Engaging the multiverse

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At last week’s Forum of Journalists organised by the EU-LAC Foundation in Stockholm, two presenters on a panel on which I served alluded to the cross narratives of the modern era that render the work of journalists and academics infinitely more difficult than it has ever been – or perhaps recognised in the past as being challenged in that way.

For those unfamiliar with the boundless, growing maze of current mass communication it might all sound like fanciful, even fantastical excuse-making for endemic imprecision or malpractice. Some see it as “too much freedom”, “licence” and even sacrilegious departure from longstanding and cherished values.

It became certain though, as we discussed these matters, that successive generations have encountered similar transitions, albeit at different rates of change and engagement.

Even as one European academic spoke, it dawned on me that the determinants that influence the quality of history’s first on-the-ground drafts have throughout time always existed to impose questions of authenticity and even outright truthfulness through ubiquitous, multiple realities and narratives.

It has always been that if journalism, or its rough equivalent, does not or cannot or has not produced reliable first takes on our histories, there will be difficulty with coming to terms with current realities through retrospection.

We think, for example, of our own Caribbean histories and the parallel and integrated narratives of slave-owners and those of their human chattel and other intermediaries. Current projects to achieve reparatory justice are highlighting the several confusions.

What then, does all of this mean for journalists? I asked. One colleague who had recently travelled to Moldova in the face of the assaults on Ukraine by Russia, seriously contested prevailing mainstream narratives reflective of presumed public opinion.

It was a discussion I was patently incapable of engaging, except to note its association with the concept of inter-woven realities. There are scholars examining this as a sub-set of multiverse theory which goes beyond examination of “the two sides of the coin” or even multiple perspectives on the same land or peoplescape.

It occurred to me, that while being frequently mocked by people who don’t know better, modern journalists (including Caribbean practitioners) have been called to new duty in ways predecessors would doubtless be entirely ill-equipped to manage.

The world has changed and so have tools and circumstances through which media professionals have been having to deliver on a growing variety of needs and responsibilities. This is a rather bitter pill for some and needs to be administered in small, palatable doses and without offence.

Yet, life in these times subsists on pique and hubris even in small vulnerable spaces such as ours. I have been both fortunate and plagued, through engagement of the national, regional and global dynamics, to have witnessed the changing landscape.

Substance has grown to overtake the designs of supremely malleable form. TikTok’s verticality. Instagram’s command of visual space. Twitter’s authoritative immediacy. Social media’s subversion of traditional structures of storytelling. It is now clear that management of fact now exceeds the call of orderliness and polite compliance with ageing rules.

Social media, artificial intelligence, algorithms, bots, the failing viability of the “mainstream”, and a redefining of the challenges to “legacy” conspire to surpass ancient habits and values.

Fail to understand these things at your peril, even though S.I Rosenbaum’s contrarian op-ed last week in the New York Times eschewed the escapism embraced by notions of such real-world multiversity.

“If we have to believe in something invisible, let me believe in a version of the universe that keeps my focus where it belongs: on the things I can touch and change,” he says … hopefully.

Oh, were it that easy to do as it is to say. Even such views hardly travel along tracks of their own. There are in fact alternate realities that run alongside, through and between the paths of what is often deemed to be “truth.”

All of this musing to say that modernity will not be turned back. It is true that radio remained when television arrived, but the fax machine has virtually disappeared alongside typewriter ribbons, while telex persists in limited application.

The past, Rosenbaum insists, can subsist alongside both the present and the future as durable timelines. In other words, I dare argue, all of these are inter-related realities.

I happen to think it has always been this way. However, there are now tools to capture it more efficiently, and cover more about which we were never aware. Framing this as journalistic challenge is another way of securing understanding. The young among us know this far better than the rest of us. Their time is upon us.

 

Universities and Caricom’s food challenge

(T&T Guardian, March 22, 2023) - Not long ago, while excavating some online archives, I came across a belatedly declassified Caricom document from 1975 outlining a programme of technical assistance via UNDP for “feasibility studies on selected regional agricultural projects.”

According to the 48-year-old document, among the principal reasons for exploring new options was the fact that “the traditional export orientation in the Caribbean area has resulted in insufficient food production for local consumption.”

At that time, it was also estimated that up to 40 percent of the region’s fast growing tourism earnings was being re-exported for food purchases to satisfy the sector.

