BOLDLY GOING WHERE NO MAN HAS GONE BEFORE...
NO! The shock of Marcia’s death under obviously violent and strange circumstances is compounded for me by the numbness that arrives right after. Like a sneaking feeling that ‘this too is expected’…
It was always her working class British perceptiveness about and intolerance for class snobbery and pretension that riled Marcia to action. She could not take that Trini VVIP status crap- finding it especially absurd that we Trinis should be practicing these stupidities with so much abandon in an ex-colony amongst mostly red, black, and brown people… She was a committed journalist first- but then something happened to Marcia, and she switched on- deciding to be completely and wholly herself. To pursue secret passions to the fullest. In all their personal, eccentric, and flamboyant glory. So Marcia became journalist-as-activist… And a hardcore full-blown British 1970s Punk- Mohawk, studs, coloured hair, rakish thumbed-nose attitude and all. And she started getting the business done! She started descending into the heart of our darkness (into one quadrant of many aortas) and kept bringing back missives of injustice and the realities of these grimy streets… She was boldly going where no man had gone before. At least no mainstream journalist... She made us watch, confront the truth of marginalized lives, and in so doing gave validation to the lives and struggles of the urban poor and disenfranchised. And she sought redress for them. She was not perfect- but who is? She was working on it…
And now this…
What gets me about Trinidad now at ground zero is that the ‘madness in the air’ that is resulting in these seemingly endless surreal murders, ‘accidents’, and compounding tragedies is a symptom of a community that has gone off the deep end and is now living an unexamined, uncontrolled life of Extremes. Extreme Consumption. Extreme Greed and Corruption. Extreme Rage. Extreme Hate and Ignorance. Extreme Violence to Beauty, Mind, Heart, and Spirit- and finally Body…
This atmosphere of freefall and ‘free-for-all’ did not begin with this administration- although they have exacerbated it enormously. It is a darkness that has been advancing for some time. We are falling now because we never stopped the car to find out what that noise was under the chassis. And we knew the brakes were bad. And the gears used to stick. We are falling because of the unanswered questions about ourselves: the unexamined lives of our incest and rapes; our petty and large corruptions; our class, colour, and race issues; our small-island self-hate; our massive narco-economy and its sheltered kingpins; our uncharitable elites; and our social, infrastructural, and economic problems resulting from ignorant, petty, and incompetent politicians and Public Servants we have sheltered and are too lazy to deal with…
We turned our back, but the Beast never stopped advancing…
Because of decades of these things going unchecked we are now at a place of Pandemonium- where up is down, left is right, and all kinds of extreme absurdity can happen. And does! A wheelchair assassin appears and escapes the police right after 2 police assault a wheelchair man in plain view of the public and cameras; a man from North attempts to steal a PTSC bus in South; a $50 million fraud is committed normel normel; a UWI drop-out reaps a forest of weed in his apartment; a Minister is implicated in an assassination plot and a love quadrangle with a DJ and a sports hero right after being embroiled in a corruption scandal worth hundreds of millions; Ministers are accused by several separate people of assassination attempts- one of which is the sickening assassination of a beloved Senior Counsel; murders of increasing boldness and lunacy spiral out of control- children and grandmothers, decapitations, murders and shoot-outs on prime-time TV… No headline now is too absurd, no new revelation can surprise…
In the midst of this ripping apart of logic and the bonds of a thing called ‘normalcy’- trying to hold, keep, weave, and stitch the fabric back together are a handful of activists and civil society organisations… This bedraggled few are attempting to repair damage, sew and deploy a parachute, and maintain a focus on the real problems responsible for our madness. All at the same time. Amidst the smoke screens and red-herrings of PNM vs UNC a committed few are pursuing the real engineering problems of the national car: lack of a real Public Procurement Policy to regulate the use of Public Funds; lack of a Children’s Authority to oversee issues regarding the rearing of children; lack of a Gender Policy to engage issues of gender equity and the reality of female abuse; lack of policies, institutions, and enablers for the Dreamers , Artists, and the creative spirit of our people; lack of redress for historically dis-advantaged communities; and lack of progressive interventions in East Port of Spain and in collapsing urban communities island-wide…
In this failure of government, in the absence of an enlightened elite, in the boundary-less land of Extremes that emerges when there are no sane checks and balances, Trojans like Marcia emerge. With all their complexities…
Marcia was someone who plunged straight into the maelstrom of that Extremity- being inhabited by some of it herself! And she was good because she made us acknowledge it and because she was finding ways to restore some balance at the nether edges. She began a crusade to bring back tales from the fringes. A fringe that is really our Centre. But how are we to know direction and location in a Land without boundaries?...
Now she’s gone.
The savagery of her end is a mirror up to the savagery of our present. And that savagery is now an increasing norm. Years ago I said:
"As above, so below. As within, so without. The love we as Trinidadians do not give ourselves is the same lovelessness that is returned to us by the soul-less boys now running rampant. The savagery with which we have dealt with our best is the savagery now being returned to us by our worst.”
Our failure to honour the phenomenal Gifts we have been given is now being paid back to us by the crowning of our worst. Take dat!!! In the last 20 years especially we have presided over the neglect and wasting down of: our heroic Ancestors; our genius Elders; our precious cultural Traditions and Legacies; our beautiful buildings and sacred sites; our financial and cultural riches beyond belief… To the point of collapse. All blessings squandered. All Gifts dis-respected.
When you are given so much and spit on it so ungratefully you reap the vengeance of Moko on yourself. And that is what we are living through now…
Marcia’s loss marks yet another scattering blow to Civil Society- that Rosary bead of NGOs and under-resourced citizen-led institutions that actually fulfill the role of government and an enlightened elite… She joins the ranks of the fallen: Dennis Pantin. Norris Deonarine. Pat Bishop. Teddy Belgrave. Professor Julian Kenny. Michael Als. Peter Harris the archaeologist- and dozens of grassroots activists that have paid with their lives in our mean streets... Any one of these people is worth more than 50 politicians… Somehow we must grieve and remember them, rally again, and commit the best revenge possible: we must continue in the name of these blessed Departed and win back the country from the darkness, pen the ‘Feral Elites’, put down the rampaging Principalities and Powers, and exorcise the shadowy Spiritual wickedness in high and low places…
REST IN PEACE MARCIA. THE MESSAGE IS CLEAR. WE HERE HAVE WORK TO DO…
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