Fire from the hills
Posted: Wednesday, April 30, 2003
by Kim Johnson
For millennia, the idea of how the earth would be destroyed was a deluge.
Appropriately, it was a Dutchman, Albrecht Durer, who in 1525 painted its nightmare quality, after a dream.
"Many great waters fell from heaven. The first struck the earth about four miles away from me with terrific force..."
That was before we learnt how to annihilate everything with manmade fire and brimstone.
Today's image of apocalypse must be ground zero of a nuclear explosion, or a world doused in napalm.
In my mind's eye, I saw the Labasse. Dirty grey smoking mounds of objects of indeterminate shape and origin.
That's changed. Now, my mental image of extinction is the Northern Range.
I don't know if it's worse off this year, but it came as a shock the first time I noticed the state of our mountains in broad daylight, during one of my rare forays off the beaten path between home and work.
I felt my human rights had been abused: huge bald swathes stripped of all greenery; scorched earth with a ragged carpet of cinders and a scattering of blackened, skeletal trees.
Even the leaves as yet untouched by fire are thin and dry and frail, like a soucouyant's skin, just waiting for the spark.
Once, during a KNA (kole-no-arse) English winter in the 1980s I wandered into the Sussex downs and lost sight of its vast, sprawling, red-brick university behind a ridge.
Surrounded to the horizon by frozen whiteness I realised this frolicking in the snow, which every never-see come-see Trini enjoys, is playing with death.
But that's far away. While I'm in what should be a lush tropical island, the destructive horror I fear is those glittering fires which crawl up the mountainsides like Haitian necklaces.
People are still vex about the conflagration of July 27, 1990. For the hills it's an annual event, the annulment of that thick, green, wild, anarchic Northern Range bush, in which I spent my happiest boyhood days and which symbolises the crazy exuberance of life here.
Perhaps attending Trinity College up in Moka contributed to the idea, but nature has always had an air of irrepressible bacchanal.
Ever notice how razor grass takes over a vacant lot if you give it half a chance? How weeds peep mischievously through any crack in the pavement?
What you mightn't realise is how rare and precious that is. You don't see it, for example, in Jamaica, where "rain a fall but the dutty tuff," as Bob Marley put it.
The jungle there is concrete.
Maybe if more Trinis were to experience its oppressive ugliness we'd be less eager to incinerate our hills, cut down our trees and barbecue every walking, crawling, flying, climbing, hopping or slithering creature.
It's a funny thing that if you ask someone what he loves most about this country he'll list the food, the parties, Carnival, whatever. Never the hills and rivers, the forests and the beaches.
But apart from the Carnival women, who are indeed sacraments from God, it's the birds and the beasts of the bush that make here different from every other Caribbean island.
Mountains were an unattainable dream of freedom to Jamaicans trapped in servitude. And as for Bajans, every square inch of their coral isle was long parcelled off, until the plantations became hardwired in their orderly, law-abiding brains.
Not us. We've always been able to "run away" (we still use the phrase) for a river lime, or to beat drums in the hills and invoke the gods.
As I write this at home a faded iguana is slowly, scratchily dragging his prehistoric carcass across the galvanize porch roof.
He's from the dense, overhanging mango tree. Keskidees and grey tanagers zoom down to peck at his long tail, and fly off. Like children teasing a vagrant.
They're a raucous and greedy, those birds. They steal the dog's food. They make such a squawking racket, shouting all at once, like Jamaicans after a football match. Over the phone people ask if I live in a zoo.
Sometimes, if your eyes are sharp you'll see two or three brilliant green young iguanas clambering amidst the bougainvillea where the birds can't reach.
Every day an agouti or sometimes two visit from the tangle of bamboo, bois cannot and bird vine next door to sit on their tail-less rear and nibble a pommecythere. To work up an appetite they first dash around the russet lawn.
It was their playful scampering, and the overgrown, perennially green home in the bush beyond the fence, which blinded me to the state of the hills. I heard people moan about the heat but they didn't see the agony of the hills.
Now that I'm aware, it's the animals I grieve for, the countless agoutis, iguanas, snakes, tatous, manicous, ocelots, deer, mongoose, lappes and mattes roasted alive.
There's an Environmental Management Authority which I suppose is a good thing, or would be if it were more effective, but what can it do?
Even the word "environment" is part of the problem, suggesting something out there, separate from us and needing to be managed. We borrowed the word from other countries where it replaced "nature," of which humanity was considered a part.
We didn't have "nature" here. There was slavery, and the culture of exploitation on one hand.
