The importance of a culture ministry

We each have our culture, our identity, our story...To me, being different is beautiful and I embrace my indigenous identity more and more everyday.

Shina Novalinga, throat singer

Have you ever heard of throat singing? It is a beautiful tradition of the Inuit indigenous community in Canada that uses the throat and diaphragm to make noises that mirror sounds from nature.

Usually, two women face each other and embrace, matching each other’s song and movement. Throat singing techniques, passed down orally through generations, were almost completely destroyed by colonialism.

However young people like Shina Novalinga are sharing this ancient tradition on social media, ensuring that throat singing will live on in the consciousness of their people.

On the surface, the culture and heritage of TT seems safe from extinction.

For the most part this is true, although many of our traditions suffer from misinformation or mixed up information. Additionally, there are folk traditions that are almost entirely alien to our young people. For instance, in our organisation we consistently encounter children who do not know the names of calypsonians (not even the more famous ones), have no concept of Gatka or Kalinda, nor are they interested in traditional carnival masquerades beyond the costuming.

So, what then is the mandate of a ministry of culture, regardless of what name we call it?

Despite having a national policy on culture, we are still faced with a growing phenomenon of children who have never left our shores speaking with American accents and limited cultural literacy. We should regard this as a budding crisis of nation-building, one that requires closer collaboration between ministries of culture, education and other relevant entities.

Closer collaboration between ministries is critical for other reasons. It is disgraceful that after global independence struggles and the gains of several civil rights movements, we still have an issue with teachers who discriminate against students based on religion and race.

There continue to be serious gaps between what our society needs and the people tasked with educating our children.

Oral culture is notably fragile. As we are seeing with Patois, colonial attitudes and values could have caused our nation language to be completely extinct. Today, the persistence of some concerned citizens means that there are a few places where the language may still be learnt and experienced.

Unfortunately, the reality is that Patois is no longer a lived language as when my mother and grandmother’s generations were growing up. Kamau Brathwaite, who first created the term nation language, describes the languages that evolved in the Caribbean as evolving from our oral tradition.

“The poetry, the culture itself, exists not in a dictionary but in the tradition of the spoken word. It is based on as much about sound as it is on song.”

As such, one of the main functions of a ministry of culture should be to distil this knowledge, break it down and transform it into easily understood information for schools and communities.

Although the issues of cultural detachment and ignorance are not limited to younger generations, it is crucial that we begin the process of strengthening this aspect of our education with children at pre-school levels.

Children respond to stories.

They easily understand the characters, lessons, concepts of good versus evil, struggle and triumph, hate and love. Yet, storytelling is not integral to how we teach or share information with our children.

The art of creating original stories is also still a mystery for many parents. Our national media network does not create enough interesting and relevant cultural content for children – hence, local children with American accents. In order to achieve its goals, a ministry of culture must make the creation of local content part of its core business.

Over the years we have been distracted by what to call the ministry and what to align it with. It is time to re-imagine the ministry of culture as a vibrant, de-colonised space and equip the people who work there to deliver on this mandate. As Shina and others in the Inuit community recognise, ancient traditions must be respected and made visible to guide us for the future.

In TT, it is time that we come to this realisation and focus on empowering our children. This is not the entire responsibility of a ministry of culture, but it is unquestionably the best place to start.

Dara E. Healy is a performing artist and founder of the Idakeda Group, a cultural organisation dedicated to empowering communities through the arts.