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A Joint for Mr Biswas

IF YOU REALLY want to depress yourself, walk over to your bookshelf and pull out your tattered old Penguin paperback of Old Sir Video’s first travel book, The Middle Passage, and read the chapter on Trinidad – assuming people in Trinidad have bookshelves at all, far less a copy of a 50-year-old book by an eighty-year-old firetruck we’d all rather hate for all time than contemplate for even a few minutes.

It can depress you almightily but, if you substitute, “the soca” for “the bands” in the text below, Sir Video’s 55-year-old paragraph could have been written this morning: “Port of Spain is the noisiest city in the world. Yet it is forbidden to talk… In restaurants, the bands are there to free people of the need to talk. Stunned, temples throbbing, you champ and chew.. In a private home as soon as anyone starts to talk the radio is turned on. It must be loud, loud, loud… There was no guiding taste because there was no taste. In Trinidad, education was not one of the things money could buy; it was something money freed you from. Education was strictly for the poor…”

The only difference today is that not even the poor get education now; unless you count a graduation from the School of Hard Knocks. As a firm believer that good state schools that all our children go to are better for our society than any number of expensive “international” schools, I’m willing to support my old alma mater, St Mary’s College (even though it never supported me) – but I haven’t been able to attend its annual fundraiser fete in a decade: even with high-quality earplugs, I leave a Carnival fete – or any public Trinidad event, really – feeling like I’ve been beaten by a gang of thugs; and the CIC fete is one of the most stoosh in the country.

The soca is there to free people of the need to talk.

But how do you become aware of yourself without a national conversation?

In Trinidad, more than anywhere else in the Caribbean, we have always looked outside of ourselves for validation; when people like Old Sir Video see us so plainly for what we are, we hate them for it. We find ways of dismissing them – and the truth they speak. As long as we can persuade ourselves that they are madmen, we can fool ourselves that we are not hollow men.

We want so desperately to put ourselves “on the map” that we blind ourselves to the possibility of charting our own course; before we can matter to the world, we must first matter to ourselves.

Which is the challenge we stubbornly refuse to take up: if the society is broken it is because every individual in it also is; citizen, heal thyself.

Three or four weeks ago, my erstwhile Guardian colleague and still pardner, Raymond Ramcharitar, wrote a column exposing the ludicrous prosecution of an elderly woman for selling the ganja she needed for medicinal purposes, viz, the undisputed and indisputable pain relief from her glaucoma. Another old colleague, Wesley Gibbings, and an old soldier, Raffique Shah, also wrote about the plain stupidity of our marijuana laws. Raf also pointed out that ganja – which was legal in Trinidad before Independence – offered Parkinson’s Disease sufferers immediate symptom relief at a fraction of the cost of foreign medications that took hours to kick in.

Anyone who has spent a morning at a magistrate’s court knows that our legal system is jam-packed with “criminals” whose only transgression was taking a pull. And anyone who has spent any time at a fancy cocktail party knows that there is not a single class or occupation – lawyer, doctor, teacher, garbage-man, middle-class, working-class, elite – in Trinidad that does not smoke weed. We are hypocrites about marijuana; and I almost wouldn’t mind that, except we are also stupid about it.

Legalizing ganja right now would have two immediate substantial benefits: one, it would prevent thousands of citizens from being classed as criminals; and, two, it would precipitate the most important discussion these little half-formed “nations” need to have: how, exactly, can someone’s rights be taken away from them?

We like to think of ourselves as modern – Sir Video wrote of drive-through banks in 1960s Trinidad being proof of its modernity – but we remain societies still recovering from slavery; and the persistent legacy of our history is not poverty, but the willing devaluation of the citizen. In the 17th Century, the human being was devalued into a chattel slave (with the Fatel Razack perhaps lessening that devaluation marginally). The slave or indentured worker of the past is the ganja smoker or homosexual of today: rights are taken away without either thought or justification, because they can be, because one party in the relationship is so much more powerful.

So let the pastors and priests make their Bible-based case against ganja; and let citizens contemplate liberty and responsibility; and then let the society make up its mind whether belief should fill churches or prisons.

Allowing people to grow rich from farming marijuana would also be good for our agriculture. My father, an agronomist and plant pathologist, convinced me that no country could be independent without food security. If he were alive, I reckon he would vote for a Ganja & Agriculture Party; what is shocking is that so few of us even contemplate what would happen if food supply lines were interrupted for even a few weeks. When we can’t pluck eight-packs of Old El Paso corn tortillas off the Hi-Lo shelf, we might suddenly see the wisdom of having planted enough blue food to go around seven weeks ago!

The real threat to ourselves is our ignorance of ourselves. It strikes me as the kind of Trinidadian remedy that the Old VS himself might approve of, even if he made a point of not mentioning it: legalization of ganja will make upstanding citizens of us all; instead of worthless criminals defined by someone else.

BC Pires believes the mystic marijuana will free the Mimic Men

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