TERMS OF ESTRANGEMENT
Dr. Lester CN Simon
Friends. Antiguans and Barbudans. Countrymen. Open your ears. Antigua and Barbuda is dead. Long live Antigua and Barbuda. The old country is passing away before our very eyes. A new state is coming into being. Ask yourself what it means to be an Antiguan and Barbudan. Ask yourself, because that is all you will do. You dare not answer the question. Not because you do not know the answer. But because you are afraid of the answer.
Well, let me tell you what Antigua and Barbuda means to me. My first sense of belonging to something other than my family, my church, my school and my group of friends came to me at a little corner in my little village of New Winthropes. On the four arms of this corner we had the church, the steel band, the shop and the union hall. I was proud to be a member of the juvenile branch of the Antigua Trades and Labour Union (AT&LU). I was ecstatic when, as a juvenile, I was given the key to open the union hall and attend the big-people-AT&LU meetings. How proud I was to hear a meeting called to order, proceed in order, overcome sprinklings of disorder, and end in order. Yes, it brought order to my wayfaring life. I recall the war between the sacred noise of the church and the profane bedlam of the steel band and how they seemingly settled into some sort of dissonant harmony.
What sense of growing nationalism I had, came tumbling down with the consequences of the fracture of the AT&LU over the estrangement of George Walter and Donald Halstead. In 1968, I witnessed the widespread labour unrest, the demonstrations and riots with the deployment of soldiers and fire trucks. A schoolmate got shot and wounded near Big Church. When I left here in 1970 for university, I was glad to leave. On the morning of my departure, I deliberately walked around my house and told all the plants, trees and animals goodbye and swore they would never see me in this land again. When I returned in 1983, friends from my last 3 years at Antigua Grammar School were so few and far between, I ran and hugged the first one I saw. Where had all the flowers gone?
To me, Antigua and Barbuda means separation. Seemingly, there are more of us outside the state than those of us living here. Historically, we have always been a transit state. Ironically, because of the flood of foreigners that have come in (to replace the flood of natives who have emigrated), we are now seeking more fervently than ever to find our national soul.
The leaders of this country have to understand a simple thing. They cannot cater to foreigners to the extent that natives continue to feel ignored or left behind. Let me say it in ways they can understand and that can be printed in a respectable newspaper. If you are in a relationship with person A, and (for whatever reason) you are courting a relationship with person B to the extent that person A is badly affected, you know what will happen. Person B will be smart enough (hopefully) to realize that the same estrangement between you and person A can happen to them too. In the final analysis, there is no relationship at all. This is where we are in this country right now; in a state of un-relatedness and disinterestedness. Some of us have become so disinterested, instead of using the active, grammatical voice to say we cannot bother, the passive voice saying we cannot be bothered is more suitable, literally.
Moses was born an Israelite but he was raised in Egypt in Pharaoh’s house. One school of philosophical thought says that Moses did not enter the promise land because his nationality was ambivalent. Leaders must understand that foreigners always know their place. When we are foreigners overseas or when foreigners come here, we all abide by this unwritten rule. But the same industry and drive that drive all of us to become foreigners also drive us to take whatever is available, even if that means taking over the whole adopted country or the promised land, unless rules, customs and burning bushes militate against this.
The stark irony that native Antiguans and Barbudans face is that we have to continue to seek to find our national identity whilst we embrace those foreigners who have helped to build this country. Some of them have been more patriotic than our very own. In this regard, natives and foreigners come face to face with an ambivalence that would make the causes of schizophrenia look like a pleasant Sunday afternoon beach picnic. The only way out of this national malady is to continue the healthy debate on what it means to be Antiguan and Barbudan. Natives must be the hypotenuse of this triangular relationship between us, politicians and foreigners. Otherwise natives, politicians and foreigners alike will perish and we will continue to define and redefine Antigua and Barbuda as a transit state.
The alienation of natives living in a transit state is in keeping with the ethos and pathos of our main industry, tourism. Frankly speaking, all this moko-jumbie talk about tourism being everybody’s business is making me sick. Who is everybody and what does everybody do? How can we take away Half Moon Bay from one owner and give it (the whole half-moon) to another? Were we natives born in a taxi or with serving trays and cleaning implements in our hands? The only sensible thing to do is to let citizens of this country (natives and foreigners) buy into it. This does not mean it will be run like some sort of insipid, pepperpot business.
There are successful ways, with the appropriate education and training, to run a hotel or any other business in which the people can invest their money and their pride. And for those who say it will fail, let me remind them of all those brilliant, foreign investors who have failed miserably. The future of APUA will help to define our ability to move from chaos to a new economic order. The rabid inability of two of our brightest and bespoken patriots to agree on the mode, pace and sequence of this transition is top ranking testimony to the lack of a clear, conjoint, pragmatic vision of the future of this transit state.
