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krisrampersad · 7 years

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From Beirut to Port of Spain: How the West Was One Pelau That Get Sour In The Bambam: Musical Masquerade of Crime Violence Gangsterism as Prelude & PostScript to the Coup. July 1990 Remembered

Media mishaps, the mafia, the message as fodder & fuel of food wars, fundamentalism and the sound and fury of Caribbean cuisine all ABoudaing Bad Brets of a Tropical Arab Spring Storm backfiring PR bier bottles and musical spoons.

In an age of selfies, it is a selfie gone wrong.

I couldn’t settle on a title so I included above all that came to mind, to give readers the luxury of choice.

My first bite at knowledge of the apple of Lebanon was through its literature, in the musings of Lebanese poet/philosopher and it is sad, prophet, Kahlil Gibran. A knowledge-starved preteen, I was introduced to Gibran while poaching through my sister’s nicely stashed away romance collectibles. The long nights reading under the covers while everyone else was asleep, gripped by the poignancy and potency of the poet’s outpourings and the philosophical depths of his passion and pain recounted through everyday experiences, evoked A Tear and A Smile, or two, as one of his books is titled. Feasting on my sister’s private hoard, I soared with The Prophet and moaned with The Broken Wings. They inspired me to save my pennies to buy a second-hand copy of A Tear and A Smile (dam'ah wa-ibtisamah, 1914) for on my father’s unpredictable seasonal market gardener’s earnings, books were unaffordable, generally, and we had no TV. In district Trinidad with the nearest public library some ten kilometres away in the nearest town with no public transportation options, the books we knew were textbooks, usually hand-me-down older editions, unless one got a spanking brand new one as a choice Christmas or birthday gift or present from a benevolent ‘uncle’ – not necessarily a relative but an elder - for doing extremely well in exams – an incentive if ever there was one! My silent absorption into the philosophical musings of Gibran must have come as welcome relief to my family and those close who were then being assailed by my strategically hurled quotes from Shakespeare’s Puck, ‘Lord, what fools these mortals be!’ having discovered and devoured a dog-eared copy of A Midsummer’s Night Dream from one of my sibling’s high school years, still years away from high-school myself when Shakespeare, as other reading matter I love, would be presented to me as a subject of English Literature and ‘text’.

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With few opportunities then of stepping out of the house compounds, much less the district and no television, curled up at the back of the house on a branch on a mango tree that time forgot, books were my window to the world, a portal through which one peered into the hearts and minds and souls of others and to become immersed in other worlds, and resurfaced with options of the possibilities and potential of being and becoming incomparable beyond and above what was presented by the immediate reality.

Books, as music, and drama and art, would open my mind and my heart to other peoples, places and lifestyles and cultures. I entered their imagination as I would, someday, enter their borders, to discover, explore, engage, and to love and to breathe the air and savour the scents and the sounds that moved me as it moved them. It can’t be by mistake that the fall into the body of disciplines called the Humanities. They opened up humanism long before I would consciously engage with The Humanities, academically, and humanitarianism, socially, and fed the impulse in literary endeavours since - to free knowledge from the cages of classrooms and textbooks to landscapes and life experiences and the local to global connections through various endeavours and explored through LiTTscapes – Landscapes of Fiction and itsassociated LiTTours – Journeys Through the Landscapes of Fiction and LiTTributes.

I visited many lands before I would visit many lands, even lands I have not yet visited, as Lebanon.

With Gibran,

I was in Beirut. The gardens were full of Nisan flowers and the earth was carpeted with green grass, and like a secret of earth revealed to Heaven. The orange trees and apple trees, looking like houris or brides sent by nature to inspire poets and excite the imagination, were wearing white garments of perfumed blossoms.

Spring is beautiful everywhere, but it is most beautiful in Lebanon…. Beirut, free from the mud of winter and the dust of summer, is like a bride in the spring, or like a mermaid sitting by the side of a brook drying her smooth skin in the rays of the sun…

– Kahlil Gibran from The Hand of Destiny in The Broken Wings/Al-Ajniha al-Mutakassira, 1912

This is the Beirut, or the first association I make, when I hear of Beirut, just as Waterloo for me would be Samuel Selvon’s descriptions in The Lonely Londoners (1956) of early West Indians, flocking into London at the boat-train station, rather than the Waterloo of Napoleon – that too would come later, with formal education, trying to erase what knowledge natural learning had implanted.

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So when I heard the term ‘like Beirut’ in that widely circulated video, I was already aware of alternative interpretations of the expression, to the images of Beirut that had gained worldwide currency to become the simile of the 1980s. That’s when, ‘Like Beirut’ became the common expression to describe a city under siege, a city in chaos, besieged by lawlessness, a city in decay and despair; a place that has lost control over itself – and this was long after Gibran had passed on. ‘Like Beirut’, in this context took root, from the Lebanon Civil War that lasted close to two decades from 1975, beamed from the new phenomenon of life televised images directly from Beirut into living rooms everywhere in the era when television sets became household fixtures, streaming stories of western hostages, like the humanitarian Terry Waite, lost in prisons in this dark place, Beirut (featured in the video on this page, Keep Hope Alive).

In the same way television sets and their now microcosmic mutation as cellphones and wrist cell phone watches attached themselves as indispensable to our lifestyles, the simile, ‘like Beirut’ has become an imaginative spectacle of chaos, lawlessness, a place under siege, and consumed with internal strife whose people are in depths of despair. It does not help that a syllable in the two-syllable name, is ‘rut’.

Although Lebanon and its capital city, Beirut, might be climbing out of the rut that besieged it, more than two decades later, the potency of the image remains in the simile “like Beirut”, a metaphor resounding with indelible impressions of the city.

It becomes almost inconceivable that the expression can be re-associated with a sense of pride as one looks down at any city. One would assume that any citizen of the modern age would know that, and would know, too, that the potency of media extends far beyond what we can possibly conceive it to be, even beyond our fondly held ancestral memories and pride. It is an assumption one takes for granted, as it takes an insider – bred and fed on independent and critical thought, and how many really are? - to really know what ingredients are in a cuisine and its cultural underpinnings; a culture and its violent underpinnings; and of course, a media and its representations: How it will be best received? What flavours will beguile? What aromas will entice?

