One of the practices that really irked me was the awarding of .5 of a point by some judges.  As you will see, there are a few judges who, for no apparent reason awarded a band .5 of a point in a couple of areas.  When I say that there was no reason for the .5 of a point I mean that there was no explanation or justification for the .5 of a point.  In a number of cases the .5 occurred under the criterion of “Tone.”  I had score sheets from seven bands in the large band category, and after separating the score sheets by a judge’s name, there was one judge who gave every band listened to 4.5 for “Blending of pans/Consistency” and 4.5 for “Rich quality of sound”.

Tone has always been part of the criteria for the judges to use when adjudicating Panorama, but for 1993, the description was modified. When judging that criterion, the intent was to have the judge listen to the overall tuning of a band, and unless the ear perceived some real bad tuning/blending, the band should get ten (10) points.  So when these judges give a band 4.5 for “blending of pans/consistency”, and 4.5 for “rich quality of sound” I am baffled as to how they are able to discern that the tuning and/or blending of over a hundred instruments is off by .5 of a point.  They cannot be human.  Each large band has between 25 - 30 lead or tenor pans, and given the fact that each band had to have a maximum of 100 players for this year’s semis and finals, this leaves 70 - 75 players playing more than a single pan.  So the real number of instruments in an orchestra is probably more like 250 - 300, and it is just impossible to ascertain that the tuning or blending of all these percussion instruments is off by .5 of a point.

Here are the actual score sheets of two judges who awarded 4.5 each under the overall heading of Tone and their comments from the semis.  The score is on the left and their comments on the right.  Some of the writing was not legible, and I solicited my friend to assist me with deciphering some of the handwriting. Whenever we were unsuccessful, the writing we could not understand is indicated by question marks (????)

Another area of concern to me was Arranging.  As one who has been trained as an arranger, I was taught to employ various techniques such as melodic development, motivic development and re-harmonization.  In 1992, when I heard Panorama, arrangers were using these techniques in their arrangements without having any musical training; however, these techniques were not part of the criteria. 

I felt that since the arrangers were already utilizing them, they ought to be included in the criteria and assessed.  After a series of meetings with arrangers and judges, this was accepted.  Arrangement was allotted 40 points; Performance was allotted 40 points; and Tone and Rhythm were allotted 10 points each.  There was no specific numeric breakdown for any of the criterion.

Initially when the criteria was changed, judges would have had to exercise a substantial amount of listening skills, recognize these nuances-melodic development, motivic development and re-harmonization in the arrangement-and appropriately award points based on what they heard.  All these nuances were to have been weighted at the discretion of the judge.

In 2006, a “high music person” in Trinidad convinced Pan Trinbago to change the text accompanying the criteria and allocate a specific number of points to each sub-category of Arrangement, Performance, Tone and Rhythm. Based on my experience, the text that now accompanies the sub-categories is detrimental to the manner in which a judge has to mark a band.  This inevitably sets up a situation where the judge is forced to mark a band one way and the band is going to be subjected to inaccurate points from a judge.

The awkward and regressive outcome was that re-harmonization is now weighted the heaviest-twelve (12) points, even though it is the least utilized of all the arranging techniques.  So, based on my analysis of the comments from the judges at the semis in February, my opinion is that the judges do not have a full understanding of what re-harmonization means.  I am basing this on the paucity of specific comments on the re-harmonization process. Since the judges are now required to award the most points in the Arranging category to re-harmonization, this approach inevitably yields organized chaos. 

In the score sheets in Table 2 , the judge on the left made the comment under Performance, “Colour appropriate with the conversation between the pans.”  This is an example of a comment which, in my opinion, is totally useless to an arranger; and it exemplifies how the text has forced this judge to write a comment that is incomprehensible.  What is an arranger supposed to do with that comment?   There really is not anything that the judge on the left said that focuses on the music being played.  However, the judge on the right made an attempt to address how the leads were functioning. It was without specificity though, and unless the leads were unclear for the entire arrangement, it would have been a challenge for the arranger to embrace the comment, know where in the arrangement the judge is referring to, and then go back to the yard and work on clarity of leads.

Let’s move to the judges’ score sheets in Table 3 (above).  Now, the judge on the left begins with the comment “Uniquely suggestive opening” and I believe that this was meant to address the Introduction.  Wait!! Wait!! I am asking myself the same question you are asking-what dat mean?  With regard to the comments from the judge on the right, there is specificity regarding re-harmonization, but the comment is under Performance as opposed to Arranging. I did not want to compromise on what was written on the score sheet, so what you see is what was written.  Nonetheless, the comments from both these judges demonstrate again that there is a need to have a common understanding of what the criteria mean.  As you can see, the dreaded .5 appears again-without any comment.

In Table 4, while the judge on the left really says nothing particularly constructive, I am, however appalled by the number of times that the judge on the right uses the phrase, “fairly good”. It leads one to wonder whether this judge is a rookie who is yet to develop a vocabulary necessary for judging, or, a judge who was totally bored with the performance and just wanted to get to the other band. 

 At the root of this myth is the belief that a panman-because he could play or arrange-understands the myriad techniques in a Panorama arrangement.  I would argue that such is not the case. It appears to me that this individual just took an adjective, placed it either before or after the text describing the criterion. The norm in Trini is to call every panman a musician, and anybody who utters anything about steelband a musicologist; but we have to be very careful how we use these words. There is a big difference between a musician and an instrumentalist.  Michelle Huggins-Watts-the arranger for Valley Harps is a musician and she can also be called an instrumentalist. Nalo Sampson, the front line lead player for Trinidad All Stars is an excellent instrumentalist.  While Michelle has served as a judge for the Junior Panorama, I suspect that Nalo would need some training before she is able to serve in that capacity. I use these two female members of the pan sorority in the most positive way and mean no disrespect to Nalo; but the point I am making here is that as far as this judge is concerned-an established pannist/arranger-I am very sorry to say that the method used to judge this band supports my theory about the use of pannists/arrangers as judges.

