Sunday 30 January 2022

THE REAL MAN OF THE YEAR 2021 (I Mean, Honestly...)

THE REAL MAN OF THE YEAR

(I Mean, Honestly…)


When 2021 started, our Man of The Year looked like he was under siege.  Up against the ropes. Backed into a corner. And other cliches.


Chastanet’s ruling United Workers Party was painting him as a stuttering, half-witted idiot on social media. Supporters of his own party were pointing to his deputy (Ernest Hilaire) as the kind of prime minister the future demands. People on the fringes of partisan politics were being persuaded that our guy was a good guy, a stalwart, a great hand to have around…but not really leadership material.


DOESN’T LOOK LIKE A WINNER TO ME…


To anyone who didn’t know him personally, it looked like The Man was losing ground, his stock was dropping before it even went public and his ‘leadership’ career was over before it even began. He just didn’t look like a winner.


Where Chastanet was all flash and metropolitan accents, Philip J Pierre was dull and unsophisticated. Where Chastanet was as light skinned as a man with a black grandmother could get, Philip J Pierre was as dark brown as a man could get without actually being black skinned. Where Chastanet was full of visionary promises of a great leap forward for the island, Philip J Pierre was nothing more than an unspoken promise that things could get back to normal. Chas was a heavyweight and this guy was a middleweight at best, both physically and in terms of his presence. There was no comparison on a superficial level - which is where it matters most these days.


In the second year of pandemic protocols, Pierre held less political meetings and press conferences than any other political leader before him.


It was like The Man wasn’t really trying to win the election at all.


For several months in 2021, it looked rather like Chastanet’s UWP was running a successful air war, bombarding Pierre’s Labour Party with accusations against its leaders, boasts of their achievements and reminders of why they lost the last election.


And Philip J Pierre looked like he was taking punch after punch straight in the face.


Was this guy even trying to defend himself?


Perhaps we just all forgot who Philip J Pierre was.


WHO IS THAT BLACK MAN, ANYWAY?


Here was a guy who ran against UWP legend Romanus Lansiquot and fought one losing battle after another until he finally won. Here was a guy who turned Castries East, a faithful UWP constituency into a seat they can’t ever get back - at least not while he is still alive. Here was a guy who was now the longest serving Member of Parliament and showing every sign that he would beat the record holder within a few years.


Here was a man who was both a real life successful entrepreneur and a long serving public servant. (Unlike the then prime minister who was a fictional entrepreneur and a yes-man when he was in the public service.)


We all underestimated him, supporters and detractors alike.


And instead of being overwhelmed by it, he simply turned it into his most potent weapon.


While Chas and the UWP were busily dancing round the political ring trying to score headshots and knockouts, Philip J Pierre was working the body.


For one thing, he already knew that the tide had turned on the Chastanet government as it had on every single one term government since 2006. Before he even did anything, he was poised to win the 2021 election  by 11-6 seats. All he had to do was not fuck it up.


It’s a brave politician who can admit when it is time to do nothing and let the enemy defeat himself. That level of politician is called a warrior and so far there had only ever been one of them in the history of Saint Lucian politics.


But apart from courage, The Man had Genius. Secret genius that had never shone in public before and so, no one even knew it was there.


He knew what many of us didn’t know and applied it in a way none of us would have.


MASTER OF MARCHAND ARTS


You see, while Chastanet’s UWP was trying to create rifts in the Labour Party, they had a couple of rifts of their own.


One rift was with a former UWP minister who was on radio and television attacking them every single chance he got, pretty much doing all of the Labour Party’s dirty work for them. He was smearing the Chastanet government with enough slime that anyone who was gullible enough to believe the government’s lies of success would also have doubts about the character of that government.


Another sat silently in Chastanet’s Cabinet, biding his time…biding his time…


When the right moment came, both of these former ministers of the UWP announced they were against the Chastanet government and would run against them. Chastanet seemed to be taken by surprise by at least one of them. Two UWP seats were now three way races, with the ruling party’s support split in two. The timing could not have been worse for Chas and his government.


But would the UWP faithful stick to their party or to their rebel candidates?


No one could be sure what the answer was…except Philip J Pierre.


The answer was, ‘It doesn’t matter how many Flambeaus defect from the party with their candidate IF ALL OUR VOTERS SUPPORT THEIR REBELS.


WHAT? The embattled leader of Labour was coming out of the corner with devastating body blows.


‘You mean you want us to vote for Richard Frederick?’


‘Yes.’


‘You want us to vote for Stephenson King?’


‘After all what they did when they were in office?’


‘Yes. Vote for them.’


‘You’re going to bring these people into OUR PARTY?’


‘No. Just keeping them out of that party.’


‘What…? Oh. Oooooh…’


It was genius. A winning party had never taken such a gamble before. Instead of taking a chance on winning the seat, they simply guaranteed that their opponents would lose it.


When the result came out, it was better than anyone who supported Pierre could imagine. His leadership had resulted in winning 13 seats - two more than any party in the last four elections. Body blow after body blow. But it wasn’t over yet.


Of the remaining four seats, he had deprived Chastanet’s UWP of two of them, leaving Chastanet with just two seats - the second most humiliating number of seats an opposition leader ever had to his name in our country.


Headshots.


The knockout punch of the century.


And you’re telling me you think that Philip J Pierre is not Man of the Year?


Are you smoking the bananas instead of eating them?


Are you still underestimating him?


Well, good. Because that’s what he wants. That’s how he’s going to beat you again next time.


Tuesday 3 August 2021

THE PREACHER, THE PIMP & THE PRINCE

THE PREACHER, THE PIMP & THE PRINCE

Ok. Time to remember everything.

It was a knee.

Then it was a knee to the neck.

Once upon a time...

The kid felt the rage rise up in his abdomen and the burning in his palms as his own fingernails pierced his skin.

'You're killing him.'

'He can't breathe...'

'You should be ashamed!'

The street sang protest in many colors as the cop slowly killed the man in black and white.

The street was alive with chaos. People on both sides of the street were making their modern genuflections: camera phones raised to eye level in worshipful prayer. People's memories may have been shortened in the 21st century, but the internet never forgets.

Two of the cops were holding Georgie's legs and torso down while Sergeant Chauvin dug his knee deeper into Georgie's windpipe. One more cop was standing between them and the crowd of cameraphoners. That was Vincente.

Georgie  shuddered. He stopped wheezing, gasping and wretching. He was dying for sure. There wre four cops, only three of who were acting like killers, while dozens, maybe over 100 citizens witnessed them employing a most excessive violence to pacify a non-violent offender who never once showed any sign of resisting arrest. Witnessing and recording were the only weapons they had the courage to employ.

Cowards.

Bloodless, treacherous cowards. Posing as people with conscience, when really they were just taking their own stab at five minutes of second hand celebrity.

The kid put down his phone.

