Three little boys on the ocean

* First published in the T&T Guardian on December 2, 2020 and should be followed by a read of this Man Overboard!

There are some subjects best left to the poets and dramatists and musicians and visual artists whose deft touch can straddle emotion and the rigours of reason at the stroke of a single moment or line. Issues well out of the reach of the disciplines of law, politics and journalism. Equations that defy the arithmetic of known logic and the dicta of organised religion.

Since the events of last week, I have therefore been turning to Victor Edwards’ Takdir on the question of migrant journeys. To Wayne Brown on matters of the troubled ocean. And to Pablo Neruda on love and the sea.

To Victor I present the makings of a script that echoes Gurusammi’s fateful voyage. To Wayne, a child of the sea. To Pablo, the troubled strait that took its name from a genocidal European explorer.

For Victor I offer as opening scene three little boys set sail on the ocean – Aylan (3), Felipe (8) and let’s call the other one Hugo or Pablito.

Pablito, the landlubbing seafarer. We don’t know his age, but he wore a Spiderman t-shirt in the newspaper. We couldn’t see his face because he kept staring at the tears that reached the wet ground when he landed.

Sternward, in the growing and increasingly dark distance, can be seen the ruinous flames of a collective death – Joshua’s fabled Hazor, to those who this season sing of Baby Jesus and claim to know why.

To the bow, the tentative promise of life. Aylan’s parents raised $5,860 for the trip. His mother wears a life vest later found to be “ineffective.” She dreams not of shopping malls and romantic rendezvous with strangers speaking strange languages but yearns for peace and safety.

Little Aylan wears a red t-shirt and dark blue shorts. New suede shoes for the journey to a new life. His mother sings him lullabies through the stormy night.

Felipe has not stopped coughing since they left the soggy, wooded makeshift port. He has had the flu. He’d earlier been separated from his parents for “processing” and now he is running a high fever and shivers each time the rain comes down on the open vessel.

Then there’s Hugo. He’s hard to miss as the boat sways wildly in the wind and rain and Mr Spiderman casts imaginary webs to tame the wild ocean.

You put them all on an open pirogue under an angry sky, at which point all that went before and all that happens after pale into insignificance as counterbalances on perspective. Three little boys on a boat in the ocean.

You wonder if in freezing the moment and stripping it of context you reach the core, the raw elements of what adults describe as “rights.” At the very moment that the giant wave arrives there is little behind both horizons, since though there is a relativism attached to many rights, there is an absolutism that flows from all – the “fundamental” cast in law versus the universality and indivisibility of human rights.

The experts make the distinction far less clearly than the water colourist at her palette. Suddenly, “how dem reach there?” and “who put dem there?” become as irrelevant as the burning shore to the west and the three cloudy peaks to the east.

There is no “other take”. No “perspective” apart from the fact of three little boys on a boat on the ocean. Nicolás, in thick rubber boats had kicked the boat from its moorings and turned away while muttering insults at people who weren’t there.

On the other shore, faceless, leaderless “authorities”, regular folks, and friends of the sea shouting cusswords and waiting with steel-tips to kick the vessel back. No more room at the inn. No more space for any boarders. “Send dem back. Send dem back” – as elections slogan. As potent as the command to a firing-squad. As murderous as official confusion and cluelessness.

Anna Levi writes: “Pablito like an ornament in his birth blanket/Asleep with his angels/Fallen overboard/Tumbling with the tides/A moment of silence.”

Sometimes, you turn to poetry and music and art to explain and to help turn away from depravity. Sometimes, you think of three little boys on the ocean. And, suddenly, they are gone and there is nothing and no one else in the world.

Footnote: In memory of Aylan Kurdi of Syria and Felipe Gómez Alonzo of Guatemala. Thinking of “Pablito” of Venezuela.

Man overboard!

Media colleague and friend, George Leacock, beat me to it in a social media post on Sunday, by quoting GML Tobago Correspondent Elizabeth Gonzales’ report on Friday’s dramatic ocean rescue of a man off the northwestern tip of Trinidad in choppy, open waters.

Passengers on board the Buccoo Reef inter-island vessel had spotted a lone swimmer who was waving desperately out at sea as he tread water and fought for his life. The ferry crew responded quickly enough to launch a lifeboat and to execute a dramatic rescue – the first ever under such circumstances, according to NIDCO.

This was when the story got even more interesting, prompting George to quote just one sentence from Elizabeth’s dispatch: “While some passengers were happy to help,” the reporter wrote, “others were irritated over the extended time the voyage to Tobago took.”

The swimmer was one of three people eventually saved after a boat left T&T, bound for Venezuela in darkness, but overturning in rough waters. I do not suppose routine maritime regulations were stringently observed or that immigration and customs authorities played a role in ensuring other lawful guidelines were observed.

And, for a change some might contend, with human cargo on board, the bow was conspicuously due west and, from the stern, could have been seen the north coast shore of Las Cuevas. How bothersome! They are both coming and going!

It could have been much like a similar journey three years ago when, forcibly turned back at sea for Venezuela by “the authorities,” a missing vessel was purported to have taken two dozen people to their death. This prompted sombre reflections on this very page entitled: Three Little Boys.

I metaphorically enjoined the fates of three little boys from three separate migrant tragedies - Aylan Kurdi of Syria, Felipe Gómez Alonzo of Guatemala and a boy called “Pablito” of Venezuela on whom writer, Anna Levi, reflected:

“Pablito like an ornament in his birth blanket/Asleep with his angels/Fallen overboard/Tumbling with the tides.”

