MIA > Archive > Tim Hector
Fan the Flame, Outlet, 15 November 1996, online here.
Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
A friend of mine recently told me that I was “too sensitive”. He meant, of course, that matters which disturb me, innervate me, or infuriate me, seem to bother few others, if any at all. He hastened to assure me that he did not mean by “too sensitive” that I took offense very easily, that I was “touchy”, and quick to respond to imagined or real slights. In fact he said, things that “touch you” things that “affect you personally”, I hardly bother to take issue with “you deal with them quietly”, said he. “But matters which affect the public personality drive you up the wall.”
What provoked this discussion was my indignation about the $85,000 granted to one Don Charles, a friend of the Prime Minister, to hold a “free show” for the 15th anniversary of independence. The callousness with which it was done disturbed me no end. As everybody knows I am not against “shows.” Few people here attend more “shows” than I do.
For instance, and by way of digression, I have attended every Food Fair in Antigua. To me, a food fair, even more than a calypso show, provides an opportunity for ordinary people to show and define what they think is distinctive about us. And it is this distinction which gives us as a people our particular, even peculiar, but definitely distinct identity.
Let me extend the point. The Anglican Food Fair, asserts in a very striking way, that we are a Caribbean people. I myself make a determined effort at the Anglican Food Fair, to sample as much as I can, pocket allowing, of the food from the island-nations of this archipelago. Every year I watch the presentation of the food, and I have noted, that people are making a determined and conscious effort to present the fare offered better in the best possible manner. And not for money. The prices remain constant, more or less, but the presentation is far better each time. I drew the conclusion, that ordinary people are deeply conscious of what they present, how they present it, and how they are seen through the presentation. Style content and quality are the ordinary people’s preoccupation. They would meet me afterwards and ask “How did you like so and so”. It mattered profoundly.
The Pentecostal Food Fair struck me. Once again ordinary people made every conceivable effort to make sure that they put their “best foot and food forward.” High quality presentations were key, and money was not a major consideration. Nearly every item was packaged well, and presented well. But the Pentecostals stuck to Gospel music. Caribbean music was, true to their fundamentalism, abjured. Alienated culture stood before me bald and glaring, like a gargoyle. The Church members hardly attended. They were, it seemed, not of this world.
The Moravian Food Fair has grown by leaps and bounds. At first it seemed like a low-keyed affair. Then it seized hold on the members and their enthusiasm too off. Organised groups within the Church compete in good-natured rivalry, each trying to outdo the other in uniqueness and note, quality of presentation. The specially Antiguan version of ‘tracha’ dumplings, and cane-piece dumplings, served with a modern version of what our slave ancestors called “festiva” – probably from “festival” – was a historical and culinary novelty.
The Roman Catholic Food Fair stunned me. I expected its mix of Spanish, Arab and local, knowing the ethnic composition of the Church. Again one noticed the low prices and the high quality. But there was a notable, most striking, most pleasing aspect to the Roman Catholic Food Fair. This was its respect for the environment. The Anglican Food Fair is an environmental nightmare. People litter indiscriminately. At the end there was litter, litter, litter everywhere. In striking contrast, at the end of the Catholic Food Fair it was as clean as at the beginning! Incredible but true. I have never seen the like before, not even in more environmentally conscious societies.
People here, myself included, litter as a matter of thoughtless course. I had to stop myself, by conscious effort from doing it years ago. I too, until the 60’s, would shell peanuts and let the shells drop where they may. What the Catholics achieved at their Food Fair, was to me a near miracle. The seriousness with which they approached the question of litter, amazed me. And this in a culture that paid scant regard to the environment, no matter how people declare that cleanliness is next to Godliness, they do exactly the opposite in public, though personally clean at home. Please note the alienation. Their private behaviour is totally alien to their public behaviour. Yet the Catholics overcame this alienated behaviour, this lack of regard for one’s own public environment.
I personally regard the Roman Catholic effort, its major ecological effort, and its outstanding success, as the achievement of the year. In that it demonstrated, beyond all reasonable doubt, that our worst habits, our worst alienated behaviour, can be overcome by conscious organisation. There is no more profound lesson this nation has to learn. I will get back to it.