He took off his backpack and put it inside. (No point losing it, even if he got killed.) He adjusted his mask, a homemade mask of an old t-shirt with a Nike symbol as a crest. He knelt reverently and tied a shoelace. He pulled his hoodie over his head. Then he broke into a run, straight for the one officer who wasn't busy killing Georgie. He jumped, launching himself into the air and lifted a boot. Just one single boot. It smacked the officer in the chin.

The people around broke into cheers and their cameras turned to worship him.

Some of the tough guys on the sidewalk, not wanting to be left out, jumped over the police car and descended on Georgie's assassins with mighty and furious violence. The officer who was kicked in the face, sat up, stood up, drew his gun and headed the kid's way.

The kid spun on his heels and sped off in the opposite direction as the cop fired multiple rounds into the air and those killing Georgie found themselves suddenly on the defensive trying to reach for weapons as they got crowded.

'Freeze, motherfucker!'

But the kid knew that the only sure way to survive this day was to not get caught by killer cops. The cop gave chase, matching the boy's speed as he cut through increasingly shadowy corners, alleys and cracks of the ghetto.

'Don't make me kill you! I don't want to kill you!' Vincente shouted, firing off another round.

A bullet tore through the top left corner of the backpack at an angle. The kid felt the momentum drag him to the left and he skidded haltingly on the sidewalk before making a sudden right turn. Vincente raced around the corner and ran, face first, into a length of lead pipe. A red mist, as Vincente spun slowly. The cop stumbled around like a headless chicken, in slow motion, his gun still pointing, somewhat impotently, from his right hand, at nothing in particular. He fired a shot at the nothing.

So the kid hit him again. And again.

It felt good to be the instrument of vengeance.

He stood over the bleeding body, the lead pipe dripping and suddenly, the air was filled with little silver sparks. The air around the silver sparks turned black and then the blackness consumed everything until all that was left were the silver sparks surrendering to the darkness, the giant stain spreading over his mind. His heart pumped faster, but his knees buckled as he realized what had happened to him. The sticky wet warmth spreading over his left shoulder and breast was spreading down his arm. He couldn't see it, but he knew what it was.

He had assaulted an officer. He had resisted arrest. He had run from the law. He had attacked and attempted to murder an officer, wounding him so severely that he might have to go on disability. And now...

Now he was bleeding out in an alley, with the evidence of his crime bleeding its way from an assault and battery charge to a full on murder charge. From jail to death row. And he couldn't run. He couldn't even help his victim to stay alive so that he could take a lesser charge than homicide.

In a few minutes, he might not even have to worry about murder one. Dozens of cops were already answering the call for back up. When they found him, they would probably beat him within an inch of his life. If he was lucky. Maybe they would just cross the line. If he was really lucky, some maniacs would just fill his head with lead before the beatings even started. If he was really, really lucky, he would die before his executioners even got here.

IDIOTS IN COSTUME PLAYING REVOLUTIONARY

THE INTRODUCTION OF JACKAL & SPARROWHAWK

'I don't like this, Martin. I don't like this at all.'

Malcolm Xavier had just come out of his office in the bar when his friend and rival, Martin Bones came briskly through the chaos toward him. Malcolm was holding a shotgun in one hand, keeping it pointed at the ground and keeping his finger off the trigger.

'Damned stupid thugs. Illiterate gangsters.'

Martin had no sympathy for foolishness and even less for idiots in costume playing revolutionary.

'Burning down everything but the goddamned precinct and the goddamned banks. Damned fools don't even know who their enemy is. A man dies and to them, it's just a shot of getting a free TV from Target.'

Martin's right hand was on the grip pf a holstered pistol. Unlike Malcolm, he didn't use firearms for show. Martin would never threaten anyone with a gun. Like his daddy used to say, 'You're either going to use your gun or you're not. You show a man your gun, you best kill him.'

STRAY BULLETS 1: AFTER ABEOKUTA

 AFTER ABEOKUTA

To dig gold and diamonds, you need humans. To grow cash crops, you need humans. To trade and transport, you need humans. 

Humans are more valuable than all the gold and diamonds, cash crops and merchandise put together.

Ask history.

Ask economics.

But you can't sell humans.

That's how we got in trouble. When we sell humans, we devalue ourselves.

After Abeokuta. Before the fall of Nri.

Christophe was so far from home that he knew there was no going home again. He left home in the islands to go home to Africa and found that he was just as lost as he had ever been.

It was Dahomey that broke him in his heart. It was Dahomey that made him into something that he himself did not recognize. It was the great Dahomey king Ghezo in his oriental silks and Italian sandals and that stupid, vain parasol he carried above his head everywhere.

Christophe knew the tricks of politics that forced wise leaders to openly do things that they were steadfastly against. Ghezo was playing a game he inherited from his grandfather. Old Agaja knew that to traffick in people would make his kingdom weaker. In fact, it would make all the kingdoms weaker. Agaja wanted to trade in palm oil. And gold and minerals and metals. He wanted to trade in ideas and techniques. He wanted to compete in peace and for prosperity. But the other kingdoms on every side of him wanted glass. And textiles. And guns.

So he went to war, defeated them piece by piece and sold their people into slavery.

Refreshed by new resources and clothed in newly acquired powers of powers of terror and violence, he still tried to play the wise king. Agaja tried to use his new powers and wealth to bring his newly subdued subjects out of the slave trade and into a more prosperous peace. But besting an enemy in a battle and selling his captured soldiers as captives was not enough to convince the Oyo, the Aro and the half breed Portuguese traders on the coast to give up the source of all their wealth and power. The good king decided that to bring an end to the slave trade, there was only one thing to do - he had to conquer them all.

To do so, he would need more wealth and weapons. And the fastest way to get them? The slave trade.

Better than the annual head business, he comforted himself.

Perhaps he told himself that he was saving so many from having their heads separated from their necks. Every year, the Fon priests would sacrifice thousands of captives in a bloody festival meant to ensure that both Dahomey's enemies and its citizens would understand that the gods demanded the lives of all those who opposed the king. Perhaps he thought he had enough years left on his life to win the peace so completely that the next generation would not be diverted from the path he set for them.

He did not.

When he died, Dahomey did not pretend to be trying to end the slave trade by selling their enemies as captives.

Within two generations, his grandson Ghezo had reduced the plan for peace to a vain pretense. There would be no end to the people traffic. Not as long as the the West African royalty and nobles were growing more rich and powerful.

Christophe had sailed with the British for West Africa. He thought he was going to liberate Africans from slave traders.

When they bombarded a town for switching trade allegiances to the French, Christophe abandoned the British. He relieved himself of his uniform, except for his boots, belts and weapons and headed for Ouidah and Alladah. That's where he would meet up with the Dahomey.

The Dahomey army was everything a good soldier could want - except for being an effective fighting force against foreign slave traders. Because he was a soldier who had fought both against and on the side of the foreigners, he rose up in the Dahomey military, until he became a favorite of the king - one of the special guard who did not protect the king as much as do his bidding in ways that ensured no one could see the king's hand in the doing. He was, in effect, the king's favorite assassin.

