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Reading Time 2 mins
November 3, 2022
This is our home.
This is our land.
We are one family.
All for one and one for all.
We must build a foundation
For the young generation,
Free from complex and poverty.
We will buy a mint.
We will make our money.
We will print to the nation’s glory.
I am a Trinidadian
A lover of my race.
Will you kindly remove
This white woman’s face?
Lord Melody had seen, heard, and experienced enough to conclude that, among the still-to-this-day thankless British citizenry, the
Queen’s face was in many respects great for preserving the British Monarchy. However, for Lord Melody and the colonized British Subjects, in fact, and indeed, her face is bad news.
Growing up in Trinidad, he knew of the tremendous rise of London’s sugar magnates (Tate & Lyle) and the decline of the major sugar cane factories (Caroni, Brechin Castle, St. Madeline) as soon as beet sugar appeared to be better business. And, so it was with the rest of the Caribbean’s agricultural industry: bananas, cocoa, coffee, citrus, and not to mention the families negatively impacted by such preferences as presided over by the ostensibly bureaucratic indifference of the British Monarch. Still, this wasn’t all.
Whereas the Queen similarly presided over acts of subjugation, discrimination, and oppression Lord Melody must have cried when:
(a) The British Red Devils descended on Anguilla and arrested Ronald Webster over his independence movement from St Kitts and Nevis,
(b) Cheddi Jagan and his closest associates were arrested on accusations of Communist indoctrination in British Guyana,
(c) “The Iron Lady” shamelessly lost face enacting war against the Falkland Islands,
(d) Britain stood idly by while, courtesy Eugenia Charles, the Ronald Regan administration took ‘unholy’ advantage of tiny Grenada, having had her fill of Uncle Gairy’s Mongoose Gang,
(e) He would have learned that in 1945 after World War 2, Britain opened her doors for the influx of “Subjects” to assist in rebuilding her devastated towns and cities, only to attempt just the other day to get these same long-settled “Subjects” deported in her curiously devilish twist of the proverbial life span,
(f) On reflection, he would have recalled the psychological damage he suffered singing “Land of Hope and Glory” and “God Save The Queen” every Empire Day on the 24th of May, along with having to look, as shown above, upon the Royal Couple’s faces throughout his brainwashed childhood school days,
(g)Further on reflection, Lord Melody would have noted that every Royal Commission, one after the other, documented, among other things, and most significantly: A SOCIETY WAS NOT BEING FORMED,
(h) He realized that the iconic Uriah Butler, whose leadership of the first genuinely working-class movement spawned the birth of Trade Union representation of workers through Collective Bargaining, particularly in Trinibago, was arrested and thrown into confinement on Nelson Island.
Very much like Sparrow’s, Lord Melody’s vocal activism allowed them always to look and learn ‘below the surface’ and was therefore encrypted in the escapingly spiritual foundation that led to his fellow laureate’s assertion:
Dey wanted to keep me down indeed.
Dey try dey bess but did not succeed.
Yuh see: Meh head was duncee,
An up to now ah cyar read.
Big Drum Nation introduction to the “London Bridge is Falling Down” series
Duff Mitchell, recently recognized as a Cultural Ambassador by J’ouvert City International, Inc., is Vice Chairman of The Trinidad & Tobago Folk Arts Institute.