Cut, spiced, spliced and sliced artlessly, ancestral pride can become a recipe for fostering racism and to inspire social chaos – not unlike the images of a media finding its power through television of the seventies and eighties; and the hints of the pivotal role media has played, even in instigating some wars.

Media and message, and even the casual off cuff statement, packaged by a producer in one context can be received by a consumer in other contexts that are the antithesis to what may have ever been intended, if one wants to give those producing and promoting the show the benefit of the doubt.

But that in itself would be lost to those in a society fed and bred on foreign consumer products and consumption habits, including in its consumption of (foreign) media over local, growing obese now with ostentatious consumption of cable and internet.

So it was with a tear and a sigh that I watched the eager anticipation and impatience displayed in awaiting airing of what to minds conditioned by tourist brochures, must be a glorification of how we does cook. Without cultivated pride in self, including home generated local productions, they could hardly be expected to have an objective understanding, much less anticipation, of the resonances and repercussions that would come. Unanticipated, even by the colonized public relations spin doctors and stunts men and women still in awe of the new selfie obsession and toasting the strategically placed beer bottles as the public relations coup of the century – the same ones who would lament the deficiencies of local media while simultaneously bemoaning the BBC’s decision to close its Caribbean programming when it was no longer profitable to what would become Brexit ideals.

Until it backfired.

The shots still echoing – and reechoing with shares and likes and comments ad nauseam; the Yankee cowboy having rode off into the sunset without a backward glance – just like in the movies - the tribes rush at each others’ jugglers, hurling insults and accusations, shaking fists and threats.

Puck’s impish hurls surfaced as it had in my salad days, but I resisted that urge, and the urge to shout above the din ‘It’s about the ratings, stupid!’ No one was listening anyway, nor were they listening to themselves or each other, too busy casting the blame and the self-shame on someone other than themselves.

Waiting for the smoke to clear sitting at the centrepoint of the North-South divide, I instead decide to produce my own exposition into parts unknown of culinary culture.

I scan the landscape for ingredients and wade into the lagoon to harvest some of my best grains – not from the once-lagoon grounds on which sit the Parliament and the city on the unsteady foundation of land reclaimed from the sea, but the best grains South of the border, as Damascus is to Beirut, or Mexico to the walled USA.

Not in the least imagining whose head is in this mix, I pound out the chaff from the grains in the antique mortar and pestle in my back yard; toss the grains in the soup I cut out from an old biscuit pan, and hold it up to the wind to blow out the chaff, feeling the air of contention drift off, too. As the coolness descend, I know it may be time now, to bring my pot of pelau into the mix, because rationality is best served with the cool dispassion that I knew would only make sense after the sound and the fury, signifying nothing, subsides. Still chaffing from the absence of the most representative of dishes, a delicious pelau, in a media pot said to be representative of local cuisine - someone must have forgotten to heat up the Chulha – I decide to turn on the heat and set up my own melting pot, with a musical mix.

Melting Pot of Pelau: A counter revolutionary play in five Acts I was washing the grains with some lagoon water, rising with the rains to engulf my kutiya on stilts, when the fellah from up East pass by, and say he has a chicken and he would feather, clean and bring it.

“We could make a nice pelau, eh,” he says, as if this pelau thing was all his idea. I nod, suspecting the chicken might be one of his neighbour’s which he had been threatening in fowl language to cook for straying in his yard and he going to set up a Berlin Wall that could provoke one of those border wars, but, ask no questions and you hear no lies. I zipped my lips. He said he will get some peas from his pardener in the food basket, in Aranguez. What is pelau without some fresh peas, eh? I acquiesce, not knowing that that was also an invitation to the Aranguez pardner and he tassa side along with their fanclub which was really the whole of the food basket, yes.

I asked if while he in town if he could get some seasoning from the ‘panyol’ in Paramin. He called me back to say they said I could have all the seasoning I wanted if they could join the lime. They would bring a parang band, too. I didn’t know I was having a lime, but I say okay, and they could bring some limes too. I call up meh friend on the train line and ask for some brown sugar she was making from she patch of sugar cane in she home factory - the national sugar mill, like the railway, close nah, because they too colonial. So cut off nose to spite face, or cut off race to spite State, is an old unsustainable development motto nd i have to wait the six hours it take to get through the traffic to get the ingredients for my pelau.

I light the Chulha. Brown sugar, saute the garlic and onions, set in oil from the coconut estate in Mayaro, and some bandania from Chaguanas. It bubblicious. Chicken, Peas, Rice, go in, in that order, and I licking the back of the spoon ahready. Somehow word get around town and the babash man from Moruga turn up with his brew, and crew, who manage to dudge one of the many colonial legal orders that stamp down on local enterprise long time ago because it served the purpose of the nouveau riche, one percentile to build a top heavy economy that now crumbling because it had no bottom. I thought of Puck again and that Bottom donkey and realise that this thing beginning to sound like ‘Bottom’s Dream, because it had no bottom,’ as the bard himself wrote.

Moruga hail out the other side of the River who descend on my fireside, en masse like Burrokeets coming dong the hill on JOuvert morning, pounding on their pan round the neck.

All this keep me busy while waiting for the smoke to clear, the Yankee cowboy long gone, and we waiting for a new day dawn when everybody, toute bagai, passion spent, ready to come back to feast on meh melting pot of pelau and so now I could get back to my pantomime of From Beirut to Port of Span in Five Acts, and How the West Was One Pelau with the three visible tribes (and, burp, three invisible ones who would know they missing anyway?) – and then braps, one love break up and the shout was;

‘Who’s Yuh Leader?’ or was it ‘We in Charge’, bang bang. The most powerful one percentiles of all the tribes – except the Invisibles - went at it, and the remainder sit up wondering and declaring, ‘we eh taking that so’ - well ah handful of the remainder; some of the remainder waiting for the signal for the rioting and looting to start; the rest declaring ‘wake me up when it is over;’ and the rest of the remainder of the Invisibles, still maintain a hostile and recalcitrant minority silence, Cantonese style, inscrutable. But it ain’t over yet – through courts, and regime changes, and killings of a former Attorney General, a former Chief Prosecutor, a few businessmen and women and plenty plenty other folks from Laventille to Enterprise, Rio Grande to Rio Claro and it still ain’t over, because the poor get poorer and the rich richer and the middle class getting angrier and more and more jealous of being called have nots y the haves and the powerless power structure more flaky and crumbly and still chest thumping and blaming but nobody make jail or if they make jail they bust out, holding up the key, so everyone else could live in jail.