It was all well and good being a Dahomey assassin under Ghezo's father, Agonglo and his brother Adandlozan. That war, politics and trade would meet at the end of his blade was still a better fate than what he escaped on the island. He could have ended up blacklisted from working on the docks for singing some satirical lyrics at a rum shop cabaret. He could have ended up back in jail.

When the pretty young prince took the kingship after his brother's death, he spoke the same words he grandfather, his father and his brother had spoken to keep the peace between the people of the Fon and beyond. For Ghezo, however, peace talk was just talk. He had no interest in peace or palm oil. He would sell his grandfather's corpse for a length of blue silk.

Twenty years fighting for freedom came to nothing.

It was a long way from Dahomey to Abeokuta. To make matters worse, many people had never even heard of the City of the Free and many of those didn't even think it was real.

A place in Africa with no slave trade? Ha!

Black skinned people were the single most valuable thing in the world. Why would any king with a strong warrior party not raid villages for captives? It's like saying a farmer would plough his field for crops instead of digging for gold when his tools started plucking nuggets out of the turned soil.

By the time Christophe reached Abeokuta, it was too late. He was only on time to help save them from annihilation. For the rest of his life, Christophe regretted not abandoning Dahomey sooner and heading for the free city the first time he heard about it. Twenty years in Dahomey had only made him hate the kings of Africa. Ten years in Abeokuta may have salvaged his love for humanity.

As luck would have it, he came just a year before it was time to watch it all fall down. All he could do was help slow down the invaders and organize the citizens into escape parties headed in the direction of another near mythical kingdom - Nri.

'How come we are stronger than them, but they can defeat us and trample over us and buy and sell us?'

'Weapons and traitors.'

'So simple? Guns and slave catchers?'

'Yeah. And, well...what supports the weapons. Like ships. And books. And a special kind of  greed. Greed that is not satisfied by having. Greed that is only satisfied by getting more.'

The blue man had a different lilt of speech and different features from all the rest. He was somehow blacker than any West African. Like Christophe, he did not resemble any tribe or ethnic group that anyone in West Africa could recognize. He was called Nilo and was friends with some powerful people on the council at Abeokuta.

'Why are you coming with us? Why don't you just go home?' Christophe had never spoken with him before, although they had met and exchanged pleasantries several times.

'Eventually,' Nilo replied. 'Home is very far away for me.'

'So after all this, you still have your own war to fight?'

'Not you? Are you ready to go home?'

'There is no home for me. My war is already over. And I lost. I just keep losing.'

The blue man laughed out loud.

'So...why do you keep fighting?'

JACKAL & SPARROWHAWK

Home.

It is important to have a place to go home to, even if you intend never to go home again. It's important to have people to go home to. Without home, you are just a wave on the endless ocean being birthed and crashing to your death with no purpose, no significance, no consequence.

'One day, they will tell stories of us, our escape and our exile. The children will sing about you when they play warrior games.'

Nilo was half-laughing to himself. Christophe did not have such a highly developed sense of humor.

'No one will remember us. No one cares about anything except a bunch of escaped slaves wandering the jungle like lost cattle. Nobody cares about these people.'

Christophe pulled himself away from where the water was dripping in through the makeshift roof. Both Nilo and Christophe had their legs pulled in, fetal position, because the shelter was too small for the full length of a man. Nilo curled up like a child, his face shining with excitement in this moment of despair. Christophe just looked uncomfortable.

'Nobody cares,' Nilo repeated. 'Nobody cares but you. And I, personally, think that will be enough.'

'I am not their leader. I am just a lost boy from an island made of fly shit who can never back.'

'Maybe...But you are the one they turn to in a crisis. You are the light in the dark, the great shield in the night of spears, the only bridge that leads away from the fire and over the river.'

'Your English is very good, Nilo.'

'My grandfather was a shoeshine at a British port.'

Did he teach you how to lie, thought Christophe. He didn't know who or what Nilo really was. All he really knew was that Nilo was against the trade, Nilo was warrior smart and Nilo's words usually matched his actions exactly - except when he was talking about himself. Of course.

'We like to think that people...you know...people are brave...people are smart...people are organized. But in the big song of everyone, people just want someone to lead them, to show it's okay to be brave, to bring them victory. They need somebody to show them how to be strong when the world is drowning in rain and armies of enemies are on their tail. They need someone who would die for them. They need someone they can die for.'

'Why don't they get someone they can live for?'

'They already have that. They have family. They need something else to die for. Something bigger than the life of a child or a wife. Bigger than a family or a tribe.'

'It's a nice bedtime story. The lost boy becomes a great warrior who leads runaway captives to a new promised land out of the reach of the cruel invaders.'

'Yes! You see it? You see it?'

Christophe couldn't help but chuckle. It would be an entertaining story if Nilo was talking about someone else.

'There's already a king where we are going.'

'You say that because you think we are stopping at Nri. But why would it be any different there? Abeokuta had a council chosen by people. Nri has a king. And we both know by now, all kings are bad.

'Even your king?' Would Nilo deny it or condemn his king?

'My king is not just a killer. He is the chief assassin of the land.'

'Does he terrorize his people?'

'He terrorizes his enemies. And in doing so, reminds his people what a terror he is.'

'And this is what you wish for me?'

Nilo turned to Christophe.

'You are no king. But you are a true warrior. The best kind. You don't betray and you don't die foolishly.'

'People died under my protection.'

'The children will sing for them too. Everyone will remember that revolt at Alladah. Everyone will remember that slave who went across the sea, made himself a free man and came back to burn the ports.'

'I only burned one port.'

'There's still time. They will burn other ports and give you the glory just so they can say, "I was there when the Sparrowhawk burned Ouidah. And Freetown. And Gold Coast."'

'All of that is behind us. And I am not turning back to burning them for my vainglory.'

'Well, brother. What can I tell you? That's just the way that legend works. It has nothing to do with you personally. People make the legend they need out of the leader they have. The leader is made of legend. The man is just a seed.

'You left home in the islands because it wasn't home. You came home to Africa but it wasn't home either. Because there is no home for you. But you will lead them home. That matters, Sparrowhawk. It matters a lot. More than either of us can know.'

'It's a good story,' Christophe conceded of Nilo's fiction.

'Yes,' Nilo agreed.

'Too bad it won't be true.'

Nilo turned to Christophe suddenly, eye to eye in the rain under the cover of branches and leaves.

'It's true. It is already true even though you haven't done it yet. Even though you never do some of it. It won't be fact. But it will be true.'

'What's the difference? Facts have to be true.'

'Facts have to be true, but truth does not always have to be factual. Sometimes, we know the truth before the fact. Sometimes, we know the truth in spite of the fact. But this time, it is no problem between facts and truth because the truth is you are taking these people to safety. You are taking them home. That's a fact. That's the truth.

SOUKOU: The Book Of No Mercy

 SOUKOU: The Book Of No Mercy

THE BLOOD GIVER TREE

You are going to kill us all.

