Gimme de strength
Gimme de energy
Gimme de guidance to walk in de
legacy
Walk where dem giants walk
See what dem giants see
Gimme de strength
Gimme de energy
-Giants, 3 Canal
Soon there will be no more giants. Soon we will just be a collection of souls, a vague sha-dow of the greatness that went before. Soon there will be no more giants. I fear I have stopped growing and my footsteps will never fit the ones the giants have left behind. In this place of five-year memory spans, who cares enough to remember you? Who cares enough to keep you in mind, to call your name, to give you the first drink of spirits when they open a new bottle? Death is something that is only sad for the living. I am not sad that Keith Smith is dead. I would wish anyone a peaceful death over a pain-filled life.
Rather, I am sad that we have been left alone without the bigness of his words. A generation is disappearing and with them goes an understanding of Trinidad and Tobago that this generation is yet to grasp. And worse than having a grasp of something already defined we have no language to name this place ourselves. It's not just the media left wanting. This broken, battered thing called media with few if any voices that count, that are credible. More evidence that we are a society in crisis. There is an emptiness here. An echo of nothingness overpowering the beauty of blue for spite days when the sun is so perfectly hot and the breeze so refreshingly fresh that you wonder what kind of luck of the universe conspired to land us in paradise.
We've forgotten what we don't yet know and Keith Smith has died and now there is one less person there to try and remind us. I belong to that generation that has to leave to see the beauty. I belong to the generation that grows weary of being patriotic, of being in love with is country. We never had to fight for this country and so we don't really know what it is to love it. We don't know despair. We lack for nothing but a desire to hold on to what is valuable. There is no one large enough to fill the space left behind by Keith Smith. There is no one wise enough to fill the space left behind by George John. We walk where giants walk but do not remember their names. Their shadows cast strange shapes on the landscape that we don't recognise.
There is no sense of history here. Legacy is a word that means less. I fear that there is no one in my generation to do the words justice. To articulate a time and space in our history so beautifully. I fear that when they are all gone we will be left with nothing but yellowing newsprint and our newsroom memories of giants of men and women who filled our lives with words and the music of these words. They just leave us. With no idea how to fill their shoes. Buss it, go their way and leave us stuttering and fumbling for words.
But who can design a template for nation-building? Not even the giants who went before. Even they were flawed humans who made mistakes. Who did wrong to themselves and their compatriots. They too were badjohns and cowards and wajangs. In death we forget the pain they caused. We absolve them of their sins. But they need more than absolution like we need more than just their shoes to fill with our own mistakes and flaws. Soon there will be no more giants and we will all be a nation of VIPs clamouring for better free drinks and a better view of the stage where our lives are given to us in a series of barked instructions.
There will be no sweetness left. Just exposés to sell more advertising and bylines that mean nothing. We will all be fillers of space and meeters of deadlines and we will fit every dream, every hope, every nation-building wonder into a Facebook status update or a 140-character Tweet. Soon there will be no more giants and then what will we do? Who will we aspire to be like when we grow up? Who will fear that they cannot fill our shoes? Who will mourn us when we leave them?
