Dear Lizzie, Rest In Peace!
Her life spans the phenomenal revolution in media from the advent of mass media as radio and television through to new media.
Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II (1926-2022) had just bought her first tablet when these Letters to Lizzie began as tweets in virtually 120 characters. Her Majesty, born with television through a portal of new media reflections – for if a cat may look at a king, why can’t a tweeting twit a Queen?
Mostly in characteristic satiric vein, The Letters to Lizzie in lilbit tweets – because time would not allow deeper and longer pieces as thinking and writing and creating are not real jobs that pay bills – reflected my increasing excitement at discoveries of the large degrees of variance between formal historical records and documentation of the realities I encountered working within Commonwealth communities, researching and resurrecting buried knowledge traditions of peoples, cultures across the regions which the British and other Colonial Empires touched – now categorised as the Global South and through diasporas in parts of the Global North too!
Resurrected bodies of lost knowledge
Behind the ‘lilbits’ of the original Twitter renderings of Letters To Lizzie is a body of research insights, interviews, images and recordings unearthed in knowledge-sharing and interactions that merges into the experimental disruption of knowledge traditions effected in mDNA of MotherContinent – the ‘middle earth’ component of The MultiMedia MicroEpic of the Anthropocene, the new creative genre that takes on the grand task of adapting the classical long form epic for short form new multimedia.
MultiMedia foray into the Legacy of Queen Elizabeth II
They coincided with the time I was inside UN and Commonwealth processes, a witness to the tumultuous currents swirling at its centre threatening to burst its banks in the processes of empowering and tooling global civil society and professional sectors and its hot of umbrella CSO bodies to utilise the access afforded by new media to augment their voices while participating and provoking the UN-Commonwealth-Caribbean interrogation of itself over the past two decades.
Transforming the lilbits of the Letters to Lizzie tweets into segment of The MultiMedia MicroEpic of the Anthropocene allows for encompassing the legacy of her 70 year reign and the legacy of her and the impact on the era being defined as the Anthropocene.
Classical Epic Meets 21st Century MultiMedia
The MultiMedia MicroEpic transforms the classical long form epic for short form new multimedia to disrupt colonially entrenched forms and formats of what is deemed accepted and superior knowledge traditions and create new ones that embrace the diverse span of cultures and experiences that extend beyond the colonial era and across geopolitical demarcations. Introduced at the Commonwealth Scholars’ Forum n 2021, already it is generating waves among educational film festivals across the globe.
Queenly Majesty and Potent Force of History
As a woman leader and a potent force of history for almost a century, who held her own with dignity and grace in the most testing of circumstances, the world morns; as the Monarch of an empire whose conquests resonate in repercussions across the globe to this day, the sentiments are more ambivalent.
To have served for seven decades to within forty-eight hours of her death – her last public act being appointment of the 56th, her 15th and the third woman Prime Minister of Great Britain – is something else entirely.
That her death marks the end of an era in the path of dissolution of an old order is indisputable, for even her successors have hard decisions to make about the roles, place and directions of the British Monarchy and the Commonwealth.
Her birth, with the birth of television placed her in the spotlight of global developments for 96 years, three scores and ten of which were as Queen and Leader of the Commonwealth!
Interrogating the Common-wealth
The pieces capture how entrenched was her legacy, even when she was not directly engaged, she was an omnipotent force.
She was already planted through her family’s legacy in my home district, generations before even her birth.
Research and Real Experience
The empire she inherited resonated through every dusty piece of old parchment and newspaper, magazine and recorded scribblings I sneezed and shuffled through to completing my doctorate ,tracing the transference and intersections of knowledge traditions the emerged as Finding A Place.
Embedded in the documented thought of the sons and daughters of her Empire and the musty dusty scribblings of newspaper men and women of the centuries prior who would demand and then be called upon to shape their own independence, the complex relationship of Empire unfolded.
