First Published On: Monday, May 23, 2011 in the Tribune newspaper.
THERE is a Yoruba story that says when the earth lost its tongue and could no longer speak the heavens gave birth to the drum. In the ceremony of Junkanoo, when the goatskin drums start to beat and the brass band starts to play, the Junkanooer disappears into a deep meditation as the spirit expresses itself in movement and sound.
If Junkanoo were to exist in its most natural form, perhaps it would appear more like a masked ancestral ritual on African soil or the dance of a honugan in a Haitian Voudon ceremony. But as with much else, we are living outside of the natural order of things.
Win or lose, I don’t care; just give me that sweet rush. That is the spirit of Junkanoo I saw over the past week, as thousands celebrated the life of Jackson Burnside, and I was truly inspired. Lest the moment simply fade like a passing fad, I wanted to share my insights in hope that it would keep the fire burning.
The first rush took place under a bright full moon night Over-the-Hill. Each time I remembered we were there because Mr Burnside was not, I cried. I was most overwhelmed when the band belted out the tune, “It is Well with my Soul”, at the doorstep of Mr Burnside’s 93-year old mother Gertrude Burnside. She sat on the porch with her children and family. I can imagine her swelling with anticipation and pride as the sound of the drums approached. Young and old alike lined the streets to watch the people’s rush. We travelled in the dead of the night around Fort Hill.
The experience was so powerful for me because it took me back to another era; a time long before Junkanoo became a competition and commercial enterprise; before 1948 when Junkanoo moved to Bay Street; and perhaps even before my grandparents came of age in the 1920s. I am a dancer and I have rushed Bay Street, but never before has the experience transported me back by an easy 80 years.
This time was different and Mr Burnside helps us to understand why. He saw a long time ago what we gave birth to on that night. That night, I stood in the company of my African brothers and sisters with the spirit of our ancestors ever so present marching through the streets for the sole purpose of celebrating one of our own. There was no European holiday to observe; there were no rules of competition to confine us; and most importantly, there were no tourists to give us definition. Few times before have I felt so close to African soil in the Bahamas. It was a homecoming for me as much as it was a celebration of Mr Burnside’s home going.
The rush was a performance of culture, but we were not in performance of our culture. Mr Burnside appreciated the difference, because we would debate the concept from time to time. I would commiserate with him; expressing my thoughts that Bahamians perform their culture while others live it. I had no complaint that night when we rushed through Jail Alley. That night we were feeling, breathing and living the expression of our collective spirit of remembrance for Mr Burnside, and it was the sweetest rush.
I felt the same way about the Bay Street rush on Thursday after Mr Burnside’s thanksgiving service, although the element of daylight and an emotionally detached audience created a different energy. There was a mystical ancestral energy on Wednesday night that evoked the spirit of the dead, while Thursday afternoon the energy was more festive and rooted in the living-community.
Thursday afternoon’s rush brought a spontaneity to Bay Street that it has not seen in moons. There was an explosion of spirit on Bay Street unlike none other in recent years.
“Jackson always said we have to do these things for us and then invite the tourist to our house to share it with them. We did this our way for him. If any visitors were on Bay Street it was totally coincidental. This was done for Jackson and those visitors who were fortunate to catch us, would have gone back with a Bahamian experience they could not have ever managed to have on any other occasion; a much richer experience than anything that could have been planned for them,” said family friend and fellow Junkanooer Arlene Nash Ferguson.
A Powerful Message
The experience of the past week reminded me of a time when our ancestors needed no permission slip and no external audience to dance, sing and lick the drums; when they lived their own cultural reality without apology. It was a powerful moment in which we enacted a story described time and time again by Mr Burnside in his vision of a one Junkanoo family rushing to its own rhythm.
Mr Burnside left us with a powerful message that Junkanoo is much more than a competition or a parade. It is a healing ritual; it is an ancestral dance. Mr Burnside’s commemoration rush allowed us to step into that space.
In his own words, Mr Burnside said: “I can no longer get as excited as I have in past years about the celebration of competition. Excessive jubilation or dejection for a win or a loss no longer motivates me…Costumes and parades are only the end products of a process of communities coming together for a common purpose to work, practice and express our collective spirit.”
In the context of the competitive Junkanoo space, no group has achieved the level of maturity that Mr Burnside dreamed of, but I believe his death has renewed the call for us to rekindle the spirit and get back to the core.
Mr Burnside said: “Junkanoo is the most flamboyant expression of the spirit of the Bahamian people and a fountainhead of artistic expression.” But it is beneath the external pageantry of the Junkanoo parade that we touch the essence, even though the spectacle is so grand. For African people, drumming is not music; it is a language that our spirits speak, as do our ancestors. Dancing is not just movement; it is meditation. All that was seemingly mundane and external in the lives of our ancestors, particularly in the eyes of our historical oppressors, actually had great depth and meaning, and spiritual value.