That's when Penguin calypso jump into my head, We Livingin Jail. It won Penguin (Seadley Joseph), dishing out his biting social commentary in flavours of soft diplomacy, the Calypso Monarch crown of 1984. But I really wanted to back back a little so I found the track with his attempt to make a case for equal (sexual) privileges for the ‘remainder’, as high and mighty Sheriffs, Presidents and Ministers already had the privilege that a Deputy Essential. The masses, who had their priorities right took his protest to the street – power to the people - and Deputy won the Road March of 1982. But I had back back too much. It was the 1983 track I was looking for to be the background track for this pantomime, as my pelau pot boileth over. I don’t even have to change any of the words. It is the calypso that took to the airwaves in the days of the demanding winds of change leading to the landslide election of 1986 with its own subtle inferences to power, corruption, misdirected education and diminishing acculturation in the clash of traditional knowledge-based culture of the ‘prophets of old’ versus modern. Everybody gather around the pot and start singing yes, tassa, parang and steel band side – north south and central, dipping into meh pot of pelau and sing de chorus of What Sweet In Goat Mouth (Penguin, 1983, italics mine):

Dey send me down, like prophets of old

To cool dis town, keep it more control

Me eh get no vision and ting

Neither no big message to bring

All dey tell me in hand, as a kaisonian

Go and sing dese songs through the land.

Chorus: Keep singing everyday, remember Mammy say

What sweet in goat mouth does sour in the bambam

What keep you flying high, same ting does make you cry

What sweet in goat mouth does sour in the bambam

Little bit of treasure, little bit of pleasure

So you take, and you take, and you take, and you take. Mistake!

Please say, What sweet in goat mouth does sour in the bambam

Forget who vex/and dem school girls tell

That books and sex/ doesn’t mix too well

Tell the youth who gone off on dope

That they are the future and hope

Tell them if dey too tight/Nothing wouldn’t go right

Is dem and the whole country blight.

Chorus

Dey tell me watch at the new bourgeois

Drinking scotch, travelling afar

Video and stereo like peas

Air-conditioned car, dey ‘fraid breeze

But not a plantation/so next generation

Could truly say this is my land.

Chorus

And if you check, you will see is true

The ill effects of the wrongs men do

All who make women catch dey tail

All who lie and send men to jail

All who rob dey neighbour

All who rape dey daughter

Sing de chorus loud, let dem hear!

Chorus

What sweet in goat mouth does sour in the bambam

What a furor! Evoked from a ten seconds sound bite we don’t know how much who pay for it, but all ah we paying, because is not when the Yankee sneeze all ah we catch cold. And what for? One group sitting on a high table, having dinner, enjoying their traditional ethnic cuisine, and some ole talk washed down with some foreign liquor, reflecting with awe on the distance traveled from a land far away to a small island, contemplating with pride at the new city they helped to build! That might have been the intended message. But that is not what was transmitted, it seems.

Instead, down below, in the hills and the valleys, another tribe, see the foreign cameras showing them sitting in their high tower, looking down upon a city on which they climbed, standing on the backs of the down trodden and discussing them, the have nots with dispassionate indifference, and even a slight sense of unease at what displeasure dispossession may brew.

Did one have to know a bit about consumption habits to see what was bubbling in that media brew? Had the Yankees carefully constructed this brew to lure and lasso the dumb-witted natives whose senses have been so dulled by servings of rum on the plantation pay line and all them chemical injected imported food that it drug them into boasting of the foreign consumption habits, afforded at the expense of the local farms and breweries that were mashed up to promote the monopolies that gave the one percenters the powers to manipulation the powerless superstructures?

A cursory look at the story outline shows it all, I could have written that script with my eyes closed: a segmented feature, each segment showing ‘a tribe’ cooking and eating, yes – must have some eating though we not really about that, just telling them so – so they could be prodded and baited to bring out their beef about the other tribes and burp up some race talk that could stir up some violence, ‘what about skin colour’, ‘status in the power structure?’ The cameras move from the streets and rivers to the high tower and then to the valley, all stereotyped in their comfort zones, back down the hills and on the streets again:

Act I: The hapless youth trying ineffectively to define basic elements of what she knows as culture, ‘liming’ and ‘wine-ing’;

Act II: Tribe I. The men in a happy break from work and invisible and voiceless women who must still be somewhere in backyard mud kitchens;

Act III. Scene i: Tribe II: The high and hoity chest-thumping one percent on a literal high, a little uneasy at the rumblings from the valley, and down there;

Act III. Scene ii: Splice in a clueless, self-absorbed media for some comic Bretless relief that the Bret threats blow over, as a marker of the level of native intelligence.

Act IV. Scene i: Tribe III The descendants of slaves still pridefully enjoying what used to be the hand-me-downs from the massa’s table transformed into appetizing oildown and pigtale and souse awaiting the approval of the Yankee massa as they regale him with tales of the glory days of their revolt.

Act IV Scene ii. Flashback: the days of the revolt and the of roots in a violent stickfighting culture that boasts of ‘is me or dem’, another one percent winner-takes-all (like the Westminster system).

Act V: Cool it down with a nice las lap illusion. They expect that bit of opium or ganja washed down with some liquor, from that bottle again, and the Calypso Queen of the Rose Bowl belting out lines in she most melodious voice so they could ease back into the illusion of self - serene and tranquil touristic Tobago.