Imagine therefore my angst when I read in The Daily Observer a few days ago that, “A Cabinet subcommittee will meet with Sir R Allen Stanford …..at which time the billionaire investor will, once again, present his vision for Antigua and Barbuda……The latest meeting comes on the heels of the partial disclosure of the judgment on the Asian Village”.
First of all, my dear good people, let me say to all those jumbie-crab neaga who keep on saying that Antiguans and Barbudans knew nothing about these offshore islands and all of a sudden we are drunk with adulterated, moonshine nationalism, that they miss the proverbial point. The separation between us natives and the offshore islands is the very same separation between us natives and the mainland where we live. Separation is the constitutive, defining culture, the etymology, of Antiguans and Barbudans. Why then do we want to heap further separation on ourselves? The nascent nationalism will be totally extinguished forever.
It cannot be a coincidence that on the same day Stanford was reportedly due to meet with the Cabinet subcommittee, it was announced on Observer Radio that the mental hospital will be upgraded to the tune of 1 million dollars. Not nearly enough money, if you asked me.
Monday, October 8, 2007
An Unfiniished Symphony
THE UNFINISHED LIBRARY
Dr. Lester Simon
I write to associate my name with the suggestion made by Joanne C Hillhouse in The Daily Observer of Wednesday 19 September 2007 that each of us buy a block or whatever we can afford to finish the public library. The unfinished public library is a joke gone too far. A public library is not just a place for reading. We used the old public library on lower High Street over thirty years ago to socialize and chat up each other. We understood that we were in the presence of great men and women whose works and ideas were indelibly recorded and re-recorded when the unique scent of old paper whistled through the air and reminded us to be quiet; to be still and know. We learnt the meaning of silence in a crowd.
Many years ago in Martinique, I was admiring the library so much, someone suggested that I returned at night to see how picturesque it was and the throng of people congregated outside just to admire it and feel good about themselves. I declined the invitation on the grounds that someone would read my mind. Maybe, just maybe, the lack of a public library here, with the equivalent lack of respect for the value of paper, is responsible for all the paper strewn all over the place.
Seriously though, the most important reason for completing the public library is rooted in a very simple but profound lesson we all must learn in a library. When you borrow something, you must give it back for others to use or pay the penalty. Isn’t this what life is all about?
Dr. Lester Simon
I write to associate my name with the suggestion made by Joanne C Hillhouse in The Daily Observer of Wednesday 19 September 2007 that each of us buy a block or whatever we can afford to finish the public library. The unfinished public library is a joke gone too far. A public library is not just a place for reading. We used the old public library on lower High Street over thirty years ago to socialize and chat up each other. We understood that we were in the presence of great men and women whose works and ideas were indelibly recorded and re-recorded when the unique scent of old paper whistled through the air and reminded us to be quiet; to be still and know. We learnt the meaning of silence in a crowd.
Many years ago in Martinique, I was admiring the library so much, someone suggested that I returned at night to see how picturesque it was and the throng of people congregated outside just to admire it and feel good about themselves. I declined the invitation on the grounds that someone would read my mind. Maybe, just maybe, the lack of a public library here, with the equivalent lack of respect for the value of paper, is responsible for all the paper strewn all over the place.
Seriously though, the most important reason for completing the public library is rooted in a very simple but profound lesson we all must learn in a library. When you borrow something, you must give it back for others to use or pay the penalty. Isn’t this what life is all about?
Wednesday, October 3, 2007
The Gospels of John and Simon
The following letter appeared in The Daily Observer newspaper in response to my article. First and Second Corinthians.
Click for enlargement.
The Following reporsents my reply to John, posted the very next day.
Click for enlargement.
The Following reporsents my reply to John, posted the very next day.
Friday, September 28, 2007
Duplicity
FIRST AND SECOND CORINTHIANS
Dr. Lester CN Simon
The good Lord knows I am a wretched sinner and I need all the help and prayers I can get. But I know He must have a good sense of humour. After all, it was in third form at the Antigua Grammar School that Father Brown, in his immaculate pastoral gown, posited that God was the greatest gambler of all to put a naked man and a naked woman in a beautiful garden, with a snake in the grass to boot. It was a long time after third form when I realized that all Father Brown was saying was that life is full of risks, challenges and temptations.
And so, I take no sides in the recent story of the excommunication of the young girl and her mother from the church consequent on the alleged matter between the girl and the pastor. Suffice to say that the good humour of Father Brown and the supreme humour of the Lord visited me with bountiful cackles when I heard the report on the reasons for the excommunication on Observer Radio.
The news was that the girl and her mother were excommunicated because, among other things, they did not seek the solace of the church to solve the matter, according to the first book of Corinthians chapter 6 verses 1 to 20. The chapter starts thus: “Dare any of you, having a matter against another, go to law before the unjust, and not before the saints?” Unfortunately, the family went to the police. In the same expiration (hold your breath), the church is saying that if the girl and her mother continued to make their presence felt on the premises of the church (or words to that effect), the church will seek (wait for it) legal action. What about chapter 1 verse 13 of the very same first book of Corinthians?
