By Ricky Jordan
In Trinidad
While the grandstand of Trinidad’s Queen’s Park Savannah will now carry the name of Slinger Francisco, also known as the Mighty Sparrow, Prime Minister Mia Amor Mottley has called for his music to be used in formal education and to also remind upcoming generations of the obstacles he and others of his era faced before “punching above our own weight”.
Addressing the funeral service of the Calypso King of the World at the National Academy of the Performing Arts in Port of Spain last Friday, Mottley said Caribbean citizens like the Mighty Sparrow had redefined what was our “weight” and, therefore, it was necessary to teach youths about the limitations that were overcome by Sparrow and his contemporaries.
She added that he and others who helped to create the great post-Independence Caribbean civilisation in the last 60-plus years would be leaving us, thereby making it incumbent upon regional citizens today to show upcoming generations that they could draw inspiration from their forebears.
“You cannot simply accept that there are limitations to what we can achieve. Those who had most things against them came to show us how they could move beyond those limitations. [Therefore], those of us who have more than they had have a duty now to take that and carry it to the highest planes,” she advised.
Describing Sparrow as “truly a Caribbean man,” she said he was even more. “He was a Caribbean intellectual and in the same way Sir Garry (Sobers) understood and redefined physics on the cricket field, Slinger Francisco defined for an entire region what it means to be a total man, reflecting not only on the philosophy and the politics but reminding us that it is in the most intimate of moments, it is in the understanding of who we are, and it is in the expression of that, from levity to seriousness, that he gave us an interpretation
of the Caribbean.”
Mottley said Sparrow’s music and performances would, therefore, “forever tell the story of the early Caribbean according to us, not anyone else,” and urged Trinidad and Tobago Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar to join her in persuading other Caribbean leaders to make his 1963 classic, Slave, a core part of the Caribbean Examinations Council curriculum.
This, she said, would ensure that “every single child of this Caribbean understands (not only) the pain but the mission which that song presented.”
In speaking to the relevance of Sparrow’s music to the Caribbean post-colonial experience, Mottley said those like the Birdie, who made us listen and laugh through calypso, had also made Caribbean folk understand that life must be balanced; so that amid deep thought and reflection, they must also laugh, lime and dance whether faced with the discomfort of taxes, capitalism going mad, or the vagaries of politics.
She also said that just as jazz had allowed Black people of the United States to improvise and teach the world improvisation, Trinidad had taught the world the art of picong and melody; so much so that the Birdie’s beautiful voice had made the calypso melody sound better than anyone else could.
Mottley thanked Grenada and the twin-island republic for the man who on September 27 joined the passing parade of Caribbean icons including Jimmy Cliff, Sir Emile Straker and Sir Garfield Sobers, whom Sparrow dubbed “the greatest cricketer on earth or Mars”.
Meanwhile, Persad-Bissessar praised Sparrow not only for his remarkable intellect but noted that “he never had to become less Caribbean to become international”. With this in mind, she said there was no more fitting way at this time to ascribe remembrance of his work than by naming the refurbished grandstand of Trinidad’s Queen’s Park Savannah after him.
“The microphone is silent . . . . We say not goodbye, but thank you,” she concluded, paving the way for musical performances by Destra Garcia, Zachary Ransome and Aaron Duncan, Super Blue, Crazy in collaboration with Shurwayne Winchester and Ta’Zyah Connor, Sheldon Reid, Chucky Gordon who was joined on stage by David Michael Rudder, Gypsy and The Most Honourable Anthony Mighty Gabby Carter, Machel Montano co-performing with Lord Kitchener’s son Kernal Roberts and the Mighty Shadow’s son Sharlan Dread Wizard Bailey, the National Philharmonic Orchestra and the Trinidad & Tobago Police Service Band.
Other tributes from Minister of Culture Michelle Benjamin, Sparrow’s daughter Karen Francisco and Samuel Thomas Jr., daughter Michelle Francisco who read the eulogy and granddaughter Ashley Hutchinson who read an original poem, followed the opening prayer by Monsignor
Martin Sirju.
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