Nationalism and the soul: gospelypso as independence.

"What use will you make of your independence?"--Dr. Eric E. Williams (Cudjoe 1993, 266)

If they hadn't just called it gospelypso, everything would have been fine!

--Roddie Taylor

What might or should a Christian response to national independence sound like? What musical shapes can contribute a constructive, uniquely Christian perspective to a nation-building project? For that matter, how can music perform a redemptive task in a post-colonial, post-Christian society? These questions occupied Trinidadian Protestants during the drive toward political independence from Great Britain beginning in the 1950s and continued unabated after Dr. Eric Williams became the country's first Prime Minister in 1962. The ideological agenda mapped out by the Black Power movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s, furthermore, created an atmosphere within which these questions were transformed into burning issues. (1)

Enter gospelypso! Not that gospelypso was a new innovation--far from it. Rather, gospelypso was refocused and came to be understood as a means of answering many of the questions that so concerned Trinidadian Protestants of the time. More to the point, it provided a vehicle that lent shape to a particular type of response to these issues, for Protestantism itself was engaged in a struggle for independence. Different in kind and degree from the national movement toward political autonomy, Protestant discourse nevertheless drew on nationalist themes and found itself inextricably bound up in the political agendas of the 1960s and 1970s.

This article examines the ethical and religious dilemmas produced when local expressions of Protestant faith in Trinidad and Tobago intersect with a transplanted, North American, Pentecostal worship-ideal. Specifically, it investigates the central place that gospelypso occupies in mediating and articulating these dilemmas. Because gospelypso has in large part grown out of Pentecostal churches and in order to contextualize the discussion that follows, I should like briefly to review a few key aspects of the Pentecostal presence in Trinidad and Tobago.

Pentecostal missionaries invited themselves into Trinidadian history during the middle third of the twentieth century and introduced a new paradigm for thinking about and performing worship. The missionaries preached a faith and practice that refocused and heavily emphasized the spiritual and metaphysical aspects of Christianity. The importance that Pentecostalists placed (and continue to place) on spiritual gifts, healing, and the work of the Holy Spirit within the church offer the most striking evidence of this new emphasis. While these teachings were not wholly absent in the worship-life of other denominations, the Pentecostal message placed them center-stage, making that message a powerful and unique alternative to more long-lived paradigms.