When some time ago it was said that Ms. Plummer had passed on to the great beyond and then only to have the Express retract that faux pas of theirs, it was not just a journalistic fall from grace as it was a case of the singer letting them know that via her singing she had already attained immortality and that death to her was just another verse in her life of lyrical transcendence.
The irony of Denyse Plummer’s life is that while she shattered the glass ceiling to become a calypso Queen in a land that accepted calypso singing to be something that belonged to Afro-Trinis, this Trini white girl, a Caucasian Trini to the bone, took up calypso singing with such gusto that even the toilet-paper hooliganism of the San Fernando aficionados could not break her spirit to be a calypsonian; but that what was supposed to break her just made her stronger, leaving her detractors to wallow in the ugliness of their bigotry while she scaled new and more distant horizons in the world of artistic excellence.
So to the one who might have pelted the first roll of toilet paper that day and who might already have gone on to the great beyond and perhaps buried in an unmarked grave, note that the one you targeted has become one with eternity and that via her life and music, she nah leaving.
And so like the many artistes of the world who are no longer here physically but still live on via the work they have left behind, Denyse Plummer now belongs to that celestial world of glitterati that is reserved for them as immortals such as Elvis, Tina Turner, Lata Mangeshkar, Michael Jackson etc. make elbow room for their new visitor.
L. Siddhartha Orie
