Sectoral Interest Trumps National

By MICHAEL HARRIS

It was the Governor of the Central Bank who, to his credit, first called for the creation of a social compact. Now, the Prime Minister, in a televised address to the nation of the state of the economy has, apparently accepted that it is a necessary feature in this period of adjustment.

We need to be fair and accurate however. For while the Governor of the Central Bank actually used the term “social compact” Mr.Manning did not. What Mr. Manning did say was that “dialogue between the Government, business and labour must begin” and he did so in the context of urging restraint “at all levels” since this was a time to tighten our belts.

The distinction is important. For while I have no doubt that a genuine social compact will certainly be beneficial for this country, not only in the context of our current economic crisis but as an institutionalized feature of our future political landscape, I have very grave doubts that we have the necessary understanding or acceptance of what is entailed in a genuine social compact for us to successfully create such an institution.

Before we discuss this however let us categorically dismiss the notion that any tripartite dialogue between Government, business and labour will accomplish any measure of what needs to be accomplished if we are to weather the current economic crisis with a minimum of dislocation and distress.

We have had attempts to initiate tripartite dialogue before. Most of these have been very limited in scope and confined to labour issues. Even with such limited scope these discussions have invariably petered out largely as a result of the failure of the parties to reach consensus on any issue.

A far more ambitious attempt was made in 2000 when signatories representing the Government, labour and business interests agreed to a declaration entitled “Compact 2000 and Beyond”. That declaration committed the signatory parties to engage in a collaborative effort to realize an agreed set of national objectives and to negotiate policies and to settle conflicts on the basis of those commonly agreed objectives.

Compact 2000 was initiated by the then UNC administration largely in an attempt to fulfil its promise to the labour movement to ratify the ILO Convention 144 on tripartite consultations. At the signing of the declaration, Mr. Willi Momm, then Director of the ILO Caribbean Office, warned in his address that although the creation of the tripartite consultative body could bring many social and economic advantages there were several risk factors which could lead to failure.

He stated then that:

“ The first risk is that the parties involved do not take this project quite so seriously and continue the old ways of adversarialism in managing matters of national importance because they see no need for change and ignore the threat of crisis. The second risk is that the Declaration is not sufficiently supported at the decision-making level of Government, private sector and unions. The third risk is that the involved parties continue to treat each other with mistrust and disrespect. Only a full recognition of each other as partners and respect for the different positions and values that they represent can breathe life into a social dialogue process. The fourth risk is that after a period of hype, in particular election hype, the Declaration will slowly sink into oblivion, in particular if no concrete and immediate benefits would seem to flow from it for the involved parties.”

As it turned out, whatever the commitment of the UNC administration might have been to making the process work, the fact is that a little over one year later, after the December 2001 elections, they were removed from office and the incoming PNM administration demonstrated absolutely no interest in the consultative arrangement. As Mr. Momm had warned, the declaration sank into oblivion.

But “Compact 2000 and Beyond” was significant in that the provisions of the declaration closely approached what is required of a genuine social compact. We do not have to go very far to find an example of a social compact which works and to glean from it the elements critical to a successful social compact.

One of our closest Caribbean neighbours, Barbados, has operated under the terms of a social compact for many years. The first protocol establishing the Barbados social compact was introduced in 1993 as part of that country’s response to the grave economic crisis which it faced in 1991 and 1992.

That first protocol had a very clear economic focus and was, in fact, a central part of the efforts to strengthen the economy. More specifically, it was a core strategy to avoid the prescriptions of the International Monetary Fund which included the devaluation of the Barbados dollar, a move which all of the Social Partners believed would have been disastrous for Barbados.

The Social Partners instead agreed on a series of tough policy measures; including a Prices and Incomes Policy for Barbados, as part of an overall strategy for the sustained economic development of the country.

That first protocol of 1993 has been renewed and expanded continuously since then. The fourth such protocol was signed in 2001 and it is interesting and instructive to highlight some of the statements made in that fourth protocol:

“The Government, Employers’ Representatives and Workers’ Representatives (herein called the “Social Partners”)

RECOGNISING that there resides among them a mutuality of interest, an inherent interdependence and a maturity in the exercise of their relationships;

FURTHER RECOGNISING that the success of any sustained social and economic progress in Barbados will depend to a considerable extent upon their on-going individual and collective commitment to a philosophy of governance which is characterised by participatory democracy and the subjugation of their sectoral interests to the national good;

…………….

FURTHER ACKNOWLEDGING that there are potential societal and economic benefits to be derived from an expansion of the scope of such previous tripartite agreements;

RECOMMIT themselves to a formal structure to govern their continued collaboration and consultation on fundamental issues affecting their individual and collective contributions to all aspects of national development…”

Let us not fail to emphasise the key aspects of these undertakings. The social partners in Barbados in the first place were all committed to an agreed and understood “philosophy of governance”. Second, they all understood and agreed to “the subjugation of their sectoral interests to the national good”. And finally that in pursuit of their objectives they agreed that there would be “consultation on all aspects of national development”.

If these three elements represent the foundations of any successful social compact then it is not difficult to understand why the chances of establishing such a compact here in Trinidad and Tobago at this time of economic crisis are not very good.

Our fundamental political problem remains our failure to construct a viable and sustainable system of governance, defined here as “an agreed upon network of laws, regulations, processes, traditions and values which form both the foundation upon which- and the parameters within which- governments operate and which ultimately confer on those operations the mantle of legitimacy.”

In the context of this discussion it is important to realise that what such a system or philosophy of government does is establish clearly for all parties the boundaries of what constitutes the “national good” beyond which their sectional interest must be subjugated. Without such an agreed upon system there is no national interest or, more accurately, everybody’s sectional interest become the national interest.

And this is precisely where we are in this country today. When the Government and the Business associations call for restraint from the Labour Unions in their wage demands they are in fact defining the national interest to coincide with their own particular sectional interest. And, similarly when the Labour Unions warn that in the period of adjustment “not a man must go” they, too, are seeing the picture from a highly particular point of view.

While the absence of a system of governance constitutes a huge impediment to the successful establishment of a social compact it does not have to be an insurmountable one. For, as in the Barbados example, the very economic crisis in which we find ourselves presents us with a clear opportunity to begin the process of constructing such a system of governance.

The point is that such a system of Governance does not have to be, and perhaps cannot be, constructed all at once. The present crisis presents us with a particular set of economic issues and if there is the will among the interests, then at least we have the possibility of establishing a protocol limited to how we manage the economy and the role of each of the interests in that management. And that would be a good beginning.

The truth is however that even for such a limited beginning, the prospects are not good. For the key element here would be the willingness of all the interests to engage in genuine consultation which would involve coming to the table without preconceived options and non-negotiable conditions.

But already the chances of that are slim to non-existent. For in his address to the nation, the very same one in which he called for tripartite consultations, Mr Manning made it clear that his government would be the only party involved in deciding where and how cuts in public expenditure would take place and how the diminished revenues would be allocated. That attitude hardly constitutes an auspicious basis upon which to build a social compact.

By CARY FRASER

In 1963, the African American writer, James Baldwin, published My Dungeon Shook: Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation in which he wrote:

“Please try to be clear, dear James, through the storm which rages about your youthful head today, about the reality which lies behind the words acceptance and integration. There is no reason for you to try to become like white people and there is no basis whatever for their impertinent assumption that they must accept you. The really terrible thing, old buddy, is that you must accept them. And I mean that very seriously. You must accept them and accept them with love. For these innocent people have no other hope. They are, in effect, still trapped in a history which they do not understand; and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it. They have had to believe for many years, and for innumerable reasons, that black men are inferior to white men. Many of them, indeed, know better, but as you will discover, people find it very difficult to act on what they know. To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger. In this case, the danger, in the minds of most white Americans, is the loss of their identity. Try to imagine how you would feel if you woke up one morning to find the sun shining and all the stars aflame. You would be frightened because it is out of the order of nature. Any upheaval in the universe is terrifying because it so profoundly attacks one’s sense of one’s own reality. Well, the black man has functioned in the white man’s world as a fixed star, as an immovable pillar: and as he moves out of his place, heaven and earth are shaken to their foundations.”

Barack Obama

Baldwin proved to be remarkably prescient as the outcome of the 2008 American presidential election unfolded over the course of the year. The election of Barack Obama to the Presidency has shaken America to its foundations. American politics stands on the cusp of new era that will redefine both its social order and the role of race therein. Just as important, the incoming Obama administration marks the emergence of a generation of political leadership that will have to manage the recovery from the catastrophic mismanagement and chronic incompetence that have characterised the Bush administration and contributed to the most severe threat to the international economic order since the Great Depression. The end of the Bush administration amidst the collapse of Wall Street’s credibility in global finance, the accelerated decline of American industrial sectors exemplified by the state of the automobile industry, the ballooning fiscal and trade deficits financed largely by increased foreign borrowing and investment, and the military misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan, have all resulted in a perfect storm for America’s short- and long-term economic well-being. Barack Obama’s promise of a decisive break with the image and substance of domestic and foreign policies under the Bush administration provided the rationale that led American voters to elect an African American as President for the first time in American history. The 2008 election is a watershed in American history and it is pregnant with new and previously unrealized possibilities for both America and the wider world.

In the American context, Obama’s victory is a signal that the Constitution which has been at the core of the American political project and which was constructed with considerable deliberation by the Founding Fathers — including George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and James Madison — continues to be reconstructed and renovated by successive generations of Americans. The original design had been shaped by the culture of plantation slavery that defined America at the moment of American independence in 1787. The early American Republic was the privileged province of property and white patriarchy, and the Constitution was shaped to institutionalize that reality. The original Constitution restricted the franchise to property holders; people of African descent were consigned in the vast majority to the status of slaves within the Constitutional framework. In legal terms, slaves were property and while not endowed with the right to vote, their owners were beneficiaries of voting rights by virtue of the property qualifications for the franchise.

In deference to the Southern states where life had become inconceivable without slaves, the American Constitution stipulated that representation in the Congress “shall be determined by adding the whole number of free persons, including those bound to service for a term of years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other persons.” Thus, for purposes of representation, a slave constituted three-fifths of a vote. The “three-fifths clause” allowed the Southern states to maintain a level of representation within the Congress that was out of proportion to the actual size of the white voting population in these states. In effect, the Constitution symbolized the triumph of plantation slavery over “freedom” in the shaping of American political culture and life as an independent nation. It was a political culture that was thereafter defined by a politics of exclusion of African and African-descent populations and the perpetuation of a “white supremacist” ethos as the cornerstone of American life. This idea of racial exclusion was best articulated by the United States Supreme Court in the Dred Scott decision of 1857 which ruled that:

“In the opinion of the court, the legislation and histories of the times, and the language used in the Declaration of Independence, show that neither the class of persons who had been imported as slaves nor their descendants, whether they had become free or not, were then acknowledged as a part of the people, nor intended to be included in the general words used in that memorable instrument.”

It is a remarkable irony that Barack Obama, as the descendant of an African who came to the United States in the 20th century as a college student, has become the 44th President of the United States. He is now the leader of a country that had been founded upon the idea that people of African descent should not hold citizenship. The irony is doubled when one takes into account the fact that his field of expertise is American constitutional law. One of the key tasks of his Presidency will be restoring “America’s moral stature in the world” – in large part by demonstrating respect for American constitutional doctrine and practices that signals a departure from the constitutional violations that have defined the Bush-Cheney administration in both domestic and foreign policies. Barack Obama, an African-American citizen, will be responsible for breathing new life into the American constitution some two hundred and twenty years after its promulgation and, in the process, help to reshape notions of American identity in a society defined by increasing cultural pluralism.

