De Carnival is Over

Listen to this here:

Eeef you know how allyou does get me vex this time of the year. Results does come een and like it had mad pills in your beer. The people and dem practise hard, hard for months, but quarrel is all you have in your response. The judges and dem try hard to be fair, yet when results reach is like louse run in your hair.

It must have a formula to get rid of this, something that work fast like Phensic or Vicks. Instead you keep kwart and head out Buccoo Reef, you bawling and screaming how the judge and dem t’ief.

Remember the time Machel win the Road March, and was like somebody iron your drawers with cornstarch. Everywhere you did turn was somebody grumbling, or behaving in ways that was extremely disturbing. A man pull a gun for a girl in a bar, a next one kneel down and pray to a star.

Now don’t get me wrong, I know how it can turn, you don’t need a rule book to express your concern. But it would help if you take a lil time, to acquaint yourself with how the rules line by line. The judges come from here and most try to be fair, yet you cussing and vexing like if they don’t care.

A time a man from Grande lose a bet on the pan, he had to run naked all the way Tableland. A next one he say Gypsy go beat them in song, lose all he money and selling chilli bibi in town.

Massy Trinidad All Stars en route to another win

Now some of you must be wondering and saying, that Wes take a drink or still jumping and playing, but oh lord I have now to declare, I can’t take the grumbling about how all things unfair.

Pan remains the greatest thing we does do, better than everything else we pursue. Whether is oil or gas or financial affairs, everything else does leave we in arrears. Congrats Renegades and All Stars you won our hearts, with excellence in the practice of musical arts.

XO we love you and for you it was hard, but coming third didn’t mean you were bad. BJ, Khan and Ainsworth you worked like a team, and this year’s arrangement soared high like a dream.

Not taking anything from Duvone or Smooth, to do that would be mindless and rude. These two genius have no limits on talent and skill, obligations to their great bands they always fulfil. I followed their arrangements from the prelims, the songs grew new torsos, organs and limbs, crescendos and flourishes melodious rifts, such wonders contained in your musical gifts.

Bp Renegades reaches 13 wins with this tie

Now that the storm has ended and calmed, and soon everybody will be waving a palm. Doh quarrel and fight about who win or lorse, collective creativity will always be boss.

On this quiet Ash Wednesday we know, we have a whole nation to nurture and grow. Pan, kaiso, street theatre and mas, a whole nation does be audience and cast. I was never a fan of much of this, outside of pan which brings so much bliss. But we can do all without being drunken or high, or believing in miracles that come from the sky.

We live in a place where love and imagination, is more than the passing tide of an undeclared vacation. For the rest of the year, the pans won’t go quiet, for music is something with a limitless diet. The kaiso need work and the mas’ could be better, a new Minshall can come and be the trendsetter.

Republic Bank Exodus - third

Ditto the kaiso that has started to move, in a direction to show that it can improve. New Machel, Karene, Chucky, Mical and Helon, lyrics and music sweet like a ripe melon. Actually, I prefer MM this style, so I haven’t paid attention in quite a while. How much jump and wave and wine you could make, when there are forms that nice like a hot shark and bake?

All ah this make me resort to couplet and metre, de Carnival fare was so much better and sweeter. I wasn’t there with scant clothes in the street, yet this was more than who did or did not compete. Now on this Ash Wednesday there is much work to be done, the real answers to which was a part of the fun.

Let’s do this!

Carnival defiance

Last weekend provided a good opportunity to sample, in small and large bits, the contradictions of a country said to be under siege from violent crime and social conflict, and the offerings of people bent on defiant creative expression through it all.

The one thing you realise when doing so in T&T is that those intent on challenging the odds do not comprise a marginal, monolithic minority. It seems that for as many who have yielded to fear, there are numerous others interested in claiming earned doses of freedom.

This is, perhaps, the spirit of “Kambule” as expressed by poet Pearl Eintou Springer – a veritable battle of wills between the mighty and the small that has found common metaphorical cause among all of us.

We should know that two Carnival days do not by themselves constitute the most important features of the season. No, “everybody” does not play mas’.  “Everybody” does not like soca and fete. And, though I cannot understand why, “everybody” is not into pan.

