visual essays
Calypso, within Public Access– reflects its earlier cultural manifestations both as popular song and social commentary. The use of the Calypso song allows Davis to insert into this landscape a small act of resistance and reclamation of the Barbadian landscape. This narrative of reclamation and resistance is played out within Public Access through Davis’s performance of a popular Calypso song ‘”Jack! This Beach is Mine”, a song composed and originally performed by local musician, “Gabby”. “Gabby” composed ‘”Jack! This Beach is Mine”, as a response to the Barbados Board of Tourism’s legal counsel advising hotel owners that they had the right to extend their property down to the waterfront. Furthermore, Gabby’s Calypso highlights that the production of the Caribbean as an empty landscape for tourist relaxation is only achieved through physical force and barricades. I grow up bathin, in sea water But nowadays , that is bare horror If i only venture , from my seashore Police Telling me, i cyan bade no more Cause “JACK” doan want me to bade on my beach “JACK” tell dem to keep me outta reach “Jack” tell dem , i would never make de grade dey STRENGTHEN SECURITY and build barricade Dat cyan happen here in this country I want Jack to know that the beach belong to we dah cyan happen here, OVER MY DEAD BODY Tell big guts JACK “GABBY” say dat de beach belong to we chorus Dat beach is mine, i can bade anytime Despite what they say i gine bade anyway Davis’s Public Access (2010) seeks to reclaim the beach, its landscape and the cultural heritage that it has produced from song, to literature to craft as part of the national heritage of Barbados. A national heritage that is also visually signified within one of the colours of the post independence Barbadian national flag – aquamarine, a cultural heritage that continues to inform the making and imagining of the contemporary Caribbean. Biography: Janice Cheddie is a UK-based writer on contemporary visual culture, difference, cultural translation and issues of cultural democracy, currently she is Visiting Lecturer at the University of Greenwich
VOL 3 | ISSUE 6 | FALL 2021
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