On his return to TALK, at the end of his COVID-19 break, the host Rick Wayne was typically provocative. A walking encyclopedia of all things political on the Rock of Sages, he started with what he deemed “a prayer.” Yes, your eyes have not deceived you. But what a prayer! ‘Pity the Nation’—the poem by Lawrence Ferlinghetti—which kicks off with “Pity the nation whose leaders are liars . . .”
Actually Wayne’s prayer was less an appeal to The Most High than yet another warning to Saint Lucians to be mindful of sheep in wolves clothing, especially in the season of elections. Wayne seemed also to offer the island’s Prime Minister a life belt in the storm generated by his highly flammable comparison of economics and colonization, when he said the latter at least had “a conscience.” Wayne did not try to defend the statement.
Oh, no. Indeed, he said that were he in Chastanet’s “peculiar circumstances” he would’ve found a better way to get his point across. After all, in this day and age, in the United States, especially, carelessly delivering even a useful message can prove costly. “But a statement not carefully spoken does not automatically mean it is without some truth,” added the TV host, pointedly. After all, “the colonials gave us our parliament, our constitution, our laws, our courts. They gave us schools and a system of education. They subsidize almost all our undertakings.”
Let no one ever suggest Rick Wayne has ever not been thought provoking. And since we’re in prayer mode, let us take a look at the New International Version of the bible at Luke 6:45: “A good man brings good things out of the good stored up in his heart, and an evil man brings evil things out of the evil stored up in his heart. For the mouth speaks what the heart is full of.” So, if after four years on the job, the Prime Minister continues to be careless, if not outright reckless with his pronouncements, who’s to blame if some listeners speculate about what may or may not be going on in his heart of hearts, as they say? There are stormy situations when lifebelts alone won’t cut it.
During his 2016 election campaign Allen Chastanet promoted himself as a businessman. So does Prime Minister Chastanet in office think, talk and operate like a businessman? Notwithstanding Rick Wayne’s suggestions to the contrary, it need be said that there was nothing conscionable about what our forbears suffered under colonization. To cite Dr. Eric Williams: “Colonialism impedes in every way possible the progress of the West Indian people, individually and collectively.” If Caribbean people were to move forward, suggested the Trinidadian prime minister, then colonialism would have to be confronted and destroyed—not given a makeover. Colonialism was always concerned only with maximizing profit at the unspeakable expense of the colonized.
In 1979, at the Sixth Summit Conference of the Movement for Nonaligned Countries, Grenada’s Maurice Bishop characterized the Eric Gary regime as neo-fascist. “The legacy of this neo-fascist regime for the people of our nation was,” he said, “a total dependence on imperialism, a reality that meant extreme poverty, characterized by massive unemployment, with more than half of the work force out of work, high malnutrition, illiteracy, backwardness, superstition, poor housing and health conditions, combined with overall economic stagnation and massive migration.”
As for poet and scholar Grace Nichols: “The legacy of slavery has given Caribbean people maybe a kind of restlessness, where part of them feel psychically connected to Africa, and maybe don’t see themselves so much as rooted in the Caribbean and of belonging . . .that this is their country.” Our own Derek Walcott warned about Caribbean people remaining stuck in the mud of our slave past while doing little to move out.
Chastanet, when he made his controversial remark, was comparing the twin evils of “economics and colonization,” a bit of mumbo-jumbo, considering slavery was all about economics. Indeed, were it not for economics there might’ve been no Middle Passage. Rick Wayne offered good advice when he suggested the prime minister be less off the cuff with his pronouncements—especially in the era of Black Lives Matter.
As C.L.R. James points out in Black Jacobins: “When one is what the greater part of the planters are, one is born to own slaves. When one is what the greater part of the slaves are, one is born to be a slave. In this country everybody is in his place.”