On the other hand was the freeco mentality of slaves, who saw only two important categories of creatures: those "that does eat good and those that does bite".
That's the attitude of someone who owns nothing and so feels no compulsion to preserve anything.
When that changes, when people feel the love and protectiveness for the landscape that they would for their highly-mortgaged houses, that's when we'll get true emancipation from mental slavery.
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Absurdity in the legal system
Posted: Tuesday, April 8, 2003
by Kim Johnson
After Barry Clarke killed cashier Summer Charles for not replacing the defective $1.20 pen he'd purchased, he was taken to St Ann's. There a psychiatrist asked him, "Why you do that?"
"Well," Clarke shrugged, "Somebody has to uphold standards in this country."
The gap between Clarke's sound principles and his excessive effort to implement them is so absurdly wide it seems, with all due respect to poor Summer, risible.
At least Clarke had the excuse of lunacy. But what about those clowns who contrive to reduce our legal system to equal absurdity?
I've written about former Chief Justice Michael de la Bastide's dismissal of valid appeals on grounds that the prison authorities filed them too late.
But another case, that of 39-year-old Sheldon Roberts, carries the demented reasoning of our courts to its logical conclusion.
Roberts' alleged crime was committed in Roxborough, where a 15-year-old girl awoke in her bedroom one night and began bawling like the Queen that a man in her bedroom.
"This vicious, immoral scoundrel Son of a common mongrel Scared me through and through."
She told her grandfather, who rushed to the scene, that the intruder was Roberts.
This is Tobago so, of course, the families knew one another, and talk quickly got back to Roberts that he'd been, so to speak, fingered.
He immediately and forthwith proceeded to the station with his mother. He explained that he had indeed been in Roxborough that night but only to meet a friend and go liming. Besides, he wasn't into sex crimes.
The police didn't hold him then, but a few days later he was arrested.
On June 17, 1999 he was summarily tried in the Scarborough Magistrates' Court.
It's often difficult to get a conviction based solely on what an eyewitness saw in the dark. At night, as the law aways accepted (contrary to my experience), all cats are grey.
Still, magistrates, whose whims (in the interests of speed) are constrained by no jury, often become a law unto themselves. You could get off easy in a magistrate's court, just as you could make a jail for no reason.
Roberts was found guilty and given the maximum sentence – two years hard labour for breaking and entering (in that order), and two years for indecent assault, the sentences to run concurrently.
Like many without a lawyer, Roberts appealed the verdict. Alas, the magistrate, perhaps because Roberts had previous housebreaking convictions, didn't set bail.
The problem with appealing is that you cannot be heard until the notes of evidence are typed up and the magistrate submits his reasons.
That, by the Summary Courts Act, should be within 60 days of your notice of appeal. What a joke! Trini slowness grinds to a near halt in our soporific sister isle.
Roberts received the notes of evidence and the magistrate's reasons in July 2002. That is, three years later.
Now, bear in mind that he was sentenced to two years. In jail a year means eight months. The rest is held in case you behave bad and licks aren't enough: they can make you stay the full term.
Roberts, with remission, would have served 16 months. Because he appealed, however, he languished for 39 months behind bars — until September 2002, when he was granted bail, I think by Chief Justice Satnarine Sharma.
Here I must point out that so far Justice Sharma has shown himself to be more right-minded than any CJ we've seen in the last 30 years.
Isaac Hyatali, Clinton Bernard and de la Bastide's collective achievement was to demonstrate that cold-heartedness excludes no race.
Roberts' case is not unique. Kenneth Scott, for instance, was sentenced in May, 2000 to three years, that is, 24 months, for possessing a joint or two. (How many judges or lawyers never smoked a joint?)
Apart from being poor and black like Roberts, Scott also made the even worse mistake of appealing.
Scott spent 32 months in jail. He was let out on bail last January. His notes of evidence and the magistrate's reasons are yet to appear, though.
God alone knows when his appeal will be heard. I think he should sue government for enough money to buy a whole ganja plantation in Jamaica.
Anyway, back to Roberts, whose appeal was heard Tuesday before last, the same day cases came up whose notes of evidence had taken 10 years to materialise.
Presiding were Lionel Jones and the one who so bright he went straight into the Court of Appeal, and who rumour had it was in the running for CJ — Ralston Nelson.
In the magistrate's reasons, the girl's testimony was unsworn (and thus inadmissible). But in the notes of evidence her name had "sworn" written by it, so See-no-evil and Hear-no-evil thought that good enough.
Roberts had spent 39 months in jail waiting to appeal a 16-month sentence.
