"If that person's person outweighs his babble...."

You may well want to ask--Is not every person a valid person? And I say: Yes. I say yes only if that person's person outweighs his babble in the war against the reduction of himself, because every word or deed a person utters or commits which fails to recognise or increase the value of another ends up by effecting a reduction of the provenance of the intention.

-- Martin Carter, address at the University of Guyana's eighth Convocation Ceremony, 1974

(This person's person feels slightly more valid this evening after reading some Carter, listening to some Bach, and sipping some Campari on the rocks.)

"Bang on the gates and demand to be heard"

Andre Bagoo, writing in today's Newsday:

“If ever I am aggrieved by anything the media does in the future, I am going to the courts,” Manning said. But why didn’t he go to the courts in the first place? That was and is his right as a citizen of this country and he has exercised that right in the past. Why did the Prime Minister ignore the rule of law by his actions? Instead of driving for miles into Port-of-Spain, why did he not just pick up a phone and make a call to complain? Or write a letter? Or complain to the Media Complaints Council? Or call for the implementation of the Telecommunications Authority of Trinidad and Tobago (TATT)’s draft broadcast code. TATT, which is established by an act of Parliament, has included a clear and concise complaints provision in the draft. The Prime Minister is aware of all of these options.

You see, if you have a grievance, there is a procedure. That procedure ensures law and order. For this reason, no citizen of this country, no matter how aggrieved by anything the Prime Minister does, can drive up to La Fantasie, bang on the gates and demand to be heard.

(Maybe we should?)

Invalid persons

So on 25 October, just four days after Reporters Without Borders released its 2008 Press Freedom Index--in which Trinidad and Tobago slipped eight places down from our 2007 ranking--Mr. Manning took such visceral offence to the on-air comments of a couple of radio journalists that he swooped down upon the 94.1 FM office, with all the security detail commesse that prime ministerial dignity apparently requires, to make a personal complaint to the station management. The two journalists were swiftly suspended.

What were the vicious and scandalous comments that so roused Mr. Manning's righteous ire? Today's Express helpfully publishes a transcript. They had the nerve to--drumroll--criticise the government's gasoline pricing policy, and mock Mr. Manning's suggestion that cars be converted to run on CNG.

Prime ministerial dignity, it seems, is a delicate and fragile thing. Mr. Manning was "aggrieved", he said. His rights as a citizen were trampled on. Worse, this kind of criticism by the media, Mr. Manning said at a press conference two days ago, could even bring the country to its knees:

... too many of the commentators either in the newspapers, or in the media or on the radio, do not respect our institutions. It is a question of being disrespectful to institutions and authority, and pursuing a course of action that could cause the image of these institutions and individuals to be tarnished in the minds of those in whose interest they are set up to serve, and therefore they could become completely non-effective. That is the risk that we run.

Never mind that many citizens would say the institutions and individuals of the Manning government are already "completely non-effective" at solving the real and urgent problems facing the country. Forget the murder rate, the babies dying in hospitals, the near-permanent gridlock of the country's transport infrastructure, the power outages and water lock-offs, the widespread belief in massive corruption and fraud at high levels of government, the secret new constitution now being drafted that will consolidate executive power, etc etc etc etc. What we really need to worry about, Mr. Manning seems to believe--and he even seems hurt that we don't agree--is a free press.

The Media Association of Trinidad and Tobago and the Trinidad and Tobago Publishers and Broadcasters Association have rightly--and forcefully--objected. Today's Guardian and Newsday run strongly worded editorials criticising Mr. Manning's stance. Georgia Popplewell at Caribbean Free Radio has weighed in. Taran Rampersad at KnowProSE lists his concerns in an open letter to the prime minister.

But the real question here is even more fundamental than freedom of the press and all citizens' freedom of expression. In a letter printed in today's Express, C. Peters says: "It may do Mr. Manning well to remember that prime ministership is leadership and not ownership." In her column in today's Guardian, Attillah Springer makes a similar point:

We can't imagine ourselves ever as anything else but good slaves, doing massa's bidding. We can't bear the threat of the threat of massa's whip coming down on our backs.... We can't be anything that is not expected of us. Loyal servants, with ready smiles and words of praise.

