By EDDY GRANT

The following text was delivered on Eddy Grant’s behalf by Josanne Leonard at the funeral service for Kelvin Pope, the Mighty Duke at Coronation Park, the Point Fortin on Thursday January 22, 2009. Grant was in Australia at the time.

To: The Wonderful Family of Kelvin Pope (a/k/a The Mighty Duke)

To: Lovers of Classic Calypso Music the World over.

To: The People of The Caribbean 

Over the last decade or so, I have been cast in the role of Father, brother, son and friend of some of the greatest talents that God has blessed this planet with. I have seen them in every conceivable state as together we have tried to elevate and transform both themselves and their chosen art-form Calypso into one that could sit alongside others with properly accorded pride, respect and dignity. With all of them, as with all men and women of this world, there have been weaknesses, some more than others. It is not ever my position to judge any of them, even if it was my desire to do so. It never was, and it still is not; I love them all for the awesomeness of either their sheer talent or their humanity or in some cases both.

Today, again I find myself having to deal with another extreme loss, a loss of such magnitude that had I not been fully prepared by the person himself for this momentous and so final event, maybe someone-else would be writing this address and thereby I would be speaking to your hearts from a different location.

Ladies and gentlemen, here lies the material body of Kelvin Pope, a brother that neither my Mother nor Father made for me …. an extremely gifted brother. In fact had my Mom and Dad graced me with such privilege as having him as a blood brother, I might have treated him like we, especially it seems those of us here in the Caribbean, tend to treat our own. But say what, if that is how we is, then that is how we is; it certainly never bothered “Dukie”, for that is what I called him, this greatest of the greatest of  Caribbean artists, and human being extraordinaire. Oh yes, there will be many, many words written about “Dukie”, as there have been during his lifetime and indeed during the lifetimes of all the other great ones who have predeceased him. There will be calls of all kinds, but haven’t we learned anything yet? “Dukie” stands supreme in many disciplines of life, even in death. I choose to allow others who will eulogize him at this time and those who may or may not have known him as I did, to enlighten you with the generally well-known career achievements of his exemplary life. You see, this, (apart from the fact that he was one of the legion of Great Calypsonians to grace my little Ice Record label), was why we were such close friends. Dukie liked people who would tell it like it is; people who not only wrote some clever words in preparation for the Carnival season when they hoped to win a crown of dubious long-term value, but caring people, really caring people, worldwide and world-wise thinkers on matters that impacted on others. 

He was most articulate in this form of thinking and behaving, which is what really set him apart. So much has been overtly made of his particular modes of dress, that sometimes one would have to wonder about our broken sense of values that would allow a whole region’s vision to stop at a man’s attire, and not allow one to see the real man. “Dukie” was a real-real man, he had many concerns regarding our progress or lack thereof; of our world’s journey into what looks like, at a cursory glance, to be a journey from which our world will not return in good condition. He wrote about these kinds of things, not only about bacchanal, a subject on which he was also an expert, but real message songs regardless of the fashion at the time. 

Do you have any idea of what  Dukie  would have faced coming as he did from the South of Trinidad as a journeyman Calypsonian seeking to make an imprint on the sacred fabric of Calypso and taking back to Point Fortin (South Trinidad) not one, not two, Not Three but four consecutive Calypso Monarch Titles from 1968 to 1971? Are you joking or what? Everybody who was considered great in calypso at the time was around, yet Dukie was indestructible. He has truly earned the sobriquet Mighty. So now he’s no longer with us in body, only in song, which is maybe where he was the strongest anyway, as no pernicious disease can destroy those songs….great songs that will stand the test of time…songs written by his own hand with all the cleverness of his very swift mind…. a real legacy to the world that he loved so much and which love he unreservedly expressed in so many of his songs. The Mighty Duke would appreciate the irony of this situation. We have discussed it on the many occasions on which we have engaged in serious discussion on the precarious nature of nature itself and the arrogant little creatures broadly named mankind who exist as an almost insignificant part of it. Don’t get me wrong, Dukie wanted to live. Dying was not an option in his eyes. He was also physically a very strong and handsome man, gifted from his genealogical background. Mother Pope, his Mum, who he never tired talking to me about, imbued in him most, if not all of the values he came to be revered for, among his true friends and admirers, cast an almost saint-like persona over and within her magnificent son. 

