Reading with Raoul http://www.trinidadexpress.com/index.pl/article_opinion?id=161293287Friday, March 14th 2008
Riveted, I was reading Raoul Pantin's recently published book, Days of Wrath, his eye-witness account of the 1990 coup attempt, when I had to put it down and stare into the distance, having just read the following:
We had watched them, over the past 24 hours, assemble in groups, taking their turns at the elaborate Muslim prayer rituals. Men on their knees in prayer one minute, wielding automatic rifles and shotguns the next.
I felt the old Imam and perhaps Bakr himself and some of his closest companions probably shared the 'faith', and took its contradictions in stride. But when I looked more closely at some of the younger gunmen around me, I saw and sensed something else.
"How old are you?" I asked one young man guarding a corridor, the huge gun in his hand almost bigger than he was. He looked up at me, quickly dropping eyes.
He smiled sheepishly and lied:
"Seventeen."
If he was 15, he was plenty. And looking at this boy, a child really, I was certainly old enough to be both his father and grandfather. I suddenly felt a great sadness overwhelm me.
I felt we, the larger society, were responsible for his generation, responsible for his anger and even his despair. We had failed him-all these little boys with guns in their hands and their faith in this cause.
It came to me that we hadn't harnessed their idealism, all that youthful energy and enthusiasm and capacity to believe in something larger and grander than themselves. But Bakr had. Like a kind of modern-day Fagan, with an AK-47 in hand, Bakr had.
For in this boy, as among other younger gunmen all around me, I saw poverty, a lack of education and skills as the root of the problem. I saw unemployed and unemployable, without the means of earning an income as the weed that choked their spirits. I saw hopelessness and disillusionment replaced by the Bakr-taught ideals of Islam. This little boy could not have been more than 15 years old.
He, so many others like him, had probably been roaming the streets, foraging for food, ducking the police, getting involved in petty crime. And then he found himself down at the mosque at No 1 Mucurapo Road being offered food, shelter, hope, a faith, a wife or four, a gun.
The gun was important.
A couple nights later, Bakr would order the gunmen to stack their guns at night, and they'd do that. They stacked all the guns together in the middle of the room, except for the guns in the hands of the men on guard duty.
But this little boy lying next to me on the floor wouldn't stack his gun; instead he lay there, cradling the gun in his arms.
"You didn't hear the man or what?" I said to him. "He wants the guns stacked up."
"Not this gun!" the little boy whispered fiercely. "This gun is my freedom!"
By the time you read this, I would have returned to Raoul's terrifying TTT experience but, at the time of this particular reading, what stopped me in my tracks was not the then, but the now-my mind reeling over how the essence of scenario the journalist had unfolded was being replayed, even as I read, so many teenagers east, west, north and south of where I sat reading, believing that the gun was their pathway to freedom.
I sat there, thinking, last Wednesday night, about exactly what Raoul's 15-year-old meant-whether he meant he would be able to use the gun to shoot his way out should the soldiers outside come blasting in? Hardly likely, since the likelihood was that the soldiers would have shot him dead possibly even before he could get a single shot off. So what was this gun freedom that boy-child was talking about?
And, then, I thought of all those gun children whose pictures we keep seeing in the papers, either killed or having killed and I thought, too, that they, too, had seen in the gun that they had bought, stolen or borrowed, a means of liberation, their contemporaries living in and around me in Laventille, feeling that mere gun-possession put them notches above everybody else.
I have this idea that I am saying this badly and that whomever is reading is reading into my writing the view that having the gun gives these young boy holders the freedom to rob and kill and, yes, there are those gunderilitos who use the guns they have to do that, but it is not just that or even mainly that. It is that having a gun, in their minds, somehow gives them a value that they didn't think they had without it.
And as I keep thinking about that, as I weave my way through the vale of tears (our tears!) that is Raoul's remarkable, head of the class, reportage, I fear I am hurrying to the conclusion that the cracks that Abu Bakr saw and used have only widened since, the papers replete with links between the failed but amnesty-freed insurrectionists of 1990 and the gangland gangrene that has set in today, and it is all I can do to prevent myself from simply giving up all as lost and dropping on my knees to pray.
Raoul, though, is sure to remind me that our lot is to watch and write, if only to help those who come after to understand what really happened here-all the outstanding money talk, jet talk and, yes, jam and wining talk, notwithstanding.