It had been noted at the time that Guyana and Belize, among the early members of Caricom (Suriname was not yet a member), had large areas of unexploited agricultural land and low population densities.

The current reality has not changed that much, except for the urgency of the tasks at hand. Imports to feed tourists have if anything increased, and an ability to purchase foreign food proved to be a disincentive to invest in a notion of “food sovereignty” – a concept that has evolved over time to focus increasingly on domestic production.

To be fair, it is not that absolutely nothing has happened. Regional institutions such as CARDI (established in 1975), IICA, and the FAO among others, have consistently extended support in a wide selection of areas to essentially ensure that the diagnosis of 1975 would be addressed.

There can be discussions and debates on the degree to which such support has been adequate or whether these agencies have been influential in changing dangerous tendencies. But the fact is several agencies have been present and active. The focus, I believe, must be on the responsiveness of the respective states to the imperatives of change.

This supersedes the lure of domestic politics and the power dynamics that guide relations between ports and plantations. The pandemic era has emphasised the need to move much faster than we have on this question, and to ensure that the directions are sound and sustainable.

Among the realisations has to be the longstanding knowledge that, within Caricom, there are few countries objectively capable of feeding themselves. There are issues of limited land space, models of economic development that expand consumption bases, environmental concerns including the climate crisis, and a view that the food sector does not necessarily share equal qualitative space with other economic poles of development.

Government ministerial appointments to the food and agriculture sector, for example, do not command as much prestige and power as do portfolios focused on trade, commerce, and finance.

Vocational opportunities do not frequently highlight lucrative opportunities in the food production sector, and the education system has done little to dispel such a perception.

In this regard, it is significant that Caricom universities have determined to play a role in promoting achievement of the goal set by regional leaders last year to reduce the region’s annual food import bill of over US$4.3 billion by 25 percent by the year 2025.

This is a rather modest goal that focuses heavily on the agricultural science of domestic production but insufficiently on the social science of taste and consumption patterns.

The latter, of course, is much more easily proposed than achieved. But this is also more than mere “foreign tastes.” There has been an almost wilful absence of official effort to skip the delusion of an ability to feed ourselves all on our own, and to pursue collective regional will.

This brings us back to the studies proposed in 1975 and the objectives they were designed to pursue including “multi-national food development schemes.”

The Caricom universities project including The UWI, University of Guyana, and soon, the Anton de Kom University of Suriname (and hopefully The Bahamas and Belize), is proceeding based on the assumption that cross-border collaboration is an imperative and must be led by joint research, innovation and teaching.

This is a significant initiative that will also involve the participation of the Caricom Private Sector Organisation (CPSO).

Hopefully, this grouping will enjoy the willing ears and eyes of regional political, business and civil society leaders. It would however be advisable to ensure that such a collaboration proceed fearlessly through the socio-political maze of dependence.

Even in the face of vastly uneven growth, instability, and extreme vulnerability to natural disasters and external economic shocks, the food production project might well be Caricom’s sternest test at this moment.

It was deemed to be urgent almost 50 years ago. We do not appear to have done all that much to satiate such inward hunger.

 

Politics, privilege, and science

And there we were three years ago in this very space. Contemplating, against some considerable odds, the triumph of science over politics and the vain folly that accompanies privilege.

One inspired moment had led to a hurried huddle at the Trinidad Hilton, led by CARPHA and an assemblage of journalists, to consider the threats and challenges of an encroaching pandemic.

We stood near the podium, about five of us, chuckling while considering appropriate non-touch greetings. Kiran offered ‘namaste’ and Carlon a light touch of knuckles. Already, the offer of a “virtual” event for greater reach – particularly to a somewhat sceptical bunch motivated by any of several factors that often emerge against the tides of scholarship.

Then came the news on Dr St John’s phone that a pandemic had been declared by the World Health Organisation (WHO). So unfamiliar were some that everything from institutional jurisdiction to international membership to “virus” was quickly Googled and the room took on a different look and feel.

This, some of us thought then, was it. But those who felt protected by professional credentials, political status, or religious creed commenced the rigid erection of doubt and scepticism. I took the screenshots and recorded many of them in order to plot curves of conversion … if ever they occurred. In some instances, they never did. Even three years after. Even now.