 SOME OBSERVATIONS

I received score sheets from nine bands altogether-seven of which were in the large band category.  Printing all the score sheets would make the article much too long.  To see all the score sheets I received, please visit www.tntreview.com. 
In my opinion, the objective of a judge’s comments is to provide some guidance or feedback for the arranger to improve his/her arrangement.  There ought to be specificity with a judge’s comments, because if the comments are too broad or vague, the arranger has nothing to go on in terms of improving his/her arrangement for the next round.  I happened to be in Trinidad when the show Dancing With The Stars was aired recently, and have been told that the show is quite popular in Trinidad.  The judges on that show epitomize the responsibility and accountability that judges should have when they critique a performance, and Panorama judges should strive to achieve that level of detail with their comments.  Furthermore, it might not be a bad idea to institute aural comments when judges visit the yards in the preliminaries; I have a strong feeling that attendance at pan-yard judging would increase two-fold.
Quantitatively, about 1 percent of the comments on the score sheets I received specifically addressed the music played by the bands.  I read all the comments and there were six comments-and I am placing myself in an arranger’s shoes-that I could have taken back to the yard to work on my arrangement. Here’s an idea of what I might write on a score sheet if I were in the role of a judge:
I liked the way you coupled the first few bars of the verse with the hook of the chorus to come up with your intro, and the transition from the intro to the first verse was very effective. Or, when the background pans played the melody of the verse at about 3:16 into the arrangement, there was too much activity with the front line pans, and this hampered the clarity of that section.  I suggest you temper the tenors a bit, or strengthen the bass part with the guitars or cellos.
Several arrangers I spoke to said that they don’t even look at the comments; this is sad because somewhere among the variety of comments, there should be something of consequence that the arranger could use to make the arrangement better.  However, because the majority of comments are not focused on the music, I can well understand why arrangers’ attitude to the judges’ comments.
The process of adjudicating is a very responsible undertaking, and with that undertaking comes a certain amount of accountability.  For too long, the executive of Pan Trinbago has not called on the judges to be accountable for what they write on the score sheets, and judges have not voluntarily demonstrated such accountability. So when a judge uses “fairly good” seven times to describe a band’s performance, and the same phrase from the same judge is seen several times on the score sheets of other bands, one can understand the demand by arrangers for foreign judges.
Another concern of many arrangers was Pan Trinbago’s decision to discontinue throwing out the highest and lowest scores.  This year’s Panorama saw an aggregate of all the scores, and while I do not have any specific philosophy on scoring, I believe that giving the steelbandsmen some empowerment could bring about some healthy dialogue on the best methodology with regard to scoring. 
One arranger reported a conversation with an executive member of Pan Trinbago who encouraged him to furnish a list of names whom he thought would be good for the judging process.  He did so and took the list to the executive only to have another member of the executive shoot down all the names.  Arrangers are supposed to have a say in the selection of judges, but my interviews with several arrangers suggest that they have very little- if any- input in selecting judges. Several executives of Pan Trinbago are affiliated with one band or another, and when you have these same executives choosing judges to adjudicate a band with which they have some affiliation, you have a major conflict of interest-major!  This situation obviously needs to change.
In conversation with an arranger who was totally fed up with the adjudication process, I suggested the idea of  having a band’s score projected on a screen immediately after a band’s performance-just like Dancing With The Stars- as one way of ensuring accountability on the part of adjudicators.  He replied that he had already made the suggestion only to be told that “dey go pelt the judges if dey eh like what dey see!”  There are competitions world-wide where the judges have to expose their scores immediately after each performance, and while this sort of change will be difficult for the steelband movement to embrace, it could raise the level of accountability on the part of the judges.  Here it is in 2009- before the scores are released, Pan Trinbago ushers the judges out from the judging area. What is the problem?

RECOMMENDATIONS

There are a number of recommendations that I would make to Pan Trinbago in the interest of reducing the level of rancor that follows each Panorama competition:

(1) Training
The judges must attend a training session before the Panorama season starts-every Panorama season. The arrangers should be included in these sessions and the session must be facilitated by a qualified musician and/or an individual who has studied music that is not limited to classical music, is an arranger, understands what arrangers are doing, and has a substantial amount of credibility. 

(2) Criteria descriptions must be removed.
The Introduction sub-category of the Arrangement category says: “the count should be clear, demanding attention and the right tempo, execution flawless, good balance.” In assessing an intro in a Panorama arrangement, this language is just ludicrous. Nobody counts a band at Panorama; the person responsible for starting the band knocks the side of the pan, and that person is not going to start to knock the pan unless s/he is sure that everybody is ready to start. So to talk about the right tempo, execution flawless, and good balance for an intro is just asinine. 

(3) As previously stated, the points allocated to all
     the sub-categories must be removed.

In the category of General Performance, the descriptions of the sub-categories are just awful.  Dynamics has two sub-categories and with texture, there is the description “Use of melodic/harmonic strategies to complement expressiveness and style.”   One does not use strategies in an arrangement; one uses techniques. So again, the “high music person” who convinced Pan Trinbago to incorporate that text into the criteria is misguided. Creativity is a tool that arrangers use when they are doing an arrangement so it ought to be in the Arrangement category, not General Performance.  If you listen to Trini to de Bone on the Reid, Wright and Be Happy CD, when I take my piano solo you will hear that from an improvisational point of view, I super-imposed a number of Kitch’s melodies-Dr. Kitch, Trouble in Arima, My Pussin and [All Day All Night Miss Marianne]-over the stop time; that is creativity.  So to tell a judge that creativity is limited to “the artistry and skill with which the arranger modifies the melody” is very narrow from an arranging perspective.  Creativity covers much more than that one sentence.
If you have a formula that is supposed to produce a specific outcome, and you change the formula, you cannot expect the same outcome. The text accompanying the criteria is bad, real bad, and when you combine that text with judges who have varying interpretations of the criteria and what the text means, you are bound to have chaos.  When you look at all the score sheets you will see a comment from a judge under Performance that says, “expressive textural strategies.” This is an example of a judge who was driven to respond to the text under Performance, and this begs the question, what dat mean boy?

CONCLUSION

On Carnival Saturday on a news segment on i95.5fm, the President of Pan Trinbago said that in order to add more elements to the finals, Pan Trinbago planned to have some entertainment while the judges deliberate. And also, because the same six or seven bands keep emerging in the finals year after year, they are working on bringing the zonal finalists to the finals. With all due respect to Mr. Arnold, the judges are not deliberating. As far as I know, the scores are being entered into a spreadsheet that is calculating all the scores as soon as a band completes its performance, so within five seconds after the last score goes in to the spreadsheet, the results are available.  It is better to say that entertainment will be added while some administrative tasks are coordinated and completed.  He said that after Carnival, Pan Trinbago intends to sit down and do some planning.  I trust that this planning will include a review of the adjudication process. 
In announcing his candidacy for the presidency of the United States of America, Barack Obama’s mantra was change I believe that the time for change has to come to the most prestigious steelband competition in the world.  It has to start with the judging.  When the President Obama comes for the Summit of the Americas, ah go try a ting to see if ah could have him buss a lime with one or two executives and some steelbands men so that he could institute some change.