I had at the time lamented the role of the “turn them back” and “close de borders” (coming and going?) crew – willfully ignorant of non-refoulement obligations under international law - who have, since then, never been able to publicly and regretfully reflect on a tragedy that saw some people branding authorities, politicians, and regular folks this side of the border near savages.

“Turn them back” (refoulement) had by then become the stuff of political slogan and even official doctrine – more so as a fallback position had “close de borders” failed.

Now, don’t get me wrong, none of this is meant to advocate disorder or unlawful behaviour. I am taking aim at the psycho-social pre-disposition that considers a rescue at sea an annoyance – a needless disruption. Experts on communal mental illness and sick societies probably have a name for this.

This can also be fertile metaphor for a state of collective being – the lost and drifting encountering the reluctant and uncommitted, themselves afloat but hopelessly lost.

All of this, even as we ourselves flounder in a vast global ocean of cognitive challenges. Only Monday, International Migration Day, UN Secretary-General António Guterres put a brave and healthy spin on this: “If managed well, mobility can be a cornerstone of sustainable development, prosperity and progress.”

“If managed well” – much easier said than done. We also don’t appear to be keeping an eye on this particular requirement of the migration challenge – even when it comes to what could well have been an attempt at voluntary repatriation … perhaps.

It is also true that recent experiences have turned our attention more inward than it is currently devoted to exogenous challenges, however urgent. The discomfort is evident. Witness the partisan confusion over Guyana/Venezuela when viewed as fuel for sectional posturing.

On stark display has been the absence of sound, independent countervailing values at a time when national decisiveness on the basis of rational discourse is required. While the official response has been consistent and clear, even if at times incorrect or contestable, nothing much has emerged that appears to be from vantage points untouched by simplistic partisan gamesmanship.

It seems so many times that we are all overboard and grasping at the turbulent tide. The lifeboats and vests we dispense for our own benefit and survival.

Rights as habits of human conduct

At the current rate, there will come a time when the people who require the greatest protection on grounds of the universality of human rights will begin dismissively forging alternative pathways to justice, peace, freedom, and equality.

In my view, generally muted national, regional, and global observance of Human Rights Day last Sunday signalled a state of cognitive dissonance induced by cynically routinised breaches in the letter and spirit of enshrined rights of all varieties.

I would like to think that when the world assembled in 1948 to declare the universal, inalienable nature of human rights and to prescribe their tangible expression it was expected that the ravages of global conflict at that time would have provided an impetus that was urgent and seen to be indispensable.

Alongside the civil and political rights eventually came a vast suite of economic, social, and cultural rights. National constitutions and laws were codifying them. Systems of justice were being crafted to interpret them. Civil society was inculcating rights as foundational values for advocacy and change. More than 60 international human instruments have been created and adopted.

Our leaders were all over the planet signing pieces of paper and delivering speeches and press releases. We were seeing some as exemplars and others as reckless violators and pariahs. There was the institutional entrenching of values deemed to be important pillars of true development –intangibles that belong as much to statute as to stature and status. 

Yet, four days ago, some of the loudest state voices on such imperatives were found, when thin outer coatings were stripped, to be actively presiding over violations of the rights of children, military non-combatants, the poor, the displaced, the different, and the weak.

This is no esoteric parable. Genocide, invasions, threats to territorial integrity, systemic discrimination, state-sanctioned murder and violence – all there in real time before all our eyes.

Despite this, our Caribbean region, whose peoples have been collectively victimised through historical antecedent by the issues frontally addressed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights has been slow to consider recognition of human rights as being the stuff of official instinct and habit.

Witness active resistance to the notion of all rights as an entitlement of all people. Our countries neither officially nor informally recognise such a truism.

Had the contrary been the case, current attitudes toward the LGBT community, migrants, reproductive rights, freedom of expression, and the rights of the vulnerable among us would have been settled matters of public policy and life.

It would have also helped us come to terms, far less painfully, with current regional and global developments that require an understanding of territorial integrity especially as it relates to the rights of inhabitants, deadly aggression at times of illicit collective punishment, discrimination on account of race and ethnicity, and the more stringent application of civil and political rights as preconditions to the achievement of economic, social, and cultural rights.

We could have told there would have been this difficulty with countenancing such difficult terrain. There is a sprinkling of special interest activism but too few national umbrella organisations in our region (I think our Bar associations should lead this, but they don’t) to capture these obligations within the context of developmental objectives.

The Sustainable Development Goals provided important pathways to understanding the connections, but our countries have not yet taken the hint. For example (and I raise this yet again), SDG 16 speaks to the promotion of “peaceful and inclusive societies” for sustainable development through “access to justice for all”.

A key target (16.10) promotes public access to information and the protection of fundamental freedoms. The Global Forum for Media Development, of which I am a part, put up a stout fight to have this target expressed. Caribbean countries (not T&T so far) have also signed on to the Escazú Agreement on access to information and public participation in environmental matters.

I am unaware of a single political organisation in T&T that put Sunday aside to remind their devotees about these things. Additionally, how many sermons in holy places addressed them?

It seems to be hardly a necessary annoyance at this time to let people know that there are terrible things in the world today that could have been so much different had people resolved to convert rights into durable habits of human conduct.

