Of grief and fêtes

Let me be today’s wet blanket at a time when so many are declaring the redemptive qualities of fetes and revelry in the face of both imminent and actual tragedy and pain.

There is, admittedly, some 1990 T&T and Saint Lucia 2010 PTSD on my part. These were two completely different encounters with death and destruction marked by so-called emotional “safety valves” of different varieties.

I am willing to risk being part of a tiny minority of Caribbean folk not committed to the view that socio-economic and socio-psychological imperatives can provide a level of re-assurance that life may continue “as normal” even after the most atrocious assaults on lives and the quality of life in our tiny states.

In 1990, it amazed me that there had been some boastfulness associated with the fact that people had organised “curfew fetes” and danced long nights away even as bodies lay rotting in some facilities and on the streets of Port of Spain.

Then when Tomas struck Saint Lucia in 2010 and the mountainside came crashing down on Livity Arts Studio and other nearby structures, and bodies were still being excavated from muddy piles, and there was water in hotel swimming pools and none in Castries homes, the Caribbean Tourism Organisation announced that the island was “back in business.”

The string of angry emails to the organisation perhaps cost me some friends and (most likely) participation in future forums with my usual messages of caution about the net value of tourism as a stable, long-term solution to poverty and need.

Colleagues and friends and complete strangers from Caribbean countries (of which I have more than passing knowledge) hate when I meddle in “their” business this way, so I cleave to a few marginal voices expressing caution and care to secure a degree of validation.

For example, accomplished Jamaican journalist and attorney, Dionne Jackson-Miller, took some heavy blows on social media when she attempted to explain why some Jamaicans seemingly avoided the advice of disaster officials on the question of hunkering down at home. She hit an important nail smack on the head.

“So, a lot of people got REALLY upset when I posted that it's easier to talk about staying home when you live in a comfortable home!!!”, was her retort when faced with the accusation that she was implicitly encouraging slackness. She need not have explained more than she eventually did. My own response was that while there were clear dangers associated with the act of ignoring officialdom, there must also be space for some of us to “recognise our own privilege.”

It generated some additional queasiness when Tourism Minister Edmund Bartlett announced on Friday that “Jamaica is open for business and, once again, the resilience of the Jamaican people is on full display … We are grateful that there has been no wide-scale impact to our general tourism infrastructure and our tourism industry is fully operational.”

Some clever social media user juxtaposed photographs of communities picking up heart-breaking pieces following Beryl, and the idyllic promotions of a tourism industry that cannot afford to miss a single revenue step.

Like Saint Lucia in 2010, there is space for a measure of (even contrived) “balance.” If tourism fails, the ability to recover from the annual assaults is substantially reduced. So, we resort to a kind of bi-polarity descriptive of completely different realities within a single space.

In St Vincent and the Grenadines where, if you don’t try to be strong nowadays you would shed tears every single day, post-Beryl, a scaled-down Vincymas proceeded over the weekend and up to yesterday. Here, again, is territory with which I am familiar. But they don’t like you in their business.

One person told me that the same way some people turn to prayer and religious devotion to cope, so too there are people who believe that dancing their sorrows away can help.

I hear this – loud and clear. But I think that these things underpin a significant psycho-social shortcoming. It might be that this is because I am not prone to superstition, and do not easily subscribe to a notion of  socio-cultural “safety valves” of the party kind.

In the meantime, there is also a new generation of cranks sharing voicenotes and social media posts on “geo-engineering,” the mythical connection between earthquakes and hurricanes, and general challenges (in some instances aligned to political preference) to clear scientific evidence that explains more intense weather events.

How is this different from the music cranked high while people pick up the pieces from broken lives? It’s yet another fete in the face of grief and suffering.