A review by Rose-Ann Walker

PART ONE

The latest production from the Department of Creative and Festival Arts entitled Fragments: Celebrating the works of Derek Walcott generated a certain expectation because of the source of the title, namely, “The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory,” - the title of Derek Walcott’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech.  That expectation was further intensified with the pre-show, on-stage warm-up that greeted the audience on Sunday 29th. March 2009, the visual of some 24 cast members in black body-fitting garb, energetically stretching and moving to pulsating drum rhythms becoming a poignant metonym for “the fishermen, the footmen on trucks” that Walcott’s speech posits to be “all fragments of Africa originally but shaped and hardened and rooted now in the island’s life” (What the Twilight says and other essays 81). 
Here indeed seemed to be the figural embodiment of Antillean geography and Antillean art, the Directors’ Note in the program openly disclosing on the inside of its cover page that Walcott’s writing gave the production “both content and context.” By that standard then, the production not only soars, but it also epically distorts the vision of the Antilles projected by Walcott’s acceptance speech, a vision that perceives in the Antillean condition both “African and Asiatic fragments” (69) albeit with their  “white scars” (69).
In terms of content, therefore, the production eschews Walcott’s inclusion of Asiatic fragments and chooses to bear the historical weight of colonialism’s binary oppositions with a highly selective mix of Walcott’s poetry, prose and drama, the fragments of the latter genre clearly providing a channel for the release of contemporary angst about black identity by a post-1970s’ Caribbean generation.
Accordingly, the content of the production emphasizes solely Afro-Caribbean cultural resistance, the opening vignette establishing the stage as the space for artistic and tribal collaboration and confrontation.
Artistically, the collaboration / confrontation is between tragedy and comedy, the former appearing first on stage to the opening bars of Johann Sebastian Bach’s “Jesu, Joy of man’s desiring,” a motif of European dominance, presence and legacy, as is the character being taller and the mask being bigger than the other.
By contrast, comedy makes a distinctly Carnival-type entry to the sound of engine-room iron, the ensuing center-stage scuffle between the two mask-bearing / mask-wielding characters infusing the beginning of the play with a confrontational notion of cultural. relativism that is immediately counter-pointed by the voicing of Walcott’s lament, “[b]reak a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole …” (69).
Artistically, the production of Fragments equates that stronger love with Afro-Caribbean revolutionary militancy, the voicing of Walcott’s lament evoking a choral response from characters emerging within the auditorium, their chants declaring inter alia, “we go ambush this road march,” “Arawaks, Ashanti, Conquistador,” ‘we changin’ this road march now to war and rebellion … musket, bow and arrow, big stick …”
The entry of this motley, marauding group, a potent symbol of “our shattered histories” (69), conflates the artistic with the tribal in the ensuing stick-fight, a precisely choreographed piece that displays the agility and dexterity of the lithesome cast, even as it evokes the exuberance of freed slaves, the two flags waving in the background serving to sustain the Emancipation / Carnival image while foreshadowing the subsequent movement of the dramatic action into an excerpt from Walcott’s Drums and Colours, an epic drama that earned Walcott the Jamaica Drama Festival Prize in 1957. 
Foregrounding the idea of an emerging West Indian consciousness, Walcott’s Drums and Colours is described by Judy Stone in Studies in West Indian Literature - Theatre as being “structured around the personal tragedies of five heroes [sic] of the region: Columbus, Raleigh, Toussaint L’Ouverture, George William Gordon, and … Pompey, one of Jamaica’s rebellious Maroons, who represented the grass-roots of the West Indies”  (104). 
However, the excerpt utilized by the Fragments production treats with what reviewer Veronica Jenkin claims is “the mannered elegance and cynicism of French generals and their wives in Haiti on the eve of the slave rebellion” (105). This is visually and aurally established in Fragments where the play within the play technique provides the illusion of plot development while serving to shift the tone and pace of the production with language, conflict and irony.
Thus, the earlier stick-chanting and prancing of the stick-fighters give way to crisp exchanges between Generals Leclerc, De Rouvray, and Yu, to the seductive dialogue of Pauline Leclerc and Anton Calixte, and to news of the impending slave rebellion, the linguistic artillery in the excerpt seeming to declare “[b]ut that’s all them bastards have left us: words,” in mocking echo of Shabine, the persona of Walcott’s “The Schooner Flight” (Collected Poems 1948-1984 350).
In his essay entitled “A Misunderstood Society,” Gerard Barthelemy clarifies that one of the false images that still persists about Haiti “is the view which pits slaves against white planters/colonizers” (Enterprise of the Indies 221).
Barthelemy insists, however, that the “role played by the slaves in the upheaval was that of a mass of workers while the great revolt was in fact led by the free Blacks and it was these free Blacks who retained power after independence” (221). So, as though apologizing for the inaccuracy, the production of Fragments uses David Rudder’s mournful refrain, “Haiti, I’m sorry,” to seamlessly move into the violent onstage, night-time murder of Anton Calixte by shadowy figures amidst his vocal declaration / affirmation of black lineage.
The countryside setting comprising a red moon, ominous sounds and calls, and the suggestion of hills/mountains combine to hint at the tribal practice of voodoo, although aesthetically, they also function to imbue the action with pathos, while simultaneously enabling another appropriate shift in the production’s rhythm and pace.
Consequently, by the time Anton Calixe emerges from within the auditorium and journeys toward the stage, where the lights have been dimmed, the drum beat has been intensified, an African dance is in progress, and his murder is enacted in a brutal image of tribalism, it becomes clear that contrary to the spirit and substance of the  source of the production’s content and context, Fragments was not about to fully concur with Walcott that “even the actions of surf on sand cannot erase the African memory or the lances of cane as a green prison where indentured Asians, the ancestors of Felicity, are still serving time” (What the twilight says 81).
With regard to the latter, (the Asians), the production clearly suggests that it has been erased, the omission of anything vaguely representative of “Asiatic fragments” being as stark as it is contemptuous of the speech that gives the production its title.  By contrast, however,, the production aesthetically and linguistically declares that the African memory cannot be erased.
Hence, after ensuring the audience’s experience of catharsis through the use of atmosphere, song, and spectacle for the riveting climax provided by the murder of Anton Calixe, the production queries “how can I turn from Africa and live?” - the final line in Walcott’s “A Far Cry from Africa,” its voicing providing an anticlimactic, echoic/poetic extension of Calixe’s declaration of black lineage.
Symbolically remaining with Haiti and aesthetically consistent with its Afrocentric focus, the production then moves into its next excerpt, the encounter between Toussaint L’Ouverture, Dessalines and Christophe after the revolt.
Taken from Walcott’s Haitian Earth, the excerpt shifts the tone and rhythm of the production and takes the idea of confrontation to a new tribal level with the depiction of harsh discord between L’Ouverture and Dessalines over the treatment of Calixte-Breda, Imaging contrasting attitudes towards the French planter class in the characterizations of L’Ouverture and Dessalines respectively, the scene seemed to agree with C.L.R.James in the Black Jacobins that L’Ouverture “set his face sternly against racial discrimination” (261),  James asserting relative to Dessalines that “the ties that bound this uneducated soldier to French civilization were the slenderest” (288).
Accordingly, the scene constitutes another highpoint of linguistic artillery in the production, its strident projection of Afro-Caribbean militancy through the verbal exchanges between L’Ouverture and Dessalines serving to propel the pace of the play and also to jettison the illusion of plot and movement into a parallel scenario of verbal protest and picong, a fitting prelude to the excerpt from Walcott’s Beef No Chicken.
Written in 1978, Walcott’s Beef No Chicken enables the production to include synchronic sociopolitical commentary, the particular excerpt providing much-needed comic relief after the emotionally intense scene from Haitian Earth.
The Mayor and Borough Councillors in the Beef No Chicken excerpt therefore visually image a motley political crew of sorts, whose misshapen and eccentric appearance, together with their frequent word play and satirical comments, infuse Fragments with vaudeville theatricality.
Accordingly, their comments such as “don’t go into a coma over a comma,” “bribery is the first stage of economic development” and “if we crooked, the highway goin’ to straighten that out” evoked peals of laughter from the nearly full house on Sunday 29th March 2009, although the attempts to move Otto Hogan’s Roti/Auto Shop to construct a highway  seemed to justify Walcott’s terrifying prediction in his Nobel acceptance speech that a “morning could come in which governments might ask what happened not merely to the forests and the bays but to a whole people” (83).
So here indeed was a parody of local politics and the local comedy show, the play- within-the play foreshadowing the final excerpt that was staged before the intermission, namely, A Branch of the Blue Nile, Walcott’s 1983 “play-within-a-play-within-a-play” about the Trinidad Theatre Workshop (Stone 136). 
Modified to represent the play’s conflict as between Caribbean speech and that of a ‘fresh-water’ Yankee, the excerpt from A Branch of the Blue Nile artistically sustains the emphasis on tribally-charged verbal conflicts in Fragments, the line “If you so good, what you doing here” signaling, in essence, to quote Walcott, “a misunderstanding of the light and the people on whom this light falls”(What the Twilight Says 76).  
                  
—TO BE CONTINUED NEXT MONTH

A Critique Of Panaroma Judges’ Score Sheets

By ORVILLE WRIGHT

Here is what the current score sheet looks like.

