The Book of Kenrick Part XXIII

In 2011, God the Uncle – my imaginary Uncle Godfrey –called me to sum up the Bible in the voice of Kenrick, the kind of tess who goes backstage at the Tobago Jazz Experience to get David Rudder’s autograph and borrows a pen from Farmer Nappy and a piece of paper from Benjai.

Last day, Joseph, who had become Pharaoh’s right hand corn man, had tricked the brothers who sold him into slavery to ransom their brother Simeon with their youngest brother, Benjamin, and had thrown big fete in Egypt for his little brother. Their father, Jacob, had been reluctant to use Benjamin to bail out Simeon, fearing loss of yet another son. (Daughters don’t matter in the Old Testatment, except for begetting.)

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Feel the pulse and vibration and the rumbling force/ Somebody is out there beating on a dead horse/ She never said nothing, there was nothing she wrote/ She’d gone with the man in the long black coat – Bob Dylan

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ONE THOUGHT goes off in my own mind every time some crackpot Muslim jihadist explodes himself: that mofo just blew himself (and innocent bystanders) to bits gleefully, to rush to Heaven and reap his reward of 72 virgins; 72 virgins! As a reward! As Robin Williams (I think) said, “Anybody who thinks 72 virgins is a good thing clearly never actually had one”. You could accurately call the jihadist mindset a firetrucked-up perspective. Read more

GOD ALONE knows when last I prayed. I want to believe that the last time I did it even half-seriously– or quarter-seriously, or one-eighth seriously, or one-sixteenth – was at university, 30 years ago, when, every May or June, after liming on Paradise Beach for the preceding two-and-a-half terms, I would beseech the Almighty to let there be four questions on each paper based on the two measly topics I could manage to revise in the two days before each exam. (God unfailingly prevented me from failing, indeed, allowed me to graduate with honours.) Read more

FIRST BLACK FRIDAY of the year and, just like the first working day of the year, Y’Boy in one-them pensive mood, whereby he can’t think ‘bout nothing else other than the thing he thinking ‘bout, which is how them Maraval people and the Diego Martin Regional Corporation only un-fairing all them Catholic by trying to stop the Opus Dei school from opening on Long Circular Rd, which part it had one-them Japanee Chinee restaurant before, right there opposite the biggest Catholic church, by square footage and by congregation- and collection-size, in the whole of Trinidad; is like them adding insult to injury.

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