Maybe it is that the whole of these divided loyalties surpasses the sum of the variety of discrete, not always harmonious parts. Bits and pieces that somehow coexistent as in an expanding fragmented yet cohesive universe – as my astrophysicist niece Zahra would probably put it.

So, my friends and colleagues all know I do not like Carnival fetes. The music is too loud, and all the soca songs sound the same to me. Yet, there are sensible people who partake.

I also happen to believe that the share of nonsense lyrics and unoriginal music at calypso competitions has always vastly outstripped anything of value – so when they were on competitor number 150, or whatever, at Skinner Park last Saturday, I was on a folding chair in a panyard in the open air not listening, though I tried earlier.

Sure, there has been creative genius along the way, but I am also not keen on most of mas’ and never aspired to be a part of it – save for teenage Jab Jab in Curepe.

I am aware of existential value, though, and would never attempt to diminish the importance of such things. As a fledgling watercolourist I recognise colour and light and movement. The best costume designers can employ all these conditions to tell valid stories.

These are some personal contradictions of mine. You probably have yours too. You may, for instance, do not believe that pan is the greatest thing we do in T&T. That its role in musical expression, social organisation, and economic potential is the stuff of fanciful myth.

So, on Sunday, for me, it was the Medium Band final in Tobago, on television.

Some of you probably missed the fact that pan arrangements have crossed epochal points of excellence at the hands of a new generation of musicians. That for young Kersh Ramsey from Black Rock, Tobago, who arranged for repeat winners Katzenjammers, there is no turning back.

That, at one time one of his mentors, Duvone Stewart, was that “brilliant young man” who was bound for greatness. Preach nonsense about youth disinterest in pan!

So, that was it for me on Sunday. But, on Saturday, I did have the chance to do three Carnival things. First stop was to check in on artist Jackie Hinkson’s Carnival murals in St Ann’s, which was still under construction.

I recalled at the height of the COVID19 lockdown (I think it was 2021) a young lady I know parked her car, put on a costume, and chipped, chipped by herself along Fisher Avenue alongside masqueraders and various Carnival characters frozen in place by Hinkson. She was not to be chained!

Then, when I left Fisher Avenue, I heard music at the Savannah where the Red Cross Kiddies Carnival was wrapping up. No fan of mas’ per se, but a huge supporter of anything positive to do with children, I raced over to the Savannah with camera in hand.

There is an element of child sufferation at such events that turns me off, but there was also a sense of pride and joy on the faces of the children whose parents and guardians had not already whisked back home.

The only thing left to do when I left there was to find myself in the idyllic Supernovas panyard in Lopinot. I had by then noted that everywhere people were not yielding. The defiance of Carnival’s early, indigenous origins was clearly in evidence. There was a liberation being pursued. Defiance, and the hope that drives it. Let’s see what the rest of this brings.

 

A Developmental Bottleneck

For me, what is remarkable about UNECLAC’s study on the impact of chronic road traffic congestion in T&T has been the virtual absence of sustained public outrage at the economic loss and psycho-social injury.

Instead, we have had the typical rote responses of public officials, business organisations, and politicians that have all sounded as patchy as the roadworks regularly on display. Then Carnival competitions began in earnest, and the rest of us forgot all about it.

An assessment of TT$2.26 billion in economic loss – 1.37 percent of GDP – and the evaporation of over one month of productive time is significant enough to merit more than passing attention. Just a reminder, and for contrast, even with new thrusts in food production agricultural output remains at just about 1.5 percent of annual GDP.

ECLAC also notes that its online survey of “social impressions” was conducted over the period June 20 – September 26, 2023. This means that school holidays, which usually provide an ease in traffic, and which in 2023 spanned July 7 to September 4, had to have been captured as a positive measure.

Could be all of this was considered. But I have the feeling that the traffic problem is actually worse than is reflected in the study. There is also an impact on our dignity that easily escapes the grasp of social research, even when assessing anger, frustration, and feelings of hopelessness.

For example, there is a small depression, let’s call it a small “hole” along the northbound section of the Southern Main Road in Curepe, near the OTB establishment. Once you’re free from the traffic lower down, at the fancy intersection with the Churchill-Roosevelt Highway, you can drop your guard and unwittingly take aim at the hole near the shoulder. It has been this way for years.

My son and I once witnessed a near violent crime when two hole-dodging drivers came out of their cars with murder on their minds over a tiny scratch on one of the vehicles.

