AT the big Welcome Home Miss Lou variety concert for cultural icon Louise Bennett Coverley last Wednesday night entertainer Tony Rebel, departing from his popular deejay lyrics, addressed Prime Minister PJ Patterson directly: ‘Mister prime minister, take down the naked people and put up a statue of Miss Lou instead’.

Comedian Oliver Samuels was less direct: What appears to be a prayerful posture by the two naked figures in the statuary at the entrance to Emancipation Park was, he said, really a plea to God to explain why they were chosen to stand there all the time and have to listen to “people passing all kind of remarks ’bout we”. And it wasn’t comfortable to stand in the water, either.

Judging from the loud applause that greeted the negative comments of these two major stars in Jamaica’s entertainment industry, as well as the controversy that continues to swirl in the media, the prime minister must indeed be thinking about the political pluses and minuses from Laura Facey Cooper’s sculpture which every Jamaican must know by now.

Some cartoonists (Las May, Gleaner August 8) and talk show hosts (Wilmot Perkins, Power 106, everyday) have suggested that the prime minister may indeed be happy that the controversy has diverted public attention from more pressing issues like the economy, crime, police shootings and the bad conditions in some children’s homes.

One could add that opposition leader Edward Seaga also may be happy that, so far, he has been spared a searching spotlight on his continued viability as political leader of the Jamaica Labour Party after the Privy Council ruled that companies that he controls were liable for taxes and penalties in the region of $130 million.

But even if the controversy and the obviously care-free, feel-good tone of this year’s celebrations of Emancipation and Independence did, indeed, give our leaders a bit of respite, the reality is that the debate is serious and has implications beyond our personal likes or dislikes of nudity in art.

A Gleaner editorial of August 6, reflecting the view of supporters of the Emancipation Park sculpture, expressed the “hope that over time viewers will find it possible to elevate their eyes to the expression on the faces of the couple, an expression of spiritual yearning and hope which convey the essential meaning of the monument as a symbol of our emancipation from slavery”.

Similarly, the Observer editorial of Friday warned against “a hegemony of the professional talkers and intellectual commissars” seeking to impose their own “intellectual and political correctness” on society.

There is no doubt that there are strong feelings on both sides of the issue and different answers to the question eloquently put by Wilmot Perkins on Friday: “What is the meaning that the artist is conveying and what does this say to us about emancipation that is inspiring and uplifting”?

Personally, I do not have the technical competence to judge the artistic merits of Facey Cooper’s work any more than I have been able to judge the many pieces of public art that I have seen in the handful of the world’s countries and cultures that I have had the good fortune to experience.

But I know that public art is supposed to fill some public policy functions. One function is to provide opportunity for pubic education and appreciation of fine arts which would otherwise only be available to the rich who can afford to buy works of art.

Another, of course, is to give a people a sense of pride in themselves, their history and their achievements and to inspire them to even greater accomplishments. Sometimes this sense is captured in heroic figures, sometimes other forms.

So for me, the essence of the debate is whether the work is a worthy representation or symbol of national ideals or an inspiration for personal or national achievement, that is, whether it makes a positive contribution in public policy terms. It is not about artistic freedom.

Whatever else it may mean, emancipation for Jamaican means freedom from a system of slavery in which white people owned black people and used them to make private profit. The owners employed both physical force and psychological conditioning to maintain that control. The daily message of the psychological condition was that white is superior and black is inferior.

In the intervening 165 years, generations of the descendants of the former owners and the former owned have been engaged in an on-going and imperfect project to fashion a society of equals, casting aside both historic notions of entitlement to privilege or being condemned to perpetual poverty and ignorance.

Only the most myopic among us would say that we have not made progress along the way. Equally, it would be wrong to say that some of us do not remain trapped in historic ignorance.

So, how does this piece of sculpture advance that project? The question is especially relevant as Marcus Garvey’s famous saying, popularised by Bob Marley, ‘None but ourselves can free our mind” is boldly inscribed at the base of the sculpture. Incidentally, I believe the task is to free ourselves both from mental slavery and mental slave mastery.

In the instant case, it is clear that the commission to Mrs Facey-Copper was partly to fulfil the public policy purpose of advancing the project of emancipation.

The Patterson administration, having re-established Emancipation Day, August 1 as a national holiday and beautified the six acres of public gardens in New Kingston as Emancipation Park, must have had the clear intention to add a dimension of public art that would inspire us to realise the so-far unfulfilled promise of either emancipation or independence.

The park itself has been enthusiastically embraced by the Jamaican people who have dismissed the earlier criticism that it was too expensive, or that it was created through inappropriate use of our contributions to the National Housing Trust.

On the three occasions that I have been to the park, the large majority of persons viewing the sculpture openly expressed offence at the way in which nudity is presented in both the male and female figures, but especially the male.

Unlike the Gleaner editorial writer and many other beholders of spirituality and artistic magnificence, many of us have only been able to focus on two beautiful bodies at the peak of sexual and reproductive health. Anyone who cannot see that must be too old to remember what eroticism feels like. It may be spiritual, but it is also erotic!

Laura Facey Cooper’s current work, like that of Alvin Marriott 40 years ago, was commissioned by the government. We are not privy to the detailed terms of reference that either sculptor was given except that they were asked to create something that reflected freedom and emancipation. Separated by gender, generations, social backgrounds and political circumstances they, nevertheless, came up with similar creations and have come up against similar reactions.

What are we to make of the coincidence? The first is that there is a disconnect between these creations and what many Jamaicans see as the essence of our freedom. To the extent that the work fails as a symbol of national ideals, it would have failed the public policy test.

At a time when the society is inveighing against ‘bad words’ on stage and lewd lyrics in dance hall music, although these are part of popular culture, some people are clearly having difficulty supporting the war against ‘bad words’ in public while extolling the virtues of nudity and sexually suggestive art in public park even if it has justifiable claims to being noble and uplifting.

With the celebrations now over, the prime minister must be wondering if the voices against the nudity of the statue will cause enough political fall-out for him to do what Seaga did as prime minister in the 1980s when public outcry forced him to remove a statue of Bob Marley despite its obvious artistic merits.