Amina Blackwood MeeksYour Excellency, Governor-General:
SO SORRY you are out. I would have enjoyed talking with you directly. But I am really grateful that Cable and Wireless has extended its free voice mail service till the end of the month. That way I can leave you a fairly lengthy message and in the normal course of the meaning of free it should not cost us a thing to retrieve. I meant to seek audience with you immediately upon your return from your recent trip to the Mother Country, that is, the country of which the Queen Mother is mother. Actually I would have written to you before you left, but it got really busy around here.
There was the enquiry into the prison beatings, controversy about who owns or should own the patent to the voting system, failure to reach agreement on who should sit on the Electoral Advisory Commission, scandal about a sex manual, kass-kass about the Caribbean Court of Justice, and then Mr. Butch Stewart spoke and rendered us all paralysed by pointing out something which no one but him seemed to know, that crime was out of hand. So you know we had to sit still and take note.
So many things happened while you were away, that I am having a smirnoff moment just trying to recall them all. It leaves you breathless. Here I am coming up for air, and coming to terms with all the keeping in touch, I have not been able to do. You see, it is Heritage Week and I was making a list of interesting things to tell my students about why they should treasure their heritage.
Question? Did Columbus ever find any of that gold in Jamaica? No.
Question? Was gold ever found in Jamaica? Yes
Question? Where is it now? Fashioned into the lignum vitae flower and sitting somewhere in the Queen Mother's treasure chest for one of her grandchildren to inherit.
Question? Will we ever get a chance to see it? Maybe. If one day it is put on display in the British Museum of how good Mankind has been to the Empire, proudly taking its place with the rest of the Queen's gatherings from the wealth of the common people. Of course we would have to be in the empire at the time or take a trip just for the viewing.
Anyway, before you left you were reported as having said that a lady of her uncommon qualities and longevity deserved uncommon gifts. This got me thinking of our centenarians who were celebrated by the National Council on Senior Citizens this year. There was this lady at the ceremony out in Montego Bay who celebrated her 115th birthday in March this year. That was a millennium moment. I know you know her name because you were there. She only received a mug and a handshake from you. Our centenarians had to receive something functional. A gold brooch? Only if they were going to have a gold brooch occasion and they don't do that much.
Would their great grandchildren have had any use, taken pleasure in inheriting a piece of gold given to a "grand" who had lived uncommonly long through uncommon hardships on little or nothing? Comparing apples and pears, right? But this lady in Montego Bay was a peach, in a class by herself. Like so much of what we give away before our children realise that we had it. Then we ask them to take pride in their history and their heritage, and we pretend not to understand why they gawk at pieces of metal, broken plates and the like which the Queen Mother's heirs and successors so carefully retrieve, label and secure behind glass cases so that all may understand who and how Britannia ruled.
So, in Heritage Week 2000 I am just a little stumped explaining these higher matters to my students. Aesthetics, that is the name of the course, is partly the study of that in which we find beauty and how it is that we come to appreciate some things as valuable. I want to be able to discuss the Caribbean Court of Justice in that context, as an expression of sovereignty, something that we could build, take pride in bequeathing. But I suspect that if the subject of how we treat our own and that which we give away should ever come up, I would lose all credibility with them.
So, instead, we are going to look back and dance, dance for future healing, Dance From A Spiritual Space. That is the name of the three-day symposium being held this week at which some of the major Caribbean figures who have worked all their lives to ensure that we do not lose sight of what is important to us will be making presentations.
Still I trust you enjoyed the birthday party and tea with the uncommon lady. Maybe we should be happy that we have been able to globalise our one likkle deggeh gold find. I understand that it is not the first such, but I could not find trace of that piece either.
Anyway someone told me that the Queen does not work without getting paid and that as Head of State and Head of the Commonwealth she is entitled to some of the wealth which turns up in these common places. Even if the Queen Mother accepts on her behalf. Maybe I could use this as a metaphor for tax avoidance as distinct from tax evasion.
Without this voice mail I might have had to use something really old fashioned like drum sounds to send this message. Remember how that was banned? It is still resisted in some places. Or maybe smoke signals. What a lot of smoke I would have made over the little bit of firing involved in shaping the few grams of gold.
Have a great Heritage Week.
Amina Blackwood Meeeks is a communications specialist.