Panorama judges are responsible for determining who earns bragging rights for the flagship steelband competition in the world. However, year after year, controversy swirls around the results of the competition.  While much of the controversy is limited to Panorama finals, the semis in February 2009 brought an unprecedented level of negative reaction from the public as well as from within the pan community.
Prior to the semis, a colleague of mine living in New York and I discussed, among other things, some of the arrangers who had moved up to the large band category. During the internet broadcast of the semis, we chatted on the phone and found we shared a common perspective on who were the top two bands on that night.  While the South and Tobago legs of the competition were yet to be completed before the actual release of scores, we felt confident that our choices were pretty safe. 
Well, our confidence proved to be misplaced when Petrotrin Phase II emerged with the highest score at the semis.  I have been tagged as a Phase II man-rightly or wrongly-but I just did not believe that “Boogsie” was at the top of his game on that day. A report in the Trinidad Express on February 12, 2009, suggests that even “Boogsie” may have been surprised.  In it, he is quoted as saying: “I have a good feeling, I am happy to be the leader, but it is back to the drawing board. Boogsie is finished only when the race is done. Final night is always a different story.”
I made a couple of calls to Trinidad before the scores were released and was told that the consensus was that Silver Stars and Desperadoes were the top two bands, and when I read the reaction to the scores in one of the dailies-especially the Newsday on February 12, 2009-it was clear that my previous concerns about the process of judging Panorama had reared its ugly head again.  In the past, I have complained vociferously about the lack of training on the part of the judges and their level of competency, and the exercise that I am about to undertake-at the urging of a number of arrangers, pannists and a past executive member of Pan Trinbago-will demonstrate my concerns.
While I was principally involved with developing the structure of the present criteria in 1992, the descriptions and point system currently used is a result of the Executive of Pan Trinbago asking somebody in Trinidad-whom they would only identify as a “high music person”-to tweak the original text and point system that was approved by pannists and arrangers back in 1992.  This is critical because the judges seem not to understand how, what and why they are marking a band.   My point will become manifest as I discuss some of the score sheets from the semis in February.

Before going any further, let me publicly thank all the arrangers and managers who gave me their semi-final score sheets that I will be analyzing as a major part of this commentary.  I will neither name the bands whose score sheets I received nor will I identify the judges whose scores I will be analyzing.  What I will do is print-for the purpose of this article-some of the judges’ score sheets, analyze them based on the criteria, and draw some conclusions about the individual’s performance so you can get a sense of how the most prestigious steelband competition in the world is assessed.

Time To Sharpen The Caribbean Mandate

In the few days that we will occupy the world stage later this month, Trinidad and Tobago and the rest of the Caribbean run the risk of getting lost inside the ideological cross-winds that are likely to be whipped up around Air Force One heading in from the north and Chavez’s Airbus-A319 coming in from the south.
When G20 leaders met in London last week, it was clear that the urgency and severity of the global economic crisis had all but melted the remnants of the politics of the Cold War. With their hometown agendas so inextricably linked with the global, and the angry and hungry masses back home nipping at their heels, G20 leaders arrived anxious to do business.
In ten days times, some of those leaders will be here, no doubt primed and ready to push their agendas forward. The question for us and for our Caricom partners is what is our agenda?
It has been suggested that the domestic agenda is limited to showing the world that we’re  in the big league in terms of skyline, hotel rooms and conference facilities. But surely that’s tongue-in-cheek talk.  One would expect our leaders, above all,  to be clear on our real interests, although, if they had been more articulate on the issue, they might have had far greater success in bringing the population along with the Summit.
There are a range of burning matters facing Caricom at this time. Among them:
1) The destabilising impact of being caught between drug-exporting and drug-consuming economies.
2) The challenge posed by market size in attaining economic independence despite having some of the world’s largest economies right on our doorstep.
3) Environmental degradation and the uncertainty of island life under conditions of climate change.
4) Cultural attitudes, from both south and north, that reduce the  Caribbean to the status of playground and its people to the role of playthings.
While some leaders might come here more interested in testing the temperature and texture of hemispheric ideology, our agenda must be our own business.
It is true that Barack Obama’s rise to the US Presidency has unexpectedly given the US room for an honourable exit strategy from the dishonourable policy of its obsolete embargo against Cuba. That embargo has simply been dying for someone to put it out of its misery. As it turns out, Obama’s blank sheet of inexperience has become a  great virtue for American foreign in providing opportunities for new beginnings.
We, too, need some new beginnings. And it should begin with the awareness that we have a right to be here; that our people matter to us and that an independent Caribbean civilization, able and willing to negotiate with the world on its own terms, is within our reach and capability.

By DAVID CAVE

The display of Carnival-relevant art at some of the trendiest galleries was a reminder that, in Trinidad, Carnival is indeed everywhere during the month of February. Equally inescapable, however, was the blandness seeping in from the streets into the gallery, the pedestrian towering above  the creative.

“String Theory” by Jenny Baboolal

On the streets the Carnival challenge is to find  a band that has progressed beyond the showgirl syndrome of beads, feathers and bikinis; inside the art galleries, itis to find art that does more than just illustrate or record Carnival activity.
“Celebration”, the exhibition at the In2Art Gallery in St Ann’s offered a mix of possibilities. Donald “Jackie” Hinkson’s work, such as Phase II,   was attractive and precise in playing it safe in its conventional illustration of Carnival imagery.  The work of some other artists, however, dared to push the boundaries. Among this group was the graphic-oriented work of Warren Le Platte.  His bold pieces such as “Transformation” confronted the viewer head-on, and were large enough to command attention.
The works of Nadya Shah, Alison Wells and Richard Ackoon also demonstrated an effort to move beyond the mere representational by their visual exploration of the possibilities of rhythm, line and texture in painting.

“Dancing Queen” by Makemba Kunle

  This movement towards abstraction is particularly interesting as an attempt to break free from the mere visual in capturing the spirit of Carnival. In this regard, the paintings of Tessa Alexander and Makemba Kunle are particularly successful because of the discrete manner in which they bridge the gap between the representational and the abstract.  

“Transformation” by Warren Le Platte

In2art’s “Celebration” was more than just a sample of Carnival-related art.  It was a wide display of talent by emerging and seasoned artists that was designed to bring some variety to the woefully monotonous visual landscape of Carnival.  Where it succeeded was in those pieces where the artist recognised the difference between mere illustration and the more profound act of interrogation in which elements were isolated, dissected and re-interpreted to create something new and thought-provoking.  What shone through in these pieces was the artist’s own engagement with the subject- much like in Peter Minshall’s Mancrab (circa 1982) or Leroy Clarke’s Queen of De Bands (circa 1974).  In art, interrogation and engagement will always trump mere illustration or depiction.
At the annex of the National Museum, the photographic work of Jenny Baboolal was another offering of interrogation.  The work, simple and unpretentious, stayed true to its focus on children in Carnival. The forty-plus dry-mounted photographs very skillfully isolated her subjects by zooming in on the children’s faces while including just enough situational context to allow the viewer to experience the expressive lines and movement of the costumes.
Both “Celebration” at the In2Art Gallery and Jenny Baboolal’s “Costumed Faces” at the National Museum should be seen as worthwhile attempts to blend the traditional with the experimental.  These exhibitions may not be perfect, but they do seek to offer a welcome change of pace to the increasing blandness of Carnival imagery.  

“Abstraction of Pan Man II” by Tessa Alexander

“Celebration” ran at the In2Art Gallery until 14th March while “Costumed Faces” at the annex of the National Museum ran until 8th March 2009.

