Introduction

The Caribbean Festival of Arts, also known as CARIFESTA, is one of the largest regional festivals of arts and culture in the Caribbean. Starting in Guyana in 1972, the festival has traveled widely around the region for over 50 years. Countries that have hosted the festival include Jamaica, Barbados, Cuba, Suriname, and Trinidad & Tobago. As we learn more about the history of this festival, it becomes clear that CARIFESTA could have never happened without the artistic contributions and organizational work of Caribbean women. Despite prevailing inequalities and biases, women at CARIFESTA also found opportunities to launch their careers and stage their art in front of thousands.

Focusing on these women’s voices shows how many CARIFESTA events elevated men’s work and heroic masculinity as ideals communities should strive toward. This often excluded women in the process. When women were featured in the festival, they had stereotypes to contend with–even well-known artists such as Louise Bennett.

This exhibit sheds light on the women of CARIFESTA by displaying original historical documents and recordings that range from the first 1972 festival in Guyana to the 1981 festival in Barbados. Existing Carifesta archives often skew toward a male-centric view. Therefore, this exhibit also offers interviews with women who were first-hand witnesses and participants in the events of CARIFESTA. Their memories can go beyond paper and bring the festivals to life.

Lynette Dolphin

Louise Bennett

Lorna Goodison

Guyana Drums

Lavinia Williams

Marina Maxwell

Honor Ford-Smith and the Sistren

Lynette Dolphin

In 1966, the Prime Minister of Guyana, Forbes Burnham, delivered a speech to Caribbean artists and writers. This speech is often considered the origin of the CARIFESTA festival idea. While no women were recorded as attending this meeting, Lynette deWeever Dolphin, Joan Cambridge, Magda Pollard, and Shirley Field-Ridley played crucial roles in organizing CARIFESTA ‘72.

The second-ever Guyanese recipient of a scholarship to attend London’s Royal Academy of Music, Lynette Dolphin was an anthologist of Guyanese folk music. She was also an accomplished pianist who performed with the ensemble for the “Legend of Kaieteur,” the Guyanese chorale by Philip Pilgrim. For many years, she led the Guyanese National History and Arts Council.

In 1970, Burnham organized a second meeting of Caribbean artists and writers to formulate policy recommendations for the festival. Lynette Dolphin chaired the Music and Dance Sub-Committee. As the official CARIFESTA Secretariat was assembled, she became CARIFESTA Director.

In preparation for CARIFESTA, Dolphin visited Caribbean and Latin American countries, including Suriname, Chile, Peru, and Brazil. She persuaded governments to send their best artists to Guyana. She also asked numerous writers to send contributions to the CARIFESTA anthology of Caribbean literature.

During her time abroad, Dolphin spent two weeks in Brazil. The Ballet Folclórico Viva Bahia, part of the Brazilian delegation, was one of the most anticipated groups to perform at CARIFESTA. After touring their new choreography Odoiá Bahia: A Folk-Pop Spectacle around Brazil, which included elements of capoeira, candomblé, and samba de roda, the group took their two-hour show to the CARIFESTA stage. Recognizing Dolphin’s efforts, a member of the group gifted her a bouquet of flowers at the CARIFESTA closing ceremonies.

Based on the success of CARIFESTA ‘72, the Cuban government invited Dolphin to Havana to advise on preparations for the 1979 edition of CARIFESTA. During that festival, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Barbadian poet and frequent CARIFESTA participant, had called her the “MOTHER OF CARIFESTA.”¹

Louise Bennett

Louise Bennett, also known as Miss Lou, was a legendary Jamaican storyteller, poet, radio personality, and cultural activist. She attended four CARIFESTA editions held from 1972-1981. She was given a place of honor at the CARIFESTA opening ceremonies of Guyana in 1972 and in Cuba in 1979 as a leader of the Jamaican delegations. A news article documenting her arrival in Guyana, where she met with festival Commissioner Frank Pilgrim in a “V.I.P. lounge,” also describes the Olympic Village-style “Festival City,” which housed the distinguished visitors. There, the article continues, “specially trained maids have already moved in with their brooms and other paraphenalia [sic] to provide a spic and span welcome.”¹ This contrast between working-class Caribbean women hired to cater to the needs of middle-class performers who are seen as their ‘voices’, the protectors of lower-class folk traditions, was a poignant reminder of the societal divisions in Guyana.

