Solomon on our anthem

THE EDITOR: Usually I find Mr Dennis Solomon’s articles sensible and clear.  His article “Our Empty National Anthem” however, is far from clear. He springs a surprise on us by declaring: “What nobody realises up to today is that there are not one but three grammatical errors in the anthem.” The first, he says, is “that ‘find’ is not necessarily an error. It may be seen as an optative, a form expressing a wish, like ‘save’ in ‘God save the Queen’.” Later, however, he changes his mind: “So I think we may safely take both ‘find’ and ‘and’ to be errors, along with the irredeemable ‘this’.” The second error, he says, is the “and” in “And may God bless our nation.” He gives what I consider an unfair example in “Britain is an industrial country, and God save the Queen,” because there is practically no link between “industrial” and “Queen.” If, however, we said: “Britain is a great nation, and may God save the Queen,” it would be a perfectly logical sentence.

The third error, he says, is: “‘This our native land, we pledge our lives to thee...’”  “This,” he says, is not vocative: you cannot use it to address someone or something.” But turn the sentence round to read: “We pledge ourselves to this our native land,” and it becomes obvious that “this” is not vocative but accusative, as all words that follow a preposition are considered in English as being in the accusative case. Mr Solomon then throws up his hands in disgust and declares: “The whole anthem, in fact, is literary nonsense.” It isn’t — the late Pat Castagne was not a fool. Mr Solomon, however, does point out a real difficulty when he says: “‘Forged from the love of liberty...’  Just who was forged?...  Perhaps ‘we’ (the people) were the ones forged.”  And, grammatically, here he is correct. When you forge something or things you bind them together in unity. And this makes perfect sense in the anthem: “We (the people of Trinidad and Tobago) are bound together in unity.”

He then goes on to attack “Side by side we stand,” which I consider to be a beautiful moment in the anthem, when the music moves from a minor key to the major. But he considers it to be “a geographical platitude” — and to a certain extent it is, but the Australian national anthem has an even worse one: ‘Our home is girt by sea’ — so is Trinidad, and Gasparee, and Centipede Island for that matter. To be fair to him, Mr Solomon reminds us that Pat Castagne composed the anthem for the short-lived West Indian Federation, in which context “Side by side we stand, Islands of the blue Caribbean Sea” would have been a magnificent, though sadly untrue, declaration. When the Federation failed, Pat dusted off his Federal anthem and presented it to the committee that was to choose the TT anthem, no doubt saying to himself: “Well, we’ve still got two islands anyway and, sometimes at least, they stand side by side.”

I presume Mr Solomon has no objection to every race finding an equal place — if he did he might be stigmatised as a pseudo-racist. So his quarrel must be with the words “creed” and “God.” But everyone has to have a creed of some sort. Atheists have a creed, namely that there is no God. As there is no way of proving that there is no God, they can only believe that there is none. Agnostics are more sensible — they say that there may or may not be a God, but we have no way of knowing, so let’s just get on with our lives. But they still believe in some things, such as that we shouldn’t kill or steal or trample on the rights of others. So they too have a creed.

And Christians, along with Hindus and Muslims, of course, have a creed — as there’s no way of proving mathematically that there is a God, they have to make an act of faith that there is one. So even Mr Solomon does have a creed, of one sort or another. Yet he objects to our anthem having “the pseudo-pious crap about fires of hope and prayer and invocation of divine blessing.” Here I think he is out of step with most of his compatriots. I know of no other nation in which, at the opening of each year’s parliamentary sessions, no fewer than five or six religious leaders read out prayers for God’s blessing on its deliberations. Trinidad and Tobago is a very religious nation, and may it long continue to be so.

ROLAND QUESNEL CSSp
Port-of-Spain