By MICKEY MATTHEWS

Scenes of confrontation at the UNC meeting at Rienzi Complex, Couva.

The rebellion staged by Jack Warner and Ramesh Maharaj did not surprise. When Basdeo Panday left for three weeks holiday after a particularly ugly public quarrel with this “twosome from his awesome foursome”, an uprising against him was the logical consequence. What was surprising was the utterly in-your-face nature of it.
The choice of battle ground could not have been more strategic, although much might have been decided by the fact that Panday’s grand charging had led to another final showdown in the form of this meeting of constituency delegates ambitiously charged with the responsibility for getting ‘Jack and the nemakaram Ramesh to behave’. They, for their part, could not have resisted challenging the superficial egalitarianism on which this meeting was based: all five hundred of the delegates expected to attend were to enjoy equal status except Panday who would preside as imperious chairman and Political Leader—the very display of authoritarianism that remains the issue of contention.
In politics, some people are indeed more equal than others and if among those who are more equal there is one who is yet more equal, he or she can only be first amongst equalS or primus inter pares as they say. Notwithstanding the standard machinery of executives, council of representatives and of the plenary, when it comes to decision-making it is the committee of the “more equals”, formally or informally constituted, which is decisive.
Some such paradigm must surely have informed the operations of the UNC/A in the run up to the 2007 elections when Panday strove with Bissessar, Warner, and Maharaj to keep Dookeran and the CoP at bay. It must be troubling indeed for all those who had contributed to that effort to see Panday abandon his position against being “a King of Kings” in favour of naked one-man rule.
One-man rule is always going to prevail so long as the culture permits its leaders to own parties. Our best bet against it lies in bringing the parties together in an explicit coalition. In 1986 Lloyd Best proposed a Court of Policy as part of the architecture that he had provided for the NAR Party of Parties. He envisaged the Leader of the NAR as chairman of a committee of the leaders of its four constituent parties (the ONR, the THM, the DAC and the ULF) whose validity would be anchored by the powers of veto they enjoy over three critical areas of public policy. These were (1) the constitutional status of Tobago, (2) Reform of the Public Service and (3) Caroni Ltd and the huge acreage of land therein. The committee of leaders would also act as a court overseeing the integration of their parties and resolving disputes between themselves over policy and discipline.
Panday was lukewarm to this proposal even though he knew that it would have secured his political interest as strongly as it would have secured those of his coalition colleagues. Even though Robinson had warned, for all those who had ears to hear, that as Prime Minister he would deal with all those who expected him to be their man-Friday, Panday had elected to gamble recklessly on his status as the broker with the largest number of bankable seats.
By 1995 however, he was warm to the idea. He made much public ado about his intention to live by it in the coalition government he would form with the DAC. But once he had elevated Robinson to the Presidency he sang a different song to Hochoy Charles and the Tobago House of Assembly. He fired the Tobago senators for taking instruction from Scarborough rather than Port of Spain in matters relating to Tobago, and peevishly proceeded to undermine Charles thereby paving the way for the return of the PNM to Tobago after an absence of twenty fours years.
It is within his own party, however, that Panday has been most erratic about what he has learnt from the debacle of the NAR experience. Implicit in the Best proposal for a court of policy is that initiatives which tend to change the status of, or transform relations within parties ought to be the subject of negotiation amongst its leaders. This is true not only for parties that are manifestly coalitions but also for those that are seemingly monolithic as well. The key is to acknowledge the claims of collaborators even when, or perhaps particularly when, they are also rivals.
Seeking to extend his mandate to oligarchic interest, Panday ignored these common sense tenets of party building and sought to impose Minister Carlos John as Chairman of his ruling party. Trevor Sudama and Ramesh Maharaj opposed it, and their candidate was triumphant in the elections that decided the issue. Panday never recognized the results of those elections in which he lost effective control of the party’s executive. The infighting which followed spilled over to the Cabinet and into the parliament leading to the 18-18 tied elections mere months after his party had retained power on its own strength by a comfortable margin.

Two points need to be underscored here. The first is that it was the failure of maximum leadership to concede the validity of other sources of leadership and authority which provided the seeds of its own undoing in both the case of the NAR and UNC governments.
The second is that the defeat of Carlos John in spite of the backing he received from Prime Minister Panday shows that the UNC population has been prepared for a long time to stand up to its excesses.
Maharaj and Warner’s fearless attempt to confront the UNC/A’s meeting designed to underweight their significance seemed to leave Basdeo Panday shaken and confused. A lesser man would have been devastated and dumbstruck but Panday maintained just enough presence of mind to decry what has transpired as political thuggery, and to rally along with the most conservative elements in the society who continue to pin their hopes on him.
We are thrown back to the time when, as Prime Minister, he locked horns with ANR Robinson as President, forcing opinion in the country to become sharply divided. Then as now the issue was the challenge to constituted authority and to the foundation of our system of governance. There was no resolution then although we were furnished with insights. Perhaps it was because the issue emanated in the executive and the corridors of government and administration. Now that it is coming from the communities and party politics could we afford to be more hopeful?

By TONY DEYAL

Things don’t mean the same in Trinidad that they mean elsewhere. Here chutney is not only a condiment but is something you listen or dance to; elite is a shirt; lime is less a fruit than a get-together or a telecommunications provider; and when the party is over, it is a fete accompli.  Trinidad is a place of contrarieties and contradictions where language can be a pitfall trying to trip you or a pitbull trying to eat you. 
To survive, you need to know the difference between a Jammette and a Jamaat; a mean muslim and a muslimeen; a bake and a saada roti; soca, soccer and sucker and which one is “the beautiful game”; a homo name and a homonym; a team and a theme.

