Not Pan in Schools but School in Pan
Reform of Panorama

Lloyd Best

I - Tuning up

Somehow I sense that this is a propitious moment. Keith Smith once wrote a series of articles in the Tapia newspaper about Bertie Marshall which he called "Pan Is Mih Gyul." They were delightful pieces. I was so moved, I dared to make my first ever proposal to the pan community. It was a proposal for a Pan Theatre somewhere. That was 30 years ago. Of course nothing like that has happened, despite the petro-dollar bonanza we enjoyed in the years between 1973 and 1982. And then one magnificent dry season evening, not very different from this, Scherzando invited me to the panyard in Curepe, a little way up the road from here. That was in January 1995. Now six years later, the ideas we then traded on "School in Pan" have gained such currency, Pan Trinbago has asked to see the text.

Here we are this evening, at this festive occasion at La Joya to present the awards competed for during the World Steelband Festival 2000 and Panorama 2001, with a preview of Panorama 2002. I take note that Boogsie has only just announced his programme to promote activity all the year round at the Phase Two panyard. In this morning's Express, Terry Joseph reports on a brainstorming on Pan held in New York a few days ago. So it does ndeed feel like the season to come back to School in Pan. I admit to being encouraged, not the least by this assembly of pan enthusiasts. It is an opportunity I feel duty bound to seize. What we have to talk about tonight is the reform of Panorama, long overdue.

I must confess I've not met any member of the Pan community for whom the compelling requirement of reform is not money, meaning that our premier competition cannot continue not to seek to transform Pan as art and entertainment into business. Its mandate cannot but be to convert the panyard into an economic zone and an education plant as well as a breeding ground for community and culture. The priority now can only be to offer a combination of jobs and incomes. I mean profits, salaries and wages, money. We know that Pan cannot help making music, of course. But can it hope to survive and endure for another 60-70 years, unless it also made money by triggering economic and industrial transformation, along with social rehabilitation and civic welfare for the great multitude of the people? Emphatically, the answer is no. However, the one thing we're not talking about here is outdoor relief or handouts to the needy. We do indeed envisage public as well as private spending on a considerable scale. But the purpose cannot be to subsidize popular amusement at Carnival or to encourage bragging about what Trinbagonians are proud to say we invented during the course of the 20th century. What is in prospect here is remuneration for work, value for expertise and art, payment for service.

The only conceivable ends are viability and prosperity. The only conceivable means are what already exists, what has been proven and arrived with a track record. From a practical standpoint then, what we have to deal with is Panorama. There is no other starting point. The task is to convert it and employ it. What has been an engaging show and show case of talent in the 20th century must in the 21st century be transformed into the dynamo, the generator and the motor of Pan.

II - Jumping up in steelband

We have 183 registered steelbands, not counting schools. More than 6,500, possibly 7,000 players are active though no more than 25 percent so on a full time basis. Outside of Carnival, for up to 46 weeks, the life of pan is irregular and uncertain, confined to stage sides of less than forty players, gigs here and there and the odd trip abroad now and again over the years. The dominant theme is idle or spare capacity, anathema in the world of industry and business. For the majority of bands, activity is limited to the competition once a year. For between four to six weeks, up to 120 players and supporting cast devote an average of 30 hrs per week to preparation, overture and tuning up. One researcher has pointed out that, using the minimum wage, the minimum economic value of unpaid labour alone is nearly $4 million. For shorter periods, at earlier hours, school children often share the facilities. The panyard is a beehive of activity sustained by immense expenditures on transport, food, drink and other supplies vital for its output; but those inputs are paid for on a private basis by individuals and the community. They are not as in business charged as inescapable and tax-deductible costs.

According to 1997 figures, total spending in 1997 was $8.25 million dollars including purchases of instruments, spending on panyards and ancillaries. Income ran to $10.6 million. This included prize money, performance fees and proceeds from tours and trips. Add record sales and royalties. Then, export of pans last year (2000) brought in $3.8 million. As the basis of this turnover, one estimate of industry assets puts the value of instruments and infra- structure in excess of $50 million.

