I respond to your columnist Raymond Ramcharitar, whose piece about Patrick Chookolingo appeared in the Guardian on November 12. While I don't claim to be in Ramcharitar's league (nor do I desire to so be) I feel compelled to respond to his ranting about the alleged inaccuracies and legacy Choko left.
To begin with, in my own simplistic understanding, Ramcharitar is a poor communicator even though he no doubt has the capability to speak in unpretentious and modest terms. From the outset I see that as one of the major differences between him and Choko. Ramcharitar is a literary critic probably accustomed to the works of VS Naipaul, Eric Williams and Shakespeare and mostly of people who have long expired.
Choko was a student of some of the literary masters like Shakespeare (even though you would never know that from casually conversing with him) but a critic of lesser men like Eric Williams, Basdeo Panday, George Weekes and the like. He was a down-to-earth pragmatist with a deep sense of humility who had a purpose for his work. His knew his criticism was for the greater good.
Ramcharitar, on the other hand, imposes himself on others with pomposity, hypocrisy and contemptuousness par excellence all just to play to the gallery.
Parading some complex words and phrases does not make a good writer. In fact it is downright silly even trying to company Ramcharitar and Chookolingo because when Raymond Ramcharitar is long gone he will be childless and I venture to say that no one will even remember his name.
But to get to the meat of his cantankerous, fallacious comments about Choko, one wonders where he got his information from, since he is not one of Choko's contemporaries. This was not revealed in his very brief article. He does not state the source of any of his comments, though I suspect most of the off-key "findings" came from one Lennox Grant, who hosted the "Choko lecture" two weeks ago and no one that I know indicated to me that he contacted them. To simply read one of the newspapers that he launched (that still exists today) and say that that is Choko's legacy will be a grave injustice.
I suggest that any research must first and foremost include his weekly column which was aptly entitled Choko's Spectacular which was required reading for all, and I would expect that the sources of the research to be identified, so that Ramcharitar falls far short for someone who claims to be an accomplished and skilled writer and critic by relying on hearsay and mauvais langue.
But to rub salt into the wound, in true Grant style, Ramcharitar's story was full of gross inaccuracies that left me wondering why he was so piqued by someone who he never met and obviously never studied...indeed the very inaccuracies that he so complained about were the hallmark of his outburst.
To quote Ramcharitar, who said: "After Bhadase (Maraj) death, he fell out with the new management (Sat Maharaj)...and started the Mirror, Target and Sunday Punch papers," these statements are totally inaccurate, to say the least. Firstly, Choko launched the Bomb on behalf of Bhadase with one proviso, that Bhadase would not have any editorial control. After one year Bhadase died and Sat took over as his executor. So for his next 11-year stretch at the Bomb, Choko made a new arrangement with Sat Maharaj in the form of a lessor/lessee agreement. This is a far cry from what Ramcharitar said.
And Choko didn't start his own newspapers, namely the Mirror, Target and Sunday Punch, after any falling-out with Sat. The Sunday Punch started in the year following his new lease arrangement with Sat Maharaj (in 1972, a decade before the break-up with Sat) and the Target newspaper started a few years later in the 1970s. Notably, it was only the Mirror that was launched after the Sat Maharaj "break-up." These are some of the undisputed facts that were manipulated and or distorted.
With Ramcharitar's story about the Choko losing his appeal at the Privy Council for the judge's wife story, he conveniently omitted the remarks made by the English Lords that Choko's case was compromised by bad advice from his lawyers.
So again we see that if Ramcharitar had a respect for the truth, he would have explored all the angles of his twisted article.
He did, however get it partially right when he said that Choko had a class war aimed at the society's elite, but even that was done in the same prejudiced approach as the rest of his diatribe. What it was was a war against abuses and corruption and the country's big boys were the main offenders.
He just seems bent on "correcting" some of the positive aspects that came out about one of the sons of the soil during the lecture and so obviously hoped would be a hatchet job on Choko.
But I was wondering why this Biswas group felt that it was Seepersad Naipaul (father of VS Naipaul) who so influenced Choko. Again no evidence was proposed for that supposition.
As far as I know, Choko's life was profoundly influenced by his stint at London's Fleet Street, the then centre of journalism, but maybe that did not gel with the agenda of the Biswas group.
This glimpse into Ramcharitar's life clearly shows that he cannot understand why the vast majority of the broad spectrum of working journalists respected his work so much even 28 years after his passing.
His attempt to censure Choko is very curious, since what he is really doing is arguing against freedom of expression and the press, one of our hard-fought rights.
My simple advice to Ramcharitar is to give up the crusade, do like real people and work in the trenches first and then get a life. What's I'm sure about is that Choko, the founding father of the T&T's free press, would never have given him the pages of any right-thinking paper to play himself.
Daniel Chookolingo
Former media manager