Dear Lord, why did you write two Corinthians? One for the family and the other for the church? Father Brown would probably have said: Though I speak with the tongs of men.
Dr. Lester CN Simon
The good Lord knows I am a wretched sinner and I need all the help and prayers I can get. But I know He must have a good sense of humour. After all, it was in third form at the Antigua Grammar School that Father Brown, in his immaculate pastoral gown, posited that God was the greatest gambler of all to put a naked man and a naked woman in a beautiful garden, with a snake in the grass to boot. It was a long time after third form when I realized that all Father Brown was saying was that life is full of risks, challenges and temptations.
And so, I take no sides in the recent story of the excommunication of the young girl and her mother from the church consequent on the alleged matter between the girl and the pastor. Suffice to say that the good humour of Father Brown and the supreme humour of the Lord visited me with bountiful cackles when I heard the report on the reasons for the excommunication on Observer Radio.
The news was that the girl and her mother were excommunicated because, among other things, they did not seek the solace of the church to solve the matter, according to the first book of Corinthians chapter 6 verses 1 to 20. The chapter starts thus: “Dare any of you, having a matter against another, go to law before the unjust, and not before the saints?” Unfortunately, the family went to the police. In the same expiration (hold your breath), the church is saying that if the girl and her mother continued to make their presence felt on the premises of the church (or words to that effect), the church will seek (wait for it) legal action. What about chapter 1 verse 13 of the very same first book of Corinthians?
Dear Lord, why did you write two Corinthians? One for the family and the other for the church? Father Brown would probably have said: Though I speak with the tongs of men.
Saturday, September 8, 2007
Wake Up
IF MUSIC BE THE FOOD
Dr. Lester CN Simon
An insatiable hunger stalks the land. It pangs in the way we talk to, and about, and love, each other; how we dress, walk, drive and park indiscriminately, or engage in conversation in traffic, oblivious of any code of basic manners. The gnawing hunger reflects almost all of the problems we have in school, at work and at play. There is only one aspirin solution to this singular ailment manifesting itself in diverse forms. Every child must be exposed to music from and even before the cradle. This exposure cannot be solely the simple, passive practice of listening to music. It requires learning and mastering a musical instrument.
The single tenor steel pan, also known as the leading pan, is uniquely familiar. If Martians were to take back a single musical instrument that best represents Western music, it would be the single tenor pan. The crux of Western music is distilled in a particular cycle of all 12 musical notes and this pattern is the defining outline of the single tenor pan. We must understand and celebrate our West Indian steel pans and steel orchestra. However, steel pans are not the most portable musical instruments.
Our children must also be taught to play string, brass, woodwind and percussion instruments. School children must own their instrument and be allowed to take them home to engender a sense of responsibility, caring and development. I know of no substitute for playing in a big band or an orchestra, other than longevity itself, to learn all the key lessons that ensure an emotionally rich and rewarding life.
Culture has to be the center of nation building as we define and redefine who and what we really are and what we really mean by culture. The commensurate education, instead of tourism, will perforce become everybody’s business. Tourism and all other industries will naturally follow because we cannot define and manifest our culture without exploring, understanding, developing and welcoming our very own. We can then embrace others as attachments when investments in culture, and music education for all, become the centerpiece of development. This is not an idyllic dream. It was done in Finland after the Second World War according to BBC Music magazine, which also noted that Venezuela’s system of music education for all was lauded by Sir Simon Rattle as the most important thing in classical music anywhere in the world.
There is much useful talk about computer literacy and the dissemination of information technology. We also need cultural and musical literacy. They provide that sense of awe and wonder that ensure our familiar is not taken for granted whilst we marvel at new, shiny things. They lessen our scant respect for nature and humankind and scoff at the occasional, annual, incomplete and half-baked celebrations of our human soul and national conscience. Attention to information technology in cultural isolation will leave us as empty and as emotionally naked, desolate, cold and hard as inorganic, metallic hardware. To embark on information technology divorced from cultural and musical technology is to decimate children into particulate elements.
There is nothing like playing music together to make mathematics and logic, and respect for self and others, come more easily and reside in you forever. If you think this is an idle boast, consider the training required to become a world-class conductor of an orchestra. The conductor is a maestro who understands the music, instruments and musicians and draws the music out of them with the simple sight and sleight of the hand. At the Royal Academy in Stockholm, the cost of training a conductor is more than training a fighter pilot or a surgeon. The contribution to society is priceless. A group in Trinidad and Tobago is making Pan In Education a sustainable business model for music, with impact on innumerable industries and businesses.
Music has its dark side. I almost wept when, in 1998, I heard that the 43 year old master pianist, Kenny Kirkland had died from a heroin overdose. The reasons for the dark side in music are many and varied, but they must be part of music education, as young musicians learn early that actions have consequences.