From the stereotyping emerges the subtext - of a society that has hardly inched from its colonial moorings, despite its boast of Independence and progress and unity in diversity.

I could already hear the grumbling about the segments of the society that deprived in this script so I had to rewrite it.

Feeling duty-bound to apologise to my friend, the maestro panman Len ‘Boogsie’ Sharp, so I switched to Boogsie’s ‘Breakdown’, which earned him third place in the Panorama Finals of 1990 – an outstanding year for pan music when any number could have played and well we wanted him to win but who could argue too with the combined talents of Kitchener and Jit Samaroo and Amoco Renegades taking home the crown with Iron Man?

In this foreign media fiasco the artist extraordinaire Boogsie, too, is stereotypically overlooked and rendered silent, though not invisible like in the massa days, in favour of the stereotypical psuedo intellectual interpretation of his art.

‘Boogsie’ was one of the first steelbandsmen who befriended me when I was an embryonic journalist when he played a compilation – East Meets West – fusing steelband music with a variety of international and Eastern/Asian music forms in a performance to mark the birthday of the Japanese Emperor Hirohito at the local Japanese Embassy, in my salad days in journalism. From this occasion in the blend of local and Japanese culture – in cuisine, performance, music and fashion, I wrote the article, East Meets West/ A Night To Remember, which seems to have inspired those who read it because it led to a Fellowship to Japan with the Foreign Press Fellowship. I was still only in my first trimester in journalism.

Boogsie is a prophet himself, because 1990, was the year when it all ‘Breakdown’.

And that reminds me to get back on track with my musical meltingpot. Somebody probably tell the foreign media man that stickfighting is roots culture so he take that to mean that stickfighting must be the roots of the violent culture. Go to LiTTscapes, nah. Stickfighting a tradition brought individually and shared collectively by both migrant streams of the descendants of the Ganges and the Nile, was an art, in which few are still interested. Its related cultural underpinnings are now on deathbed from starvation off the cultural systems and beliefs and relationships that sustain it. Who care about stickfighting anyway? The university graduating the young bandits into finer quality white-color warefare, sophisticated arms and armoury, and the mafia grip of the one percentile across each of the tribes helping out the remainder to maintain social disorder, and all the rest of the remainder, that is all ah we, living in jail.

Another 'share' of the viral video pop up on meh cell.

Gibran pop into the scene too, and hand me a page from A Tear and A Smile, The Criminal. See what it says, in the image, this page/below.

‘Eh eh, but ent that true?’ someone share and commented, and there is a nodding chorus. ‘But is true. Just look around, high and low, in the Parliament and in the lagoon.’ Who sets the tone for a society?

The ‘remainder’, the recipients, the hapless natives educated on tourist brochures are bewildered at these unflattering, non-touristic images floating on the silver screen, evoking ghosts of some skeletal truths that they thought were neatly tucked away in dark closets, devour it wholesale, whisper, ‘Is true, this is we.’ With the bubble of who’s really in charge busted – ‘is not we is them.’ Self-recognition leads to self-shame that turns into anger and surfaces as the bile that has to be redirected somewhere else, ‘at them’ and they crawl out of their tipis and start to pelt bois.

They still want to blame the Yankee, but he gone, and who take over town to set the agenda, the tone, the race baiting, bile baiting that has become the fodder of the Parliament to the media and through this, the hapless masses to hurl stones at each other, that has earned the title of ‘governance’, and the now inspired cry, as on that hapless day in history, the end of one love, to this, the end of one people, one nation: July 1990 Form ‘Who's Your Leader’ to Who's in Charge

Musical Melting Pot in a Pelau Potpourri

I turn up the music and begin to wine and hum to Kitchener’s: Tek Yuh Meat Out Meh Rice! Now ever cooking show bout these natives and their discordant disunity should have a song like that. Spicing it up with my own chutkaisocaparang twist, of course, readers can singalong because after that exposition above I am sure you need the comic relief, that is if you do not recognize the comic truths that could have been a nice soundtrack as the background music for the show that would have heightened the depths of absurdity into which it descended. Everybody joined the chorus:

TAKE YOUR MEAT OUT MIH RICE

(Adapted from the Rendition by Lord Kitchener, 1967)

Bourdain, Aboud and some Trinidadians dying for attention

The Bourdain say, "Look, Trini, let we make a cook.

I put the rice, you going put the meat

Then we going both have something to eat."

But when the pot was nearly to done

The Bourdain decide to pull a fast one.

He said, "Trini, I’m a born Bourdainian, I don't like to fight

But when come to the occasion, man, I stickfight fuh mih right

You put in a twelve-cents meat bone, you worse than a lice

I going give you a word of advice, "Take your meat out mih rice!"

Trini got in a big rage, "What wrong with you, Bourdain?

I going tell you flat, Bourdain, I ain't taking that!

When we were shopping we both agree

The food will be cook and share equally

I put meh last penny in this meat and I ain't moving until I eat."

Bourdain say, "Trini, I’m a born Bourdainian, I don't like to fight

But when come to the occasion, man, I die fuh mih right

You put in a ten-cents meat bone, you think that is nice?

Well don't make me have to tell you twice, "Take your meat out mih rice!"

The Bourdain then said to Trini, "Man don't tell lies on me.

I never told you that all ah we is one family, we going join and cook up in two.

What I mention, I can repeat, I said to lend me a piece of meat."

Trini so vex, he begin to cry, "Bourdain, in front mih eye you telling a lie?"

Bourdain say, "Trini, I’m a born Bourdainian, I don't like to fight

But when come to the occasion, man I die fuh meh right.

Yuh put in a nine-cents meat bone, good lord, you want half a slice?

If you don't want a Bourdain ice, "Take your meat out mih rice!"

By this time the pot finish, Trini pick up a dish

The Bourdain say, "No no, no, never happen so!

If you wanted something to eat, man take a fork and pick out your meat

But if you add one grain of rice, by Christ, I squeeze yuh throat like a vice."

"Trini, I’m a born Bourdainian, I don't like to fight

But when come to the occasion, man I die fuh mih right

You put in a eight-cents meat bone, you Trinidadian lice

Before I squeeze you like Christ, "Take your meat out mih rice!"

