Stuart’s abracadabra moment

By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
March 22, 2025

Hear the urine drip
From an immense bladder...
Hear words stripped of their soul
Hanging like bats from caves of rotten teeth.
—LeRoy Clarke, Douens

Last week was an unfortunate one for our democracy. Words were thrown around as though they possessed little meaning. A profound change is taking place in our democracy, but the political elite could not summon the necessary language to capture that moment.

Speaking of the “unique circumstances” of the moment, President Christine Kangaloo offered the following circumlocution: “Because the Constitution contemplated [sic] and requires that there shall be a prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago and does not contemplate there shall be no prime minister, upon the honourable Dr Keith Rowley MP’s resignation...there arose occasion for the appointment of a prime minister”. (Express, March 18.)

On a lower register, the former Leader of Our Grief and Sorrow continued to utter his inanities. He felt the Leader of the Opposition was the source of all our problems, even though he defeated her ten years ago, promising a new start.

PM Stuart Young’s address did not speak to a sense of national pride or lift the nation’s soul to “higher heights”. Instead, he offered a confusing cacophony of sounds: “It is truly an honour to stand here today, not just as Prime Minister of this great nation, but at a pivotal moment where our nation’s rich diversity offers us a powerful way forward—a new chapter in our history.”

What constituted this “pivotal moment” he didn’t say, but he knew we had arrived at that point. He continued his discordant note: “Together, we begin a new chapter. Together, we can and will move forward. Together we truly take hold of our destiny. Together, we can achieve all that we need to create the future of our destiny.”

He did not explain what he meant by “the future of our destiny”. Did the Heavenly Father design it for us or could we achieve it if we pray hard enough? This was his abracadabra moment: he used words to invoke a utopia, an imagined place that exists “over there” somewhere, rather than “here and now”.

Abracadabra is an Aramaic word. It means “I create as I speak”. Young may have been trying to create something new as he spoke. Or, might he have been envisaging a “new chapter” with the same tired personalities who wrecked our lives for the past ten years? Even as he reshuffled the old pack of cards, he was likely to wind up with the same set of inadequate jokers.

Young may have been the major joker in the pack. He has never uttered a word of disagreement with his boss. Nor has he ever outlined a political, economic or social philosophy of any consequence. Like his boss, he may also be a bully, a trait of long standing.

This raises the question: how can a clone of a discarded leader who organised Young’s ascent to the leadership of the country offer a new beginning at this moment of international turmoil and uncertainty?

An Express editorial captured our dilemma: “In June 2024, Colm Imbert...warned that, without more taxes, ‘the next three years will be very challenging from a revenue perspective...the Government will soon be faced with very difficult choices in terms of maintaining the current levels of grants, free services, and social programmes’.” (March 19.)

Last Monday, Vishnu Dhanpaul, the new Minister of Finance, declared: “There will be no hardship. Not under my watch. That’s not going to happen.”

This was Dhanpaul’s Alice in Wonderland moment. When challenged by the March Hare that she should say what she means, Alice replied: “At least—I mean what I say—that’s the same thing, you know,” to which Hatter replied: “Not the same thing a bit. Why, you might just as well say that ‘I see what I eat’ is the same thing as saying ‘I eat what I see’.”

Dhanpaul may have meant: “There will be no disaster under my watch since it would be so short.”

One cannot repeat “a new chapter” and intone “together” seven times and feel that one has captured a new reality. Physicist Richard Feynman reminds us: “Everything we know is only some kind of approximation, because we know that we do not know all the laws yet. Therefore, things must be learned only to be unlearned again or, more likely to be corrected.” (Quoted in the Financial Times, March 17.)

This is what LeRoy Clarke meant when he spoke of “stripping words of their soul” and offering them “like bats from the caves of rotten teeth”. Such a caution is especially relevant to a prime minister who did not secure a mandate to govern from his people.

—Prof Cudjoe's e-mail address is scudjoe@wellesley.edu. He can be reached @ProfessorCudjoe.

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The Slave Master of Trinidad by Dr. Selwyn R. Cudjoe