By Mel Cooke, Freelance Writer
Blackwood-Meeks
WESTERN BUREAU:
AMINA BLACKWOOD-MEEKS was elegance personified at the Phillip Sherlock Centre for the Creative Arts on Wednesday evening. And aptly so, on a programme entitled 'An Evening of Elegance', put on by the External Affairs Committee of the Guild of Students, UWI, Mona Campus.
The Panoridim Steel Orchestra pleased the audience up to the intermission, with JCDC Gospel Contest 2003 winner Kevin Downswell preventing any possible onset of ethnic fatigue from the cocktails with an interpretation of I Can Believe I Can Fly which prompted calls for an encore.
It was into this buzz that Amina Blackwood-Meeks stepped calmly on stage, faced the audience with a pleasantly enquiring expression and asked: "How do you start a story?"
There was silence and then a brave soul in the class volunteered "once upon a time".
"No man, it must happen two time. You brush your teeth one time?" she asked firmly but gently. "You have to acknowledge that you belong to a longer now," she said, informing the two-thirds capacity audience of the continuum from the past to the future.
Then, still standing, she told them of the correct way to start a story, starting the 'crick' and allowing them to respond 'crack'. "That was the sound of Johnny, breaking sticks to make slingshot," Ms. Blackwood-Meeks said, proceeding to weave a tale of Johnny shooting a particular bird and what happened after.
"CHI CHI BUD OH"
Weaving singing into the tale, including the call "chi chi bud oh" to which the audience, totally involved, warbled back "some a dem a holla some a bawl". Blackwood-Meeks spoke of how Johnny ignored the bird's sung warning that "yu betta carry mi home", employing blue chalk, kananga water, cream soda and three green limes, among other implements to ward off danger.
And he ate the bird.
The audience was enthralled as Ms. Blackwood-Meeks developed the tale of Johnny's belly swelling to a story of resistance to the 'Redcoats' ("and it wasn't George Bush, it was a ambush") by Nanny ("cause she was Capleton mumma") facing down the terrible Mr. Brooks. In the end, Nanny and Mr. Brooks faced off with the fate of the children she was protecting hanging in the balance.
It was her gun repellent against his gun and she defeated him, but not before Brooks shot her and Nanny fell over a cliff. And as the children cried out up came a bird. And the audience gasped as "right den Johnny belly pop, and out come Sammy Tutu". And he sang "you better carry me home". Which is what Johnny did, right back to the place where the two rivers meet.
"And from dat day, Johnny neva shoot anodda bird."
The audience sighed and applauded.
Ms. Blackwood-Meeks sat to deliver her next tale, of the people in Africa who could fly. And when the Africans were ripped from their homes and the lashes of the masters fell, those who could "lifted one foot, then the other, and they were gone".
"They say at night the people who had forgotten how to fly would talk about those who could fly and they never stopped flying till they reached a place called freedom."
Ms. Blackwood-Meeks, who never once sounded strident or fell out of rhythm, rose to speak of Miss Jing Bang making a presentation on globalisation at an international conference. She use pictures and various implements, working backwards, to make the connection between the banana issue, taxes, tourism, roadblocks and the road that the tourists are afraid to walk on, with "de pothole in de road dat we buil".
Constant swigs of humour sent the lessons down easily, the audience chuckling almost constantly and erupting for lines such as "a likkle global village call WTO".
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When Miss Jing Bang got to the slides, though, and made the link between Iraq, with two US soldiers being killed almost every day, people in a boat "sailing between Haiti and anywhere" and "some people a de bottom a Spur Tree Hill giving thanks for the rice truck come stop a dem gate", the audience gave a collective laugh of understanding of globalisation.
Amina Blackwood-Meeks concluded with a Nigerian story, 'The Greatest Treasure', singing "Christmas a come me want me--." at various points. The man found that he walked half-way around the world, only to find that he was back home and "all the time he was living with the greatest treasure of all, people who you love and who love you". It was an audience in total agreement that replied, when Amina Blackwood-Meeks said "Jack Mandorah", "me no choose none".