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZqWLwZIncec

Kitchener released this song before I was born so it was part of my growing consciousness of not just the humour but the social value of calypso music. It is one of the pieces I use to stimulate students in both formal (UWI classrooms) and informal (community spaces) in efforts to liberate literature from text into the arena of lifelong learning from our diverse repertoire in the oral traditions. They were challenged to identify the pivotal line on which was hinged the diminishing value of the inputs in this partnership, and the core source of humour of the piece. You could imagine most made the same grade of the bunch who thought Paul Keen’s Douglas’ Las Lap wine was the kind imported in a bottle, and the post Carnival madness that possessed his protagonist made her a candidate for St Anns Mental Asylum - then all ah we eating that pelau should be going St Ann's, fuh true.

As music is so much a part of our culinary traditions, it was finding its way into my pelau party. I made a compilation of musicians and musical accompaniments I wanted in my private pelau party play list at this exposition on real Caribbean Cuisine that the whole country invite themselves into. (inbox me if you want the link, nah). The Mighty Trini – no pun intended on the ‘Mighty’ one percentile because Trini is really from the remainder non-powerful - turn up knocking at my window like Davindra Dookie before his suicide at the alter of frustrated artistry. He shouting, ‘Ah Have a Tabanca, Ha, Curry Tabanca’. It was then I realise why there were no women at the river scene and all the men there singing Curry Tabanca, because ‘she pack up all she curry and she gone away, Tabanca like gobar/Burning like anchar/In deh ghar …curry tabanca ha ha'. Trini was still singing.

I felt myself dozing off, so I had asked someone to ‘wake me up when it is over.’

Draupatie was shaking me, jiggling she behind about some movement to unite the rhythms of Africa and India, to come together in a perfect mixture but she laughing ‘ha ha, Hotta Than A Chulha’. I realise she had to be joking. One love break up and this was insurrection and nearly thirty years later, David Rudder, still pleading with me and 1990, please make a liar of me. (lyrics below)

Towers and Terrors: Memories of an Insurrection

‘Like Beirut’. It is not a term anyone would want to use to describe their city, at least not with pride. That was the term that came to mind.

I had survived the five days of the coup, calling in reports to the office, sourcing form near and far, un-monitored because I was not at any of the hotspots, but near enough to the unfolding action at the television station to give a virtual ‘ball by ball’ from the vantage point of my apartment block that had been appropriated by soldiers.

The day of the night and the night of the day of the five day ordeal was nearing its close.

It was the day of the release of the hostages. I scaled the wall again, headed down Picton Street and across Marli towards Maraval Road, just north of TTT, crouching between soldiers, guns pointed as the insurrectionists came out one by one, little boys and a big man’s game, recounted in the entry in my coup diary, Hostages in Our homes: “Freedom Came on Emancipation Day.”

As if I had not had enough, I left that scene following the surrender, storm soaked and all and headed into Port of Spain happy to leave my post, from where I had been covering the scene at the television station that was under siege by insurrectionists. The anticipated tropical storm system had veered. I was taking in the city for the first time. Walking through the streets on the eastern end -.the business and commercial hub of the city that stretches further eastward into what is generally described as the city’s ghettoes and slums.

It is a stereotype from which it has been trying to emerge, but the brand remains.

To the west is the administrative side. Here is the Parliament, the offices of the judiciary, and those institutions that define itself among the power pillars. Further west are the high rises and the more affluent communities. They do not try to escape that stigma. It’s good to say one is from that side of town. It is also a good brand for property prices. It is not what anyone would now describe as ‘like Beirut’, now.

But then, Port of Spain, soaked by the tail end of the hurricane that accentuates the scents of the stink the fires, gunfire, and ash. I am gingerly stepping over rubble of concrete, glass, protruding steel and live wires, sparking, trying to breathe through the air still thick and heavy with smoke. Not even torrents of rain could wash off the scent or the heaviness of the air. The storm had veered but the skies were still heavy. I was grasping for breath in the heavy air.

It is not Beirut. It is Port-of-Spain.

Like Beirut, I write, back at my desk. It is the central phrase in an article of few words. The images say it all. A city razed to the ground. Its trims and frills torn off. Its underbelly naked and exposed. The raw anger, resentment, sense of disempowerment and frustration that is said to have driven the insurrectionists to their crazed attempt at seizing power sticking out like the looted buildings, their showcases shattered, leaving only the rubble and the ash.

Like the Beirut of the television images, it was a scene of devastation. There was little signifying the life as we knew it. The city has been evacuated. Even the birds seem to have migrated, as had the stray dogs, and the homeless who roamed the city streets, rummaging through its spoils, like dogs. The scent of ash still hangs on my nostrils to this day, almost two decades later.

Who win eh? I am surveying my collection of writings and accumulated literature and analyses and my own jottings of the effects on the social systems through my beats in education, health, local government, culture and the arts, and with the front seats to the unfolding action at the nearby Trinidad and Tobago Television. This one, a coup diary of the unfolding action each day, as soldiers occupied my building to monitor and pump barrage of bullets daytime and nighttime at the building; these about surveying the damage in Port of Spain, buildings burnt to the ground, raided and looted and the shocking followups that the insurance would never compensate; this one of the hospitals overflowing with dead and dying, including the Health Minister who had to be whisked away for treatment because the oil rich economy didn’t spend what was required for a hospital that could serve the first world needs, like the first world tastes of people; this one, interviewing the family of the victims, like Leo Des Vignes who lost his life; and this about the Hosay drums, gone silent, too, like in David Rudder’s song, Hoosay.

Who win, eh? When the sons and daughters of Laventille and Enterprise dying all around; and businesses, now top heavy, tottering because they have stifled off the basic creative cottage enterprises for monopolies that encourage conspicuous consumption without trying to strengthen the base; so when the top fall, the bottom collapse too, as in Bottom’s Dream. Again that Puck phrase of my salad days come to mind. More mature now, I suppress it, with the other stuff that want to pour out. Like why the drums of the Ganges and the Nile gone silent; why the priests silent; why the courts silent; why the business people and the politician the commission of enquiry collect its dole and file away Cabinets of documents.