One of Guyana’s flagship performances during the festival was the variety show All Kinds of Folk. The show highlighted the diversity of Guyana’s communities, descendants from African, Indian, Chinese, and other ethnicities–all of whom were brought there under the duress of enslavement or indentured servitude. Miss Lou’s performance during All Kinds of Folk was a hit, inspiring rave reviews in the press.⁠² Her brilliance saved a reportedly “ponderous” and heavy-handed production from “lethargy” and forgettability.⁠³

Stealing Guyanese hearts, Louise Bennett appeared during “All Kinds of Folk” with her Guyanese “sister,” poet-performer Pauline Thomas, most known as Auntie Cumsee. Newspapers referred to Thomas as “Guyana’s answer to Jamaica’s Miss Lou.” A caption below the picture of the women greeting each other on stage cites the Jamaican Mento song Auntie Cumsee performed for Miss Lou, “LANG TIME GAL ME NEVAH SEE YOU.”⁠ The original song, usually titled “Dis Long Time, Gal,” is about the reunification of old friends or lovers. Cumsee’s homage to Miss Lou infuses this first-time meeting of the two performers with a backstory, as if they had been sisters or best friends all along. One critic even compared this moment between Thomas and Bennett to a rekindling of “the spirit of the West Indies Federation.”⁠⁴ The singer’s invitation to “come mek me hol your han” doubles as a diplomatic handshake.

Bennett ventured beyond the confines of her V.I.P. housing and the festival venues, taking her performance to the streets and nightclubs of Georgetown and spending time with the locals. Barbara Gloudon, the Jamaican journalist and playwright—herself a patois pioneer, using it in her newspaper columns—was housed next to Bennett at Echilibar Villas. In her 1972 column about CARIFESTA, Gloudon’ describes the interactions between Bennett and her fans. Bennett’s personality transcended languages with laughter. Walking around the market, Bennett brought her “labrishes” to life. Her proximity to these market women echoes the history of marketplaces in plantation societies such as Guyana and Jamaica, where enslaved, and runaway women would work as “higglers” in a state of “provisional freedom within slavery.”⁠⁵ In the temporary spaces of spontaneity created during the festival, Bennett became Miss Lou, the authentic embodiment of the people’s voice.

For CARIFESTA ’79 in Cuba, Bennett was once again a specially honored guest. She had been invited to write and recite new work at the opening ceremony in the national stadium. She shared the stage with Nicolás Guillén, Robin “Dobru” Ravales, and Edward Kamau Brathwaite. Her performance of her new poem, “CARIFESTA Rydim,” was partially captured in Errol Brewster’s film recordings of the CARIFESTA ’79 opening night.

Louise Bennett’s verse finds communality in Caribbean rhythm and performance. Notice her wordplay on the processes of stirring, blending, turning, shaking, and tempering, and the final punchline of a “ridim” that is “sweet.” Her puns blend the techniques of cooking with the devices of poetry (tempering becomes tempo, the rhythmic beat evokes the beating of batter, and turning becomes tune).

Lorna Goodison

Though she would become well-known as a generational talent in Jamaican poetry, Lorna Goodison started her creative life as a visual artist. After studies at the Jamaica School of Art and a stint at The Art Students League of New York (taking a course with no less than Jacob Lawrence), she cobbled together odd jobs in public relations and advertising. Interestingly, in 1976 she worked for Don Miller & Associates, the advertising firm contracted to do promotional work for CARIFESTA in Jamaica that year. She later became the festival’s official “Advertising Consultant.”

"The way everybody in the arts just took part in it—it was quite stunning."

In an interview with the curator, Goodison described the work she did for CARIFESTA and the memories of the festival she still cherishes. She recounted how she “just went to work one day, and we’re told that the Carifesta people want us to handle the advertising. And I was just really chuffed because it was the greatest thing.” However, she continued, “in the middle of all of this, the company we were working for collapsed. It was the 70s, and there was a lot of political upheaval going on. He [company director Don Miller] decides he’s going to go back to Canada. But I wanted to do it so badly, so I joined the staff at the Carifesta Secretariat, as a sort of writer. There are a number of things I’ve written—brochures, anything that uses writing like that.”

