Tales of Strange Lands

It’s the only salvation…” (David Rudder, The Madman’s Rant) In the Enchanted Woods, there is a tree called The Magic Faraway Tree. At the top of the tree, strange lands visit for short periods and move on to make place for another. One can remain trapped on a land if she does not move out in time. She will then have to wait until the land’s next visit to the tree. Some lands are pleasant, some are exotic and some are unpleasant. Among them is Trinidad and Tobago.

Moon Face and Silky warn the children. It’s dangerous. Mary, Kwame and Indra sneak out and enter the land anyway. Children will be children. Curiosity either makes you or kills you.

On the land, the soca music numbs the children’s brains and they lose track of time. They do not make it off the lands. They never do. They lose their senses.

They grow old and…they all die.

Tragic? Call me Lemony Snickett.

I believe in unfortunate endings.

I live here, in this glorious land of Calypso and Carnival.

Here, every gender and race finds an equal place Under the butcher’s knife.

The madman’s rant isn’t any salvation. Sorry Rudder. ‘I quit’, suggests action. But even that we cannot do, for, ‘to quit’ presupposes actually doing something from which to quit.

It is a telling sign, when someone like journalist Sunity Maharaj, as the newspapers reported, offers her place for citizens to meet to speak about the issue of fighting back crime and taking back the country. Rally cries from people like Maharaj who are known for a fairly level head (very few can claim such a reputation) should be viewed as a warning to administrators that matters have gone overboard.

(I just got the role of Dame Slap- A-Lot but The Director said I’m to be called Dame Innovate because corporal punishment was outlawed.

“But Alleyne get Inspector-punished on national television.” “That doesn’t count. Do as I say…”) Following the murder of Shannon Banfield, once again, another senseless act of brutality, one wonders whether the people in the insane asylum are actually not supposed to be the people out on the street. Shouldn’t the rest of us unthinking, immobile lot, be warded? Here’s why.

We should be warded: 1) Because we possess no faculty of reason. We live, inert beings, unable to think and hence act on our discomfort; unable to come together to fight. We sit and wait.

This is no life. Euthanasia! 2) For not realizing that the fence we have been sitting on has gone right up our…leg. It’s infected.

Even the sight of worms hasn’t alerted us to the fact that something rotten lies beneath. Madness! 3) For not realizing that we go through the ritual of electing people into public office every five years who actually do nothing that impacts positively on our quality of life. Madness! 4) For believing that financial and structural progress is progress and not realizing that we live in a perpetual jail where we cannot even feel safe to tie our shoelaces, leave our cars behind and go for a walk (Unless of course you are a man, or you live in a ‘gated community’. One woman’s safe community, another woman’s jail).

Madness! 5) Because the doctor writes: “Patient thinks law equals order.

Police…have…speedy…guns.

They…shoot…quick…kill…all… bandit.

He tries to sound out the sense of her sentences. He shakes his head sympathetically.

Prognosis: Demetia.

“Look! Land of Carnival and Soca!” the children shouted.

(Soca rhythm starts) “Han in d’ air, han in d’ air, One murder, two murder, three murder four, Five murders, six murders, seven murders more…” (Citizens dance with gay abandon to the sound of bullets and s c r e ams in the d i s t a n c e thi nki ng they are sound effects)