It’s not irrelevant to the ECLAC study. There is considerable attention to the public policy implications of its findings. Fair enough. The buck probably stops at several points and public policy is one.

Widening and re-routing provide only temporary relief. People with fancy vehicles are also wont to declare the presence of “too many cars on the road” without offering a solution that includes a formula for determining who gets to keep their cars and who should be required to dispense with or suspend use of theirs.

Policy implications and conclusions recorded by the study focus heavily on public transportation services “including strategies to make public transportation services more accessible and attractive to commuters.”

Impressively, this suggestion is tempered by concerns regarding public safety, and the need to provide complementary “paratransit” services, ostensibly for people with disabilities and those who require off-route transits.

There is mention, as well, of the obvious, workable option of “telecommuting … to reduce the need for physical commuting especially among the professional categories of workers for whom this may be feasible.”

Now we’re talking. But this runs so afoul of current official and public culture that we may have to leave this for the next generation of public service and business leaders – lessons of the pandemic notwithstanding.

In any event, remedial measures are in most cases long-term. The ECLAC researchers remained conservative on the question of “better spatial planning” by restricting their concerns to annual and/or seasonal events.

There is clearly a need for a far more revolutionary approach. I remember discussions about this decades ago under the banner of “decentralisation.” Should local government reform in its truest sense occur, it would be natural to envisage the main cities, boroughs, and towns being disburdened from hosting central government offices and operations.

Admittedly, some of it has been happening over the years. The Ministry of Agriculture is now in Chaguanas. Passport offices now span more locations. But what are the ministries of Labour, Sport, Tourism, Rural Development, and Community Development doing in Port of Spain?

This is how governments can lead the way. But how can the private sector and other employers contribute? Telecommuting is on the menu, but so too other measures that can help transform the world of work.

All the while, and not that this should be of any comfort, but we aren’t the only ones confronting this massive monster of traffic congestion in the region.

Jamaica and Barbados are right alongside us, and in some ways even worse. They too can benefit from an ELAC reality check, even if life continues as usual beyond the initial headlines and soundbites, and this developmental bottleneck persists.

 

Reform Infatuations

Like so many other laymen with an interest in this sort of thing (and some experience with navigating it in associated fields), I have been paying close attention to recent, revived interest in the need to reform elements of our national constitution, ostensibly to bring the document in closer alignment with contemporary needs.

There have been peaks and troughs in wider interest over the years, and this phase too shall pass. So, let’s at least try to leave a better imprint this time around.

Public interest is sporadic even as those with vested interests, through advocacy of one kind or the other, persist in advancing both specific and general manifestations of national values.

The experts acknowledge that constitutions have as much to do with national aspirations and values as they have with application of law.

So, it’s fine for regular folks to provide broad expressions of concern and to propose changes more in keeping with what they see as necessary to move from one developmental point to the next. There won't be instant unanimity.

So, prompted by yet another wave of public interest, the Prime Minister has gone so far as to appoint an “advisory committee” headed by former House Speaker, Barendra Sinanan, and including an impressive mix of public figures, to formulate terms of reference for another national consultation on reforming the constitution.

Nothing wrong with that, though some are already declaring the effort’s redundancy in the face of a variety of starkly under-developed ideas on how the country can function better on the basis of constitutional principles.

The late Basdeo Panday, for example, can be credited posthumously with the current project because “constitutional reform” was a refrain that frequently bore his trademark eloquence.

Yet, I have never encountered, in his case, the kind of rigour required to convert generalised, fanciful intention into tangible language to inform serious review.

What, specifically, would be needed in the language of our collective statement of values to correct democratic deficiencies, address systemic faults in the hierarchy of governance, and generally render the preamble, rooted in human rights, an essential constitutional pillar?

Identifying technical prescriptions would have been useful. For example, drafters would have had great difficulty identifying the specific features of a system of proportional representation to address this notion of all-inclusive governance.

There are several models. Right here, within Caricom, there are examples to be found in Guyana and in Suriname. They operate systems of PR and have unicameral legislatures. Yet, even so, there are recurrent arguments, in these countries, focused on the entrenchment of privilege regarding different groups.