He has shown us all through his illness, an unusual degree of fortitude and majestic grace, even in the face of his final earthbound adversary, death. It was his intention to compete on the Grand Stage at least one more time but that was not part of nature’s plan. The rest, as The Mighty Duke knew only too well, would depend on you, the people he loved, you the governments upon whose actions and deliberations he observed with an eagle eye now forever closed and commented on and tried to guide; you the youth of the world in whom he had great hopes for the future, especially when it came to an appreciation and practice of his beloved Classic Calypso. My great friend “Dukie”, The Mighty Duke, Kelvin Pope, all these people he was, is no more in flesh; I am sad, I can’t help it, I am angry as I’m thousands of miles away and he has told his loyal Queen Rebecca who worked so hard with his fantastic doctors nurses and other medical professionals to preserve his earthly life, that his buddy, his confidant, his trusted guide in the latter part of his career, would be there at his demise, to guide one last time this uncertain journey of his -and I can’t because of the promises I have made in advance as a practicing artist, that like “Dukie” would know, I always keep. 

Death very rarely alerts us of its intentions with regard to time and place so situations like these will happen from time to time. Rebecca, you know his heart and his desires, such as they were in his so recently expired life, you and his children would also know at first hand the deep love and respect we held for each other; yes, I would like to beseech each and everyone to celebrate the life of the Mighty Duke, a great life well spent but my eyes and heart are not as intelligent as my brain, and so in the tradition of so many who have loved and cared for someone this great, I cry. What the hell would Dukie say? He’d say “Is awright family, is awright”.

May God take him to a safe place as we all stand in line waiting for the train. God Bless.

Ringbang for life -Eddy

By MICKEY MATTHEWS

TOP supporters at the recent Tobago House of Assembly elections.

On the THA campaign trail, only the most simple-minded were allowed to believe that the failure of pensioners to receive their grant on time last month was the result of a computer glitch. In Tobago where the issue became a burning one for the House of Assembly elections of January 19,  the popular view was that it was a deliberate attempt to place the burden of adjustment on the most vulnerable in the society from which the government would not have easily relented were they not reminded that those elections were due.

As far as Dr. Vanus James is concerned Tobagonians as a group under Orville London and a House of Assembly controlled by the PNM are as vulnerable as pensioners. By his calculations, under conditions of plenty they were denied their share of the national income to the tune of one billion dollars. What would become of Tobago’s share in these times of impending scarcity, he asked as he drove this wedge issue, prising open the political situation in Tobago to help retrieve the fortunes of the Opposition?

When James arrived in Tobago in the middle of November he knew the primary task at hand was to unite the opposition to the PNM. Successive defeats  in the elections of 2000 (as government) and 2004 (as opposition) had led to the disintegration of the DAC, the party that led Tobago for twenty five years and is responsible for re-instituting the House of Assembly as Tobago’s foremost representative institution. Unity for the professor of economics meant rallying behind Ashworth Jack, the opposition’s only representative in the THA. Jack, he reasoned, by virtue of being the minority leader in the House of Assembly was in fact the Leader of the all of the opposition forces.

James validated Jack’s standing by two dramatically decisive initiatives. Firstly, he elected to speak at a rally organized by the Tobago Organization of the People, the breakaway faction of the DAC led by Jack. Secondly, he travelled to Port of Spain to introduce Jack to the Trinidadian press as Leader of the Tobago opposition.

Once Jack’s standing was established, all aspirants to the post of Chief Secretary in the opposition camp felt encouraged to make their energies available for the campaign and to suspend their ambition which ultimately, they saw, would not be threatened by his elevation.

The electorate for their part was invited to reconsider the thin estimate they had made of Ashworth Jack.  

Remarkably, James did all this without being seen to be farming a seat for himself or for anyone else for that matter. He left all decisions on matters of candidate selection and portfolios to Jack and the TOP executive - or perhaps it was because of it. 

This approach did have its downside. James himself is reported to have said in the wake of the election that injudicious candidate selection prevented a TOP victory. Pundits say his distinguished candidacy would have sufficed, but in the heat of the campaign he appeared unbothered by these considerations. Having secured peace on the opposition benches, he now sought the resources of groups that were not campaign outfits but which had fought for Tobago’s autonomy over the last eight years when Tobagonians’ dream of an autonomous homeland has been at its dimmest.

