The morning after he delivered his most recent Independence lecture at the Finance Administrative Building in Castries, I read with keen interest related comments by those who had attended at the venue, as well as by others farther afield. From the many Facebook reviews, I learned the evening’s speaker had been eloquent, brilliant, great, and that he had addressed his audience “in a comfortable manner.” One particular pundit could not resist advertising her familiarity with Kipling’s best known poem. She labeled the speech maker an educator at heart, a motivator par excellence, an intellectual, a person who has remained ever so humble—“a visionary who can walk with kings and not lose the common touch.”
I wondered whether Dr. Didacus Jules had set aside from his regular packed schedule adequate time for basking in his fawning fan mail. What was his reaction to the Facebook outpourings? Might he have preferred more scholarly analyses of his recommendations on the remembered special occasion?
The accomplished Dr. Jules must by now have grown accustomed to hosannas, whether from respected professional critics or from our more commonplace purveyors of fulsome praise. I have no doubt he has in all circumstances been gracious. Why then has there not been, nearly three weeks after his “Building a Nation and Shaping a Society” speech, a single published word about the character of its content?
I will attempt now to remedy the sorry situation. But first, a volunteered confession by one of my favorite African-American heroes, still on the subject of applause: “Whenever I go to a white writers’ congress, I have a method of figuring out whether my colleagues are racist. It consists of saying stupid things and supporting absurd theories. If they listen to me respectfully and then burst out in applause, there’s no doubt about it: a group of racist pigs.”
When he spoke his own opening lines at the finance center, did Jules have in mind James Baldwin’s yardstick? “It is an easy temptation on an occasion like this to speak platitudes about national progress to chronicle the difficulties overcome on the long and painful journey that is our history. In Saint Lucia,” he said, “we have cultivated a mythology around the notion of a nation and society that provides a comfortable cloak that conceals our underlying nakedness.”
He seemed unperturbed by the wall-to-wall concussive sound of silence. “In all our narratives about both nation and society,” he went on, “there is an implied unity of purpose and public consensus not reflected in the discourse in the public street, in our social intercourse, and is certainly negated by the volume and nature of crime in our society.”
Baldwin had good reason to say an invented past cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life, like clay in a season of drought. More to Jules’ point, this from Norman Mailer: A nation that makes important decisions based on facts that are askew from the subtle reality is a nation doomed to lose its mind.
His reputation still intact after a lifetime of disturbing sleeping mongrels, the lecturer whistled a warning that in some ears may have carried a threatening sound. He signaled his intention to make “an uncomfortable exploration into the cultural cracks in the edifice of the nation and the widening fissures in the fabric of our society.” Oh, but he promised to be kind, to keep the uncomfortable exploration “simple.” And since the site to be disturbed was cultural, he sprinkled it with some soothing native kwéyòl: “Mamai-la I di kweek?”
I have been reliably informed that the question is usually posed by tellers of fables, in advance of the telling. Audiences are expected to play along with a never-changing monosyllabic response, also in kwéyòl: “Kwak!”
The question, loosely translated for my benefit by a local connoisseur: “Children, is what I’m about to tell you true?” Response: “It may be or it may not!” At which point the raconteur proceeds with his fairytale. So it was en temps longtemps, so it must remain, out of respect for our culture!
I cannot say, without fear of contradiction, what was the official reaction at the Finance Administrative venue. I may speculate, however, about what may have criss-crossed the erudite minds of Governor General Emerita Dame Pearlette, newly minted government ministers Virginia Poyotte and Joachim Henry, Cabinet Secretary Ben Emmanuel, House Speaker Claudius Francis and others of a certain age, by no stretch of the imagination “children.” Did they mentally revisit long forgotten exciting kabowé rides and other adventures on the grassy banks of rivers once teeming with kwibich and zandji, now dry and gone forever? Or were they unwillingly transported to places they’d rather forget, to memories too rocky for old bones? Then again, they were among the frontline promoters of the story of our nation’s odyssey from temps de l’esclavage to glorious Independence. They had to have been in on our storyteller’s joke.
“Mamai-la I di kweek?”
For Jules, history was “a long road in the journey of becoming.” The journey had started for us just before we became a nation, with what Walcott described as “the long groan that was slavery,” when the vehicle was not a bus but a carriage, and “the passengers on that journey were not us but the white colonizers.” The journey was “not a process of becoming; it was a process of removing. The carriage was not horse-drawn. We were the horses that propelled this vehicle toward a destination of wealth extraction and imperial ambition.”