Now this $85,000 “grant” for a “free show” knocked me for six. I couldn’t get it out of my mind. First it was arbitrary. The Prime Minister decided to do it and cheated it through Cabinet, according to a Cabinet member who alone objected. Objection not withstanding it still went through. The show, the “free show” was suddenly, in this last minute adhocracy, trumpeted across the land, as featuring big foreign artists – Kross Fyah of Barbados, and WCK of Dominica. Neither came. The public was deliberately fooled, conned, trifled with, bad-played in bad faith, by officialdom. And all in the name of “culture” and “Independence”. I could not think of anything worse. This monstrous hoax, perpetrated on an unsuspecting people, using culture and independence celebrations as the medium.
Besides, the whole monstrous gargoyle of a hoax was conceived and executed, by the Prime Minister and Impresario to sabotage another show, with local calypso Kings in a most unique show. Public funds arbitrarily and fraudulently spent to perpetrate an act of political sabotage, and in the process, violating the little that people hold dear. And at Independence besides! And all for money!
What is even worse is that the allocation of this $85,000 independence free show conceived in fraud, and arbitrarily executed in fraud, is more than the entire budgetary allocation to the Government’s Culture Department for a year! The Culture Department is allocated the ridiculous sum of $50,000 for 1996! Yet one show, organised by Prime Minister and Friend, exceeded the annual allocation for Culture. I could not help but be shocked to the core.
It led me into deep reflection about our culture – not Steelband, calypso and Carnival – but our way of life, properly known as culture.
Something else hit me with great force, as great if not greater than Hurricane Luis.
The Lester Bird government was passing a law to approve after the fact, government borrowing the huge sum of 160 million 148 thousand dollars! The law itself and the scant, bikini information provided to account for each loan, showed that it was a banana leaf for various corrupt loans from as far back as 1987. 1987 loans being brought before Parliament for the first time in 1996! It is the proof, if proof is needed, that our way of life is arbitrary, arbitrary in the extreme. And therefore does not deserve the name of a way of life.
What demonstrates this, again beyond all reasonable doubt, is the fact that this law, for these humongous amounting to $160,148, 296.00, states this in its opening declaration: “Notwithstanding the provisions of any other Act, the Minister is hereby authorised to borrow the sums set out.”
In fact and in deed, in a single sentence, the government was setting aside all previous laws, forbidding them to borrow in this manner. What was forbidden was made legal by the literal stroke of pen. A more arbitrary society, would be hard to imagine.
By a single sentence, the Lester Bird regime, was making the illegal, legal! It is incredible but nonetheless a fad.
And, in our way of life, our culture, the Ayes have it. And that is the end of the matter. So let it be written. So let it be done. We are more Pharonic than Pharaoh.
The arbitrary, the illegal, the high-handed, the outrageous, holds sway in our culture. State power alone determines. The Ayes have it. And that is the end of the matter. The illegal is made legal. Just so. Willy-nilly. All previous laws outlawing specific offenses are made legal. Overnight! There is no public outcry, from an unorganised, and therefore, amorphous public of isolatoes.
One day, I thought, the Prime Minister will commit, or his colleagues will commit murder, and there will be passed, in Parliament, if you please, an Act stating: “Notwithstanding the provisions of any other Act, Prime Minister and Ministers are hereby authorised to commit acts of murder against any member of the population it so targets.” I do not exaggerate. For worse than murder has already happened. A whole nation has been and is being raped. I am going to make a leap.
Antigua’s finest historian, Professor Paget Henry, has a very fine chapter in his major work, and the chapter is entitled the “Post-colonial Cultural System.” He wrote: “With the end of formal external control, the basic problem facing the system has been the re-constitution and re-assertion of their traditions and institutions, so that the members are able to form satisfactory identities (emphasis added) and the attainment of the level of consciousness and training necessary for functioning in the contemporary period.” It is therefore necessary, Dr. Paget Henry continued, “to pursue policies that attempt to undo the devaluation of the local heritage, to correct the self-image of the people, recover or compensate for the losses that resulted from their colonisation and produce greater participation in the scientific and technical [and, I add, artistic] aspects of modern life”.