Mr. Manning's radio station raid is yet one more reminder--as if, Lord, we needed another--that in Trinidad and Tobago democracy is not a practice but a concept, and a concept that we still, forty-six years after independence, do not really understand, much less believe in. In a representative democracy--the form of government we claim--the people's representatives, our members of Parliament, and the prime minister chosen from among them, have the duty of acting in the people's interest. Instead--with the help of a constitution which already concentrates too much power in the executive's hands, a system of tribal politics that is destructive of clear thought, and a succession of politicians enamoured of the trappings of power--we are lorded over by an administration which seems to believe it is the people's duty to act in the government's interest.

Mr. Manning has demonstrated over and again his disdain for criticism--however useful, however well meant--whether it comes from the media, the public at large, or even from within his own party. The 94.1 incident is perhaps not even the most serious example we've witnessed of late. I have no doubt that the Trinidad and Tobago media, backed up by their regional colleagues, will face down Mr. Manning's threats of personal and legal action against journalists by whom he feels "aggrieved". But who among us is facing up to the bigger and deeper crisis, the bankruptcy of "democracy" as a meaningful idea and principle and practice in twenty-first-century Trinidad and Tobago?

Because we are all responsible.

More than three decades ago, Martin Carter summed up his social and political ideal for the Caribbean as "a free community of valid persons."

I have never in my life felt so pessimistic about us merely understanding this ideal, much less achieving it.

A Change Is Gonna Come

I was born by the river in a little tent
Oh and just like the river I've been running ever since
It's been a long, a long time coming
But I know a change gonna come, oh yes it will

It's been too hard living but I'm afraid to die
'Cause I don't know what's up there beyond the sky
It's been a long, a long time coming
But I know a change gonna come, oh yes it will

I go to the movie and I go downtown
Somebody keep telling me don't hang around
It's been a long, a long time coming
But I know a change gonna come, oh yes it will

Then I go to my brother
And I say brother help me please
But he winds up knocking me
Back down on my knees

There been times that I thought I couldn't last for long
But now I think I'm able to carry on
It's been a long, a long time coming
But I know a change gonna come, oh yes it will

Yeah.

Apologia Pro Vita Sua, ch. 1

He was irresistibly drawn to lost causes.

I am on the wrong side of the world.

Come to Vahni Capildeo's reading.

Read Tobias Buckell's book.

There are no ideas in my head, only words.

Three cheers for Mark Bittman.

"Savages rarely murder new-comers"

Qualifications for a Traveller. -- If you have health, a great craving for adventure, at least a moderate fortune, and can set your heart on a definite object, which old travellers do not think impracticable, then--travel by all means. If, in addition to these qualifications, you have scientific taste and knowledge, I believe that no career, in time of peace, can offer to you more advantages than that of a traveller....

[Health--check. Craving for adventure--check. Moderate fortune? Um.... Definite object? Yikes.]

Reputed Dangers of Travel. --A young man of good constitution, who is bound on an enterprise sanctioned by experienced travellers, does not run very great risks. Let those who doubt, refer to the history of the various expeditions encouraged by the Royal Geographical Society, and they will see how few deaths have occurred; and of those deaths how small a proportion among young travellers. Savages rarely murder new-comers; they fear their guns, and have a superstitious awe of the white man's power: they require time to discover that he is not very different to themselves, and easily to be made away with. Ordinary fevers are seldom fatal to the sound and elastic constitution of youth, which usually has power to resist the adverse influences of two or three years of wild life.

[No worries then.]

-- Francis Galton, The Art of Travel, or Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries, 5th edition, 1872

"We are not the first"



View across the rooftops of Venice, looking roughly westwards from the Campanile of San Marco; 5 July, 2008

"The first thing we notice once we reach the top, is that there are no canals to be seen. We are not the first to make this surprising discovery.... It is mildly irritating to find that this ... has been noticed by almost every previous traveller to Venice. We must get used to sharing our feelings and discoveries with travellers of the past."

-- J.G. Links, in the introduction to his great Venice for Pleasure

Four duppies

The silk cotton tree--called the ceiba in the Spanish Caribbean--is traditionally associated with duppies and jumbies, spirits who inhabit its vast, buttressed trunk, and who exact their revenge on anyone foolish enough to take an axe to the tree, or otherwise inflict damage.

On the island of San Andres--a little fragment of Jamaica that broke off and floated towards Nicaragua, and now belongs to Colombia--there is a small freshwater lagoon that locals call Big Pond. Not far from the lagoon is an ancient silk cotton tree with a hollow trunk, big enough for a dozen people to stand inside.