You don't remember what we are about.

You have forgotten your purpose.

Why? Why would you do such a thing? What makes you think we want to change what we are?

He hates himself. That's why he is doing what he is doing. He hates us all.

No one thought to ask: 'How did you do it? How does it grow?' No one thought to acknowledge, 'This is a miracle.'

He would not have had the answer anyway. He couldn't really remember. He had taken no notes on what he had done.

'The new specimens are more promising. The zoological specimens are mature enough to splice into the botanical specimens. The hybrid is emerging from the dicotyledon with mainly botanical features. However, there seems to be a network of red (and to a lesser extent, bluish) fluids running through the light green saplings.'

Matthias was already working as a doctor when the idea came to him. That was, maybe, about 130 years ago. In the midst of a plague of worms and cholera, there was an increase of miscarriages and abortions. It was hard to find healthy specimens, even among women who were feigning miscarriages in the hopes of not having to carry a baby through the plague and famine ridden world.

However, his first batch of experiments yielded results he never could have dreamed of. The splicing had delivered thoughtful, telepathic breadfruit and tamarinds that sang in chorus and choir, without words, but with clear, unmistakable prepubescent voices. The papaya made sounds like children eating playfully: 'Nyum nyum, nyum, nyum!' all day and all night; and oranges, grapefruit and limes who chattered non-stop until they fell asleep, snoring and whistling through their 'nostrils.'

And they all smelled like good, healthy, rich living blood. It was when he came to the mango that he realized what he had done. The mango as quiet, silent, like a fruit, even though through its translucent skin you could see the seed sleeping like a fetus in the red glowing juice of the fruit.

The mango tree was as silent as its fruit. They were, unlike the other genii, essentially fruit. The other fruits were not. They were people.

He picked a breadfruit. He was startled when it cried out in pain. He cut it open and it screamed and gasped while the others, in the tree, looking down, mumbled and moaned, while they witnessed the murder, helplessly. Even though it was night, he could see, for the first time, he could see their faces. They all had faces. Human faces. Men, women, but mostly children.

All those years he had spent trying to teach plants to grow blood were wasted. Instead of simply making blood for sap, the plants had learnt how to be human. They were sentient. There was no doubt. They were no longer plants. They were, in fact, more than animal.

He licked the red milk of the breadfruit, where the white sap should bleed.

'Blouwa!!!'

He spat. No one could consume this, not even in the worst of times. It tasted like breadfruit sap, except rich and rotten and sick. The breadfruit continued gasping, pleading in its own way for life, not wanting to die. He cut the breadfruit again in four pieces, put it in water and buried it in a hole in the earth.

The rest of them....

He delayed as long as he could, but there was only one answer for his mistake. He armed himself with blades - an ax and a cutlass - and chopped it all down and burned it. 

Except for the silent mango. And the buried breadfruit, in the warm, dark womb of the earth mother.

CHILDHOOD MEMORIES OF A BREADFRUIT TREE

The mango tree may have turned away from the horror and blocked the unhappy business from its mind.

But the breadfruit tree remembered everything.

Everything she could not see and hear, the ground told her, so vividly that she could see the screams and hear the twisting of wood in the flame, taste the wood turning to charcoal turning to ash. She could see the merciless ax swinging, shimmering in the moonlight. She could not see the man. The man was black now. Blacker than the night full of clouds. The man was thunder and his ax was lightning. It was murder. It was massacre. It was genocide. There would be no more such as them on the face of all the earth. It was genocide, but also, it was not, because the man was god. He had given them life and now, their mad god was taking it away.

The greatest mercy was for those who died that night in the fire. For many days after that, the half-burnt and severely wounded lay whimpering on the ground in heaps the man had made of them. He dug ditches and he buried them under raw wood and set that wood on fire and covered that with burnt dirt and covered that with tinder and set that tinder on fire.

Maybe he gained silence.

But the ground moaned and wept and crept with new strange ghosts for months.

The breadfruit was the first tree to ever have the sense to be afraid of a man. The tree did not want to be born. It wanted to die in the subterranean, sunless womb of its mother. But its mother would not let it die, would not deprive it of salts or water, would not let it become too hot or too cold. And so it was that the tree, haunted to insanity by the ghosts of that lost generation, burst from its mother's belly, eyes half closed for fear of seeing the the face of its father.

The man ignored the sprout and the sprout stayed silent, fearful of provoking him. The man would sit silently for hours. The man would smoke and drink and begin to sing and dance to his own unseen ghosts of the past until he broke down crying - at first, a low, sad sobbing, growing deeper and rougher until it was a grunting, then a roaring rain of rage.

The man would disappear from the house for days and night. The man would come back with a woman and dance with her and drink with her and finally, drink her until she was empty. The man would lay drunk and unconscious, sleeping, cradling the shrunken empty body of the woman. The women.

The man dreamed, but the tree could not dream, only feel the rumblings of it when the man mumbled in his sleep.

'You want what you do not understand.'

The sleeping man would touch his lips with two fingers: 'You want it because they forbid it. And who are they? Who the hell are they? Presumptuous pedestrian plebes, that's who they are.'

The man had promised a woman something. But that was not what he gave her. He gave her the only thing he had to give. He gave her death.

The god of death, the breadfruit tree thought. He is the death god.

The man would awake and put a woman's shrunken carcass in a box. The man would sweep and scrub and clean through the night. The man would take the box away and when he returned, he would sleep for three days and nights.

Then, the man would go out and come back with another woman. And another. And another.

"I can't believe that just happened. So you really are a...I didn't think they were...Are fairies real? Are genies real? Are angels real? You must be the Devil...Do it. Do it to me. I can't resist you. Why can't I resist you. You're the black Devil and you have come to kill me and steal my soul.'

'I want nothing to do with your soul. I only want your body.'

'Oh God. Help me. Why won't God help me? Why can't I resist you? I feel it. I feel it! It's too much! I can't take it! It's too much! Don't stop! It hurts! It hurts! Oh my God, don't ever stop!'

The man was drunken, unconscious, sleeping. The man was putting a woman in a box. The man was standing in front of the young breadfruit tree, barely more than a sapling, looking directly at it.

'You must think I am a monster,' he said. 'Maybe I am. Maybe you are a monster, too. Or maybe, you just don't understand...'

The man stood silently, imprisoned in his thoughts.

'You're right,' he told the young breadfruit tree. 'These women are not the true object of our revenge. It is the men who have to pay...'

Thus it was be brought home men.

Most would have been incapacitated or at least pacified, well deceived by the time he brought them in. There was little conversation. He would break their necks and drink from them while the crippled bodies were still alive.

'I don't like the taste of fear,' he told the tree. 'Maybe that's why I prefer the women. I wish they would leave the homosexuals alone, so they wouldn't have to be so sickly and poxed. But then, the homosexuals are not the target either, are they? That preference does not make or unmake a racist.'

The man killed many men. But instead of oversleeping, he was restless.

'You don't trust me, do you?'

