The Lajobless [Song]

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THE LAJOBLESS
By Lord Executor [1938]

For a night and a day Narbadeen was lost
Mountain and rivers he had to cross
For a night and a day Narbadeen was lost
Mountain and rivers he had to cross
The Indian laddie had such a fright
He was led away by a woman in white
This is the rumor they heard next day.
"La Diablesse chaye li allay."

This is the story of Narbadeen
Of St. James Village he was highly esteem
With his book in hand he went by a stream
And unfortunately he began to dream
He being a student of human nature
He went to study his literature
This is the rumor they heard next day
"La Diablesse chaye li allay."

On a log of wood he sat by the ground
When suddenly darkness came around
Strange whispering came to his ear
Saying, "Go back home, young man, beware!"
But the awful voice of the woman in white
That gave him such a serious fright
That is the rumor they heard next day
"La Diablesse chaye li allay."

She led him over mountains, valleys and plain
If he would slide, he surely would break his brain
She led him over many precipice and rocks
That his body should feel some electric shock
There must have been some angel by his side
Or otherwise he would have died
That is the rumor they heard next day
"La Diablesse chaye li allay."

She hypnotize him with her magic spell
As though she was a devil from the gates of Hell
Her eyes were large like goblets of fire
And she said, "Let us climb up higher."
She led him to a room that was like a tomb
There, Narbadeen nearly met his doom
That is the rumor they heard next day
"La Diablesse chaye li allay."

Source: The lyrics posted on this blog are often transcribed directly from performances. Although it is my intention to faithfully transcribe I do not get all the words and I have a knack for hearing the wrong thing. Please feel free to correct me or to fill in the words that I miss by dropping me a message via e-mail. I'd be forever grateful. Thanks in advance! ..............................................................................................................................


A Note From The Gull

Thank you, Lord Executor.

Aliyah Khan makes the following observations in her Ph.D thesis, “Calling the Magician": the metamorphic Indo-Caribbean."

pg. 177
"East Indians are nineteenth-century latecomers to this bloody colonial history. They have only remembered snatches of Hinduism and Islam with which to confront other people’s ghosts. And so religion and superstition, or at least spiritual belief, swirl (darkly) around each other in a new place and resyncretize.

pg. 178
From the very beginning, whatever spirits there were noticed the new East Indian arrivals. In Trinidad, Lajabless, (la diablesse), a beautiful cloven-hoofed woman who lures young men to their doom, cottoned on right away to potential new victims in the 1938 calypso song “The Lajabeless Woman-Calypso,” by Lord Executor and Harmony Kings’ Orchestra (Decca).7 What is remarkable is that in 1938, exactly one hundred years after East Indians had begun arriving as indentured laborers in the Caribbean, they were a little commented-upon political fact and community, existing to others mostly as statistics in plantation logs. Afro-Caribbean people were not sure whether East Indians would stay, and what their role would be, and especially who they really were. But it seems the local spirits, particularly the predatory ones, noticed some potential.

The Indian laddie had such a fright
He was led away by a woman in white
That is the rumor they heard next day:
Ladjablès chayé li alé. [The Devil Woman took him away.]

This is the story of Na[r]badeen
Of St. James Village he was highly esteem

pg. 179
With his book in hand he went by a stream
And unfortunately he began to dream. (Hill 76)

This calypso was produced the same year St. James was incorporated into the capital of Port-of-Spain, which is perhaps why Nabadeen hails from there. Every Trinidadian listener would know without being told that Nabadeen, sometimes rendered Narbadeen, was an East Indian Muslim. Anything –deen is a dead giveaway, as the Afro-Trinidadian calypsonian Lord Executor would have known when he wrote the lyrics.8

For Nabadeen to be a studious, respected young Muslim man in a relatively diverse urban place, when most Indians were rural Hindu plantation laborers in South Trinidad—and conceived of as illiterate country people in the national imagination—is fascinating. There is some implied joshing for his perhaps racialized bookishness (a local stereotype pertaining to the few “town” Indians and their perceived hunger for education), but this early calypso in no way duplicates the racial attitudes and strife in many of the later ones. This Afro-Trinidadian calypso gestures towards how, in 1938, Nabadeen had potential to be Trinidadian, even though he was not of African descent: so much so that the lajabless found him a good-looking chap, so “Ladjablès chayé li alé.” It is a signifier of further belonging and incorporation into Trinidadian history that Nabadeen enters mythology in a proper local creole language, sung in by those who have a right to do so, the first

8 Deen is an Arabic word meaning “religion,” but it is better translated as “Islamic way of life/obedience.” Muzdhab is the generic Arabic word for religion. Using –deen as an appellation and suffix to other names is a nomenclature practice mostly of Indian subcontinental Muslims.

pg. 180
ocean wave of exiled, newly-resident slaves, the Afro-Trinidadians.9 So he receives the approbation of the Afro-Caribbean and one of its spirits, the lajabless. SOURCE

"Patria est communis omnium parens" - Our native land is the common parent of us all. Keep it beautiful, make it even more so.

Blessed is all of creation
Blessed be my beautiful people
Blessed be the day of our awakening
Blessed is my country
Blessed are her patient hills.

Mweh ka allay!
Guanaguanare