This unique blog is Jamaica's very first blog. It documents the work and thoughts of Jamaican Philpsopher, Yannick Nesta Pessoa. I am an Artist, Graphic Designer, Copywriter, Poet, Social Advocate, Community Activist, Western Mirror Columnist and Legal Student. Follow on Twitter & Instagram @yahnyk. Follow on Youtube @ and Reply to yannickpessoa@gmail.com
Eintou, a citizen of Trinidad and Tobago, is the recipient of a national award, the Humming Bird Silver Medal, for her contribution to the development and propagation of Arts and Culture. An award-winning actress, and in 2004 was awarded the Vanguard Award of the National Drama Association of Trinidad and Tobago (NDATT), an organisation that she helped to form. She recently retired as Director of the National Heritage Library of Trinidad and Tobago an institution which she holds the distinct honour of creating and developing.
Her career as an activist and artist has been a lifetime of service to the dispossessed youth of the inner cities, young artists, dramatists and performers and basically any bright spark with the gleam of the future in their eyes.
It is this drive to empower young people that inspires and fuels her talents as a storyteller and magician of the spoken word."
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| Music - The Royal Road to Our Consciousness |
Sunday, January 28, 2007 |
"Wisdom is the breath of the power of God, and in all ages entering into holy souls she maketh them friends of God and prophets."
- Ralph Waldo Trine, In Tune with The Infinite
The Right Reverend Alfred Reid used the following quotations in the sermon at the funeral service for Viola Simpson, a former educator and choir director of the St James Parish Church in Montego Bay, on 2006 December 11:
"Music is the royal road to our consciousness/to our psyche"
and "Let me write the music of a nation, then I care not who writes its laws".
Writing in his column, The Montegonian, published in the 2007 January 13 issue of the Western Mirror, Yannick Pessoa described the heralding of 2007 by the garrisons of Montego Bay as follows:
"Bam bam bam bloiy bloiy bloiy chk chk chk thoom thoom pieee pieee blam balm bookam bookam.no amount of onomatopoeia could convey to you the grand gun orchestra that played in Norwood, Gulf, Glendevon, Canterbury, Albion and Gully (all inner-city communities of the city of Montego Bay, Jamaica) to commence the New Year. Literally the year in St James started with a BANG!
At the stroke of midnight December 31, 2006 or the morn of January 1, 2007, I was at the yellow night owl's outpost in Paradise, Glen Skeng's shop, only to see the whole Paradise pull to a halt and I watched as multitude of people stopped what they were doing to come outside and listen to the barrage of bullets in what seemed like gangsters singing their own anthem. I watched people listen, and listened as well to gunshots on rapid from 12 (midnight) to 12:30 am and I counted somewhere in the region of near 500 rounds and can only imagine what I missed..The year has begun, the garrison has spoken."
Yannick Pessoa then invited readers to listen to the lyrics of a hit record by Mavado and Busy Signal (Kingston-based singers) called Badman Place that contain phrases such as "fools get kick inna face. get erase we nuh quarrel, inna bwoy head lead a rest.inna badman place.shot brush off yu face like napkins, thugs dem ready fi go rise the Gatling(s). tings wey talk yu cyan repeat or yu get delete.".
Shocking! These are the lyrics and others that I refer to as verbal pornography, accompanied by real pornography shown on DVDs, that our children listen to in minibuses on their way to and from school, at parties and at the big dancehall shows. These are the lyrics that are played daily on sound systems in hundreds of communities all over Jamaica. Who produces these records and to what end?
'Let me write the music of a nation, then I care not who writes its laws.' All of the crime plans will continue to fail if lyrics like those of Mavado and Busy Signal, and so many others, are what our children experience on the royal road to their consciousness.
Jamaican musicians have given many songs of freedom to the world. And so we can exchange the songs that celebrate death with our own songs of freedom. Our foreparents died to secure our future and sang songs of freedom as they did - songs of engagement and action! Leading us to what we are emancipated for!
A Quiet Heart
Meditation for your quiet time. Those quiet moments in your special silent place.
"So freedom sings what Freedom brings. Human freedom sings what Divine Freedom brings. It sings because it acknowledges the glory with which God continues to create human life with dignity, beauty, and freedom. It sings because it is not simply absorbed with what we are emancipated from but, rather, by what we are emancipated for. It sings because freedom brings not only creative empowerment but also creative hope.
The song of freedom is no song of abandon or illusion; it is a song of engagement and action..We act out our doxology in the context of our freedom, for we hold to the confidence that only in the service of God is perfect freedom assured. As freedom sings, no one is excluded or alienated, but no one is elevated either - for God shows no partiality."
- Kortright Davis, Emancipation Still Comin
Marjorie A Stair can be contacted at 601-3841; e-mail loyal@cwjamaica.com.
Bring ordinary folk into CSME foldTuesday
October 24th 2006
I am a concerned Jamaican. I am concerned that with the advent of the Caribbean Single Market Economy (CSME) the governments of the Caribbean have failed to plan our way forward, glossing over the details and intricacies that the merger of Caribbean will bring. This initiative is the only way forward for the region but, we must examine its social ramifications. The governments have only examined the CSME and Caricom in terms of economies and broad macro policies that don't exactly reach to the average Joe, and don't exactly have clear manifestations in everyday life and reality.
This has occurred mostly because of the lack of media attention and government initiatives to stimulate awareness in the broader cross-section of society. Such an awareness can generate ideas for opportunities in business and education, opportunities for individuals to explore and generate ideas beyond those that propagate the myth that USA is the land of opportunity and the only option for feasible living and generation of wealth.
Integration can only become sustainable if individuals see benefit to it; it can only function if we capture the imagination of individuals whom the society and government rely on to keep the wheels turning - John Public.
Most members of the public know very little, if any, about the societies, the mores, the norms, the values, ideas and cultures we are about to meld and mesh with.
We are more exposed to North American media than we are to Caribbean media; we need regional newspapers that come out regularly and frequently, we need TV (beyond the efforts of HYPETV and Tempo) to carry messages and ideas from around the Caribbean to us, to expose us to the variations in terms of language, ideology and ethos. We need to see more of our Caribbean neighbours in order to awaken us to the new possibilities, cultures and opportunities that lie before us. We need to also explore Caribbean radio, a vector that can ignite or further ignite the musical interactions occurring across the region. We also need further interaction in sports, not just cricket and football.
Governments need to set up cultural exchange programmes for everyday people, not diplomats and such - exchange programmes like sending students, both rural and urban, prep and primary, to other islands to experience schooling there. Children are the future, and if we are to have a joint Caribbean future, we ought to start with the children.The need to energise the social dimensions of Caribbean integration must come soon or we may fail economically, because at the end of the day an economy, for all the maths and models, can't exist without the human factor.
Yannick Nesta Pessoa
via email