It’s anyone’s guess how many among his audience, live and via Facebook, were unfamiliar with the tragic story of our earliest ancestors, who were taken from Africa in chains to be beasts of burden to the white man. The tale had been told countless times at Emancipation Day assemblies, at National Day rallies, at every other opportunity—to remind our people of who we are, never who were and would never be again.
Not by a long shot is Dr. Jules a race baiter. But history is history, with its own twists and turns, its ups and downs, its own sounds, its sweets and sours. No one knew this better than the night’s extremely well-read lecturer. For instance, there was Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans and the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War,” authored by Howard French—a white American journalist, photographer, author and professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
A reviewer for The Guardian newspaper described Born in Blackness as “magnificent, powerful and absorbing.” Jules cited for his purposes, the following from French’s book: “The Caribbean was the boiler room of the north Atlantic economy. In the late 18th Century white Jamaicans enjoyed an annual income 35 times that of British North Americans . . . more slaves were trafficked to Martinique than to the entire United States, while the French so prized tiny Guadeloupe that they swapped it for the whole of French Canada.”
At several points in the earlier recalled journey, said Jules, “the exhaustion of our exploitation led to breakdowns, until finally the spirit of resistance triumphed. The ‘horses’ were no longer prepared to carry the burden and the baggage of the colonial drivers.” He went on: “We arrived at a point where, to borrow from Frost, two worlds diverged in a wood and we took the one less traveled, and that has made all the difference. That was the stage of our journey when we became the drivers of our own destiny, swapping the blood-and-sweat propelled carriage for a bus of our own, driven by our own, to a destination of our own becoming.
“And here we are today, 43 years on this journey of becoming. In the life of a person this is an attainment of adulthood. In the chronology of history we are still in the infant and formative years of our nationhood and in the shaping of our Caribbean civilization.” In the grand scheme of things, we were still children. And what do children love better than a good story?
At this point at least one member of his TV audience expected to hear the lecturer say again: “Mamai-la I di queek?” End of story. Applause, applause, applause! But Didacus Jules had other ideas. He needed an assessment of how far we had come since we took over as “drivers of our own destiny.” And although comparisons can be odious, still there were times when there was no other choice but to measure our accomplishments against those of our neighbors. Our lecturer cited nations that were constructed on “their self-definition of their own greatness.” There was the American Ideal. The Chinese Dream. Singapore’s Golden City ethos. And what may possibly be the lecturer’s personal paradise, Cuba, with its “construct of non-negotiable sovereignty.” Also Jamaica, with its “cultural assertion of Brand Jamaica.” As for the Republic of Barbados, under the leadership of Mia Mottley, the island was “evolving on steroids.”
He had some questions, conceivably rhetorical: “What is the nation of Saint Lucia and what is Saint Lucian society? Is a nation its infrastructure, its bridges, roads, buildings? Is the stature of a nation the height of its skyscrapers, or is it the accumulated catalogue of its accomplishments? He spoke of Derek Walcott’s chronicling of our journey from the Babylonian bondage of the Middle Passage to the lamentations of slavery, to the jubilation of emancipation, right up to Independence “when each rock broke into its own island.” The lecturer seemed to blame the failure of Arthur Lewis’ dream of Federation on “the sea surrounding and separating small island states.” Ah, but that he said, disappointingly for this particular observer, was altogether another story.
Saint Lucians knew instinctively where we need to go, what we need to do, Jules said. We’d had five personalities as our prime ministers in the period 2001-2022, and he had done a textual analysis using a word cloud of a random Independence speech by each of them. “The rhetoric was all the same,” he had discovered. “The language urges national unity, the call to country above self, the priority on people, the will to succeed. Looming large in the lexicon are words like Saint Lucia, country, people, national, government, economic, respect. If the words align, then what is preventing the actions from aligning?”
He ended on a note that brought to mind classroom blackboards and white chalk: “Building the nation and shaping the society is a symbiotic process. The one strengthens the other. But it all starts with our vision of ourselves and the aspiration to our fullest potential. Leadership is essential to this process. Religious, political, economic, community leadership. But it is our political leadership, as the apex of power in the nation, that we must look to for direction on the imperatives.”
Dwight Venner, for most of his working life a public servant, had spoken similarly shortly before his death in 2016. So had Winston Fulgence, a lecturer at Sir Arthur Lewis Community College, during a televised interview in 2020—that in consequence of too long blindly following the blind we now discover our flailing selves irreversibly stuck in an ever-sinking mud of mediocrity.
And now, you know what I know you did not know before the 43rd Independence lecture by the esteemed Dr. Didacus Jules: Our future, immediate and long-term, continues to depend on clueless politicians!
Mamai-la I di queek?
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