky no bruk no square," Miss Lou greeted them, before bursting into her version of the folk song, Water Come Ah Mi Yi.
"But whem mi memba sweet Jamaica...," she crooned.
"Water come a mi eye," the crowd chimed in loudly. Then they applauded.
She then went on to explain, with rib-tickling humour, the origins of that famous line from a traditional folk song - 'peel-head John Crow sit down pon tree top pick off the blossom' - and what it really meant.
Before leaving, Miss Lou implored the gathering to speak 'Jamaican' whenever the opportunity presented itself.
"When the Irish sing their songs, or when the English sing 'if a body meet a body coming through the ride...', they do it in the dialect of the day, they don't say 'if a person meets a person...'," she said. The remark was occasioned by more laughter.
"No, they sing their songs in the language of their country. We must celebrate our culture, it is ours," she said, pointing to the example of writer Chaucer who wrote his critical masterpiece Canterbury Tales in the dialect of the day.
"When you talk, talk Jamaican," she said.
Ms. Lou received an emphatic standing ovation.
The guest speaker at the function Prime Minister P.J. Patterson alluded to the importance of Ms. Lou's earlier performance. "This morning, seeing her perform, I could not escape the fear that I had been set up. Miss Lou is a tough and almost impossible act to follow," Mr. Patterson said, before suggesting light-heartedly that she was 'stealing his thunder'.
JIBE
During his address, the Prime Minister made a jibe at the placard-bearing FAST members, but largely stuck to his own platform of trumpeting the governing People's National Party's national focus on self-reliance as an essential plank of the country's development.
He pointed to Jamaica's rich biodiversity and high agricultural varieties, stating that this was one area in which the country had begun to gain a measure of self-reliance.
"Self-reliance is about taking responsibility for one's own development. It is about creativity and enterprise. It is about playing to one's strengths and acknowledging the external context in which one is operating," he said.