Ramesh Maharaj, Basdeo Panday and Jack Warner

And when you arrive triumphantly at the golden gates of the promised land of linguistic clarity, proud of your ability to easily navigate the undercurrents of argot, patois, dialect and creolese, you discover that in Trinidad, Unity is a hamlet somewhere near Gasparillo. 
However, when you find the time to look for it, you find out that Time is a foreign magazine, Hamlet is a Prince of Denmark in a Shakespeare play, Shakespeare is really Bacon, bacon is made from pigs, there was once a Minister of Education in Trinidad named Hogben, and Unity is not in Trinidad but is a village on the East Coast of Guyana. Further enquiry from any well informed national enquirer places another Unity in Missouri, USA, fifteen miles southwest of Kansas City.   
There is a song about Kansas City in which the singer insists, “Down to Kansas City/ Kansas City, here I come./ They’ve got a lot of pretty women there and I’ve got to get me one./ I might take a train/ I might take a plane/ But if I have to walk I’ll do it again./ Down to Kansas City…”
The moral of the story is that while you might find unity in Guyana or in Missouri, and pretty women in Kansas City and Trinidad, the one thing you won’t find here is unity.
So why this constant and vain pursuit of what Shakespeare would call a “phantasm or hideous dream”?  Why does every Tom, Dick and Harrilal, every man-jack and Ram-Jack, every Panning or Manday, pursue it with such avidity or, perhaps, rapacity?  And then, like Walter Raleigh and his search for El Dorado, or King Henry VIII and his desire for a male heir, why does it end with a beheading or two, or even more? 
Many years ago, I met Raffique Shah who with Basdeo Panday, George Weekes and Joe Young, were the collective leadership of the ULF.  We were talking about Panday’s unwillingness, or inability, to work with other people.  Shah told me, “Boy, Panday would go out and make statements on his own and when George and I asked him about it he would grin that foolish grin of his and say, ‘Fellers, I had no choice’.  You just can’t trust the man.”  Shah says the same thing on his “Raffique Home Page” on trinicenter.com: “In 1977, mere months after the ULF formed the official opposition following the 1976 general election, Panday began behaving strangely. Or, as we would later learn, his true character began manifesting itself. He had used us from 1975 to gain national recognition… It was written into the party’s constitution, and thus it was expected that the four leaders—Panday, Weekes, Young and I—would consult on any matter that was deemed important…Then he quietly jettisoned collective leadership by arbitrarily making decisions that ought to have been brought before the party’s central committee.” 
Panday would always have a different take on what Shah said and on Shah himself.  He is the master of the shattering one-liner and it would be like him to say something like, “Raff?  He was a Lieutenant who want you to feel he is a General” or “He is not in touch with reality.  He went to Sandhurst so you could expect him to bury his head in the sand.”  One day I mentioned to Panday that Lloyd Best had told me about going to Panday’s home on the night before the 1986 General Election and waiting for hours to speak to Panday.  Lloyd was concerned about the lack of a power-sharing agreement and the problems that would ensue without one.  Lloyd told me that Panday had said that he did not care what happened after the election, he was only interested in getting rid of the PNM.  Panday laughed and said, “Lloyd is the kind of feller if he see a man drowning he would throw him a book on how to swim.”  
In 1991, Panday’s long association with Kelvin Ramnath was coming to an end because Panday feared that Ramnath and Dr. Rampersad Parasram were trying to take away his party from him. It had started as Club 88 when Panday broke away from the National Alliance for Reconstruction and became the United National Congress (UNC).  He dumped Ramnath and brought in Ramesh Maharaj at the last minute to be the Party’s Candidate for Couva South in the 1991 General Election.  I heard later that Panday had promised Maharaj that he would hand over the Party to him after the election.  “I am John the Baptist,” Panday is reputed to have said.  If we use the old joke that to the Almighty one minute is an eternity, Ramesh will have a lot of time on his hands.
The next test was in 2001 when out of the blue Panday called for internal elections in the UNC.  Ramesh Maharaj led “Team Unity” and fought Carlos John and Kamla Persad-Bissessar for control of the Party. Team Unity members always felt that they were fighting Panday as well but, except for Trevor Sudama, avoided open head-to-head combat with Panday.  They presented themselves as the successors of Panday, content to live in his shadow but prepared to take forward his dream and his vision. 
In his victory speech, Ramesh Maharaj, who was elected Deputy Political Leader of the Party, having beaten both John and Persad-Bissessar by a huge margin, pledged that in the future there would be no more Team Unity and that they would all be Team UNC.  It sounded good. The sublime double irony was that there was no unity in the UNC.  Panday was a sore loser.  He spoke about “fools” who would never lead the UNC.  Persad-Bissessar claimed that Maharaj was just looking for a “ten days”, a term associated with short-term employment on the Government’s make-work projects but which referred to Maharaj’s ambition to act as Prime Minister whenever Panday was out of the country.  Maharaj and most of his Team Unity leadership left the UNC to convert Team Unity into a national party.  That, too, dissolved in disillusion.
Jack Warner is now finding that as the old song says, “Money can’t buy you love” from Panday.  Maharaj is finding that John the Baptist has metamorphosed into the Almighty.  You might find Panday at weddings but his head would definitely not be on the “sohari” (palm) leaf or any other platter with the aloo, channa and mother-in-law. It might be with the daughter-in-law and he might lose his head but he is like Hydra and Cerberus.  
Perhaps Warner could do a Hamlet on the Bas and hoist the engineer with his own petard, maybe set a play within a play, a mousetrap for the big cheese.  Arrange a meeting with him at the Miami Airport where in the midst of the heavies of Homeland Security, he could get Bas to call out to him from across the hall, “Hi Jack!”  
Ramesh has been in and out so often, lost and found so many times, that if Panday is John the Baptist, Ramesh is the Prodigal Son.  When Panday needs his help he force-feeds Ramesh with fatted calf regardless of whether the Maharaj eats beef or not.  Panday has worked him out well and uses the same spit that he reserves for the barbecued calf to make a bonfire of Ramesh’s vanities. Ramesh will continue to come and go like dengue between rainy and dry seasons, or like Devon Smith on the West Indies team.  Ramesh is a leader in search of a party or perhaps while generally he has no reservations about trying to get ahead politically, his reservation at the political banquet table is only for a party of one. 
People who bet on Panday to bring unity to Trinidad and Tobago, or Robinson, or Ramesh, or Rowley or any of the politicians should remember the wise words of poet Victor Questel who wrote about betting from race to race, or in this case just race. 
There are two people who have cured me of the romanticism of unity.  The first is the late Ronnie Williams.  We were talking after the massive PNM loss to the NAR. 
He said to me, “Tony, you know why they call it ‘One Love’?”  He did not wait for an answer, “Because they all trying to (expletive deleted) one another.”  The second is the Bas himself. When the UNC joined up with the other parties to form the National Alliance for Reconstruction, Panday was asked, “But Mr. Panday, isn’t that a marriage of convenience?”  And Panday replied insouciantly (and typically), “Isn’’t every marriage?”

Tony Deyal was last seen on his way to Kansas City. He said even if he can’t find Unity he might find One Love.

SHEILAH SOLOMON reports insights from the Civil Society Consultation which took place at Woodford Square in Port of Spain on Saturday 28th March, 2009.

The Civil Society Consultation at Woodford Square on Saturday March 29,  organized by TT CAN!, produced a genuine breakthrough in understanding about how our society could use the uniqueness of both its challenges  and achievements as a basis for designing governance arrangements that best meet the aspirations and needs of our own society. At present, our institutions are designed to impress others. Being ‘accepted’ as a democratic State has replaced the need to actually function democratically.
Participants believe that change is now in the air. Far from merely aspiring to become ‘a developed country’ - whatever that now means! - by 20/20, citizens are yearning to create a new Caribbean model of governance that permits us to finally live in a humane and mutually-caring society.
Trinbagonians need to recognize themselves as a unique people, having learned to create community survival tactics and cultural expressions which overcame the hard circumstances of people displaced from many lands, forcibly brought together in an alien land.  Yet the same reliance on ‘community’ that enabled each group to survive has created an entrenched fear of reaching across ancient barriers, unable to trust each other enough to collaborate. Indeed, the main tribes in our society have, up to now, found it useful to rely on centralized government control to maintain and safeguard their separateness and distrust of each other.
Creating meaningful Constitutional and political change requires us to understand how our society actually functions and the entrenched cultural constraints on creating such change. So it is now time for us, individually and collectively, to examine honestly our real values and motivations. It is time to undertake the task of learning to understand, respect and trust each other.
This task, the Consultation noted, should be the primary objective of both the Education system and the Media, both of which have the potential and responsibility to free the population from the ‘Mimic Men’ mode of mindlessly copying imported fashions and models in the hope of being accepted as a developed country. The Education system and the Media are agents for stimulating critical thinking, for recognizing the uniqueness of our challenges and achievements, and for promoting self-confidence in our capacity to create and innovate forms of social interaction and governance that truly reflect our Caribbean experience and aspirations - while remaining receptive to positive influences from abroad.
 We were reminded that “a Constitution is not a contract between citizens and their government. A Constitution is a contract between the citizens themselves as to what vision for their society they wish to aspire. It is the citizens who then hire ‘representatives’ to develop that vision and meet those aspirations by putting in place appropriate legislation and institutional arrangements.’ But theory is threatened by the reality of actual cultural behaviour - and that is why, as the saying goes, every country gets the government it deserves.
It was  noted, for example, the direct behavioural connection between casually throwing fast food boxes on the ground and casually misleading Parliament on an issue of national importance. In this society, personal irresponsibility has traditionally been accepted as no big thing. The protection of our freedoms depends on our willingness to value responsibility, accountability and participatory democracy.
It is against the background of these insights that the Consultation emphasized the need to review the arrangements for representation and participation, the very basis of democratic governance. The view was expressed that there is really only one Constitutional crisis in this country: Citizens have no effective influence - and certainly no control - over the Government they elect every five years. That recognition of powerlessness, particularly among young people, is a direct cause of the breakdown in the social fabric of our society.
Our society is grappling with a pervasive sense of crisis and a lack of trust in established governance institutions. These include Parliament, the police, state enterprises, the Justice system and particularly the carrangements for the security of persons and the welfare of children. President George Maxwell Richards has himself warned that this lack of trust in, and compliance with, the rule of law could reduce the country to the sad status of ‘a failed state’. The Trinidad & Tobago Review (Mar. 2009) has recently analysed our situation as ‘Trapped in a Constitutional Quagmire’ in which citizens feel powerless.
Our Constitution, and the mysterious Working Paper on Constitution Reform recently presented by the Prime Minister, both put all power into the hands of a Prime Minister/Executive President. Neither provides citizens with any effective mechanism for influencing the institutional governance framework or developmental priorities established in their name, at either local or national levels.
The Consultation noted that the strong community arrangements that citizens had developed for themselves over time have been emasculated since  1956, when the party in power centralized “Community Development” and at the same time refused to make Local Government an enshrined part of the Constitution. Consequently, Local government elections can be postponed repeatedly or even abolished at the will of the ruling party.