This was to be nothing but a bad flu’ through which institutional, partisan, corporate, and geo-political advantage was to be gained. Its origins dark and dank out of a monster live and raw encroaching and extending tentacles intended to rebalance tentative equilibria of global power and influence.

Through the gates of misinformation, disinformation and old-fashioned ignorance came plots fast and furious. We, the small and weak, were to foot a tragic bill. A single government in a small twin-island state had conspired to shut itself off from the rest of the world in order to “protect” us little folks from an imaginary peril.

I was uncharacteristically compelled to publicly dispel absurd untruths. No, the rest of the Americas had not remained “open for business” while we closed. No, slavish obeisance to WHO dictate was not intended to impose a regime of needless caution. Caution was being interpreted as “panic” intended to reinforce control of all that officialdom purveys.

There were “sheep” everywhere. Led to slow torture. They, who claimed to unravel the plot, lay safely apart with all the appurtenances of privilege and advantage. But boxed in from outward flight, as is their wont at times of trouble. This time locked away through plandemic device and the designs of lesser mortals.

Such was the outflow of determined misguidance the global response found tacit expression in the public domain as contrived “overkill” with overwhelming consequences for vulnerable economies and the balance of power big and small.

Had science really prevailed over common sense? Had cold calculations in laboratories replaced warm passion and belief? Or could it just be that some were right and others outright wrong?

Having looked before at the contention science often attracts, much of it remained at least vaguely familiar. I had by then witnessed and recorded some of the more accessible scientific evaluations of the anthropogenic contribution to climate change and the accompanying crisis. Many, to today, do not accept the point.

Among them remain those in blissful denial who now lay claim to seamless association with COVID-scepticism and the accompanying unease over pandemic measures. One such advocate pointed repeatedly at the financial fractures being sustained and surmised that livelihoods outdid lives – particularly of the older, sicker, more expendable variety. Almost as if human circumstance routinely subjects itself to simple measures of bipolarity.

But surely, the plot is as deep as it has been wide. How far away, indeed, from contentions over the spherical dimensions of our planet? So much common space for anti-science/anti-proof and the sterile distance social and economic privilege accords.

After all, “don’t you know who I am?” At the vaccine site. At the hospital. At the table around which sit the poor, infirm, the young, the old, the heavily pigmented, those who will live and those condemned to die.

At the very end of this, if some finality were to ever come, we would likely have found that the triumph of science and proof has proven far more elusive than what is pronounced by some to be real or unreal. Put that way, nobody ends up winning.

 

 

 

Flight of the nightingale

Last week, one week after Carnival,  a conversation we have not been keen on initiating opened, uncomfortably, in full public view. This was not the routine arguments over who won which Carnival competition, or the current appallingly framed discussion on “human trafficking.”

The Human Rights Watch (HRW) presser on detained ISIS fighters and their families came like an exploding flambeau in the middle of the mas’. How many of us would have preferred the situation remain off the public agenda and away from unaccommodating eyes?

There was, after all, no real political tension over the issue. Most of our political combatants would not know where to begin a meaningful dialogue. Additionally, the gaping psycho-social wounds of July 1990 congregate alongside the oozing sores of murderous ISIS adventurism.

For over four and a half years, a “Nightingale Team”, comprising at least a dozen state agencies, has worked quietly (and out of sight) to address the concern that nationals of this country were being held indefinitely and under horrendous conditions at camps and detention centres in Syria and Iraq.

I cannot recall any significant updates on Nightingale’s work since it was launched in August 2018. But it was set up by the ministry of national security with multiple Cabinet fingers in the brew.

When HRW launched its report here on February 28, the most significant responses were from the attorney general and the minister of foreign affairs – signalling the current dominance of diplomacy and law-making in the process of addressing the challenge.

This is not to say that national security concerns have at any stage been backburnered by either the government or other interested international parties. I am aware of the watchful eyes and attentive ears.

Problem is, countries big and small have not found it easy to answer questions about both suspected perpetrators, and those who can be considered to be victims of the horrible nightmare that engulfed parts of Syria and Iraq for over five years, between 2013 and 2018.

The putting down of vile ISIS ambitions meant a variety of things to different countries and people. There have been lingering geo-political challenges, uneven application of international and domestic law, and massive efforts to rebuild and rehabilitate large swathes of territory scarred by violence and destruction.

