You couldn’t get a more Bajan “debate” than the current brouhaha over whether principal Jeff Broomes should be “separated” from the Alexandra School.
A single issue (which could be as petty and personal as the tearing of a calypsonian’s shirt) is escalating into a national division, with each side certain it is completely right; there is a surfeit of accusation and recrimination and a dearth of argument and persuasion; neither side will give an inch, nor recognize that much common ground; the people being most badly hurt – the students – are entirely innocent.
And nobody knows for sure exactly what the firetruck we’re really talking about.
Welcome to the Caribbean, visitors.
It’s not just Barbados. It’s Trinidad (even more so), Guyana (even more so, with firebombing), St Lucia (la meme chose mais en patois), Grenada, St Kitts, wherever. All over all of these pint-sized, half-made rocks we half-made people live in without occupying, which we govern without ruling (in the case of the best real estate in Barbados and best beaches in Jamaica, without even owning) – we have one thing in common:
Any time we have anything of any importance to discuss, we breeze past the essential and latch on to the trivial. In a region where the vast majority have been powerless for almost all our history, we have learned the art of non-debate. In Trinidad, they call
it pappyshow, but it is how we do it all over the West Indies: we ignore the entire fabric forever and spend millennia minutely ripping apart the hem.
It could be any topic: corporal or capital punishment; whether or not sugar is dead (or king); silk for judges or states of emergency to get the buses to run on time; who’s really the best God, Jah, Allah or Jesus; whether one principal or a couple dozen teachers should be “separated”; who or what was moaning like Samantha from Sex And The City during the CBCTV weather forecast last week.
It does not matter in the least what we talk about; because we don’t talk about it. We talk around it. We make a show of doing something. We puff up our chests, occasionally beat them, if we’re tired of beating around the bush. We have even been known to pelt bottles.
But no word that could shatter a carefully maintained illusion is uttered.
I’ll show you what I mean: in Barbados, there is only one issue: race. The mightiest river of Bajan social troubles can be traced back to that source spring. Block that and you block everything, clear that up and everything will flow freely.
Now, guess which is the one topic Bajans have tacitly agreed never to speak about?
We learn nothing and are proud of our ignorance. The age-old English expression, “telling tales out of school” referred to schoolchildren spreading school gossip at home. It figures that, in 21st century Barbados, we modern West Indians should be delighted to tell tales in school.
