THE MEASURE OF PROGRESS

Jul 10, 2008 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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“It’s traditional” is one of the all-time great hits of the Trade Winds. It captures the very essence of the idiosyncratic lifestyles that West Indians have traditionally embraced, including not wanting to be disturbed when some great West Indian batsman is at the crease.

I thought that V.S Naipaul’s Miguel Street also does the same, but accidentally. Naipaul simply set out in that book to tell some funny stories about his childhood experiences.

I am sure he satirized much of the work and exaggerated the idiosyncrasies of the characters. Little did he appreciate how much he caricatured much of ordinary life of the West Indies.

Miguel Street should be required reading for those who wish to understand West Indian culture for it introduces the reader to characters who have big dreams and small means.

The more things change in the Caribbean, the more they remain the same. In my youth, there were three things you could be assured would start on time.

The first was estate work. If you lived near a sugar estate your whole life would revolve around the estate horn that woke you up in the morning and the opening and closing of the factories.

If you were a cane cutter or a factory hand, you knew what time you had to be on the dam to get transportation to either field or factory from that horn. Not much has changed since then.

The second thing that started on time was cricket. No matter what was the level of cricket, play always started promptly at the prescribed starting time.

The third thing that started on time is another colonial hand-down– church. Everything else started late and this tradition has been maintained to this day. We are being true to our traditions.

I never expected, however, to have seen the sort of photograph that I saw in the Tuesday edition of the Kaieteur News and it makes me wonder whether we are setting new standards of public comedy or whether we are allowing traditions to fall into disrepute.

On the front page of Tuesday’s edition of this newspaper was a mentally-ill woman leading the procession of police outriders. What a photograph! Congratulations to whoever took that shot.

It is a picture that tells a million words. I cannot for one reason explain how it is that a mentally ill person could have been allowed through the police cordons and so position herself that she could actually be seen in front of a covey of police outriders.

I have seen police barricades being stoutly guarded by ranks. I have seen protestors try to go past such barricades sometimes with success, sometimes without, but always there has been resistance. Yet a person who is of unsound mind could find herself leading a police parade, unwittingly of course.

This could only have happened in the West Indies and would be something that would fit naturally into one of Naipaul’s chapters in Miguel Street. Naipaul also wrote a book about his father. It was called a House for Mr. Biswas.

It is also a work that all those interested in West Indian life should read. In a remarkable way, the dream of Mr. Biswas is today still the dream of tens of thousands of Guyanese, forty two years after we attained Independence.

Many Guyanese too dream of owning their own house just like how our independent architects had dreamed about taking possession of their colonies, taking possession and being in charge of their own countries.

When I listen to the leaders of the Caribbean and especially to the utter nonsense that our own President spoke about at the opening of the just concluded summit in Antigua, I have to ask whether these leaders have missed the point about the dreams and aspirations of the ordinary West Indian.

Those dreams remain as simple and as personal as they were in the time Naipaul’s novels were set. People do not want to hear about investment in information technology and about hooking up the region to the rest of the world.

People want, like Mrs. Biswas, to own their own home. That is their simple dream. To wake up in the morning, to go to work and to come back in the afternoon knowing that just by working they are doing something worthwhile.

People want to share in the pride of owning their own home, of sending their children to school so that they can do better than their parents did.

I have always felt that this is perhaps the best barometer we can have of historic progress in a region that stands on the periphery of the greater nations.

If there is any simple test of how far we have progressed, it has to be in judging whether our children have done better than we have. If they generally have, then as a society we have progressed.

It matters not whether church or cricket remains the only two things that commence promptly in the West Indies because in owning our homes and having our children do better than we have done, we can say we have progressed, even if a madwoman leads a police parade.

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