Over the years, through the process of commercialization, Junkanoo has been stripped of so much of its original meaning. Much of the new meaning has eroded the elements of sustainability that used to be a part of its natural order. In an historical account of Junkanoo, Mr Burnside spoke about the ceremony as being the “great equalizer.” In the past, he said Junkanoo used to truly be a process of making “junk-anew.”
Modern day Junkanoo is stricken with contradictions; pulling it in competing directions. On the one hand, there are those like Mr Burnside, Ms Nash Ferguson and their contemporaries, who recognize the power of Junkanoo as a classroom and basis for coming together and building strong communities. It was important for Mr Burnside that we always preserve “the inalienable right” of each citizen to be a participant in Junkanoo, not just a spectator.
“His thing was as is mine that Junkanoo is a spirit. It transcends the parades. It was all about the community and coming together and celebrating something that has been in our tradition for thousands of years. It speaks to the strength of our people who were able to celebrate in one of the darkest eras of our history. He was all about expanding the horizon of Junkanoo,” said Ms Nash Ferguson.
On the other hand, with the commercialization of Junkanoo, and its unchecked expansion, it is becoming more and more like an elitist sport that requires you to pay to play. The Junkanoo community is still very much committed to the competitive space. Many of the young people in Junkanoo today know nothing other than the competitive spirit of Junkanoo. There is a view that without the element of competition, groups would not be able to keep the shacks packed.
Tension
Add to this picture the fact that Junkanoo is making ever-increasing demands on volunteer time and energy, and that the lack of transparency in the fiscal management of groups is creating ever-increasing tensions.
The beautiful thing about Mr Burnside is that in the face of all the contradiction and complexity of the Junkanoo world, it took his simple sacrifice to bring us together and to get to the heart of the matter.
Mr Burnside used to say, as Nicolette Bethel reminds us, “Be who you is and not who you aint!” That axiom has so many layers of meaning, but in this context, I think it calls us to be true to the essence of who we are. Junkanoo is not just an event on the Ministry of Tourism’s calendar; it is not just a street parade; it is a ritual renewal of the spirit African style. That is what we did last week in commemoration of Mr Burnside. We have done it before, but never on that scale.
Mrs Nash-Ferguson told me the story of a treasured One Family base drummer named “Boomer”, who was gunned down in 1998, the night before a regularly scheduled practice. Boomer’s family joined the Junkanoo family at practice that night and what occurred can only be understood by those who have felt the power of the drum.
“I had never seen people rushing and screaming at the same time. They were dancing and crying their heads off,” she said. When someone is mourning the death of another, in Junkanoo parlance you say: “We have to rush through it,” she also recalled.
On another occasion, she said, a drummer came to the One Family shack after being “severely insulted by his group.” One of the other drummers said, “There is only one way to get him out of that and they started drumming.”
In true serendipitous style, Mr Burnside was treated to a short story on his last conscious night that spoke to these very themes. He was in attendance at the book signing of Christian Campbell, where Emille Hunt, a young Bahamian writer, read his story entitled, “Return of the Dragon.” It spoke about a widow who found her spirit of dance overburdened by the pain of her lost love. Her husband died when she was pregnant with a son. He inherited the drumbeat from his father and rose to be a great drummer like his father.
When the boy was gunned down by a police officer, the community planned a Junkanoo celebration in his honour. The plan was in defiance of state officials, who declared the times to be too volatile. After years of being dead to the beat, it was the sound of the drum that pulsated in tune with the earth’s vibration of her son’s grave that had enough ase (power) to spark her spirit. Her rhythm was resurrected by Junkanoo.
In this time of national crisis, we have an opportunity to look to the ceremonial space of Junkanoo for the healing cure. It is not the Junkanoo of Boxing Day on Bay Street that contains the secret elixir. It is the Junkanoo of Jackson Burnside that we experienced while honouring him. The closest we get to the spirit ordinarily is in the space of Junkanoo practice. As a nation we need to look seriously at these questions and rush for the cure.
It was with sadness that I received news of Mr Burnside’s transition, but it was also with a deep sense of respect and appreciation for the ordered design of the universe. It was only through crippling personal trial that I came to understand and accept without reservation the notion that we are born at the right moment in history; we die at the ordered time; and we leave when our purpose has been fulfilled, even if the community and we ourselves are unable to comprehend the true scope of that purpose.
So even though the great spirit of iku (death) carried Mr Burnside for his final rush during the waxing of this Taurus moon, I can rejoice, because I know he is now everywhere, “within the ethos of the atmosphere”, as Reverend Eneas articulated.
“We cannot escape him anymore. Everyone who ignored his proposals, wouldn’t listen to his radio show, whatever you were trying to escape, you will not be able to anymore. And for those of us who were working with him, he has even more to teach us now,” he said.
The ancestors welcomed home a grand spirit that was surely too awesome to contain. Mr Burnside: We will call your name and rejoice in your new journey. I know we will hear you speak in the sound of the drum and the trumpet of the conch shell. I hear you and I answer your call. Maferefun egun (Praise be to the ancestors).