Chronicle of several deaths foretold

THANK GOD IT’S FRIDAY

YOU KNOW your week’s not going to end well when, on Monday, Africans and Indians in TT are furiously spitting accusations of racism at one another and, on Tuesday, a white American Democratic presidential nominee, Joe Biden, chooses a dougla woman, Kamala Harris, as his vice-presidential nominee.

The irony becomes steely when you consider that this is the place that coined the word “dougla” to describe the child born of an African and an Indian person making love to one another!

You think, well, what’s the firetrucking point of being Trinidadian/Tobagonian any more? Look, you best tell David Rudder to firetruck away with the Ganges and the Nile, yes.

The great Lloyd Best, who was right about more or less everything while he was alive (and was more or less ignored by policymakers for the same period), recognised race was a legitimate basis for political organisation in newly-independent TT.

Our problem is that, in near 60 years of independence, we never laid anything more upon that foundation: our whole political building, every block, every trowel-full of mortar, every lintel, the ring beam and the roof, all is race.

And, if you try to build an institution on racial politics, all you end up doing is institutionalising racism.

So you didn’t need to be a political seerman to predict either the PNM or the UNC would win this week’s election. The 17 other parties/people who contributed to the coffers of the Elections and Boundaries Commission were only extras, no matter how many thought they would become stars.

And it was safer to put your money on the PNM getting to 21 seats ahead of the UNC. The PNM has got out its unfailing 28 per cent of the electorate to put an X next to the balisier every election since 1956; especially in a pandemic, PNM supporters personify “diehard.” Additionally, low voter turnouts usually favour the incumbent, and “it had pandemic” this week.

Again, the UNC political leader, Kamla Persad-Bissessar, whom I like personally, added much more bacchanal than substance to the debate. The blank man feeling to party in the covid19-free sunshine and thing. It was not so much debate as picong, and pretty ineffective picong at that.

Not that the “debate” had any meaning at all, for debates only matter if someone is likely to be persuaded to change his or her mind, and we have more swing bridges than swing voters in Trinidad.

Here, political party loyalists are not so much PNM-til-ah-dead as PNM/UNC-from-birth-in-Belmont/Barrackpore.

Monday’s proceedings, then, were not so much an election as a probably more accurate count than any census of how many Africans and Indian voters are registered in every constituency.

For nearly 60 years, two full anthropological generations, either the Indian or the African party in Trinidad has won the election, with the single exception in 1986 of the National Alliance for Reconstruction, Lloyd Best’s “party of parties,” and even that quickly revealed itself to be nothing more than a drunken punch-up at a wedding (to borrow from Radiohead).

Fully 19 parties or independent candidates took part in Monday’s exercise and, for 17 of them, the day and week would end even worse than it did for TT, shown up as racist opportunists by the American Democratic Party.

The older masochists – David Abdulah of the Movement for Social Justice, Steve Alvarez of the Democratic Party of TT, Garvin Nicholas of the Movement for Something Else, Carolyn Sepersad-Bachan of the Congress of no People – have developed scar tissue, but you had to feel sorry for Kirk Waithe of the Nationwide Organisation of We the People, who found out on Monday night what Jamaal Shabazz, one of the 114 Jamaat “soldiers” of the 1990 attempted coup, discovered when he contested a parliamentary seat in Morvant/Laventille.

“You is one o’ we,” they told Jamal. “You take bullet for we! We would never vote for nobody but you! You is we boy!” Etc, etc, ad lib, fade.

Jamaal gave himself up for his people, like Taffy of VS Naipaul and Earl Lovelace novels fame.

He lost his deposit.

The lesson of the week, then, for those who really want to start a third political party in TT, is dead simple:

Start a new race.

Or get out of the electoral one.

In TT, no matter how we party at fetes, at elections, Indians vote for the Indian party and Africans vote for the African party.

And the douglas could haul they ar-- to the US and vote for Kamala, not Kamla.

BC Pires is staining his finger red only for pepper mango. Read the full version of this column on Saturday at www.BCPires.com