Farewell, Miss G
Amidst the accolades heaped on journalist, playwright, and radio talk show host Barbara Gloudon in the days following her passing, it was her love for Jamaica and its people that her daughter Anya Gloudon-Nelson chose to highlight as she eulogised her mother during a Mass of Resurrection at St Margaret’s Anglican Church in St Andrew on Thursday.
She told a congregation, which included a wide cross section of Jamaicans including members of the theatre community and other areas of the arts, politicians, the business community as well as the media, that despite all Gloudon’s pronouncements against the island nation and its people she never gave up on Jamaica and Jamaicans.
“From start to finish, Barbara Joy Gloudon, nee Goodison, is part of Jamaica ground. Even when she would despair and ask ‘A wah do we?’ she never gave up on Jamaica. And she would say we and not unno [you]. In her guest speaker’s role she once said, ‘Everybody complaining that dem mash up the place. A dem do dis, and dem do dat. But when I go and ask dem who do it, dem say is you’. We are all here together, let’s make it better for us all. That was the method and mantra of Barbara Gloudon,” she said.
She used a scene from her mother’s play Augus’ Mawnin to further highlight this mantra that everyone deserved their own level of respect.
“That production tells the story of enslaved Africans running away from the plantation on the eve of Emancipation. The group bucks up an old woman living in the bushes. The old woman asks ‘A who unno?’ and someone answers, ‘We a nuh nobody.’ The old woman, bent with age, pulls herself straight and said, ‘Never mek mi hear yuh say dat again. We might be slave but we a smaddy too.’
“Babs, the sister; B, the wife, Mommy, Auntie Barbara, Mrs G, Mrs Gloudan believed we were all smaddy too, and dedicated her life to making sure that sentiment was as affirmed in all of us as she had it in herself,” Gloudon-Nelson shared.
She attributed part of her mother’s strong sense of self to the influence of her parents Vivian and Doris Goodison and related how on Gloudon’s first day of school at St Andrew High School for Girls she was accompanied by her father who presented his first-born to the headmistress and informed them that they were lucky to have the chance to teach her.
“After her years at St Andrew her mother took the next handing over and wrote to Theodore Sealey [editor of The Gleaner] telling him she had a bright, young prospect who would be an asset to the newspaper. And once again, the Goodison parents were right as their daughter Barbara excelled at The Gleaner. She began to show Jamaicans their ‘smaddiness’. Her first big story was to cover an obeah man who was performing miracles and healing in Westmoreland. She recalled that somehow in the laying on of hands, his hands always ended up in the bosom region of the ladies seeking help.”
Gloudon-Nelson revealed that when her mother was first offered the national award, Order of Jamaica, she declined, feeling that she was unworthy of such a recognition, but would later accept the award, which was an upgrade to the Order of Distinction she had received in 1975 for her contribution to journalism.
“On the night she received the Order of Jamaica she felt her father’s presence beside her and she whispered to him, ‘Papa, si where it reach now’. When she told her mother about that feeling her mother responded ‘So why you think he wouldn’t be there.’
“Now, as we stand here saying goodbye, just as her father and then her mother watched over her, we know she will watch over us too with Daddy by her side,” said Gloudon Nelson.
The 87-year-old, who was also a columnist for the Jamaica Observer from March 21, 1993 until April 10, 2020 when ill health forced her to stop, died on May 11 at University Hospital of the West Indies, 11 days after the passing of her Trinidadian-born husband Ancile. They had been married for 62 years.
The Mass of Resurrection was officiated by six senior clegry of the Anglican Church — The Most Rev Dr Howard Gregory Archbishop of the West Indies; Rt Rev Robert Thompson; Rt Rev Harold Daniel; Rev Fr Franklyn Jackson; Rev Canon Michael Allen; and Rev Melrose Wiggan.
Their involvement in the mass was a fitting tribute to Gloudon, who served the Diocese of Jamaica and The Cayman Islands for many years including as a lay reader and active member of St Joseph’s The Grove, near Gordon Town, St Andrew; editor of the diocesan newspaper The Jamaica Churchman, which, in 2004 was renamed The Anglican in response to a synod resolution calling for a more “gender-inclusive” title; and host of the church’s weekly radio programme Think on These Things.
