A song for Andaiye

Nov 25, 2012 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

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Readers familiar with my commentaries over the long years would know I am deeply in love with the music of the composer Burt Bacharach. I first encountered Bacharach as a little boy on Durban Street, Wortmanville, when the Rhythm and blues singer, Chuck Jackson, made a huge, international hit of his song, “Any Day Now.”
Everybody who listened to “Any Day Now” had to like it. Jackson’s voice haunted you and Bacharach’s music tormented you. It was a perfect song. Then Bacharach turned up again with a melody all the dance halls in Guyana played on a Saturday night, “Mexican Divorce”. But what will remain one of the world’s best soul groups, “The Drifters”, with its inimitable front man, Ben E. King, took the cake.
It was when I was courting my wife thirty-five years ago, that Bacharch came into my life fruitfully. We listened to Bacharach while traveling all over Guyana and even when we journeyed to Canada to study. My wife’s favourite Bacharach then was and still is “Alfie,” a reflective song on the role of love in one’s life.
I do like “Alfie” but my choice in Bacharach is his later composition for the Isley Brothers, “Love’s still the Answer.” What an amazing song it is, filled with sentiments of what life and love should be and our commitment to see a better world for us and our children.
After leaving the church service for Nigel’s father, Clarence Hughes, last Thursday, I encountered Andaiye at the gate. We chatted and I felt sad in both heart and soul. She told me that she is off to Barbados for further medical treatment for an illness that is not so harmless. We talked about if change can ever come to Guyana in our lifetime and I intoned to her that I want to see a free Guyana before she gets older because she deserves it.
I was optimistic that justice and freedom were about to dawn. I sensed she didn’t share my anticipation. Whenever you talk to Andaiye there is always a philosophical flow because she is a philosophical person.
As I walked towards my car I thought of Andaiye and hope that she comes back to the Guyanese people who needed her from the seventies onwards and more than ever need her now in these extremely disturbing times that invoke the potency of Martin Carter’s poetry.
As I sat in the car, my thought flew immediately on doing a column on her and I thought of dedicating a song for her as I did for Tacuma Ogunseye and Dr. Josh Ramsammy. “Love’s still the Answer” came straight into my mind.
I first met Andaiye when I was just a youth in the Movement Against Oppression (MAO) in Tiger Bay. I learnt so much about politics from people like her. I was glad that I met women like her, because women like her were what Guyana needed then and now.
Here is a song for Andaiye that tells us of our obligation to each other. If you like it, I recommend an unknown version by an unknown singer, except in her native country, Holland, Trijntje Oosterhuis. Go to YouTube and watch a beautiful woman with a beautiful voice perform a beautiful song. If you like the reach of Trijntje Oosterhuis, then she has an album in which she sings the hits of Bacharach. Just ask your friend who is going over to Suriname to buy it for you.
Aubrey Baptiste of Matt’s Record Bar did me a personal favour in getting it. The sentiment expressed in “Love’s still the Answer,” is that it is still a hopeful, lovely world.
A note is in order before you read the verses listed here. The opening lines are uncannily relevant to Guyana; It goes like this; “Twenty Years ago, I could have told you that the world was round. Good and sound. Freedom bound. Our future was secure.”  The PPP is in twenty years of its rule when twenty years ago we stupidly and unwisely removed President Desmond Hoyte.

Twenty years ago
I could have told you
that the world was round
Good and Sound
Freedom bound
Our future was secure
Now I’m not so sure
It seems like gravity
has been reversed
and getting worse
Nothing works
And everybody hurts
Yes there’s a trail of tears
Down through the years
of broken hearts
it’s still so hard
to let the sun shine in

Love’s the answer
No matter what I swear
Love is
Still the answer
Just like it always was

Such a simple truth
Love never changes
or betrays a friend
From the start
Love was part of some fantastic plan
Some brotherhood of man
Now it’s down to us
We either shine the light
or darkness rules
Our children lose
We’re free to choose our fate
To find our way
Beyond this veil of tears
the sky is clear
and every star
stands for the heart
that lets the sun shine in

Love’s the answer
No matter I swear
Love is
Still till the answer
Just like it always was

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