Music teaching and playing should not be confined to the school. Investments must be at the grass root level with community orchestras funded by government, private organizations and community functions. To this day I deeply regret not taking violin lessons with the village tailor, Mr. Richardson, in New Winthropes when I was a boy. However, I recall the sheer pleasure of listening to our North Star Steel Band practice.
Music afforded me immense joy and fellowship from playing on stage in a jazz orchestra. I will never forget the primal experience of playing my saxophone one Saturday afternoon in a yard in Jamaica in which there were woodwind, brass, double bass and other musical instruments playing and communicating, whilst others were cooking and talking and just being normal people celebrating life. It’s difficult to disrespect your community and your people when they bring you so much joy, peace and satisfaction. Music can make us kinder and gentler or rough and uncouth. The orchestration of music can help us orchestrate our social relationships. There is no beast that music cannot tame. Like time and containing time, music heals.
Adults cannot be left out. There are many adults who are rediscovering the joy of playing a musical instrument and many more are learning for the first time. Music can be humanizing to a fault. A conductor said he sometimes felt embarrassed conducting the music of Gustav Mahler because the music can become so personal, it probably should not be experienced by anyone other than the composer.
It is in the communal, orchestral playing of music by well trained musicians and in the listening and experiencing by a constitutively attentive audience all together in one architectural place that music, with myriad muses for its composing, itself becomes the muse of our existence and the conscience of a nation. The voices of our ancestors, Carib, Arawak, African, European, Indian, indigo and in between must not be left to sing alone, lest, as Luciano Pavarotti would sing, “Nessun Dorma”: None shall sleep.
Dr. Lester CN Simon
An insatiable hunger stalks the land. It pangs in the way we talk to, and about, and love, each other; how we dress, walk, drive and park indiscriminately, or engage in conversation in traffic, oblivious of any code of basic manners. The gnawing hunger reflects almost all of the problems we have in school, at work and at play. There is only one aspirin solution to this singular ailment manifesting itself in diverse forms. Every child must be exposed to music from and even before the cradle. This exposure cannot be solely the simple, passive practice of listening to music. It requires learning and mastering a musical instrument.
The single tenor steel pan, also known as the leading pan, is uniquely familiar. If Martians were to take back a single musical instrument that best represents Western music, it would be the single tenor pan. The crux of Western music is distilled in a particular cycle of all 12 musical notes and this pattern is the defining outline of the single tenor pan. We must understand and celebrate our West Indian steel pans and steel orchestra. However, steel pans are not the most portable musical instruments.
Our children must also be taught to play string, brass, woodwind and percussion instruments. School children must own their instrument and be allowed to take them home to engender a sense of responsibility, caring and development. I know of no substitute for playing in a big band or an orchestra, other than longevity itself, to learn all the key lessons that ensure an emotionally rich and rewarding life.
Culture has to be the center of nation building as we define and redefine who and what we really are and what we really mean by culture. The commensurate education, instead of tourism, will perforce become everybody’s business. Tourism and all other industries will naturally follow because we cannot define and manifest our culture without exploring, understanding, developing and welcoming our very own. We can then embrace others as attachments when investments in culture, and music education for all, become the centerpiece of development. This is not an idyllic dream. It was done in Finland after the Second World War according to BBC Music magazine, which also noted that Venezuela’s system of music education for all was lauded by Sir Simon Rattle as the most important thing in classical music anywhere in the world.
There is much useful talk about computer literacy and the dissemination of information technology. We also need cultural and musical literacy. They provide that sense of awe and wonder that ensure our familiar is not taken for granted whilst we marvel at new, shiny things. They lessen our scant respect for nature and humankind and scoff at the occasional, annual, incomplete and half-baked celebrations of our human soul and national conscience. Attention to information technology in cultural isolation will leave us as empty and as emotionally naked, desolate, cold and hard as inorganic, metallic hardware. To embark on information technology divorced from cultural and musical technology is to decimate children into particulate elements.
There is nothing like playing music together to make mathematics and logic, and respect for self and others, come more easily and reside in you forever. If you think this is an idle boast, consider the training required to become a world-class conductor of an orchestra. The conductor is a maestro who understands the music, instruments and musicians and draws the music out of them with the simple sight and sleight of the hand. At the Royal Academy in Stockholm, the cost of training a conductor is more than training a fighter pilot or a surgeon. The contribution to society is priceless. A group in Trinidad and Tobago is making Pan In Education a sustainable business model for music, with impact on innumerable industries and businesses.
Music has its dark side. I almost wept when, in 1998, I heard that the 43 year old master pianist, Kenny Kirkland had died from a heroin overdose. The reasons for the dark side in music are many and varied, but they must be part of music education, as young musicians learn early that actions have consequences.
Music teaching and playing should not be confined to the school. Investments must be at the grass root level with community orchestras funded by government, private organizations and community functions. To this day I deeply regret not taking violin lessons with the village tailor, Mr. Richardson, in New Winthropes when I was a boy. However, I recall the sheer pleasure of listening to our North Star Steel Band practice.