In terms of the wider world, Obama’s electoral victory poses a fundamental problem for all “Western” societies where history has been shaped by the legacies of African slavery and colonialism in Africa. Europe has also been the destination of African, Caribbean, Asian, and Muslim migrants for the last half-century and Obama’s election victory will inevitably pose the question: How many of these societies will demonstrate the maturity to provide such a powerful statement of the acceptance of cultural pluralism within their own political systems?

A similar question can be posed in Latin America where there has been a revival of the politics of indigenous communities in the Andes and Central America and a growing mobilization of African descent communities in Colombia, Venezuela, Brazil and other societies which share the legacy of African slavery in the shaping of the New World. For older societies, like India, where the growing electoral power of the “untouchables” has become evident, does Obama’s victory open the way for a rethinking of the politics of exclusion on grounds of caste? For the Middle East where there has been an ongoing struggle for representation among various Muslim traditions and communities within and across the boundaries of any single state, as well as among the different Jewish and Christian communities in the region, will Obama’s election in America require an ecumenical vision of the political order? For African societies, it is obvious that Obama’s rise to the Presidency will continue the process of soul searching about the politics of multi-ethnic societies in a context where South Africa as a model moves increasingly beyond the era of Nelson Mandela. In effect, Obama’s victory represents, at a global level, the expanded possibilities of multi-cultural democracy that redefines the context of majority rule in democratic societies.

In his speech at the National Constitution Center on March 18, 2008, Obama asserted:

“I am the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas. I was raised with the help of a white grandfather who survived a Depression to serve in Patton’s Army during World War II and a white grandmother who worked on a bomber assembly line at Fort Leavenworth while he was overseas. I’ve gone to some of the best schools in America and lived in one of the world’s poorest nations. I am married to a black American who carries within her the blood of slaves and slaveowners – an inheritance we pass on to our two precious daughters. I have brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles and cousins, of every race and every hue, scattered across three continents, and for as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible.”

For how long will America and Obama’s experience remain singular? It is obvious that his electoral success was not based solely upon the African American vote but represented the emergence of a viable multi-ethnic coalition in which African Americans, whites, Latino/Hispanic voters, Asian Americans and other minority groups embraced Obama’s message of change to create the groundswell that led to his victory. In effect, Obama’s victory does not mean that America has transcended race. Rather, it signals that American politics has become the search for a new politics of race in which multi-racial coalitions are increasingly key to electoral success- especially at the national level. In that sense, the 2008 election is a watershed which has redefined the terrain of American politics and opened the way for a new political dispensation and a new social contract across the society.

For Obama and the leadership of the Democratic party, their challenge over the course of the next several years will be to institutionalize this new politics and to establish a political compact that would ensure the survival of a multi-cultural democratic order grounded in the traditions of constitutional democracy in America. Obama’s electoral victory may well presage a wider search for alternative visions of democracy to accommodate the population flows and demographic shifts over the past century which have created a world of increasingly diverse populations within the borders of existing states. Given the excesses of “monocultural” nationalism that have defined the 20th century, including the episodes of ethnic cleansing, genocide, civil war, Obama’s victory poses the question – is this experience transferable to other societies? Further, will this example set by Obama and America in 2008 rekindle the image of America as a progressive society that can serve as an example to the rest of the world and which will allow it to restore its moral stature after Bush’s misadventures that have sought to export American democracy through the metaphorical barrel of a gun?

This relationship between American domestic politics and foreign policy was key to Obama’s campaign strategy. His willingness to advocate an end to the American occupation of Iraq which was based upon his earlier opposition to the war in 2002, and his argument that the war was diverting attention and resources from pressing needs at home, struck a responsive chord in the American electorate. Similarly, his willingness to hold open the possibility to engaging Iran as part of a broader strategy of reshaping American policy in the Middle East and the Persian Gulf, even as he sought to reassure Israel of America’s commitment to its security, suggested a search for ways to distance future American policy from the absurd “War on Terror” pursued by the Bush administration. However, Obama may have to think even further about whether the pursuit of American military supremacy at a global level that defined the Bush administration is either feasible or desirable in terms of America’s engagement with the wider world. The misadventure in Iraq resulted from the Bush administration’s desire to impress the international community that America was prepared to engage in the unilateral pursuit of its strategic goals - even in violation of the UN Charter. The Obama administration will have to be cognizant of the concerns for collective security that have gained increasing momentum in the wake of the war in Iraq and it will also have to rethink the American culture of war that has led from the Cold War to the current debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The strategic blunder that led to the Iraq war, if compounded by increasing military expenditures to perpetuate the culture of war under the guise of the “War on Terror,” will inflict further damage upon the American social fabric. The education system has become increasingly dysfunctional and needs considerable investment for its reform, and health care is becoming increasingly costly and scarce for many, including the veterans of the previous and current wars in which the US engaged. These long-term demands for social expenditures will be compounded by the growth in the elderly population that is expected to result from the retirement of the post-1945 “baby-boom” generation of workers with the attendant rise in costs for social security payments and health care.

In effect, the Obama administration will be confronted by the extraordinary challenge of reinventing the American social contract that has been shredded by the Bush administration in its preferences for policies that benefit the privileged, and its search for undisputed strategic primacy through the pursuit of pre-emptive war. In addition, the failure of successive administrations during the last four decades to address, over the long-term, the rehabilitation of the country’s infrastructure; the expansion and upgrading of its power grid; the more efficient use and diversification of its energy sources; and the application of effective oversight of financial markets- have all contributed to the growing urgency for the restructuring of the American economy. In an era where the dynamism of Asian economies pose a threat to America’s economic primacy that has underpinned the international political economy since 1945, the United States will have to display a strategic vision that will allow it to negotiate the current crisis and lay the foundations for longer term economic sustainability. The incoming Obama administration is facing the most serious political and economic crisis since the Great Depression and it presents an extraordinary opportunity for the first African American President to put his stamp upon the revitalization of the American democratic project in the 21st century. Success will be largely measured by Obama’s ability to transform his campaign message of hope and change into policies that restore American political self-confidence, consolidate the politics of ethnic and cultural pluralism as vital to the maintenance of a democratic order, and inject a renewed economic dynamism that allows America to remain competitive into the future.

UWI, BirdSong Celebrate Kari Polyani-Levitt

Professor Kari Polyani-Levitt has been honoured by the University of the West Indies with a Doctor of Laws and toasted by the Birdsong pan fraternity for her contribution to the development of the Caribbean. Prof. Polyani-Levitt has spent almost 40 years working with scholars and activists in the Caribbean, mostly in Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago. Following is the citation delivered by St Augustine campus orator Prof. Barbara Lalla at the Award ceremony at the St Augustine campus on October 31. The photos were taken on November 2nd at the Birdsong Pan Academy which hosted a celebratory event in her honour.

Kari with long time friend and associate Prof. Norman Girvan

Professor Kari Polanyi-Levitt, Professor Emerita of Economics, McGill University, has enriched Caribbean scholarship and illuminated economic policy for almost fifty years. Although born in Vienna and resident in Montreal, Professor Levitt was embraced by peers as an “honorary Caribbean citizen” as recently as the 2006 launch of her book, Reclaiming Development: Independent Thought and Caribbean Community.

Daughter of renowned economist, Karl Polanyi, Kari Polanyi spent her undergraduate years at the London School of Economics while working, during World War II, in factories and in research groups in heavily bombed areas of London. Marrying Joe Levitt, she relocated to Canada as a war bride and conducted her graduate work at the University of Toronto.

Warren Buffet explains: “Price is what you pay; value is what you get.” As Visiting Professor over many years at St. Augustine and at Mona, Kari Levitt made returns that far outstripped investments on our side. Appointed to the George Beckford Chair in Caribbean Political Economy in the 1990s, she published the George Beckford Papers. Already she had demonstrated her worth to the region by attracting to McGill University graduate students who became eminent Caribbean figures, like Dr. Edwin Carrington (Secretary General, CARICOM Secretariat) and Dr. Ainsworth Harewood (former Governor of the Trinidad and Tobago Central Bank).

Kari receives the Doctor of Laws degree.

Professor Levitt also collaborated with Sir Alister McIntyre on Canada-West Indies Economic Relations, and contrived for William Demas to visit McGill and deliver lectures that established the foundation of his ground-breaking work, Economics of Development of Small Countries. With Lloyd Best, she sought to represent major trends in Caribbean economies marked by the legacy of plantation slavery and, after five years of her meticulous editing, The UWI Press will publish Best and Levitt’s Plantation Economy Models early in 2009.

Her international standing, manifest through membership in a range of associations and affiliations, rests on such achievements as the classic, Silent Surrender – a book that examines American interest in Canada to probe the role of foreign investment in effecting loss of sovereignty in a host country. Currently, she interrogates that “super-boom” through which economic growth, sustained through escalating debt, rescues and the financing of deficits, has produced a “permissive condition”. She urges us to remedy this economic disorder (advanced over six decades to potentially lethal proportions) by rethinking the real value of goods and services in social contexts defined by power relations between private and public authority. Against the backdrop of global trends she has unfailingly addressed toxic financial circumstances in the Caribbean, as in Origins and Consequences of Jamaica’s Debt Crisis (1991). Beyond scholarly work, notably on input-output studies, she has supplied practical advice -for example, to the Government of Trinidad and Tobago on national accounts, and to the World Bank on national accounts of Haiti.

Professor Levitt has wholeheartedly invested her energies not only in the Caribbean world of scholarship and finance but in its popular culture. A committed reveler in Carnival, she played mas as recently as 2006 with an independence of spirit that renders her indomitable in adversity. Vision impairment might slow or deter others but, in 2006, to the music of Invaders, Kari Levitt appeared unaccompanied, chipping up Charlotte Street. What frailer spirits might bemoan as misfortune or disability, she transcends. It is the same professionally. Lucid, forthright and intellectually fearless, Kari Levitt applies cutting edge scholarship to regional practice.

Kari, right, with friend John Maxwell, centre.

According to Jonathan Swift, “Vision is the art of seeing things invisible,” and Professor Levitt’s extraordinary gift has been her ability not only to perceive acutely but to render clearly visible to policy-makers the subtleties of Caribbean Economics. She not only finds her own way with certainty but leads with breathtaking accuracy. Chancellor, I present Professor Kari Polanyi Levitt, and ask that by the authority vested in you by the Council and Senate of the University of the West Indies, you confer on her the degree of Doctor of Laws, honoris causa.

By LLOYD KING

The World Is What It Is the Authorised Biography of V.S. Naipaul By Patrick French

Knopf, 554 pp.

V.S. Naipaul

The authorized biography of VS Naipaul treats us to all the shabby details of Naipaul’s life in a manner which should satisfy all those who love to hate the man who turned his back on his native land, unlike the Martiniquan poet, Aime Cesaire who in his famous poem, celebrated his return and hymned his praise to those “who had invented nothing”, in the language of those who had invented all sorts of things.

