Yesterday, I got a hold of Beverly Manley’s Manley Memoirs . Remembering the past is a focusing exercise that prepares one to envision the future. Today, let us do both for ourselves, our families, communities and nations. My car is in the garage so yesterday my mother gave me a ride home and we were discussing Beverly ‘s book. The past came alive in a very real way. Beverly ‘s descriptions of her mother….her parents her upbringing, the state of the nation and the challenges of that era – the 60’s and 70’s transported us. Stories that lit up life, define existence and cause us to remember and realize who we are.
One character that stuck out of the pages of the book and the pages of my mind is Norman Washington Manley, whose birthday today is a cause to celebrate. This tower of a man who on his deathbed, when asked by his wife to linger a little longer on this side, insisted that he had a train to catch, and that was his priority. Life on this side, he decided costs too much.
We can enter into the pain of this man, whose creativity and determination is a central shaping force of the Jamaica of our experience today. It was the vision of independent Jamaica he embraced and sacrificed for that has largely shaped our present reality. He lived to see it…and watch in irony those forces, once most antagonistic to his dreams, usurp him and hijack those dreams off into new directions. Life on this side does cost much indeed.
My friend told me that she actually had traveled as a child on the last federal ship throughout the Caribbean . Manley’s dream of a federated Caribbean State, like Marcus’ dream of a liberated race had ships that sailed during their lifetimes that sail no more….except in the seas of the minds of the heroes of the moment, who have been seized by the dreams, that are, if not larger than life, certainly larger than time….for as long as we remember. And that’s all a dream really ever is…..a memory.
I am now culminating a collaboration with Caribbean Vizion – the brainchild of Trinidad ‘s Kurt Allen who is himself quite the visionary. Kurt, ever aware of dream stealers and haters decided to retreat into obscurity behind the glare of public scrutiny and put out a more benign face to negotiate his ideals and ideas. What could be more harmless than a child? And if Kurt is right, and I think he is, what could be more revolutionary? Choclate, Kurt’s biological child is a living breathing vision of the future, and for 2 months, she has been reminding us that so are we. Choclate, turned 15 last month, and she has lived and worked in nearly every Caribbean territory with Caribbean Vizion, of which she is now CEO.
She reminded us that she has spent more of her lifetime in other Caribbean territories than in her native Trinidad . If there is any one in this generation approaching Norman ‘s dream of a United Caribbean state, its Choclate. And for two months I’ve been privileged to witness her passion for life, her passion for purity, her passion for people as she has engaged Jamaican youth from coast to coast in a conversation of possibilities.
A very focused young lady, she sees herself working within her own generation to create new Caribbean realities. Perhaps it is coincidental, that the only other group that I have experienced with as focused and harnessed an energy, committed to creating the new Caribbean is also from Trinidad – Dr Noel Woodroffe and his Northgate College young people.
The multi-textured and complex nature of Caribbean reality being what it is, it would take the simplicity of a child’s unadulterated mind to dismantle and rearrange these disparate elements to give birth to the unifying dream. Whether Kurt or Noel and there are many more, I am just so glad to know that the Caribbean still has Fathers providing for its future, and children prepared to build it. At some imminent turning point, this generation will fully recognize the futility of abandoning or distorting its most noble dreams….and dreamers.
But we know that a new generation isn’t even waiting in the wings, it is already poising itself not just to face the future, but to be the face of the future, and they all like Choclate are chanting the mantra…….”I AM PERSONALLY RESPONSIBLE”.
YeKengalé 