A fine drizzle sweeps the flanks of Northern Range foothills; Mount Tamana hides in a grey squall while morning birds breakfast on a blighted starch mango tree, strangled by vines but still bearing fruit only accessible by wing.
This is the time of year which used to be the dry season but then nothing now is as it was, excepting the perennial bacchanal. Bees and frogs are disappearing across the face of the earth, along with schoolgirls in Nigeria and Christians in northern Syria.
To reiterate my theme of last week–"the time is out of joint" but unlike Prince Hamlet I'm under no delusion about the possibilities of setting it right. The combination of global warming and rabid fundamentalism–man made products of progress and regression–accounts for where we are now.
We've seen the swing between massive flooding, drought and forest fires; we're becoming inured to beheadings and suicide bombings, the hate-fuelled destruction of human dignity and heritage, the marauding of those mighty on proscribed right or greed. If the West isn't trembling, it's dissembling, while the wheel keeps turning and as fast as we feel we going forward, we're only reversing at increasing speed.
These reflections from the hills are not aimed at inducing despair, but rather, to clear the air. Do we only see what we want rather than what is there?
This morning I watched as the children in my small daughter's pre-school solemnly recited the national pledge. It was a chilling moment to realise that these innocents were repeating the hollow words of a pledge now hopelessly sullied, a little more than 50 years after Independence. From parliament to parlour, who can honestly say they have dedicated their life to either God or country? As for cleanliness in thought, word and deed- wha de france. As for striving for the greater happiness of all, come out me road before ah lick yuh dong yes.
By the time those whose beds of nails we've been making when we're not plugging them into the same technology we distract ourselves with (from ourselves and them) began singing the national anthem, I wasn't sure whether to grit my teeth, or grimace. Only a fool can retain a "boundless faith in our destiny" which has systematically been trampled by the greedy, powerful and supremely ignorant. Failed Federation, globalisation and petty nationalism have made a mockery of the notion that the islands of the Caribbean stand side by side. It took an earthquake for the region to awake to the misery of Haiti, our first truly independent nation. Maybe instead of standing side by side we need to change to sing: lie down in the common poverty of vision and the embrace of mediocrity.
There may well be a case for reparations, the legacy of slavery greets us every dawn, but money or infrastructural, educational or wider developmental initiatives don't change the bankruptcy of vision not even in blessed, floating on energy dollars, Trinidad. Maybe our national motto should be revised to more accurately reflect our post-independence mode: "Together we conspire, together we deceive."
We're independent, but horrendously dependent; we may be postcolonial but we haven't yet begun to de-colonise and apparently we like it so, because the worst continues at a furious pace.
While Caribbean dysfunction can be historically analysed in terms of European exploitation, many of our current wounds are self-inflicted and the barbarity, which CLR James predicted would descend on the region unless it emancipated itself from the plantation model, has arrived with a bang, leaving many whimpering. Far from making a break from the legacy of Chris Cum buss us, we resolutely continue in his footsteps.
The Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier besides championing our "real maravilloso" (magical reality) gave us an imaginative insight into the "Discoverer's" motivation in his 1979 novella El Arpa y la Sombra. The sacred mission of Christo-phoros–the transporter of Christ, is debunked in his deathbed confession: "...there is an autumnal light that tears me away from the resplendent islands where–perhaps because I had not taken a chaplain aboard the ships, perhaps because I had never thought of converting or indoctrinating anyone–the devil waited to catch me in his traps. And the evidence of those traps is here, in the draft of my account of my voyages ...that I pull out now with trembling... to reread what...seems an entire repertoire of illusions...that began on October 13th with the word GOLD...when I saw with a thrill of surprise that some of the Indians wore small bits of gold in their noses...Seeing this marvel, I felt a sort of internal shock. A lust the likes of which I had never known rumbled in my guts...And from that day on, GOLD was the word most often repeated in my diaries, reports and letters."
The dystopia of our paradise isles was inscribed in the greed and violence shipped here in the caravels. We can never be free of it by singing or mouthing hollow words or wearing the colonists' khaki pants.