Unfulfilled at sixty

DR GABRIELLE JAMELA HOSEIN

HOPE SPRINGS eternal, but hopeless floods the nation. It’s a hard time to think about celebrating independence when it feels like we are becoming worse off than we were. We have frittered the dreams we held at independence.

Is there anyone who feels hopeful about the years between now and our 75th anniversary?

We produce brilliant athletes, creatives, professionals, inventors and activists, and committed and caring communities that surround them. They keep our sense of possibility alive, reminding us that we can be both small and great, and that our best selves set a world standard.

However, we must also be honest. Beyond the symbols of nationalism that make us feel proud today, whether military parades, marching bands, congratulatory speeches or fireworks, what is our stake in making TT a place where people want to live tomorrow?

I think of celebration of our independence only partly as commemoration of the greatness of these past decades. I think of it also, and more importantly, as the baton we are handing on, from one generation to the next, and the inheritance we have protected over our years as custodians.

I think of the nation as a garden that we tend for those also in our care and for those to whom we will one day give this living, breathing complex ecosystem. I think of commemorations as a grounding and a reasoning, when we ask ourselves what we are doing with this responsibility.

I’m sceptical of pomp and ceremony, even as I recognise the effort that goes into it and its value. One mother, driving a taxi, told me that she insists her children, from ages eight to 24, line the streets of Port of Spain to watch the parade each year, to be awed by the impressive glint of sun off uniform buttons and the horns and symbols that vibrate her children’s chests, shaking loose a little tight-throated emotion. For her, it’s a chance to teach pride in their country.

It’s understandable, for there are not many such moments or places that make visible and beautiful the idea of independent nationhood. I was glad for her that there are such displays, noting that they become moments of tying love for family with love for country, when both may otherwise be wearying and hard.

I’m not that kind of nationalist. It’s not about lack of pride, it’s about concern at the way that nationhood gets mixed up with state power, and love for country becomes mixed up with loyalty to state authority.

On an anniversary of independence, we mark transition from being a colony. We also mark decades of self-rule. We present how we see ourselves now. We breathe into a vision for who we want to be and what we still must achieve.

We must also ask ourselves about exclusions, and what our independent status means to those without equal access to the freedoms and protections of the very citizenship we are celebrating, such as LGBTI communities. We must ask ourselves about inequities, and what independent status means to neglected rural communities where flooding results from near-abandonment by the very state being celebrated today.

We must ask ourselves about fear at a time when citizens are in terror both in and outside their homes, because of failures and corruption that connect politics to ports, to police. Institutions are how a state touches the lives of its nation of people, and are how they most experience its rules and their rights.

We string up flags, as a state does to mark its birth, but working institutions would bring more daily pride and reciprocity, making citizens less likely to undermine the bureaucracies that alienate them, making government much more of, by, with and for its people.

Reasoning even further, isn’t it time we see the nation as more than its people, but also as its land and sea, its mangroves and coral reefs, its wildlife and its migratory species? Haven’t we moved beyond becoming modern “hell or high water” on obsolete terms, based on closed-door agreements with foreign capital? On our 60th anniversary, what do we consider worth most protecting for the next 60 years?

Like slowly receding waters ready to rise again, the country is rippling with despair. We can celebrate our small greatness and our best examples of brilliance, and come together in pride, but we need hope to spring from the places of exclusion, inequality, alienation and threat, for the rewards of self-governance to spring eternal, precious and shared.

Diary of a mothering worker

motheringworker@gmail.com

Entry 474