The man moved his chair and table closer to the tree.

'I guess you don't have a choice. I am the god of you.'

The tree and the man had agreed of something. It was good to have something to agree on, since they were stuck together, inseparable until death.

The man went away for many days.

The man came back with many other people, men and women. They danced and sang and ate and drank and talked and fucked. And then, the ones the color of night killed the ones the color of day and feasted on their blood. They all lay in drunken stupor among the exsanguinated corpses.

The cycle repeated. Years flowed by.

The tree grew. Then, one day, it flowered. And the flowers began humming in a high pitch, like a choir of children in a field of sugar cane.

'Be silent,' said their mother. 'Do not let him hear you. Do not let any of them ever hear you. Man is a mad god. He feeds on his own, like a plant that eats its own fruit and seed. Man is only good at killing. Do not do anything that calls his attention. Do not make a sound.'

Every day, the tall young breadfruit tree whispered to her flowers. At night, the flowers stayed silent, except for sometimes cooing in their dreams.

Then, the man was standing in front of the tree.

'I don't want to know,' he said. 'I just do not want to know.'

He clipped the flowers, gathered them, every single one, burnt and buried them. He clipped the top branches of the tree, so it would grow no taller and bear flowers at inconvenient heights. The tree couldn't hold back muffled screams. The man cut the branches, burned and buried them, without giving any sign he had heard a thing. When he was finished, he considered the tree.

'I know you can hear me. I know I'm not crazy.'

The tree wished for a breeze to break the awkward stillness, but the breeze did not come. A cloud covered the moon, then passed, exposing it again.

'You don't have to talk to me. I think you know what I did. I had to do it. They were...they just....things like that should not be. Nature does not intend it. If I had let them live, they would spread. They would not know how to hide. They would not know when to stop. There would be too much fear and chaos. I made a mistake and I had to take it back. I couldn't just let it go out of control.'

The tree held its thoughts tight and close. It wanted to call him a hypocrite. He was the one nature did not intend. He was the one who spread fear and chaos.

'I know. If only there was some dignified way to kill myself. If only I had the means and the courage.'

The tree determined that it would find the courage, build the courage in him. It was the only way to help him. It was the only way to get revenge.

But how would a tree kill a man when it had no poison except its own words?

XUMBI: Blood of My Blood

When Xumbi gave the Gana the poison cup and accepted the throne of Palmares, he knew there was a possibility it would end like this. What he could not know was how much it would hurt. But so many hundreds of miles from the burning ashes of the twin kingdom, with no place to call home, no way to turn back and no possibility of surviving what came next, the once confident young warrior who had, on numerous occasions performed and achieved that which was previously thought impossible, found himself on the edge of a precipice, ready to effect his own defeat.

In a way, he accomplished that task, too.

Xumbi never returned from that long walk through the mountainous jungle. The Xumbi who returned was so different that it was as if all that remained of the former freedom fighter were his physical features, his manner of speaking, his hatred of the slavers and his penchant for doing the impossible in the service of the people of the night.

'Do you want to live for ever?'

No one knows where Xumbi went that day, who he met or what transpired. No one knows and Xumbi never told. He promised to write it all down one day but either he never did or his recollections have been lost, weathered, weakened and finally blown away by the relentless wind, rain and decadence of colonialism.

'The king is dead...long live the king.'

Who can clearly remember the ritual he performed on his return, when by his magic and miracles, he remade his followers, so they were like gods, compared to men?

In this ritual of death and rebirth, he stood at the head of the circle, the wound from the nail in his hand pouring blood. Into the calabash, the blood of new life gathered in a great pool, reflecting the moon. Holding the calabash in his other hand, he gave them to drink as he wrote on their foreheads.

'When we die, we burn in hell for ever. But while we live, they will pay with their blood and their children's blood, with fear and their women's fear.'

He wrote on their foreheads two symbols in blood. The first symbol was the same for each of them. The second symbol was different for each of them. As such, each knew the personal sigils of every other but no one knew the personal sigil written on their own forehead except as much as it was written, not on their skins, but somewhere deeper in their substance.

'By these signs, I bury you and all your life before this. By this blood, I give you life - new life that cannot be taken from you, but can only be forfeited through your own fault and doing.'

It must have occurred to the others that they were partaking in a suicide, a spiritual and symbolic sacrifice that would deny their enemies the final certainty of their deaths. It would give refugees and runaways in the never-ending forest some undying sparks of hope with which to ignite new rage against cruelty and injustice. They probably thought it was one final 'Fuck you' to the masters and their hunters.

Imagine their surprise when they woke from the sleep induced by their sickness.

It was dusk. No telling what day it was.

The red of the sky penetrating their cave was like a furious, belligerent omnipresent flame, consuming everything except their precious shadows. There was confusion from having slept off the sickness through the day and awakening as though it was morning without first remembering what had transpired on the last night they could remember. Then came the disappointment of still being alive, at the failure of not even being able to kill themselves, of still having to pause at every unexpected sound, of still having to fight and run and fight again, repeating the cycle until all involved were inevitably defeated by time itself. Then came the silence, for what could be said to Xumbi after his great ritual had come to nothing.

Then came the night.

Xumbi painted his and their faces white.

He left the cave and they followed. Xumbi turned east at the bottom of the mountain. Xumbi was headed away from the forest, back to the place where they had spent seven years running from. They followed. Perhaps they thought they were now wrong about suicide and their king meant for them to make a symbolic last stand, dying like heroes in a great conflagration that would be seen and sung for generations.

Xumbi walked briskly. He broke into a jog. And then he ran. He was racing through the forest so fast it seemed that his feet were barely touching the ground. Their feet were barely touching the ground. The jungle raced past them and suddenly cleared into an opening that revealed a majestic landscape of blue-green mountain ranges. Xumbi raced into the opening and flung himself. There was no ground beneath him. They followed him without thinking. They had learned to die with Xumbi and he had delivered them alive into the arms of victory so many times. One last death and he would deliver them from the mouth of defeat.

They followed. And they learned that earth could no longer hold them down. They were free. Finally free. From forced labour. From running. From death itself.

He taught them how to feast.

No longer could they feast on the fruits of the earth like men, being, themselves, no longer men. He taught them that the satisfaction of their hunger and thirst was the satisfaction of their purpose. They were, at last, the great revengers they always wanted to be. Fruits were for men and the men who wronged them would be their fruits.

The fruit was so sweet. A new kind of sweet. A sweetness that ordinary men could never learn to savor.

First, they visited the administrative barracks of gold mines in Minas Gerais, starting of course, with Vila Rica. They were a long way from Pernambuco. A long way from Palmares. A long way from Africa. A long, long way from home.

In fact, there was no home anymore except for their togetherness.

When the serfs, slaves, peons and drudges woke up for work the next day, their drivers and overseers could not be found. A few days later, the strangely shrunken, bloodless corpses the bandeirantes and their brothers were found in a field by a river, abused by scavenging animals, but drained, worthless even to the eaters of carrion, who thought them diseased.

