The Mighty Sparrow (Slinger Francisco) has been accused of misogyny, and supporting repressive patriarchy via his songs, but this criticism needs to be revised to see Sparrow as an enabler of women as well, Prof Patricia Mohammed says. Mohammed, a lecturer at the University of the West Indies, St Augustine, was delivering the final in the series of tribute lectures to Sparrow, If Sparrow Say So, at UWI’s Daaga Auditorium on Wednesday night. Her lecture was titled Who Taking Advantage of Who?—a line taken from Stella, one of Sparrow’s songs.
Archived collective memory
Mohammed’s lecture began acknowledging the social value of Sparrow’s oeuvre. She said his lyrics and songs (and music in general) were a “means of retrieving archived collective memory”. His songs allow individuals to access personal memories as well as “a slideshow of political, economic and social issues of the time” they were performed. Apart from his social and political commentary, said Mohammed, songs examining “man and woman ting” comprise 93 of his repertoire of some 200 songs, and Sparrow was “best known for his undressing of the anatomy of sexual politics in the region”. Her own experience of Sparrow began, she said, at Naparima Girls’ High School, when Sparrow was invited to speak to and perform for “rows and rows of impressionable young girls” and he sang the raunchy Sa-Sa-Ye and The Lizard for them.
This incident, like many of Sparrow’s calypsos, was not a thoughtless or miscalculated gesture. There is a subtle perception at work, which is not necessarily accessible to the casual observer interested in simple moral equivocations. In general, said Mohammed, “if he slurs women’s sexuality, he also castigates male behaviour”. If the Village Ram, Sa Sa Ye and Mae Mae are unambiguous, in Stella, for example, Sparrow’s protagonist is a man who is determined to not take advantage of a young lady, but the young lady insists. Phillip My Dear (about the intruder, Michael Fagan, who was found in the Queen of England’s bedchamber in 1982) is essayed from the point of view of the Queen. Benwood Dick is the story of a cuckold.
Sparrow the shape-shifter
The Sparrow of the songs, said Mohammed, is a shape-shifter, not necessarily belonging to any of the characters or protagonists he creates and the women he addresses, Maria, Jean and Dinah, Maharajin, Mae Mae, Melda (and many more). As a social agent, Mohammed also compared Sparrow to the early English poet Geoffrey Chaucer, who introduced into the mainstream the voices and stories of the lower orders, who did not have access to the official languages and literacy. Like Chaucer, she said, Sparrow introduced the stories and language of the lower orders of society into the literary canon, bringing them to wider consciousness, and inserting them into the archive of collective and formal academic memory. Sparrow’s links to the past also included a canonical relationship with the past masters of calypso who had preceded him. Mohammed recalled the calypso dialogues of the 20s and 30s which dealt with the sordid male female relationships, bringing them explicitly to public consciousness for the first time.
Gender dialogue
Sparrow had copied these songs’ style and technique, but had also improved upon them, she said. In doing so, Sparrow enabled the continuation of the gender dialogue into the 1960s, which had “ushered in a second wave of feminism post-War”. The same progressiveness, Mohammed proposed, could not be said of contemporary calypso, chutney and soca offerings, since “the lack of censorship and freeing up of sexual mores have diminished the intelligence of contemporary calypsonians.” The lecture was also interpolated by snippets of Sparrow’s calypsos sung by David Bereaux, accompanied by the Canboulay Players, and on one or two occasions, by Sparrow himself.
After Prof Mohammed delivered her lecture, a formal presentation of a cheque for $100,000 was made to Sparrow to assist in defraying medical bills. Canboulay Productions director Rawle Gibbons, during the course of the presentation, said Sparrow had not asked for any help, but he and Canboulay had taken it upon themselves to organise a tribute and collect money.
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