Our audacious expectations

My 65–70-year-old cohort emerged around the tail end of the colonial era – a quickie experience that left precious little to non-vicariously stimulate any substantial tabanca as seems to currently be the case.

Our “good old days” occurred post-Marlborough around the time of the assembling of colonial fragments and the setting of early targets.

For us, uncontrived nostalgia relates to efforts at the time of our awakening to come to terms with new responsibilities, the building of self-esteem, and a new kind of social compact.

There was, everywhere, a sense of wrongs to be righted. Bold, new directions to be forged from a developmental crossroads.

Back at Caroni Presbyterian, Grandpa/Headmaster Gibbings   - who had a first-born (my father) by the name of “Arthur Andrew Cipriani” - would assemble us in an ‘n’ shaped structure in the middle of the canefield to speak about “citizenship” and devotion to duty.

One day, artist Mahmoud Pharouk “M.P” Aladdin, then cultural officer in the ministry of education and culture, stood over our shoulders as we drew people and stalks of cane. I cited this experience recently when I exhibited for the first time at the QRC Art Legacy show at NAPA.

Aladdin had published a guide book for teachers called Man the Creator which argued that the arts were central to and not peripheral to the education process.

Grandpa would never frame consciousness in the manner of the irreligious title. He however paid close attention to Aladdin’s work and gifted me a compilation of local writings including poems by the late artist/writer/educator.

Later on, he gave me a copy of The Monstrous Angel – Aladdin’s 1969 collection of poems - which I read alongside Tagore and Naipaul and the Trinidad Guardian.

Aladdin’s efforts, together with Cipriani’s Labour Party creed of “human dignity” had by then echoed from the red concrete corner of the little school in the canefield out to the main road that took us back to Curepe every day.

There seemed to be, in all this, an under-current of deprivation to be addressed, inequity to be recalibrated, inhumanity to be humanised.

One day, somebody “important” visited the school or was nearby and we all held little red, white, and black flags and waved them high and briskly. It had to be Miss Holder (who taught me most of what I know about the English language) who explained the meaning behind the colours far more clearly than designer Carlisle Chang was to later elaborate.

Miss Diane played the piano and we sang “national songs.”

Then, through Grandpa, we heard about “nation building” and “respect” and his version of Cipriani’s “dignity” message – directed at a largely shoeless, rural school population.

These are among the early “independence” memories of some of us: colonialism as an instrument of “man’s inhumanity to man”, and independence a mission to correct this through principles and standards focused on a different kind of future.

So, off I went one day to Queen’s Hall – hair slicked back, seams straight and sharp, and hungry (because we got there too early), reciting The Test of a Man: “The test of a man is the fight he makes,/The grit that he daily shows;/The way he stands on his feet and takes/Fate’s numerous bumps and blows.”

The views of American poet Carlyle Straub (or whoever; people aren’t too sure) were considered appropriate by my grandfather to describe the task at hand for a new T&T.

Grandpa Samuel Gibbings in his later years

Grandpa insisted in his “citizenship” lectures that such was the challenge of the new era. There was nothing shameful, embarrassing, or regrettable about the sights set by a new T&T. We were onstage ‘live’ and proud.

Then came the QRC years whose first chapter opened in Form 1A in September 1970. Against the backdrop of major challenges to an obstinate post-colonial status quo, came the assertion that “better” was there to be acquired.

Today’s nostalgia is thus less impressive through talk of the “good old days” than for the audacity of expectations.

The years after Marlborough were no golden age, and the independence generation was hardly innocent of failure, exclusion, or contradiction. But there was a sense that the future was ours to construct and that citizenship meant accepting responsibility for what we built.

That, more than any remembered song, flag or school uniform, is what remains from those early years: an unfinished promise that a small country with two names could nevertheless develop a common purpose - and that “better” was not merely something to be desired, but something for which we were expected to work. When was that mission outsourced or terminated?