Edward Baugh speaks on Passages

 

LAUNCH OF WESLEY GIBBINGS’ PASSAGES

(The Observer Board Room, 31 May 2019)

 

Prof. Edward Baugh reviews 'Passages'

The title of the book is Passages.  Since that isn’t the title of a particular poem in the collection, we try to guess where it is taking us, for the word may have various meanings.  As we read, we find that most of the poems deal, in different ways, with comings and goings, sometimes between one person and another, grappling with the idea that these relationships are never fixed or conclusive.  The situation is one of moving towards, of passing, of passing by, of moving away, of inconclusiveness, of ending, of endlessness.

 

So, in “Shadows,” “the shadows born one day ago / are hunting lights, / the forms that put them there / long gone / behind a spaceless sky.”  In “That Time Has Come,” the persona tells us that the “time has come,” presumably to arrange for departure:  “We have waited long enough / The tide has turned / The ship is in.”  He will put his house in order, rearranging the books of poetry on his bookshelves.  “The time has truly come / For old diaries with blank, unturned pages / City streets with tired feet / To flee the frame.”  In “In the End,” “the streets are bare / we greet each other / with knowing, lonely / eyes // And we say goodbye.  Goodbye. / Goodbye.”  The poems make us think; they tease thought.

 

Here is “The House:”

 

              It was a house

              Of many absences

 

              Dust settled on her bed

 

              Outside, the green of mountains blue

              Inside, the shadowy dim of things we knew

 

              I met you here

 

              This empty house

 

              Echoes spliced between silence and quiet

              Nothing etched with nothingness

 

The first poem in the book is titled simply “The Poem,” and it may be read as a prelude, speaking to and for each poem, prefiguring the mind-frame and drift of the collection.  The poem, in its way a love poem, shies away from making any great claim for itself, from conclusiveness, from elation.  In the process, it advances the necessity of moving on, of leaving, of being left:   “I would prefer that you hold / the page to your heart / upside down / and read it once / and put it away,” “and walk away, / slowly, as if on forbidden ground.”  “Just hold the damn poem / in your hand / and read word by word / and just throw it away / and leave it there.” The idea of passage, of passing is being engaged:   “How good it would be / if you read it aloud / so the words sail away / to never / return.”  The line break after “never” in “sail away / to never / return” prompts a double meaning.  The words will sail away, never to return, but also, the words will sail away to “never,” a place, a condition.

“Every Morning (for Mom)” is a plain-speaking, arresting elegy, which begins: “There was no justice / in her leaving / in the middle of the / Poui’s short hello”, and ends, “This morning / I wait for you again / I hope / You too wait for me”.

 

In “The Poem,” also, idea is realized in one or two arresting images.  We should “Swallow [the] poem like a pill. / Like the one that ends / a headache on a plane / or speeding minibus / or riverboat.”  Again: “Drink from it like sweet coconuts / in the island sun. / Then burp politely / and walk away […].”  “Exit” ends with “the sound of the ocean’s / Muffled drums / That fade away / In the dying light.”  In “Once it was,” “the insomniac terrier / In the neighbour’s yard / Howled as if the moon / Had landed there.”  In “The Shore of Dying Dreams,” “Near the empty conch shell / where the groping waves cannot reach, / there’s an old shoe. / Sole lost to uneven pavements […].”  Maybe the reader will wish for more such evocative, meaning-pointing imagery.  Conversely, one might feel that the easy, vaguely poetic “dream” could have been a bit more sparingly used.  Similarly, there might have been some pruning of the little rhetorical redundancies.

 

The scene-setting images of small island, beach, waves, sea, ocean locate the collection, and provide a frame and grounding for the dominant themes.  This frame and grounding, for universal ideas, is Caribbean.  In the middle of the collection we come to a few poems that are set in the Caribbean and the wider Caribbean.  They shift focus from the personal and inter-personal, to the social, the public, the historical, the people, thereby widening the interest of the book.  “River Story” seems to be set in the Guyanese interior and to address ethnic interface in a manner that suggests the surrealism of the Guyanese novelist Wilson Harris.  In “Bartica Dreams” we are still in Guyana, in the town of Bartica, at the confluence of the Mazaruni, Cuyuni and Essequibo rivers, gateway to the interior and to the gold and diamond mining areas.  The poem is a response to the Bartica Massacre of 2008, when a gang of criminal gunmen entered the town by boat, murdered twelve citizens and wounded several others.

 

The terror of guns is also central to “Red House Fears” and “Of Haiti And Other Wars.”   The Red House is the popular name of the Parliament building in Port of Spain.  In July 1990 a group of insurgents stormed the building and took captive the Prime Minister and members of his Cabinet, holding them hostage there for six days until the uprising was quelled.  The insurgents killed seven persons, including Mervyn Teague, an employee of the Government Broadcasting Unit and colleague of our poet, who writes: “angry, bursting bullets and angry tears . Mervyn loved it here […].”  Again,

                            

angry, crying bullets, rage and fury –

                             have they died?

                             have we died and, rising

                             with the sound of trumpets,

                             are left with Paradise unfolding?

                             I think not.      

 

 

“Of Haiti And Other Wars” evokes the complex spirit of Haiti’s history of struggle, resistance, loss, oppression and deprivation.  It begins:

                             Dark soldier at attention near the sea

                             A tear, like sudden blood,

                             Down sweat and flesh and the teeth of strangers

                             Through bullets and barrels of loaded guns

 

As the book moves toward its close, there is an upswing in tone and point of view.  There is a clutch of love poems, mostly lyrically affirmative, poems such as “At Night’s End,” “Young Lady,” “Tall and Slim and Wonderful,” and “Love’s Revelations.”