Nothing, nothing of the kind is going on here. Culture as a way of life which allows for greater participation in the scientific, artistic and technical aspects of life, is either unknown here or barely incidental, or worse, accidental here. Instead of countering “the devaluation of the local heritage”, that devaluation of the local heritage, since independence, continues apace. Everything, for example, is foreignised. People here have been told and are made to believe the worst falsehood that a colonised people could ever be told, and have come to believe. That is, that their colonisation left them with a rich heritage. It is nonsense from beginning to end. Colonialism, by definition, imposes an alien way of life on a colonised people. It is by rejecting colonialism, that a people begin to find themselves under the morass of centuries of domination. Our becoming begins with independence. We are freed ‘to be’.
No such becoming is taking place here, not even to the deliberately myopic.
All this arbitrariness, this grant of $85,000 to hold a “free show” is both the abuse of public authority and funds, as well as the devaluation of the local heritage, by gross manipulation and downright conning of the public. It reinforces the colonial view that all life is a con game. And the purpose of life is to con as much as you can out of individuals or the public as a whole. Either way, is best. It is, truth to tell, the lowest form of existence. It is, to be frank, existence without essence.
It has become a myth, a terrible myth of the modern world, that our leisure activities constitute culture. It is the worst fraud perpetrated on people. Our culture is at once our politics, our family life, our business life, as it is our everyday life.
The great Henri Lefebvre, in his seminal work, the Critique of Everyday Life posed himself and the world a hard question. He said there is certain obscurity in the concept of everyday life as culture.
“Where is it to be found? In work or leisure? In family life and in moments lived outside the norm as culture? Initially the answer seems obvious. The concept of culture as everyday life, involves all three elements, all three aspects. It is their unity, their totality. And it determines the concrete individual.”
Good so far, but only good so far. The great 20th century scholar Henri Lefebvre continued. Where does the living contact between the concrete individual and the whole cultural domain take place, he asked.
“In fragmented labour? In family life? In leisure? Where is it acted out in the most concrete way? Are there several modes of contact? Can they be schematized as representational models? Or must they be refined to fixed behaviour patterns? Are they contradictory or are they complementary? What is the decisive essential factor? Where are we to situate the poverty and wealth of this everyday life which we know to be both infinitely rich (potentially at least) and infinitely poor, bare, alienated; which we know we must reveal to itself and transform so that its richness can become actualized and developed in a renewed culture? ...”
At least a hundred pages can be written on the above. But I will confine myself to a hundred words. That is the challenge before us now. To end this “culture” of arbitrariness, of conning and corruption. It is that, in and of itself, which daily devalues our bare, even alienated, heritage.
The Roman Catholic Church, to its eternal credit, challenged our heritage or habit, of littering everywhere, and overcame it in a specific instance. The specific can become the national, the everyday.
We must first of all end the arbitrariness of our political culture. It corrupts everything. It is not an accident that the majority of business people, do not join the Chamber of Commerce. And so the Chamber of Commerce can exercise no self-discipline, no sense of shared values an everyday sense of conformity to self-determined rules and regulations. The same is true of workers. The majority of workers are unorganised and uninvolved in trade unions or other civic organisations. There is no civic life, that is, people belonging and functioning in organisation to change their world. It is by taking part in organised activity, that one belongs. Otherwise one merely inhabits. There is a world of difference between the inhabitant, (the native) and the citizen as belonger. The ‘native’ controls nothing. And is controlled down to his most minute stirrings. He or she is an isolatoe. One belongs, in order to become. Belonging is the thing.
Indeed, our alienation has gone so far, that people here abhor belonging to anything except Sunday School. In consequence, there is as much arbitrariness as there are individuals. Government is the most arbitrary of all. That is why we have arbitrary laws, which read “Notwithstanding the provisions of any law, government is hereby authorised ...”
Nothing devalues a people more than such arbitrariness and its pliant or compliant acceptance. It is that fact which stands in the way of a genuine culture emerging here, family life, food fair, cricket, Carnival, Steelband and calypso notwithstanding. Indeed all are devalued by arbitrariness. The devaluation is the one constant of our current existence. It has to be overcome. We shall overcome, is the recurring hope, I suppose, of the “too sensitive.”
Last updated on 9 February 2022