In the slum ghetto parts near the city, the inhabitants eat the refuse off the then, and now, master table – the pigtail that they have made into a delicious souse. Above the Central plains at the River’s source, it is curry and doubles and the boys lime where women are invisible. In the affluent west, the most powerful sit in their towers on high, looking down on the city below, Beirut.

Stereotyping. Media stereotyping and its damaging effects unleashes on the unsuspecting masses and everyone is bewilderingly wondered what have they just witnessed. Truth? Half Truths? Innuendoes?

When the smoke clear they realise they are central to the pantomime: the protagonists, the performers and the spectators, and it is not the outsider, but themselves selfies, self-inflicting, suicidal injury to the body politic to the point now at which, all things fall apart – the judiciary tearing at itself and its elf image to shreds; as a bewildered political system hurling the worst kinds of racist and other stereotypical insults across the floor, setting a tone for the national discourse that unleashes on social media. The national selfie taking advantage of the age of selfie. What a self image. Through my tears and sighs, that’s the nature of The Criminal, I find Gibran’s analogy in A Tear and a Smile, same in Beirut as in Port-of-Spain:

THE CRIMINAL: from A Tear & A Smile by Kahlil Gibran

A young man of strong body, weakened by hunger, sat on the walker's portion of the street stretching his hand toward all who passed, begging and repeating his hand toward all who passed, begging and repeating the sad song of his defeat in life, while suffering from hunger and from humiliation. When night came, his lips and tongue were parched, while his hand was still as empty as his stomach. He gathered himself and went out from the city, where he sat under a tree and wept bitterly. Then he lifted his puzzled eyes to heaven while hunger was eating his inside, and he said, "Oh Lord, I went to the rich man and asked for employment, but he turned me away because of my shabbiness; I knocked at the school door, but was forbidden solace because I was empty−handed; I sought any occupation that would give me bread, but all to no avail. In desperation I asked alms, but They worshipers saw me and said "He is strong and lazy, and he should not beg." "Oh Lord, it is Thy will that my mother gave birth unto me, and now the earth offers me back to You before the Ending." His expression then changed. He arose and his eyes now glittered in determination. He fashioned a thick and heavy stick from the branch of the tree, and pointed it toward the city, shouting, "I asked for bread with all the strength of my voice, and was refused. Not I shall obtain it by the strength of my muscles! I asked for bread in the name of mercy and love, but humanity did not heed. I shall take it now in the name of evil!"

The passing years rendered the youth a robber, killer and destroyer of souls; he crushed all who opposed him; he amassed fabulous wealth with which he won himself over to those in power. He was admired by colleagues, envied by other thieves, and feared by the multitudes. His riches and false position prevailed upon the Emir to appoint him deputy in that city−−the sad process pursued by unwise governors. Thefts were then legalized; oppression was supported by authority; crushing of the weak became commonplace; the throngs curried and praised.

Thus does the first touch of humanity's selfishness make criminals of the humble, and make killers of the sons of peace; thus does the early greed of humanity grow and strike back at humanity a thousand fold!

Winner Take All at WestMinister, the Abbey with the Most Powerful In Charge

From Perestroika to Glasnost, Paris to Pennsylvannia, Bogota to Brussels and Beirut to a Port of Spain like-Beirut. Who wins? The city settles back into amnesia, and I retreat back to my lagoon, like Trinidad Rio, Ah Going Back To Basics, as we all should, so we could emerge from the amnesia.

Back to basics, too, I return to Gibran, to restore my original illusion of the Beirut of which he had written almost a century earlier. He commiserated with me in passages he had written a century before my own close up experiences of the terror and violence in the hearts and minds of men and women to break my wings, and my heart. I am struck by how easily I could apply to any other nation, even to easily substitute the name of the country, You Have Your Trinidad and Tobago and I have Mine It’s the piece, You Have Your Lebanon and I have My Lebanon (see image/below)

You have your Lebanon and I have my Lebanon by Kahlil Gibran

You have your Lebanon and its dilemma. I have my Lebanon and its beauty. Your Lebanon is an arena for men from the West and men from the East.

My Lebanon is a flock of birds fluttering in the early morning as shepherds lead their sheep into the meadow and rising in the evening as farmers return from their fields and vineyards.

You have your Lebanon and its people. I have my Lebanon and its people.

Yours are those whose souls were born in the hospitals of the West; they are as ship without rudder or sail upon a raging sea.... They are strong and eloquent among themselves but weak and dumb among Europeans.

They are brave, the liberators and the reformers, but only in their own area. But they are cowards, always led backwards by the Europeans. They are those who croak like frogs boasting that they have rid themselves of their ancient, tyrannical enemy, but the truth of the matter is that this tyrannical enemy still hides within their own souls. They are the slaves for whom time had exchanged rusty chains for shiny ones so that they thought themselves free. These are the children of your Lebanon. Is there anyone among them who represents the strength of the towering rocks of Lebanon, the purity of its water or the fragrance of its air? Who among them vouchsafes to say, "When I die I leave my country little better than when I was born"?

Who among them dare to say, "My life was a drop of blood in the veins of Lebanon, a tear in her eyes or a smile upon her lips"?

Those are the children of your Lebanon. They are, in your estimation, great; but insignificant in my estimation.

Let me tell you who are the children of my Lebanon.

They are farmers who would turn the fallow field into garden and grove.

They are the shepherds who lead their flocks through the valleys to be fattened for your table meat and your woolens.

They are the vine-pressers who press the grape to wine and boil it to syrup.

They are the parents who tend the nurseries, the mothers who spin the silken yarn.

They are the husbands who harvest the wheat and the wives who gather the sheaves.

They are the builders, the potters, the weavers and the bell-casters.

They are the poets who pour their souls in new cups.

They are those who migrate with nothing but courage in their hearts and strength in their arms but who return with wealth in their hands and a wreath of glory upon their heads.

They are the victorious wherever they go and loved and respected wherever they settle.