I quote:

 

                             There you are, young lady.

                             March, indeed, brings laughter –

                             brings sunny, Maracas kinds of days;

                             glimmering, tumbling waves

                             on little, noisy islands.

                                                          (“Young Lady”)

Or:

 

                             Because at night’s end

                             When your eyes betray

                             Your dreams

                             And your tiny hands reach like

                             Butterflies for the sky

                             I see the sleep rise

                             With mine

                             Above the groans and strains

                             Of waking earth

                                                          (“At Night’s End”)

Or:       

 

                             Listen to me, lady.

                             He does indeed love you

                             in the way the bee finds the bursting flower

                             in the early dew.

                             And like that time

                             before the evening fell

                             like a ripened mango and, startled,

                             he held you close

                                                          (“This Morning”)     

 

The love poems transition into poems about ageing, looking back on the past, dying, departure:

 

                             On the sands of the seas

                             We stand seeing the sunset

                             Melt before our eyes

                             And cry good-bye

                             To our years

                             Of leaping for golden clouds

                                                          (“A Story”)

 

                             … we both now know

                             each day goes faster than the last

                             a clock ticking on the wall

                             like a leaking toilet

                             in the night

                                                          (“Because We Know”)

 

In “When We Die” the speaker, now ageing, recalls himself as

 

                             I who once walked in the hot, melting asphalt

                             Cooled only by crushed pomeracs and dried dog shit

                             And fumbled sno-cones

                             And the old man’s crumpled sweaty frame

                             Awake from drunken, midday sleep

 

But eventually, departure is release, a going forward and upward.  “Come See Me Fly” ends: “Let’s leave / This weary, dying place / Let’s fly away / Let’s live / Let’s just fly and live.”  To end is to ascend; “passages,” again.

 

 

Edward Baugh

 

 

When nothing changes

Seven days after going missing, young Tessa returned home on Sunday to the relief of an entire St Joseph community. A “mixed breed” black and brown dog, wearing a pink collar, her situation was the single most discussed issue on the neighbourhood WhatsApp group for a very long time – including ongoing discourses on crime.

Maybe it’s the algorithms or sheer coincidence, but I also cannot remember as many missing animal reports as were recorded since … you know when. One unfortunate character was arguing on social media that the noise and mayhem were an important part of religious observance. Don’t huff and puff, I’ve heard other denominations with the same talk.

In a community that experiences frequent encounters with non-domestic animals – birds, squirrels, parrots, manicous, iguanas and others, it could not have been roaming hunters alone responsible for their sudden absence for about a week.

In a few weeks from now, we are bracing for the same assaults – long established to be harmful to humans and our natural environment. Then, for yet another 12 months, leaders of politics, religion, business, together with numerous everyday citizens will be declaring: “leave dem nah”.

The fact is, not one single government has been prepared to do what is needed to address the problem – Noise Pollution Rules and Summary Offences Act notwithstanding. “Zero tolerance” thus remains among the more hollow official declarations.

Yes, I will be the sourpuss to keep at this. For, I do not subscribe to the preservation of any ancient or longstanding cultural or other practice that is provably harmful. We have already discussed this in instances of child marriage, corporal punishment, and vigilante justice, among others.

But where else is the dissent? Environmental groups, animal rights activists, and a few stragglers with access to public platforms say the same things at least three times a year. The typical response elevates such practices to approvable cultural practice and tradition.

Where are the politicians invoking regulation and enforcement? The business leaders urging moderation, even in pursuit of profits? Religious leaders preaching a duty of care? The police doing their duty? And community leaders helping people understand the potential for damage and injury.

True, it may well be that a referendum on continued breaches of law and civilized behaviour will fail on the basis of notions of cultural value. So, until this changes, every single year, on more than one occasion, we will hear the complaints of the ill and aged affected by the noise and smoke, and there will be the ritualistic posting of photos of lost pets spooked by the mayhem, and natural flora and fauna cynically disturbed and destroyed. Nothing will change.

Not long from now, mere weeks away, the posters identifying missing animals will go up again around our neighbourhoods, somebody will require more medication or attention for burns, maybe a house of two will be damaged or destroyed by fire, and the letters to the newspapers and radio talk shows calling for more considerate citizens will be in abundance.

Then we won’t have to wait too long for the assurance that something will be done about the situation. We know the drill. A Cabinet item, public consultations, “zero tolerance” etc etc.

Some of us have been around long enough to have heard all of this numerous times from politicians, police commissioners and everyone in-between.

Maybe this will earn mention at forthcoming “crime talks” of the various varieties currently on the table, once the main actors drop the political grandstanding.

At times like these, colleague journalists ought to be busy checking with the various magistrates’ courts on the vast amounts being transferred into government coffers as a result of fines derived from application of the law - $1,000 under Chapter 11:02 and $1,500 under Section 70 of the Summary Offences Act.

Everywhere, in full view of politicians of national and local status, the police, religious leaders, respectable business people, academics, professionals, and lesser mortals such as journalists we could have run informal tallies. In my area alone, the national coffers could have benefitted in the tens of thousands. Some people kept count – but more in order to calculate the cost of idiocy.

I can imagine the ensuing Cabinet discussions. The minister of social development congratulating the minister of national security, the prime minister congratulating the minister of finance.

We can at least dream on – provided we are given the opportunity to sleep of course.

The media literacy challenge

Recent national and global events have stressed the need for far more rigorous private and public examination of what is presented to us as “fact” and “truth.”