Music afforded me immense joy and fellowship from playing on stage in a jazz orchestra. I will never forget the primal experience of playing my saxophone one Saturday afternoon in a yard in Jamaica in which there were woodwind, brass, double bass and other musical instruments playing and communicating, whilst others were cooking and talking and just being normal people celebrating life. It’s difficult to disrespect your community and your people when they bring you so much joy, peace and satisfaction. Music can make us kinder and gentler or rough and uncouth. The orchestration of music can help us orchestrate our social relationships. There is no beast that music cannot tame. Like time and containing time, music heals.
Adults cannot be left out. There are many adults who are rediscovering the joy of playing a musical instrument and many more are learning for the first time. Music can be humanizing to a fault. A conductor said he sometimes felt embarrassed conducting the music of Gustav Mahler because the music can become so personal, it probably should not be experienced by anyone other than the composer.
It is in the communal, orchestral playing of music by well trained musicians and in the listening and experiencing by a constitutively attentive audience all together in one architectural place that music, with myriad muses for its composing, itself becomes the muse of our existence and the conscience of a nation. The voices of our ancestors, Carib, Arawak, African, European, Indian, indigo and in between must not be left to sing alone, lest, as Luciano Pavarotti would sing, “Nessun Dorma”: None shall sleep.
Sunday, August 12, 2007
How You Could Sing So?
I COME TO RUN THIS PLACE AGAIN
Dr. Lester CN Simon
Sting, the former teacher and world renowned musician from Newcastle upon Tyne was once asked when he knew he had really made it. He responded that it was precisely when he heard a window cleaner outside his hotel room whistling his song, Roxanne. I was in a local department store a few weeks before Carnival and I knew precisely then that we were in for a treat this year when a 5 or 6 year old girl, unbothered by the goings-on in the store and without the sound of music in the air, plaintively sang to herself, “Go Claudette”.
We have to understand the anatomy of “Go Claudette” to understand what we will be up against in preparation for the next General Elections. You have to be really hot and brimming with self confidence to start a song pledging that you come to run this place, again. It cannot be an idle boast. Think of the relatively few good, popular songs that carry or start with a boastful “I”. I Come Out to Play by Shadow; I’m Bad by Michael Jackson; I Was Made To Love Her by Stevie Wonder and I Got Rhythm, the jazz standard by George and Ira Gershwin. If you want window cleaners or school children to sing your songs, it makes good sense to start the song with a child singing it, as in “Go Claudette”. Some marketing expert is earning their salary.
In music, as in marching, there are strong beats and weak ones. A jazz singer once chided some members of her (mostly white) audience for tapping and clapping on the strong beats. She politely explained that the strong beats were already strong and therefore if they wanted to be hip, and humane and not cruel, they must accentuate the weak beat, not the strong one. So with the emphasis on the weak, second beat of “Go Claudette”, you add an upbeat after that same weak, second beat but before the next, first, strong beat, which is imagined but not heard. It is as if soldiers are no longer marching to Left-Right-Left-Right but to Right-and-Right-and, with the Left in the imagination only. The strong beat is suspended in ether and you are left totally weakened and rocking as the lady comes to “run this place again”.
Vanity is always a difficult subject to handle. If you are going to tackle human weaknesses such as the seven deadly sins, it is wise to take on one at a time, unless you are writing the classic novel without a hero, Vanity Fair. “Go Claudette” does this with masterful ease as she exalts her anatomy and becomes the ultimate mythical hero by turning us into her personal Narcissus. She delivers on the bald and bold declaration that she comes “to run this place again”. We enjoin the bliss of requited love responding with her hook line as she basks in the reflection from the pool of her vanquished fans.
This brings us to the other vain creature in our society: the politician. When an astute politician declares a mere couple of days after Carnival that he wants the Carnival Development Committee (CDC) to give the nation a detailed account of how the money was utilized, you can bet your ABST dollar he is doing a completely different accounting. His real concentration is on how to stop a ruling political party that will most certainly use “Go Claudette” at its political party meetings in 2009? Imagine a prelude of chanting, “Go Baldwin; Go Baldwin”, followed by PM Spencer proclaiming to his dear good people, “I Come to Run This Place Again”. The die is cast. Between now and next Carnival, the hunt is on for that unique song that can lift a singer and a party from second place to first.
There are many similarities between a singer and a politician. They claim to treat everyone equally at the very same time they make every one of us truly believe we are unique. They promise the world and say they would climb the highest mountain and swim the deepest sea to keep their promise. They cannot exist without us and we cannot exist without them. They are good story tellers even when, especially when, they tell untruthful stories. Their main aim is to get us to open ourselves to them. It is all part of the historic call-and-response phenomenon. They make the call and we respond. It does not matter much which way we respond initially, they can fashion the precise response they desire by repetition. They are like some televangelist in some ways, preaching their own vainglorious sermon. Oftentimes they take your collection money and perform poorly, if at all.
