A tale of two Trinidad and Tobagos

TALE ONE: Great are the LL and MM and They Shall Prevail

ON FRIDAY NIGHT, March 18, 2022, our own Freetown Collective play Austin’s SXSW Music Festival and I know they will bring the house down even as they set soaring every heart in the place.

The band is led by co- – no, twin – founders, Lou Lyons and Muhammad Muwakil, singers, songwriters, guitars – and includes Jayron “Rawkus” Remy (DJ and bass guitar) and the Trinity of backing vocalists, Tishanna Williams and sisters Malene and Shanna Joseph.

Before they left, on the Sunday of their Naparima Bowl gig, I spent four hours with them (the fruits of which Newsday readers will soon see unfold in Trini to the Bone over six consecutive Mondays, hopefully starting soon).

That Freetown Sunday came near the end of a personally difficult five-week period, in which I narrowly escaped bereavement and was forced to come to terms, somehow, with pointless and gratuitous violent behaviour, not from some random faceless bandit, but from someone connected to me, though remotely.

All my life, in the most trying times, moments of my lowest ebb, at the darkest point of the long dark winter of my soul, I’ve passed the individual tests, found myself washed back to shore and looked up to see a ray of light in music.

Sparrow’s Congo Man, Shadow’s Bassman and Kitch’s Tourist Dame rescued me as surely as the Beatles’ Hey Jude and all the Rolling Stones’ Honky Tonk Women.

If Jimi Hendrix and Carlos Santana played my soul with bent guitar strings, Andre Tanker’s own lead showed me the way to Forward Home. If Pink Floyd made me sit still when they told me to Shine On, You Crazy Diamond, David Rudder made me jump up when he explained this was Madness. If Led Zeppelin built a sonic Stairway to Heaven, Bunji Garlin showed me I was Ready for the Road.

Even before they take/took the stage tonight, Muhammad, Lou, Rawkus, Tishanna, Malene and Shanna had already changed the world for me, for the better. I left them happy to think Freetown carries now a musical baton passed, hand-to-hand, from the start of our music, directly to them, another link allowing us to keep on playing out Tanker’s chain of freedom.

Freetown Collective, you’re the love I always knew I’d meet.

TALE TWO:  Space for a Heart

ON FRIDAY MORNING, March 11, 2022, at 10.30 am, on the tarmac at Piarco, Prime Minister Keith Rowley was the last passenger to board my Caribbean Airlines TR7 flight to Barbados. From my second-to-last starboard window seat, across the aisle and back, I could watch him in the last window seat on the port side. He looked down at his papers, his brow furrowed.

What was going through his mind? He must know the government he leads is the most unpopular we’ve ever had. Although I’ve had relatively close friends in both major parties (and an actual relative in one), I’ve never figured out why anyone would want the gig.

Why, I asked Keith Rowley’s bowed head, does political leadership always attract the most cynical and shallow of us?

And then the plane took off. And I turned away and looked out of the window.

It’s a measure of the shallowness of our time that ours is the first generation in which a KFC fry-guy can get to actually fly in the air… and we don’t appreciate it! We demonstrate our sophistication by ignoring the world beneath us and playing a stupid game on a smartphone. The most cosmopolitan of us are utterly bored by flying.

Not me. Unless and until clouds prevent it, I stare out of the plane window in awe. For all human history, our kind has looked up at the sky and wanted to fly so badly, it hurt their hearts.

And we really do fly!

I looked around the plane. Everyone I could see was either sleeping or tapping a screen.

Except Keith Rowley. He was twisted at the waist in his seat, hands on the edges of the window frame, not at all like a Rottweiler, but like a Pom-Pek. Staring out the window, like a child.

Until the clouds took away the view, he remained there, rapt, missing nothing.

It’s not a lot, but hope never is, and hope is all we ever had.

He was okay in his human form.

BC Pires realised too late that A TT of Two Tales

might have been a better headline.