This has always been an expected function of media people whose professional scepticism ought, ideally, to routinely guide their conclusions for representation on the respective news and information platforms.

There are a few foundational guidelines that are useful. They include the need for multiple identified sources (both independent and openly biased), accountability and transparency in professional conduct, and a number of other well-established ethical guidelines.

In the private sphere, there are no such professional obligations, but there is a personal responsibility to ensure that information shared with others is as truthful as humanly possible.

Reckless online trolls, partisan surrogates, and sundry mischief-makers typically do not consider themselves bound either by the professional requirements of journalists or even a personal commitment to share stringently verified information.

Nowadays, with pervasive social media, the latter cohort of information-sharers vastly outnumbers those who consider it a duty to be truthful and accurate – to the extent that this is possible within an environment that is not often conducive to the free flow of reliable information.

These are some of the “supply side” components of today’s information infrastructure. You should be able to identify a few other vital elements and even name some of the dominant culprits in your virtual spaces.

In recent years, though, the UN system has promoted a “demand side” approach to managing information flows. Such an approach was perhaps always there in the form of critical-thinking instruction and application – presented in different forms in the education system and resident among the skills-sets of numerous professions and vocations.

You probably witness this at work when you go to the mechanic, visit the dentist, or talk to farmers about their crops. There is an ability to sift a variety of circumstances to diagnose and administer what is required to get their jobs done.

I think that the Media and Information Literacy (MIL) campaign of the UN now being adopted by governments and organisations around the world provides us with an opportunity to achieve a human rights compliant approach to misinformation and disinformation, and other mass communication dysfunctionalities.

The theory is that equipping consumers of media content with an ability to distinguish fact from fiction, and truth from lies, has the potential to greatly diminish the impact of the supply of unreliable news, information, and other content.

This is an important issue to consider especially if we concede that digital content, in particular, will continue to grow and escape even the finest mesh of regulation. Prohibition and regulation are of limited impact.

Through demand-oriented MIL, both direct and collateral social damage has the potential to be avoided, or at least minimised. The lower the receptivity to everything on offer, the greater the hindrance to uninterrupted supply.

This however does not provide a comprehensive shield. So, most defenders of rights agree that the protections currently provided to the subjects of media content, under common law and statute, should continue to apply.

Even the founding principles of free speech, as captured by Article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, identifies duties and responsibilities and with them, widely accepted limitations.

There are lively debates regarding the application of such limitations. This resonates alongside what we have to consider on questions of media and information literacy.

For example, there are important nuances to consider when it comes to things such as defamation, threats to national security, and incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence. There is also the principle that addresses the infringement of other rights such as privacy, to cite one example.

This should clear the air among those under the misguided assumption that people who advocate for freedom of expression are somehow envisaging a situation of untrammelled liberty.

In the Caribbean, progress with such an approach has been rather slow. The speed of change in the virtual world has accelerated greatly. The advent of generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) offers solutions but is also laden with serious challenges that test verification processes as nothing else has in human memory.

Whether we like it or not, AI is here to stay and, with it, a more urgent need to achieve much higher standards of media and information literacy – challenged as we already are in the area of functional, traditional literacy.

Regulation and prohibition won’t do the job. We have to hold this by the reins as societies and not evade responsibility for making the necessary change as a collaborative effort involving all concerned, including and especially our young people.

Our Wounded Nations

The shadows of past traumas hovered low but tamely when Grenada launched one year of 50th independence activities in the runup to February 7 observances next year. It was however instructive that Prime Minister Dickon Mitchell appeared unafraid to acknowledge some key challenges of history.

He noted at the launch, for example, that the National Organising Committee (NOC) had chosen the scenic Carenage in St Georges for the occasion - a location that was significant because it had seen, in the life of the country, “the best and worst times of Grenada.”

In addition, the event had been initially planned for October 19 - the 40th anniversary of the deadly end of the 1979 revolution. This saw the assassination of Maurice Bishop and other senior operatives of the People’s Revolutionary Government (PRG).

The organisers were promptly forced to rethink this plan and October 31 became the new date for the launch. October 19 is now National Heroes Day.

True, there is always awkwardness in recalling certain features of history. The October 19 anniversary of the tragic events of 1983, for example, is too long ago for too many to remember first-hand (the current median age in Grenada is just over 31), and too recent for many of us to escape the dense mist of proximity.

I once questioned Bernard Coard, now resident in Jamaica, about the degree to which his book The Grenada Revolution – What Really Happened, can be competently challenged by people who were there and can lay claim to knowledge of well … what really happened.

Late leader of the People's Revolutionary Army, Hudson Austin, also had a lot to say in a 2021 interview with journalist George Worme. Much of it would alarm you.

Excerpt of George Worme's interview with Hudson Austin

Mitchell’s apparent awareness of such undercurrents belies the fact that when Eric Gairy was peacefully overthrown in 1979, the current Prime Minister was just one year old. In 1983, when the revolution imploded, he had reached his fifth birthday on October 8 – 11 days before the dramatic events.

Yet, by citing the leader of Grenada’s “first revolution”, Julien Fédon, and the integrationist ambitions of T.A. Marryshow, the Prime Minister displayed an understanding of some of the dynamics worthy of capture in observance of the independence milestone.

Surely, upon revisiting Marryshow, it would not be inconceivable to witness the return of a Caribbean Court of Justice referendum during this period of reflection. As part of a 2018 plebiscite on a new constitution, the CCJ did not successfully cross the line. Why not give it another try?