Of course, Mr. Patrick French, in the midst of the often unhappy details he provides of V.S. Naipaul’s life, undertook the biography because he thought Naipaul an important writer and the challenge he faced was to make bridges between the life and the work. Does he do so effectively? I am not sure. Maybe it is too early. What I wish to do here is to use Mr. French’s account and also other sources, including Naipaul’s own autobiographical offerings, in order to place Sir Vidia from a Trinidadian perspective. I therefore stress some of the factors which would have shaped him.

The title of the biography, The World Is What It Is is quite likely taken from a note on the possibly greatest of novelists, Leo Tolstoy penned by the French writer Romain Rolland: “Things are as they are, not otherwise.” Can we say the same for Naipaul and his work as could have been said of Tolstoy’s great novels?

Certainly, one’s choices in life are dictated by one’s temperament, by one’s family history, and by the larger socio-political circumstances of one’s time. It has been said that the impressions of childhood last longest and cut deepest. What then do we learn of the Naipaul childhood? He grew up under the shadow of his mother’s family, the Capildeos, who looked down on his father as a non-performing failure, always beset by grinding money worries. At the same time, he learnt from them a sense of superiority and of separateness from the common Indian labourer. It was a feeling he would extend equally to the English labourers he got to know, when in England in dire straits for money, he worked on a farm. The plight of the common man, such as you find in Orwell would not bother him. V.S. Pritchett has summed up his type amazingly well, but applied to some ambitious young Englishmen of his own earlier time: “They grind away at their lessons all their boyhood and youth, (they) may be brilliant but are emotionally infantile, are given to turning a bleak eye on the non-ruling class and may be driven to feel distinctive and superior, both spiritually and socially.” Naipaul is more typical than has been imagined.

At the same time, certainly in Trinidad terms he was quite unusual. In the Trinidad of his time, the one prevailing desire of the bright boy (and he was very much in the tradition of the Trinidad bright boy) there were only two careers valued; you either did medicine or became a lawyer. They assumed status and financial security. Naipaul chose an Arts degree at Oxford, because he was set on being a writer.

In this sense, Naipaul would not have been what he became, except for the amazing life story of his father, Seepersad Naipaul, a life partly delineated in his impressive novel, A House for Mr. Biswas Seepersad Naipaul’s life would be a singularly depressing record were it not for the fact that escaping work in the cane fields and on the basis of a primary school education, he was bitten by the bug of literature; and he transmitted to his son a dream vocation as a literary man. Now, it isn’t that there wasn’t some interest in literature in Seepersad Naipaul’s time. The thirties were the era of the Beacon, when Alfred Mendes and C.L.R. James and others were publishing their stories. But Seepersad had no interest whatsoever in being part of creole society; the only mentor he accepted was an English editor of the local Guardian newspaper and he conceived a desire to be recognized in London, in the literary programme, London Calling. Like so many Indians out of Hindu Central Trinidad, except those who had converted to Presbyterianism, he rejected colonial creole society. It was a kind of version of a well known recommendation to the early Christians: “Be in the world, but not of it.”

Seepersad N. who had hidden as a boy rather than return to India, moved to Port of Spain but lived in an ambiguous relation to the society. But he was not at all appreciated for what he wrote in the Guardian about the secretive Indo-heartland, which I am informed is still quite secretive. On pain of being murdered, he was forced to perform a primitive Kali puja, which led to a nervous breakdown. This dissociation would leave his son, Vidia, with a horror of the country into which he was born. Seepersad Naipaul taught his son to be an alien. But he was also shrewd enough to understand that to escape the society- and where else but to London- you had to master its schooling system and win its scholarships. Seepersad sent his son to the most highly rated primary school in Port of Spain, at the time Tranquility, where he got an exhibition to QRC and then to Oxford. It was all in the bright boy tradition. Eric Williams had done it and eventually returned to be proclaimed by the illiterate as the third brightest man in the world. Naipaul’s unbeloved uncle, Dr. Rudranath Capildeo, according to Mr. French, thought he was the third greatest scientist, after Newton and Einstein. Trinidad is a place like that.

Before success came to him, the young Naipaul went through some very difficult times financially, and had a nervous breakdown, was emotionally supported by the English girl who became his wife, Pat, and whom he treated quite badly as Mr. French makes clear. There was, one suspects, a combination of factors to explain his behaviour. Leaving Trinidad, without boy days and being emotionally immature, he resorted to prostitutes and got caught on the horns of a dilemma. His girlfriend, then wife, was a woman of high intelligence but somewhat frigid. He could have chosen not to marry her but would have felt guilty. At the same time, it is clear that even though he had renounced Hinduism, he had absorbed to whatever degree, the traditional attitude of contempt for women, which his father had exposed in the Gurudeva stories.

French does not go specifically into the extent to which Hindu environment affected or shaped V.S. Naipaul. Naipaul for example has told of the impression made on him as a boy seeing a performance of the Ramayan story, the extent to which he and many others responded to the idea of exile dramatized in it. We know that it shaped his eating habits and sensitivities and anchored him in a certain kind of caste certainty and specialness. We can understand that it might- and did- create a distaste for the creole habits of liming, playing mas and rum drinking. And then there was/is the Hindu habit of grading people according to caste – skin colour (which coincided with certain creole prejudices) and we have something of the making of the man.

Naipaul’s family history made him somber and sardonic. And from his point of view, in Trinidad he would be a writer in an unsettled society with ambiguous points of belief or value; in Port of Spain , a set of compartmentalized groups, each in its own glass box. He wrote to his mother: “I think I shall die if I have to spend the rest of my life in Trinidad. The place is too small, the values all wrong.” What memories he had. Inside his extended family he had experienced the sense of betrayal the child feels when evil is revealed to him. He was sexually abused by a male cousin. This and his father’s distress, we conjecture defined his psychic wound. In the same way that the then Hindu minority felt protected from Afro-creole Trinidad, Naipaul decided that life in England would be his protection, where he could write against the grain and current of facile expectations in the transition out of colonialism.

From what has been said, it becomes clear that, from early o’clock, he would not wish to be classified as a West Indian writer. He felt that ethnic writing was a trap and, likely with Sam Selvon in mind, that it offered the temptations of facility and ephemeral solace. But, of course you can only write about what you know about, unless you are into fantastic literature. So what was Naipaul’s solution? How would he become a British writer? A clue may have been provided by Evelyn Waugh, who wrote a novel called Black Mischief in 1932. At first glance, and indeed at any reading, it might be taken to have been a vicious, racist, attack on the Africans. Not so, the distinguished literary critic Stephen J. Greenblat argued in his book Three Modern Satirists; the novel deals not with the impossibility of civilizing the Negro, but a sly and satiric examination of Western modernity itself, of the sterile culture which the English have sold to the natives. Naipaul would write for British readers and kill two birds – 19th century French writers used a famous expression to define the intention of their writing: épater les bourgeois (to scandalize the middle class). Naipaul decided that his role would be “épater” the English liberal establishment and the new black/African nationalisms, but based on a Conradian code: to be an accurate and unflinching observer with an absolute loyalty to his feelings and sensations.

Because he judges that there had been no migration of mind to the West Indies, he could quote Froude that nothing was created here. He had the planter class in mind because he did not expect either the ex-slave or the Indian indentured labourer to produce a culture with an explicit weight of religious, moral and philosophical preoccupations. He did not believe that peasants are a great sanctuary of sanity, even with a pool of common wisdom and humour. “Deprivation is to me what daffodils were to Wordsworth”, the English poet, Phillip Larkin once wrote. What would it be for Naipaul, anti-nostalgia?

Mr. French’s biography is not strictly speaking a literary biography. For example, he does not seem to see how crucial publication of The Middle Passage was. The first three novels, in West Indian terms, were safe. The ironies or satire were directed at Indo-Trini characters. The writing was entertaining and A House for Mr. Biswas was a major novel, it was a revindication of a life which was, on the face of it, a failure. Now, Hinduism shares with the Puritan ethos the view that worldly success is an outer sign of inner virtue, of Karma at work. To the Capildeos, Seepersad Naipaul was a failure. The novel confronts the Hindu karmic view. Naipaul’s achievement led Dr. Williams to offer him the opportunity to return to the West Indies and write up his observations. What Dr. Williams could not have known, and the biography reveals, is that Naipaul had returned in 1956 privately and was appalled at what he perceived as the element of racial revivalism in the just launched PNM.

The book was the first time that Naipaul seriously focused on the 20th century post slavery black Caribbean. It caused outrage and dismay. The epigraph from Froude, and the account of the trip from England of the immigrant ship, in particular, offended black West Indian sensibilities. I have suggested before that the immigrant ship record is directed at what Naipaul considered the romanticizing of the immigrant by Selvon and Lamming. Carrying his own psychic wound, and even his own history of nervous breakdown (to neither of which he admits in the book) Naipaul dramatized and perhaps self defensively mocked at immigrants (not of his intellectual level) who also had breakdowns under the pressure of English circumstances and at those who, like him, but under humbler circumstances, wished to escape their islands and seek new horizons in England. We might keep Edrich Connor in mind or C.L.R. James, the more successful ones. He was the creative émigré, different.

Elements of this perspective peep out in his essay on Michael X, which is also about the folly of the overzealous English liberal. Michael X’s writing shows that he was a failure, without talent, a truth he covers up with a bogus racial assertiveness. We scarcely are aware of how much things have changed. In the Sunday Guardian column (9 November 2008) Lennox Grant recalls that his mother kept a copy of the Guardian souvenir supplement marking Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation. “In her contemporary consciousness of globalization” he writes “ it was to monarchy in distant London that my mother owed allegiance.” I am sure Mr. Grant is aware that his mom would nowadays be mocked for her colonial ways. Or read Wayne Brown’s characterization of Mr. Obama in the Sunday Express of the same date: “like us, he lived his formative years open to the diverse cultural winds of the world, so that today he is sophisticated, cosmopolitan, rootless, as close to being a true citizens of the world as we are.” Mr. Brown may speak for himself and selected others. The point about Mr. Obama is that he is black as in African. The imagined world of Mrs. Grant has vanished. The imagined world of Mr. Brown is not shared too widely in this world.

This brings us to Naipaul’s relations with C.L.R. James. He took James very seriously as a precursor. He greatly admired Beyond a Boundary. I see he actually gave a talk on the Mighty Sparrow, which suggests that he would have gone along with James’ taste in calypso. But the calypsonian who is closest to Naipaul in spirit, if not in what he targets is Cro Cro. And because James was a liberal, he would have been uneasy with Cro Cro, and he became increasingly uneasy with Naipaul. After An Area of Darkness, James remarked: “Naipaul is saying what the whites want to say, but dare not. They have put him up to it” (French, 245). In A Way In The World, Naipaul would have his revenge, even as he pays tribute to the masterly old man. And he would have his revenge not only on James but on Arthur Calder Marshall, a writer who had come to Trinidad in 1937 and celebrated the labour struggle in a book called Glory Dead (1939). He is given the name Foster Morris.

It appears that Calder Marshall had been seen by the young aspiring Naipaul as a possible mentor. But Marshall had responded negatively to an early work. James appears as Lebrun, possibly a name taken from Learie Constantine’s father. What Lebrun and Foster Morris have in common is their support for the black workers’ struggle in 1937 and they are shown at a meeting together in Trinidad. This of course is fiction. What Naipaul had against James was that in The Black Jacobins he had sought to raise racial pride, by looking backwards, while keeping his eyes averted from Haiti’s parlous contemporary circumstances. Foster Morris (i.e. Calder Marshall) supposedly wrote of Tubal ‘Buzz’ Butler and his associates “as though they were English people – as though they had that kind of social depth and solidity and rooted-ness.” Of course, this kind of statement is calculated to make people’s hackles rise.

