Foreword “Delay is not denial.” Two decades ago, Kenrick P. Thomas did his due diligence to create this extraordinary book telling the story of “we thing” and in “we voice.” For Kenrick P. Thomas is “one of we;” and steelband is “we thing.” Within a few years of the completion of the final first draft, a tentative first edition was published. That was on Emancipation Day 1999. It is now Carnival Tuesday 2014; and the definitive first edition of Panriga: Tacarigua’s Contribution to the Evolution of the Steelband Phenomenon in Trinidad and Tobago has finally seen the light of day. Delay, indeed, was decidedly not denial. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., perhaps the most feted and prolific of the present-day African American literary theorists, in the preface to The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), characterized his work as an “attempt to lift the discourse of Signifyin(g) from the vernacular to the discourse of literary criticism” (xi; emphasis added). The singular popular oral poet known to all as Atilla the Hun claimed that the ultimate determiner of the artistic merits of the kaiso is the vox populi. Thomas’s voice is a “vox populi.” He is a bona fide representative of our steelband movement. “Le style c’est l’homme même,” and Thomas’s style is as authentic as the man himself. With Thomas there is no question of attempting to lift his discourse, voice—“we voice”—up to the supposedly superior realm of academic speech.
Posted on: Mon, 10 Mar 2014 15:59:04 +0000
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