THE PRODIGALS
Sometimes life throws you a curveball. Sometimes two. As reported by Antigua News Room, this commentary by Dr. Lester Simon reflects on the experience of leaving Antigua and Barbuda — and what it means to be forced to return.
We recall the first time we left Antigua and Barbuda. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times — going away from our home, fractured over the years into bouts and bits and pieces of rare happiness and rabid, frequent sadness. We were so relieved to leave that, the morning we departed, we walked around the yard and spoke to the remaining animals that had not been sold and were waiting to be given away. We embraced the trees, touched the plants and, in the familiar language of animals and plants, we told them we were sorry we had to leave, and that we would never return. Never.
Off we went to foreign. The first odd observation came on the drive from the airport. There they were — split images of faces from back home, so real, even surreal. Saltfish Head. Red Mouth Girlie. Big Ants. How did you get here so fast? We just left you back home. There they were in a foreign land, doing all sorts of work, or no work at all. Some had laid waste their lives with riotous living.
We swore we would never become like some of them. We would be good and stay out of trouble, walking tall to our new home and workplace — head high, back straight — save for the slanted shoulders, the swinging arms, and the bopping walk that is the defining gait of a real West Indian.
Time passed by and whispered that this foreign land, the land of the free and the brave, was free to go to but brave to stay. More time passed, and without whispering, it told us it was no longer free to go to, and that bravery would no longer secure our stay.
Some of us did well, but others caught hell, right in our tired, naked hands. Some wanted to return home because life would come in and go out, leaving us in a constant recycling state of spinning into and out of dizziness. Some started singing Home, Sweet Home in dissonant harmony but were too ashamed to admit it. Others cast their minds back to what one of our great female writers said about racism — a joke, but like all jokes, it told the bitter truth. She said it was so bad in some places, black people could not eat white ice cream.
That vignette serves as a corridor into what Dr. Simon describes as the biggest and newest joint hurricane-earthquake hitting the Caribbean: the forced return of our people. With no room to argue, no room to discuss, caught between a rock and a hard place, he writes that we must stop pretending. Send them. Send every single one of them. These are our people in the wilderness, and we will not forsake them. Send them back. Send back the whole lot.
One of the cardinal lessons the fight for reparations has revealed, the commentary argues, is that the instigator must come to the realisation that dehumanisation works both ways. Ask Nelson Mandela. If the instigator chooses to live with a bitter conscience pricking him forever, then so be it. He will never be at peace, seeking solace in overt, covert, internal and external abuse.
Come home, my people. Come home. Why try to exist overseas in a famine of the mind, and would fain have filled your belly with the husks of swine? We will prepare a place for you and bring out our fatted calf, lest you perish from mental hunger and weep bitterly in the foreign, strange land of Babylon.
The commentary then turns to the political dimension. All politicians on both sides came together in Antigua and Barbuda at this time of national and regional crisis. Some say this unity had already begun with the Purple Revolution. But talk is cheaper than walk. The people, Dr. Simon writes, are called to arms in a national public meeting.
Comrades. Brothers and Sisters. This is the time to gird our loins and join the battle. We do not know who is coming, except that they are our people. We must prepare for the worst. This is the time to invest in our country. Those with money sleeping under the bed must wake it up and invest tranches of it in this new venture and the enabling environment the government will provide.
Police officers now have real policing work to do. One listener at the meeting recalls the joke about the parson's wife who reminded her husband that were it not for the devil, the parson would not have a job. But it is not just the police. Everything and everyone must change.
All streets across the island must be named. Every house must be numbered. Every resident must have a national identification card. The census is no joke — it is mandatory. You have to be counted to be able to count your blessings, one by one.
Dr. Simon urges the nation to view this crisis as an opportunity for national renewal. We have been through worse. We built the northern world with cotton and cane and more. Our earthly and other fields can grow again for our very own — who are lost and now find themselves back home.
As the national public meeting continues, two friends buried in the massive crowd exchange a searching look. The red friend speaks first: This sounds like a real, new beginning — a rebirth, a reawakening of our country and people. A renaissance.
The blue friend, reflecting quietly on the theme of "Renaissance" adopted by his red friend's political party in the recent general elections, whispers in reply: Be careful what you wish for.
