Mixed Company

Three Early Jamaican Plays

Yvonne Brewster

• Publisher: Oberon Books
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781849432160
• eBook ISBN: 9781849436342
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: British Drama
• Index: Literature

In 2012 Jamaica celebrates the 50th anniversary of Independence. Mixed Company is a collection of three of the finest early Jamaican theatrical works, written for the most part before the dawn of Independence.

Written in 1954 (The Creatures by Cicely Waite-Smith), 1960 (Bedward by Louis Marriott) and 1970 (Maskarade by Sylvia Wynter), the plays are examples of works conceived with a Jamaican audience in mind, a Jamaican audience conscious of the melting pot in which it lived. Each offers a unique perspective on the spirit of a people who held on to traditional beliefs and customs in the face of colonial opprobrium as the populace struggled to gain its political, social and cultural independence.

Yvonne Brewster talks to Woman's Hour about Jamaican indpendence

Introduction to Maskarade

Sylvia Wynter answers questions put to her
by Yvonne Brewster.

YB: Your paper ‘Jonkunnu in Jamaica: Folklore as Cultural Process’ is a highly regarded academic paper, not a play. How did the play Maskarade come to be written?

SW: Firstly, it is in no way either an anthropological or an ethnographic disciplinary paper. It was first written as an essay for a UNESCO conference on folklore which explains its non-academic, and instead, politico-cultural dynamic as a paper… Jim Nelson¹ would have responded to the paper in the way he did, especially given the fact that growing up in a then imperial colony like Jamaica, all things African had been systemically stigmatized. That is, until the anticolonial movements initiated the decolonisation of our hitherto British imperial domesticated consciousnesses. As a theatrical artist, Nelson would have been attracted to the other major aspect of what I myself had discovered in writing the Jonkunnu essay. This is the fact that, as in the English Morris dancing popular tradition, or indeed, as in the black American minstrel show, all of which had, like the African carnival tradition which gave origin to Jonkunnu, emerged from the immeasurably older, pre-Christian, pre-monotheistic, pagan religious, earth-centered popular religions.

As a tradition out of which pagan elements, such as those still carried over in Catholicism, had come to constitute, in our modern world, an ecumenically human popular tradition. One which we find, in contradiction to the brutal hierarchy of the slave master and the slave, had continued to be syncretized within the terms of what had become in Jamaica, the now matrix African-pagan carnival tradition.

With the result that the popular, farcical doctor plays common to them all had come to syncretically integrate themselves at a popular level, as carried, on the one hand, by the slaves, and on the other, in the case of the English Morris dancing, for example, by the lower bookkeeper overseer classes, who would have been the main carriers of the Anglo-Scottish variant of this tradition. This paradoxically then, as a tradition out of which the now global popular musical culture of the world was to emerge.

YB: Music plays an essential role in the play. How did you go about deciding on this element?

SW: This has always seemed to me to be provided by the popular musical tradition, whether in the United States or in Jamaica in its contemporary forms. What Sandra Richards did was use elements from the Jamaican folk tradition as well as from the emergent rap tradition. I would imagine that any version of the play would follow the same formula by incorporating the contemporary popular musical forms.

YB: The play script of Maskarade which appears in this collection is a later edition performed in the USA in 1983. Is there a reason for this choice?

SW: Originally the Miss Gatha character of the play had been imagined in the same terms as she had originally been in my novel The Hills of Hebron (1962). This explains my strong disagreement with Jim Nelson on this single aspect of her being made into the stereotyped figure of the yard woman tradition in the original productions. I felt that this was strongly at variance with the African tradition out of which the Jonkunnu ceremony of the play Maskarade had evolved. This especially so with respect to Miss Gatha, whom I had conceived as still embodying the major conception of Mother Earth and of the conception of justice, which is fundamentally different from that of the West’s legalistic conception. By the way, the latter itself is a conception of justice that is also completely different from what had been the West’s medieval tradition’s conception ...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half-title Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Maskarade: A ‘Jonkunnu’ Musical Play
• Introduction to Maskarade
• Introduction to Bedward
• Bedward: A Play in Two Acts
• Melodic lines for songs by Noel Dexter
• The Creatures
• Introduction to The Creatures
• Notes on Contributors