Tribute to Lloyd Best
A Sober Heorism
LeRoy Clarke

Among the intrigues of constantly shifting hemispheres of our space, there is arisen, a citizen of our highest, yet, elusive aspirations that wont to fashion our sphere in the likeness of monument and reflection as expressed by a well distinguished labour only, that can register it in its full, maturing height. He is arriving, just when the lure of the lost is being immanently secured and its gleeful proponents draw their blood-tipped pens to final rites and obituaries!

Those innocent indignations do not touch him though. How can they, when he fails to be, among them, a witness to his own funeral; rather, he participates in his dying no less than he is doing in his living transcendence! He will have no part in the fictitious existence in which his mission-like zeal to offer critical alternatives to out-dated paradigms has been an unrelenting resistance to being swallowed-up in the rhetorical flourish of political ruse. Lloyd Best is a gift deferred, a symbol of our own genius that is impossible to be absent; one that we love to punish, to ignore and eventually bury beyond our memory!

Nevertheless, with the disquieting force of his well constituted sense of independence, with subtle wit and variations of a bold, confiding heart, he is the embodiment of a sobering heroism that rides the carnival shuffle of a land charged by considerable paradoxes of no mean measure of violence and restraint. Abhorred by popular imagination and intellect, he seeks a monumental form that countenances the ideal reputation of good intelligence –a universal voice whose governance commands principle and definition.

We often miss his splendid, suffered width of gratitude because of his seemingly merciless criticism and affront to our paranoia and hurried formula to bribe and satisfy immediacy through rampant import of ideas foreign to us. Quite relentlessly, he encourages our intuitive potential to labour in order to evoke mediums, imaginative symbols, and a cogency that is rooted in an earth identical to us. How else does he manage to walk away as if entering upon newer horizons, leaving us consumed by his presence in utterances that continue to outpace and baffle our debates!

With the thoroughness of natural scholarship, he lets no caprice in. His fastidious manner is studied, sacrosanct and, even as he is of community, a solitary niche he has most likely fashioned for himself, looms, exalted in a mysterious open for fresh ideas whose foundations he questions at every turn, weighing their solidness, eyeing the future with the entirety of his smouldering passion and thought.

No angle of his chiselled, masculine countenance is tortured in the brine of Caribbean cynicism or despair, no parasitical farce underscores his bite. His is no surrender to any brand of our mamaguy or its mania for distortion and distraction –the gossip of no-name-no-feet! This Caribbean man, armed in the certainty of him, assails where duty holds to its integrity among reified judgements of those who are sanctified by their deeds to vocation -mainly that distinguished duty of being here. Not satisfied at being a tenant, Lloyd lives in the authentic manner of his own voice, dwelling in his word, using his skills in Economics with the enormous grasp of the essential tools that language life!

This Caribbean man, this El Tucuchean spirit is profoundly assigned; greatness, nouminously inherent, is with him. He is our islands’ dream keeper of continent’s birth. Our legacy to civilisation –where the true possibility to bring to fruition the best of us– resides in an un-tampered, unexploded seed, its unrealised portents webbed in a bed of sleep, awaiting the risks that courageous hands of creative minds take to rending!