Presumably, we are supposed to understand, a Fabian leadership would have had behind them an educated history of discussion, provided by writers like H.G. Wells and Bernard Shaw, while Butler was a semi-literate Bible-toting Grenadian immigrant, not to be compared even with Bustamante of Jamaica. The sophisticated James we imagine, had he been in Trinidad, would have some difficulty dealing with the undoubtedly charismatic Butler. In any case, that Lebrun is said to be connected to Panama is a detail which brings up Bustamante’s name.

Thus using the liberty afforded by fiction, Naipaul brings together a Jamesian figure and a Calder Marshall figure (Foster Morris). And Morris tells the Naipaul narrator of an embarrassing incident which took place but which he had not written up. Here Naipaul is dwelling on the ways in which, supporting our side, we tend to pass over what is not palatable, here applied to 1937 in Trinidad. Foster Morris, the white liberal is sitting around with some of the black activists, including Lebrun. And in the course of the old talk, sexual capability is tied to race in a way that is a calculated attack on Morris. It is the old joke about penis size and black (African) men. What is it all about, here? In fact, it is Naipaul’s revenge on James.

The story is the following. An English woman has written a memoir (I don’t have it to hand) claiming that she was James’ mistress, while she lived with her English husband. And according to her, James was always after her to tell him how his penis size compared with her husband’s. Serious (and civilizational) issues, one feels Naipaul is suggesting, can be debased by primitive, coarse, race pride obsessions. Maybe he felt referred to as well, who can tell.

There is another character who contributes to the roman à clef aspect of A Way In The World. It is a man called Blair, whom the young Naipaul knew and respected when he worked in the Red House before going abroad. He is murdered in an African country. Mr. French believes the murder is a reference to Walter Rodney, except of course that Rodney died in Guyana.

We know that the Trinbagonian who was murdered was not Rodney but Mr. Victor Bruce, former governor of the Central Bank, who died under mysterious circumstances in Sierra Leone. There was a suspicion that he was turning up some local financial crookedness. Of course the Blair episode is consonant with the Naipaul theme. Blair had embraced the black consciousness movement and had, though it is not stated explicitly joined the PNM. His death in Africa is ironic, since he had made a sort of back to Africa trip. Mr. French’s reference to Walter Rodney may perhaps be opposite in a kind of a way. Rodney, we know, spent some time in Tanzania, he continued to be forthright and honest and was told by certain persons from the Tanzanian political elite, that he would not be expelled as he was from Jamaica, he would be killed if he continued with certain criticisms.

But keeping to a West Indian perspective, what was noted over and over was Naipaul’s focus in his atrabilious way on Afro-creole society, as is implied in the discussion above. Is it straightforward racism? What is clear is that Trini-Indians recede in Naipaul’s imaginative world and in his focus in writing. The letters quoted by Mr. French tell a different story. They tell of his sister, Kamla being put out of his house by her uncle, Rudranath Capildeo, who was not a nice man. In his remarks, he is dismissive of the Indo-Trinis he does meet.

So, when he wrote to his mother that “The place is too small, the values all wrong”, he didn’t have only creole Trinidad in mind. At the same time he also held the view that: “I cannot belong to India for the simple reason that I don’t know the language. Language is so important in belonging.” Is this an echo of the lines in A Far Cry from Africa: “How to choose between this Africa and the English tongue I love?” and is there not a real sense in which Naipaul seeks to examine an equivalent dilemma in his own engagement with India?

There are two points that should be made. One is that from the moment in his youth when his family moved to Woodbrook and then to St. James, Naipaul begins to experience life as a relatively isolated young person. In St. James, there were Indo-Trinis around, many highly creolized, but none worthy of friendship with the bloodless, socially superior Naipaul family, at least in its own mind. It may have developed in his mind the idea that Naipaul took to heart and identified with the Walcott lines: “The eye devours the horizon for a sail” in The Castaways. If we look at preceding Trinidad fiction, which Naipaul surely read, we see that the isolated Indian or couple are shown dealing with creole society. Consider Selvon’s A Brighter Sun and Mittelholzer’s A Morning At The Office, with its one obnoxious Indo character. We can fast forward, closer to our time, to The Dragon Can’t Dance, where again there is an isolated couple. So it is an aspect of the imaginative world we haven’t gotten beyond. And a challenge to younger writers. Mr. French remarks that Naipaul may well have had unfriendly feelings towards Selvon, who had been at one time one of the boyfriends of one of his sisters.

To these antecedents, Naipaul simply brought a vision true to his misanthropy and quickness of eye, his anti-nostalgia. I suspect that only time will disentangle prejudice from true, to the quick, perception. V.S. Pritchett wrote of his generation: that they had inherited the Edwardian attitude to literature: never interested in character in itself or in the book in itself – interested in something outside. That is where I believe most West Indian writing still is, or how it is regarded.

It is precisely the “something outside” that has stirred Derek Walcott, who has led the charge against Naipaul. Recently, one gathers, he wrote a denunciatory and hostile poem directed at Naipaul, whom he calls somewhere V.S. Nightfall. I gather from a published report that Mr. Walcott was piqued because Naipaul had declared his admiration only for Walcott’s earlier poems. Our local Naipaul experts were interviewed on the supposed feud. There is a simple point that they missed. It is this. Occasionally Naipaul offers views of other writers. Among them, he has dwelt briefly on the greatest novelist, Leo Tolstoy and the great English novelist, Charles Dickens. What is striking is that Naipaul declares a preference for the prose of the early Dickens. Do we not prefer Naipaul’s own earlier work and which of Walcott’s poems do we remember best? In any case, as has been noted, in faction, where so much of personality is revealed, the absence of generosity is a great loss.

What Mr. French’s biography helps us to understand is the extent to which Sir Vidia Naipaul was the product of particular circumstances shaped by his birth into a particular society from a recently indentured Indian point of view, utterly unlike any shaping experience of Mr. Walcott.

There is an unflinching exposé of Naipaul, the man, much of which is provided by Naipaul himself, such as will satisfy most Naipaul haters. There are also small surprises. Michael Manley was impressed by The Mimic Men and wrote Naipaul to say so. Naipaul disliked red-skinned women, reminding us of their negative image in Earl Lovelace’s writing and in references to them in calypsos, as Gordon Rohlehr has shown. Why is this surprising: because Trini-Indian males, it would seem, find red-skinned women very attractive. You only have to look around at the couples you see in the street. As in much else, Naipaul is an exception.

Mr. French’s biography, I am sure, will be the occasion for a lot more comment, I hope. For one thing, he is not strong on the Trinidad and West Indian background. For another, he does not attempt all that much to be psychologically penetrating; to see, for example, that the young Naipaul who arrives in England, socially gauche, his only real experience of women being his sisters, would under the pressure of circumstances resort to prostitutes. It is now commonplace, after all, that proof of manhood is connected with sexual performance, one of the modern substitutes for primitive initiation rites. Naipaul was no longer part of the Hindu tradition which had simplified matters by marrying couples off early. It would have helped if Mr. French had situated Naipaul in the tradition of modern writers such as James Joyce or Graham Greene. Greene had more mistresses than you can count on the fingers of one hand at least.

And Joyce, also renounced his homeland, Ireland, was a man of hauteur and conceit, and his work caused absolute outrage in his native land. We might even return to Trinidad and find this remarkable pronouncement on Dr. Eric Williams by Dr. Patrick Soloman in his Autobiography: “He (Williams) never regarded Trinidad and Tobago as a corporate entity with a personality of its own nor yet as his homeland to which he owed allegiance and loyalty” (p. 136). Mr. French might have added to his title what was said of the Russian writer Lermonov, “Whatever is written on a man’s forehead he is not fated to forgo”. I end on this note.

Coming To Your Screen Soon

By JOHN MAXWELL

The environmental community—in Jamaica and beyond—is abuzz with discussion following the broadcast of a documentary titled “Jamaica For Sale” on TVJ two weeks ago. In the following review, re-printed from the Jamaica Observer of Sunday, November 16, 2008, JOHN MAXWELL joins the condemnation of the island’s concept of development.

JAMAICA FOR SALE

A Vagabond Media and Jamaica Environment Trust production
Produced by Esther Figueroa, Diana McCaulay
Directed, edited by Esther Figueroa Written by Figueroa, Diana McCaulay
Narrators: Jonathan Chambers, Diana McCaulay, Esther Figueroa

In 1989, before the general elections of that year, the PNP Opposition accused Edward Seaga’s government of having a “Going out of business sale” of Jamaica’s assets, privatising left, right and centre.

That sale was as nothing compared to the present ‘madness’ sale, initiated by P J Patterson and enthusiastically endorsed by Bruce Golding. If Seaga was selling the furniture, Patterson and Golding have been scrapping the house itself, selling the verandah, the doors and windows and the flooring.

The Jamaica Environment Trust and Vagabond Media, two entirely Jamaican organisations, have teamed up to produce a cool, calm documentary examination of the methodical, brutal and unsustainable development of the tourism industry of Jamaica.

What they say is not new: most Jamaicans already have a pretty good idea of what is happening. The wanton destruction of the Jamaican landscape, an integral component of the Jamaican “tourism product”, has made the pages of the New York Times, the National Geographic, countless Internet blogs and lots of other places. What is new is that the whole horror story is presented about Jamaicans, by Jamaicans, for Jamaicans.

Jamaica For Sale allows the Jamaican victims of our fantasy development to speak: the craft vendors, the construction workers, the hotel workers, the fishermen, hotel owners and managers and the ordinary citizens who see themselves under siege by unscrupulous people with much more money than sense and with no recognisable aesthetic or environmental values and no feeling for the Jamaican people or the Jamaican reality.

One of the construction workers says near the beginning of the video:

“Dem is like ticks ‘pon we back”—an eloquent expression of the reality of the new tourism —parasitic and dangerous to health. The workers tell of dreadful working conditions, 12-hour days for $800—below the already inadequate Jamaican minimum wage—and their employers are not poor companies. Their rules and laws are enforced by the Jamaican constabulary whose interest is not justice but “Law and Order”.

The people attracted to the worksites and to the tourism development areas find nowhere to live and many become squatters. Even the squatters in the wetlands are turfed off; bulldozers come by night and demolish their miserable dwellings, destroying their furniture, their few personal possessions and wrecking their lives. Their rivers, streams and beaches are polluted by wastes of all kinds. I have taken photographs of human excrement in the sea at the formerly pristine Pear Tree Bottom Beach. What remains of the gazetted public beach and public fishing beach is now off limits to the public, by the illegal order of the National Works Agency which has erected a sign warning that ‘Trespassers will be Prosecuted”.

In Negril there is a new development afoot that will reconstruct the coastline, building artificial inlets and beaches a la Dubai - to maximise their profit at the expense of the Jamaican environment which, in this area, is largely unexploited and unspoiled.

One Negril hotelier, a Jamaican, with tears in his voice, describes the plight of workers whose children have no schools and who have to take two or three buses to get to work, spending up to a third of their meagre wages on transportation. There is, he laments, no social development to match the commercial development.

All this despite the alleged fact that tourism is Jamaica’s leading earner of foreign exchange.

