Turbulence at Sea

In the beginning you really loved me
But I was blind and I could not see
But when you left me, oh, how I cried
You don’t miss your water
Till your well runs dry
You Don’t Miss Your Water, The Byrds

Did you see the news on Thursday night?  Did you see them throw the unarmed physicist off a barge and into the water?
Because on this sweet and sour island, the criminals are the ones whose weapons you can’t see.  Whose only crime is thinking that they deserve better.  Who stand trial for standing up for themselves.
They threw Peter Vine off a barge when he was pleading with a crew of workers, appealing to their conscience to halt the destruction of another piece of mangrove.
A woman poses with a dolphin, and the EMA is silent.  No one is arrested.  No one expresses alarm that we’ve resorted to eating mercury ridden endangered mammals.
No one sees the connection between what we are doing to our seas and the fact that we’re eating mercury ridden endangered mammals.   We’re killing Flipper and nobody cares.
But an unarmed physicist gets bodily thrown into the sea. And I wonder how it go look to people outside of Trinidad, that we treat our own like this.
We might think it’s no big deal, but the language of a video where the white boss looks on while three big black men rough up an unarmed activist.
And those of us who wallow in all our middle class self-consciousness and our working class paranoia about white people not wanting black people to have nutting, will say is no scene.   Will say Peter Vine look for that. What the hell he go on the people barge for. Everybody have a right to do they work.  Like the police have a right to intimidate me with their big guns in town as if we are at war with ourselves.  And the government has a right to spend millions on a useless blimp circling our heads like a cobo that eats sponge cake instead of filth.
An unarmed physicist gets thrown overboard and the President might have a party.
And we kill Flipper to pay homage to the wanderings of a man who walked on water and fished men from their despair and we don’t note the irony.
We destroy the things that sustain us and act surprised when these things turn on us.
We will not question why the prices of fish are so astronomical.  We assume it’s the greedy fishermen.  We accept no culpability for living off the spoils of industries that dump their effluent unchecked into our waters.   We suffer from I never thought when our children are struck down with strange cancers.   We want to eat king fish every day and it never occurs to us that we might be over-fishing.
We’re doing development and we’re doing it large.  Well done, T&T!  Well done.
An unarmed physicist gets thrown off a barge by three big black men.  It’s the stuff of true independence, this.  We really reach where we have to go.
Flipper gets slaughtered and many people have expressed concern, but when do we take responsibility for creating a burden on our resources with our growing demands and our ever increasing levels of waste?
I wonder about public servants who get paid to attend conferences where we sign endless international conventions only to result in unarmed physicists being thrown overboard.
Why did we sign the Convention on Wetlands? What is going on in our education system that is stopping our children who then become our adults from knowing that wetlands are sacred?   What are we not doing to ensure that people have different notions of what sustainable economic and human development means?
Chances are, if you’re putting down a port, you don’t give a damn about protecting coastal areas on a small island, where, according to EMA Chairman and Nobel Laureate John Agard, the sea levels are rising.
Chances are, if you’re killing Flipper you either don’t know or don’t care that dolphins are protected under the 2000 Protocol Concerning Specially Protected Areas and Wildlife (SPAW) of the Convention for the Proetction and Development of the Marine Environment in the Wider Caribbean Region.
But everybody have to eat a food.   So Flipper will continue to get slaughtered.  And physicists will be manhandled for daring to ensure that the laws of this country are upheld and we will make it through Lent.
All is well with Trinidad.

Outside the Rope

What dey go do
when dey realise

that dey cah push you across the line

Don’t you go over

Don’t you go over

—The Borderline, 3Canal

Carnival Tuesday dawned bright, almost too bright and I spent a long time in bed thinking about whether I wanted to go out into the madness.
Carnival heat is a different kind of heat. It’s the sticky sweaty kind of heat that reminds me of hours spent watching cricket, frowning in the glare, squirming to keep your boomsie from falling asleep on the cycle track concrete.
I like J’Ouvert best because it’s so cool. But more so because no one with an original thought makes mas anymore these days.
And truly, I remain unconvinced that Brian Mac Farlane is a shining beacon of the mas being saved but I guess I applaud his efforts to break up the endless and stunning monotony of bikini and beads and feathers and shiny pretty things.
I venture out into the streets. No costume to differentiate me from myself. No streak of colour that might suggest that I had undergone any transformation.
I bounce up a pretty mas band and I’m struck again this year at the presence of the rope.
I wonder if the rope is bulletproof, bottle proof, an invisible barrier stopping the masqueraders from being soiled by the outside world.
The rope pisses me off about as much as the fences that separate general admission from VIP.
The rope spoils my enjoyment of Carnival because it’s just another reminder of how everybody can pay for the appearance of safety.
The security the rope represents brings up all my own insecurities about being an outsider in my own home. The rope keeps me out of a place I’m still not sure I want to be in.
I stand on the pavements and watch the bands pass. Plenty security. Plenty rope. Plenty niceness for the pretty women and strong men.
On the sidelines, outside of the rope, spectators yawn. Didn’t I see that costume before? A wild Indian appears, staring at me throw the streak of blue across his face. He is not behind the rope. I know the colour of his eyes, the musty smell of his headpiece and it is beautiful.
And then he is gone and then there is more pretty mas.
There is blood on the road. Inside the rope. My mas-playing friends tell me that someone inside the rope has stabbed somebody. I wonder why one of the safe ones is armed with a knife in the first place. Isn’t the rope enough?
I guess even inside the rope there are ignorant, dotish, bad-behaved animals that the rope is supposed to keep out. Luckily for him, he is on the inside of the ropes and so his crime will not make it to the front pages.
No-one confirms or denies the story of the man inside the rope and the stabbing. Even though his victim’s blood is spilt on Ariapita Avenue, seeping into the hot, soft asphalt, chipped on by thousands of feet of masqueraders inside the rope.
Later I am reasoning with my sistren about why the rope is important. She says it makes sense because as soon as it comes down, the outsiders come in and get on rahtid.
But we both wonder if what was on the inside of the ropes weren’t so untouchable, would the outsiders act so hungry and desperate?
Carnival Tuesday comes and goes and I am still thinking about the rope. On Thursday in a taxi I hear a Savannah vendor talk about how much money she lost renting a booth from the NCC. Of all the things that were promised that never materialised.
She leaves the taxi and a voice comes on the radio. A host of officials talking about how successful Carnival was. If you were inside the rope.
People win and celebrate victories. The rope haunts me, as does the blood of some anonymous stabbing victim on Ariapita Avenue.
And then I get an e-mail from a Midnight Robber recounting tales of the way the NCC treats with traditional mas. A 94-year-old, blind, wheelchair-bound Midnight Robber in mid-speech being forced out of the way by an NCC official in an SUV. About the music trucks drowning out their robber talk. Because 13 Midnight Robbers are not as important as several thousand sequined revellers waiting for their chance to prance inside their rope prison.
Still, it was a successful Carnival. We successfully played ourselves. We played gated community and barbed wire and more for me and none for you and let’s see how much I can be less of myself.
The protective services did their jobs and the ropes protected the masqueraders well. We did well not to cross the borderline between the safe and the unsafe.
So why do I feel uncomfortable about the rope? Maybe because I am stuck on the outside and do not think I will have anyone to protect me, should I need it.