Let’s just say it wasn’t any ordinary week last week. Discussing media coverage of crises and disasters with journalists of Dominica and Barbados, among other things, excavated recent hurts at the devastation of Hurricane Maria in 2017 and the nameless child who looked up at PM Roosevelt Skerritt and made a chronic crybaby of me by asking him: “Why did Jesus do this to us?”
Then, as La Soufrière scalped the rich terrain of northern St Vincent in April, Barbadians who had contemplated unassociated destinies ran for cover as volcanic ash dragged them back to proximate Caribbean reality.
Weeks later, last week in fact, a lone senator ducked and ran from the election of Barbados’ first president, Sandra Mason, as the island moved toward the achievement republican status a month from now.
On my Twitter feed landed a quick and nervous enquiry from Jamaica about T&T’s own embrace of such status 45 years ago. I could not think of a proper response that did not make silly reference to 51st State aspirations.
It was also a week when Jamaican journalists forgot that their colleagues in Guyana had long stopped calling conman and mass murderer Jim Jones “reverend” or “pastor” or “preacherman.” There may have even been a time when the ecumenical community also paid like homage and respect.
Two knifed to death, one shot by police and the thuggish cult leader “Dr,” “Pastor,” “Bishop” Smith was mentioned with reference to “congregants” from his “church.” On Monday he died in a car accident while being driven from Montego Bay to Kingston for the laying of charges.
Then, Gail in far-off Madrid sent me a recording of a recent interview with former general in the People’s Revolutionary Army of Grenada, Hudson Austin, even as the country marked the 38th anniversary of the deadly circumstances leading to the violent US invasion/intervention.
By that time, Austin had already declared himself “Chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council of Grenada.” He was pictured days later being led away by US troops—broken, silent, shirtless, and bound. He spent 25 years in prison. He is speaking now.
Who can forget his much younger voice through the crackles and pops of the AM band one fateful evening? We put our ears to the radio speaker in Curepe: “Let it be clearly understood that the Revolutionary Armed Forces will govern with absolute strictness. Anyone who seeks to demonstrate or disturb the peace will be shot.”
Last week, as interviewer George Worme skillfully pried and coaxed responses, the 83-year-old denied knowledge of some decision-making moments and his voice often cracked with emotion.
I thought there are so many from among the Barbadian and Dominican cohort to whom Austin’s interview means very little. The reality is, we could well have dumped the lectures, left assembled journalists with the recorded interview, and walked away.
Even as we communed online last week, German broadcaster Deutsche Welle’s DW Akademie was circulating its publication on media and conflict entitled: “How close should we get?”—a thoughtfully crafted manual which captures both the physical/logistical challenges of crisis media coverage while rendering bare the human face/souls of journalists behind the cameras and other tools of the craft.
The death of 1990 coup leader Yasin Abu Bakr on Thursday helped make the point. You can tell who, even from among our ranks, could not contain their enthusiasm for someone responsible for more death and mayhem from any single event in our history, than perhaps the current pandemic.
Contrary to some claims, and one particularly defamatory account, I happened to have been there. On location. Live. Parliament Friday July 27, 1990, at around 6 pm. I heard the first bullets that recklessly killed people. Unlike Linda and Deborah, who stayed and suffered, I made it out.
“How close should be get?” Close enough. Yet, within the perimeter that fairness permits. From the kind of distance that extracts from the boisterous impeachment sitting—yet another of last week’s many human episodes —sufficient to acquire clarity on the question of proposed “revolution.”
What a week, indeed. What a time. There’s more to come, I’m certain. There is more to come in these perilous times.