The slogan “People of the Sun in all their Glory” was all over Carifesta; it was Goodison’s idea. “That was my slogan!” she said. The slogan was also used as the title for Wycliffe Bennett’s monumental CARIFESTA Grand Gala at the festival’s closing. With the CARIFESTA Secretariat, Goodison organized the copywriting. Other people handled the visuals. “That poster was done by a friend of mine named Howard Salmon, he was sort of the main artist in the agency at the time.” Reminiscent of Henri Matisse’s bright color cutouts, the iconography of the abstracted sun and waves adorned all official festival publications. The top right section of the illustration shows stylized portraits of the five Carifesta ‘patron saints’: Toussaint L’Ouverture, Benito Juárez, José Martí, Marcus Garvey, and Simón Bolívar.

The Secretariat also commissioned a promotional film for CARIFESTA, just as Guyana had done for the previous edition. “I worked on a long-ish promotional film,” Goodison recalled. “It was done by Franklyn St Juste. He taught at the Media Studies department at UWI, a pioneer in film in the Caribbean. He was the director. I wrote it and was the producer. We went to Haiti, Trinidad, and St Lucia, and shot footage for this promotional film.” Franklyn “Chappy” St Juste was one of Jamaica’s distinguished cinematographers at the time. He had worked on the international hit film The Harder They Come (1972) and had filmed Ethiopian ruler Haile Selassie’s legendary visit to Jamaica in 1966. Unfortunately, the film has been lost.

Many of Goodison’s siblings were involved in the arts in some way. “My sister Barbara Gloudon was deputy Director of Tourism at that time, and they made a real push to reach out to the African American market. I really like that ad because it highlights the arts, not just sea, sun and sand.” (Above, see Gloudon’s column on the Guyana 1972 festival.) Other ads were placed in the Washington Post and the Chicago Tribune. The promotional campaign also included a high-profile fundraiser, with Louise Bennett performing for a distinguished audience of paying guests and Jamaican embassy officials at the New York Waldorf Astoria, which had been organized by the “CARIFESTA Committee of the Americas.”¹ Her status as national icon was sure to draw crowds willing to pay the $25 ticket price and encourage them to travel as tourists to Jamaica.

Another aspect of Goodison’s packed CARIFESTA portfolio was helping print books for the festival. She provided work for two pivotal volumes for CARIFESTA ‘76: Edward Kamau Brathwaite’s Our Ancestral Heritage: A Bibliography of the Roots of Culture in the English-speaking Caribbean and John Hearne’s Carifesta Forum. While Hearne did not acknowledge her work in print, Brathwaite expressed his appreciation to Goodison “for cover design and graphics.”

Guyana Drums

According to journalist Petamber Persaud, this slim booklet was the “first anthology” of female Guyanese poets, produced on the occasion of CARIFESTA ‘72 in Guyana. The poets were Syble Douglas, Pat Cameron, Sheila King, Evadne d’Oliveira, Mitzie Townsend, and Shana Yardan. These six contributing authors got together to publish their work because “not every writer could be featured” in Arthur Seymour’s official festival anthology, New Writing in the Caribbean. The book was self-published and with only a few copies printed. While only four academic libraries in the world possess a copy, it no doubt remains in the personal collections of people who attended CARIFESTA. The music of these six drummers will continue to be heard.

The cover of this poetry collection was designed by one of the six contributing poets and the author of the book’s title poem, Syble Douglas. She was a woman of many talents. Douglas (1926-2020) studied visual arts and her painting “Still Life with Pineapple” was featured in the CARIFESTA ‘72 arts exhibit.¹ She was also one of Guyana’s first female journalists. Her column ‘Just between us’ appeared in the now-defunct Daily Argosy newspaper, where she also edited the Woman’s Page.² Curator Elfrieda Bissember notes that she founded Georgetown’s first private art gallery, the Malcara Art Gallery, in 1969. A short entry on her life was included in the 1979 book Caribbean writers: a bio-bibliographical-critical encyclopedia. There we learn that Douglas was also a playwright. She continued to write poetry throughout her life and published her last collection of poems, Transition, in 2008.

