Doubles or nothing

BC Pires
BC Pires

THANK GOD IT’S FRIDAY

YOU CAN always tell how crucial a discussion is to Trinidadians by how resolutely they avoid its essence and how quickly they jump to a vigorous dissection of its periphery.

Ask Trinidadians why they’re entirely content with a political system that guarantees fully that half the population, by race, feels unrepresented for five years at a time and the best answer you’ll get in near 60 years of so-called independence is, “We like it so.” An answer provided, by the way, not by several faculties of the University of the West Indies, but by a calypsonian.

Ask the Trinidadian if he isn’t willing to protest the crippling traffic jams that make life miserable every day, twice a day, for everyone, and he will tell you he will make his stand against the insanity by driving with his own headlights on in the daytime.

Let the Minister of Agriculture make the most fundamental and incontrovertible food statement imaginable – that the “national dish” is completely made up of foreign imports – and they will spin away from that rude truth faster than Michael Jackson from Ola Ray in the Thriller video. Trinis moonwalk away from any harsh reality and back into a far more entertaining fantasy.

All week, Facebook has exploded over the matter that really doesn’t matter. Buying doubles means you’re supporting cucumber farmers, pepper farmers, chadon beni farmers, what other kind of farmers it have?

The real arguments in defence have been made: German chocolate is the best in the world and you’ll never find a cocoa tree in the Black Forest; Italian coffee ditto, ditto coffee beans; and if you take something old everyone in the world has had forever and turn it into something new – flour into doubles and the handheld roti, old oil barrels into steel orchestras, a religious festival into the definitive urban street party – it is yours, and it is national.

But those arguments have been made only in the way that even a stopped clock is right twice a day. It’s not the argument that matters in a Trinidadian discussion, nor even the audience, but the gallery.

Doubles is ours and doubles taste great. But, wherever its ingredients come from, what is a doubles, really?

If you want a dispassionate assessment of the national dish, find the Trinidad episode of the late Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown. Watch Anthony hug up Kees, fast-forward past the bumbling revelation of what Comrade Wesley Gibbings calls the “wonpasent,” and study that short scene of Anthony sitting on the bench. “Since I got to Trinidad, everyone’s asked, 'You tried doubles? You tried doubles?' All right, I’m eating firetrucking doubles!”

We don’t talk about what he said about it: that it’s two bits of fried dough with a savoury pea filling and sweet sauces.

Although, admittedly, the last occasion when the whole was greater than the sum of the parts on this level was the Beatles. Taste-level-wise, it’s difficult to attack doubles.

Nutrition-value-wise, it’s difficult to defend doubles.

What doubles says about us, I would venture, is much more than what we say about doubles.

We will fight for days about doubles; we have, this very week. But what we’re really fighting over is a deep-fried white flour product and some sugary sauces dressing up an ordinary legume; talk about having your finger on the firetrucking pulse.

Doubles taste good because it goes to the worst part of our bodies – those damn undefeatable fat cells – and they really aren’t very good for us.

But we’ll do it all again next week, when the “discussion” moves on to KFC, every input into and aspect of which, from deep fryer to cardboard box, is foreign.

And we’ll never once ask ourselves what we really should be eating. Or how we should be producing it. And whether we should be importing, not channa, but everything.

But it could be worse.

Show the Trinidadian a photograph of a baby crying in her mother’s arms and the Trinidadian leaps from that image to what he will see as the big picture, as expressed by our own Prime Minister: what they see is not a child in danger, but the plain illustration of the impossibility of a nation of 1.3 million accommodating 33 million “gang-leader/members.”

It really is a case of doubles.

Or nothing.

BC Pires is a nihilist, but with slight pepper. Read the full version of this column on Saturday at www.BCPires.com

Comments

"Doubles or nothing"

More in this section