All of these concerns converge around the fate of thousands of displaced persons, including over 10,000 from approximately 60 countries outside Syria and Iraq.

It is from among such ranks emerge the 90-100 T&T nationals – mainly male terror suspects (who have neither my respect nor sympathy), non-suspect women, and children.

Most of the other detainees in the camps are from countries currently undergoing problematic processes to comply with humanitarian law while confronting sharply negative public opinion.

In 2019, for instance, a failed parliamentary petition with close to 600,000 signatures called on the government to revoke the citizenship of those who travelled overseas to take up the ISIS cause. You may have also followed the case of Shamima Begum who only weeks ago lost a final appeal against the revocation of her citizenship.

In Canada, there was vigorous debate over a failure to prosecute returning fighters through a purported violation of an international (genocide) convention and domestic anti-terrorism law.

The United States has been at the forefront of global advocacy for repatriation/domestic prosecution against the backdrop of the possible “re-emergence of ISIS Core” – to quote Ian Moss, US Deputy Coordinator for Countering Violent Extremism and Terrorist Detentions.

There appears to be anecdotal evidence that such a threat truly exists, particularly when you consider conditions conducive to the radicalisation of young detainees in the camps. There is some journalism to support this contention.

In January, three Barbadian nationals, a woman and two children, were handed over to Barbados authorities. The island’s experience however hardly mirrors ours. T&T has the dubious distinction of attracting the highest per capita number of recruitments to ISIS in the western hemisphere.

I have a particular concern about the young children and babies born at the centres who are being subjected to atrocious living conditions. Fifty-six of them are ours.

If only for their sake, the “Nightingale Team” needs to accelerate its work. The fact that the matter now actively engages the attention of the attorney general also suggests that appropriate laws for the prosecution and conviction of terrorism suspects are being actively engaged.

I think we should bring these people back home, even if suspects are made to come last. It is the extremely difficult but correct thing to do. The flight of this nightingale needs to take us to that point.

 

Of horses and digital futures

Once, following one of several columns published here on the subject of our national failure to embrace the opportunities of digitalisation I was accused of “flogging a dead horse” by someone who knows a lot more than I do about the subject.

This is perhaps the most dreadful fear of anyone claiming public space to advocate for things meant to improve the quality of human life. That you are wasting time.

The “dead horse” idiom, after all, points to a sense of terminal pointlessness. But, if we are to continue to envisage a viable future for coming generations, the engine that drives our development must both promise to be of a quality exceeding the capabilities of a biologically mortal animal and, more importantly, pronounced to be more alive than dead.

Every now and then, we get a sense that people with decision-making power over our lives are beginning to get the point but eventually let us down. In July 2021, for instance, a Ministry of Digital Transformation was born. It was at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and there were hurried steps to rectify earlier reluctance in the move away from paper and physical files and long lines. Social distance as a stimulus for digital proximity.

The major tasks require multi-pronged attacks on processes, business models, domain management, and cultural/organisation transformation – concepts all now globally resident in tech-speak and expressed as political aspiration.

Yet (and for the umpteenth time right here) I remind people of the fact that at approximately 2.20 p.m. on Thursday September 23, 2021 – in his capacity as minister in the Office of the Prime Minister - Stuart Young announced the possible arrival of “digital vaccination cards” in “four to six weeks.”

There have been explanations by the responsible ministries – health, and digital transformation – about why an initial delay that grew to an indefinite postponement, and eventual abandonment. What has not been explained is the unwitting mamaguy that raised expectations at a time of supreme nervousness regarding a likely return to work, school, business, and play.

Now, don’t get me wrong, “digital vaccination cards” are not among the more spectacular achievements of the digitalisation efforts of any government. Neither is the presence of downloadable forms for the conduct of official business. These are extremely modest developments that hint at business processes only tending in the general direction of digital governance, but possible even with both feet embedded in the past.

Mind you, this is true not only of government but of private actors. Bear in mind the requirements of “business model transformation” and you will realise how far off-base are even the important business sub-sectors of banking and insurance.

It does not require the itemising of anecdotes to prove the general point I am making. Just tell me the significant differences between doing business with a government agency and any of the main private businesses with which you interact on an occasional or regular basis. (Note to reader: Insert personal story here.)