Candidates are, in practice, chosen by the political parties, not the communities themselves, and the Municipal Corporations mandates and access to funds are not subject to clear Parliamentary control, unlike the Tobago House of Assembly. Citizens therefore routinely address their protests, like burning tyres in the road, to their Parliamentary Representatives instead of to the impotent local councils. Those Parliamentary Representatives then depend for action on the will of individual Ministries or the all-powerful Cabinet.
Parliamentary oversight of all issues, including Local Government, is equally impotent for two reasons: Almost all Members of the House and a significant number in the Senate hold Ministerial responsibilities. They therefore cannot be depended on to be objective since they hold office at the personal whim of the Prime Minister. There is therefore a continuing demand for expanding the House of Representatives to ensure that there will be enough backbenchers with the time to spare to help service Parliamentary Committees.  But will that guarantee non-partisan objectivity in considering the real interests of the people?
 What role should our Senate play in balancing party politics in the Parliament? The Senate in most democracies, unlike Trinidad and Tobago, does not provide the Government with a permanent built-in majority. A Government is therefore required to persuade Senators that its proposals are indeed in the best interest of the country as a whole.
In Trinidad and Tobago, no such justification is necessary. The framers of our Constitution provided Government with a permanent majority, while retaining the fig-leaf of Parliamentary democracy by allocating seats to the Opposition and to Independent Senators chosen by the President in his own discretion. Independent Senators have indeed laboured valiantly to serve the nation as a whole, but their minority voice alone cannot carry the day in any debate.. 
 Individual citizens are represented on a geographical (constituency) basis, following democratic traditions which have evolved over three centuries in Europe and America. In Trinidad and Tobago, however, the relationship between history and geography has promoted tribalism and divisiveness. There is little hope of breaking that tribal stranglehold under the present constituency system since the main political parties have already entrenched their control over voters in most electoral constituencies.

At present, citizens have no constitutionally-guaranteed mechanism for making their voices heard on issues that go beyond the physical boundaries of their Parliamentary and Municipal constituencies - and there are no constitutional guarantees that their concerns will in fact influence the Government’s policies and actions. Can this possibly make sense in the 21st. century when technology has created unlimited means of non-geographical connectedness?
ONE constitutional innovation that could serve to free us from the bondage of solely race-based ‘representation’ is the expansion of the Senate to represent ‘constituencies’ of civil society organizations, which cut across race, class, creed and location in order to serve higher communal purposes. Those civic action groups include sports clubs, educators and scientists, professional and economic associations (both employers and workers, credit unions and banks etc.) and, above all, those who tirelessly care for our disadvantaged citizens. Non-governmental civil society also includes the Media, Faith-based and humanist organizations and all political parties (excluding Members of Parliament and Municipalities).
It is this rich mosaic of Civil Society Organizations which in fact holds the fabric of our society together, despite internal and external pressures. And today, when technology has removed the limitations of geography and broadened our horizons in all other areas of life, surely ‘constituencies of collective interests’, not linked to geographical location, must also be represented.
 All international conferences hosted by Trinidad and Tobago, now routinely require inputs from ‘Civil Society’. The United Nations itself has  identified about 15 broad categories of civil society organizations  (CSO)- educators, farmers etc. - for purposes of representation. Yet CSOs here remain fragmented- and therefore powerless- within their own country.
It is therefore our proposal that Civil Society Organizations of various kinds should now organize themselves into recognizable categories in order to claim their space in our Parliament as the voice and ‘Senate Ombudsman’ for their areas of civic concern. Until the Government’s undemocratic control of the Senate is completely removed, there is little chance of success in pushing through Parliament the other specific Constitutional Reforms which citizens have been demanding. Those of course include the right to referenda, the right of recall of elected Representatives and the regulation of political party financing. 
The question each group of Civil Society Organizations should now ask itself is this: Would a Senator, appointed and recallable by us, serve the national interest, particularly in that area of society in which we voluntarily serve?
The Consultation concluded by identifying a number of volunteers who have committed themselves to carrying forward the Citizens Agenda for Effective Governance, in particular by promoting collaboration among Civil Society Organizations within Trinidad and Tobago and throughout the Caribbean.

By Ian McDonald

Let me make another trawl in the deep sea of reading which lies all around us and see what bright catch comes up.

• There is a scene in Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence when the lovers, Ellen Olenska and Newland Archer, meet in the old Metropolitan Museum in New York in a deserted room containing antique fragments from vanished llium. Ellen wanders over to a case: “It seems cruel that after a while nothing matters…any more than these little things, that used to be necessary and important to forgotten people, and now have to be guessed at under a magnifying glass and labeled “Use unknown.” “Yes”, her lover replies, “but meanwhile.” “Ah, meanwhile -.”

•Why does one write, except for bread? I read William Faulkner’s answer: “Because it’s worth the trouble.” The force of that lapidary justification lies in its single minded focus on the internal processes of literary creation - what Flaubert called the writer’s “adventures” with words. It implicitly rejects the obvious incentives which impel anyone to do anything at all in life - such as the classic Freudian trio of money, fame and the lure of beautiful women.