The Feast was pleasure and duty become one. It was sex and violence, orgiastic battle, hedonistic militancy. If there ever could be such a thing. The merging of victory and true physical satisfaction. It was revenge you could taste.

Not a one could regret the deal they had made to be the undying devils tormenting the tormentors, killing the killers and doing wrong to the wicked. Satisfaction had married achievement and now their souls were all pregnant with power.

The sound and the taste.

The fruit screamed to confirm that they were reduced by their fears to something less than human. The juice spurted hot and sweet, fresher than fresh picked cherries. Even in their fright, they were so slow, so weak as to be no different than if they were immobilized with no legs to run and no arms to flail. So scared. So submissive. So amenable to the finality and terror of true justice.

They licked the taste of vengeance from their lips.

For Palmares.

For the people of the mines and the plantations. For those on the auction block and those on the beds of rape. For all the children born, unborn and dead in slavery who would never know justice. Drunk with conquest and power and proof that they could punish the world for its wrongs, they had taken the corpses clumsily in the fields where no one could hear them scream and had floated home, tingling warmth from head to toe, even in the blustery cold of the high winds they rode.

High on their newfound sustenance, they staggered, as much as those who do not touch the ground may stagger, back into the cave, their collective tomb, their new world womb. Reborn, they slept as babes, dreaming new indecipherable dreams, writing their new lives on blank slates, sinking to new depths of peaceful slumber that slaves could never know.

Invincible they awoke, this time with no confusion, but rather, with all the confidence of those who know themselves the masters of their own fates as well as the fates of whomever they may chance to meet.

THE ANATOMY OF HATRED/ THE CULT OF VENGEANCE

At first, they focused on the obvious targets. The culprits.

And so, they cut a winding path of strange death through the mines and plantations of Minas Gerais.

'They must not  see us coming. They must not see us going. Only the ones who we seek must ever know we are there. Revenge is personal. We are not spreading fear. We are making them pay their debts.'

Over the next ten years, many of the most cruel masters, overseers and underlings disappeared from the face of the earth, supplanted by their heirs and blessed by fortune to wait their turn before vengeance would turn its attention back to them.

'We must go about this more sensibly - with better intelligence. We are acting on circumstance. We should have more intelligence so that we could pay sooner respects to the more deserving.'

The hunting party of a creole aristocrat went missing. The coach of a well-landed adminsitrator was found with his body and those of his retinue burnt to a curious crisp. The captains of slave ships repeatedly found drowned in apparent suicide, their drained bodies bloated with brine, their eyes and genitals eaten by fish. A dozen good gentlemen consumed by fire in a reputed brothel - none of the traumatized women harmed, several of them leaving the town soon afterward. Three bankers fell to their deaths from a cliff after a nighttime walk, which seemed quite uncharacteristic of them. Bandeirante after bandeirante...

'People are still talking. After that brothel, people are saying that flying devils came and tore at the men with their teeth.'

It was a feast of 150 years.

Then came the first change. A change designed to increase the hurt and to spread supernatural fear.

SOUKOU: THE PRIDE, THE POWER & THE PUNISHMENT DUE

A WOMAN NAMED WEDNESDAY

She used to be called Wednesday.

Was she Xumbi's mother or sister? She was the mother of Woe, the only one of the Merciless Ones who was born after Xumbi buried them in his blood and made them new. Woe often spoke of Xumbi as though he was her father. Was it because Xumbi was the only father she ever knew? Was it because Xumbi was father and brother to them all? Or was it because Xumbi and Eka were not related by blood at all?

Wednesday, who used to be called Eka in the old days when they were only human, was the real life patron saint of the armed struggled against slavery. Over the nearly 200 years between the end of the twin kingdom and the emancipation of the night people, she became a legendary, really a mythical figure. she was there when Gaspar Nyanga forged his power in Mexico, terrorizing those who dared to cross his border. She was there to give safe passage to John Horse when he led the Seminoles across the southern United States to settle new lands away from their home in Florida.

Over the hundred years after the so-called Emancipation, she was an unseen but seminal figure in the popularization of the blues and the development of jazz. When they tell the story of Robert Johnson making a deal with the Devil at the crossroads of his life, they are talking about the woman named Wednesday. She was the one who met Robert Johnson at the crossroads. Because of her, Charlie Parker and John Coltrane stayed super high thinking the drugs in their blood would keep her from harming them.

She was also familiar to the Comanche, the Apache and the Navajo, becoming a well-known and well-feared protector of the indigenous peoples in the fight for survival and preservation of land rights. If there were 99 more like her, the history of the America's would have been very different. So it would have been, also, if there were none like her. Many of those who survived to modern times owe their existence solely to her, for without her they would have suffered the fates of those who never met her - extinction.

The romance of Eka and Xumbi is one of the few things that does not succumb to the loss of memory.

The woman called Wednesday was the most human of all the Merciless.

But she was also the most merciless of them.

WHEN GODS CRY

'It is all very nice to brag about what we have achieved since Emancipation, and it is all well and good to say now is not the time to turn our backs, because the Klan in all its forms is out to get us and our people. But while we are here defending riches and property, Europe is over there dividing up Africa.'

'Serve them right,' said Woe. She looked into their shocked faces defiantly. 'I wasn't there. I didn't come across the salt water like many of you. But I can read a book. I know what they did to us. I know what they did to our ancestors. They are not night people. They are day-whippers, just like the Europeans. The white skins bought us, but they sold us. They fucking sold us. They are not our people. They wrote their own fates.'

Wednesday knew more than Woe could ever know. Somewhere inside of her swam the memories of a child named Eka who crossed the cruel stormy ocean in the rank, vile hull of a shameless ship on an evil mission. The girl in her deep memory, the girl diving in the translucent memory of her new being, the girl remembers that it was not the white man who burnt her village, rounded up her people, killed her grandparents and all the other old ones as well as all the sick. It was not white men who tied them all together and herded them from one outpost to another until they were on the coast at the edge of the continent. It wasn't the white man who first sold them.

It was their own nobility.

'It's one thing for them to conquer these continents and bring us here as slaves,' Wednesday told her daughter with all the patience she could muster. 'It's another thing entirely for them to go Africa and make us slaves there.'

'Us? Us?' Woe was indignant. 'They are not making "us" slaves. They are making them slaves. They are giving these African slave traders a taste of their own medicine.'

'It would be double the calamity that...'

'It could be ten times the calamity. One hundred times. I don't care. Africans sold us. They get what they fucking deserve.'

Woe could not be persuaded.

And so they were truly divided for the first time. Divided by intent and action. Divided by a great ocean. Divided by sentiment.

Seven of them together could not hope to stop half the armies of Europe from achieving their objective in the old continent. Four of them could barely make a scratch.

'Remember,' Wednesday said, when they finally faced their foe, 'this is not a feeding, this is a massacre.'

But it was too much.

No matter how much blood they spilled, it was not enough.

It could never be enough.


