Raoul Pantin of Trinidad and Tobago remains one of the outstanding journalists of our time. There are few real countries, if any, that would dare allow someone like Raoul to stand on the periphery of a crumbling professional media infrastructure, at a time when it needs all hands on deck.
It might be there is a greater, divine logic behind his newsroom absence or, perhaps, a higher calling in the form of more complete literary achievements such as the writing of books and plays and, hopefully, some poetry.
Heaven knows the routine slaughter of the Muse in the course of a news day, the unending triumph of the ‘W’s over metaphor. A “flick of the wrist” the editor often declared through the haze of forbidden cigarette smoke that should have rightly clouded Independence Square.
At the Express, and later at CCN radio and television, we shared poetry to pass the time between the verbal incontinence of parliament and the fiction of social justice that filled the spaces between the latest shoe sale and list of defaulting mortgagers.
Today, the need to grow the flock of readers is matched only by the absolute requirement to cultivate a withering crop of writers.
That Raoul has completed this particular work of journalism suggests there is some room for hope in what my favourite West Indian poet, Martin Carter, describes as this dark time.
All round the land brown beetles crawl about
The shining sun is hidden in the sky
Red flowers bend their heads in awful sorrow
This is the dark time, my love,
It is the season of oppression, dark metal, and tears.
It is the festival of guns, the carnival of misery
Everywhere the faces of men are strained and anxious
Who comes walking in the dark night time?
Whose boot of steel tramps down the slender grass
It is the man of death, my love, the stranger invader
Watching you sleep and aiming at your dream.
The days of wrath and of darkness are, perhaps, still upon us. Raoul’s testimony as journalist extraordinaire is thus as necessary as the shining sun that emerges from its hiding place in the sky.
It might be there is a greater, divine logic behind his newsroom absence or, perhaps, a higher calling in the form of more complete literary achievements such as the writing of books and plays and, hopefully, some poetry.
Heaven knows the routine slaughter of the Muse in the course of a news day, the unending triumph of the ‘W’s over metaphor. A “flick of the wrist” the editor often declared through the haze of forbidden cigarette smoke that should have rightly clouded Independence Square.
At the Express, and later at CCN radio and television, we shared poetry to pass the time between the verbal incontinence of parliament and the fiction of social justice that filled the spaces between the latest shoe sale and list of defaulting mortgagers.
Today, the need to grow the flock of readers is matched only by the absolute requirement to cultivate a withering crop of writers.
That Raoul has completed this particular work of journalism suggests there is some room for hope in what my favourite West Indian poet, Martin Carter, describes as this dark time.
All round the land brown beetles crawl about
The shining sun is hidden in the sky
Red flowers bend their heads in awful sorrow
This is the dark time, my love,
It is the season of oppression, dark metal, and tears.
It is the festival of guns, the carnival of misery
Everywhere the faces of men are strained and anxious
Who comes walking in the dark night time?
Whose boot of steel tramps down the slender grass
It is the man of death, my love, the stranger invader
Watching you sleep and aiming at your dream.
The days of wrath and of darkness are, perhaps, still upon us. Raoul’s testimony as journalist extraordinaire is thus as necessary as the shining sun that emerges from its hiding place in the sky.