Quite frankly, what comes to mind from these derisory numbers is an activity that generates an immense public interest, one that commands huge energies, consumes an extraordinary amount of talent, skill, organization and management, involves constant initiative, innovation and technological progress, and plays a huge social, civic and even economic role with its spin-off activities. And yet, pan in many ways, remains stunted, underdeveloped and a source of frustration and futility. The simple reason is that it has never operated and functioned as business, not even of the explicit co-operative type.

Two observations must be made here. The first is the pronounced tendency to reserve only the entertainment and amusement value for those who do the actual work and who even spend their own money to produce the main output, while the business income in the form of income and profits is creamed off for those who mostly observe the process and sell expensive supplies. Let us recall that this was the dominant feature of the slave economy which, for some strange reason that we must hasten to explore, has survived well into independence and freedom.

The second observation is that this feature of Pan as one activity is shared with the other components of Carnival and with Carnival as a whole. Carnival was the theatre of slaves, vested with the responsibility of confronting a social order dominated by planters and investors. Carnival was the theatre of the streets which reduced all and sundry to a common denominator. It has been the central rite of Caribbean slave society, of Caribbean culture and of Caribbean civilization. It has therefore never been required to function as business for at least one profound reason: The business of Carnival has been to supply popular gratification but from our point of view not to keep us content and quiet but to mount a deliberate subversion of the formal economy and the written Constitution. So it is that under current conditions of freedom, we can make perfect sense of what we have done with Carnival, Pan, etc. Now that we're in charge, we cannot afford to overestimate the importance of accidents, or acts of God, or of visitations of the colonizer, in a world that knows no logic save the logic of domination and power and in which our role is simply to surrender to Fate, or to complain and protest. Quite the contrary, we're obliged to locate the whole record of events in the context of history, in the flow of encounter and contestation, with ourselves as active agents, even when enslaved, indentured, colonized and kept in shackles, figurative or real. Most of all, we need to recall the strategies, if not quite policies, we somehow devised from the moment some of us were embarked on the Middle Passage, tied down and tied up, down beneath in the hole. The distinguished Guyanese novelist and essayist, Wilson Harris, has noticed that our first response to the ravages of enslavement took the form of Limbo. Limbo implies, first an imagining, and then a creating or inventing, clear space and passage, where before there was none. This designing of a largely imaginary gateway to freedom did not so much involve the employment of physical equipment, ammunition, or materials of war. What, above all, it involved was the deployment of wit, craft, imagination and intuition, of the ancestral software, if you like, the obeah we'd brought in our heads from the continents and the cultures on the other side of the Atlantic, for use at a time and place where enslavement as chattels, or indenture as servants or as labour power, was the equivalent of being dispossessed, of having no hardware whatsoever at our disposal, or to which we could validly lay claim, not even our own bodies. Harris refers to these innermost reserves and capabilities as sleeping resources, most of which are still waiting to be aroused and awakened, to be tapped for entrepreneurship and business.

Pan in Five Bars

So the first thing we invented was Limbo. In characteristic Caribbean fashion, the process was downside up. In the West, the economy started by emphasizing hardware and goods before it arrived at a point where the decisive ingredient took the form of software and services, now celebrated as knowledge, the only factor of production on which the chattel-slave could depend. Right from the start, it was the economy of the slave, as distinct from the economy of the master, which set the stage for high value output which was neither material nor tangible but was essentially cultural and artistic, offering mostly in welfare and gratification that could not be appropriated and diverted. So if we've continued in this tradition, there was logic enough. For many different reasons, we were wary of a physical output which could be distributed to others different from ourselves and in any case, we were hard put even to own land and real estate, let alone the physical means of production - equipment and plant.

So much for limbo, making space where before there was none. Our second invention or creation was Mas which we hastened to add. Looking back, we can see now that it formed part of a family. Almost everywhere else in the global order, the practice was for the society to create the economy. People sought to feed, clothe and shelter themselves. In the Caribbean, again things were upside down, meaning that we'd pay a high price for continuing to import economic and social theory from outside and other situaions. Our challenge is to design and devise our own, based on our own history, our own conditions and circumstances.

In these parts, it was the economy which was first established by absentee investors and then turned to set up a society that was at least compatible, if never quite adapted. For the purpose of installing a secure and guaranteed source of labour power, the imperial proprietors set about transplanting and introducing people from all over, not so much as communities but mostly as individual persons, stripped of identity and terrorized by the regime of being severely alone, stranded in a very strange place. As late as the 19th century, many Indos tried to walk back from Caroni\Naparima; the evidence is abundant.