They are the ones born in huts but who died in palaces of learning.

These are the children of Lebanon; they are lamps that cannot be snuffed by the wind & salt which remains unspoiled through the ages.

They are the ones who are steadily moving toward perfection, beauty, and truth.

What will remain of your Lebanon after a century? Tell me! Except bragging, lying and stupidity? Do you expect the ages to keep in its memory the traces of deceit and cheating and hypocrisy? Do you think the atmosphere will preserve in its pockets the shadows of death and the stench of graves?

Do you believe life will accept a patched garment for a dress? Verily, I say to you that an olive plant in the hills of Lebanon will outlast all of your deeds and your works; that the wooden plow pulled by the oxen in the crannies of Lebanon is nobler than your dreams and aspirations.

I say to you, while the conscience of time listened to me, that the songs of a maiden collecting herbs in the valleys of Lebanon will outlast all the uttering of the most exalted prattler among you. I say to you that you are achieving nothing. If you knew that you are accomplishing nothing, I would feel sorry for you, but you know it not.

Not recreate. Not imitate. We thought we could remake the image, the self image, and rescue the spiral: Hold up a different new, self made self with Independent thought and the hold melting pot of creators, directing their own show. As with the Arab Spring, then, as now, the Ganges and the Nile and the other, even invisible people were united in a desire for freedom and justice and equality – the East inspired by the West and the belief that democracy is to be defended and the desire for a more fundamental changes to the development deficit that would guard against the rising tides of fundamentalism with the backlash of dictatorial authoritarianism - bitterness expressed in violence, and the curbing of freedoms, and greater militarism.

But that was Bottom’s Dream, that had no Bottom, left sitting under the television table, tongue hanging out and dribbling, unable to wait for the alien arrival, falling over each other to get in on the action, bottle and spoon and all; then growing resentful even before it is aired to hear that it might not be the pretty mas, but the other kind of social humour – the kind that makes we shame because is we killing we; and then the uproar that it wouldn’t be aired because the cable network didn’t buy the rights and then – well the classic Grecian tragic Pandora’s Box of ills that it released when social media grab hold of it and let all its little imps out to all and sundry, making the American news network that supposed to air it regret that it didn’t think of that and just let the local cable people just air it for free because, well because It’s About the Ratings, Stupid! The number of views it get on social media – more than 100 times what its other shows got - would have shot the network’s ratings through the glass ceiling that the show didn’t break with the especially invisible women from the river lime.

But bad judgement could come from anywhere and anytime, even from among the self-acclaimed most powerful news network in the world or the world’s most powerful hostile and recalcitrant minorities, or the most powerful race, class, and colour resentments that social media gives ear and air to, or powerful community leaders, Member of Parliament and Cabinet appointees, dis-appointees, mis-appointees, re-appointees and unappointees to head social development of community leaders – same swamp, different lagoon.

PR gone wrong all around, inspired by brainwave or intoxicated and seduced by pelvic gyrations, wining and dining, like in the sexy tourist brochures. Some heads in the advertising world must be lolling from too much beer soaked bad advice about Bret and which chest thumping soundbite should complement the chain of coffee shops being marketed to lure the travel and tourism market to let them know we are stars with big bucks too.

Lord, What Fools We Mortal Be! To think that any local production could do that for we people and we culture and we tourism and show we cuisine in the cultural milieu, through pelau as a musical melting pot and a potpourri of people from the East and West.

Much like Columbus, in a climate where even the calmest winds could portend a storm with bad Brets, it is venturing with no reservations into parts unknown in a Cross Country LiTTour through Sonny Ladoo’s scorpion infested lagoons of the North and the South, inflicting No Pain Like This Body politic – crawling with criminals, violence and class and ethnic tensions, showing off the dark, and brown and white underbelly of the nation churning with the diversity of doubles, dhalpuri and dhal belly, gyros, pigtale and souse, shark and bake, and other belly types of nationhood nurtured on curried cascadura that Sam made and captured in LiTTscapes: (see image, this page and Al Creighton’s Review, LiTTscapes Showreel)

Those who eat the Cascadura will,

The native legend says,

Wheresoever they may wander

End in Trinidad their days.

(Johnson and the Cascadura, in Ways of Sunlight, Samuel Selvon, 1957).

But then we have invested less in cultivating nationhood than what might have been vested in the show, that wouldn’t have even been shown here, if it wasn’t rescued from ignominy by social media and a chorus of power deprived citizens outraged at the revelations of the stratification of power, when they must have at some time or the other held on closely to their illusions to power. If anything, it provides a nice case study on how anticipated bang for your bucks can become bang bang. It’s about the ratings, stupid!

To Create, not recreate. Not unlike his attempt to present the Lebanon of his heart, with LiTTscapes and its satellite LiTTribute activities across Europe, the Caribbean and the Americas – LiTTurgy to the Mainland, Guyana; LiTTribute to the Republic – Trinidad and Tobago; LiTTribute to the Antilles, LiTTribute to LondonTTown … trying to represent the collective vision of our poets, playwrights, philosophers, singers, songwriters, artistes, visionaries whose love penetrate the good, bad and ugly, for truth beyond narrow small island boundaries with their lace in the expansive universe. An exploration of literature is an exploration of self as it is of nationhood, and our universal selfhood, epitomized in the final pages of LiTTscapes as “Global Movements” show how writers’ representations transmuted to the experiences of others to influence other societies and to shape the consciousness of educators and learners and policy makers for knowledge as thought, not just taught, from Port of Spain, to Beirut and beyond to discourse with other world literatures and UNESCO and the world.

To learn from experience, even the vicarious experiences of one society speaking to another across the oceans; of one artist, communicating with another across time and space, revitalizing the ashes of reality of a city that renders love futile and promotes only its haters into a virtual world of limitless possibilities, reawakened from its amnesia, like Gibran:

What do you seek, my countrymen?

Do you desire that I build for

You gorgeous palaces, decorated

With words of empty meaning, or

Temples roofed with dreams? Or

Do you command me to destroy what

The liars and tyrants have built?

