To make up the worth of a picture here are a thousand words.
I wrote this commentary last October in response to a University
of the West Indies lecture by Professor Hazel Simmons-McDonald. The speaker
highlighted the importance of the Creole language in terms of preserving Dominica’s
cultural identity. Whilst supporting a
case for preserving the Creole language - and by extension Creole dance, music
and dress - I consider that one significant aspect of Dominica’s cultural
identity is being largely ignored: that being, the built environment.
Throughout life we are
confronted with man-made surroundings.
Increasingly, our houses, offices and public buildings reflect a foreign
influence. Their design and material of
construction does not relate to the local environment. Regimented housing is replacing scattered
settlements. Hence, Dominica’s visible
identity is being eroded. It follows
that the individuality of places reflects the individuality of ourselves.
Villages and townships
tend to grow of their own accord over a long period of time. There was seldom a pre-determined master
plan. The people and their dwellings
fitted into the topography of the land: they had to, because in earlier times
there was no heavy earth moving equipment to make significant changes. When these settlements are viewed from the
air or on a map, it seems that our forefathers had a great contempt of straight
lines and regularity!
It is the
higgledy-piggledy nature of these country communities that gives them their
distinctive appearance and attributes. Not
least of these attributes is yard space.
Dominica’s sparse population in relation to landmass allows yard space
that is the envy of city dwellers throughout the rest of the world. The yard is the family’s domain. It acts as outdoor extension to the house and
a breathing space between neighbours.
Dominica has all the
natural resources to sustain and promote a vernacular built environment. What is needed is the revival of necessary
skills. Take a look at the old wrought
iron balcony supports in Roseau and compare them with the shoddy welded fabrications
of today. A skilled craftsman cannot be
trained in six weeks, let alone six years. It is not just a case of wielding a hammer or
pushing a plane, it is the accumulation of knowledge that is handed down from
father to son. The great cathedrals from
the past were not designed at the drawing board by architects but by craftsman
at the workbench. Thus, the craftsman’s eye becomes a gauge to measure beauty
by.
The built environment
is particularly relevant at this point in time.
Tropical Storm Erika has destroyed whole villages and displaced hundreds
of families. Just as you cannot easily
uproot a tree that has been growing for a lifetime and re-plant it in a new
location; the same difficulty applies to re-settling a community of
people. It is one thing to re-locate one
by one, in one’s own time and inclination, be it to the next village or to a
foreign land. But it is quite another
for whole communities to be faced with an unforeseen immediate need to move and
leave everything behind.
But a community is not
made up of houses alone. Numerous other
elements are needed to sustain life. They range from church to rum shop and
from school to the village store. Not
least is the means of employment and preferably employment within walking
distance from home. In the past these
elements came together of their own accord over a period of time. To instantly plan a township is an art form
in itself. Interestingly, the man who
wrote the definitive book on the subject began his working life in the
Caribbean. The book, The Concise
Townscape by Gordon Cullen, should be required reading by all involved in the
re-settlement initiative. Another book
that has relevance, is News from Nowhere by William Morris. His vision of utopia was set down over a
hundred years ago and deemed to be “pie in the sky”. However, at this point in time, the book
could be considered as a viable blue-print for Dominica.
Incidentally, it is
interesting to speculate how Dominican’s would have coped with the aftermath of
the storm had it occurred eighty years ago.
I suspect that every man, woman and child would have immediately started
re-building with the resources at hand, albeit initially thatch and gaultry. In doing so they would have been putting into
practice a line from Rudyard Kipling’s poem “If”:
If
you can…watch the things you
gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with
worn-out tools:
In all of this I am
not advocating that we return to the dark ages.
As an engineer I embrace technology and as an artist, I believe that all
work should be creative and pleasurable.
Equally, our man-made environment should reflect our individuality and be
pleasing to the eye, whether it be the chair we sit upon or the house we live
in.
The re-building from
Tropical Storm Erika could be a first step towards the restatement of
Dominica’s visible cultural identity and in turn set a benchmark for the rest
of the Caribbean.
I can't leave you without a picture, so to illustrate the above here is a drawing from my book “Caribbean
Sketches”
