CKK #52

image from google dot com

Dear (kuyu) haiku friends, This July our fifty-second kukai.
I have proposed word play as the theme . Since 'word play ' is a theme you can write about it, without using the exact term as given. Send one haiku, written in the style of your choice; via e-mail Have fun, be creative. Enjoy!

Drag Yuh Bow
An interesting folk custom, here in Trinidad and Tobago, more frequent seen nowadays at carnival time, as an icon of traditional mas; but also also very much so prominent in staged folk productions;
is the Tobago speech band. The Speech Bands are most present at The Tobago Heritage Festival, first staged in 1987; It spans a two-week period from mid-July to August, an annual event. The players in A Tobago Speech Band wear ruffled shirts, flamboyant coloured satin pantaloons, stockings, and wire hats, or cork hats ornate with coloured paper streamers, the hats look like ships. Face masques are usually of wire mesh. Their traditional footwear are alpagartas but its not unlikely to see a present day character wearing sandals. They carry sticks which represent swords of Admirals past, in the history of the island. Characters dance a stacco marching movement to background drums and fiddle, criss crossing each other on stage. Out of the march a challenger emerges, goes to the microphone and chants "Drag yuh bow, Mr. Fiddler." the music subsides briefly, and a question is posed. Questions may be of a social and political or even personal nature. and the expectation is that after replying; in return a similar question will be flung back. The music returns in cresendo, after each oration. Questions and answers are commonly posed in comic rhyme so that audiences are throw into fits of laughter. Special to this tradition are the dialect of Tobagonians spiced with a Scottish brouge influenced from land overseers and church missionaries from the nineteenth century; and, the background music of fiddle, flute, and tambrins; a combined harmony of African and British folk rhythms molded to produce a new Tobago sound."(text first published at Sketchbook 4/3 09)

Example:-
rhythm of the drums -
a question answered now
the dancers swagger
--gillena cox


Deadline for sending entries is July 10th 2014
Deadline for sending votes is July 20th 2014

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much love
gillena