There does not appear to be recognition of the fact that the unfolding global reality credits digitalisation with providing reliable assurance that livelihoods can be protected and maintained.

Almost everywhere else in both the developed and developing world there is emerging research on the socio-cultural peculiarities to be assessed and managed as people experience the required transformations.

It would thus be reasonable to assume that the agencies actively engaged in guiding T&T through the changes are applying rather clinical eyes when it comes to research, and innovative application of available technologies, together with the processes that employ them. Please let me know where I can find evidence of this.

If the pandemic taught us anything, it would be the extent to which all areas of private and public conduct converge at open portals to digital realities. It is an inescapable path. Whether we like it or not (and there are many people in positions of influence and power who do not believe this), the timeless, borderless frontiers of new technologies, platforms, and processes are upon us.

Though the 2022 UNDP Digital Readiness Assessment Report on T&T provides some insights, and will no doubt be cited in the good news bulletins, there is little in it to indicate progress on a psychological predisposition which, for instance, has militated against positive action on things like work-from-home regimes and remote learning. It is not only a matter of infrastructure or even connectivity, important as they are. There are changes that require political, economic, social, and cultural momentum.

In many instances elsewhere, these are horses that have long bolted. We are yet to studiously apply the whip to ours.

 

 

 

A Carnival Tabanca

I don’t know about you, but my favourite post-Carnival songs are of old and recent vintage by two of my favourite performers in any musical genre – Lord Kitchener and Bunji Garlin.

I know there are calypso/soca aficionados who can rattle off another half a dozen finely-crafted offerings by others they consider to be near equal in value. But hear me out nuh.

Forty-four years ago, Kitch sang: “The sun is descending/The moon is approaching/And the crowd is gone/It seems like nobody is interested to carry on/Well the stand is like a wooden shack after a storm/Not a pan or a mas’ is around to perform./All I can see is some broken old bottles so far/An indication the Carnival is over …”

Even those of us who witness the celebrations from some distance cannot help but experience a sense of sombre nostalgia, framed by Ed Watson’s wonderful arrangement of this Kitchener classic from 1979 – The Carnival is Over.

Then, in 2014, Bunji Garlin captured the essence of the departing festival with Carnival Tabanca: “I am a real Carnival tabanca/Hard Carnival tabanca/As soon as Carnival done this year/Well I just start catching fever/When the doctor come diagnose me/Tell meh wife me well, is not dengue/Is just delusions and delusion have/Me thinking Soca can you help me.”

Some of us who suffer mainly from Panorama tabanca could have barely sat still when Arima Angel Harps offered an Aviel Scanterbury interpretation of Bunji’s haunting melody – assembled by the young arranger almost entirely for purposes of feeding the tabanca rather than meeting the requirements of inflexible competitive parameters.

Though I usually limit my involvement in the annual event to what happens with pan and spend a little time with the kiddies in St Joseph (which I missed this year), followed by about an hour of Tunapuna mas’ at dusk on Tuesday, I keep sufficiently informed to advise general feelings about what transpired.

Comrade BC, who has much more experience than I do with all aspects of Carnival, thinks that pan remains a relatively uninfected feature of organised activity. Even my admittedly limited exposure to the other elements leads me to a similar conclusion.

Though there remain chronic maladies associated with the staging of Panorama, the musical instrument and all it means to and for us in T&T remains to me the most spectacular event of all. It is in fact, and not by mere vainglorious declaration, “the greatest show on earth.”

I have used this space in the past to allude to the flattening of the elitist curve that occurs each time we engage in the festivities – never mind the push back of the VIP and VVIP phenomenon. Pan plays a unique role in all this, even among the hot spot tourists who have been frequenting the panyards.

There have been justifiable observations about the systematic degrading of lyrical content in the calypso and the clichéd contributions of ‘mas. There are experts who can speak in more informed ways about this, but my general impression is that there has, in general terms, been no improvement (in general terms) over what prevailed in the past.

I opened by referencing Kitch and Bunji – past and present masters of their art. The standouts both of then and now have always been part of a minority. Nothing wrong with that, actually. The consumption of art is substantially a function of taste.