James availed himself of this civic capacity at a redoubt  for the opposition forces on Tobago’s Channel Five television station. At his first appearance he established his credentials as a unifier by staying away from controversial issues that were not of his making and expressed his willingness to contribute to what was being built there. Indeed, he did much to win for himself two more fulsome interviews in the lead up to the elections.

For James what stood in the way of the opposition was the intimidation Tobagonians felt when confronted by the growing power of the state which, in Tobago’s case, is the House of Assembly.

Explaining how this behemoth was built, he said that with oil and gas prices rising over the last fifteen years, Tobago has received huge transfers from the national treasury which allows the Assembly to employ more than 50 per cent of the labour force.

He therefore set about confronting this fear, charging that this domination of the Assembly had been achieved at the expense of the internally-propelled economy and in particular, the tourism plant.

He further charged that notwithstanding the fat gained by the Assembly over the last eight years, the transfers it received felled short of what is mandated by law as enshrined in the Dispute Resolution Commission (DRC). 

The DRC as an agency for settling disputes between the Assembly and the central government was the result of the work done by the Policy Research and Development Institute, a non-partisan think tank headed by James more than eight years ago. 

That shortfall, he said, now stands at one billion dollars and should be earning interest and constitute Tobago’s own heritage fund that could have now be used to stimulate its economy in the teeth of worldwide economic meltdown.

Notwithstanding Hochoy Charles’ outburst, the strategy of pursuing peace on the opposition’s front and of drawing on Tobago’s civic capacity brought dividends in the form of substantial campaign funding enabling TOP to publish its manifesto culled from the discussion with James both on the internet and on the pages of Tobago News. Yet the campaign needed a bump. It came in the form of the government’s withholding of the pensioner’s grant. James exploited this to the fullest.

By Wednesday, the middle of the penultimate week of the campaign, the crowds came to hear him. He drew crowds of three thousand at Roxborough and Bethel. He spoke to them with panache that drew from Best in its broad perspectives and from Robinson with its easy referencing of his resume and his assertion of Scarborough as a cultural and administrative centre on par with Port of Spain. 0n the Saturday of the election weekend, when by some estimates the crowd grew to five thousand at Mason Hall, he was heard paying tribute to the Fargo House Movement and the DAC for bringing Tobago thus far. He declared that his good friend Orville London, like Hochoy Charles before him, must be replaced for his own good. Like a picador, he tauntingly declared that a rampant Manning as executive president would not be allowed entry to Tobago and (piece de resistance) would be locked up if found past the entry ports of Scarborough and Crown Point. 

The crowd, to whom he appeared as an erudite son returning to let his bucket down, loved it all. Young girls wearing orange TOP t-shirts waved flags and buntings as they danced to music coming from the big truck, confident that their side, hitherto considered being without a chance, now seemed on the ascendant. 

All of this happened with the press in Port of Spain being largely unaware of it. It was not until Sunday had passed and the TOP put on the road a motorcade as large as that of the PNM that they seemed to realise that an upset could be in the making. By Monday morning election day, they were descending  on Ashworth Jack, anxious to interview him after he had voted as if he were already the winner. By 10 p.m. the tally was 8-4 in favour of the PNM.   Tobago people say they put goat mouth.

By Gregory McGuire 

Finance Minister Karen Nunez-Tesheira

In its annual report on Trinidad and Tobago, Moody’s Investors Service gives the country a Baa1 investment rating.  It argues that “T&T’s stable outlook is supported by a vibrant and well-diversified energy sector, a relatively low and declining public debt burden, and a strong macroeconomic policy consensus.” Moreover, Moody’s endorses the Government’s view that “the economy seems far better prepared than in the past to prevent the recent energy boom from turning into a full-blown bust.”

Moody’s recognises the downside risks but assigns low probability to it:  

“The main risk to Trinidad and Tobago’s ratings is that the major correction in energy prices will cause severe macro-economic dislocations. An extreme scenario would include a deep contraction in real GDP growth, the inability of the Government to undertake meaningful fiscal adjustment, and a serious deterioration in the external position and a loss of competitiveness.  The probability of the extreme scenario materializing remains low at this point.”  