But where does this foreign exchange go? The craft vendors complain that hotel guests are warned off the Jamaica outside the hotels: they will be robbed and murdered -they are told. So the few who venture outside are mobbed by vendors and others wanting a piece of the action, terrifying hotel guests who have been comprehensively warned of the badness of the people they will meet outside.

The video was shot before the tourist Mecca of Ocho Rios was overwhelmed by mudslides and human excrement from the unplanned squatter settlements above the town. No one seems to have learned anything from this disaster. There are no plans to build a new town for the thousands of people who need accommodation, many of whom work in the hotels but who live in subhuman conditions or have to travel miles to work every day.

The current worldwide economic disaster will eventually catch up with the lunacies of fantasy development. The price of oil will increase rapidly as it becomes more scarce and will put airlines and cruise ships out of business. But, sadly, not before we transform beautiful Jamaican towns like Falmouth into tourist-only communities, ‘attractions’ a la Colonial Williamsburg and Disneyland. These guys are not only stealing beaches, they are stealing whole towns.

In the meantime the burgeoning people-processing industry is busy destroying the foundation on which its real attraction is built. The bozos who are building the monstrous concrete ramparts by the sea were attracted to Jamaica because it is Jamaica, but they are determined, like other uncivilised people, to distort and deform what is natural but foreign to them to suit their tiny-minded fantasies of ‘Treasure Island’ and similar mythical European versions of paradise. They will mistreat wild animals like dolphins and killer whales until they become extinct, like the tigers which, now mainly and for the time being, may only be found in zoos.

EATING BIODIVERSITY

On the hotel coast there is another serious threat to the Jamaican environment. Imported foreign workers have discovered that we have snakes and turtles and they are eating them to extinction. The hotels are closing down turtle-nesting sites, and hotel excrement and waste are killing our reefs at an increasing pace. In the video, fishermen from all along the north and west coasts are complaining that the reefs are dying, fouled by over-fertilisation from the hotels or other land-based sources of pollution.

The beaches themselves are going, either stolen by the truckload by night or destroyed by interference with the sea-floor or the wetlands that nourish the beaches. In the video one man testified to what I know from personal experience. Even a few years ago, the beaches in Negril, alone in all Jamaica, extended up to a hundred metres into the sea.

Today, the sea-floor at Negril is no longer sandy but mainly mud. As we told the Urban Development Corporation more than 30 years ago, most of Negril’s sand was made by argillaceous algae, “seaweed” that absorbed calcium from the water and crystallised it as flakes of ‘sand’ which gave Negril’s beaches their unique powdery feel. If these flakes of calcium carbonate are not constantly refreshed by the algae, the beaches will die - as they have died.

Part of this problem arose from the UDC’s determination to use the Negril Morass as a sink for hotel sewage, poisoning the South Negril River which nourished the argillaceous algae.

Another problem with Negril is that the UDC - unlike King Canute - refused to believe that they could not control the tides. We at the Natural Resources Conservation Authority told them 30 years ago that they should not build a groyne at the point on which Hedonism Two (then Negril Beach Village) was sited. At that time, NRCA had an oceanographer on staff, a Jamaican who became so fed up with the bureaucracy’s unwillingness to listen to reason that he gave up and went off to study law instead. The illegal UDC groyne interrupted the flow of sand from the north of the seven-mile strip, thus interfering with the supply of regular sand that provided the foundation for the powdery flakes from the south. Between these two deficits, Negril’s famous beaches are now reduced to thin, mostly muddy strips, attracting hosts of sandflies (which, paradoxically, prefer mud to sand).

Now, on the North coast, those who do not steal sand from other beaches, dredge it from beyond the reefs that guard the coast.

Since the living corals preserve the integrity of the inshore beaches, subtracting sand from the seaward side of dead reefs will eventually undermine them and destroy them. At that time, the beaches built by theft or by illegal dredging will disappear and ‘Jamaica—No Problem” will become ‘Jamaica—Big Problem’.

Unknown to the foreign hoteliers, Jamaica was always more than a beach. In a few years they will discover what life is like without beaches. The vulgar people-processing plants on the cutting edge of unsustainable development will be besieged by rising seas in their lobbies and storm surges on their third and fourth floors.

Then perhaps, we could build a sound tourism industry on the rubble of our fantasy hotels, new reefs, man-made and offering accommodation to starfish and swarms of jellyfish.

The video Jamaica for Sale, is much more polite than this column, and its producers are not responsible for my comments. But I urge you to see the video.

Walk good and take care where you swim.

jankunnu@gmail.com

By David Cave

The launch of the Trinidad and Tobago Art Society’s November Annual Exhibition last Tuesday was bolstered by the display “People’s Canvas” recently mounted in the Queen’s Park Oval. For the first time a diverse assortment of local art has been taken out of a restricted and confined gallery context. Thanks to the wonders of corporate sponsorship and digital signage, drawings and paintings are enlarged to monumental billboard size and placed for the average passer-by to admire or ignore.

Sara Joseph

The exercise in the Oval is noteworthy. Above all, it brought some much-needed publicity to the local fine art scene. However, as the old adage of Art School always reminds us: there is no substitute for the real thing. In order to fully admire any work of art you must experience the original, and this year’s annual November exhibition provided art aficionados with a plethora of original work to savour.

Every year the modest gallery at the end of Jamaica Boulevard in Federation Park provides Art Society Members and the general public with a diverse array of local art. The modesty of the gallery space is a constant factor with which any newcomer must contend. It could sometimes be the greatest asset or worst detriment of this exhibition. The quaintness or homeliness of the gallery is inviting- even comforting. Such an atmosphere works well with the traditional landscape and nature paintings that the Art Society is noted for. Ironically, the small space also complements the new work of an up and coming artist. The closeness of the gallery connotes a place of nurturing and belonging. It is a place of gestation, the perfect place from which the budding “next-hottest-thing-since-sliced bread” could conquer the art scene. That being said, the sheer quantity of artwork displayed is a bit overwhelming. With over 120 pieces on display in this area it can be quite daunting to separate the wheat from the chaff. This problem is further exacerbated when one is trying to hold a drink in one hand, hors d’oeuvres in the next and simultaneously greet fellow artists with a strained grin.

Bertram de Pieza

In spite of any logistical inadequacies, there is some brilliant work on display here. There are the usual stalwarts that do not disappoint: the impressionist-like images of Donald “Jackie” Hinkson, and the thick, carefully textured scenes of Lisa O’Connor and McClean are tranquil and reassuring. These works are a gentle reminder that the old guard of the society has not waned in proficiency or artistic aptitude. They will not fade out quietly into the sunset. Rather, their recent work on display proves that they will continue to seize any scene with every meticulous stroke of their brushes and master the placement of nature on canvas.

However, the surprising highlight of this exhibition is the high number of works in non-traditional media and the pieces from recent graduates or current students of the UWI Creative Arts Centre and Howard University, USA. Notable examples include the work of Garvin Pierre that challenges the spatial relationship between the image and the frame, the energetic and violent brushstrokes of Michelle Isava, and the tranquil and harmonic morphing of Sarah Joseph.

A significant development is also displayed in the photography and graphic art categories. The simplicity and eloquence of Kwyn Johnson’s Pop Art treatment of the traditional “Laundry Blue” product must not be ignored. Moreover the black-and-white photograph by Bertram De Pieza with its exquisite hand-painted embellishment is a work of superlative creativity. This piece elegantly bridges the gap between painting and photography in a tasteful manner. De Pieza has single-handedly elevated the standard of photography in this exhibition and presented a true and sincere fusion of mechanical and hand-crafted techniques.

My personal touchstones of this exhibition are not intended to negate the artistic validity of the 100-plus other works on display. The longevity and resilience of the Art Society of Trinidad and Tobago is a testament of something being done properly. Over the years many galleries and more eccentric exhibition spaces have faded into obscurity or simply ceased to exist. The Art Society perpetually displays an all-embracing nature and willingness to create room for neophytes to exhibit alongside established veterans. This trait has enabled the society to stand the test of time and retain a high degree of respect and bullet-proof air of authenticity.

Garvin Pierre

The November 2008 exhibition is a clear indication that the Art Society of Trinidad and Tobago is successfully walking that fine line between changing with the times and maintaining a stringent tradition of artistic excellence. Let us all hope for the sake of Trinidad and Tobago art that the Society can continue to maintain this delicate balance. An injection of new blood into the system is always beneficial, but corporate and governmental support should not be overly scarce. The new work on display is vibrant and worthy of appreciation and support. The stereotypical view of art as a lofty and frivolous exercise is gradually being eroded by the ingenuity of this year’s Art Society exhibition, but one needs to witness this exhibition firsthand in order to grasp a full appreciation for the future of art in Trinidad and Tobago.

By WINSTON RILEY

November was a month of celebration of the art of LeRoy Clarke as the artist turned 70. Among the events hosted in his honour was the El Tucuche Symposium which took place over three days (Nov 17 – 19) as part of the Living Heritage Series by the Trinidad and Tobago National Commission for UNESCO at the Central Bank Auditorium in Port of Spain. Below is an edited version of a presentation by Winston Riley who has studied Clarke’s work for over 25 years.

It has become increasingly difficult for me to pen my thoughts on LeRoy Clarke’s work for two reasons. One, because I am not as intensely involved in LeRoy’s work as I was in the 80s and 90s and because in the 80’s and 90’s LeRoy exhibited an intensity about his work which at times bordered on madness.

During that period I interpreted his effort to speak to community- to “re-chart the ruins” as he would say- as a plea to be “environed” by friends and community. As reflected in his current work, LeRoy is now a much calmer person. Seventy, however, is that age when all of us are held by our gonads as we approach ever so slowly our rapprochement with the inevitable.

I do admire LeRoy’s present work. David Galenson’s in Old Masters and Young Geniuses raises the question; “How and why does the quality of artists’ work vary with age?” Galenson concluded that there is a life cycle to artistic creativity. Paul Gauguin, the famous French Post Impressionist artist, after musing on similar questions about himself concluded that “an artist is always an artist”.

In 1996 with the support of Roy Watts I organised and chaired a symposium to bring closure to Clarke’s exhibition Pantheon II - Slave Ship called Fossil of Memory - mounted at the National Museum & Art Gallery of Trinidad and Tobago. The speakers at that symposium were Pat Bishop, Makemba Kunle, Tracy Wilson, Dr J. D. Elder and myself.

Tracy Wilson presented an in-depth historical review of LeRoy’s life divided into three sections: Birth and Early Life (1938-1967); The Sojourn Abroad (1967-1981) and Back To The Origin (1981-1996).

In Birth and Early Life, Tracy pointed to:

LeRoy’s humble upbringings in Gonzales a village with strong African cultural retentions.

His organisational skills and cultural activities during his secondary school period.

The development of his teaching skills as a primary school teacher.

The launch of his first one man exhibition - A Labour of Love- in 1967.

Labour of Love, as I recall, drew scathing public criticism from Derek Walcott, whom some believe was affronted by LeRoy’s temerity in mount aone-an exhibitioning so early in his career. Derek’s comments were “too early LeRoy”. By 1967 LeRoy’s personality and objectives were well defined.

