Eric Williams created the Labasse culture when he inundated Trinidad with small islanders whose primordial approach to existence was a life and death one with existential finesse, with the niceties of life, of please and thank you and may I please being extravagant terms of a civilized people evolving from a Jurassic Park dinosaur origin to a knife and fork Hilton Hotel sophistication.
Williams did not bother that he was taking little NY (for that was how POS was seen then) back to the cave man jungle of Africa because they fulfilled his objective of voting him into power election after election ad infinitum. In so doing, the labasse was born.
While the term labasse exuded an aura, well, more like a stench of rotting fish, of stagnant water filled with things dead, from a political standpoint, it meant forward never, backward ever; that whatever our condition, we like it so because William the Messiah bestowed it upon us and we are thus, blessed to have it.
The people of the Lagoon pinched their nose at this labasse culture and saw in their voting habit doomsday; that to vote whomever was their candidate – crapaud, bullfrog, tadpole – meant disaster for the country for it meant buying cat in bag and not getting value for your money which was in contradiction to the lagoon people’s economics which has always been pound for pound.
But see now, see how the lagoon crowd are only concerned with having a political leader who is more akin to their IQ, to their own lagoon mentality and it doesn’t bother them that she has not the capacity to go beyond being the opposition leader because during her one term as PM she made herself out to be some kind of Santa Claus leader and for which they now nostalgically hope to recreate as something inevitable. They are not realising that her Santa Claus moment was just a myth and the real her is a mirage, Saharan dust in the wind.
And so in being blind to the real Kamla, a Siparia labasse has been born where a blind eye is turned to all that is wrong by supposedly educated persons who justify their support for her on the grounds that she excelled in her one term and that is all that mattered; that all her shortcomings since then must not be tabulated as PNM does. Kamla’s UNC is just a downloaded version of the PNM, a Sohari leaf adaptation of the Balisier leaf deification. One looks at these young, educated Indo/Trinis groveling at the feet of Kamla and asks how are they different from those of the small islands whose mission is to vote the balisier symbol; whom they looked upon with scorn and cursed for letting the country go down the abyss of destruction just to keep the PNM in power. Are they not replicating those small islanders?
L. Siddhartha Orie.