IN his calypso “Steel Beam” Sparrow reports on his conversation with a PNM supporter. He tells her, “neighbour look, if I was a selfish man, I wouldn't be involve in this election”.
Assuming that she is intelligent he declares, “I done old already, I doh want fame, I eh looking for fortune again.”
He urges her to consider “the same old problems we face from dawn to dawn”.
But, instead, she proceeds to cuss him “bout whey ah born, behavin' like a moron”.
He says to her, “yuh pipe eh ha no water, yuh pay too much for butter.”
She replies, “Take yuh steel beam and go.”
“Agriculture in a state, planning is inadequate.”
She shouts back, “We like it so.”
“Hospitals eh ha no linen, is brown paper dey usin'.”
“We like it so. We free.
“Whatever is wrong he go put it right, Georgie Porgie tell we de other night.”
But, he continues, “Classified information, for personal use is common. Soldier with bulldozer break down mih shack in Morvant. Is plenty sexual favour, to be a ten days worker.”
Unmoved, she stands firm.
“Take yuh steel beam and go, we like it so.”
It was 1981/1982, after the general election in which the PNM, led by then-prime minister George Michael Chambers, vanquished the emergent Organisation for National Reconstruction (ONR), led by the former PNM attorney general Karl Terrence Hudson-Phillips, who had broken ranks with the party and its leader, Dr Eric Eustace Williams in 1973.
With the steel beam as its symbol, the ONR had gotten 91,000 votes in the election, but won “not a damn seat”, as Chambers had petitioned the electorate to ensure.
“Not a Damn Seat for Dem,” was the title of Lord Kitchener's offering, also recording the sense of PNM triumphalism.
Same thing in 2017?
Come 2017, 36 years later, and Terrence W Farrell returns to this lament with his latest book We Like It So?
“We like it so?” he asks, arguing that he does not believe it. His sense is that enough of us don't.
He argues that we shouldn't, and he advances propositions as to what to do in demonstrating that we don't.
At the local launch of the book, held at the Chamber of Commerce building in Westmoorings Friday evening, the audience included Sharon Rowley, the wife of the Prime Minister, prominent figures from business, the professions, the arts and academia, representatives of sections of the country's elite.
Farrell is a monetary economist who years ago resigned as Deputy Governor of the Central Bank. He was for relatively short stints, group executive director of the insurance giant Guardian Group; and CEO of Fujitsu ICL and CEO of One Caribbean Media (OCM).
OCM is the parent company of Caribbean Communications Network (CCN) which publishes the Express newspapers and operates CCN-TV6.
Among other engagements, Farrell sits on several boards. More recently, he became an attorney.
He is chairman of the Economic Development Advisory Board under the current administration.
Delivering remarks at the launch, Martin Daly SC, corporate attorney and newspaper columnist, summed up the audience, remarking on the number of high-end vehicles in the parking lot, and invited them to summon the courage to try righting some of the society's wrongs, as articulated in Farrell's latest work.
Speaking before him, senior lecturer in Literary and Communication Studies at The UWI, St Augustine, Dr Paula Morgan, said from reading the work, Farrell came across as a “scholarly observer” and a thoughtful commentator who was humble enough not to portray himself as having all the answers to the country's many crippling ills. He is “exceedingly well read,” she says. “He is clear and decisive, but humble in his tone.”
She said the book was a natural sequel to his earlier publication, whose title—The Underachieving Society—reflected his assessment of T&T society.
“We Like it So? is presented to us as Farrell's attempt to plumb the depths of The Cultural Roots of Economic Underachievement in Trinidad and Tobago,” the book's sub-title.
So whereas the first book was a statement primarily about economics, this latest offering, which he had earlier disclosed was his attempt to seek reasons for underachievement, seeks to tell us it lies deep in the cultural mores we have developed, and moulded in our own image. And likeness.
But only perhaps.
It was his sister Kathleen, he told the audience Friday, who insisted that he use the question mark in the book's title.
The listener is left to form the impression he was at least tempted to leave it out.
“Underdevelopment is a state of mind,” the American development specialist Lawrence E Harrison told us in a 1985 publication, based on his 20 years with the US Agency for International Development.