I would come to experience all of it first hand when I was thrust into the bowels of the Commonwealth itself – from studies and travels through, India, Africa, Great Britain and the UK and and Europe too, and then across the myriad diverse interlocked communities that colonialism deposited and spawned in the Caribbean and the Americas. Through studies in colonial and Commonwealth at UWI, globalisation as Cambridge University, with the Association of Commonwealth Universities harnessing Commonwealth energies in synergies of education and media.
A Cat In A Common-wealth Wonderland
Like the cat in Common-wealth Wonderland, I was fascination at the vacillating emotions the Queen stirred – in India, from Malta, London, Scotland, Ireland, through to north, central and south Africa, across in the once-colonies in the Caribbean as Belize, Jamaica, Grenada, Guyana and at home in close work with the myriad and diverse indigeneous and migrant culture communities of LAC – Maroons, Rastafari, Mayans, Aztecs, Incas, Arawaks, Garifuna, Mestizos, Inuit, Indian, African, Chinese, Syrians, Lebanese, Jews, Revivalists. The threats, the anger and shaking fists that greeted the notion of imposed international authority carried the sceptre of distrust that morphed and melted into adoration and adulation in Her Majesty’s presence, or that of one of her representatives.
Dissolution of the Old Order
She was there in the vociferous protests by civil society in the Commonwealth People’s Forum on the doorstep of the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meetings from Malta, through Uganda, across the Caribbean and in the mellowed cheering voices of the same crowds waving flags of adoration and adulation.
She was in the friendly rivalry of viewing the televised World Cup Football Match during the World Summit on Arts and Culture in Newcastle where I drew lots with Sir Ken Robinson on the match (football – courtesy the UK – and well-played alcohol – courtesy yours truly of the Rumpire) while interrogating his and David Throsby’s emerging economic theories of the creative industry and economics of cultural policy.
since alcohol and poor football
Tom Shakespeare, Handmade, for the World Summit on Arts and Culture, 2006
(and this should surely not appal),
football and well-played alcohol
will break down every social wall
She was there when we met on the grounds of Alnwick Castle, Northumberland, England even before it passed into popular culture as Hogswarts Castle of Harry Potter/JK Rowling fame.
Roadmaps of cultural ambivalence
She was there in the drawing rooms of Malborough House where is headquartered the Commonwealth and to the Cumberland Cottage where her uncle Edward abdicated with his Mrs Simpson and paved the way for Her Majesty’s successorship to throne as I presented the roadmap of cultural ambivalence to the Commonwealth at 50, defined in three cool images of Rum, Curry and Cricket and the associated counter culture.
Moving parts of the Commonwealth
Beyond that through scrutiny of the moving and static parts of diversity in engagements through Malaysia, South Africa, across the Caribbean, the Queen and her Commonwealth loomed larger outside, than within. The most potent were in trying to unravel and untangle the myriad messy muddle that colonisation splashed on and that has remained stuck onto the institutional and social, economic and cultural processes of the region that inhibits active and meaningful participation in the world community.
And she was there from the moment I stepped into and then out of formal newsroom journalism for the rocky and uncharted terrain of new media and communications for development.
The short snapshots titled Letters to Lizzie are the forerunner to the now unfolding MultiMedia MicroEpic as it captures the transition from the dominant media forms at the first quarter of the last century into the first quarter of this century and the new millennium that faces a new dawn into the Post Pandemic Planet.
Next: The King and I and exclusive one-on-one on Commonwealth Futures
About Dr Kris Rampersad
Dr Kris Rampersad is an award winning journalist, innovator, educator and sometimes scholar, with a PhD in Literatures in English, a UNESCO-trained heritage educator/facilitator, National Geographic certified educator, global Woman Tech Makers’ Ambassador and Worldpulse/Google Digital Ambassador. read more here.
To support, sponsor, collaborate or find out more about this or creating and developing your own legacy initiative make contact through social media or here.