Self definition is, however, a continuous process. In the words of Gabriel Garcia Marquez –“Human beings are not born once and for all …Life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves”

It is important to view LeRoy’s formative years in a wider social context. The tremendous political and social upheaval, both locally and internationally, would have influenced him immensely. These upheavals included World War II (1939 -1945), the rise of the working class and the trade union movement, the rise of the independence movement in Africa and in the Caribbean and the breaking of the colour bar in West Indies cricket

During that same period there was an explosion of individual excellence in academia, the arts, politics and sport. Men like Dr. Eric Williams, CLR James, Sir Learie Constantine, George Padmore. Henry Sylvester Williams, Beryl Mc Burney, George Bailey, Vidia Naipaul had all made their mark locally and on the international stage. It was a period of great expectations.

The Sojourn Abroad New York (1967-1981)

The years 1967-81, were, as Tracy pointed out a time of ethnic resurgence the world over. It was a period of reflection on the African condition in the Diaspora which saw the blossoming of LeRoy’s art as demonstrated in works such as Fragments of a Spiritual and Douens and his participation in at least sixteen exhibitions at leading studios mainly in New York.

It is important to note that LeRoy’s sojourn took place at a time when the effect of the Harlem Renaissance and the Marcus Garvey movement was to raise the self esteem of blacks in the United States, the Civil Rights Movement had peaked and Martin Luther King was assassinated.

In his 1983 book The History of Abstract Expressionism, art historian Serge Guibaunt wrote:- “After the Second World War the art world witnessed the birth and development of an American avant-garde which in the space of a few years succeeded in shifting the cultural centre of the West from Paris to New York”.

In Latin America, the landscape of art and architecture was being transformed through the autochtonous styles being developed by four painters: Diego Rivera (Mexico, 1886-1957); Joaquin Torres-Garcia (Uruguay,1874-1949); Wilfredo Lam (Cuba, 1902-1982) and Roberto Matta(Chile, 1911- 2002).

All four artists were exposed to the shift in European art influenced by the poetic dimensions of African Art leading to avant-garde European ideas, from Cubism to automatist Surrealism. All four artists returned to Latin America and sought inspiration from their native cultures - the most relevant example of this can be seen in the works of Wilfredo Lam who turned to Santeria, an Afro Cuban variation of Orisha for his inspiration.

Back To The Origin (1981-1996).

By 1981, Clarke had returned to a less confident Trinidad and Tobago. The Black Power Movement of the 1970s seemed to have run its course. There were some areas of individual excellence- Lloyd Best, Peter Minshall and Brian Lara to name a few- but the stark reality was that the independence movement had collapsed.

Eric Williams had just died and the oil bonanza was on the decline. In this period LeRoy dug deeper into the Orisha tradition in an attempt to define more precisely his own ethnicity and to negotiate ethnic space for himself and others of African descent. The volume of his outpourings was staggering.

At the symposium Makemba presented a dissertation on Clarke’s techniques from the perspective of an ‘artist in residence’, having witnessed the initiation and completion of the Clarke’s painting Spaceship, Fossil of Memory. Makenba raised the following points:-

Orisha rituals circumscribed the production of Clarke’s paintings.

Clarke named his distinctive method of approach ‘Obeah’ meaning using things present to change the course of things future.

Clarke’s technique involved a continuous overlaying on the canvas of works which in themselves exhibited a sense of completeness. (I will add that revealing and hiding is one of Clarke’s defining techniques. What is revealed as well as what is hidden draws in the viewer.)

Clarke is like a jazz musician on canvas evoking memories of George Bailey, the painstaking decorating of costumes for Red Indian Mas and the music of Boogsie Sharpe, Shadow, Miles Davis and Pat Bishop- all in the process of founding a new world.

In attempting to bring Clarke’s style into greater focus one has to remember that Clarke is a Caribbean person- hence the bright colours in his work. In addition, mas influenced the form and the colours in his work. I draw on the comments of Helen Frankenthaler on her own work “When one made a move toward the canvas surface, there was dialectic and the surface gave an answer back, and you give it an answer.” The works themselves seem to take on the decision of self-expression. Clarke discovers the work within the work itself. This is what I believe Clarke means by Obeah and what Ananda Coomaraswamy will call painting by spirit on the canvas of spirit.

In her turn, Pat Bishop pointed to:

The risk LeRoy was taking in his decision to live by his art.

The fact that LeRoy’s paintings are illustrations of his philosophy and that he himself is part of the way and emphasised the importance of placing the paintings in an historical context. Pat pointed out that his disciplines have as much to do with word as they have to do with image, as a consequence of which the surfaces are always richly detailed, there is always an ambiguity in the context of space so that you do not know which image is in front of which image, which image is behind, whether the perspective is aerial or whether it is pure linen, or whether it is there at all and I want to suggest that these concerns are not relevant…because we have to look at the work as though the work is a poem.

Dr. J. D. Elder posed the question: In what way is LeRoy Clarke and his work different and unique? In answering the question J.D. drew on his understanding of depth psychology and the work of Dr. Gardener Murphy in the Making of the Creative Genius. J.D saw Clarke as:

a prophet, a diviner with pre-cognitive abilities, and an Egyptian artist. J.D. pointed to the Jungian possibility that an Egyptian Sage, a Nubian Sage, an Ethiopian Sage, an artist of 3000 years ago could be draining his blood down into the blood stream of a LeRoy Clarke and freeing him to plant signs, to bring back 3000 years of African culture to us.

the “Bringer of the Message” A message encoded in a world of symbolism where the circle, the square, the triangle, the pinnacle and the void have their play. A play which reveals opportunity. A play which is a pointing to a space. A space where all black people regardless of size have opportunity in waiting. An opportunity that will move us out of that arrested state of development called Douendom.

In commenting on LeRoy’s work, El Tucuche 11 in 1989, I argued that the artist employed the female form as a kind of mandala for plumbing the depth of his own unconscious. As mandala it is both point of entry, exit and encompassing sphere of the world of noumena and phenomena, the entry and exit to the noumenal world and the encompassing sphere of the world of human phenomenal activity. “The woman in Clarke’s work is a totality of our manifestations. She is thematic of the “Rite of Remembrance and presides over the issuance of our disclosures “Douens, Men and Gods”

An artist works with the raw material of the imagination (ideas, schema) and the raw material of his craft (canvas, paint, wood). In this sense the artist’s production is no different from that of a craftsman who produces things for a pre-given world where use value and reliability are the essential characteristics of that world. A creative work of art has no pre-given world. A creative genius through his work brings into being a new world, a new way of seeing and relating. A world wherein art can become a gift. Art as gift sets up an ‘Umwelt’ a living environment ushering in a renewed sense of place. This renewed sense of place allows for a non exploitative encounter. Herein lies the ability of LeRoy’s art as gift to disclose a new sense of ethnic space as a negotiated encounter.

All The Time

By CYNTHIA NELSON

Given that long ago thyme was used for its antiseptic properties and medicinal uses, and in ancient times some bathed in its water to renew their energy while others used it for embalming, we should really feel fortunate, to be able to get three varieties of this herb while many the world over only get one variety and I’m not talking about flavours here but rather, thyme in general.

If there was one herb that is identified with everyday Caribbean cuisine, it is thyme. As much as we love pepper, we would forgo it if we had to make a choice between buying that and thyme when we go shopping. We use it in almost everything; sometimes a dish might not require it but we sneak it in nevertheless because it will give the dish that special oomph in the flavour. The three varieties we get have no scientific names for us, we just call them thyme but for the sake of this column, I am going to differentiate them for you based on how we would ask for it at the market.

The most popular variety is the one with the very fine, almost tiny leaves. When you want to purchase this thyme, simply ask for thyme. The other variety which is not that well known throughout the Caribbean except Guyana, is usually referred to as Guyanese thyme, as long as you are purchasing it outside of Guyana. In Guyana itself, it is referred to as “fine thyme”. This variety grows tall in clusters and the leaves are flat and small and shaped almost like oregano. Actually the vendor I purchase thyme from refers to it as oregano, never mind most of his thyme customers are Guyanese and will ask him for “Guyanese thyme”. The third variety is called broad-leaf thyme and if you’ve been reading this column long enough, you know that we name things and call them as we see them. So, broad leaf thyme literally means that the leaves are broad. They are also thick.

When it comes to flavour and aroma, I find the broad leaf thyme to be the most potent, perhaps that is because of it sheer size and like I said above, the leaves are also thick. When you grind this thyme it becomes moist unlike the others, so the natural oils of the leaves makes it more potent than the other two. To use the broad leaf thyme in food, it is usually chopped or minced. The Guya-nese fine thyme is the more woodsy in flavour of the three, highly aromatic, it is to be used sparingly. And finally, the really fine thyme or let’s say the regular thyme, is the least intense and a cook can get away with using a lot of it in a dish without overpowering the dish itself or other ingredients.

Like many of you, I use thyme all the time, sometimes onions and thyme are all the ingredients I add to a dish. Soups, stews, rice and peas, cook-up rice, pelau, garlic pork, you name it and thyme is there. My Auntie Betty used to make a bang-on Fried Rice and Fried Chicken and what made it unique was thyme. You knew that it was not Chinese Fried Rice or an imitation of it you just knew that this was a homemade fried rice and Auntie Betty put her stamp on hers by the use of thyme, it was subtle but very much present.

Of the three varieties of thyme I have available to me, I mostly use the Guyanese thyme and the regular thyme as the broad leaf thyme is not available every week and I like the idea of just dropping the regular thyme, stem and all into the pot and fishing it out at the end. The Guyanese thyme, the leaves come off much easier than the regular thyme so that is a breeze to use. For long cooking dishes such as soups and stews and cook-up rice, I opt for the Guyanese thyme but rice and peas and vegetable sautés I like the regular thyme. The broad leaf thyme I tend to use if I am making an herb paste or making green seasoning.

One of the ways I like to use the broad leaf thyme is to make a garlic-thyme butter that I smear on top of pan-seared pork chops and then put in to the oven to finish cooking. Because the thick leaf thyme is so potent, it stands up to the garlic and the extra cooking in the oven.

Have you ever had thyme lemonade? So good! You must try it. Add 1 cup of water and 1 cup of sugar to a pot and 2 tablespoons of fresh thyme leaves (add more if you like) put on high heat and stir to dissolve the sugar, let it boil for exactly 1 minute, remove from the heat and leave it to cool completely, all the while the leaves will be steeping. Squeeze your lime or lemon juice, add it to a pitcher along with cold water and sweeten it with the thyme-infused simple syrup you made, garnish with a couple of thyme leaves if you like and serve over ice, unbelievably refreshing.

You can make thyme tea too or you can add it with ginger to make thyme-ginger tea. Simply bring the water to a boil add the thyme leaves and if using a couple thick slices of ginger, let boil for 1 minute and remove from heat and steep for a couple of minutes, sweeten according to taste or you can just drink as is.

I often get requests for a fried fish recipe and the one I use is very simple: one large clove of garlic, lots of fresh thyme, salt and black pepper. I grind everything to a paste and gently massage the fish all over with it. The paste in essence perfumes the fish, a quick, light dust in flour and shallow fry. The fried fish always has that homemade taste to it and that taste obviously comes from the fact that a lot of our everyday cooking at home involves the use of thyme. It’s a taste of home.