In neither case, has there been a minimisation of political conflict and alienation. Nor has there been the kind of consensus-based decision-making to distinguish these two neighbours from the rest of us where “winner-takes-all” is the order of the day.

Notions of “power-sharing” are also quite elusive by way of actual models.

Indeed, the option to explore unique pathways to such an arrangement in our case was rejected a least three times, (albeit bearing different features) – in 1986 with a 33-3 electoral outcome, in 1995 when the DAC held the balance of power following a 17-17 split, and in 2001 with an 18-18 outcome.

In the latter case, “power-sharing” options emerged in different forms but were rejected outright by all the key players, including advocates of such a condition.

It was then proven that it is the practice and habits of politics and not constitutional dictat that are the most influential factors in moving away from the current malaise.

Helen Drayton’s important column last Sunday also questions the effectiveness of reform under a variety of circumstances through which official, societal, and political behaviour are more likely to engender changes in circumstances. Go back and have a close read. Constitution reform is no miracle cure.

On a not unrelated note, what of the Caribbean Court of Justice? Mr Panday went on record to describe it as a vital building block toward the achievement of true independence as Caribbean states. It is one by-product of a revised Treaty of Chaguaramas frequently paraded before us as an international pact to which we voluntarily and boastfully subscribed.

How come the required changes to implant the CCJ as our final court of appeal, are not a part of our constitutional setup? We now have an attorney general who once expressed strong support for this, and a revered leader on the other side who gave it high ratings in its developmental stages.

The fact is, we may well find that those most heavily engaged in calling for reform of the constitution are among the least predisposed to any change. But let’s see how this latest infatuation goes.

 

 

OMG Pan!

Everyone who understands the value of pan to T&T would know how much of a hard sell can be the idea of its unmatched role as a musical instrument, as a model for social organisation, and as a platform for realisation of latent economic value.

On point number one, though, people are fully entitled not to like pan and the music played on it. I get “oh geed” in the eyes of some people I know whenever I talk about a “sweet” arrangement or how pore-raising has been one performance or the other.

Last Saturday, for example, I confessed to having held back tears during the Small Bands Semi-Finals when one particular band played an old Sparrow. I saw similar sentiments on the WACK feed and recalled one COVID lockdown evening of 2021, when a solitary online performance inspired the question from one virtual onlooker: “Am I supposed to be crying?”

Music appreciation is very heavily a matter of personal preference – instruments, treatment, and genres. For example, I have seen bagpipes perform as accompaniment for rap, but must say while I listen to such music, bagpipes do nothing for me.

Last Friday, I wowed over the abilities of a random assemblage of musicians at a jam at the Ethnic Jazz Club. Jazz does it for me.

I also frequently argue with my musician son about the vast superiority of Tupac over anything produced by any modern exponent of rap. He was brought up on Rachmaninov, Curtis Mayfield, Fela, Kitch, Tupac, and Barry White.

So, yes, pan’s value as a musical instrument playing a vast variety of genres can be the subject of emotional interpretation; though we also need to consider matters related to its unique origins and its suitability in conveying indigenous aesthetics.

Even so, I am completely against legislated taste and do not agree with some of the mandatory requirements of music airplay and education being proposed – “national instrument” or not. This amounts to a measure of jingoistic coercion that is never helpful.

As a counterpoint to such a situation, there have been other nonsenses, including reference to at least one other instrument. But not today. Not I.

On point two, it is much more difficult to dispute steelband organisation – the role of the panyard in particular - as being among the more important instruments to address much needed social transformation.

The “oh geed” types who will not be found semi-conscious around a panyard won’t know what I am talking about, neither would those who link pan and panyards with a notion of collective ethnic failure.

The panyard is a unique and special place. Real steelbands employ such spaces for the inculcation of values associated with discipline, production, and tolerance.

Then comes the part I have written about repeatedly – the significantly untapped economic value of pan and all its various elements. The list of opportunities is long – from steelpan manufacturing, to tuning, to arranging, to audio engineering, to design, to playing. There is a growing number of people, groups, and bands who have recognised this and now play active, income-generating roles in other countries.

We have long passed the stage where we focused on ill-advised protectionism even as we allowed intellectual property value, in earlier manifestations, to elude us. The world already knows the correct size of the rubber! They also know that, in T&T, we have the best players on the best pans, playing the best music (of both the past and present) by the best arrangers in the world.