You'd think the Court of Appeal would set him free.
You'd be wrong. The two judges found that Roberts had appealed his conviction only. Not his sentence.
They hadn't the initiative to allow Roberts to change his plea.
Instead he must serve his original two-year sentence, starting on the day his appeal was dismissed. That is, two Tuesdays ago.
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Forged from the love
Posted: Tuesday, April 1, 2003
by Kim Johnson
I love libraries, especially those here. Not to borrow books, mind you. They never have anything I'd want to read.
You see something in a review in some magazine and think, hm, that's interesting. And you go to Amazon.com to see if it's affordable.
Don't waste time checking a library; they all operate with an unwritten principle whereby no book is allowed on a shelf unless it borders on the antiquarian.
Still, I like them. For one, they don't have piped music or televisions.
Then they are staffed, believe it or not, by people who, even when they have a reputation for hoggishness, I've found to be helpful, flexible and accommodating.
I've used libraries mainly for research, scouring old newspapers and magazines, rare West Indian books, and the occasional PhD thesis.
Not only me. There are men who spend their years of retirement relaxing in the congenial atmosphere of the archives.
But others go for other reasons. My friend, the late Keith Radhay, wherever he happened to find himself, would find time to read in the nearby library, even if it was just the foreign newspapers.
Despite their absence of conversation, libraries invoke a spirit of camaraderie.
A researcher will share ideas with another in those hallowed walls, which he'd guard closely once out in the open.
I even met one of the loves of my graduate student life in a library decades ago, when in my absence she “borrowed" a book I'd set aside on my desk to read.
Must have been the ambiance of the place because she too turned out to be flexible and accommodating.
Consequently, I looked forward to the opening of the new National Library, and with increasing anticipation as it took shape.
I'm not keen on the canvas sails flapping on its north-east corner, but what the heck, Colin Laird is allowed a folly after having designed such a beautiful edifice.
Here I might let you know that the word “edifice" originally applied to cathedrals, because that was where you were edified about the word of God.
Such was my enthusiasm that I rashly cast aside all common sense knowledge that politicians who probably haven't read a book since they were schoolboys, were bound to talk rubbish, and I contemplated for all of 1.27 seconds attending the opening ceremony.
Whew! The guardian angel of inertia saved me from a fate worse than terminal boredom, as I discovered to my relief when on the way home I switched on the radio.
What filled my jalopy was such a horrible caterwauling that my mouth dropped open.
The national anthem was being performed by the Lydians as if it had been written by a Puccini wannabe.
Now, I've long thought that our national anthem, to truly express the Trini spirit, should swing a little more.
You should be able to chip to it. It doesn't have to sound like a dirge to be solemn, and if any producer is interested, I've composed a lovely calypso melody to which you can sing "Forged from the love..."
But what I heard at 7.45 on Wednesday night made good old Pat Castagne sound like the Grandmaster.
O gyad, I thought, as I listened to the end in a kind of sick, morbid fascination, switching off only when another piece came on in the same castrati vein.
Why do they do things like that?
We opening a new brand National Library. Somebody in charge decide the gala ceremony must have music. And what they choose? Something pretending to be 18th century Italian.
Dear Sir or Madam, in case you haven't noticed, this country annually generates music whose beauty and intelligence can stand comparison with anything else being composed today.
I am talking, of course, about the Panorama arrangements for conventional steel orchestras, which at their best comprise the true New World symphonies.
They are our Taj Mahal, our Eroica and our Illiad.
This year's three top Panorama arrangements embody the genius and passion of Trinidad and Tobago more than could any other cultural artifact.
That's why pan is the national instrument: because it represents our technical and artistic creativity, our triumph over adversity. Not because Patrick Manning said so.
Pan is perhaps the only sphere in which anyone who can make a contribution is welcomed, regardless of race, class, education, sex, nationality, age or moral rectitude.
In this benighted era of ethnic squabbling, Jit Samaroo isn't a good example of pan's inclusiveness because Indians were in the steelband movement from its beginning; and the palaver about pan being the same as the harmonium or tassa doesn't deserve a response, because it's just politics at its most vile level.
The true example is Anise Hadeed, because if there's a group here which feels itself to be, and is often treated as if it were an outsider, it is the Syrian-Lebanese community.
Pan is the holiest thing created in this country, because it was and still is, ultimately, a product of the purest love.
Not intelligence or creativity or talent, even though all of that and more comes into the mix, but worship at the altar of transcendent beauty and freedom.
More than anything else, pan was forged from the love of liberty.
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