The necessary consequence of this manner of founding the society and peopling the land was two-fold. To begin with, we the alienated and dispossessed became especially pre-disposed to embrace a bonding which was essentially ethnic, ethnic in the precise and only relevant sense that we seized on any form of identity which seemed to offer ready succour, solidarity and support. The important thing was that the ethnic bonding had to be ready, to the point of being automatic, almost mindless, no questions asked. This is the ethnicity we still live with today and are gratuitously scared by.

It is no surprise that it is based mostly on race. With race, identity is above all visible. And yet, it might be a mistake to equate valid, necessary and enduring bonds, effected on the basis of race, something we certainly have here, with a racist, racialist or racist impulse, which may not be much less pervasive than it sometimes seems to some. In point of fact, there is another exciting innovation that the Caribbean has again been responsible for, especially in T&T. We've converted ethnicity into an entirely different animal from what it is elsewhere and we've accomplished that by creolizing and making it creole, in this precise and important sense. What we've systematically endorsed is a footloose type of bonding on many different bases at one and the same time, almost without thinking, be it jahaji bhai, race, class, colour, religion, homeland, tribe, clan, or caste. It was any port in a storm, so long as it ssemed to offer community and belonging. The reason caste has substantially collapsed in the Caribbean is that the conditions have not been present for it to furnish any real support. In a slave society, caste is absurd. Here the need to touch and to be touched by virtually any category of person and to share facilities and context is the very antithesis. We duly innovated, not completely, but considerably.

The irony is that the same psychology which drove us to the ethnic response at the same time dictated a feverish and almost diabolic changing of roles. From one moment to the other, we playing different parts, putting different faces on and fitting new masks to express a solidarity that is often contrived, if not fake. With almost any old stranger we encounter, we're invariably skinning teeth. Dan Crowley has published a wonderfully hilarious piece about the improbable roles Trinidadians played in the 1950s. The cosmopolitan society imported so many peoples and had so many migrants from so many places, role playing became standard. Mas, which is not the same thing as Carnival, became indispensable to existence. Not only did we learn to play the Other in many different incarnations; we also saw the virtue of ourselves in many different guises. Every Trinidadian recognises how we change personality, presence, language and style just to suit. But because we have been a late developed island, constituted out of the experience, culture and people of other islands, Trinidad is the extreme case of the alienated Caribbean condition. Everybody insists on being second-class, with no first and no third.

You can see how the culture of Limbo combined with the tradition of Mas to make Carnival necessary as showcase. From this great social ceremony and community ritual, the benefit and the gratification we got was the knwledge that we'd outwitted and subverted the system of economy, society and politics and had achieved that feat without any hardware, only through the software of imagination, creation and subversion, even if. in the process, we earned little or nothing. It was therefore easy to add Calypso to Limbo and Mas. Limbo is making space where there was none. Mas is creating friend and even family and community out of stranded individuals, and doing so through rapid and flexible changes of identity and affiliation, wherever and however required. Given all that, what choice did Calypso have?

Not surprisingly Calypso thrives on extempore and its stock in trade is double entendre. That means that on the spur of the moment, you can alter your stance and even your conviction. You are chancing the most outrageous, the most irreverent, and the most risque of observations and of social commentary. You're meaning what you say; but at the same time you're not really saying what you mean, except to those who know the inside dope, can follow the thing through, and get the message, text and sub-text.

Pan on the rise

With this collection of instruments - Limbo, Mas, Carnival and Calypso - we somehow arrived safely. With great unfulfilled promise, from the slave society we journeyed to self-determination and freedom.

Effective enslavement had lasted more than 400 years - from the end of the 15th century to the middle of the 20th. This new age exploded into a region-wide uprising of the Labour Movement, beginning with post World War I strike in 1919, when Cipriani and the veterans came back and culminating in the disturbances of 1937 in Trinidad, 1938 in Jamaica. Can it be any surprise that in the ferment before and during World War II, Pan stormed the stage and made its dramatic entry?