In the form of a foreword, Guyana Drums received the endorsement of Prime Minister Forbes Burnham’s wife Viola Burnham. She was a classics teacher and the Vice-Chairperson of the Women’s Auxiliary of the ruling party, the People’s National Congress. Still, the book was not an officially sponsored festival publication with a serious budget. This speaks to the persistent inequality that women politicians and poets faced in Guyana at the time.

The book title Guyana Drums calls on women to take their place in the drum circle, an instrument traditionally reserved for men. It encourages women to take up space and make noise. The book envisions a role for women to sound the beats and create the rhythms of national progress.

Lavinia Williams

Lavinia Williams, an African-American dancer, was an important representative of Haiti during CARIFESTA. By the 1950s, Williams had become a distinguished figure in the performing arts world as a member of Katherine Dunham’s touring company. In April 1953, Williams moved to Haiti after being invited for a six-month teaching gig by Haitian officials. With her technical prowess and training, she promised to modernize and universalize traditional Haitian vodou dance forms.

She founded the Haitian Academy of Folklore and Classic Dance during this time.¹ Her legacy is troubled, however, by the violent and repressive government of François “Papa Doc” Duvalier and his son Jean-Claude “Baby Doc.” Like them, she romanticized and used vodou to excuse the impoverishment of the Haitian people. She told a CARIFESTA reporter: “Many people have always wondered why, although Haitians are poor materially, there is no crime wave, riots, strikes and labour unrest in their country, but the reason for this social phenomenon is voodoo.”² Nothing could be farther from the truth–not only was there plenty of unrest in Haiti during the Duvalier era, but throughout Haitian history, vodou has served as a catalyst of revolt.

Williams attended CARIFESTA 1972 in Guyana as manager and choreographer of Haiti’s National Ballet Company (Ballet d’Haiti). The company sent fourteen dancers to the festival. However, the Guyanese reception of Williams’ work repeated certain stereotypes. For instance, the caption to the newspaper illustration of Williams’ dance minimized the difference between her stylized version of Haitian traditional dance movements and the real-life ritual.

Another article called Haiti a “Fairyland of Voodoo Drums and Strange Ritual Dance.”³

In a festival profile of Williams, a journalist wrote: “We in this part of the world tend to regard voodooism with a mixture of fear, curiosity - and amusement, but if you ask Lavinia about casting spells and sticking pins into dolls, she would frown seriously and proceed to give you a disquisition on the influence of the voo-doo cult on the nation of Haiti.” Guyanese culture was no less influenced by African religious practices. This is evident, for instance, in the drums and dances of Cumfa (or Komfa). One then wonders how and why these stereotypes persisted in Guyana.

Williams herself did not dance during the festival. She told reporters that she wouldn’t dance, “since I have to do all the stage managing and the reading on stage before the dances and I also have to overlook costumes and equipment.” Through the performance Williams wanted to combat the ignorance about Haiti that was prevalent in the Caribbean. Her choreographies were not just symbolic but also based on Haitian history. One of them was a “dance based on the revolution of 1791 featuring the acts of a rebel slave Boukinan [Boukman].”⁴ Williams refers to Boukman, one of the leaders of the Haitian revolution who, together with Cécile Fatiman, presided over the religious ceremony at Bois Caïman that launched the revolt.

Also part of Williams’ busy Carifesta schedule was her morning dance masterclass at the Guyana Teachers’ Association. According to the festival timetable, she held her dance classes between 10am and 12.30pm. She was scheduled to lead eight workshops, but the Haitian delegation was called back by the government five days before the festival’s ending. She, therefore, handed her last three sessions over to a fellow African-American dancer, Chuck Davis.⁵ He recalled the situation in an interview, many years later:

"While I was there [at CARIFESTA], Lavinia Williams was teaching Haitian dance forms as a part of the series. The government called her back to Haiti. And she saw me and she says, “Chuck, I have to go back to Haiti, take over my classes, I don’t want to cancel,” so she said, “will you take over my classes?” So they made arrangements for somebody to pick me up from where I was then and I came over [...]. I wasn’t teaching Haitian! I was teaching what I knew was dance, and at that point you know their traditions, and the class was exciting, and she had about twelve, and after the third day I had about 40 people."