Tuesday 15 September 2020

CABOT'S $10,000 WORTH OF BAD PUBLIC RELATIONS

FOREIGN INVESTORS VS SIR ARTHUR LEWIS ECONOMICS

So you got a $10,000 donation for education from Cabot?

How generous. How charitable. How thoughtful. How foolish.

What did they get from you?

A $30 million dollar loan from the National Insurance Corporation also known as your pension funds. Perhaps you think that a country ought to be able to bet on its own development. Perhaps you never read Sir Arthur Lewis - you know, the guy who won the Nobel Prize for Economics and wrote the theories that helped transform South East Asian Third World economies into Asian tigers. Perhaps you are just another partisan who plays politics in black and white.

Or maybe you're just Minerva Ward, social media advocate for just about any pappyshow that is labelled UWP.

If you fall into one of these categories, it all makes sense. But...

Only if you accept that the Allen Chastanet government is selling you out piece by piece until there is nothing left of you but your labour. Hmm...what is it called when you are worth nothing but your labor? I forget what it is called, but I think it has something to do with SLAVERY.

On it's face, the exchange of $10,000 for $30 million is an accurate, though tragic metaphor for the the perverse brand of sick-onomics that rules the land that gave us the only Black Nobel Prize Winner in any scientific discipline.

Allen Chastanet and his minions (picture of Dominic Fedee as a minion) have repeated sold pieces of St Lucia for less than a song. He gives away valuable lands which form the basis of almost all capital investment. He wipes away all responsibility to pay taxes and be a good corporate citizen for all foreign investors. He guarantees their loans and greases the way for them to access local money to implement their dodgy schemes.

If you or Minerva Ward knew anything at all about Sir Arthur Lewis, about the growth of small island states or about economics in general, you would be able to recognize a simple fact about Chastanet's sick-onomics:

The basic function of foreign investors is to bring new capital into the country with their investments.

If foreign investors have no access to capital from outside your country, they are not investors at all - they are just foreigners. If foreign investors need you to give them land to complete a proposed project, they are not investors, they are speculators. If foreign investors need you to lend them money to invest in your country, they are not investors, they are economic vampires.

In what messed up version of reality does a $10,000 donation assuage concerns about a $30 million loan to a foreign investor? What kind of foreign investor even asks for a Third World country to loan them money?

And finally, what kind of fool participates in a public relations exercise that paints a $10,000 donation as fair exchange for a controversial $30 million loan.

I'll tell you what kind.

The kind that current runs the finance ministry and the tourism ministry of St Lucia.

What did we really expect from a tourism minister whose job experience consists of being a mediocre reporter who ended up in the public relations department of a hotel - where all mediocre reporters belong?

What did we really expect from a Prime Minister who stole the idea of a the Jazz Festival from a woman who made the proposal to him in good faith?

What did we really expect from a Prime Minister whose father is the richest man in St Lucia, but would never give him a job in any of his businesses?


Friday 28 July 2017

WHO SOLD OUT SABWICHA??

WHO SOLD OUT SABWICHA?

When they found out that Sabwicha was one of the best recreational beaches in Saint Lucia, they did the only thing any good government would do.

They sold it out for a pittance.

But not satisfied to be just a good government, they decided to go one step further.

They decided to sell the road. The Choiseul road. The one that connects people to their jobs, their schools, their hospitals and their business partners.

And hear that: The developers did not even want the road. They were willing to own and develop the land on both sides of the road without interfering with people's ordinary lives.

But the government, eager to please the investors, decided it was better to build a new road on an existing country lane at the cost of tens or hundreds of millions, disrupting the lives of thousands of the most self sufficient people in Saint Lucia.

Great!!

Just what Sir Arthur Lewis ordered.

CHOISEUL PEOPLE JUST WANT TO KNOW

Whose idea was it to sell the Choiseul road?

'Not me,' said Bradley, current MP for Choiseul. 'The thing was thinged by the time the people thinged Lorne and put me here instead.'

'Not me,' said Lorne. 'Even though it looks I owned it more than the people that owned it by the time it ended up at INVEST Saint Lucia.'

'Not me, said Hilaire. 'I know something about that hotel deal for Sabwicha and I think I want to explain in a language that everybody can easily understand.'

And so, on Sunday, Earnest Hilaire, the former and future next Prime Minister of Saint Lucia will explain, live and in person at Alco's Disco.


And if you know anything about Choiseul discos, you know it is going to be hot.
https://scontent-mia3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t35.0-12/20449049_10209777364415650_5437289625121866262_o.jpg?oh=3261c5167df9b1f7ca28c6ea6c769259&oe=597E39F8&dl=1


Thursday 2 June 2016

IMPACS & GANJA - KENNY’S RETARDED DECRIMINALIZATION


THE SHEENYA POPOT POLITICS CHAMPION
"Don't look at me. I am not longer the most spineless man in St Lucia...
Check your big brain shabine..."

And now, presenting the new heavyweight champion of marijuana legalization: Kenny ‘Rosebuds’ Anthony. Smoke them if you got them boyz. Your prime minister finally freed up the economy…I mean, the ganja.
Last night, St Lucia’s most intelligent, most progressive leader announced the legalization of…he didn’t?

He said what?

We’d talk about it? In six months? At a CARICOM level? What does hell does CARICOM have to do with it? We don’t smoke CARICOM weed and we don’t sell CARICOM weed. And they don’t smoke ours. WTF is that jackass doing in the prime minister’s office for three terms?

This guy has more brains in his left buttock than Flambeau has in all their 30,000 heads put together.


Full disclosure: There is not such thing as 30,000 Flambeaus.
I don't care what it looks like.

But his promise to decriminalize ganja is retarded.

Literally retarded.

It wastes time, it squanders our competitive advantages, throws hundreds of millions in potential revenue and tens of millions in taxes down the drain. It is the IMPACS report of socio-economic policy. It’s just another foolish and dangerous delay tactic of the most sheenya popot left wing leader ever – a man who just won’t stand up for what is right. I mean, left. Good. Ykwim.


Please don't ask me about smoking weed at university or my other substance abuses.
My hypocriticus is so full, it's about to burst.

The delay will be devastating to small farmers and will give big companies time to prepare their takeover of what will be the strongest cash crop in the Caribbean, barre none, within the next two decades.

If there is one good thing John Compton taught us, it is that until we’re all millionaires with robot servants, small farmers must own agriculture. Latin America is just the closest example of why we don’t want big companies in our agriculture. And we’re not even going to start on the dangers of genetic modification, which is always where agriculture ends up when big business starts growing crops.

But with what we are learning about campaign finance and how millionaires and billionaires buy candidates and elections legally, it will not be a surprise when Kenny Anthony’s ganja policy turns into a set of all-inclusive corporate farms, another slave plantation. Under those conditions, small farmers will be better off with no legalization at all, because at least they have a livelihood and a shot of escaping the police.

Kenny's last minute promise to talk about freeing up ganja is not a plan. It is not a strategy. It  is drunken cowardice. 




