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Last Sunday, Queen’s Hall was the venue for Dawad Philip’s Sunday with the Warlord, a play about the calypsonian Lord Blakie (Carlton Joseph).
Blakie was perhaps best known for his two Road March wins, “Steelband Clash” (1954) and “Maria” (1962), and the play is a sort of narrative about his life with two main characters: Kurtis Gross as Blakie, and Penelope Spencer as Queenie, a devoted supporter during his travails.
This is not a review of the play; it is simply that one of the lines set me off.
Queenie, reflecting on the kind of man he was, said that Blakie knew better than to get his hopes up high. Perhaps it was because he had reached such a state of dejection that he could not bear to go through the process of applying for a visa again to go to the US, where he believed he could get the breakthrough his contemporaries were having.
It made me think about hope—however improbable it might be—and how not having any of it is the thief that robs life of meaning.
Even a wisp of hope can keep us floundering on when circumstances seem grim. We trust that somehow things will turn around.
To reach the point of complete despair is truly the state that kills the spirit. Blakie had been a man who seemed to be spirited and full of bravado; incorrigible and wutless even, yet he seemed to be crushed by the obstacles that came from high places.
We all have our different circumstances, different paths, and naturally, different challenges. What are the things that can suck even a wispy modicum of hope out of us? That was the question that has been haunting me.
I live in a state of optimism. Having gone through many hardships, I learned not to depend on others to find solutions to my problems.
Over time, as I accumulated desperate episodes, I realised that it was possible to get past them, and to put them to good use. Now, when grumpy things arise, I can dig into my experience and remind myself that I survived this or that, and so I will more than manage this.
It’s not that I always have solutions, but I have faith that I will figure it out.
The most important lesson I’ve learned is that life will always be throwing things at you, always: bam, bam, bam. What you can control is how you respond.
I used to lose it often. Stumble and crumble and go into terrible silent funks. But I knew I had to keep going without any real support system, and I had to pull myself together because I had a young child to look after.
I used to tell myself: Vee, you can wallow for 24 hours, but after that you have to go into problem-solving mode. Not blame mode, not victim mode, not anger mode. Just focus on fixing.
As I have grown older, I have also come to relax a lot more. No more high dramas, at least, not in my mind.
I try to see the big picture, thus reducing the issue to a manageable size. And I am fortunate that I can rally around my own quirkiness and find humour, and more importantly, search for some unexpected benefit that can be derived from the situation.
It saves me, and I am sharing this because they were conscious decisions I made to keep me from the abyss. And the more you see how a changed approach can work, the easier it gets to go into that mode.
This works for me, but what about all the people who do not have the comfort of having made peace with who they are and so find it difficult to trust that they can find a way?
We have to face it, at the core of this country’s increasing malaise is the fact that people are living in a state of despair. They’ve lost hope that things can turn around.
Within that feeling of hopelessness, like Blakie, they blame what they see as the higher forces: in this case, political parties, the wealthy, gangs, all sorts of entities.
The level of bitterness and rage is a sign of the growing bruise angrily discolouring the public psyche. Are we really haters at heart?
We could say what we want; the loss of hope is nestling right there next to the loss of confidence, of trust, in our institutions. And we have become so used to depending on them to make everything right that we forget that we can do little things to ease the tension.
(Copyright Sean Morrison)
Which is not to say that we should accept the incompetence and often wilful neglect of the people who are charged with finding solutions and supporting sustainable development. They have to be held accountable.
But do we really do that? We continue to go along with unacceptable declarations, preferring to distract ourselves with puerile arguments, rather than applying a little thought before opening our mouths.
I am straying a little from my own question of what makes people lose hope. They lose it when they feel nothing they do will make a difference. Then they can get reckless, because they feel they have nothing more to lose.
It’s a sobering situation, and I don’t know how we’re going to find the strength within us to lift our spirits.
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Vaneisa Baksh is a columnist with the Trinidad Express, an editor and a cricket historian. She is the author of a biography of Sir Frank Worrell.