The task is not impossible for the current second place holder. Their researchers will have to study epic works like The Lord of the Rings to understand classical themes such as good versus evil, humility over pride and the heroic struggles against the great ring of power. More familiar territory might be a resort to the Book of all epics and the teachings of the true Master, whose themes personify repentance and forgiveness of sin as prerequisites to admission.
Religion was an enthralling force during the last General Elections. It will have a second coming. There is never a sight as noble as a congregation of contrite sinner rising from the depths of despair, earnestly testifying that they would do things differently if only given one more chance to “run this place again”.
Dr. Lester CN Simon
Sting, the former teacher and world renowned musician from Newcastle upon Tyne was once asked when he knew he had really made it. He responded that it was precisely when he heard a window cleaner outside his hotel room whistling his song, Roxanne. I was in a local department store a few weeks before Carnival and I knew precisely then that we were in for a treat this year when a 5 or 6 year old girl, unbothered by the goings-on in the store and without the sound of music in the air, plaintively sang to herself, “Go Claudette”.
We have to understand the anatomy of “Go Claudette” to understand what we will be up against in preparation for the next General Elections. You have to be really hot and brimming with self confidence to start a song pledging that you come to run this place, again. It cannot be an idle boast. Think of the relatively few good, popular songs that carry or start with a boastful “I”. I Come Out to Play by Shadow; I’m Bad by Michael Jackson; I Was Made To Love Her by Stevie Wonder and I Got Rhythm, the jazz standard by George and Ira Gershwin. If you want window cleaners or school children to sing your songs, it makes good sense to start the song with a child singing it, as in “Go Claudette”. Some marketing expert is earning their salary.
In music, as in marching, there are strong beats and weak ones. A jazz singer once chided some members of her (mostly white) audience for tapping and clapping on the strong beats. She politely explained that the strong beats were already strong and therefore if they wanted to be hip, and humane and not cruel, they must accentuate the weak beat, not the strong one. So with the emphasis on the weak, second beat of “Go Claudette”, you add an upbeat after that same weak, second beat but before the next, first, strong beat, which is imagined but not heard. It is as if soldiers are no longer marching to Left-Right-Left-Right but to Right-and-Right-and, with the Left in the imagination only. The strong beat is suspended in ether and you are left totally weakened and rocking as the lady comes to “run this place again”.
Vanity is always a difficult subject to handle. If you are going to tackle human weaknesses such as the seven deadly sins, it is wise to take on one at a time, unless you are writing the classic novel without a hero, Vanity Fair. “Go Claudette” does this with masterful ease as she exalts her anatomy and becomes the ultimate mythical hero by turning us into her personal Narcissus. She delivers on the bald and bold declaration that she comes “to run this place again”. We enjoin the bliss of requited love responding with her hook line as she basks in the reflection from the pool of her vanquished fans.
This brings us to the other vain creature in our society: the politician. When an astute politician declares a mere couple of days after Carnival that he wants the Carnival Development Committee (CDC) to give the nation a detailed account of how the money was utilized, you can bet your ABST dollar he is doing a completely different accounting. His real concentration is on how to stop a ruling political party that will most certainly use “Go Claudette” at its political party meetings in 2009? Imagine a prelude of chanting, “Go Baldwin; Go Baldwin”, followed by PM Spencer proclaiming to his dear good people, “I Come to Run This Place Again”. The die is cast. Between now and next Carnival, the hunt is on for that unique song that can lift a singer and a party from second place to first.
There are many similarities between a singer and a politician. They claim to treat everyone equally at the very same time they make every one of us truly believe we are unique. They promise the world and say they would climb the highest mountain and swim the deepest sea to keep their promise. They cannot exist without us and we cannot exist without them. They are good story tellers even when, especially when, they tell untruthful stories. Their main aim is to get us to open ourselves to them. It is all part of the historic call-and-response phenomenon. They make the call and we respond. It does not matter much which way we respond initially, they can fashion the precise response they desire by repetition. They are like some televangelist in some ways, preaching their own vainglorious sermon. Oftentimes they take your collection money and perform poorly, if at all.
The task is not impossible for the current second place holder. Their researchers will have to study epic works like The Lord of the Rings to understand classical themes such as good versus evil, humility over pride and the heroic struggles against the great ring of power. More familiar territory might be a resort to the Book of all epics and the teachings of the true Master, whose themes personify repentance and forgiveness of sin as prerequisites to admission.
Religion was an enthralling force during the last General Elections. It will have a second coming. There is never a sight as noble as a congregation of contrite sinner rising from the depths of despair, earnestly testifying that they would do things differently if only given one more chance to “run this place again”.