On some such matters, I am not overly troubled. Young people are indeed “into” pan and can carry the torch. Perhaps not at ticket counters or jersey sales, because there is more to “participation” than that. There isn’t a single musical instrument competently played and appreciated (beyond classroom requirements) more than the pan. The impact of this exceeds the esoteric value of music.

It has been this way for a very long time. Young people do not routinely transfer to seats in the stands after they have learned to perform, but many do. This was already the case 40 years ago. Some also move to different instruments and other genres – the marvels of music already infused through pan.

The so-called seasonal nature of pan has also long been addressed. Pan people know the bands that play meaningful socio-cultural roles outside of Panorama competitions.

Sceptical? Check out ongoing Junior Panorama preliminaries, Small, Medium and bands. Visit a panyard. Tune into the online platforms. “Oh geed” can become a precious OMG moment. I dare you.

I see things

So, most of us have made it to 2024. Happy New Year! Last week I threatened to convert the Caribbean public affairs focus of this column into a space to which you turned for advice on love, jobs, the weather, pet care, the best curry mango, and fireworks.

We had had thick Sahara Dust last week, you see, and the neighbourhood animals were psyching themselves up for the usual assault from humans who consider loud noises capable of delivering some form of sadistic/masochistic happiness.

I spoke then of this ghostly, floating, human form I took for a late friend and colleague and literary gem who did not make the crossing beyond 311223. BC routinely imitated former Miami Herald columnist Robert Steinbeck’s annual predictions column.

The great bald one had even included some amazingly accurate predictions of his own (with some moderate adjustments including the names of people, places, and times for greater accuracy). For example, he would predict things like: Today, a man in north Trinidad will enter a pharmacy before noon with a prescription to address a lingering hangover from Sunday night’s revelry.

Then, when recording such a remarkably accurate prediction, he would insert the name of a friend he had taken to the pharmacy. Sometimes, he would also count on people forgetting what he had predicted and post-facto report on the success of what he recalled was a wild guess.

All fun and games until you notice that the last Play Whe mark of 2023 was “spider” (33). I would have lost at least $5 on that draw, since I only play “12” whenever I remember that I can get rich off these games of chance.

By the way, my number did not play on Boxing Day (even though it signifies “king” and there is no Play Whe on a Sunday or “holy” day because gambling is a sin unless the government says otherwise). Late prime minister Patrick Manning once announced to collective horror that he planned on outlawing all forms of gambling. Three years later, his party spectacularly lost a prematurely declared election. Just saying …

But, back to “spider.”

If you did physics at school you must know that either real or imagined spiders (including those that find your sleeping face in the night) can mean both good and bad things. Trinis typically believe that if you see a spider in your house (a brown one … not a pink or blue one) it means that you will win the Lotto and have enough money to light up the entire country in fireworks next festive event.

In some cultures, though, spiders bring only poor luck, especially if they rest on your face at night. This basically ensures that you’re not going to make it to the Lotto ticket booth. The South-East Asians, and others, minimise such a risk by roasting and serving them lightly salted and peppery at street markets. Tip: Avoid roasted tarantula butt at all costs.

So, “spider” played on 301223, and this means that we can expect a mix of good and bad. I hope you took pictures of the fruit punch bowl, because all of it would have been right there before your very eyes. As a longstanding teetotaller (nope not even rummy black cake), I keep my eyes wide open when confronted with a fruit punch bowl. I am aware that genuine psychics also use cards left hanging around after games of All Fours – by looking at the Jack cross-eyed and for long enough. Everything appears magically.

Last year, for instance, I predicted that a stubborn pothole along Abercromby Street in St Joseph some of us had given a name because of our intimate familiarity with it (I called it “Rohan”) would have been patched with a loose amalgam of oil sand and pitch and fought back with all its might to return within weeks to claim more rims and front ends.

For 2024 – because I looked cross-eyed into a rain puddle that had accumulated in a pothole along Gordon Street in St Augustine – I saw water leaks undermining roadways and WASA-like interventions that temporarily stem the waterflows but leave undercarriage crushing humps and sharp tyre-busting gravel.

