Culture for Christmas: Storytelling foundation launches commemorative calendar

Encouraging individuals to embrace cultural richness this year amid the holiday gift rush, renowned Jamaican writer and speaker Amina Blackwood-Meeks is advocating for the diaspora to enrich their cultural reservoir. As part of her Ananse Soundsplash initiative through Ntukuma, The Storytelling Foundation of Jamaica, Blackwood-Meeks is presenting a special 2024 calendar featuring the iconic character, Ananse.

Explaining the inception of the intended keepsake, Blackwood-Meeks shared, “Every year my festival, Ananse Sound Splash, has a legacy project. This year, the theme was ‘First People’ so we celebrating first people, the first people who do things like Miss Lou or Mikey Smith or Claude McKay. But also historically first people like the Tainos, the Maroons, and the Africans. So out of that festival, we have done a first calendar that gives us some facts about Ananse that is not normally in the public domain.”

The calendar, like many Caribbean folktales centres Ananse, the cunning trickster, as its main focus. Not only delving into some of the character’s lore like other aliases and the names of his family, the storyteller explained that the character is not just a fixture of Jamaican culture.

“Anansesem is how the Ghanaians, the Akhan people say Ananse stories,” she began. “So Ananse don’t belong to us alone, enuh. Ananse is the first global citizen. So we have a little map of the Caribbean countries that also have Ananse and the various names by which Ananse is known in those places.”

Beaming with the artefact in hand she explained, “We know so little about who we are and the calendar is a fun way to share the information so it makes a good gift for schools, teachers, educators, and students; but we also find that our family members and friends who visit Jamaica for the Christmas want something to take back to the diaspora, so we thought we would create this.”

Seemingly enthralled by Blackwood-Meeks pitch, Joy Roberts approached, cash in hand, to collect her piece of the culture. She told Living, “I wanted to have something to give my grandchildren with the history of Jamaica, the authentic stories.”

Referring to Blackwood-Meeks she said, “I tell her every time I see her I learn something new from her.”

Including in the commemorative calendar are two other stories tying into theme of ‘firsts’.

“We have two stories that we have inherited from the Tainos in terms of the ball games that we play. And, the second story is about the fact that the Africans who came to Jamaica came with a lot of knowledge. They came as Metallurgists and from Jamaica the knowledge of their Metallurgy was taken, I want to say stolen, robbed and thieved, to Europe where it became essential to the industrial revolution. And that’s what the the calendar is about. It’s a keepsake but it is informative about Ananse and it also has two little known stories about our heritage and culture,” she said.

Blackwood-Meeks says the calendar is available online and in pharmacies islandwide.

Shanel.lemmie@gleanerjm.com