The sounding of chaos

September 01, 2004

So they came in the night. Mere weeks before the 2004 celebrations of Independence began. And what if they, after murdering Police Inspector Williams with five shots, had entered Marjorie's home to come face to face with LeRoy and Earl? Moreover, what if, in so doing, they had turned their murderous intentions to the personage of the ex-President? What, pray thee, would have been the outcome?

I shudder even to ponder on this. For certainly the four that fortune had placed within that home are not to be taken lightly.

Arthur Raymond Napoleon Robinson, under the gun at the Red House during the 1990 Muslimeen coup attempt, had the courage and probable temerity to shout to the protective forces on the outside: "Attack with full force!"

Marjorie Thorpe, the hostess of the evening, is the daughter of none other than the late, indomitable Violet Thorpe, who was a stalwart of the early movement for the empowerment of women and one who possessed the raw guts and strength of character to live on the corridor and go against the fashionable flow of the late '50s and early '60s and be a member of, not the PNM, but both the POPPG and the early DLP.

One senses that a woman of such daring would not have raised a daughter incapable of facing any untoward challenge particularly within her home.

As for the men of letters, artist and writer LeRoy and Earl, whom I know personally as men of steel, they do not suffer fools and imps lightly, neither do they broach easily even the slightest affront to their sense of manhood. You go up into their faces at your own peril.

Earl, in a piece written shortly after the incident, suggests that he does not know if he would have had the appropriate "words" with which to address the murderers had they entered.

If I were a different soul, I would wish to thank the Almighty that they did not enter the home, suggesting that divine intervention permitted closure to the incident at that point.

More likely the truth of the matter is that the murderers were alert enough to consider that the five shots would have forewarned and forearmed those inside to the existing imminent danger to their good selves. Murderers are usually cowards who like the element of surprise and love to have on their side the superiority of weapons, and better yet they relish doing-in the unarmed and the innocent.

Is this the existence to which we have descended in T&T? What a world? No longer is there any respect for the sanctity of our homes. And suddenly there is no value to our lives as the criminal element grows bolder and bolder day by day while leaders seem to lack the capacity to implement effective measures to deal not only with that situation but for that matter any situation.

Lloyd Best says it's more a case of the "un-responsibility" rather than the irresponsibility of our leadership elites. We on the other hand maintain that the course of development upon which we embarked after formal Independence has now frizzled out completely. We have gone nowhere.

Despite our tremendous wealth of material resources we have not built an integrated structural framework to which all and sundry can relate, and to which all and sundry can develop a sense of belonging. This is so precisely because there is no acknowledgement of what we have created together from below in the course of our struggles for survival on a daily basis.

Everybody here feels marginalised, a feeling that is intensified by class, race and ethnic overtones. In the dog-eat-dog atmosphere that prevails, only criminality gets sustenance and what we hear now is the actual sounding of chaos. We need to rethink the whole decolonisation process.

Butler, an anti-colonial activist of immense historical importance, deemed himself "black but British" and, in context of the then international ferment and his own philosophical view of the world, was ready as ever to defend the Empire.

What are we to defend in today's globalised world; from what are we to garner a sense of belonging; especially when so many of our social leaders and educated elites insist that we are half-made and have created nothing?

Interestingly, a man of letters was attacked by criminals in another part of the world. Ngugi Wa Thiong'o was robbed, beaten, pistol-whipped and his wife raped mere days after his arrival back home, having been in exile for some 22 years.

Ngugi is the world-renown Kenyan novelist and playwright whose work depicts the struggle for the independence of Kenya, the unravelling of the subsequent decolonisation process and the impending chaos that results.

His novels and plays include Weep not, Child, A Grain of Wheat, Devil on the Cross, Secret Lives, The Trial of Dedan Kimathi, This Time Tomorrow, The Black Hermit and, most of all, Petals of Blood, the title of which is taken from Derek Walcott's poem, The Swamp.

Ngugi in his dedication to that book quotes Walcott's poem which utilises the notable features of a swamp, eg twisted mangrove roots, to depict the confusion of different parts, the knots that merge to weaken self-awareness and culture and pull everything "backward to darkness" and onto "chaos, like the one road ahead..."

Ngugi was a professor of English literature at the University of Nairobi until the forces of reaction forced him to flee from Kenya in 1982. Today one of the criminals who attacked him and ravaged his wife is alleged to be his nephew.

Do we understand? Everywhere we have turned violently against our own selves. The process of decolonisation has made us our own worst enemy. LeRoy depicts it as "douendom" and Earl shows how "nationhood is impossible without the struggle for manhood and womanhood."

It is probably only a mere accident of circumstance that Leroy and Earl are not now facing grave personal misfortune like that of Ngugi. Do we see the parallels?