Her masterclass was so popular and successful that Williams promised to return to Guyana as a teacher. Reportedly, she was “so impressed with the natural aptitude of the Guyanese people for music and dancing that she is hoping to start classes locally at the National Cultural Centre or the University of Guyana to teach voodoo dancing and drumming.”⁶ Indeed, she taught several workshops in Guyana between 1973 and 1974 and became the director of Guyana’s National School of Dance from 1974 to 1976. Many of her students have spoken about her enduring legacy in Guyanese dance.⁷

Marina Maxwell

Seemingly everywhere and nowhere, Marina Maxwell (née Archbald-Crichlow) is one of the unsung greats of Caribbean feminism and cultural activism. Born in Jamaica in 1934, she traveled widely in Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America. Having obtained degrees in English, History, and Sociology at the University of the West Indies (UWI) in Mona, Jamaica, she later pivoted to communications and media studies.

In addition to publishing her own poetic, essayistic, and theatrical writing, she worked in radio and television production. Founding her own production company, Omnamedia, she stewarded over 100 TV productions, with a particular focus on local educational content. Throughout her life, she taught in London, Jamaica, and Trinidad and Tobago, where she made her long-term home.

To appreciate her unique contributions to CARIFESTA editions of 1979 and 1981, we have to go back to her formative years at UWI and her time among diasporic Caribbean artists in 1960s London.

Maxwell’s first theater production dates back to 1959, entitled “Cane Arrowing,” a “Words and Music programme” dramatizing the arrival of Christianity “to the Black Man in the New World.” This production was staged at the University College of the West Indies (as UWI Mona was known before independence). Arrowing is agricultural terminology for the flowering or blooming of sugarcane; in the context of 1959, the symbolism suggests the country’s imminent independence. Already present is a theme that would preoccupy Maxwell throughout her work: the synthesis of European and African cultural traditions in the Caribbean. Notably, the influential Jamaican playwright Dennis Scott was part of the production as an undergraduate student.

While in London in the late 1960s, she worked as a secretary for the Caribbean Artists Movement, where she made connections with the who’s who in the arts, including Edward Brathwaite and Andrew Salkey.

One of Maxwell’s enduring cultural contributions in the Caribbean was her founding of the “Yard Theatre.” Embodied in her writing and production of Play Mas’, she reflected on her reinvention of folk theater in a paper delivered at the Caribbean Artists Movement symposium in 1967 on “West Indian Theatre” and later published it as an essay, “Towards a Revolution in the Arts,” in the second issue of the journal Savacou. Maxwell was explicit about finding inspiration in the Trinidad Carnival. The essay claims “Carnival as a vehicle for political documentary theatre, political theatre, and art deeply involved in our political turmoil, for me the only truly relevant art at this point” (27). She saw Yard Theatre as “an attempt to place West Indian theatre in the life of the people, to find it in the yards where people live and are” (30).

“I see the drum at the center, and Carnival informing all the arts in the future. Out of this can come our painting, our sculpture, our theatre, our costuming, everything—and different and more exciting than anything ever produced before. Here is improvisation, here is surrealistic, naked, mad experiment and I repeat, here is synthesis."

The play features a crew of men working to prepare their carnival float of an enormous butterfly (measuring fifteen feet) and is accompanied by a live steelpan band. The motley crew represents how artistic production can bring Caribbean society together in a synthesis of social differences. Prominent playwright Rawle Gibbons had a leading role in the production of “Play Mas’” at UWI Mona’s Creative Arts Center.

Maxwell’s work is often not sufficiently recognized among the pioneers of folk theater, despite her significant contributions. Although Play Mas’ debuted to mixed reviews, Anne Walmsley has pointed out how the influence of Yard Theatre lived on in Jamaica, with the founding of Harambee Theatre by Frank Hasfal in 1972, and the opening of the Cultural Training Centre in 1975, where its ideas for theater were carried on by Dennis Scott, Rawle Gibbons, Honor Ford-Smith, and Thom Cross. Furthermore, Maxwell explored the parallels between her work and African-American experimental theater, citing influences such as LeRoi Jones’ (Amiri Baraka) Spirit House Movers and Barbara Ann Teer’s Harlem-based National Black Theatre.