Saturday, August 11, 2007
No Grounds For Recreation
JUST ACROSS THE ROAD
Dr. Lester CN Simon
Some people are unconscionable. They do not have a heart, or better put, they have no heart at all. They have no sense of history whatsoever. How else can you explain me (as my Trinidadian friend would say) the playing of all that riotous music and all that bacchanal for entertainment at their so-called recreation grounds during Carnival whilst we are left locked up just across the road?
For a very long time we have been enduring this uncalled-for pressure. In the early days, we had additional bombardment from Boy School and Princess Elizabeth Hall. They think Lions roaring now? At least they have natural air conditioning. In the early days, people would dance at Boy School and PE Hall until their clothes got wet and stayed wet for days. Now, they have to go to Ffreyes beach for that. I know for a fact because I was there as a little boy a time when a woman danced so much to the music of Saints Brothers, when she came out of PE Hall to catch a little breeze, somebody handed her something wet, wet, wet saying, “Miss, look you blouse”. Even though I was young, I knew it was not her blouse at all.
I wasn’t there but the older inmates recalled that one time a man who would dress up pretty-pretty like Mr. Carnival danced so much to the music of Oscar Mason, Sons of the Vibratone and drank so much rum, he fell down the steps at Boy School on the west side. They said when he was falling and his entire body was a mere few inches horizontally away from the top flight of the stairs, he straightened back up, deftly took off his costume, folded it neatly, handed it to his drinking partner, and then tumbled down flat, flat, flat.
But I get sad at Carnival time, not because they do not let us out from just across the road; I get sad because they do not know what they are doing to themselves. They call it a celebration of emancipation from slavery. But how can they celebrate something they refuse to discuss? With all the time I have to serve in this prison, I have been reading a book called, African Voices of the Atlantic Slave Trade, subtitled, Beyond the Silence and the Shame by Anne C. Bailey. It seems that we cannot rightly celebrate Carnival without going beyond the silence and the shame of slavery. This compulsory journey beyond the silence and the shame must include black, white, indigo, Indian and in between. Reconciliation in the West Indies by and amongst West Indians is the defining motif of reconciliation. We, West Indians, are the world because the world created us in its own image.
At the heart of this shame about slavery is a complex set of issues but a key one is understanding why Africans sold other Africans into slavery. We already know why Europeans wanted slaves and the overwhelmingly dominant role the Europeans played in the Atlantic Slave Trade. Or do we? In our endless Holy Grail quest to unite all black people through an African passage, we wrongly assign too much additional burden to ourselves because we miss the central fact that during the era of the slave trade, and to a lesser extent today, Africans were not one socially and geographically homogenous group of people living on one continent. It was never so, unless we go way back to the homogenetic genesis of all of human kind. Beyond that, the dispersion and differentiation of black people that we blame on slavery exclusively, mistakenly force us to unite into a continental whole that did not exist in the memory of our ancestors, and into a wholesomeness that only artificially exists for other races. After all, the two World Wars can be seen as European tribal wars to a large extent.
Domestic slavery existed in Africa before the Atlantic slave trade. In fact, many forms of domestic slavery were widespread and not confined to Africa. Anne C. Bailey reminds us that in Europe, serfdom was predominant till the fourteen century. The serfs were not slaves but their rights were limited. According to Anne C. Bailey, “The supreme irony is that it was the very question of slavery that engendered the debate around the issue of freedom and equality”, which themselves were the noble ideals of the American Revolution in 1776 and the French Revolution in 1789.
When we critically examine slavery, we can celebrate the fact that we brought to the so-called new world, the seeds and instruments of civilization in that many slaves were highly skilled workers, having honed their skills and garnered their knowledge from the many enterprising kingdoms in Africa, at a time when some natives in parts of Europe were running around uncivilized.
News has reached us that at the Emancipation Watch Night Gathering this year we were finally reminded of an uncontestable fact by the chairman: No where else on earth have people come from under the yoke of slave masters and become owners of lands and islands and masters of their own destiny in such a short period of time. No where. Hence the noblest ideal to celebrate within and without the Carnival season is the survivability and the inestimable contribution of black people. We see some of these qualities in aliquots when we regard the hard work that goes into making a successful Carnival. This hard work is not primarily in reference to the Carnival Development Committee and other formal groupings. Most importantly, it is in reference and reverence to those who have so little and yet do so much for so many so often.
This brings us back to this place just across the road because in Africa prior to the Atlantic Slave Trade, domestic slavery served the role of prisons today. So as you jump and prance and celebrate, do remember that we, just across the road, serve as a historical metaphor for slavery, domestic and Atlantic, from which we emancipated ourselves. Talking of emancipation, I have to tell you that this Carnival, a group of us, men and women, decided to escape one night by climbing over the wall, dressed in black camouflage and then dressed up in carnival clothes. We had to time our escape perfectly to avoid the guards. Regrettably, it all went terribly wrong when we were perched on top the wall and one of the women amongst us prematurely gave the signal to jump all because some idiot just across the road mistakenly shouted, “Go Claudette!”