I also saw traffic jams and confusion on main roads and highways. A puddle in Arima told me this. Then, elections. I saw elections coming in 2024 when the sun reflected off a poster on a San Fernando rumshop wall at an angle that made me squint and see shadowy things.

In fact, Bunglee Bungler comes up against Thomas Crook for the presidency of the Hapless Suckers Sports and Cultural Club. On 311224, I will tell you who I saw as the winner. I promise.

The advice columnist

 

Last Sunday, I was reading the newspapers (I get hard copies on weekends because I am old-fashioned and they’re seriously handy with the mosquitoes) in my patio. My cat, Oreo, was fighting me for space on my footrest (I keep my feet up while reading the newspapers in case I see a deal I missed at the supermarket and feel like kicking myself), when I started feeling the effects of the weatherman’s Red Sahara Dust Alert.

Oreo, who was born black and white, and is a girl with a boy’s name (I explain to people that having been spayed, she/it can be called “Michael” if anyone wanted to) started looking grey and brown. I blinked and blinked, but there she/it was – grey and brown Oreo - nonchalantly licking her/its nether parts while I tried to blink away emerging illusions.

But the dust won’t go away. Then I saw before me a rising mist above the brown and purple cherry tree, and an emerging figure – short, baldheaded, earrings, and with calves the size of pregnant cows. “BC dat is you?” I asked. No response. Only this ghostly figure hovering and backdropped by a bunch of struggling dou doux mangoes.

I had just read one of the most absurd newspaper columns about Xmas and had refreshed my Blue Mountain coffee. I gulped it all in one go. Then I heard this voice: “You! Yes, you … not the cat!”

“Me?” I heard steupsing. “Yes, you.”

Now, coffee can be a rather powerful drug. Following a talk by “ministry of education officials” on the evils of illicit drugs at QRC 50 years ago, some of us dried ti-marie bush for days before cutting, wrapping, and smoking it. But there was this one guy who tried sniffing the fumes from roasted coffee beans. He ended up with one GCE pass. One. Think about that.

But this was not the coffee. I actually heard a raspy voice from above the cherry tree. Oreo paid no attention - one leg in the air (as if she didn’t care) and her/its tongue diligently committing the grossly unspeakable.

“You,” went the voice, “like too much bacchanal! Effective immediately, your column shall be used to help people address everyday needs.”

“But Master (I couldn’t think of another title … though “Bro” might have worked), aren’t there important matters of wider public concern to be addressed? Ethnic cleansing? The murder of babies and children? Geo-political intrigue? Ineffective governance? Climate change? Religious hypocrisy?”

“Shut up!” Oreo paused mid lick. I heard the chicken go “cluck cluck” before running away (I have a chicken, it appeared out of nowhere a few months ago with a youngster who has since mysteriously gone missing).

“Effective immediately, an advice column shall be published every week in this space.”

“But, but.”

“Shut up!”

“For instance, here’s someone who needs real help. There’s this guy who thinks that a ban on using fireworks and busting bamboo in his neighbourhood at this time of year is in violation of his human rights. Advise him!”

Oh, that’s easy. “Dynamite. Inside the guy’s house. Clear out the women and children first. Then wait for the blast. Let the neighbourhood kids with their puny sparklers take that!”

“Umm. I don’t think so. Let’s try another one. A thief has just cleared out a family’s fridge (ham, turkey, pastelles gone!) and run away … belching and laughing loudly. They suspect he is hiding in their annoying neighbours’ house. These people play loud music late at night and the sickening smell of cooking oil hangs in the air for days.”

“Simple. Dynamite. Two sticks. That should smoke him out!”

“But what about the neighbours?”

“Kill two birds with one stone. It’s probably not their property anyway. Get rid of the thief and the unwanted neighbours in one go. I like this. Give me another problem to solve.”

“Wes, I don’t think this is working out. Maybe we should stick to less complicated matters. Love, perhaps?”

“Yeah. The fireworks of love. What a blast. I can do this. When do I start? Next week?”

“I have an idea. Why don’t you kick off the New Year next week with something on why Caricom remains the only viable regional solution to the full range of developmental challenges in the region?”

“But I thought you said …”

“Hush, my friend. Hush.” At that stage, the dust cloud rose to meet the gloomy clouds. Oreo wanted to use the litter box. I got up and reached for a half-eaten pastelle and a fresh cup of coffee.