ON AUGUST 22, at the opening of Carifesta, Prime Minister Mia Mottley announced that the Barbados government would acquire the archives of Banyan, a television documentary company focused on local cultural content over the last 50 years.
The announcement came almost three years after the late Mark Loquan announced that NGC would acquire the archive.
The institutionally cavalier treatment of TT’s history, as recorded by its journalists, is a topic that I’ve returned to often in this column, most directly in a 2017 column (technewstt.com/bd1101/).
Decades ago at a TT talk shop, a person I remember as former PoS Mayor John Rahael, pointing out that the key difference between the rich and middle-class wasn’t just how much money they earned, it was how much they kept, underlining the difference between assets and expenses.
Great wealth did not visit me because of his advice, but his counsel did not fall on deaf ears.
Dovetailing it with decades spent observing the great care that the late photographer Noel Norton took of his negatives, I recommitted to preserving my only real assets, my photographs and writing.
Choosing that path is hard enough.
Actually walking it is painfully difficult. Guarding creative work against the predations of IP thieves, predatory work for hire agreements and the inexperience of solo freelancing dented those efforts over the years.
My work as a photographer actually began with video, controlling an early video camera for the pilot Family Planning Association video that would become Who The CAP fits, a seminal Banyan education series that mixed creole narrative with life counsel.
Musician Ronald Reid brought me first to a backyard meeting at the Woodbrook home of Maurice Brash where the early Banyan was brainstorming a Christmas special for broadcast on TTT.
Looking back at the talent in that room, Christopher and Judith Laird, Maurice Brash, Bruce Paddington, Dawud Orr, Ron and Christopher Pinheiro, I wasn’t only out of my depth; I was generously buoyed by their collective patience and support.
My continued intersections with Banyan offered a unique window into Laird’s fight to first maintain archives of the station’s output, then to digitise Banyan’s archive of tapes. His industry is remarkable. A roll of film in an archival file sheet with a contact print fits into a standard manila envelope easily.
Early video tape captured short clips and even the industry standard U-Matic tape, half the size of a cereal box, held between 30 to 60 minutes worth of raw footage. A simple two-camera setup resulted in a shoe-box full of tape cartridges.
Chris Laird didn’t just hold onto the edited work, he managed to preserve the raw footage of critical interviews and conversations, an unprecedented record evolving regional talent that covers a half-century of creative work in TT and the wider Caribbean.
In assembling an archive like this, it’s possible to identify some gems early, but history often redefines overlooked heroes in retrospect, and both the mundane and the outrageous look quite different decades later.
Standing between a potential library and the city dump is often the work of a single person determined to ignore the national inclination to dispose of creative work. “If yuh so good, just make more nah.” It’s trying to hold sand in running water and it happens almost continuously.
Our continuing national mistake in art, culture and journalism has been to treat the final product as the only product. There may be a determined few who have held on to finished calypso recordings, but there are no alternative takes, no unreleased songs, no extended versions. Reissues are impossible. Remixes are inevitably re-recordings because original tapes and masters are long lost.
What is special about the Banyan archive is the scope of what was kept, not just the broadcasts, but the source material that informed them.
Carnival’s architects, the NCC and stakeholders, create rules and an institutional framework that’s designed to stymie a thoughtful record of the festival, make no effort of their own to even pretend to preserve or record the work that’s created and allow each year’s output to vanish with a devastatingly final flourish of indifference.
The embarrassment of repeatedly losing this country’s creative assets and history isn’t as worrisome as the continued lack of any strategy to change that humiliating status quo.
Let’s be clear. Creatives arrogant enough to preserve their work are not just ignored, they are actively punished with casual requests for freeness seasoned by a sense of entitlement to “de culture,” any evidence of which would simply disappear if it depended on the non-existent national agenda for preservation.
Read more on Trinidad and Tobago Newsday