It was of course a torrent of new music. However, Pan was also a new instrument of culture, in the other sense. What it added to our armoury was a further capacity to intervene, again without hardware. Pan turned literally to the dustbin and emerged as the essential metaphor for transforming nothing into something, the magic of creation. It translates into making music wherever you go, with whatever you find. The ultimate capacity to invent.

All this, I'm afraid, raises awkward questions. After nearly 70 years, how can we, who, under conditions of enslavement and colonialism, had been so entrepreneurial and creative, have let the momentum slacken, at the precise moment we've been free? How is it that the panyard, if not Pan, has remained so stunted? Who and what are responsible? That is the question. It is the question for which we have somehow to contrive and provide answers, mostly for ourselves. Of late, we've become markedly anxious. We eye the rest of the world moving on, even in the realm of Pan, while we seem to have stalled. Nor is it that we're especially under-equipped or inadequate, or that we've lost our capacity for private innovation and creation but that we've been hopelessly slow at collective or public organization and management. Because the macro area of public policy has broken down, or has never been constituted, initiative at the micro level has been in no position to bear fruit. The public policies and instruments that we still have were originally designed for slavery and colonialism. They were not designed for a people that is free.

As a parallel feature, our own responses and reactions have themselves remained adapted not to freedom under independence but to freedom under slavery. We are wary of - even hostile to - Minshall's spirited challenge to displace symbols and wrappings by instruments of intervention. We're invited to abandon the romance and the evasions of form and colour for reality and substance, however mundane and drab. We refuse the responsibility of being unreservedly in charge. It is this unresponsibility that we must hasten to deal with, not by looking for relief and subvention - which have their place - but rather by an act of invention and creation, beginning from the panyard.

Panyard

What then is the panyard? I have to say that I do not see a place is acted upon but one that takes the initiative on its own behalf. In serving community, the panyard plays five distinct roles. First, as a pole of innovation. It creates new music in two senses, vital to product differentiation in the pursuit of marketing. Each time Pan plays, the performance is different. It plays without scores, a genre in itself.

Moreover, with each succeeding season, Pan invents new means - the number and mix of instruments, the tuning, the supporting infrastructure. This is not a stagnant or dying undertaking; on the contrary, it is evolving. Second, the panyard is a pool of knowledge devoted to making its own new tools for new expression. It has long acquired the habit of accumulating knowledge, wisdom and experience to deliver and fashion its own self -education. Third, the panyard is a centre of excellence. In its specialty, it is the best in the world, the fountain of its own standards, needing no external validation or reference. Fourth, it is a magnet of mobilization. The youth in particular gravitate because they are lifted; they get both gratification and edification. They don't need to be bullied, bribed or even given incentives. Finally, the panyard is a network of interdependence. At one and the same time, it links so many aspects of existence, it is so integral to the culture, it engenders activities that are social and economic, spiritual and material, making itself the natural centre of community.

One other thing the panyard cannot but be. Because of what it is, it cannot avoid being a metaphor for all the other centres of excellence that play the same role in the community while not employing pan as the fulcrum around which the rest revolves. In this way, Pan has a distinctive cultural reference in the communities that spawned it. At the same time, it possesses a universal aspect. It opens possibility not only for itself but also for the mascamp, and indeed for whatever social agencies play similar roles, whether in later-coming communities in T&T, outside of the East West Corridor, where the specifics of the general experience may have been different, or in communities in other islands, outside of T&T altogether, where the detail might even be unique, but the history of transplantation to America essentially shared..

Panorama Reform

The main proposal for reform of the panyard and Panorama is two-fold. First, we must strive to convert the panyard. From a location for art and entertainment and a site of gratification and edification, thanks to musical creation and creations, must arise a centre of industry and business, of schooling and training, as well as of deliberate rather than incidental community. This implies a panyard thoroughly reconfigured. The site must cannot but develop capacity for heat and welding, sound, locomotion, metallurgy, lighting, scaffolding and props, construction and maintenance, interior decoration, and what else not? The amazing thing is that this has not been proceeding apace but has evolved in only fits and starts, bits and pieces. It is an eloquent commentary on the policy leadership that we've had, and above all an insight into our schooling and education.

