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| Friday, 16 July 2010 11:28 |
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FOR HALF MY life, I tried hard to fit in with others and never really managed it, so now I hardly try. Better to be a standout lone wolf than lost in a flock of sheep, I always say; but then, I've always had to say it; and often to myself, to boot. In my case, disparity began at home, with parents who must have spent more and more time, the older I grew, wondering if I was really their child. It would have been all right if it was just my Dad, but I suspect the old Trini catchphrase of, "Mother, baby; father - maybe" applied to both my parents: "Mother, father; baby? Hope not!" If anything, my father probably saw more of himself in me than my mother did of herself. If you ignore the approach to work as self-defining and the hairline that is ever receding, I wasn't very much like my father - but I'm nothing at all like my mother (unless you count the stubbornness). Nowadays, the only agreement she and I can come to is a mystification on each of our parts as to how the other's mind must work. (Do I need to explain this is comic hyperbole and the best parts of my self come from my father?)My siblings didn't help. In our youth, they were hardly similar and in adulthood hugely different. My elder siblings, who set the offspring pace, or at least accepted it like good metronomes, unfailingly did as my parents directed. I, to my parents' consternation & irritation (and my own salvation), never would do as I was told, or even asked (unless it made sense to me; what can I say? They put me so; or I stay so, anyway). My younger brother fell in with the pack with his first steps, leaving me all the clearer the black sheep, a position I probably still retain in that organisation (though my mother would probably see it as, "Devil take the hindmost"). "From the earlies", as they say in Laventy, I found out, in what might ironically be called an intimate fashion, that one could be family but not familiar. That perhaps inborn feeling of being an outsider persisted in the sphere of education, too. Though I went to a private primary school, it wasn't much of a privilege. It was run by nuns even less tolerant of dissent than my parents. My father would at least pretend to listen to what I thought before telling me to change it to what he thought; the nuns had one resolve: to beat some sense into me. In the two years leading up to the 11-Plus exam, I got "licks" maybe every day, certainly every week. I got so much licks, I developed an immunity to it, a necessary talent for anyone cursed with the notion that things might be done differently in the West Indies. Those nuns would beat me for anything. (Most strangely, to my nine-year-old self, they would beat me for being fidgety; did they imagine I'd be less inclined to squirm after being flogged? My welts were supposed to rub themselves? My bottom was supposed to settle easier on the seat?) Going to the Savannah wasn't a stroll in the park, either. Trinidad was still largely racially segregated along geographical lines, Africans in towns, Indians in the country, white folks in the suburbs (and the Chinese in the shops & groceries, I guess). In St Anns, we all went into the river together, as little boys, but, as adults, we weren't all in the swim. Forty years ago, the society was racially confused enough for black people to throw the beige, brown and off-white into the pile of whites, the way you'd toss a striped sock in with the cricket gear on laundry day; which would have been all right if the whites didn't cohere to themselves rather than adhere to anything with a little colour in it, like water with oil. At the Country Club, they must have thought the gardener had brought his little boy. Going to Brasil or Venezuela didn't help, because my Portuguese ended with my surname and my Spanish consisted entirely of "alpagats", "pelau" and Don Quixote. Going to London or New York might even have been worse, because I didn't sound like anybody I looked like and couldn't speak to anyone who looked like me. In London, once, a taxi driver said I "looked South American but talked coloured". So I know a thing or two about being left out, and may understand the psychology of the dispossessed better than most. I could probably go far in the PNM now. The feeling of being a victim that is never far away for even successful West Indians must be the vibe in Balisier House. If the former ruling political party could treat the former, snap election-calling Prime Minister the way they'd like, they'd be serving creamed Manning at the next fundraiser. One dotish man has lost smart cards for the whole tribe. There was, as there should have been, a feeling of triumph in Trinidad & Tobago at having dumped Mr Manning and the excesses and foolish choices he personified. But fully 285,000 people voted for the PNM; and that does not add up to a rainbow Parliament. Every one of those nearly 300,000 people - which is not that much less than the 315,000 who voted for the People's Partnership - is feeling, in their marrow, that they do not belong. It was necessary to get rid of Mr Manning's PNM but it is not enough to have brought them down. We must build something up that includes us all. BC Pires is on the fence and hoping it's not lined with razor wire.
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  written by Dr L Neville Roachlord, July 16, 2010
Strangely enough, your narrative created within me a feeling of kinship, to identify and relate with most of what you've revealed. Whilst I did not attend a Roman Catholic school, the emphasis on being told what to do has always been an enigma. The formative years, at college, university, being married, even being a father and grandfather, my misfortune, perhaps good fortune, has always been the right to be me. Thus creating the person I am today, an individual who is happy within himself, who knows himself (as much as anyone can) trying to live within the realm of today's society.
written by Dr L Neville Roachlord, July 16, 2010 Memory believes before knowing remembers. William Faulkner (Light in August)1932.
 written by Chau, July 20, 2010
Well BC... What can I say...
You're different. ...same as the rest of us.
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