There were just four of us there that day, last Friday, playing hooky from the Caribbean Studies Association conference. We hopped in a taxi and let the driver give us an improvised tour of the island. At Big Pond we met Francisco, who lives nearby and serves as a tour guide for the lagoon and caretaker for the placid, near-tame caiman who bask on its banks. He took us to see the old silk cotton tree, its top snapped off by a storm a few years ago, but new branches and leaves sprouting everywhere; he posed us inside the hollow trunk and artfully photographed us with the sky shining through the broken trunk far above.



That's me on the left, of course; then Andrea Shaw, of Nova Southeastern University; Leah Rosenberg, of the University of Florida; and Ivette Romero-Cesareo, of Marist College. A magazine editor and three literary scholars, standing in for the duppies of Big Pond. We left with handfuls of small yellow mangoes and went in search of Morgan's Cave.

In my thirty-third year

I read maybe eighty books--including The Road to Oxiana and Explosion in a Cathedral and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao--and some I liked better than others. I wrote many thousands of words, of which about thirty-four thousand were printed in various places, and who knows how many appeared online. I wrote about 240 blog posts, here, there, elsewhere. I edited four issues of the CRB and finished working on a new edition of V.S. Naipaul's early family correspondence. I took about four thousand photos. I listened to lots of John Coltrane and Miles Davis and Ella Fitzgerald and Anita O'Day. I wished jointpop would start playing their old songs again. I drank nearly four hundred cups of coffee (mostly Blue Mountain), and maybe as many glasses of wine; more than a thousand cups of green tea, and five or six caipirinhas. I ate the best pizza I've ever eaten. I spent ten weeks or so abroad and visited five countries; eleven art museums; three cathedrals; one opera house. I slept three nights in a hammock. I climbed Blue Mountain Peak with Brian. I hiked a very brief stretch of the Appalachian Trail. I swam in the Rupununi River and watched the sun set from the brink of Kaieteur. I crossed the Equator for the first time. I spent a sybaritic long weekend in Treasure Beach with Georgia and Annie. I slept on one Chris's sofa in New York and another's in Hanover, NH. I strolled across the Mississippi with Marlon and back again. I got lost in a bioluminescent lagoon with Joanna and Dan. I went back to Karanambo, and they remembered me. I went to the Lethem Rodeo with Alastair and Jonathan. I followed Fitzcarraldo to Manaus. I made seventeen trips by aeroplane, two by train, one by overnight bus. I bought new hiking shoes, a trekking pole, a map of the Amazon Basin; a black velvet blazer and two pairs of black-and-white-striped socks; the wrong kind of cough syrup in Boa Vista; a subscription to Artforum; four (unsigned) Boscoe Holder drawings. I was appointed the 2007 Rex Nettleford Fellow in Cultural Studies. I set up my own website. I used Facebook to check up on various old and hopeless crushes. I found myself at Alice Yard many Friday nights. I played J'Ouvert in a costume made from recycled insulation foil. I joined a reading group. I made my first clafoutis. I tried to save the Boissiere House, and don't yet know if I succeeded. I buried my dog Marlo. I learned to say "I don't speak Portuguese" in Portuguese. I stopped watching TV. I worried, and doubted, and longed. My shortsighted eyes got a little worse. My heart beat thirty-eight million times.

Number 19

It’s World Press Freedom Day today, and I guess some of us would love to boast at the fact that Trinidad and Tobago is the only English speaking Caribbean country to be in the top 20 of the World Press Freedom Index (we’re number 19). Even UK is number 24 and the USA is number 48.

I’ve been thinking about this number 19 status. How we ended up there. Do we really have press freedom or is it just that nobody takes the media seriously enough to think of anything that gets published or broadcast as a threat to their authority or their profit margins?

--Attillah Springer, in her column in today's Trinidad Guardian.

The view from Tihuanacu



Tihuanacu, Bolivia; photo by Cristina Quisbert


"Part of our history written on stone...."

(Via Rising Voices.)

Vive le roi

Us being a monarchy and Mr Manning, the king, explains our situation completely. It doesn't matter whether the plains upon and forests within which the peasants live flood in the wet season and burn in the dry; once they pay their tax -- an X marked in the right box every five years -- they are as dispensable as the cannon-fodder dispatched to the front lines to purchase, with their piled cadavers, sufficient cover for the Big Push.