For 13 of those years, he lived and worked in five countries in Latin America.
He picked up the term, he said, from a Peruvian intellectual, Augusto Salazar Bondy. This is that “Underdevelopment is not just a collection of statistical indices which enable a socio-economic picture to be drawn. It is also a state of mind, a way of expression, a form of outlook and a collective personality marked by chronic infirmities and forms of maladjustment.”
Drawing on this perspective, as well as a variety of other literary, economic, social and cultural authorities Farrell invites us to see this offering as our version of Harrison's “underdevelopment”.
Dr Morgan advises that there is “inherent tension in the work” as the title itself interrogates the theme, an effective summary of the complex social order of life in Trinidad and Tobago.
It draws on the historical experiences of the people and their values.
Its thesis is that culture establishes the order of the society and it comes to the conclusion that what we have is “a terrorist system masquerading as a civilisation”.
We are further defined as an Afro creole-Euro creole society, made up of whites, Afros, Indos.
We are “Trini to the bone” while at the same time being “Divided at the vein”.
We are at once a tossed salad and a callaloo.
She further describes Farrell as “a thinker and a doer, an economist who has entered the field of culture, in a quest for answers to the thorny issues in which his society rests”.
He has the temerity to address, among other things, what he suggests is “the complicity of the elites in the dehumanising social order in which we strive”.
But he also points out “the need for us to have friendly and honest discourse”.
The book addresses such themes as are seen to be applicable to us: Culture and Economic Development; Ambivalence; Status, Respect and Respectability; Amusement and Feteing; Rules, Authority and Contingent Rule Following; Risk-Taking and Non-Possession; Corruption and Trickery; Conflict, Conflict Avoidance and Cooperation.
It also makes observations and asks questions about how we work, and how we decide. It argues that “deciding not to decide” is a major national cultural trait.
Addressing the society's performance and achievement deficit, Farrell says his thesis may be questioned, even rejected by some.
But his argument is that at its root is “a serious deficit in trust within a citizenry divided by class, ethnicity and educational attainment”.
He says rules must be consistently and fairly enforced.
With prolonged national head-aching and hand-wringing over crime, about truancy and misbehaviour in schools, about the enveloping financial and economic crisis, the future of the Carnival, and of tourism among a host of others, Martin Daly says this is a propitious time for the publication of this work.
He is convinced that Farrell is a man who believes that we can change.
Dr Morgan came away earlier, concluding that, like the recently deceased Derek Walcott, Farrell “is a man who believes in the islands”.
Speaking for himself, the author presented some examples of the circularity in thinking and doing that has us going around and around on major issues.
We boast, he said, that the steelband is the only musical instrument invented in the 20th century, yet steelbands continue to be evicted from panyards in many parts of the country. Every year Port of Spain floods and every year blame is placed on clogged drains.
The Piarco airport corruption case began 20 years ago, yet the two principal accused are still to appear in the High Court to answer to charges, while in the US, co-conspirators have had their matters heard, been convicted, sentenced to prison, done their time and been released.
Replies
The point of this calypso (STEELBEAM) is PARTY FIRST and COUNTRY SECOND. Today, it has deteriorated even more. It's like PARTY FIRST and LIFE SECOND.
“Whatever is wrong he go put it right, Georgie Porgie tell we de other night.”
"Anything that's wrong he go put it right, Georgie Porgie tell we de other night."
Money finish and people are starting to look at what we have to show for all that money that pass through the country.
Cecil: The man say: "Every year Port of Spain floods and every year blame is placed on clogged drains."
And you really think ANYTHING is going to change with PAN TRINBAGO? As long as DEY PARTY in power that is all dey care about.
odw, Sparrow also said in one of his songs,
Children go to school and learn well,
Otherwise later on in life yuh go catch real hell,
Without an education in yuh head
Yuh whole life is misery yuh better off dead.
TODAY A LOT DEADIN, AND PLENTY KILLIN.
"At it's root is a strong deficit in trust within a citizenry divided by CLASS, ETHNICITY AND EDUCATIONAL ATTAINMENT"
A lot of the population are not equipped to cope with this reality. [VIP, ORDINARY VIP, ULTRA VIP]