To me, some of the most pleasant pan moments this year came from steelbands that did not win. On January 17, for example, the Supernovas Junior Band played Canboulay in the open air in the shadow of the Lopinot valley of the Northern Range. It was a moment of poetic brilliance I was moved to capture in watercolours.

Then one evening before a scanty crowd during practice, Arima Angel Harps with two tiny pre-teens in the front row, played Carnival Tabanca, and all previous chatter and moving stopped.

Finally, as witness to the evolution of Duvone Stewart as one of the most successful pan arrangers of all time, I went to the “favourites” folder on my YouTube channel and viewed for the 100^th time, Renegades’ 2019 preliminary performance of Hookin’ Meh.

Near the end of the tune, Duvone saluted the people in the nearby high-rise apartments who were waving rags and garments through their windows. There was as much emotion in that moment as in the closing flourish (Patsy Calliste with arms raised) at the end of Black Man Feeling to Party this year. Grounds for a serious tabanca.

 

Caricom's Haiti Challenge

Last week’s release of an investigative report by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) on the “grip of gang violence” on the Brooklyn neighbourhood of Cité Soleil, provides an instructive backdrop to this week’s Caricom Inter-Sessional meeting in The Bahamas which begins today.

For one, and whatever its limited scope (Haiti is much, much more than this large, impoverished community within a much more expansive city of Port-au-Prince), the report supports the view that gang violence is but the dorsal fin on a monstrous creature on the verge of terminal submersion.

But it has become almost fashionable to focus on this one key symptom and to declare populistic solidarity. This has made it pretty easy to activate expressions of interest in the current invitation to invade.

However problematic such an approach, this situation cannot continue. In Brooklyn alone, between July and December 2022, at least 263 people were killed and 285 injured. People’s homes have been raided, pillaged, and destroyed. Women and girls attacked.

Gangs now control food and water supplies. In cases where it was the norm, children have been unable to attend school, and some of the young boys are being recruited to patrol the streets and participate in acts of violence.

By all means, being party to what the OHCHR has prescribed as “deployment of a time-bound specialised support force under conditions that conform with international human rights laws and norms, with a comprehensive and precise action plan”, is an acceptable stop-gap measure guaranteed to end the violence … for the time being.

At the current rate, with over 200 active gangs in Port-au-Prince and some northern towns alone, it is necessary to simultaneously and promptly apply ameliorative measures to satisfy endemic deprivation. Otherwise, a return to square one is absolutely guaranteed within a very short space of time.

Some of this has happened before – trouble, solidarity, invited occupation, stop-gap measures, gradual withdrawal, and rapid return to a self-destructive status quo. All the while as intense migrant outflows (a declared feature of Caribbean self-interest) remain the norm.

However loathsome their parochial, political and regulatory interventions, the Dominicans next door embody a useful reference point for confronting some stark realities.

When Caricom meets today, they are also going to discuss overdue elections, knowing well that elections of any kind are impossible under current conditions. As if elections by themselves are likely to signal any kind of political normalcy. In Haiti, they have not in the past.

The OHCHR report suggests that at least one main gang has “regularly carried out violent acts to take control of neighbourhoods under the influence of the Brooklyn gang and its allies, both to strengthen the electoral bases of its potential sponsors (among others, potential candidates for presidential, legislative, and communal elections) and to increase its illegal revenues.”

The implication here is that even with the return of elections there is little possibility that criminal insurgency will end. It is a classic case of elections not being a reliable indicator of street-level democratic values.

The region, together with the global community, has been going along with a false narrative of triumphant hope. Under the influence of such denial, as I have argued before, the admission of Haiti as a member of Caricom was based entirely on fanciful ideological factors.

Ever since, it has been rocky going. The country has not been a constant, reliable ally in hemispheric relations. The PetroCaribe splurge – described in one judicial proclamation as “an orgy of corruption” was never openly discussed at regional fora and remains like a neglected boil on the buttocks of the integration movement.

In presenting the report, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, saw a country that “lurches from crisis to crisis.”

“The way out of these multiple human rights crises must be owned and led by the people of Haiti, but the magnitude of the problems is such that they need the international community’s active attention and targeted support,” he added.

True. But the prerogative of the former call to self-determination has always been far more difficult to engage than the latter compulsion to intervene from outside and above. Who knows what’s the magic formula? Most of us don’t. This is Caricom's most intractable challenge.