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RE-ENGINEERING BLACKSPACE
There is one creative endeavor I feel moved to talk about in this gathering, and that is the completion of the task of emancipation. It is opportune, I think, that we spend some time thinking about this and entering it into our meditations. This is a task to which Rex Nettleford has applied much of his psychic and physical energy. He has given the work of his head in formulating emancipation into hypotheses and theories; his hands in writing not just for academics but for popular readership; his body and imagination to dancing and choreography, forcing these issues onto the open stage; his voice on radio and TV, conducting the issues into the ears not only of the literate but of the illiterate, with which our communities are well supplied. In this, Rex Nettleford not only tells us that the work is there to be done, but offers an approach to the task of completing emancipation. His life and work design a methodology: they recommend that we reach into our store of talents and identify them, and this completed, apply all ten to the task at hand.
Who are the "we" to whom I refer? Rex Nettleford was the first academic that I heard on the UWI Mona campus refer to himself as in an intellectual discourse as "one of those Jamaicans the color of the black in the flag." This young man had just come down from post-graduate work in Oxford; "bright can't done," had, in a public forum in 1964(?) in out-of-many-one-color Jamaica identified himself in terms of a specific color, and besides had put himself and that color into the analytical scheme: two revolutions with one shot -- self in scientific analysis and color of self in scientific analysis. We who, like him, have skin color, could borrow his self-inclusive approach to our studies, and while we make our deliberations of service to the task of emancipation, look at the man in the mirror, note his phenotype, reflect on his consequent experiences, develop our personal perspectives, and openly bring this to bear on the issues at hand.
In 1974, Kamau Brathwaite presented the rationalization for this self-inclusive color-coded approach to discussions among Caribbean thinkers. In his Contradictory Omens (33), he...