Caribbean leaders, including at its start former T&T Prime Minister Basdeo Panday, were of the view that full CCJ status as both a court of original jurisdiction on matters of the Treaty of Chaguaramas and as a final court of appeal had the potential to “complete our independence” as Caribbean states. Grenada should permit itself this kind of opportunity on its 50th.

It would meanwhile be a grave mistake for us to ever start believing that what happened in Grenada between 1979 and 1983 and its experiment with illiberal democracy is/was of only peripheral importance to us in T&T.

By the time we faced the terrorist attack of 1990, there ought to have been a measure of acquaintance with the embrace of violence and accompanying political aberration.

The scenic Carenage in St George's was chosen as the venue
to launch the celebrations Photo: Wesley Gibbings

There had also already been Grenada, the remarkably bizarre Operation Red Dog in Dominica in 1981, Walter Rodney had been murdered in Guyana in 1980, and A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James provides a brilliant narrative on events in Jamaica in the 1970s and 80s and their products in the 1990s.

For Grenadians, the anniversary of the collapse of the PRG had remained in relatively muted recognition - the kind of wound that is long in healing but to which attention is only paid when pain resurfaces.

It might well be, for Grenadians, that grand plans to observe half a century of political independence will provide opportunities for diagnoses beyond cold historical recall.

In the process, our close neighbour can perhaps help us over here and in the wider Caribbean come to terms with some stark realities that trouble us all too often, and in the process, contribute to healing some longstanding injuries of history.

Jamaica and T&T have crossed 60, we never took the time to do what Grenada now has the chance to consider. The wounds now run deep enough to challenge our options for recovery.

Essequibo lessons

Essequibo lessons

Wesley Gibbings

Current global developments are today contributing to an understanding of how our respective Caribbean countries are obliged to navigate international relations like few other occasions in recent history.

We can spend forever examining the internal dynamics that have spurred alarmingly diverse views, even over here, on the situations in Ukraine, Gaza, and even Haiti.

“Alarming”, perhaps because in today’s world there are countless avenues for the accessing of authoritative information and opinion on global affairs even while we are exposed to an abundance of dogma and ideological shibboleth.

On other occasions we can have a closer look at these three situations that have elicited quite an interesting, if not disturbing, variety of perspectives within our respective Caribbean countries, even in the face of general consistency at official national levels.

We have a university that owes us much more on such questions than has been extended both inside and outside its hallowed, traditionally fortified halls. Principal Rose-Marie Belle Antoine has urged the lowering of the drawbridges. For, this institution is a singularly important portal to greater public understanding of complex issues.

It also remains important to keep our gaze fixed firmly on our own geographical neighbourhood. For instance, the absence of an informed, enlightened Haitian solution persists and this will continue to be the case. Invasion by invitation, of all varieties, appears inadvisable.

But now, and just as urgently … and yet again … Venezuela’s longstanding expansionary ambitions with special emphasis on Guyana’s place in the scheme of things have recently and dramatically re-emerged.

It has always interested me that even in the face of intense, protracted, murderous internecine conflict, Venezuelan politicians have so frequently occupied bipartisan space on the troublesome Essequibo question.

It is hard to find, even among adult Venezuelans being welcomed here, those who do not believe that the land space comprising two-thirds of Guyanese territory is theirs. It’s taught alongside the alphabet at school. There is no argument between competing political parties save for occasional assertions of treasonous compromise.

This must certainly concern regional, conflicted, ‘Chavistas’ who have been inclined to gleefully toe the Caracas line on virtually everything, including the outright violent oppression and neglect that have led to unparalleled migration challenges in our part of the world. They do this even as they embrace a notion of Guyanese fraternity, and tout Caricom ambitions.

Had these people been vigilant on the subject of the Essequibo challenge in the face of Guyana’s social and economic transformation, their unrepentant devotion to fake egalitarian revolution might have taken a deserved turn for the worst much earlier than is currently the case.

Even so, there has been no unequivocal posturing on the subject from the red berets.

That a “Guayana Esequiba” referendum in Venezuela should now be deployed as part of a process of political recovery in the face of electoral threats and brittle political circumstance, tells us a story we should have all been familiar with long before now. Makes me wonder about the state of Caribbean ‘Chavismo’. They must all certainly be in some form of doleful confusion and contemplation.

This, you see, is not about being “left” or “right” or anywhere in the middle. The International Court of Justice will hopefully sooner rather than later determine it as a matter of juridical “right” and “wrong.” Though, even so, Venezuela seems afraid to engage the process.

It is also, significantly, a rare point of political cohesion in Guyana. Two political organisations that have been trading brutal rhetorical punches at each other have met and agreed, as has been the case in the past, that the challenge to Essequibo is a national issue requiring all hands on deck.

Sadly, such a predisposition is not always apparent in our case in T&T. There have been some significant lows. Incomprehensible Opposition foreign policy ‘whistleblowing” and the absurdity of proposed selective, personalised ‘sanctions’ slipped through the cracks of informed public commentary in the age of COVID-19.

Meanwhile, in Georgetown, Aubrey Norton and Irfaan Ali in an extremely rare display of solidarity, shook hands and met, and whatever the smirks across the table, partisan weapons were left outside just for that time. In Port of Spain, there are people who craved sanctions in 2020. There has been little shouldering of arms. Instead, there is the continued emptying of clips even as violence and murder stalk the land.

Clearly, there are lessons to be learned from Essequibo.

