#IslandInsight: Bois Woman Jamie Philbert On The Challenges Plaguing The Kalinda Community
“Kalinda for me is a way of life.”
That’s according to Jamie Philbert, a multi-disciplinary artist with a thirst for knowledge who’s passionate about culture, a venerable truth speaker who doesn’t do anything in half measure.
In our quest to understand more about Kalinda and the people who practice it, Your Caribbean Guide visited Jamie at her studio (The Bois Academy) in Arima.
She explained that Kalinda is a way of understanding that conflict is not an ending point, that it’s a doorway to competence, to creativity… a way to collaborate or to co-operate.
“What does that mean in living it? It means that every single conflict that I have my life and we have conflicts as human beings every single day, right? That I have to face it, that I have to face it, even if it’s with fear that if I have fear inside of myself that I have to have a certain amount of courage that I’m facing this thing with. And you can see that very simply. When you watch a stick fighting match, even if you don’t understand what you’re looking at. You have two fighters that are stepping into a space where you might think that they’re so brave and they are brave. But that doesn’t mean that they don’t feel afraid that they want to get their head buss.”
Jamie told YCG, that Kalinda is a space of love.
“When you’re inside of the Kalinda community from watching the call and response between the Chantuelle and the drummer, between the Chantuelle and the fighters, between the Chantuelle, the drummers, the fighters and the people of the Gayelle, there’s a feeling that’s unexplainable and the only way that I can explain it is joy. So Kalinda has a lot of adjectives for me and it’s something that King David Matthew Brown used to say that kalinda has many adjectives. One of them for me is live, is love, is joy. It’s persistence, it’s resilience. It’s a resilience form. We talk about resistance a lot in our space…”
Jamie told YCG that medically, resistance is trauma inducing. She explained that while she understands the context of resistance when it comes to the African diasporic struggle, she thinks it important that we find new ways to look at our collective history.
“Kalinda inside of Trinidad and Tobago in particular, because it’s lived in places like Guadeloupe, Martinique, Barbados, Puerto Rico, Brazil, Cuba, under different names and sometimes under the same name. In our space in Trinidad Tobago, we talk about it as the thing that saved Carnival. My belief is that Kalinda wasn’t trying to save Carnival. Kalinda is set inside of freedom and it’s coming from a place of understanding that I’m not trying to get liberated. I was born free and if you watch Kalinda practitioners, they move with a certain kind of freedom and a certain kind of autonomy for themselves. That, to me is one of the most beautiful things about Kalinda because I find that as people from the diaspora, we’re constantly trying to get to freedom. We’re always trying to fight for freedom and with Kalinda you are fighting for your life and for the existence of your life and to keep your freedom.”
Jamie is dissatisfied with the positioning of the Kalinda community within cultural spaces here in Trinidad and Tobago.
She said we’re recolonising things in our space and we don’t see it.
“I used to get really upset about it and now I realise that there’s a decision that we’re making and we’re not just making the decision because we’re horrible people or we just want to make money over people. It’s not just that, we’ve been trained to be this way. I think that the colonizers injected a certain kind of poison inside of us, to teach us that capitalism was the way to go. So now we leave bartering out of the loop, right? That in order for us to be seen in a certain way that I have to grab this thing from culture and this thing, and then we use phrases like for the culture, right?”
Jamie said it’s too often the case that certain actions are taken for the culture, while the people are mistreated or forgotten entirely.
“I had to tell somebody the other day that I am not doing this for the culture. I want Kalinda to live as free as it is because it’s for the ancestors. There are people that have left us these things… We have the spaces, we have the income, we have the audience to be able to show our culture in a certain sort of way. But we’re not just showing our culture, can’t be for the culture because what about the people that are holding the knowledge in their bodies?”
Fierce and unwavering in her defense of the Kalinda community, Jamie noted that practitioners and the art form aren’t treated with the respect that they deserve.
“The idea that Calypso came from Kalinda, right, the entire complex not just the lavways that we sing, but the idea of combat and war came from Kalinda’s essence how we can’t see that posting a photo of someone that is alive or passed away and not naming them, that that’s problematic…”
Having observed the prevalence of actors being used in lieu of actual stick fighters in various national productions, Jamie said it’s important to note that “the stick now in the hand of someone that is not a stick fighter just is a stick…”
“…but in the hands of the person that is a stick fighter, it has this logic and intent that is not just about war, but ritual war that’s saturated in something that could actually make you to superheroes that you watched when you was little, you know, the Kung Fu flicks that we watched that we thought were just you know, so adjacent to us, but it’s a part of our culture. What does it mean to have a martial tradition? A national martial art in the Caribbean that still lives. We are one of the only spaces in the Caribbean and probably the world that has held on to the entire complex of Kalinda. That’s a huge deal. And if we continue to only I’m going to use the word rape it in a particular sort of way, we’re going to start to lose more parts of her. I don’t believe that Kalinda could ever die but I do believe that we kill our practitioners by not seeing them fully. I’ve heard some of the ways that people speak to practitioners when they’re on a set during Carnival. Some of the ways that I’ve noticed that NCC has spoken to me myself as a sick fighter and other stick fighters it’s degrading, you know, it disregards that humanity in a certain sort of way. So no Dionne I’m not happy. I’m not pleased at all. And not just because it’s Kalinda, but because because it’s black people because it’s people and you don’t know what anyone has gone through. I don’t know if anyone in this space has ever sat down and asked a Kalinda practitioner or stick fighter what they want, what do they want to see for their participation in Carnival.”
Editor’s Note
In part two of YCGs conversation with Jamie, she will share her thoughts on what Carnival has become.