Shall I uproot with my fingers

What the hypocrites and the wicked

Have implanted? Speak your insane

Wish!

What is it you would have me do,

My countrymen? Shall I purr like

The kitten to satisfy you, or roar

Like the lion to please myself? I

Have sung for you, but you did not

Dance;

I have wept before you, but

You did not cry. Shall I sing and

Weep at the same time?

Your souls are suffering the pangs

Of hunger, and yet the fruit of

Knowledge is more plentiful than

The stones of the valleys.

Your hearts are withering from

Thirst, and yet the springs of

Life are streaming about your

Homes. Why do you not drink?

The sea has its ebb and flow,

The moon has its fullness and

Crescents, and the ages have

Their winter and summer, and all

Things vary like the shadow of

An unborn god moving between

Earth and sun, but truth cannot

Be changed, nor will it pass away;

Why, then, do you endeavour to

Disfigure its countenance?

I have called you in the silence

Of the night to point out the

Glory of the moon and the dignity

Of the stars, but you startled

From your slumber and clutched

Your swords in fear, crying,

"Where is the enemy? We must kill

Him (Her) first!" At morningtide, when

The enemy came, I called to you

Again, but now you did not wake

From your slumber, for you were

Locked in fear, wrestling with

The processions of spectres in

Your dreams.

And I said unto you, "Let us climb

To the mountain top and view the

Beauty of the world." And you

Answered me, saying, "In the depths

Of this valley our fathers lived,

And in its shadows they died, and in

Its caves they were buried. How can

We depart this place for one which

They failed to honour?"

And I said unto you, "Let us go to

The plain that gives its bounty to

The sea." And you spoke timidly to

Me, saying, "The uproar of the abyss

Will frighten our spirits, and the

Terror of the depths will deaden

Our bodies."

I have loved you, my countrymen, but

My love for you is painful to me

And useless to you…

-- Excerpt, My Countrymen, Kahlil Gibran

Not unlike Gibran, and this list of writers and advocates for social justice who faced initial rejection by his people, these works - well received and respected abroad, moving poets and philosophers to tears, planners and policy makers to re-think and redirect, because they say, it mirrors their souls and aspirations for their people - are yet to find fertile ground in education systems or institutions here. Instead, we exalt a hollow history that goes little deeper than the recent colonial past rather than the fertile terrain of our multiculturalism and so the next generations will be inheritors of a barren earth: ‘The drums were silent, it was the night of the day that they say the matyrs died,’ choked from recognizing and acknowledging and emerging from its own biases and prejudices.

My twelve points of why we need to restore conscious creative independent thought for sustainable development: see text below/image this page:

Text Thought & Teaching for Sustainable Development

12 Facts on Why Fiction Matters

Bridges Today’s virtual world and virtual reality

Minimizes the sense of divorce from reality

Expands Humanism

Promotes Critical Thinking

Promotes Empathy

Promotes Tolerance

Enhances Intercultural Dialogue

Fosters Appreciation for Others

Fosters Respect of and for Difference

Embraces Variety and Diversity of Thoughts & Ideas

Promotes Social, Economic & Political Stability

Advances a Culture of Peace

Next: Then, as Now, 1990 Revisited and Play List of Alternative Truths on How to Emerge from the Mess

Lyrics: David Rudder: 1990

Lyrics: David Rudder Hoosay

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"Wear something red," was the popular cry And like the pavements and streets, they were filled with envy Because by morning light, they were covered with our blood I tell you not one soul there escaped the frenzy You know, sometimes you gamble in king and wild is the joker And sometimes the sight of the moon just riles up the lost, the hungry, the mad These are the troubled times that we have down in Trinidad. Because under the crescent moon and above the bloody asphalt Strange dogs were barking deep in the night Under the crescent moon, I say the drums were silent But somehow the rhythm continued, oh what a sight! On the night of the day, it was the night of the day, Oh, the night when they say that the martyrs died. Fame, yes, we're famous as hell Why don't you know we're a star At long last we have made it A star, like that star in the moon shining over the tomb Dance the moon, Come on dance Brother, Dance But death is your drummer, oh Dance, sister, prance, the future's at stake And jump high, jump low, but this Hoosay will take the cake. Because under the crescent moon and above the bloody asphalt Strange dogs were barking deep in the night Under the crescent moon, I say the drums were silent But somehow the rhythm continued, oh what a sight! On the night of the day, it was the night of the day, Oh, the night when they say that the martyrs died. The power and the glory is so close at hand But the beast he was lurking For he too sits in the wings, in the wings So when we searched for the moon all we saw were the vultures But then a chosen people never worry 'bout these things So the roll of the tassa began to sound like the rhythm of bullets And the thundering boom bass well, that was a bomb, was a bomb In ah this Muslim time when the Hoosay is number one. I say under the crescent moon and above the bloody asphalt. Brother man, strange dogs were barking deep in the night Under the crescent moon, I say the drums were silent But somehow the rhythm continued, oh what a sight! On the night of the day, it was the night of the day, Oh, the night when they say that the martyrs died. Not in this house, not in this garden of Eden Oh, how we danced to the beat of this lovely lie, lovely lie Until a man opened a door and showed us our other side And our Mecca-ed illusions walked right on by Now Trini know what is Oozy diplomacy Now Trini know what is SLR love In ah these troubled times under the stars above. I say under the crescent moon and above the bloody asphalt. Brother man strange dogs were barking deep in the night, Under the crescent moon. I say the drums were silent, But somehow the drumming continued. Oh what a sight! On the night of the day it was the night of the day, Oh, the night when they say that the martyrs died. Under the crescent moon and above the bloody asphalt Strange dogs were barking deep in the night Under the crescent moon, I say the drums were silent. But somehow the rhythm continued, oh what a sight! On the night of the day, it was the night of the day Oh, the night when they say that the magic died. So "wear something red," was the popular cry And like the pavements and streets, they were filled, were filled with envy Because by morning light they were covered with our blood I tell you not one soul there escaped the frenzy You know, sometimes you gamble in king but you pull the court jester And sometimes the sight of the moon.

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