 

Sounding the alarm

One sunny afternoon, some years ago, I witnessed raw, sadistic cruelty being delivered upon a small boy of 12 or 13 – about the age of my son at the time. I was in my car, parked and waiting for a friend who was making a delivery in the house opposite.

When I heard the first doleful howl, I thought that a child had fallen from a swing or tree or had been stung by jack spaniards while throwing stones at a ripe mango. The screaming persisted and grew in intensity, so I got out of the car and looked to see what was happening.

I saw a large shirtless man dragging a little boy onto the balcony of a two-storey house delivering heavy blows with a thick leather belt on the head, back, hands and backside of the child.

“Kneel down! Kneel down!” I heard. Then the most alarming instruction as the blows continued: “Now pray! Lemme see you pray!”

At this point, there appeared little for me to do than to shout: “Hey!” at the top of my voice. The startled man looked at me for a split second, then turned quietly and left the child, sobbing and kneeling, hands clasped in fake prayer. I don’t know what transpired after I left.

In that moment, I realised I was teaching myself the lesson of sounding a critical alarm. True, this appeared to be a violent, criminal assault. But which police officer at which police station would have acted on this?

Caning, tapping, giving licks, pinching, and squeezing have long been normalised in the delivery of lessons on “discipline”. My adult son, now an exemplary citizen, never experienced any of this.

No, we have not all turned out right because of licks. We are today a sick, depraved, violent society in part, but not wholly, because of this.

“I got licks and I turned out alright,” we so often hear. Then you look at the speaker and you understand why violence and force are so heavily routinised in everyday human behaviour here. No, sir/madam, you did not turn out “okay”. We have not, as a society, turned out “okay”.

Maybe Prof. Deosaran et al have done the research to find how many current prison inmates routinely received “licks” as children. I strongly suspect that the vast majority have themselves been the victims of such torture and violence.

In fact, much like the Tunapuna child some years ago, I am almost certain that both “licks” and coercive religious practice were standard practice in the households and schools from which these criminals emerged.

Relatedly, I am aware of a current effort to deliver “values training” at a selection of denominational schools, as a complement to “religious” education. Hopefully, the former completely replaces the latter. More of this as the project unfolds. But the developers of this programme appear to be on to something.

But back to the most common form of domestic violence and its contribution to criminal conduct. Nobody has been sounding alarms of any kind because almost everybody is certain nothing wrong is taking place. But no. We have not all turned out “okay” despite the fact that there has been no shortage of licks, church, temple, and mosque.

There are politicians today, who have received licks and pray every day, advocating more violence to counter violence. There are holy folks delivering verdicts of death upon people whose gender identity is not in compliance with their belief systems. Death, metaphorically or not, as an ultimate consequence.

This, of course, is not to say that we line up like sitting ducks. We are individually and collectively entitled to defend ourselves – though we are these days witnessing from close and afar a version of “self-defence” that is disproportionately deadly.

Through all of this, we find children – victims of every conceivable form of human wrongdoing. Wars. Combative politics. Forced displacement. Cultural norms, some of which are glorified as ancient cultural practice – child marriage, female genital mutilation, sexual initiation, human trafficking, and other forms of exploitative violence.

I read journalist, Janelle De Souza’s fine piece on child sexual abuse in last Sunday’s Newsday and wondered about the official records contrasted against silent realities. Those times when nobody sounded an alarm. When people knew … but chose to keep silent.

I also saw the reports about the two east Trinidad toddlers, disheveled and alone. Who paid meaningful attention? Who thought this could have been “okay” under any set of circumstances? Who has been measuring the parlous state of our humanity? Who has been sounding the alarm?

 

What "digital agenda"?

You can also listen to this here:

(Though meant for a Trinidad and Tobago audience via the T&T Guardian of October 11, 2023. It is my experience and knowledge that most of the Caribbean confronts lagging digitalisation ambitions.)

Not that I have been doing word counts over recent years, but I cannot recall a national budget statement with as many mentions of the words ‘digital’ and ‘digitalisation’ as the one we endured last week.

When it comes to such matters, I am probably overdoing it now. But I think it is necessary to keep tabs on where our country is or is not going when it comes to belatedly grasping opportunities before our very eyes that have the potential to dramatically improve the quality of our lives.

Today, we hear elaborate words and stated intentions – both within private enterprise and in the state sector. What are otherwise simple, routine exercises arranged at private levels within minutes on a laptop or handheld device are made to sound revolutionary and trendsetting.

For example, there are 16-year-olds capable of setting up secure online payment systems in the blink of an eye. True, there aren’t the legislative/regulatory bars of a state agency, but if there is this grand design and intent at a supposedly bipartisan level, what really are the real obstacles to getting such things done?

HTML forms are also hardly a mind-blowing innovation anymore. They are much more user-friendly than the PDF forms currently being touted as some kind of epochal, modern marvel by state agencies, but which greatly challenge users who neither have appropriate software for textual inserts and digital signatures or printers/scanners to undertake the arduous task of printing, signing, scanning, and emailing.

There is also the phenomenon that takes us one step forward (online appointments, for example) but two steps backward, such as “proof of residence” requirements that have been causing so many regrets among those of us who opted for online billing for utilities such as telecoms, electricity, and water.

So, yes, print that online bill, travel down to the utility to get it “stamped” and there you go! At WASA, they don’t “stamp”, you pay $11.25 at one window, then sit and wait for a “copy” at another window.

True, there is the convenience of an orderly online appointment system to renew your drivers’ licence (confirmation of which you are encouraged to print!). You download the PDF, print it, and walk with it. There goes the advantage of an online portal with the potential to minimise inconvenience and save paper.

