Ira Math­ur

The steel­pan, the on­ly new in­stru­ment in­vent­ed in the 20th cen­tu­ry in Trinidad, is em­blem­at­ic not just of T&T but the en­tire Caribbean.

Kim John­son, for­mer jour­nal­ist and doc­u­men­tary film­mak­er, is the au­thor of The Il­lus­trat­ed Sto­ry of Pan, Sec­ond Edi­tion.

John­son, among the fore­most his­to­ri­ans of the steel­band move­ment, says the book is “the sto­ry of Trinidad All Stars and Rene­gades and Des­per­a­does and Phase II and Ex­o­dus and all the oth­er big steel bands, but al­so the small bands, Boys Town, Boom Town and Step­yard, the ex­tinct bands, the Tripoli, Bar 20 and Red Army, the “col­lege boys” bands like Dix­ieland, Dix­ie Stars, Strom­boli and Rogues Reg­i­ment.”

As a jour­nal­ist, John­son had writ­ten about the steel­band move­ment in col­lec­tion of es­says ti­tled ‘If Yuh Iron Good You Is King’. And as an aca­d­e­m­ic, John­son con­duct­ed schol­ar­ly stud­ies on the in­stru­ment for two decades.

The Il­lus­trat­ed Sto­ry of Pan, Sec­ond Edi­tion com­bined pho­to­jour­nal­ism and acad­e­mia so suc­cess­ful­ly that the doyen of Trinidad’s pho­to­jour­nal­ists Mark Lyn­der­say de­clared it “tran­scen­den­tal”, while Andy Narell pro­nounced John­son’s book as “beau­ti­ful and im­por­tant”, leav­ing the read­er in “won­der and deep re­flec­tion.”

“The op­er­a­tive prin­ci­ple un­der­ly­ing the mu­sic Africans brought to the New World is that it must help peo­ple to live. This is a func­tion­al ap­proach to mu­sic: it is made to give peo­ple strength when they are weak; it must lift their spir­its when they are down. With mu­sic peo­ple can cel­e­brate the joys of life, and in­deed it is it­self one of life’s great­est plea­sures, yet it must al­so con­nect peo­ple with their an­ces­tors in the land of the dead, and with the gods in the heav­ens above. Most im­por­tant­ly, mu­sic must strength­en the bonds be­tween peo­ple be­cause on­ly with and through oth­ers do we be­come ful­ly hu­man.

“The ar­chae­ol­o­gist, hav­ing un­earthed his arte­facts, his ar­row­heads and fig­urines, must now iden­ti­fy and in­ter­pret them. And so it was too with my pho­tos. A pho­to­graph may be ir­refutably true, but that is a se­vere­ly lim­it­ed truth. Torn out of time’s flow, the iso­lat­ed mo­ment lacks move­ment, a be­fore and an af­ter, which give the event its in­ten­tion­al­i­ty’

“A good pho­to­graph may sug­gest what has just passed or is about to oc­cur, but pho­tographs are gen­er­al­ly am­biva­lent, al­ways want­i­ng ex­pla­na­tion.

“Some pho­tog­ra­phy—for jour­nal­is­tic and sci­en­tif­ic pur­pos­es—en­hances what we can see by mak­ing vis­i­ble what is too dis­tant, too small or too fleet­ing for the naked eye. But the pho­tos in this book are not ex­ten­sions of the eye so much as en­hance­ments of mem­o­ry.

“The pho­tographed mo­ment could be pri­vate, and the flow of events from which it was swiped com­pris­es a life sto­ry. Or it could be pub­lic, and the flow of events is his­to­ry. I sought to unite the two, so the his­tor­i­cal pho­tos could be seen as mo­ments in the lives of pri­vate in­di­vid­u­als, while the per­son­al pho­tos are giv­en their his­tor­i­cal sweep. In­ter­views with the peo­ple in the pho­tographs sparked the fu­sion.

“Strad­dling two eras can evoke re­gret or grief for what has been lost. When you gaze in­to his­to­ry it might just gaze back in­to you. One young man at a view­ing of some of my pho­tographs burst in­to tears, over­whelmed by the im­age of his dead fa­ther as a young man. But the more com­mon re­sponse was a sense of pat­ri­mo­ny, a feel­ing of pride.

“The whites feared and loathed black mu­sic-mak­ing. The noise dis­turbed them. The drum­ming and danc­ing out­raged both their mu­si­cal tastes and their sense of pro­pri­ety, es­pe­cial­ly Protes­tants, for whom the Sab­bath was sa­cred and the African mu­sic sa­tan­ic. Ad­di­tion­al­ly, the whites were ter­ri­fied of un­su­per­vised slave gath­er­ings. In­deed, a drum dance card­ed for Christ­mas in 1805 by the slaves of sev­er­al planters in Trinidad’s north­west penin­su­la was bru­tal­ly sup­pressed for fear of be­ing a planned re­bel­lion.

“It was love at first sound. The boom­ing, clang­ing, ring­ing, bang­ing of the iron band in­stant­ly cap­ti­vat­ed young men through­out the is­land. It was loud, it was mo­bile and if it was rudi­men­ta­ry, it was nonethe­less theirs; no in­her­it­ed, sea­son­al af­fair in the bam­boo but an all-day, all-night love. There was ri­val­ry and jeal­ousy, so the young men fought like li­ons amongst them­selves, for which they were os­tracised and pun­ished. But ri­val­ry al­so be­got in­no­va­tion, which trans­formed the duck­ling in­to a swan. In just over a decade, from 1939 to 1951, the dust­bin and paint-can gang be­came an or­ches­tra whose unique voice could sing all the songs of all the peo­ples of the land.”

The Il­lus­trat­ed Sto­ry of Pan, Sec­ond Edi­tion by Kim John­son, is avail­able on Ama­zon and in lo­cal book­shops.

Ira Math­ur is a Guardian colum­nist and the win­ner of the non-fic­tion OCM Bo­cas Prize for Lit­er­a­ture 2023.