THE PRODIGALS

1. Sometimes life throws you a curveball. Sometimes two. We recall the first time we left Antigua and Barbuda. It was the best of times, it 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 left, 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, talking in the familiar language of animals and plants, we told them that we were sorry we had to leave and that we would never return. Never.

2. Off we went to foreign. The first odd observation we encountered was on the drive from the airport. We had just left a split image of so-and-so back home. It was so real, even surreal, we shouted out a few names. Saltfish Head! Red Mouth Girlie! Big Ants! You told granny two big ants eat the cornmeal porridge. How did you get here so fast? We just left you back home? There they were in a foreign land too, doing all sorts of work, or no work at all. Some of them had laid waste their lives with riotous living.

3. 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 with our 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.

4.Time passed by and whispered to us that this foreign land, the land of the free and the brave, was free to go to but brave to stay. More time passed by, and without whispering, it told us it was no longer free to go to, and that bravery would no longer secure our stay.

5. 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, life would 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 mind back to what one of our great female writers said about racism. It was 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.

6. The above vignette is a corridor into 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, between a rock and a hard place, we have to stop pretending and do what we have to do and say. Send them. Send every single one of them. These are our people in the wilderness, and we will not forsake them. Send them. Send them back. Send back the whole lot.

7. One of the cardinal lessons the fight for reparations has revealed to us is that the instigator must come to the realization that dehumanization works both ways. Ask Nelson Mandela. If the instigator wants to live with his bitter conscience pricking him forever and ever, then so be it. He will never be at peace, seeking solace in overt, covert, internal and external abuse.

8. 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.

9. And so, all the politicians on both political sides came together in Antigua and Barbuda at this time of national and regional crisis. In our case, some say this unity had already happened in the Purple Revolution. But talk is cheaper than walk. The people are called to arms in a national public meeting.

10. 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 have to prepare for the worst. This is the time to invest in our country. Those of you with some money sleeping under the bed must wake it up and invest tranches of it in this new venture and enabling environment the government will provide.

11. All of you police officers now have real policing work to do. One listener at the meeting remembers 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.

12. All the streets in the entire island must be named. Every house must be numbered. Everyone 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.

13. Let us look at 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.

14. As the national public meeting goes on, two friends, buried in the massive crowd, looked at each other with a searching look in their eyes. The red friend said to the other: This sounds like a real, new beginning, a rebirth, a reawakening of our country and people. A renaissance!

15. The blue friend, reflecting on the theme, “Renaissance” of the political party of his red friend in the recent general elections, whispered: Be careful what you wish for.

This article was originally published by Antigua News Room. Read the original article here: COMMENTARY: The Prodigals by Dr. Lester Simon.