Leadership by farce
One of the serious failings of West Indian society is that, though it has evolved into a home where the progeny of slaves and indentured servants are substantially in charge of their own affairs, it continues to be a plantation in much of its linguistic sense of itself. So while we have invented a great deal of language in the West Indies, as we had to, we have also had a tendency to prefer language from other people - people whose peoplehood we perceive as being more prestigious than ours.
The evidence of our self-diminishing preference is not hard to find. It is there in questions like 'Bati-mamselle is a word? Wa is di real word? Not dragon fly?' It is there in the Trinbagonian returning home from a not-too-long stay in the United States flaunting an American accent - in a place where it is not needed for comprehension of message. It is there in the preference of (especially) youth for American formulae such as 'an stuff', 'yeah, right', 'I'm outta here', and 'Duh', when we have the perfectly good 'an ting', 'yuh lie!/Yuh jokin!/ A joke y'aa mek!', 'Ah gone', and 'So you en know dat?', which we created right here in West Indian space. And it is there in people like Tony Cozier, Michael Holding, and Reds Pereira choosing 'swipe' over a good, good home-created (onomatopoeic) word like 'voop' in both their West Indian and international cricket commentary.
In this week's column, I will focus on another routine aspect of Trinbagonian speech, our system of pronouns, which some of us mistakenly think is a corruption of English. (By the way, 'Trinbagonian' is another of our creations.)
We consciously know what the pronouns of English are; after all, we were taught them in school. But many of us may not consciously know the Trinbagonian pronouns, perhaps do not recognise a difference between English and Creole in this area of language. For the purposes of my discussion of Trinbagonian pronouns, the interesting English fact is that to stress pronouns you have to raise the pitch of your voice in producing them. So that in the sentence 'I'm talking to you', if you want to stress 'you', you have to raise your pitch on the word or pronounce it more loudly than the neighbouring words, as in 'I'm talking to YOU' (where capital letters indicate stress). You may, of course, not want to stress it. But whether you stress it or not, the word remains 'you', and that is another crucial point for our comparison.
You can therefore stress English pronouns by voice pitch, and the stressed pronouns retain the same shape as their unstressed counterparts.
Not so in Creole. We speak a considerable amount of English in Trinidad and Tobago, so we can and do stress pronouns by voice pitch. But that is the English way. The Trinbagonian way is basically to lengthen the vowel of the pronoun for stress or place a higher tone on the rhyme (i.e., the vowel and any consonant after it), as well as to use a higher voice pitch. To give you a better sense of it, I will list some of pronouns below in unstressed-stressed pairs:
UNSTRESSED STRESSED Yu Yuu Shi Shii Hi Hii Dem DEM
All of us should have known that a speaker would not have been elected on Friday, yet many hoped against hope that one would. They hoped in this way because they were relying on bases like leader decency, maturity, and wisdom, these notions interpreted, as they usually are, optimistically rather than objectively. But all the signs shouted that there would be no speaker and, therefore, no convenient way out of the 18-18 deadlock. The farce-based leadership of one side cannot be expected to confirm the farce-based leadership of the other side in government. Two farces could only clash, willing optimism notwithstanding.
Farce is one of the dominant characteristics of ex-slave, ex-colonial Caribbean government and politics. When Caribbean states continue with the imposition of the Westminster system without the home-grown culture to operate it justly, that must be a farce. When Caribbean constitutions are so crafted as to make a single MP elected by a single constituency king, governor, and maximum leader in a so-called popular democracy, that must be a farce. To be more pointed, when a prime minister could be a behemoth in the executive appointment process, that must be a farce. And when Tobago must beg Trinidad for allocations every blessed year despite how Tobagonians vote, that must be a farce.
Add to the above a first-past-the-post system, which practically means that the prime minister in a government with a one-seat majority has near-absolute control of state resources.
So that the farce we operate in the name of government and politics is the farce of prime ministerial dictatorship under the guise of parliamentary democracy, which itself is another name for prime ministerial dictatorship once the prime minister has a simple majority of supporters in the house.
Both Panday and Manning know this, and many of us as well. But while Panday, being out of power, has demonstrated this knowledge by ensuring that a speaker was not elected on Friday, Manning, being in power, has behaved as if he has lost his knowledge. Given the comprehensive opportunity of the 18-18 tie, Panday was not about to facilitate the operation of a prime ministerial dictator (he could do nothing about the installation; the president made sure of that). And since Manning is in charge of (executive) government, but not of parliament (as is routinely the case for prime ministers), he has become wishful of having that traditional power despite the harsh reality of 18-18.
Manning tried to assure us, in spite of all available indications to the contrary, that it was going to be easy to appoint a speaker and many, suspending confidence in their intellectual capabilities or submitting to the traditional superstition that the maximum leader is always right, hoped that he knew of a way that they didn't. His assurance crashed under Panday's 'madness' of having all his sycophant MPs voting against both his own nominees and Manning's.
What we are witnessing is an irony of historic proportions - one maximum leader who worked the system as a dictator when he had a slim majority (including the speaker) vigorously disallowing another maximum leader from becoming a dictator through the convenience of the vote of a speaker.
It is the politics of maximum leadership, which is now becoming an inconvenient politics.
The 18-18 tie still offers us a comprehensive opportunity to tear it down once and for all, but that won't happen through the election of a speaker. It could happen, though, through constitutional overhaul driven by the widest possible orchestrated conversation of all the relevant organised interest groups in the country. Manning and Panday, being the leaders of our biggest tribes, are best positioned to organise the conversation, but the political tradition has apparently so contaminated their mindset and disposition that they are unsuitable for the task.
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