(Reproduced from the Stabroek News)

It was with deep sadness that the region learned of the passing of David de Caires in Barbados on November 1, 2008. David was a dear and committed friend of the Trinidad and Tobago Review which shared a sisterly relationship with his Stabroek News newspaper and the more recent Guyana Review. All three sip from the same fountain of inspiration that produced the New World Quarterly publications of the 60s. As Alissa Trotz put it: “Although David de Caires entered the newspaper business relatively late in life, if we look at New World we realize that four and a half decades ago he was intensely involved in a joint project dedicated to the dissemination of ideas, and to a critical engagement with the realities of a soon to be independent region.”

MILES FITZPATRICK delivered the following at a memorial service for David De Caires, his friend and publisher of Guyana’s Stabroek News, on Friday, November 7, 2008 at the Brickdam Cathedral in Georgetown.

David De Caires

David Francis de Caires (known to his friends as ‘Dex’) was born on the 31st December, 1937. His father was a businessman who had played cricket for the West Indies and who died before he was 50, an event that was traumatic and lasting in respect of his only son David. David’s two sisters Felicity and Mary have lived in England for many years. David’s mother Marie was a member of a prominent Portuguese family, the Jardims, and ‘Maisie’ as we called her with affectionate disrespect (behind her back) was a strict and upright Catholic.

David was an agnostic, but he believed in the extraordinary importance of religion and religious beliefs and in the philosopher’s statement that “if God did not exist we would have had to invent Him.”

As a young boy he was sent to the Jesuit school Stonyhurst, in England. His stories about life at Stonyhurst were always tinged with a sense of separation, loneliness and being different. He found solace in its forbidding surroundings in an activity that was to stay with him throughout his life - betting on horses and, when possible, watching them run.

He passed his solicitor’s examination with great distinction, and remembered his time as a law student in England as among the happiest periods of his life. Staying in London in relative privacy with a loving and understanding favourite aunt, he discovered his love for the musical theatre and expanded the limits of his knowledge of “form”.

In Guyana he served his apprenticeship with Cameron & Shepherd, the leading law firm at the time headed by a legendary solicitor Edward de Freitas. Edward’s son Anthony, also a barrister in England, has remained one of David’s very close friends who shared his passion for the horses.

David and I first met around 1959 when Joey King introduced us. He was a young solicitor. I was a young barrister in my father’s old office in America Street. We shared many interests - horse racing, politics, music - the great composers of ’standards’ like Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Cole Porter and Noël Coward. And jazz. David was always excited whenever anyone talked about Miles Davis.

We spent many Saturday nights at the Carib Hotel with other friends drinking and dancing through the night, and talking about politics, politics, politics. Nervously and dangerously, Guyana was approaching independence. David was a founder member of the United Force and he remained an admirer of Peter D’Aguiar to the end. I returned home a Marxist and joined the PPP. Our arguments always took the same course. We started from diametrically opposite positions and then sought a common ground that we could only vaguely define. That is, until Lloyd Best came to Guyana!

The first issue of New World Quarterly in 1963 was a cathartic event. Inspiration came from Lloyd; organization was provided by David, Joan Dummett and Judy Drayton. Clive Thomas reviewed a book on the then British Guiana, David wrote on Regional Integration and the poems we published were gifted by Martin Carter. Lloyd (with some minor local colour from me) wrote the centerpiece entitled “Working Notes Towards the Unification of Guyana”, an attempt to analyze the need for, and describe the shape of, a coalition government. Forty-five years later it seems naïve and idealistic; but behind New World was a vision of the West Indies as nobody’s intellectual backyard, East or West, which evolved from our new regional university system.

After Lloyd left Guyana the Quarterly was published elsewhere. David decided that we should produce a simple, cyclostyled fortnightly magazine dedicated to Guyanese political journalism. In it we reported the 1964 election campaign and correctly predicted the results.

Looking back now I realize that the creation of Stabroek News became inevitable after New World fortnightly closed. Those were days of hope, argument, creation and fun. We formed a New World Football team by simply turning up, and forming the second, no the third, eleven of a Kitty football club called Northern Rangers. Our playing field was part of the present Camp Ayangana. The thought has occurred to me that we might have always had honest elections if Camp Ayangana had remained a playing field.

Our team made a priceless contribution to the development of football. We gave every other team confidence by our submission to defeat. We had seven forwards including Lloyd, Frank Solomon and Neville Trotz, each of which kept calling for the ball during every match. We had four defenders, led by David and Joey King who, throughout every match kept shouting to the others “mark him, “mark him.” Our games frequently ended in defeat but afterwards we thoroughly enjoyed the drinks and discussion.

Neville Trotz remembers those days too (with some slight differences!)

In our younger days David, Miles Fitzpatrick, Joey King, Lloyd Best, Syl Lowhar, Frank Solomon and Clairmont Moore (yes Bandit) were very close. We went through so many enriching experiences together including the inauguration of New World, the publication of New World Quarterly, long nights at Itabo, the long dark days of racial strife and, of course, our all conquering New World Football team which boosted our own limited skill base with some uncanny recruitment of local talent from the Northern Rangers football team, based in Kitty (they came at a price as we had to find place for their patron Justice Stanley Moore as our goal keeper — not the most impervious between the posts).

Those were wonderful days and they were my support group. Those were days when friendship and loyalty meant a lot. David sent his handyman, each morning, with his car, to teach me to drive, after deciding that it was a skill I needed if I were to record a higher success rate with the many ladies.

Over the years we drifted apart but whenever our paths crossed it was as if there was never a hiatus in the relationship.

I recall going to see David at his home, in London, when he was recovering from his bypass surgery. Alissa spent the afternoon with him typing out a piece which he dictated for publication– despite his physical discomfort his mental faculties were still in excellent condition—and he just could not stay still while he felt that there were so many wrongs to right especially in the country he held dear—Guyana.

I saw David, alive, for the last time, a few months ago. I was staying at the Georgetown Club and spotted him with his old friends Freddie Abdool and Ed Cummings playing billiards in the pool room. We had the usual warm chat. He said that the next time I visited we should get, just for a good old talk. I did go to GT after that but never made that meeting. We always think that we have time and we don’t.

As I write this, marooned in the lounge, in the Norman Manley airport, I feel a deep sense of loss and a bit of my mother comes to my eyes. I have lost a treasured friend and I grieve a lot.

In our law practice, David started with a few commercial clients and I had an extensive, if not lucrative, tenants’ practice in the rent restriction courts. In 1967 we entered into a formal partnership agreement after we moved to a building in King Street that we bought from a lawyer named Charlie Debedin. We might as well have shaken hands. Neither of us ever read the agreement after it was signed. Our partnership shares were based on our estimate of each of our court earnings. My estimate was 800 a month and David’s 1200 a month. I remember how disappointed he was that I came up with a figure lower than his. To this day I swear that if I had given my estimate first David would have given the same figure.

After a few months David insisted that we review our shares and become equal partners! And so we remained, never having had a quarrel either in law or in life, up to the 1st November 2008.

Our office was never exclusively dedicated to the practice of law. During the 1978 campaign against the Referendum many meetings of anti-referendum civil society groups took place there.

• Lawyers against the Referendum

• Doctors against the Referendum

• Architects and Engineers against the Referendum (I don’t know how Albert Rodrigues got this one going, for most of them were heavily dependent on government commissions); and,

• Trade Unions against the Referendum

On the eve of the Referendum representatives of all these groups met at King Street with representatives of the opposition parties and agreed on a united call to boycott the Referendum. It was the most complete boycott I have ever experienced.

In 1979 when Eric Gairy’s government was overthrown I went to Grenada to help the New Jewel Movement. David carried on our firm without a murmur of discontent (although he hated court work - he was once reproved by a judge for waggling his legs at the bar table, a habit he only resorted to when utterly bored and impatient to be elsewhere). I took the bottom flat as a separate office to do my unfinished cases in Guyana. I returned from Grenada a year before the revolution collapsed and we resumed our old arrangement without a murmur. Never a word of reproach, although I know David disapproved of much that went on in Grenada.

Legal Aid started in King Street, the bottom flat of which became with much fanfare the first Guyana Legal Aid Center. Less ‘respectable’ ventures also occupied that part for a while. One day we were asked to attend the Chambers of Chief Justice Sir Harold Bollers. He informed us that we came from ‘good’ families, and then told us there was a nasty rumour going around that we intended to establish a bookmaking business under our law offices just opposite the Supreme Court.

“Such disreputable activity,” he said, “would not befit the noble profession of the Law.” He did not want to see opposite the Supreme Court a sign saying “De Caires and Fitzpatrick Bookmakers” every time he left his chambers. He invited us to deny this rumour and this we did most vigorously. We explained that we had no such intention. The rumour mongers, we said, must have confused a bookie business with that of Turf Accountants! So “Turf Accountants Ltd.” was born.

David’s intellectual mentors were John Stuart Mill; C.L.R. James, and I.F. Stone, the American father of modern independent radical political journalism. These all had at least one thing in common - they drew inspiration from the “miracle” of ancient Greece. And so did Lloyd Best; perhaps his fourth intellectual mentor. Dex loved to quote John Stuart Mill:

“If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that person than he, if he had the power, would be in silencing mankind…

If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth; if wrong, they lose what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.”

In Stabroek News, no letter was too humble (or radical) to be published. The one work that shook David and made him think of a role that he could play, was C.L.R. James’ statement on the white people in “Party Politics in the West Indies.”

“The white people have to reorient themselves and make a positive and independent contact with the masses of the people. It has been done before, many times. But you have to aim consciously at doing it.

….. (they) can make themselves the open sponsors of civil liberties and democratic rights in the West Indies. A great deal of submission to governmental impropriety of action and expression in the West Indies is due to fear, fear of getting into conflict with those who have power over so many jobs and connected opportunities. That kind of fear touches the whites least. They are independent, perhaps more than they know.… The field for this sort of activity is wide open and, if I am not mistaken, will become in no long time wider still. I have never known a population claiming to be democratic where so many people, both Negro and Indian, live in such fear of the whole apparatus of Government.”

These were the foundations for David’s insistence that Stabroek News should be “a paper of record.” Of course, he knew that the little tabloid could not aspire to fully record everything of significance in Guyana. But he insisted that the test for a newspaper “of record” should be its accuracy and fairness so that when later one viewed a report it would seem as if a scribe had been present while events and developments were unfolding.

One of the best examples of this in Stabroek News might not have existed had David taken my advice and submitted to my fears. The day was the election day of the 5th October, 1992. It was a very insecure day for Stabroek News and the night was much worse. During the day groups of people of varying sizes walked past the papers’ offices shouting, cursing and threatening on their way to the Elections Commission building in Croal Street. By late afternoon a sizeable and angry crowd had gathered outside the Commission demanding that they be allowed to vote there.

Hostilities intensified and the inadequate police presence did not help. The Commission staff was forced to evacuate the building, every window of which was shattered by missiles thrown by the crowd. Rudy Collins remained and famously produced a small nucleus that enabled President Carter and his security to re-enter the building and re-install the staff.

I was a member of that Commission. As night fell I became increasingly concerned about the safety of Stabroek News and its staff. I visited David in his office in my car the back window of which had been shattered outside Freedom House. Everyone was worried, but all were working. I advised him to evacuate. He pondered.

Eventually, he met with his colleagues and told them he was staying, but anyone was free to leave and he would respect anyone who decided to leave. Only two persons left for exceptional reasons.

The result was one of the best issues Stabroek News ever produced. Han Grainger produced a virtual film script of the minute by minute behaviour of the crowd outside the Elections Commission that alone made the decision to stay worthwhile. On that night Stabroek News truly became “a paper of record.”

