The Tribune

By Dr Ian Bethell-Bennett

Sit. Feast on your life.

In Bahamian and indeed in Caribbean modern-day culture, we look to most men to be paragons of brutish strength and epic unthinking reaction to every stimuli. Here shall be no quiet contemplation, no words of wisdom, and no thoughtful kindness. We celebrate this kind of masculinity that will put another in the grave faster than we can create life, much like the Wild West of Hollywood that romanticised the killing of those Red Indians who were unwanted on the land they occupied because it had more value than they invested in it. (They saw themselves purely as custodians of land, never owners, always caretakers for those to come); this is not original because what needs to be said cannot be said without saying how much we are always owing to someone else’s investment, someone else’s footprint, the step on our toes the toes we stood on as toddlers as we learned the waltz that would wind us through to the final curtain.

The brand of masculinity we see, we celebrate in the leadership (who can kill one another with words meant expressly for public consumption), but condemned in the poor who will kill each other with loath-filled pistols of poison and leadership-empowered venomous bullets.

Masculinity is far removed from respectability and learnedness or creation. At neither level is their real gallantry, generosity or the culture of shared greatness. We inhabit a time where, ‘I will cut you down for no other reason that to show how big I am’.

As we sit and feast, in celebration of the life of poet and playwright Derek Walcott, we see not such, but a gentleness of spirit and the ability to create, to share, to access fabulous beauty and to pass the space onto those behind. This is not a celebration of being beyond human, but of the fragility of humanity in a body that burst every kind of limit with accessing the greatness within and beyond. The gentleness of the late Walcott’s greatness and his masculinity cannot be ignored.

To Walcott, we sit at the feast but need not bar our neighbour from joining. When we witness Walcott, we open to a higher level of being. We may come to Walcott with barred jalousies against the neighbour reality that is less than me, but we leave him with open verandahs over lives buried in pettiness and greed. This does not claim to be original, as there is no originality without debt of past, owing to footsteps in sand that, though washed away by the water’s advance and withdrawal, remain always, somewhere.

“One last epiphany: A basic stone church in a thick valley outside Soufrière, the hills almost shoving the houses around into a brown river, a sunlight that looks oily on the leaves, a backward place, unimportant, and one now being corrupted into significance by this prose. The idea is not to hallow or invest the place with anything, not even memory. African children in Sunday frocks come down the ordinary concrete steps into the church, banana leaves hang and glisten, a truck is parked in a yard, and old women totter towards the entrance. ‘Here is where a real fresco should be painted, one without importance, but one with real faith, mapless, Historyless’. (The Antilles)

Nothing remains after the end, except the greatness that was always disembodied. Walcott has left us with an everlasting impression, mental as much as spiritual of that expansive acceptance of the local and the global of the sacred conjoined with the mundane. He leaves us, as we are always want to say at funerals, with legacy, a massive man (as we ignore his humanity for his greatness). But as Walcott himself would say:

“This gathering of broken pieces is the care and pain of the Antilles, and if the pieces are disparate, ill-fitting, they contain more pain than their original sculpture, those icons and sacred vessels taken for granted in their ancestral places. Antillean art is this restoration of our shattered histories, our shards of vocabulary, our archipelago becoming a synonym for pieces broken off from the original continent.”

A boundless mind has left us, but in its wake we have the possibility of greatness shared beyond physical. In the ashes that give us beauty, beyond the political ramshackle shed of self-interested chaos, is the possibility of renewal. In the shadow of greatness there is more greatness, deeper joy, massive sorrow, incredible mourning and amazing beauty, but also a depth of being that we all touch with our minds and souls only.

Walcott has left us and we feel the weight of his departure. It is not the weight of loss when a great man dies, because he has left nothing. It is the weight of Xanadu-like wealth that winged us into this paradise too easily sold off into other worldliness. It is not the state funeral of fame or pomp, but the gentleness of soul and thought, beyond body and physical locatedness that allows us to be even more than we are. We are more than tourism and brutish, unlearned masculinity.

A culture based on joy is bound to be shallow. Sadly, to sell itself, the Caribbean encourages the delights of mindlessness, of brilliant vacuity, as a place to flee not only winter but that seriousness that comes only out of culture with four seasons. So how can there be a people there, in the true sense of the word?

Where can we find such word-smithing, brush strokes of peace-filled worship and awe for life, such channelling of nature’s beauty in the hate-filled, and poisonous wombs of our times?

We have become obsessed with destruction and as Walcott crafts:

“How quickly it could all disappear! And how it is beginning to drive us further into where we hope are impenetrable places, green secrets at the end of bad roads, headlands where the next view is not of a hotel but of some long beach without a figure and the hanging question of some fisherman’s smoke at its far end. . . . but every day on some island, rootless trees in suits are signing favourable tax breaks with entrepreneurs, poisoning the sea almond and the spice laurel of the mountains to their roots. A morning could come in which governments might ask what happened not merely to the forests and the bays but to a whole people.”

But even those places we hope are impenetrable are sold for a song, and the final dance as the lead actor bows morbidly wounded by the last curtain call of progress. As we wash away our footsteps, leaving them in blood-bathed hatred, on roads that remember not our names but only our lost dreams, our wasted energies to the vanity of earthly greatness housed in money and land deals, drugs and prostitution, we see our own demise.

Let us haul down our mainsails, hoist our jibs and staysails, as we feast; let us remember how quickly what we see can be erased by the devastation and greed we are empowering through our money and legacy inspired battle.

This may not be read; this may not be appreciated, but that matters little as we laugh at our folly and enjoy our life-bound power to destroy and to kill, we can meditate on the creativity of gentle masculinity that may never fade, but has showed us how to challenge the awful rootless trees in poisoned suits that destroy the very home they inhabit and willingly erase lives, people, who are complicit in their own undoing.

Walcott may no longer be with us physically, but his greatness and gentle masculinity remain a symbol of transcendent splendour, resting in our souls and in our minds, should we choose to open to the possibility of such gentle, contemplative creativity.