At a time of widespread national apprehension about the state of the economy, these words were like an oasis in the Sahara for many, including a Government under the sword for excessive spending of hydrocarbon windfall. Unfortunately, a cogent analysis of the economic trends and an assessment of the purpose and stance of Moody’s reports suggest that Moody’s could be very wrong.

 Contrary to the Moody’s position, I hold the view that the probability of the extreme scenario materializing is very high.  Indeed, my prognosis is that, except for the unlikely recovery in oil and gas prices, Trinidad and Tobago is heading to a full recession by the second quarter of 2009. The veracity of either forecast may be assessed by careful examination of  key drivers behind the  critical parameters identified in the Moody’s report:  energy prices, GDP growth, the Fiscal Balance, and the external account, including competitiveness and viability of the non-energy sector exports . 

 The short to medium term outlook for the economy is linked inextricably to trends in oil, gas and petrochemical prices.  The outlook for energy commodity markets remains bleak. The northern hemisphere winter is typically a period of strong seasonal demand for energy to meet heating needs.   In January, the market witnessed several crises ranging from extreme cold weather on the demand side to OPEC production cuts and a temporary disruption of Russian gas supplies to Europe on the supply side.  However, these extreme conditions failed to boost energy prices and offer a clear indicator of the extent to which  there continues to be a supply overhang in the market.  As a result,  a further weakening of prices can be expected when winter demand recedes in the upcoming spring and summer months.  Petrochemical prices and steel also remained depressed with little prospect for immediate recovery until the major economic powers climb out of recession. 

Trinidad and Tobago’s strong economic growth over the last fifteen years has been due in the main to the rapid expansion of output in the energy sector. In 2007, the energy sector contributed directly  to  45% of  GDP. Its indirect contribution does not appear in the official statistics but estimates run up to an additional 25%.  This means that a decline in energy GDP really impacts on about 70% of total GDP.  The current situation in the energy sector is that the universal fall in prices of primary export commodities is compounded by a fall in output across sectors, some temporary, and other long term.  The petrochemical companies have undertaken to bring forward plant maintenance activity to assist in restoring balance to the market. Acelor Mittal has suspended production at some of its steel plants and has given no indication of a possible restart date. As a result of these closures there has been as much as a 25% decline in natural gas consumption. New plant construction and the subsequent increase in output, have been the major contributor to double digit GDP growth levels over the last ten years.  No new downstream plant opened in 2008, and only two downstream projects are currently under construction. Moreover, most of the other planned downstream investments have been delayed, postponed or abandoned. 

In addition the systematic decline in oil production continues.  In October 2008, crude oil production was running at just above 114,000 bbls/day compared with around 140, 000 bbls/day two years earlier.  Promised changes in the tax regime to stimulate exploration and production activity on shore and offshore, seem nowhere in sight.  In summary, the engine of economic growth in Trinidad and Tobago is stalled and with it,  about 70 per cent of the economy.  The non-energy sector GDP is fuelled by Government expenditure and private consumption. In the context of a likely fall in fiscal injections, non-energy GDP is likely to experience a delayed slowdown if not a full decline.  It is apparent from this analysis that the economy will be hard pressed to  avoid the extreme scenario mapped out by Moody’s i.e. a deep contraction in Real GDP. 

In its latest statement on the state of the economy, Government estimates the revenue loss at $TT 8 billion, a figure that has been challenged by independent Senator Basharat Ali.  The Budget estimated energy revenues at TT$ 19.9 billion using an oil price of US$ 70.00/bbl.  and non-energy revenues at TT$ 29.6 billion . Given that budgeted prices have   been reduced by 35% for oil and 18% for gas   and  that hydrocarbon production is running  some  10 per cent below last year’s level, it is apparent that  the Government’s revenue estimate of a  42% reduction may refer only to  oil revenues.  