Education - not merely schooling and training - is perhaps the most natural of the spin-offs that are not strictly pan-related. Because of the technological thrust towards Pan manufacture, a dynamic panyard would readily attract, install and develop capacities for mathematics, physics, chemistry and engineering. Touring is such an integral aspect of the marketing of the product, language lab capabilities are practically indispensable; but any development in that direction is inhibited by the tradition of the school, bent on producing certificates of excellence but no capacity to speak or to function.

Pan has a dress code of its own. It invites the production of tops, jeans, caps, hats, belts and sandals. It is hard to see why the opportunity is not seized to organize textile production on a properly industrial basis to service markets abroad and at home, drawing on the advantages and conditions for which Export Processing or Free Zones have been canvassed while retaining all income, including the profits. It is amazing that some of us canvassed these notorious zones while not a few opposed them but almost none saw the opportunity for new forms of business organization, external trade and foreign investment we could ourselves have arranged with Caribbean partners in diaspora in the US. The programme of industrial and economic development we adopted after World War II was obsolete even before it was launched. We turned to the outside world for entrepreneurship, management, knowhow and markets. Of course it has not worked and Fletcher, Bernals and others have since lamented. The region has almost systematically fallen behind. Harker of ECLAC.has shown how we've been almost delinquent in missing out in the rapidly growing markets offered by export manufactures in the second half of the 20th century. Conditions not only in the labour market made any regime of unbridled foreign investment a veritable non-starter, save in the traditional offshore sector. But we persisted. We refused to formulate any other model or to devise any other way of doing business, proceeding on the basis on our own reality.

We found ourselves maintaining, propping up and even celebrating the externally propelled economy of the colonial days. We sought excuses. We're still seeking them in the fantasy that our small size is some kind of pristine handicap. We studiously under-estimate the great number advantages and benefits to be drawn from smallness. We saw and still see openness as problem not possibility. Smallness and openness are perhaps our greatest strengths, especially as there has never been any time when we were not forced to swim in the global order. We are still content to regard ourselves as developing countries of the Third World and the South, as if we're saddled with some limiting condition we cannot quickly dispense with by applying our own software and by becoming lucid and busy. We've cited mainly God given or natural factors for our failure to perform. We did not see that the chief source of stagnation and under-performance lay in a failure to liberate and activate for economics and business precisely those resources of creation and innovation which had been confined to subversion and culture. Well, all this we must now abandon and throw in the bamboo The only option is to make ourselves internally propelled, active on our own account, drawing on accumulated reserves of wisdom and sleeping resources. We must invoke the hallowed tradition of making something out of nothing, of making music wherever we go, with whatever we find.

The second proposal for reform is therefore to use Panorama as the trigger. Activity in the panyard should be all the year round. The beating for Carnival should be merely the culmination, the time to harvest and reap reward for tasks accomplished, results achieved and work done. Activity should therefore be programmed under different heads: directly pan-related as well indirectly linked so that a high priority is given to bringing on site large numbers of opportunities for employment and income. The awards for music would therefore be only part of the prize. The other part would be to compensate and remunerate efforts at infra-structure development meant to transform site into plant and to organize industrial, educational and community as well as artistic and entertainment activities. Of course the labour is divisible among panyards to foster specialization. Not every yard would do everything though there would of course be certain basic requirements, common to all.

Each site should certainly have a pan theatre, probably built much like football stadia with the performance area in the centre completely surrounded by the other facilities, adjusted to suit, but in the manner of the big football clubs in Milan and Turin or Highbury and White Hart Lane in London. What this means is that, in any one town or even regional corporation, there might not be room for too many. Any one panyard might therefore have several plants or establishments on more than one site, just like any other firm or business.

The crucial thing would be for all locations to be run and managed under the auspices of a single management cadre. There would of course be room for devolution and democratic structures within; but the concept of efficient community business must be the underpinning. Our own forms of business organization would be tantamount to a breakaway towards ideological independence. Especially we should move towards, not a second tier of the Stock Exchange, but a new concept of trading in assets, suitable for small, family and community businesses, with different disclosure and information requirements.

