Ilistened with interest to Jamaat member Kalla Akii-Bua (TV news Oct 31) complaining bitterly that the population would not forgive the Jamaat and forget the 1990 attempted coup.He went through the classic Trini pattern: disbelief, anger, bargaining, then finally, cussing about race: "Is because we is African?" The expostulation is like a strand of cultural DNA-carrying an astonishing amount of cultural information about the Trinidadian urban underclass, and Trini morality generally: how we interpret society,morality, identity, and Original Sin. First,morality.No one in the Jamaat (and quite a few ordinary people, clerisy and clergy) believes they did anything wrong. They believe 1990 failed, and things got out of hand-murders; billions of dollars of loss; psychological and economic trauma that still hasn't been exorcised. The reasoning goes: "Oh gord,we try ah ting! Look at the 'big fish'who doing worse then we." (Clico,HCU, Udecott.) But more than that, the Jamaat, and many people, believe that attempting to overthrow an "unjust" government was heroic. Of interest is how they came to that conclusion: the reasoning, scripts and rules they use(d) to distinguish between right and wrong. Usually,moral reasoning is embodied in Biblical or similar narratives (Ramayanic,Koranic).
In all such stories, narratives and parables are selected and orchestrated for maximum effect to satisfy primal emotional needs for revenge, reparation, and vindication. Ideally, in a plural modern society, there are secular national stories all groups share, based on rationality rather than emotion (enabling society to decide, for exam- ple, that child marriage is bad, no matter what religious hero did it), but not in Trinidad. The narratives that vindicated the coup attempt were disseminated in the NAR era by calypso, which articulated paranoiac social and ethnic trauma (brought on by economic austerity) as moral truth. Calypso also insisted that the urban "grassroots" are morally superior to all other social groups. The pose is reinforced today by the constant cant about slavery, reparation, and the variety of wrongs inflicted on Africans. That moral superiority is what enables making heroes and martyrs of criminals-by the very people who were and remain their victims. And, as Akii-Bua demonstrated, in the Creole sphere,when the emotional logic fails, the default setting is race: "Is because we is African?" This leads to the identity issue: African or Islamic, or both? And why? It's not accidental that the strain of (militant) Islam most attractive to many poor African men is the version that transforms them into someone else, in addition to explaining the violence they were born into. (And for those who don't convert, the sect is respected.)
The desire to be someone else manifests the Jamaat adherents' desire to escape what Fanon might call the "fact of blackness": pervasive ethnic trauma. The quotidian race rhetoric, on the surface, is a hyped-up version of "black is beautiful."Beneath the surface is the knowledge that many who say it loudest do not believe it.Within the Afro (and national) community the high valuation of whiteness and light skin, and desire for the things Afrocentric dogma claims to despise, are pervasive. The material expression of the conflict this hypocrisy generates is the rage in many poor young black men. They are locked in the economic and political consequences of this identity trap into which they are lured by costumed ethnic clowns on whom too many words have been wasted. But the enraged underclass is only part of this morality tale; the other, better half, if you will, is Patrick Manning's simultaneous "apology" to the nation for the fatal wounds he (might have) inflicted as prime minister. PM is the other end of the spectrum of the underclass masses the PNM uses and treats as beasts of burden, but his idea of morality is no better.
Manning's generation is Trinidad's first "free" generation. Williams led the country into the promised land. Manning believed he could lead us into the millennium, guided by a now mature Creole intelligentsia, locally made (by the UWI),who provided technical, scientific and cultural knowledge, and ideological and moral technology. Manning's apology encapsulates the moral enormity of his group. If the old PNM summed itself up by "All o'we tief," the new PNM has summed itself by "We sorry"- sorry as in apologetic, and pathetic. The susurrus of Arnoldian colonial moral reasoning died in "All o'we tief." Manning's apology is the final glimmer of the imago of a Christian-inspired sense of civic decency,what used to be called "broughtupcy." Broughtupcy was no match for the narcotic of political power. The PNM's/Creole society's talented tenth in power was a ma-cabre spectacle: contempt, arro- gance, and a monumental hypoc-risy which had lurked in their collective memory from the days they watched the white colonials and dreamed of being them. (See Edgar Mittelholzer's novel, A Morning at the Office, for a forensic analysis of this sentiment.) The PNM Creoles' deep shame at this ontological lust probably led the last PNM government to systematically dismantle all remaining civilising instruments-church, culture, and civic insti- tutions- between 2002 and 2010. Now we are educated by UTT, enlightened by fundamentalist Christianity (and Hinduism and Islam), ideologised by calypso (cf Karene Asche's Be Careful What You Wish For) and have abjured our civic sensibilities to moral-cultural abattoirs like Crime Watch, talk radio, and Carnival. Much as I'd like to take credit for this formulation, Gordon Roh-lehr's essay, "Apocalypso and the Soca Fires of 1990" in The Shape of that Hurt, tells the story more completely. (This is not to suggest that Rohlehr endorses me or my views.)