One of the unique features of Government fiscal accounts in recent years has been the growth of non-energy revenues.  Thus far the Government’s statements on its fiscal position have not revealed the extent to which non-energy revenues will be affected.   In the current Budget for fiscal 2008-09, non-energy revenues are estimated at TT$ 29.5 billion or 60% of the total revenue.  Non-energy sector Government revenue is closely correlated to GDP growth and thus contributions from its major sources are likely to cycle down with GDP. For example, corporation taxes which account for about 24% of non energy taxes will decline sharply as a result of the difficulties in the petrochemical sector and at NGC. The latter accounts for about 25% of total revenue collected under the Corporations Tax heading. Personal income taxes, VAT and taxes on international which account  for 16%, 25% and 20%  of non-energy taxes respectively, will also experience declines.  In fact, it is difficult to see how non-energy revenues could exceed the $20 billion earned from that source in 2007.  Rough calculations suggest a reduction in total revenue by approximately $18 - 20 billion, leaving only TT $29-31 billion available to run the country’s affairs.  

Under normal circumstances, this would not be a doomsday scenario. As recently as 2006 fiscal year, total Government expenditure, recurrent and capital, was just $31.2 billion. But these are not normal circumstances. Government expenditure climbed to TT$35 billion in 2007 and TT$46 billion in 2008 and was estimated at TT$44 Billion for fiscal 2009. It now faces the massive challenge of cutting some $TT 14 billion for its projected expenditure or seeking financing on the local or international markets. Despite talk to the contrary, Government’s capacity to continue its expenditure programme faces a severe revenue constraint. Moreover, the Government is locked into several elements of expenditure which are inescapable in the short term.  As Moody’s themselves cautioned: “the government’s pro-cyclical fiscal policy (meaning increasing expenditure in line with windfall revenue)  during the past few years will likely limit, if not eliminate, the scope for a fiscal stimulus.  The Government will no doubt do all in its power to soften the impact of fall-out. It is in the Manning administration’s political interest to do so, and the Heritage and Stabilization Fund will not be spared, particularly because the Government has a right to access the fund in these circumstances. As Mr. Manning warned in the Parliament “the rainy days are here and we have been preparing for this eventuality.” 

The third and perhaps most important factor to be examined in assessing Moody’s outlook for the economy is the external account.  The rapid growth in energy output and the escalation in prices have generated healthy balance of payments surpluses for Trinidad and Tobago for over a decade. These exports contribute nearly 90% of the foreign exchange earnings of the economy, and allowed the country to build up foreign exchange reserves estimated at US$9 billion at the end of 2008.   As indicated above, the outlook for energy sector exports remains bleak.  At the same time, the relatively high reserves of foreign exchange masks a dangerous underlying trend with respect to imports.  Imports of   goods, excluding capital machinery and mineral fuels, has been growing at a rate of about 18% per year between 2002 and 2007.  Assuming no change in the exchange rates, such imports are expected to climb to over US$5 billion by 2010, the same level as total imports as recently as 2005. While some mitigation in the rate of imports can be expected with the general slowing of the economy, several factors suggest that import growth will outpace export earnings and lead to a deterioration of the Balance of Payments in the months ahead. An economic slowdown triggers fears of depreciation in the external value of the currency.  Such fears encourage hedging on the part of importers who purchase early to protect against the depreciation/ devaluation risks.  Evidence of this behavior can be seen in the many new / pre-owned importer car lots that have been opened over the last year.   These lots contain millions of dollars of foreign exchange lying in the sun awaiting a buyer.  Unlike the eighties there are no exchange controls to prevent or control the outflow of foreign exchange.  In the circumstances, devaluation may be the best defensive policy option. However, given the obvious political fallout of such a move, it is likely to be a last resort. In the meantime, the Central Bank will continue to defend the exchange rate between a narrow band by selling foreign exchange to the commercial banks so that they in turn could meet public demand and satisfy our high propensity to import consumption. It is evident, therefore, that Moody’s third risk factor- “a serious deterioration in the external  balance”- cannot be ruled out if prices do not recover over the course of the year.

On all counts, therefore, Moody’s analysis seem to be masking the real risks, while emphasizing the positives.  In so doing, Moody’s seems to have thrown Government a life raft, which the Finance Ministers have grasped in desperation.  