•It is a rule of life that as one ages anxiety grows. In youth one feels safe and immortal. As the years lengthen that expectation fades to nothing. The dark angels of illness, accident, injury and death visit strangers, the friends of friends, friends, relatives, family, one’s most beloved and oneself - not necessarily in that order. Roger Fanning’s wonderful poem conveys the anxiety perfectly:

Boys Build Forts

Petrified teeth from some fierce - osaurus,
the rocks my friend Donny and I piled up
in the middle of a field to build a fort.
The wind through its chinks made a desolate sound
I loved. We could have been out on the tundra,
bone-tired from tracking musk oxen all day.
It thrilled me to crouch in a cow pasture
and dream I could live here. I pictured
a cook fire, a skillet, two fried eggs
agog at my good fortune… Years later,
during puberty, I saw Charles Atlas
ads in the back of my comic books
and thought those muscles would look fine
on me. It was the same idea of building
a fort, the same ideal of self-sufficiency….
Of course it’s a crock. My parents are gone.
They left me a furnished house, everything
I pictured for my fort, and more: mildew
that wears marching boots, a roof that leaks. I see
how things stand. I see how people get sick.
Every body that walks this earth
and all the ways we try to feel safe:
all are bound to fall apart. My sweet father
and mother, both dead. That cold creeps in
and I feel as though a bear has torn
my chest open, and ravaged the frail
honeycomb built there by my folks,
and left me in a field to fill with snow.

•Yes, it is true, at my age the deaths around me are too commonplace. A dear friend’s beloved daughter dies and I am heart-broken for him. A snatch of despair from an old Nurse saga echoes in my mind from long ago:

“It is bad with me
now, the Wolf, Death’s
sister, stands
on the headland,
but gladly, without
fear and steadfast, shall
I wait for Hel,
goddess of death”
Yet I must remember, and in the end I hope he too will realize, the truth in Albert Camus’s phrase: “happiness, too, is inevitable.”

• Samuel Pepys is the best, and by far the most entertaining, diarist who ever lived. Browsing in his great diary I find an entry for 10th March 1666, which sums up what happens to nearly every ambitious or a successful man or woman: “Thence home and to the office, where late writing letters; and leaving a great deal to do on Monday - I home to supper and to bed. The truth is, I do indulge myself a little with pleasure, knowing that this is the proper age of my life to do it, and out of my observation that most men that do thrive in the world do forget to take pleasure during the time that they are getting their estate but reserve that till they have got one, and then it is too late for them to enjoy it with any pleasure.”
And this trawel ends with a look into Isaiah Berlin’s The Sense of Reality. He was the shrewdest of political thinkers and one of the most lucid and convincing writers who ever lived. He damns those who would dazzle and bemuse us with their simplifications. “To claim the possibility of some infallible scientific key when each unique entity demands a lifetime of minute, devoted observation, sympathy and insight is one of the most grotesque claims ever made by human beings.”

Sarwan’s Double Century Takes Him Into A New Realm
By FRANK BIRBALSINGH   

West Indies batsman Ramnaresh Sarwan plays a shot as England’s wicketkeeper Tim Ambrose looks on during the third day of the fourth Test match at Kensington Oval in Bridgetown, Barbados, on February 28. —Photos: AP

Ramnaresh Sarwan’s 291 in the fourth Test against England at Kensington Oval, Barbados, in February, 2009 is a landmark innings.  In the first place, not many batsmen either achieve or come close to a triple century in a Test match. It also eclipses his 261 against Bangladesh in Kingston, Jamaica, in 2004.  But as a late entrant into Test cricket, Bangladesh  did not offer as testing a challenge as one might expect from more established cricketing nations such as England, Australia, India, or Sri Lanka. In the same Bangladesh match, for instance, both Lara and Chanderpaul also made centuries. If this triumph was all that Sarwan had to recommend him it could damn him with faint praise.
There is nothing faint about Sarwan’s 291 however. For one thing, it removes suspicion that he might be genetically incapable of building a really big hundred.  Many commentators have pointed out his numerous fifties, sixties, even a few hundreds, but until now he has had no really long innings apart from his 261 against inexperienced opponents.  Best of all, his 291 absolves Sarwan from something like shame for having garlanded himself with clouds of glory when he first arrived on the Test scene in 2000, also at Kensington Oval, where his two not out innings of 84 and 11 against Pakistan moved  Ted Dexter, England’s former captain, to predict greater things ahead. The shame was that the clouds of glory gradually vanished over the years and the great things never materialised, as Sarwan’s false starts slowly erased the glitter of gold from his batting to reveal nothing  but brass below. The conclusion was failed promise and nothing more.
There were purple patches of glory, though, for instance his total of 392 runs in eight innings against South Africa over December 2003 and January 2004 in South Africa and, more recently, his aggregate of 411 runs in only four innings of a two/match series against Sri Lanka in the West Indies in March/April 2008.  Still, skeptics might scoff at Sarwan’s 291 and say that it was helped by a pitch that was flat, with no grass and no “life”; and to some extent they would be justified by England’s first innings score of 600 runs for 6 wickets declared. 
 When Sarwan came in to bat after tea on the second day, the West Indian score was 13 for one, and   400 runs were needed to save the follow-on, let alone reaching an English total that looked as remote from view as the summit of Mount Everest to a climber starting at the base of the mountain. Sarwan and Devon Smith did well to hold on until end of play with the score at 85. But the next morning, Smith and Ryan Hinds were quickly out, and at 159 for three wickets Chanderpaul  entered a situation made to measure for his customary, solitary rearguard heroics.
Yet, not even Chanderpaul could bat at both ends, and the referral system soon proved itself a travesty of technological incompetence in improving the accuracy of umpires’ decisions when he lost his wicket for 70 and the score was 281; for the follow-on was still 119 runs away, and only Sarwan remained of the fully accredited batsmen, with possibly some help from Nash and Ramdin. All was now doubt, hesitation and uncertainty. A placid pitch didn’t seem to matter any more.  The last thing West Indies wanted was to lose their position of being one up in the series. In the event, Nash had a brief, breezy knock before the pernicious referral system put paid to him too. Then Sarwan and Ramdin soldiered on to day’s end, the first on 184 not out and the second 25 not out.  By then the score of 398 for five brought some solace since the lower foothill of the follow-on had been all but scaled.
Even so, on the fourth morning, with the English bowlers refreshed, and Sarwan having batted through the better part of four sessions, the summit of England’s total still looked unscale-able.  But Sarwan’s resistance proved infectious, and Ramdin played as he had never done before, with strategic cooperation from Sarwan, especially as he approached his maiden Test century. When Sarwan was out the West Indian total of 595 for six made an English victory virtually impossible. The ball that accounted for Sarwan, by the way, a perfect inswinger from Sidebottom, dropped outside off stump and passed between bat and pad to hit the wicket, showing clearly what could be done even on an unresponsive pitch.
If it does not quite match the grandeur of Sobers’s 365, Lawrence Rowe’s 302, Lara’s incredible 375 and 400 or Gayle’s 317, Sarwan’s 291 is not far behind. Something deep inside him which was previously glimpsed only in the fits and starts of so many promising but shortened innings, suddenly clicked into smooth clockwork action on this English tour of 2009, producing 107 in the Jamaica Test, 94 and 106 in Antigua, and now 291 in Barbados (average 149.5). Sarwan’s stamina and concentration over six sessions in Barbados speak for themselves. Equally impressive was his discipline. Although more than ninety per cent of his runs came from the off side, the crafty English bowlers plied him with enough short balls, tempting his predilection for the fatal hook which, to his credit, he resolutely resisted, while hungry English sharks swam around the square leg boundary eagerly hunting for the catch.
Most creditable of all was Sarwan’s sense of responsibility in controlling his personal inclinations to suit the needs of his team - a clear sign of the new spirit of teamwork and cooperation that emerged after John Dyson took over as coach. The result was a West Indian first innings response of 749 runs. Thus, Sarwan’s 291 is not simply an innings of skill, control, patience and responsibility, but a personal landmark that, in sporting terms, transforms his batting from the glamorous, if erratic individualism of youth to more stable and purposeful aims of middle-aged maturity.