The end product is at least the same amount of paper as before, but now the added inconvenience of the trip to the utility office, together with downloading, printing, and scanning of completed application forms.

Now, don’t get me wrong. As the finance minister suggested while presenting some startling statistics on the number of people and businesses without bank accounts, digital payment systems, or engage in online banking, the financial services sector has simply not done enough to foster sufficient confidence in such conveniences.

Framed as “the financial inclusion landscape”, minister Imbert dropped many jaws when he revealed: “72 percent of businesses do not have a business bank account, 88 percent of businesses do not accept digital payments, and 55 percent of individuals do not now have the knowledge to use mobile or web online banking.”

It is very easy to blame the victims aka prospective customers here. But it is also necessary to calculate underlying causes behind this apparent estrangement between people and the banking sector, in this instance.

It’s a deception, for example, that mechanisation of transactions to replace human contact at the counter, is now reflected in higher fees. For, much like telecoms assets, the initial capital costs are eventually offset by savings on wages, security and other recurrent cost centres.

The implicit message, therefore, is that mechanisation/digitalisation has net negative impacts on customers. Which service provider has reduced its fees because of digitalisation? Why are minister Imbert’s statistics so outrageously accurate?

It irritates many of us whenever we hear talk of a digital transition. One more example: The Environmental Management Authority (EMA) will soon be able to accept online payments (the same process the 16-year-old has now mastered), but what happens with the numerous copies of the same voluminous documents required for submission for transactions such as EIAs and the like?

When such anomalies disappear, only then you can talk boastfully about any “digital agenda.” Until then, people will continue not to trust such talk either from politicians or business leaders. Go find that bristol board vaccine certificate. Download the latest T&TEC bill. Lift that mattress. Find evidence of progress on any of this!

Pan as renewable resource

So, Budget Day and recent stormy winds have passed (for now), and the clean-up has presumably begun. To be sure, we’re not yet in the clear; as if we ever can be – small, exogenously vulnerable, and partially incapacitated by an instinct for self-destruction.

It therefore seems apt at this time to return to the steelpan – a singularly valuable yet elusive route out of current ruts. Pan, not only as music, but as a model for social organisation, prospective route to new forms of economic value, and as national metaphor for the triumph of ingenuity over despair.

To be sure, there is nothing else like it in our space. Such an assertion is beyond rational contestation, notwithstanding prevailing nonsenses in the public space.

For, whatever the vague details of early years and related cultural antecedents, the not disassociated emergence of pan remains an achievement of greater durability than even Walter Darwent’s bold excavations that struck the non-renewable resource of oil in the 1860s.

The steelpan and the official, informal, and other institutions it has produced, find in their human interface, vast value beyond even the beauty of music, steelbands, and industry, which have proven to be renewable assets at each epochal pass.

Others have recorded development and innovation emerging from disciplines such as pan manufacturing, tuning/blending, composing, arranging, performing, and the unmatched social influence of steelbands. Today, however, the prospects for capturing value have grown but are yet to be realised.

I stood in wait of a bake and shark at the Exodus Pan Theatre last Saturday and through the oppressive heat was able to witness young pan students rehearse a closing flourish.

In that moment, there was a promise of tomorrow that’s too easily missed, belying the myth of youth disinterest – measured by too many in measures of mere ticket sales.

Then, on Sunday, at the Birdsong Academy in celebration of his national award, Prof. Clem Imbert stood before a small, invited gathering and testified to his own development as a practitioner of science and engineering and the value such intellectual assets brought and bring to the steelpan as national instrument.

It was the kind of exposition from which books can be composed, and hope may be found amidst compendia of fear about the future.

On Sunday, there was also Birdsong director/manager, Dennis Phillip proposing a time when the music arranger in China would score orchestral parts for pan among the numerous other instruments. Not Bach or Handel or Beethoven in pan, but pan in Tan Dun, Chen Yi, and Qigang Chen, I suppose. Steelpan as a universal instrument.

And why not? Look up the duet of Josanne Francis and Chao Tian – pan and the Chinese dulcimer live from the Mansion Concert Series in 2020. There are folks reading this who can also cite, from memory, any other number of instances where pan occurs in the music of Asia, Europe, and the Americas.

Not that any of this is required validation. What appears needed, at this time, is for tangible expression – official edict or not – of the national status of this remarkable instrument.

It is often mistakenly identified as “the only musical instrument created in the 20^th Century”, but which was actually (and even more significantly, I believe) the only new “percussive” instrument developed during that period.

Let the musicologists argue the fine points and also discuss innovations in traditional instruments that benefited from new technologies that amplified and modified the sounds produced.

Among the current, important challenges of pan remains its untapped intellectual property (IP) value. This is not a unique task, since people everywhere exploring creative industries as a viable economic sector, are engaged in dissecting the potential for “value capture.”

This goes way beyond the instinct to grasp for state largesse or coercive, regulated preference – a contention that resides so heavily behind lobbying for official proclamation.

Ask what is really meant when many rally around the call for official, codified “recognition” and you will find the heavy suggestion of regulated taste and even greater gratuitous official financial flows.

To follow such a path would be to ignore what pan can mean as a renewable, national resource, and how it contains virtually everything needed to transition us from where we are to a new reality led by digital technologies that are increasingly defining parameters between social and economic success and failure.

There was more than a hint of this when Imbert and Phillip spoke on Sunday. They are not the only ones, but they are on to something big here.