Friday’s child

IT BEGAN on February 19, 1988. On that day, the first Thank God It’s Friday column by BC Pires appeared in the Express. Mr Pires, who died on Saturday at 65 after battling cancer, was then just 29. He could not have foreseen, upon filing that first piece, that writing would define his life.

His writing defined him because it was, so vividly, him. This was a figure who once staged a hoax art exhibition to poke fun at the art world; who, while working as a lawyer, created a stir by daring to wear an earring in court; and who defied his parents’ wishes by pursuing a career as a writer.

Yet, why Mr Pires matters is partly because within his columns readers witnessed him discovering himself.

“Those early columns were as much exploration of self as of the possibilities of a newspaper space,” he wrote in 2015. “With 100,000 readers telling me I was good on a Friday I began to believe it myself.”

It is rare for a newspaper column to have the reach and impact as Thank God It’s Friday, in its various incarnations, did. But Mr Pires also wrote other columns that had their fans, such as Trini/Bago to D Bone, in which he profiled the global Trinidad and Tobago diaspora with impressive reach. His succinct but passionate pieces on film and television were well-reviewed.

If the subject matter and form of his writing were variable, what was consistent was his enduring popularity. To come to a BC Pires piece was, for so many and for so long, to come to a weekly (or twice-weekly) pleasure in a country gone awry.

This enduring popularity was even more impressive given how it straddled profound changes: the movement from print to online; the rise of social media; and the social shifts and advancements which have redefined public affairs globally. The world changed, the world changes. His voice became, paradoxically, a fixture reflecting that change.

Mr Pires changed too. His most dramatic transformation was in his final act, in which he wrote, with almost unbearable poignancy, about his health woes. Few have laid bare the cruelties of cancer with such compelling eloquence and rage.

There is a debate as to whether a new genre, the literary newspaper column, has been invented in the Caribbean. If it has, Mr Pires, alongside figures such as Keith Smith, was one of its finest exponents.

Whatever the genre, form or label we put on his writing, he did what the best writers do: he allowed us to see ourselves. Few have excavated the nature of what it means to be from this country more than him. Thank God we had him.