AFTER HIS gratuitous attack on me two Fridays ago, I’m thinking of asking the Nation to rename Richard “Lowdown” Hoad’s column, “The Uptight”.
I know people get grouchy as they get older but it’s like that guy goes berserk if I mention Barbados; even if I say she stands poised for greatness.
Two weeks ago, on Independence Eve, I’d written a column appealing to Barbados to seize the historical moment, rise to the challenge and lead the West Indian nation out of Babylon; that’s like calling Barbados the Messiah. No one, I reckoned, could possibly interpret that as being anti-Barbados; but I reckoned without Uptight.
Further, I’ve declared Barbados the de facto capital of the West Indies, the place I expect all of us working in the spiritual field to congregate. (Not those quacks in three-piece suits and two-bit American accents, but the real spiritual workers, the avant-garde, the visionaries, the artists and thinkers; and me).
Anywhere in the world, if you want to work on a national scale, you must move to the city. So I voted for Barbados being the West Indian capital with my feet. I haven’t abandoned Trinidad any more than the Texan who moves to New York abandons the Lone Star state.
But I made two mistakes in that column, one big and one small – and the old Uptight blew a gasket.
The big mistake was in not spelling out the greatest challenge Barbados faces (the primary challenge every territory in the New World has faced since Europe came and made Massa, Massa, as David Rudder sang). The small mistake (which, apparently, is a big deal for Uptight), I’ll come to soon.
The great challenge Barbados faces is how to turn consumers of wealth into creators of it. There are others, but I can’t get them all in, since this column is shorter than its progenitor. Barbados cannot continue the way it has since Independence because the people who were content to be marginalised half-a-century ago will not remain so for a full one. They are, for
example, no longer content to pay land-rent to the descendants of the bandits who stole their “plantations” 400 years ago.
The other mistake was to raise smallness. I wrote of “tiny insignificant Caribbean economies” and, naturally, included Trinidad. (Subtract its windfall energy money and the Trini economy is woeful.) But hear Uptight: “Most of the tiny, insignificant Caribbean islands . . . . today . . . . are preferred as places to live over your big, significant homeland.” How did the relatively bigger size of anything of mine come up?
So I’m thinking the Lowdown transmogrifies into the Uptight if he only hears the word, “small”. I would say it really is no big thing but that might bring me a few more Uptight column inches – perhaps the only place from which a few Uptight inches might arise. So I’ll just end by suggesting that, if it really does pain you greatly to appear to be anti-Caribbean, there is something you can do to cease so appearing. Stop.
• BC Pires is a West Indian first and a Trini (or Bajan or Guyanese or Jamaican) after.
