I ONCE STUMBLED and almost fell on my face but landed heavily (and, with my weight, very heavily) on my hands and knees. My companion, an Englishman, said with a smile, “Have a good trip.”
Nowadays, this is what I say to people who tell me they are heading for Trinidad. This is a country still in a State of Emergency (SOE). As soon as the SOE was announced, people started calling it a State of Expediency and not of emergency.
The motives of the government were questioned since many people believed that the government called the SOE to avoid attempts by the labour unions to shut down the country.
There seems to be as well a high level of superstition involved. A school in a country district (Moruga) was closed twice in the past two years because some of the students were supposedly under a demonic spell. This is why the man in the following story had to be a Trini.
He was walking across the road when he was hit by a car. The impact on his head caused him to be unconscious for two days before he finally regained consciousness. When he opened his eyes, his wife was there beside him. He held her hands and said meaningfully: “You have always been beside me.
“When I was a struggling university student, I failed again and again and yet you continued to be with me. You were always there beside me, encouraging me to go on trying.” She squeezed his hands as he continued: “When I went for all the major interviews and failed to clinch any of the jobs, you were there beside me, cutting out more advertisements for me to apply.”
He went on: “Then I started work at this little firm and finally got to handle a big contract. I blew it because of one little mistake. And you were there beside me. Then I finally got another job after being laid off. I was denied promotion many times and my hard work was not recognized. I was kept in the same position from the day I joined the company until now. Yet, you were there beside me.”
Her eyes brimmed with tears as she listened to her husband: “And now I met an accident and when I woke up, you are here beside me. You know, looking at everything that has happened there’s something I’d really like to say to you.”
She flung herself on the bed to hug her husband, and sobbing with emotion, he said: “I think you really bring me bad luck.”
This seems to be the reaction, although in much less time, that Trinis have to their new Prime Minister, Kamla Persad-Bissessar.
It is like the Kim Kardashian’s or Britney Spears’ weddings. The honeymoon and divorce seem to be almost simultaneous.
Disenchantment with Patrick Manning and his government led to the election, in a blaze of hype, hoopla and hyperbole, of Persad-Bissessar in May 2010. Earlier this month, when she announced that there was a plot to assassinate her and two of her ministers because of the achievements of her government, especially in dealing with crime, the majority of the population did not believe her.
What the majority of people seem to be reacting to is the tendency of the present Prime Minister and government to make political capital of everything. In the past two weeks I have been in Trinidad and have heard tremendous criticism of the government from many of their former supporters, not for poor performance only, but for shooting off its collective mouth at any opportunity.
There is an old joke about a policeman who found a dead horse on Abercrombie Street and dragged it over to Duke Street because he found “Duke” easier to spell. The problem people perceive with this government is that while they might know how to spell “Abercrombie” their first action on seeing an equine corpse regardless of how many times they’ve seen it before, it to take out a whip or take off their belts and flog it mercilessly.
The other side of the coin seems to be no better.
Dr Keith Rowley, the present leader of the opposition, earned the nickname “Rottweiler” for his aggressiveness and ferocity. He seems a compulsive attacker and there is concern that he and his party’s only purpose is to attack everything without developing a programme, policy and plan of their own.
A colleague summed up the Trinidad situation for me: “On the one hand you have a claim of assassination where people have been detained but nobody believes the prime minister.
“Then you have the leader of the opposition with character assassination. What you have to realize is that the politics in Trinidad is like the word ‘assassination’. It has two ‘ass’ in it and only one ‘nation’.”
Tony Deyal was last seen saying that in Trinidad politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it whether it exists or not, diagnosing it incorrectly, applying the wrong remedy and boasting about it.
