Amidst the hand-wringing about the secondary school system, and the culture of violence that seems to engulf the country as the economy tanks, an interesting response came from Earl Lovelace in the Express of March 4 (Nobody Badder than We). Taking Desperadoes’ winning (eponymous) tune from this year’s Panorama as an entrée, Lovelace sketches a possible route to salvation or at least hope for Laventille, a metonym for the country.
He acknowledges the Hill as a place of horror, violence and death—one kind of badness. But out of Despers’ performance Lovelace extracted, or discerned, another notion, or theory, of badness—this as “possession of the (creative) spirit,” a “superior and liberating badness” which harnesses talent, and inculcates discipline and responsibility.
It’s an interesting take. This is something Lovelace believes passionately, and it’s a recurring theme in his oeuvre. This notion of badness of the spirit as a means of redemption from the more banal but deadly badness, in a world where post-Independence and post-Emancipation are simultaneous and present events, pervades his work—think of Dragon, Wine of Astonishment, Salt, and his collected essays, Growing in the Dark.
It’s easy to forget this is a fictional world; its ruminations and conclusions are not translatable to the real. So what is the purpose of Lovelace’s intervention? Looked at less sympathetically, it’s dangerous nostalgia; this is why Plato didn’t want artists in his Republic. The intervention has taken the problems of Laventille out of the reach of fact and rationality, and has placed them in the impenetrable (by logic) space of nostalgia and sentimentality.
By acknowledging but evading the materiality of Laventille’s plight, Lovelace’s take does not allow for fact-based rationality to prevail where it ought. This is not to say compassion and sympathy shouldn’t be present in solving social issues (quite the contrary), but they can’t prevail in this instance to the point where they obscure fact.
I can concretise this with an example from Dragon. One of the most appalling moments for me in the novel is the complete evasion of the murder of Sylvia’s innocence. The child was forced to “go with” the old man, Mr Guy, essentially for his money. This is looked at as pragmatism, even luck, not prostitution. Apropos, an interesting counterpoint to Lovelace’s fictional/real umwelt came from the redoubtable Dr Morgan Job, who, like the prophets of the Old Testament, saw today’s Laventille coming more than two decades ago said so publicly and forcefully, and found himself reviled for it. (Dr Job deserves a national apology for that, and more. He’s a very smart man who, given the chance, could probably do more to solve Laventille’s problems than Lovelace and those whose worldview he represents.)
But back to Laventille: exploitation, the murder of innocence in the womb, the toxicity of the very atmosphere, making meaningless misery, brutality, and suffering into virtues.
According to the Lovelace narrative, this has to do with legacy of slavery and the failure of independence—the two experiences merged into one, without the history of the intervening century-and-a-half. And therein lies another story, the one no one wants to acknowledge.
Many of Laventille’s problems come not from slavery but from politics. It was widely known while it was happening in the ’60s and ’70s that Eric Williams encouraged a virtually-unrestricted flow of people from the other islands into the country to replace the black voters who were emigrating en masse. The places where these people were placed (in Laventille, Carenage, along the West Corridor, parts of south Trinidad) are now the ones with the most devastated, crime-ridden communities.
(To clarify: some take this to mean that I’m saying all immigrants were criminals, which is just ignorant. What I’m saying is: if you take a poor person (native or immigrant), put him in an environment without schools, roads, police, health care, church, sanitation, and living conditions that would make a slave sick, and feed him stories of suffering and revenge, it doesn’t take a prophet to predict the outcome. To repeat, Morgan Job and many others saw it in the 1980s.)
But there’s more. By 2000 these immigrants seem to have been absorbed and the country was changing in decreasing crime and so forth. Till Mr Patrick Manning (c2002) went back to Laventille (or rather invited Laventille to talks in a hotel) and pumped millions of dollars into the hands of “community leaders.”
Strangely, no one, Lovelace included, seems to remember any of this today. And for those omissions Lovelace’s sentiment loses some of its innocence and attractiveness. It begins to look deliberately insular. In the Dragon, the lone Indian, Pariag, is an anomaly, and never really fits in.
Such is the world Lovelace creates in his novels, and which he speaks for: an “African” world, which denies, distorts, or displaces the existence of other groups to create a mythology described above which is inapplicable to the real world.
If you look, you’d notice the problems of Laventille are also the problems of other areas with completely different mythologies, like rural IndoTrinidad: the soiling of innocence, crime, exploitation of young girls and boys, illiteracy, and predation of the weak by the strong, aided in part by the bogus Brahminic hierarchy.
The point is, as discussed over the last couple of weeks, there’s a very clear line of causation for the state we’re in now. It was not accidental, but the result of ruthless, malevolent political action.
The solution starts with identifying the facts, and for those responsible for creating Laventille, and T&T, 2016, to admit to their malfeasance.
Luckily the institution and people who created it (the present government) are in power. They know how they did it, so they should know how to undo it. Waiting to see.