We need to design forms of organization inspired by our own experience and traditions as well as our current circumstances. These is no reason to persist with ill-fitting ideas, whether borrowed from the Communists or Socialists, on the left, or the Liberals, on the right. These categories appeal only to the colonial. The key intervention would be to orient the prizes. Panyards should receive distinct and remunerative incentives to widen the community support they now enjoy only in the Grand and North Stand. The aim should be to recruit and induct a capable and competent management cadre in the form of educators, financiers, economists, architects, bankers, engineers, scientists and professionals of all types, committed to Pan and to the panyard of their choosing, very likely from the community where they grew up and were first enchanted.

The inflow of talent would cause jealousies for sure; but only some would be negative and destructive. Other rivalries would serve to expand, inform, enrich and underpin the leadership thrown up by Pan. Such a scheme would be feasible only if it were visualized in a very large picture but at the same time pursued in very small steps, in two different senses.

First, for each panyard, of whatever size and character, the programme must be long-term so that the principals would approach their agenda from the standpoint of an assembly and accumulation of conditions that add up to progress. At the same time, each single step would be severely short-term, concerned with immediate outcomes and benefits. It is the balancing and the linking of long with short which would do the trick.

Second, the programme would such that panyards would be free to advance at very different speeds, not only because each yard would be starting with its own resources, possibilities and limitations, but also because the way must be open to the more robust ones to take those risks build from which experience can be gained and intelligence made available to those that did not have the strength to take on the challenge and to survive the rigours of engagement.

Any such programme would of course dictate heavy initial funding which would have to be sought from both the State and sponsors. To start with, the funding could call for annual expenditure in the range of $50 million to $100 million. The figure sounds prohibitive. In truth, it would be no more than the seed money for a massive new thrust towards another type of industrial, economic and community development. Large sums of mostly wasted money should be diverted to more productive use from formal education spending, YESS, AIM, CCA, Cottage, YTEPP and URP as well as from TIDCO, SBDC, and highly dicey Venture Capital operations that take place without any suitably designed Stock Exchange where enterprises and ventures could be floated with some respect for reality.

The call is to organize ourselves in ways that would compel both State and Community to gain a real grasp, permitting that type of judgment of risk that is indispensable to entrepreneurial initiatives and decisions.

Panorama would involve minimum basic prizes for all panyards, in return for specific and anticipated achievements or results, in well-defined areas. Big prizes for leading performers, including business trips abroad devoted to marketing. The export marketing could be pursued in novel ways, giving incentive to efficient production at home. Export marketing could possibly be of service to non-panyard sectors as indeed to non-pan activities on site in the panyard. We therefore need clear lines. We need inter-dependent but distinct plans and agendas for industry, education, art and entertainment, community Every panyard could have homework and daycare centres to cater for the large number of women who would come out with spouses and would themsleves be involved in the work. We need lines of supply for pan performance, pan recordings, pan education services, pan equipment, all of which could be widely marketed as exports.

All big firms which are now sponsors and some not so big should be recruited not so much for funding but to provide management, and above all, to offer opportunity to train cadre in a systematic way. This confirms the necessity of whole new regimes of both formal school and small business. The aim is to shift from pan in schools to school in pan. School must cease to be seen as a thing in itself and must become an adjuuct to life and reality. The idea is that panyards would become the industrial estates and learning centres. Widespread apprenticeship would add a hands-on capability to the formal school while also making it mandatory for efficient and effective small business to be an automatic outgrowth, with the whole venture aided by big and even transnational business without becoming dependent or mendicant. What we are talking about is an organized and feverish but healthy competition among big firms, small firms, schools, local areas and regional corporations, and of course, panyards. Panyards would be pivotal. Of course any such initiative would alter the flow of political and party life. It would bring enchantment back to the youth. It could divert energies away from present conflict and violence to other and more productive type of conflict and contestation involving less violence. It 'd be a real revolution not a military upheaval.

Last Lap

What we have in mind here is an internally propelled economy which would be for the first time operate with an inshore sector, one even more dynamic that the offshore sector, even when the latter is enjoying a Golden Age with good prices and abundant reserves. What we're invited to visualize is the altogether new economy of the 21st century, driven by a new concept, with the Pan as driver.

I find this to be indeed an auspicious occasion on which to present such audacious ideas. The performers and the organizers who have made today necessary are in their own way the precursors. I end by congratulating them for their leadership and encouragement.