Rather than basking in the glory of Moody’s endorsement, the Finance Ministers and others in the Government need to be reminded that once respected international credit rating agencies have been described as colossal failures for their collective role in triggering the US financial crisis. Moody’s, McGraw-Hill, and Standards and Poor’s, among others, have been accused of breaking the bond of trust in failing to flag the problems with mortgage securities. 

 At the international level, rating agencies’ country reports are mainly concerned about the narrow issue of Government’s ability to repay its debt. In general, these country reports tend to be very conformist and generous in their risk assessment.  

Moody’s reports may mask weaknesses in an economy and tbe condescending in their forecasts, possibly because of the adverse impact negative ratings may have on investor and consumer confidence.  

The case of Ireland is a classic example. The key lesson to be learnt from the US mortgage crisis and the Iceland story is that the views of rating agencies must be taken with more than a pinch of salt. To do otherwise is tantamount to “taking basket” against the odds.  It is an error the Government and people of Trinidad and Tobago must avoid.

Jamaicans have entered the New Year in a season of economic turbulence. Layoffs and rising prices are the order of the order due to economic contraction and a depreciating dollar. For just the month of January alone, the Jamaican dollar loss about six per cent of its value, crossing the $85 mark to the US dollar.

The impact has been swift and brutal on consumers with the island’s major distributors increasing prices by as much as 15 per cent. Wisynco managing director William Mahfood told the Jamaica Observer that his price adjustment last week Monday was the third price increase on imported products since the start of the year, while it was the first time he had to up the price on locally manufactured goods- accumulatively increasing the average price of his products by 15.5 per cent.

Ingrid Hayman, marketing manager for H D Hopwood, said despite raising prices by six per cent in December, her company effected another six per cent increase last week “solely due to the devaluation”.

These companies distribute almost everything, from baby food to paper products.

“All you have to do is watch the dollar. No matter what, we are going to see it (prices) go up,” said Docky Lym, owner of Brooklyn Supermarket.

Businesses operating in the construction sector, however, can’t afford to raise prices because of low demand.

“In our industry we have a recession which makes it very difficult to increase prices,” said Arc Systems principal Norman Horne of the building and construction sector. 

“Many companies have taken foreign exchange losses,” added Horne. “Unless you have a strong capital base some companies will fold. We will be able to make it through.”

An Introduction to the work of the Nobel Prize winner 

by LLOYD KING

Gabriel García Márquez is the most carnivalesque of Caribbean novelists; and this is not because he set out in a programmatic way to have his fiction so categorized but because this was what was natural to his temperament.  The imaginative exuberance of some of his best known stories and novels, it should be said, was not there in his early work.  He was influenced by Faulkner, above all, the best work he produced during this first period being No One Writes to the Colonel.  But the seeds of his characteristic imaginative style were there from early.  They are the following: a liking for extreme situations and a tendency, perhaps related, to melodrama.

This is evident from his very first novella La hojarasca, translated as Leaf Storm but which might better have been called “Fallen Leaves”, a literal translation of the Spanish.  What is the extreme situation?  A doctor who is friend of a colonel and his family has committed suicide and the workers of a banana company have decided that they will not allow his body to be buried; the reason is that the doctor had refused to treat their wounded comrades, for reasons not made clear.  The wounded banana workers may then be seen as the fallen leaves, and we are left to conjecture how come they were wounded, a conjecture we may base on later work.  Maybe they had tried a work stoppage or to strike.  At any rate in the context of the story, they are merely the occasion for the main issue.

But what exactly is the main issue?  On the face of it, it is to show how the colonel stands up to the mob out of his sense of loyalty to a friend, who had sacrificed himself to protect the colonel’s family’s honour.  The doctor had taken over as his concubine, the family servant, Meme, who, while in their employ, made fares on the side.  The doctor took her over to prevent the colonel’s family’s falling into disrepute by implication.  The above is taken by many critics as a good summary of the novel.

But Márquez was a lot more subtle than that even as a young writer.  To understand this we must dwell a moment on the novella’s structure.  There is this third person narrative and there is a first person monologue by the colonel’s grandson.  These monologues add quite another dimension to the story.  It is a small boy’s homoerotic reveries, which must be tied in with what is revealed about the boy’s father who had turned up in the village, married and impregnated the colonel’s daughter and then disappeared. The reason implied is that he was recognized as a pederast and in such a small and very machista place would have been exposed.  What is therefore suggested may be summed up as: Like father like son.  Meme may have been gotten out of the family, and the banana workers as outsiders may be looked down on, but another outsider, thought to be of the same class as the colonel’s family, had been welcomed in and had left behind him the seeds of corruption and despair: the colonel’s daughter became a grass widow, his grandson a possible chip off  his father’s block: more fallen leaves.

