The Losses

The following was written on December 12, 2006 and relates to the controversy in the air at that time over the proposal to build an aluminium smelter in the community of Chatham. Although that project was eventually shelved, plans are underway right now for the construction of another aluminium smelter in La Brea. Many of the points contained herein are therefore still relevant today.

I am here to talk about losses.

A great deal of these losses we have already discussed, particularly those in the area of environment and health and the giving away of our natural resources. Then there is the misappropriation of land; the failure to develop agriculture and other organically rooted industries in favour of a mindless mass industrialisation.

These losses are tangible. But what of the intangibles?

There is the loss of a vibrant community life that is ultimately our greatest resource. Such a loss has indeed very tangible consequences - notice the violent dislocation of our young people, the culture of violence and the skyrocketing murder rate. Do we really believe these problems will be solved with more police vehicles?

Illustration by Kitt Joseph.

We face a fundamental crisis of community and we are afraid to confront this and the real measures we need to take. Instead we go for shallow bourgeois quick fixes rather than recognise the stark truth that we require a revolutionary overhaul of all our structures. Because the crisis is not only about a set of bad boys but involves everything up to and including the dominant institutions that supposedly regulate our society - the judiciary, the politics, the armed forces, the capitalist system, the constitution itself.

So I put it to you that the core crisis is one of community; what may be termed people-hood. These smelters are a direct attack on this people-hood. Both in the way they are being forced on the people, arrogantly, violently and by force of arms, and by the profoundly destructive nature of the industrialisation involved, indeed the whole process. The imposition of heavy industry, environmental and health impacts and the mass importation of alien populations to build and operate the smelters are radical community concerns.

But let us get back to people-hood. The question needs to be asked - why have we here been so self-destructive? Why do we consistently undermine the very things that make us who we are?

The debate is an old one as evidenced in the discussion of the second-class treatment of key cultural expressions of our Carnival, or more recently complaints concerning the alienation of "Indian culture". But when we undermine such cultural expressions we are not harming "black people" or "the Indians"; we are really undermining...destroying our own people-hood.

This is evidenced again in our Trinidadian attitude to the past. Naipaul, writing in the 1960s, remarked that for Trinidadians the early 20th century is the dark ages. We have so little concern for the ancestral legacy that grounds us as a people. We have so little knowledge of the historical processes that brought us to where we are today. Even supposedly intelligent and prominent persons who would recommend solutions to the present crisis exhibit this ignorance and indifference. Little wonder that our politicians embark on damn fool schemes that show complete ignorance of our historical experience and indeed, of who we are as a people.

This brings us to Chatham and the ALCOA smelter.

The location for this proposed smelter is the site of an ancestral African village - Boukongo. Its origin is in the 19th century where there was established in Port-of-Spain and spaces throughout this land settlements of various African peoples or nations - Yoruba, Rada, Hausa, Mandingo, Congo. Hence this began as a Congo settlement, developed into a pan-African village and is a cradle of the present-day Chatham-Cap-de-ville community.

Yet what we do know of this nation-settlement and others like it throughout Trinidad and Tobago? These are key locations that constitute us as a people. Here is a sacred ancestral site along with an ancestral cemetery that we ought to protect and treasure. The significance of such locations is respected and protected internationally but not in this banana republic. Instead we invite the imperialists to rape it...to rape us...again.

We are not losing our essence; we are throwing it away.

Let us consider this imperialist colonial monstrosity that we confront because here we can begin to appreciate the scale of the losses.

As Trinidadians we are very self-absorbed but we face a global machine. A capitalist machine that seeks to plunder the wealth of nations in order to fed its insatiable hunger. A war machine that seeks to control the world, that needs aluminium to kill Muslims, to carry out a global war on Islam and other enemies of Empire. A machine having no blood, no flesh, no heart, no soul, no ancestors...it means to crush the people's struggle in Latin America and for this purpose it means to seize our South-Western Peninsula.

We speak of rape of the land and plunder of the planet and here we witness the full extent of the losses inflicted by this capitalist-military complex. It leads ultimately to the destruction of Mother Earth herself. Global warming is merely one result of this process and here the Manning smelters will contribute handsomely.

Perhaps global warming is the earth's way of fighting back but has this regime considered the consequences? How for instance would climate change and the rise in sea level impact our fragile island spaces and economies? Our honourable Prime Minister may be the architect of a new Caribbean after all.

But the people are fighting back.

The Palestinians against Zionist genocide, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Iraqi insurgency, the Afghans and Iran. Closer to home we witness the struggle for freedom and self-determination that is the revolution sweeping Latin America.

In this our land we face the Empire not merely as an external force but acting through the local regime and armed forces. I have witnessed Chatham take on the appearance of a military camp rather than a village. Some have this strange notion that the institutions of government of the state are meant to represent and serve the interests of the people. I recommend they carefully review our Caribbean history. The purpose of the state is to intimidate and to oppress. The people are confronting the ferocity of the state. What is our response?

People keep saying that if the Prime Minister wants to build he will build and there is nothing we can do about it. So we are still slaves then? Regardless of the cars we drive, the cable TV we watch, the Internet we play with or the amount of KFC we eat this place is still a plantation? What massa says goes? Is it not far better to die free?

I believe the exact opposite. If these smelters are built it will be not because of ALCOA or the government, it will be due solely to our own indifference and weakness. If 20,000 determined people block the site down in Chatham what can ALCOA and Bechtel do? If 100,000 angry citizens were to surround the Prime Minister's office can the police and army save him?

The institutions of violence must be swept away. But are we prepared to realise that the real power, the power preserved by our ancestors of Boukongo and elsewhere, resides in our community? In who we are as a people.

We are blessed in that only a few miles from that same South-Western Peninsula across the gulf there is unfolding a Bolivarian revolution of direct democracy. The only question is: are we going to be slaves forever? Or will we join all those who struggle for freedom at the rendezvous of victory.