Another instance of Stabroek News giving a helping hand to change was the controversy over the Bollers Elections Commission. Rigged elections of 1968, 1973, 1980 and 1985 and the Referendum in 1978 were followed by the collapse of the Soviet Union a few years later after which the US government decided it was vitally interested in the restoration of democracy in Guyana.

The 1992 elections were anticipated with great interest and the decision by the Carter Centre to organize an observer mission raised this expectation even further. During an initial pre-election visit the Carter people said they saw no need to change the Bollers Commission. They said they had observed a democratic election in Nicaragua conducted under the Sandinista government and there had been a peaceful transfer of power without changing the Nicaragua Commission. They seemed unaware that Burnham was not the Sandinistas.

However, Stabroek News had been persistently reporting on the work of the Bollers Commission. Full coverage was given by the paper to the courageous statements after each meeting by Clement Rohee, the PPP representative on the Commission, recording the remarkable manner in which the Commission operated. An ad hoc civil society group including business and trade union representatives contrasted the work of the Bollers Commission with that of its counterparts in Trinidad and Barbados and a report with this comparison, was published. The comparison was odious indeed!

Copies of the report and of Stabroek News’ reportage on the Commission were handed to the Carter Centre representatives. The opposition parties also made strong representations. Cheddi did his own leg waggling. President Carter concluded that the continuation of the Bollers Commission would be unacceptable. He proposed what later became known as “the Carter formula” for the selection of a new Commission. As you know that formula is still used. The result was that a completely different Commission led by Rudy Collins was established. The rest, as they say, is history.

The relentless and fearless reporting of Stabroek News helped to provide the foundation that made this change possible. President Carter, Rudy Collins and President Hoyte by both commission and omission, were the midwives to the birth of electoral democracy in Guyana; and Cheddi Jagan was its proud father. But Stabroek News provided the ambulance!

The year 1968 was our sad introduction to rigged elections. The two radio stations at the time - Radio Demerara and GBS - decided to jointly broadcast election results. David, Pat Thompson and yours truly were chosen as analysts with

Hugh Cholmondeley as moderator. Representatives who spoke on behalf of the contesting political parties were Robert Jordan and Fred Wills for the PNC and Janet Jagan for the PPP. Panelists and listeners were dumfounded when the time came to analyse the astounding results for the MacKenzie (now Linden) constituency which, as I recall, showed that 117% of registered voters had cast their ballots!”

We called the election rigged on the government’s radio station. The next morning when bleary eyed we got to the office we got a personal phone call from the Great Man. Like Queen Victoria, he was not amused!

David was proud of his children’s independence of thought and personality. The tale of Isabelle’s revolt with Cathy and other schoolchildren against Sister Hazel Campayne’s compulsory exile to the interior got a little worn at the edges between us. And Isabelle calling him to book afterwards saying she wasn’t getting the education to which she was constitutionally entitled in Guyana!

I remember a walk to the newsagents in Westborne Grove (to pick up a Racing Post) with David; and Brendan (who only came up to our waists at the time) listening carefully to our distinguished discussion of some political situation and politely begging to disagree with our analysis!

And Doreen - what can I say about Doreen? I have kept the best for last. How many scrapes did she pull us out of? The bookie shop (sorry, Turf Accountants), the New World Bookshop; and most magnificent of all the business affairs of Stabroek News. Today I say without fear of contradiction (or as Martin Carter would say “I write it out in a verse”) that without David, Stabroek News would not have started; but without Doreen, it would not have survived.

But those are institutional things. My sharpest memories now are of little things.

The look on David’s face when I introduced him to Doreen; I remembered in that moment the lines of Richard Wilbur: “The staggered sun forgets, in his confusion, how to run.”

In this holy place above all others it is easy to recognize the power of an idea and its capacity to survive its creator. David’s paper will survive him. More importantly, its sense of mission will survive him in- and through- the days ahead. And every time I pick up a Stabroek News I will remember the good times and the bad times, the man he was and the people he touched.

“Think where man’s glory most begins and ends and say my glory was I had such friends.”

By GREGORY McGUIRE

The Government’s belated response to the global financial crisis and plummeting export commodity prices falls short of the requirements for a meaningful fiscal adjustment. The Prime Minister’s declaration of intent with respect to cutting expenditure and fighting recession was unconvincing at best. For while the Government has announced cutbacks in miscellaneous small cost items such as advertising, parties, and jet rides, he insists that some mega projects—rapid rail and “industrial island” in the sea will continue. Little surprise, therefore, that Mr. Manning’s call to the nation to “tighten our belts” has been greeted with widespread skepticism and resentment.

Over the last five years, Government has collected revenues amounting to TT$182 billion from which it has saved only about 10% ($18 billion in the Heritage and Stabilisation Fund). In the eyes of John and Jane Public, such an administration has little moral authority to call for adjustments two months into a new fiscal year, at the first major economic hurdle in ten years. Their umbrage is not without foundation.

To many of us old enough to remember, it would seem that, notwithstanding Mr Manning’s tacit recognition that we’ve been down this road before, the Government does not appear to have learnt from the experience of coming out of the oil boom of the eighties. As indicated in the November edition of the TTR, prices of gas and gas-based products move in tandem with oil and will not provide shelter in the coming storm. As it was in 1982 so it is today. To quote then Prime Minister George Chambers in his 1983 Budget Speech: “The development of the non-oil sector and the broadening of the base of the economy has to be moved centre stage”.

In marked contrast to the Chambers administration, the current Manning administration appears to have taken a decidedly short term view of the situation. Planned cuts in discretionary expenditure and vows to “fight off the recession” appear to be “soft” responses relative to the “grave situation” described by the Prime Minister. Perhaps Mr. Manning is not listening, even to himself. Perhaps it betrays an underlying view that this situation is temporary and will correct itself in the short term. Government’s insistence that there is no need to revise the Budget provides further evidence in support of this deduction. The reason given is that adjustment of expenditure could be made within the current framework. Surprisingly, it is a line of reasoning apparently supported by the Central Bank. But there is more in the mortar.

Here’s why we need a full revision.

Leaving the current Budget and declared energy prices in place gives the Government flexibility to pursue its planned expenditure programme with limited fiscal constraint, under two scenarios. First, if hydrocarbon prices recover, it could revert to planned expenditure with the same extravagance that has typified its fiscal stance over the last seven years. If prices remain at current levels, i.e around US$50/bbl, the government would be able to draw down from the HSF to meet up to 60% of its revenue shortfall based on the initial expectation of US$70/bbl. On the other hand, if the Budget were revised in line with oil and gas prices of, say, US$50/bbl and US$ 3/MMbtu, Government would be forced to limit expenditure to the lower levels of revenue. If the realized price and revenue go above the new budgeted figure then the Heritage and Stabilization Fund Legislation would require a minimum saving of 60% of the excess revenue.

Trinidad and Tobago is not unique in this situation. While the Government seeks to hold firmly to its budgeted framework, several, if not all, major oil exporters have taken the prudent decision to recast their 2009 budget with lower oil price. On November 12th the Russian Government announced that it was revising down its oil price forecast for future budgeting decisions Specifically, the 2009 forecasts for 2009, 2010 and 2011 would be dropped from US$95 , US$90 and $88 to $50/bbl; $55/bbl and $60/bbl. respectively. Iran has now set a base price of $ 40 and a maximum of $ 50/bbl. for the 2009 Budget. These countries recognize that we may be in for a long haul. They have taken a conservative view of the future and are prepared to save the windfall in the event prices recover. For this Government however, savings remains a residual.

It would be inaccurate to blame our current situation solely on the global economic recession. The real problem is the incapacity of the economy to withstand the impact of an external shock in the offshore energy sector. That stems from an irresponsible fiscal stance. It is evidence of a failure to learn the lessons of the first oil boom and the years of depression. As in the oil boom period, Government fiscal stance has failed to distinguish between what is normal revenue growth based on increases in productive capacity and what is windfall revenue derived from a temporary spike in prices. Recurrent expenditure has spiralled in line with rising energy revenues, leaving little room to accommodate the possibility of a fall in prices. In doing so, Government has failed to take heed of the warnings of the 1982 Demas Task Force that “higher oil prices should NOT be relied upon as the basis of planning”. Further, “in the unlikely event that…..there is a significant increase in the real price, it would be both prudent and necessary for the country to have due and adequate regard to its economic experience over the past decade and to treat any such event as a windfall”. (The Imperatives of Adjustment: Draft Development Plan 1983-86.pg.7)

As the saying goes, those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. As we prepare to face another period of adjustment it is perhaps useful to reflect on the lessons to be drawn from the combined economic experiences of the seventies and the last decade. There are perhaps five lessons that stand out.

First, there are limits to growth. It is pointless trying to accelerate growth beyond the productive capacity of a country. Such a strategy creates supply bottlenecks, fuels inflation, compromises quality and impairs productivity among other ills. As Chambers noted in his 1982 Budget speech: “we all wish to see development proceed as expeditiously and on as broad a front as possible. This is an ideal but in the real world various factors militate against the success of such efforts”

Second, long term economic sustainability and stability must build an economy that is less reliant on the energy sector and based more on onshore growth encouraged through the stimulation of domestic demand and innovation. The government has to create the environment for innovation and to take the lead in sectors that are beyond the capacity of the local private sector. In a small open economy like Trinidad and Tobago, the state as the principal accumulator of foreign exchange through hydrocarbon taxation cannot be limited to the role of facilitator. The Manning administration has identified seven strategic sectors and an industrial policy aimed at building the non energy economy. However both the plans and the policy need to have greater cohesion with the reality of firms on the ground. When such state-funded ventures prove viable, widespread public participation should be encouraged through divestments on the stock exchange. This would provide important stimuli to the capital markets and encourage wider participation in business ownership and entrepreneurship.

Thirdly, savings of the windfall is the key to financing long term transformation of the economy. Saving must however be a conscious and deliberate strategy. In his very last work on this issue Lloyd Best in conjunction with Eric St Cyr, mapped out a comprehensive strategy for macro-economic management in times of plenty. Some of the pertinent recommendations include:

i. Budgeting based on the long run price of oil. This would avoid the excesses observed in this year’s Budget and the consequences arising therefrom.

ii. Establishment of four Funds : Heritage Fund, Stabilization Fund; Provident Fund and a Sterilization Fund. These would be critical to managing the flow of financial resoures to avoid the unnecessary overheating while ensuring that transformation is achieved over time. Each Fund is subject to inflow and outflow regulations and each is held as a separate financial account.

Fourth, a deliberate effort must be made to ensure that there is an equitable vertical and spatial distribution of rents. Failure to do so could lead to social tensions within the society, a situation with which Trinidad and Tobago is very familiar. The current context provides glaring examples of inequitable spatial distribution. One simply has to compare the quality of life in Port of Spain or San Fernando West with what exists in Point Fortin after 100 years of commercial oil production and nearly a decade of LNG.

Finally, an economy whose output and foreign exchange earnings are dominated by a single sector will suffer periodic bouts of economic decline. During such periods it is imperative that the burden of adjustment is equitably shared among different economic and social groups. In short, the plea for belt tightening must not apply only to labour but to the Government and private sector as well. There is need for a compact on incomes, prices, rents, and profits.

Admittedly none of the above is new. But the country has arrived at that juncture again that makes them worth repeating. The problem here is: who is listening?