If we jump to No One Writes to the Colonel we find another colonel who has been waiting for a pension for fifty years.  What kind of colonel was this?  Márquez’ colonels are not graduates of the Colombian equivalent of West Point or Sandhurst, they are simply members of the respectable rural élite who fought in the Colombian civil wars.  You could be twenty years old, once you came of a respectable family, you assumed this honorific title.  Such a one was Márquez’ own grandfather.  The colonel of this novella is waiting on the fulfillment of a promise by the Conservative winners in one of the civil wars early in the twentieth century to pay the defeated a pension.  Waiting on this pension, this colonel never does a stroke of work in his life. He is holding on to a gamecock which becomes symbolic of the resistance syndrome of a politically repressed village, which he has inherited from his murdered son, who had materially supported him over many years.  But his loyalty to this idea of resistance is ironically undermined by his frailty, the indifference of the Liberal Party to whom he is stubbornly faithful, his absolute indigence and constipation and frustration summed up in the umbrella he walks around through whose spokes you can see the sky

The American novelist, Mary McCarty, in one of her essays notes that there was a tendency in the writing of her time for writers to make a character of whom they were in fact fond, suffer.  This colonel is such a one, perhaps the most punished character in Latin American fiction.  How may we understand this?  My own view is that Márquez, by this time disillusioned with Colombian politics, with the futile and perhaps corrupt stances of the Liberals who had presented themselves as the party of progress and of modernity, was, in some part of his consciousness, driven to beat upon the obtuseness of the idealistic generations of idealists who held to their loyalty to this party.

It is after this that Márquez produced the novel that earned him a world wide reputation and made the idea of magical realism the critics’ delight: One Hundred Years of Solitude.  Márquez has identified the source which fuelled his exuberant imagination: namely the fantastic stories out of the rural imagination told him by his grandmother who brought him up as a boy. A literary stimulus was, to some extent or the other, the work of Alejo Carpentier who put the idea of magical realism in circulation in Spanish America.  There is an author he does not mention, who is truly his precursor, the first novelist out of Latin America to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, Miguel Angel Asturias from Guatemala, who, around the same time as Carpentier, came under the influence of the Surrealists and who had a much freer imagination, informed by Mayan myth, than Carpentier.  He displayed in his writing an incredible sense of the comedy alien to Carpentier. Márquez came to be hailed as the writer who brought a sense of humour into Latin American writing but his humour has a native source summed up in a practice on the Caribbean coast of Colombia and Venezuela as mamar galo.  Trinidadians know it as to mamaguey.

I am occasionally asked to provide clues of how to take on the fantastic aspects of One Hundred Years of Solitude.  The general context of the novel is that it is a record of the saga of family, its rise, apotheosis and demise of a certain ill-defined social status, whose fortunes are intimately tied to one of Colombia’s civil wars, told in hyperbolic and melodramatic and extreme terms. One aspect of the literary procedure is simply to portray a country bumpkin’s interpretation of some common western bit of technology. Thus Melquiades astonishes the natives in the bush because he has dentures, which by putting in and taking out of his mouth keeps transforming his appearance.  Because this is done with such humour, the idea that these backwoods people are being mocked scarcely touches any reader’s consciousness. A more ironic use of the fantastic is related to an impulse of mockery towards peasant Catholicism. The next instance concerns the ascension of Remedios the Beautiful into the skies, holding two sheets. This is obviously a parody of the Catholic doctrine that the Virgin Mary was taken up body and soul into Heaven.  There is also simultaneously a commoner- though in a way equally- ironic explanation. The family invented the story as a cover for the fact that the girl had run away with a lover. The case of the man who was also surrounded by yellow butterflies is, of course, melodramatic in itself but it is the colour yellow that is significant.  It is a death-colour.