Maxwell would bring these ideas about theater to writers’ conferences abroad, including two visits to Cuba and her travels around Africa. At the 1974 ACLALS (Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies) conference at Makerere University in Uganda, she was the sole female delegate, and one of three representatives of the Caribbean (along with Arthur Drayton and Kenneth Ramchand). Maxwell must have exchanged ideas about the resonances between her Yard Theater and African theater traditions with such icons of postcolonial African writing as Chinua Achebe, Nuruddin Farah, and Peter Nazareth.¹ She produced interviews with some of these African writers for the Jamaica Broadcasting Corporation (JBC). The conference also led her to propose a “Third World Cultural Department” under the Organization for African Unity. Though initially fruitless, we shall see the proposal resurface in various forms over the years.

In 1975, Maxwell was invited as a “teatrista” (theater practitioner) to the “Encuentro de Escritores Latinoamericanos” (Meeting of Latin-American Writers) in Cuba, February 1975. On her first visit to the island, she joined a select group of Anglophone Caribbean writers, including Arthur Seymour and Edward Brathwaite. Her presentation, titled “Towards Third World Cultural Synthesis,” was praised in the Cuban press.²

Her invitation to CARIFESTA 1979 in Cuba almost certainly resulted from the connections she had made there in 1975. The two-day symposium on “Caribbean Artistic and Literary Identity” (“Simposio sobre la Identidad del Arte y la Cultura del Caribe”) on 18-19 July drew a crowd of around 500 people and featured 21 writers and intellectuals.

Once again the sole woman on a roster of distinguished speakers, Maxwell contributed to the symposium by calling on her fellow writers to revive and expand the original Caribbean Artists Movement (CAM) to the wider region. The movement lay dormant since 1972, when Edward Brathwaite’s attempts to bring CAM to Jamaica had fallen on deaf ears. In her talk, “Towards a Caribbean Artists Movement,” she described her proposal in great detail. She hoped “to produce out of CARIFESTA, Havana, Cuba 1979, the foundation and nucleus of a network, a movement of Caribbean artists. I propose a CARIFESTA Resolution to set up a Committee to work out the logistics.” Though she is not acknowledged explicitly, Maxwell’s call initiated the resolution that the symposium speakers eventually signed and addressed to their respective governments, urging the continued support of CARIFESTA.³

Her 1981 book About Our Own Business gathered the aforementioned talks, edited versions of the interviews with African writers from 1974, and other essays and speeches that she delivered between the years 1974-1980. She had written to John La Rose of New Beacon Books to pitch a publication of her African interviews as early as 1974, but he eventually declined. Ever-persistent, Maxwell published the book herself under the label Drum Mountain. At the next CARIFESTA (1981 in Barbados), Maxwell brought About Our Own Business to display and sell at the festival’s book exhibit.

The 1981 edition of CARIFESTA in Barbados was the first to host a space in the festival specifically dedicated to Caribbean women artists and intellectuals. Though a groundbreaking event in Caribbean feminism, that term was not used at the time. Honor Ford-Smith remarked in my interview with her that feminism was a “dirty word” then, and the more apolitical framing of “Women in Culture” was favored. Sponsored by the Barbados Ministry of Education and Culture, as well as the new Department of Women’s Affairs and the Women and Development Unit at UWI Cave Hill (WAND), the “Women in Culture” symposium brought together newer and older generations of female Caribbean artists and intellectuals, such as Louise Bennett, Olive Lewin, Ivy Baxter, and the Sistren Theatre Collective. Here, Maxwell was given the recognition she sought and deserved.

Described as one of the Caribbean’s “cultural midwives,” Maxwell gave a stirring, heartfelt, and erudite keynote address titled “The Weakened Sex.” She was given over an hour to speak. Her argument about the conditions of Caribbean womanhood can be understood as what we might now call transnational feminism:

“In the same way that the centre nations have emerged as colonizers and exploiters of the periphery nations of the 3rd world, so too have men colonized and dominated and exploited women over the last centuries, sometimes with the best of intentions. [...] We not only have to declare black, which we are, in all shades and sizes and levels of consciousness, and which in the Caribbean is cardinal to our wholeness, individuation, creativity, claiming of our freedoms and identities but we also have to declare, claim, live and struggle for liberation of the black woman artist."