Neo-monarchy explains all the failures of Trinidad & Tobago a real republic would not tolerate but which we accept as conditions. We can even live with (or die by, according to postal address) our one-a-day murder rate without worry, since all who do not swear loyalty to the king cannot expect his protection; if you don't vote PNM, you can't expect a police service. (For an explanation of the king's failure to protect the PNM's own voters, see "cannon-fodder" supra.) Get a PNM party card and the kingdom is open to you. Prove yourself a hard worker for the ordained cause and, next morning, in your mail, you will find two invitations, one to the next black tie opening featuring the Divine Echoes (established since 2007 by Royal Patent) and another to bid for the contract to supply meals to the Chinese workers dredging Charlotteville Bay, damming the Caroni River or paving the Queen's Park Savannah (according to the whim of Duke Calder Hart).

--B.C. Pires is a badjohn Bagehot in today's Express.

A week in the life: 13 to 19 April, 2008

Read: Kei Miller's new novel The Same Earth

Re-read: Bruce Chatwin's Utz and The Viceroy of Ouidah

Wrote: emails; brief blog posts about Aimé Césaire

Listened: to Dvorak's Cello Concerto and Op. 96 String Quartet; to Coltrane; to Miles Davis's Sketches of Spain; to Ella Fitzgerald's recordings of "Ev'ry Time We Say Goodbye" and "Love for Sale"

Went: to the vet, with Pablo, my labrador; to hear David Dabydeen's talk at the National Library; to the supermarket, twice

Wished I could go: to Martinique, to witness the farewell ceremonies for Césaire

Acquired: piles of Paul Theroux travel books and Anita Brookner novels from my friend and colleague Jeremy, who has been clearing his bookshelves; a second-hand printer and scanner from Georgia

Ate: a lovely Spanish omelette I made last Sunday night; lots of pasta

Felt: overloaded with many small tasks; still not quite well

Worried: about getting the May CRB to press

Other significant events: filing cabinet acquired last week fell apart after one day, necessitating the re-distribution of files across my study floor

"Please eat less meat"

Just ahead of Earth Day on Tuesday, the New York Times Magazine has published a special Green Issue, promising "some bold steps to make your carbon footprint smaller". There are worse things you could do with your Sunday than browse through the dozens of short articles on everything from Chicago's "cool alleys" to the Blackle search engine to green architecture. Some of these ideas are so cutting edge, it will be decades before they're widely adopted, if ever. Some are inspiring examples of what can happen when concerned citizens, enlightened government, and responsible private enterprise find ways to co-operate. Some are really basic, practical projects you can literally do yourself at home. And, having posted this nearly two months ago, I'm inspired to point to this particular segment of the Green Issue's "Eat" section:

THE HIGH PRICE OF BEEF: Late in February, the governors of Maine, Rhode Island, Washington, Maryland and other states received letters from Lindsay Rajt of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, asking them to encourage the citizens of their states to become vegetarians. The governors of those states have been fighting for tighter vehicle-emissions standards as a way to combat climate change. That made them a target for the folks at PETA, who argue that the climate impact of the car pales in comparison to that of the cow. A 2006 report by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization found that livestock production accounts for 18 percent of the world’s greenhouse-gas emissions -- more than all forms of transportation combined. Meat’s supersize impact comes from fuel- and fertilizer-intensive agricultural methods of growing feed, all the power needed to run slaughterhouses and meat-processing plants and the potent greenhouse gases produced by decomposing manure. Pork, lamb and poultry all have their impacts, but beef is undoubtedly the Hummer of the dinner plate. Sixty percent of the deforestation in the Amazon River basin between 2000 and 2005 can be attributed to cattle ranching; much of the remainder was cleared to raise corn and soy for feed. And cows, once fed, burp -- a lot. Each day, a single cow can burp as much as 130 gallons of methane, a greenhouse gas that traps more than 20 times more heat per ton than carbon dioxide. Trimming the amount of meat Americans eat would not only help the planet -- a mere 20 percent reduction is the equivalent of switching from a Camry to a Prius -- but would also be likely to reduce obesity, cancer and heart disease. Until recently, it was only animal rights groups like PETA that were willing to ask Americans to forgo the pleasures of the flesh. That changed in January, when Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (and a vegetarian), uttered four little words: “Please eat less meat.” He continued: “This is something that the I.P.C.C. was afraid to say earlier, but now we have said it.” DASHKA SLATER

"At our limitless command"

... and there is room for all in the rendezvous of conquest and we know that the sun turns around our earth lighting only the portion that our single will has fixed and that every star falls from sky to earth at our limitless command.

-- From "Memorandum on My Martinique", by Aimé Césaire (25 June, 1913-17 April, 2008), trans. Lionel Abel