To me the most moving of all the fantastic incidents concerns José Arcadio Buendía, the eldest son of the matriarch.  Márquez was very committed and never questions the validity of the myths of machismo. And  this son has an almost donkey like penis, such that prostitutes pay him for the experience and when his mother sees him naked, it frightens her, particularly as a curse of incest hangs over the family. The result is that she always keeps him at arm’s length and he suffers a total deprivation of a mother’s love. To make a long story short, José Arcadio is mysteriously shot to death and even more mysteriously and poignantly blood from his wound runs along the street into the family home and straight up to his mother’s feet. In death the son’s desire to reach his mother always denied is both physically and symbolically expressed. Márquez is a writer who conveys his meanings in very physical language.

Márquez’ last directly political novel is The Autumn of the Patriarch which has great appeal to some readers but not to this one, and therefore I leave it to others to elucidate its imagery.  Since then he turned his attention to what has always fascinated him, the idiosyncratic relation between sexual entanglements and sexual love in people as they age. But the continuity is there: the stories are always shaped in terms of somewhat extreme circumstances and tend towards melodrama. In one of his more recent novellas a ninety year old roué  who has frequented brothels all his life decided that for his birthday he wants to have a teenaged virgin in a brothel. Using these extreme circumstances, Márquez’ narrator shows his man experiencing unconsummated love in the best courtly love tradition. It should be noted that Colombia is regarded as the most Catholic country in Latin America and probably also has the most brothels.

The purpose of this essay is to provide some basic orientation to Márquez’ work for educated readers of his work in translation.  It does not pretend to be an in-depth study of his achievement. I want to conclude with an anecdote. Some decades ago I visited the north of Colombia, the scene of Márquez’ formative years. This was after the publication of One Hundred Years of Solitude. I asked several educated people what personal meaning the novel had for them, what insight if offered into the area’s past. They all agreed it cast no light on their own sense of their world.

More enlightening was a discussion I had with a doctor from Ecuador living in  Caracas. He told me how One Hundred Years of Solitude reflected experience.  After he graduated as a young doctor, he was assigned to an isolated village in the mountains where the only person he could converse with was the parish priest.  It was a village of illiterate indígenas. There was a severe drought during the time he was and the Indians prayed to their patron saint, St. Peter.  No rain fell.  The Indians eventually decided to take things into their own hands. They went into the church, brought out the statue of St. Peter and parading it up and down the street, rained blows on it with sticks for not doing his job. Rain fell the next day.

One Hundred Years of Solitude is easily the Márquez work which has received the most critical attention. Its symbolic structure and imagery seem amenable to many interpretations. For example it has persuasively been read as a gothic novel. Márquez treatment of a real historical event, the 1928 massacre of banana workers on strike has been hailed as transcending the usual and multiple protest-literature accounts of atrocities all over Latin America.  For interested readers, I recommend Gene H. Bell-Villada’s Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude available at Nalis.

Does the work have any defects? I think there is one, which has been somewhat overlooked. It is this.  There are two historical-political events which are central to the novel.  There is the civil war early in the 20th century and then the 1928 massacres.  They are in fact linked by way of the Buendía family history, but they are not historically or politically linked.  It is interesting that the case for Márquez transcending the protest mode is that the narrative holds to a vision which I believe is central to all Márquez’s work: the vision of the human comedy.  This is the key to Márquez, that he is the great 20th century purveyor of man as a comic if disastrous failure-ridden being.  Even Autumn of the Patriarch has been seen as a comic novel.  But many modern readers like their comedy whole, so that Love in the time of Cholera, made into a film, in which Márquez’s celebrated “gratuitousness, festivity and play” are given full rein, is perhaps his most popular work.

There is another aspect of Márquez’s more political novels which I would remark on.  It is a truism that pretty well all politically shaped novels in Latin America since the nineteenth century are written from a liberal and or radical perspective.  Liberal meaning hostile to the socially conservative élite and to Latin American Catholicism.  Writers would be equally hostile to born again Christians. Márquez is no exception.  He has been unable to extend imaginative sympathy to his politically conservative or clerical characters.  This is intriguing if only because his own family is deeply Catholic, at least two of his sisters being nuns.  No nuns are featured in his work. But who’s perfect? And finally, among his novellas, I would highly recommend a less well known work, Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1981).