Honor Ford-Smith and the Sistren

Women’s unemployment was a pressing issue in Jamaica during the 1970s. As one women’s advocacy group wrote in 1981, “the burden of unemployment in the region falls heaviest on women,” their unemployment rate being about double that of men.¹ Some escaped unemployment to work as street cleaners and in other temporary jobs under Prime Minister Michael Manley’s Special Employment Programme (SEP). Of the 14,000 people in the program, about 10,000 were women. The future members of the Sistren Theatre Collective, one of Jamaica’s foremost grassroots theater groups, first encountered theater when they received SEP training to work as teachers’ aides and prepared to perform at the 1977 Workers’ Week festival. A teacher at the Jamaica school of drama at the time, Honor Ford-Smith described how she guided twelve future Sistren’s efforts:²

“I first met Sistren in 1977, in an old broken down schoolhouse in Swallowfield where we came together to discuss ideas for a play for Workers' Week, I asked them: 'What do you want to do a play about?' They said: 'We want to do plays about how we suffer as women. We want to do plays about how men treat us bad.' 'How do you suffer as women?' I asked, and we began the Iong process of exchange of personal history out of which our first piece of work evolved.”

At this time, the twelve founding Sistren were Lorna Burrell-Haslam, Pauline Crawford, Beverley Elliot, Lillian Foster, Lana Finikin, Barbara Gayle, Beverley Hanson, Rebecca Knowles, Vivette Lewis,Jasmine Smith, Cerene Stephenson, and Jerline Todd. Together, they would create one of the Caribbean’s most influential theater groups.

Sistren’s collective process of autobiographical theater-making doubles as consciousness-raising. It has drawn comparison to other activist theater methods, such as Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed. Their first piece, Downpression Get a Blow, proved such a success that Ford-Smith was asked to continue working with the Sistren. Sistren drew deeply from Afro-Caribbean women’s history, traditional ring games, religious rituals, other aspects of vernacular culture to dramatize women’s economic disenfranchisement and societal taboos like domestic violence and prostitution. Over the years, Sistren performed field research and conducted workshops with women in a variety of economic sectors, such as market vendors (“higglers”) and sugar plantation workers.

By 1981, Sistren had become prominent in Jamaica, having won several awards for the play Bellywoman Bangarang (1978) and staged two newer plays, Bandaloo Version (1979) and Nana Yah (1980). Still, Sistren became highly controversial. Ford-Smith noted that some of the participating women were threatened by men who felt that the women were abandoning their homes and duties. Some of the women, too, felt a deep sense of guilt toward their families after working long rehearsals. One performance of Bellywoman Bangarang “was attacked by hostile (male) spectators in Montego Bay during the tense months leading up to the 1984 elections.”³ In our interview, Ford-Smith also recalled how a filming of QPH was terminated by the Jamaica Labour Party government’s perception of its “subversive intent.”

In 1980, the new right-wing PM Edward Seaga shut off funding for cultural development programs and Manley’s SEP, leaving most of Sistren’s members unemployed. Despite the SEP’s good intentions, the actual results had fallen short: “the unemployment rate for women rose from 34.6 percent in 1972 to 38.7 percent in 1979,” according to one report.⁴ The group scraped by on temporary grant funding from North American NGO’s, which had little patience for anything but economic development. NGO funding for initiatives like Sistren and the Women and Development Unit (WAND) at the University of the West Indies had become available in part thanks to the United Nations’ declaration of the ‘Decade for Women’ (1976-1985) and grants from the Ford Foundation, the Inter-American Fund, and CUSCO (Canadian University Service Overseas). However, the creative constraints of dependency on foreign development aid would multiply over the years, and Sistren would become largely self-reliant.⁵ They did so by initiating small-scale commercial initiatives, such as screen-printing.

The Sistren finally toured Carifesta in 1981, but as Ford-Smith remembers it, their invitation was by no means guaranteed. At Carifesta, the Sistren were not part of the ‘official’ Jamaican delegation, since entry to the festival was highly regulated by the government: “anyone who is afoul of the state doesn’t get to go,” as Ford-Smith put it. She pointed to the administrative feats of Peggy Antrobus, a WAND founder and formerly the Advisor on Women’s Affairs under Manley, who helped get Sistren on the program: “people like Peggy were well-enough positioned to get a slot that wasn’t necessarily government-approved.” Even the WAND forum itself was nowhere to be found on the official festival brochures.

