Perpetual survival mode
Early last week I did some ordinary things that brightened my days. I went to a film my husband said would win some Academy Awards in MovieTowne (A Star Is Born).
I impulsively bought something sinfully buttery and sweet at Linda’s bakery. I meandered around Kappa’s, a pharmacy in Woodbrook, surreptitiously reading gossip magazines, before filling out a prescription.
I woke at dawn and ran for an hour on my own grinning with wonder at how the sun gently eased out the moon and burst the world open. It was air. I could gather those ordinary things and they would be balloons.
By the end of the week, news like bullets deflated the air around me. Gunmen in Kappa’s where everyone knows my name. Machine guns in a Linda’s bakery where I bought sugary buns, loving the tender warmth of the place that makes us feel like children.
A 14-year-old and 40-year-old shot at, close to the place my husband and I sat eating buttery popcorn watching a music-filled film in MovieTowne. The air around me has deflated.
It’s deflating for everyone. Prison officers killed. People locked in by 9 pm. Businesses closing. The streets eerily empty. A perpetual self-imposed curfew.
I announced the machine gun robbery in Linda’s on Facebook and called T&T a “Banana Republic.” Someone called me a racist. Said I was using the language of colonialists.
I responded that I didn’t have anything racist or colonialism in mind. Simply a frustration about the general ruin: ill-educated, handout driven, failing infrastructure, the neglected top-down running of our country which has not enabled our people to flourish and sadly not fulfilled the promise of independence from its brutal past.
A “racist” phrase, they persisted. I defined it. Banana Republic: “A small state that is politically unstable as a result of the domination of its economy by a single export controlled by foreign capital.” What about that doesn’t fit us? My friend who thought my phrase racist explained away the crime saying that our problems were “legacies of the structures and society we inherited from the colonisers who decimated indigenous people.”
She then stated that T&T is doing much better than many parts of the US. There was so much wrong with that. I responded: India, an unwieldy large, former colony, invaded multiple times through the ages (Trinidad fits into Mumbai 18 times over) has, in recent times, cleaned up their streets, banned plastics, expanded the middle class to 400 million, reduced poverty. It is the fastest growing economy in the world.
Why can’t we sort out a tiny 1.3 million people? A friend agreed with me calling the reasoning that we are doing better than the US “lame.” “Every country has its problems but we live on an island where the murder rate averages over 400 a year in a population of 1.3 million people. The killers are never caught.”
Can we really blame our colonial masters for men strolling into a bakery in broad daylight, with machine guns? I thought of the friend who was appalled at seeing a man urinating at the entrance of a military cemetery, of another friend who said her joy at a gorgeous Samaan tree around the savannah turned into disgust when she saw a penis drawn over its trunk.
What if we just don’t want to grow up? What if it’s less work if we live in perpetual survival mode? Why after so many years of oil wealth we are we still whining when we are not winning? I was thinking this as I spoke to a waitress who refused to make eye contact when I ordered a cappuccino; when I drove home on a narrow street with a truck deliberately hurtling towards me, on my side of the street, as if to say, ‘The less I care about you, the greater I am’.
What if we are just oil spoiled, equate kindness with humiliation, humility with weakness, and hard work with poverty? What if it’s easier being victims so someone else can be responsible? What if like terrorism, it’s not just about the guns, databases, detection, witnesses, and court cases. It’s about the people we’ve become.
It’s a battle of hearts and minds. Choose a side. Fight for the air around you. Fight to breathe.