The Montserrat National Museum’s exhibit “Ten to One is Murder” evoked for many of a certain age, memories of a good time. A good life. Not surprisingly, that display and the opening ceremony to celebrate it elicited all kinds of suggestions and recommendations.
Some wanted curator Dr. Clarice Barnes to include more of Arrow’s performance outfits. Some wanted more shoes. Others demanded some other goods sold by Arrow’s Manshop. Others are even more radical in their demands. They called for a statue of the Mighty Arrow, one of the island’s three national heroes.
That is a revolutionary idea – for Montserrat. This four-hundred-year-old colony, of an imperial power whose public buildings and town squares are decorated with statues, sits devoid of any monuments to human achievement. The War Memorial is a monument to sacrifice – men who died for the allied cause in the two World Wars. Montserratians never built a statue. For centuries, the only statues on the ham-shaped island hung in Roman Catholic Churches.
I know of no anthropological rationale for the absence of statues. I assert that people who live on a thirty-nine-square-mile island suffer from the problem of proximity. It’s hard to venerate and idolize people who you think you know too well. The closer you are the more you see the faults. Hence, the antipathy toward deifying and hero-worshiping and, as a consequence, monument building.
Empires, though, build monuments to flawed men. Cecil Rhodes. Winston Churchill. Meanwhile, colonials tear down men (and women) before they can achieve the success that will earn them a statue. They only who see feet of clay cannot a bronze statue envision. Arrow was worshipped by Calypso and soca fans all over the world, but for many of his former neighbors and classmates, he was merely the guy next door who sang and performed for a living.
The absence of statues remains a monument to how far we have not yet traveled on the road to self-determination.
Britain’s urban landscape boasts statues to war heroes and pirates, Nelson and Drake, abolitionists and slavers, politicians and priests, sinners and saints. Their statues stand as monuments to Britain’s imperial past. They tell the story of how a people sees itself. They are a societal boast. Statues brag about a nation’s conquests and conquerors, its victors and victories.
On the other hand, the absence of monuments can infer a lack of confidence, a society ridden with self-doubt. It’s the colonial’s burden. When we look into the mirror of achievement, we see failure instead of success, losing instead of winning. This is not what a hero looks like.
And so Arrow – the soca ambassador of Hot Hot Hot fame – is the third Montserrat national hero. William H. Bramble, a former chief minister, and Robert W. Griffith, his contemporary and a labor organizer, preceded him. I recommend busts of the three men. Small steps. A monument with all three men.
Creating a statue demands skill. Is there an artist on island who possesses the skill, tools and experience to create a statue? Given the brutal nature of the tropics, what kind of material makes for the most durable monument? That should be an easy question to answer. Other Caribbean islands have built statues that endured.
Money will be an issue. How do we finance a statue given the Montserrat government’s budgetary constraints? A statue demands a fundraising campaign. If people want a statue, they should be willing to pay for it.
Ten years after Arrow stepped off the stage, this conversation is overdue. The absence of statues remains a monument to how far we have not yet traveled on the road to self-determination. Arrow devoted his career to helping us bolster our identity. He was a Montserrat nationalist. His music catalog is filled with lyrics urging us to national identity, to cultural resilience, to standing up instead of bowing the colonial knee. A statue in his honor will not only be a monument to the man, but to his people, to us. It will also be an unambiguous message to us and future generations: stand up for our culture, for our birthright, for our piece of the rock.
I concur with everything that you wrote except for the statues in the Roman Catholic Church. A majority of Montserratians would never see them or visitors.
Maybe why we do not have any bust, it might be the fact that we were never taught our history. We were thought ‘Current Affairs’