And now some good news
Keith Smith, Express
Friday, June 15th 2007
ell, he couldn't have timed it better - could he - that Point Fortin Trinidadian, Arthur Joseph, who made a point of celebrating some of his tribe's contributions to this country's culture on NBC's well-watched Deal or No Deal programme,
Ah mean with all the negative publicity T&T has been getting - first from Akon's Zenantics, secondly Benny Hinn's hand harangue and thirdly from all those JFK terror stories - we could do with some positives, and there was Mr Joseph, as recorded for Wednesday's showing, emoting his heart out as he opted out of an opportunity to win a million US dollars by deciding to accept, instead, US$70,000 - of course - and a Miami Heat basketball court building project right here in Trinidad.
From what I have been told - having managed to miss the damn show - even the host, Howie Mandel, was bowled over by Joseph's patriotic love for the place from which he emigrated four years ago to be with his mother, the man coming on stage with a pan side, the NBC studio audience dancing as the pannists ripped out the show's theme song.
Man, it must have been a euphoric time (limbo and all!) what with mother, like son, opting to give up the lure of a promised house (had he won the really big bucks) in favour of the Trini play, unique in the show's history, all previous contestants settling for the personal rather than "nobly" (Mandel's take, not mine) making a push for a favoured place.
Arthur's act has galvanised Trinis here, from all I've been hearing, but how much more must it have moved Trinis over there who have had to take all that Trini terror thing on TV many, if not all of them, still celebrating their "home" country in their hearts in the manner of most migrants, I find, whatever their ties and, indeed, loyalty to their adopted homes.
The late jurist Telford Georges used to say that nothing ever unravels in the normal way where Trinidad and Trinidadians are concerned. He said it somewhat bitterly as if this was inherently a negative trend but it could turn out positively too, out of the blue something happening that reminds you that Trinidad and Tobago is much more than the sum of its sorrows.
You know how many Trinis I know like Mr Joseph? He said that his way was smoothed through the auditions because of his Trini accent and his affable personality. Well, I don't know that a Trini accent is more attractive than anybody else's but I kept being asked by people in North America to talk so that they could hear me "sing" (truth is, I was never sure that they weren't inwardly laughing at me) but, personality-wise, some people here (and, again I guess, elsewhere) are something else.
Glad men, I call them these exuberantly extrovert Trinbagonians of all races and classes who take life at a gallop. There is, at least, one in every village, every club, every ongoing lime - fellers who walk with a spring in their steps and a laugh on their lips, even if they are going into a shop to pawn their wedding ring as a tide-over till payday like Success Village's Ian "Clown Pants'' Pierre who could make you laugh in your mother's wake and Sparrow's late friend and mine, Finnegan, who crashed his red sports car on the Eastern Main Road one fine day, Finnegan dying - so I have heard - laughing in the wind.
Nor am I surprised that Arthur is a Point Fortin feller, Point being something special as a Trini place, its migrant population (Grenada, St Vincent, Barbados, the whole West Indian wherever) making for something of a merry mix (Duke who wrote Nelson's "King Liar" and his own "Streakin Freakin''' from there), per capita, I often swear, the biggest football and kaiso catchment in the world (Iwer and Blue Boy from dey, too) - Warren Archibald, Steve David, Arnim David, Leroy de Leon, Delbert Charleau, Wilfred Cave, Monty Douglas, Winty Hackett and 'bout a hundred others, and more from there as well.
And now with a Miami Heat ball court in the offing, complete with all the hoop-la, don't be surprised if, in a generation or two, "Point" belches out the best basketballers, Point Fortin, I keep thinking, never having been given all its due, priest, pundit and politician never quite knowing where this power place coming from.