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“Nobody Ent Billing Me” A U.S./Caribbean Intertextual, Intercultural Call-and-Response Carmen Gillespie On the Caribbean island nation of Barbados there is a place called Farley Hill. Farley Hill is a windswept landscape perched on one of the highest points on the island. From there, unlike from most locations on the island, you cannot hear but you can see the sea. The trees of Farley Hill are never still, and it is cool and dark, even at noon. Beyond the trees, there is a cane field, the primary source of income for all of the previous owners of the Farley Hill plantation. The house, now roofless, is home only to tourists , Sunday picnics, and national celebrations and bears a plaque placed in its front wall by Queen Elizabeth during one of her visits to the island. In 1956 Hollywood chose Farley Hill as the location for shooting the film Island in the Sun. This place, Farley Hill, on what the Guyanese poet Grace Nichols calls a “tiny sugar island,” metaphorizes the complex multivalent identities, histories , and ideological struggles that create the fluid dynamics of Bajan (Barbadian ) cultures and inform the island’s historical and contemporary interactions with the rest of the world. Farley Hill is emblematic of many of the questions and crossroads that suffuse the porous and interactive ideological terrains of the island: the displacements and losses of colonialism and slavery ; the realities of diasporic homelessness and the search for home; the struggle for identity, agency, and autonomy; the determinative impacts of geography; the complexities of nationalism and neocolonialism; the power of naming; the desire for and acquisition of voice, agency, and subjectivity; the ambiguities of postcolonialism and tourism; the crises of representation; and the gaze of the other. I visited Farley Hill often when I lived in Barbados as a Fulbright scholar during the spring of 1997. During that time I witnessed with great fascination an intercultural musical exchange that reiterated some of the literal and archetypal nuances, conflicts, and complexities embedded in the symbolic geographies of Farley Hill and in the particular intricacies that form the contours of Barbados itself. Farley Hill, Barbados, and the Caribbean are 38 Carmen Gillespie all spaces marked by the cultural crosswinds of ancient and contemporary ideological conflicts rooted in well-founded post- and neocolonial anxieties about the relationships between autonomy and identity. “The past continues to dwell in the present,” writes the Bajan historian Hilary Beckles, “and the resultant turbulence produces the enormous energy sources that define and propel the cultural revelation that is the Caribbean” (789). Although Barbados is technically a sovereign nation, independent from England since 1966, since it is a member of the British Commonwealth, the queen of England remains the titular head of state. As Beckles has observed, “George Lamming [an internationally celebrated Bajan writer] has consistently made the point that, with respect to the empty formality of constitutionally independent nation-states, . . . those who govern don’t rule” (787). The events of the present are forever colored by the histories of these spaces. These terrains constitute what the sociologist Ulf Hannerz has termed an ecumene, “a region of persistent cultural interaction and exchange” (218). In 1997, the release of the African American rhythm-and-blues song “Bill” on Bajan radio stations and the subsequent release of the response song “In De Tail,” by the Bajan calypsonian Red Plastic Bag, exposed the multiple trajectories of the particular ecumene formed by the Caribbean region. This musical exchange exposed some of the extant tensions on the island with respect to the correlations between sexualities and national identity and became an unexpected and revealing tool in my efforts to explore the complicated narrative relationships between Barbados and the United States.1 The exploration and documentation of this exchange is significant to studies of the contemporary Caribbean, as exegesis of this cultural moment in 1997 presents a unique opportunity to “rethink and reframe the ways that state, nation, gender, and sexuality are mutually constituted,” an analysis that is critical to parsing the nuances of the postmodern and dynamic realities of the island nations of the Antilles (Kim-Puri 139). This musical exchange also supports the assertion that the cultural products exported from the metropole are not consumed unilaterally, without rejoinder and intercultural discourse.2 Work by scholars such as the musicologist and anthropologist Thomas Turino supports close readings of individual public responses to this cultural interchange as an appropriate and uniquely illuminating methodological approach. Turino maintains that “the actual site...

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