Dr. Lester CN Simon
Some people are unconscionable. They do not have a heart, or better put, they have no heart at all. They have no sense of history whatsoever. How else can you explain me (as my Trinidadian friend would say) the playing of all that riotous music and all that bacchanal for entertainment at their so-called recreation grounds during Carnival whilst we are left locked up just across the road?
For a very long time we have been enduring this uncalled-for pressure. In the early days, we had additional bombardment from Boy School and Princess Elizabeth Hall. They think Lions roaring now? At least they have natural air conditioning. In the early days, people would dance at Boy School and PE Hall until their clothes got wet and stayed wet for days. Now, they have to go to Ffreyes beach for that. I know for a fact because I was there as a little boy a time when a woman danced so much to the music of Saints Brothers, when she came out of PE Hall to catch a little breeze, somebody handed her something wet, wet, wet saying, “Miss, look you blouse”. Even though I was young, I knew it was not her blouse at all.
I wasn’t there but the older inmates recalled that one time a man who would dress up pretty-pretty like Mr. Carnival danced so much to the music of Oscar Mason, Sons of the Vibratone and drank so much rum, he fell down the steps at Boy School on the west side. They said when he was falling and his entire body was a mere few inches horizontally away from the top flight of the stairs, he straightened back up, deftly took off his costume, folded it neatly, handed it to his drinking partner, and then tumbled down flat, flat, flat.
But I get sad at Carnival time, not because they do not let us out from just across the road; I get sad because they do not know what they are doing to themselves. They call it a celebration of emancipation from slavery. But how can they celebrate something they refuse to discuss? With all the time I have to serve in this prison, I have been reading a book called, African Voices of the Atlantic Slave Trade, subtitled, Beyond the Silence and the Shame by Anne C. Bailey. It seems that we cannot rightly celebrate Carnival without going beyond the silence and the shame of slavery. This compulsory journey beyond the silence and the shame must include black, white, indigo, Indian and in between. Reconciliation in the West Indies by and amongst West Indians is the defining motif of reconciliation. We, West Indians, are the world because the world created us in its own image.
At the heart of this shame about slavery is a complex set of issues but a key one is understanding why Africans sold other Africans into slavery. We already know why Europeans wanted slaves and the overwhelmingly dominant role the Europeans played in the Atlantic Slave Trade. Or do we? In our endless Holy Grail quest to unite all black people through an African passage, we wrongly assign too much additional burden to ourselves because we miss the central fact that during the era of the slave trade, and to a lesser extent today, Africans were not one socially and geographically homogenous group of people living on one continent. It was never so, unless we go way back to the homogenetic genesis of all of human kind. Beyond that, the dispersion and differentiation of black people that we blame on slavery exclusively, mistakenly force us to unite into a continental whole that did not exist in the memory of our ancestors, and into a wholesomeness that only artificially exists for other races. After all, the two World Wars can be seen as European tribal wars to a large extent.
Domestic slavery existed in Africa before the Atlantic slave trade. In fact, many forms of domestic slavery were widespread and not confined to Africa. Anne C. Bailey reminds us that in Europe, serfdom was predominant till the fourteen century. The serfs were not slaves but their rights were limited. According to Anne C. Bailey, “The supreme irony is that it was the very question of slavery that engendered the debate around the issue of freedom and equality”, which themselves were the noble ideals of the American Revolution in 1776 and the French Revolution in 1789.
When we critically examine slavery, we can celebrate the fact that we brought to the so-called new world, the seeds and instruments of civilization in that many slaves were highly skilled workers, having honed their skills and garnered their knowledge from the many enterprising kingdoms in Africa, at a time when some natives in parts of Europe were running around uncivilized.
News has reached us that at the Emancipation Watch Night Gathering this year we were finally reminded of an uncontestable fact by the chairman: No where else on earth have people come from under the yoke of slave masters and become owners of lands and islands and masters of their own destiny in such a short period of time. No where. Hence the noblest ideal to celebrate within and without the Carnival season is the survivability and the inestimable contribution of black people. We see some of these qualities in aliquots when we regard the hard work that goes into making a successful Carnival. This hard work is not primarily in reference to the Carnival Development Committee and other formal groupings. Most importantly, it is in reference and reverence to those who have so little and yet do so much for so many so often.
This brings us back to this place just across the road because in Africa prior to the Atlantic Slave Trade, domestic slavery served the role of prisons today. So as you jump and prance and celebrate, do remember that we, just across the road, serve as a historical metaphor for slavery, domestic and Atlantic, from which we emancipated ourselves. Talking of emancipation, I have to tell you that this Carnival, a group of us, men and women, decided to escape one night by climbing over the wall, dressed in black camouflage and then dressed up in carnival clothes. We had to time our escape perfectly to avoid the guards. Regrettably, it all went terribly wrong when we were perched on top the wall and one of the women amongst us prematurely gave the signal to jump all because some idiot just across the road mistakenly shouted, “Go Claudette!”
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