GORGERE POLITICS 
The Diminishing Utility of Big Brained Leaders

How about an emergency law that says we’re no longer locking people up for weed? Then, you can go have your palsied commission. I'd vote for  that.

Just a few days before Kenny made his newest bullshit promise, cops were boasting about marijuana busts – because they have nothing else they can boast about. Government doesn’t equip them to do anything except bust little guys for ganja. America is still tightening the noose of security sanctions around the island’s neck. For something that this government is protecting the last government from.

But now, he’s the progressive ganja hero, right, Calixte?

Drinking that scotch must be making him stupid.

Is that possible? My grandfather drank scotch twice as much as he went to church and he never showed any sign of chronic malignant stupidity.

Maybe it’s not the scotch.

Maybe he’s just too smart for his own good. Like Isaac Newton.


Did you know that Newton deliberately made Principae Mathematica difficult to read on purpose? He wanted to keep the stupid people out of math. Kenny is like a negative-Newton. He makes things more complicated than they are so that people think he’s smarter than he is.

Kenny Anthony is literally letting himself become a de-motivational poster about the damage caused by too much reading. He can’t get anything done without finishing a bottle of scotch with whichever post-grad morons are most in awe of him and then reading a report about it.

As the best symbol of the new Caribbean intellectual leader who overthrew the old obeah men in the 90s and 2000s, he has done so much but damage to the reputation of intellectuals and academics as practical leaders. His sheenya popot ganja policy is just one more example of how bright boys can be worth less than nothing. One more example of why no one will ever impress us with their PhD again. 

Sad. 

PhDees ought to be impressive. 

They are supposed to prove that you are a real original thinker. Many PhDees are. Dame Pearlette’s doctoral thesis can blow the future of education open for St Lucia. But Kenny? He can’t recognize an original idea when it’s giving the Throne Speech right before his eyes for twenty years straight. He has not implemented a single thing it says in his Governor General's doctoral thesis. Probably doesn't even know what it says.

You know what he has sanctioned and implemented with no CARICOM discussion? Alcohol over-consumption during the political season. He'll buy your drinks.

Genius…

IT DOESN’T TAKE A GENIUS TO…

(Say "Bonjour, Mde Marie Jean...")


Marijuana is not just social justice for the dozens, maybe hundreds of offenders languishing in jail for a joint. Marijuana is growth for an island that has had no real growth for two decades. Marijuana is freedom for small farmers.

Let us take a moment to consider the reasons we haven't legalized it yet.

In the old days democratic leaders were afraid of making sense on marijuana because, you know, America. But it has nothing to do with America anymore. They are rolling down the road to legalization faster than we are. We be better off if we asked the US Ambassador for help growing better marijuana instead of help cutting it down. America is now officially better at growing weed than cutting it down. Thumbs up, dudes!

Colorado has proven that full scale legalization is not just safe, it is very, very good for the economy. And the big downside is not more kids smoking weed. It’s not more car accidents. It’s not more raped girls. The downside, for Colorado, is the smell of maka kush growing is just too strong in some poor neighborhoods. 

Rich people, of course, never suffer. They only profit.

Marijuana is smelly. Marijuana is not like cocaine and those hard drugs. Marijuana wants everyone to know it’s there. It doesn’t want to hide. But we won’t have to be growing it in our neighborhoods. So that doesn’t apply to us.

What about CARICOM? If we go it alone and rush ahead, won’t we negatively affect other CARICOM countries?

Lol. In practical terms, lol.

It has nothing to do with CARICOM. We don’t sell weed to CARICOM. That’s Jamaica’s problem. The only CARICOM territory that might taste our ganja is Barbados, a notoriously tight-assed island that seriously needs to chill out and smoke some more Vinci weed.

Our weed is not CARICOM’s problem and it never was. This isn’t cocaine or pharmaceuticals. CARICOM harmony is of no practical consequence in this matter.

We sell weed to France.




In the politics of ganja, we are not Caribbean. We are French. 100% French, 100% of the time. We are their profit, we are their problem, their producers and their power boats. Check the number of Lucians in jail in other regional territories. They’re all in Martinique. For drug related offenses. We are their dealers and jailbirds.

Martinique could have been a window for almost all our agriculture, but we messed up at Independence. We just kept paying tribute to Britain with our bananas until they got sick of us. Ganja growers never gave up the French though. They were the only ones here who realized that Europe was only 14 miles from St Lucia. Columbuses of Lucian agriculture. Pioneers, but pirates, So now, French people think of us as drug dealers instead of business farmers. But, at least we’re in the market. These ‘criminals’ have given us a lead.

Can we get a thank you for the drug dealers?




All the geniuses in government and big business agriculture haven’t figured it out, though. They still think Europe is across the Atlantic.

Geniuses…flat-brained geniuses. The Caribbean is almost done with you.

THE IMPACS OF GANJA

Almost all of St Lucia’s home grown and transshipment ganja from Vinci heads straight for Martinique. The goods are worth triple what they are here. The market dictates that Lucian farmers, boat men and dealers get paid in Euros instead of EC, whenever they get a chance. That’s just elementary economics. That’s not even full blown capitalism.

But this government, in a fit of fear that they are losing the youth the Greens and the No Voters, promises to do the same thing they did with the IMPACS report.

They are going to tie up the process. They are going to make it unnecessarily complicated so that the outcome is worth almost nothing at all.

In six months, we’re going to have a CARICOM commission, headed by people who haven’t read enough or smoked enough to know what they are talking about. They’re going to talk about the same stuff that little boys on the block who should be at school already know. They are going to spend lots of money to find out what Grass Street, Pancho de Caires and Dr Stephenson King have been telling them for free. For decades.

At best, the final report will recommend that ganja be treated like alcohol and cigarettes. Kids can’t have it. Manufacturers and vendors have to be licensed. And domestic consumption ought to be taxed heavily.

But, given that they are driven by cowardice into making a simple thing like descheduling ganja as frustrating as a regional legislative a cappela group rehearsal, they are a little more likely to do something retarded – like decriminalize small amounts of marijuana, but still sanction the systematic legal oppression of the farmers who are keeping the small island economies afloat.

All while politicians waste our money. Just what we need. More billable time wasting.

“Stop making recommendations!” Lucian Facebook screamed.

“Another damned commission! What the hell does that word even mean anymore?!?”

Now that the world is getting real about weed, speed is of the essence.

When it comes to ganja, the only friends and partners we have in the region are Vinci and Laba. The rest of them are either competitors or Jamaican/South American markets. It will be quite a few years before we can compete with the Jamaicans, in spite of tremendous improvements in ganja quality over the last few decades of, what’s it called, systematic oppression, by both Flambeau and Labour governments.

If anything, we should be rushing ahead of them, shutting them out of our markets while pushing into theirs. That’s called winning.

It is a race to legalize…in case you didn’t realize…


That Kenny Anthony....I don't understand him...
What's his fucking problem?


 .

 +