As Carifesta was “the first time that the Sistren took a trip outside Jamaica, it was exciting for everyone,” Ford-Smith said. They participated in the “Women and Culture” forum, gave community workshops around Barbados, and performed their latest play Queenie, Pearlie, Hopie. Videographer Ronnie Carrington filmed highlights of the WAND forum and distributed them to national television and radio stations in the region. It appears that a related documentary was produced by journalist-broadcaster Lorna Gordon, but we have not been able to track this down. The festival’s Thursday session on the state of Caribbean theater also featured an earlier documentary film from 1979 about the work of Sistren by the Caribbean Institute of Mass Communication (CARIMAC), University of the West Indies, Jamaica.

True to their mission, Sistren did not just come to perform a play at Carifesta. At the WAND forum, they led an interactive workshop on how women could learn to recognize their interests and fight for the recognition of their labor–both in the workplace and in the home–to secure legal protection and better wages. Their workshop asked the audience to imagine another world, where working women acted as one. As Margaret Hope recalled in her report on the event, “the group is given material telling them that there is a general strike of women in the workplace and at home in the mythical Caribbean islands of Madata.”⁶ The name of these islands evokes the future generations of Caribbean women. Pronounced in Patois, madata sounds like my daughter. For the Sistren, their daughters’ futures are at stake.

Hope further noted that audience membmers were “given letters from the strikers and a list of statistics from the Department of Women’s Affairs.” The letters described the resulting chaos: “the entire economy has stopped functioning, the service sector is crippled and gangs of children are roaming the street.” Next, the strikers acted out the women’s problems in several economic roles they might occupy: “the rural woman,” “the domestic helper who is aging,” “the nurse,” the secretary,” and the “wage worker.”⁷ The crux of the workshop came in a move borrowed from Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed, when the strikers started discussing their demands and positions with the live audience: “Every Mother is a Working Mother,” one sign said; “Freedom from Domestic Slavery,” said another.

The play Sistren presented at Carifesta–Queenie, Pearlie, Hopie–memorializes a senseless tragedy. These three names stand for lost lives of Eventide, an old Kingston almshouse for destitute elderly women that burnt down on a May night in 1980. The case was never solved and the 157 women were largely forgotten after the media circus moved on. The tragedy, really, was twofold. How did these women end up living out their lives in an overcrowded tinderbox? How could our society let its elderly die like this?

The play does not answer this question directly, but instead presents scenes from each of the three lives to give the audience a sense of their loss. Through the Afro-Jamaican practice of Etu ritual dance and song, each woman’s life is remembered and restaged in community. Etu is a set of Yoruba-derived commemorative ceremonies practiced in the northwestern parish of “Hanover by people claiming to be direct descendants of Nigerians brought to Jamaica as slaves between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries.”⁸ After extensive research on this endangered practice, guest director Hertencer Lindsay ensured that the use of Etu as a theatrical device was accurate. She notes that Etu “invites ancestors to come and watch and then carry the spirits of the newly departed over.”⁹ As Ford-Smith told us, “QPH overlapped with some of the other attempts to move forward postcolonial vocabularies of dance and music and language” such as Dennis Scott’s An Echo in the Bone, which is structured around the ritual of the ninth-night wake.

Etu involves the “shawling” of one dancer by another “as a mark of appreciation and encouragement by the leader or queen” of the group.¹⁰ Each of the three biographical scenes begin with the shawling of Hopie, Pearlie, and Queenie. The other 154 women are not forgotten, however, as they are represented by the “chorus” who sing and chant during the rituals. The play culminates in Queenie’s impassioned speech to the off-stage “Investigative Commission” appointed by the government to investigate the Eventide case.

Surinamese theater director Henk Tjon attended the play and was greatly impressed: “Here’s a theater collective that has the energy to lead a movement, to provoke ideas about what should be done; a group that gets involved in society’s issues and presents a distinct identity. They did not perform often at Carifesta, but they worked with people in a hospital and a factory. It’s a theater of consciousness.”¹¹