creole@wow.net

On the soaker train to Sandy Grandy

The Port-of-Spain lighthouse, restored or redecorated, may have triggered a popular revolt of the spirit. The Mayor, an advertising agency and a paint firm together produced a shock effect in the national colours.

Were Port-of-Spain a walled city, visitors would find the lighthouse marking the gates of entry. Its exaltation of the soccer-ball image proclaims this a football capital, if not the football capital of the Caribbean.

A collective gasp at the sight of the new old lighthouse keeps being expressed in the letters pages of newspapers.

Trinidad and Tobago has prostrated itself before the altar of Soca Warriors’ hopes in Germany: this is the message of the new old lighthouse. But for some aroused citizens, otherwise loyal subjects of the Soca Warrior state, the lighthouse is a lightning rod.

It’s provoked people into thinking and saying things, for reasons of wariness or weariness, normally left unsaid.

Seldom needing much provocation, Denis Solomon even risked charges of anarchist or terrorist incitement by recommending “a hefty charge of dynamite” as a radical response to the lighthouse “abomination”.

Though he went further, Mr Solomon was actually writing in support of Maurice Halfhide, another citizen driven into unfamiliar protest mode by outrage over what the Mayor and them have perpetrated at the water’s edge.

Mr Halfhide took care to make proper genuflection: “I also want to celebrate our football team’s win.” Then he issued his own judgment: the new old lighthouse represents another despoliation of public space or desecration of venerable relics.

“Should we smear the national colours all over 19th century structures as a way of declaring our patriotism?” The rhetorical question opened a wider denunciation of what he saw as a continuing insult to sensibility reflected in architecture, mas costumes, mall decorations, and stage and TV sets.

He summed it up as “the lack of visual sophistication which has emerged as the most immediate signifier of modern Trinidad.” And in words capable of fomenting rebellion, if not of inspiring reform, he observed: “Over the last few decades there has been a cheapening of our surroundings, mirroring the cheapening of human life.”

His letter appeared in the same Guardian that reported yet another business leader identifying crime as “the major issue”. In other news that day, Prime Minister Patrick Manning was claiming “silent majority” backing of his plans for tearing up the landscape and displacing residents in La Brea and Cedros to put down aluminum plants.

More people are being moved to make a link between the natural and built environment, including mass media “atmospherics”, and the quality (or the cheapening) of life. Maybe another big demonstration is in the making, a remonstrance more wide-ranging than last October’s “Death March”.

By then, Denis Solomon may have returned to Italy. But his contribution remains. As targets for his dynamite, he identified, apart from the new old lighthouse:

• The Italian monument commissioned by NP “now ruining a once delightful stretch of lawn” near the President’s House;

• The statue of “a prancing mountebank on a plinth obliquely opposite Roxy Cinema”—a Kitchener memorial; and

• “The bewildered homunculus surmounting a jumbled heap of plastic turds on the St Ann’s roundabout”—a statue of Sparrow.

From the stockpile of a demolitions expert, Mr Solomon’s words already deliver the dynamite effect on those literal Port-of-Spain icons. In time, we’ll avert our eyes from the new old lighthouse—just as we withhold attention from the NP marble, the Clico Sparrow and the Pat Chu Foon Kitchener.

That’s how Mr Solomon himself still calls it “Roxy Cinema”, even though a generation of Port-of-Spain youngsters know the place only as a vaguely Disney-type pizza parlour.

For those who have eyes and ears to pick it up, an insurgency is brewing against the conquest of sensibility by commercialism and the rout of an aesthetic sense in the public and private spheres.

As someone who during the parang season lamented a Trini “retreat into unilingualism”, I declare an element of wishful thinking in these observations.

It was thus encouraging to read a letter from Beverly Adams, who noted that, among TV and radio announcers, “Sandy Grandy”, “Manzalina”, “Londonville” and “Tagariqua” have become standard pronunciations for Sangre Grande, Manzanilla, Longdenville and Tacarigua.

Sarcastic tongue in cheek, she urged that this standard be made official, “before we apply to the world to practise a new language”. So that, San Fernando, her address, would officially become “Sando”, stopping other pretence.

The vacancy where knowledge of history and of foreign languages once stood is being filled by an anything-is-anything indifference to precision of speaking or hearing.

We’re in a Carnival season when more and more Trini speakers from Sandy Grandy to Tagariqua will say “soaker” when they mean “soca”.

One singer of that, defending his smut on the radio last week, claimed adherence to a tradition of “double intender”. Which is self-explanatory. No?

Thanks to soaker/soca, the Trini ear is becoming one of tin. Some critics even say there’s now less and less knowledge or sharpness between the Trini ears.

Last Monday, Debbie Jacob wrote, “Carnival has also become a cesspool of plagiarism”. People don’t know and likely don’t care that they’re listening to recycled melodies. Ms Jacob said the “new wave” radio stations, meeting no felt need, seldom say who is singing what, or give related credits.

Last week, too, NCC TV ran a 1983 documentary, in which Kitchener and Sparrow complained about music pirates’ using then cutting-edge technology of cassette tapes. Sparrow told the interviewer that among his own Kitchener favourites is the song with the chorus, “Mama have, Papa have ... Blessed be the child that have his own shilling.”

I had always thought that theme plagiarised jazz singer Billie Holiday’s 1939 “God Bless the Child”: “Your Mama may have ... Your Papa may have ...”. Now, what else did Denis Solomon have in mind when he described Kitchener’s statue as that of a “prancing mountebank”? A mocking pretender?