INTRODUCTIONAuthor(s): JEAN SMALLSource: Caribbean Quarterly, Vol. 46, No. 3/4, THE SIR PHILIP SHERLOCK LECTURES (Sept.-Dec. 2000), pp. vii-ixPublished by: University of the West Indies and Caribbean QuarterlyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40654160 .

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vii

INTRODUCTION

Sir Philip Manderson Sherlock was a visionary. He was a visionary of the Caribbean region. As a humanist he has touched the lives of many people and as the Founding Father of the University of the West Indies he has contributed to the shaping of education in the Caribbean. It was Sir Philip's idea that the University should have a Creative Arts Centre where the creative imagination of a people could be fostered and it was for that reason that in 1993 the Creative Arts Centre was renamed The Philip Sherlock Centre For The Creative Arts to honour, as Professor Nettleford so correctly states, his vision, his foresight, his ingenuity, his tremendous capacity for making bricks out of straw. . .

In 1994 it was the consensus of the Staff of the Centre together with the Director, Professor Rex Nettleford that a distinguished annual lecture in the Creative Arts should be inaugurated as a tribute to Sir Philip. This lecture is held every year on Sir Philip's birthday, February 25. And as February is also the anniversary month of the Centre which was built in February 1968, there could be no better time for this celebration.

It was considered most appropriate to invite Professor Errol Hill to return to the University to deliver the Inaugural Lecture. In his paper titled PERSPECTIVES OF CARIBBEAN THEATRE:ritual,festival and drama he gives an overview of his early days when under the invitation of Sir Philip to be Extra-Mural Drama Tutor across the Caribbean he fulfilled part of Sir Philip's vision and call for the aesthetic strengthening and intellectual depth in the University and the wider Caribbean which Sir Philip believed must underpin a cultural union of the region. From his own personal experience Professor Hill demonstrates how exposure and cultural cross-fertilization shapes the Caribbean man and he places the role of the drama and theatre at the centre of this process.

Professor Kamau Brathwaite who had already broken tradition by discuss- ing historical events through poetry delivered the second Philip Sherlock Lecture , THE GODS OF THE MIDDLE PASSAGE , in poetry. The significance of Brath- waite's choice of topic is not just the traditional painful Middle Passage from Africa to the New World but also the passage that we are experiencing back across the Atlantic. This second Middle Passage is symbolic of the tides of the ocean that come in and flow out again. This process of viewing experience in two ways, this acceptance of the breathing of the ocean, Brathwaite terms 'tidealectics1. The present reality of the second Middle Passage is haunted by the memory of the first Middle Passage. Brathwaite elaborates his thesis through the icons drawn from the experiences of Haiti and Rwanda and so, the poem becomes the prose and the prose, the poem.

Professor Paule Marshall gave what she called an African praise song to Sir Philip as the Third Philip Sherlock Lecture which she titled THE MOTHER POETS OF MY ART. In this brilliant and engaging presentation she gave pride of

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place to her mother and her mother's Bajan relatives and friends who met regularly in their kitchen to 'ole talk*. She shows how language was for them a weapon and a refuge among migrated peoples in a strange and unfriendly environment. This was the language that she heard from the time when she was a child that influenced her own lyrical expression in her creative writing.

In order to maintain the unconventional approach to these distinguished lectures in the Creative Arts, Professor Barry Chevannes, known as an academic and for his musical creations as well, was invited to deliver the Fourth fecture in song. Subsequent to the performance his presentation was titled A SONG- SEARCHING INTERROGATION WITH SELF. Emerging from a collection of songs which span a period of over three decades is the discovery of self. The search is a journey through nationalist fervour, the zeal for building a culture, his early years in liturgical renewal as a Jesuit, his concern over the alienation of the Catholic church from the culture of the people and finally the calm of self-discovery through creativity. His songs are a gift to Sir Philip which unfortunately could not be included in this collection , but are available in a CD format.

In the lecture THE CARIBBEAN ARTISTS PRESENCE AND EDUCA- TION FOR THE THIRD MILLENNIUM , Professor Rex Nettleford lauds the fact that the output of popular artists and others of world renown is finally being taken seriously. It is the artist in our society who, under trying circumstances, has delved into the depths of ourselves and demonstrated our own possibilities. This demands an inner strength which has enabled the artist to sensitize civil society to the process of becoming. The historical experience of the Caribbean has resulted in textured lives which are exemplified by the best of our artists who find themselves at the crossroads of cultures and disciplines and have therefore led in the crafting of a new sensibility and the celebration of self . This crossroads nature learnt from their historical experience informs the reality of the third millennium.

MADE IN TRINIDAD, pinpoints the substance of Dr. Peter Minshall's lecture. The concept of island, the smallness of which allows for the close existence of a multiplicity of colours, shapes, religions, languages and cultures presents for Minshall a blessing to the creative imagination. The island is a microcosm of the world and the masquerade coming out of the small island of Trinidad is symbolic of the potency for creative expression. Minshall's lecture/performance gave an insight into the theory behind the practice and the audience was treated to a rare insight into the intelligence behind a work of genius, in his particular case, the place of the bat in the gradual process of his creative imagination. The relentless search for truth is the wonder of the artis's existence which is also paradoxically his frightening responsibility to his society. Driven by guiding poetic lines from Garcia Lorca, Minshall maintains that the work of the artist does not exist until it is handed back to the tribe who then imbues it with an energy that surprises even the artist. Minshall, the consummate artist and creator of the dancing mobile finds an ecstasy

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JX

in the release of energy , not on the stage, but in the streets among the ordinary and the everyday.

Dr. Erna Brodber, inspired by the shaping of ideas offered by Sir Philip Sherlock, titled her lecture MYTHS ARE US TOO. Sir Philip's projection of how knowledge affects the human mind, led Dr. Brodber to research certain Jamaican myths. Theories about the meaning of myths abounded from as early as the sixth century B.C. Myths concern us all and it is essential to have a clear idea of what myths are and what they are not and, so far as possible, of the ways in which they are likely to operate. Myths, for Brodber, can give entry into the past. She dissects two myths with which she grew up as a child in Woodside, Jamaica, showing how the scribal and the oral meet for interpretation. With the limited number of records that exist, analysis of the myths offers data towards a reconstruction of a history of the mythmakers and the mythkeepers. Woodside was a slave estate owned by a haughty mistress and the analysis of the myths provide a case history of the relation between the enslaved and the slave master, the plot and the plantation, the big and the little traditions.

The collection of these first seven distinguished lectures by members of the University family serve to pay homage to Sir Philip's ability to get under the skin of the people as Dr. Brodber so aptly puts it. His first love being History, he understood how the knowing of the past affects the minds , the future development and the doing of a people. Influenced by his personal experience of the Garvey movement Sir Philip grasped from a very early age the merit there is in blackness and this understanding fired his life's work of contributing to the fullness of the potential of his Jamaican people.

JEAN SMALL

Guest Editora Tutor/Co-ordinator, P.S.C.C.A

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