22 March 2001, 809 words
Ramesh Lawrence Maharaj's 53 little words about Justice Ivor Archie may well be the most linguistically instructive of our political history. Offhand, I cannot think of another paragraph on which a politician has foundered so badly, or demonstrated so clearly the misuse of language.
"You cannot close your eyes to the fact that Justice Archie, who is hearing the case, he himself wrote a letter and wanted the Government to give him a supergrade house, and to build a house for him, and we said no, that is not the land and you cannot get a house."
Saying these words was Ramesh's second most egregious political error; the first most egregious error occurred afterwards, when he insisted that he had not imputed any bias to the judge. The only way that that denial would have been remotely convincing was if Ramesh could have offered some other reason for mentioning the house application, which of course he could not.
So Ramesh put himself in a position where persons indifferent or opposed to the UNC knew he was lying, and lying blatantly; and where, even worse, he was telling UNC supporters that what they understood him to mean was not what he had meant at all.
In making his denial, Ramesh rejected several basic rules of human communication. This is why the hardestcore UNC supporters have been forced to adopt more than usually absurd defences: one letter-writer admitting that the AG is abusing his office, but arguing that this is the PNM's fault for creating that office; another admitting that Basdeo Panday is a dictator but saying that dictatorship is what this country needs; while for Hindu fanatics Rajnie Ramlakhan and Kamal Persad, Maharaj's crude innuendo is spun as a reasoned criticism of the judiciary.
The philosopher Paul Grice has pointed out that the act of communicating relies on a mutual expectation of cooperation between speaker and listener. The speaker implicitly guarantees that what he is saying is relevant, contains new information and fits in with what the listener is already thinking so the latter can make logical inferences. The listener therefore expects the speaker to be informative, truthful, relevant, unambiguous, brief, and orderly.
Ramesh adhered to these criteria when he made his speech at the UNC mobilisation meeting: since his listeners were partisan, paranoid and prejudiced, he knew that his statement about Archie would have been interpreted one way and one way only. Ramesh's later statement that everything he said were "facts which cannot be disputed" in effect says, "Although I was informative, I was not relevant or truthful or unambiguous."
The same concept applies to Fr. Reginald Hezekiah's 'curse' on the media. "May the profits of the newspapers made on the days of this coverage dwindle, and the reporters and editors responsible for the articles, may the food in their stomach turn sour."
The relevance here was (i) antagonism to the media for reporting Andrew Woo Ling's death from a deviant sexual activity gone wrong; and (ii) a superstitious audience. The sonorous phrasing, mouthed by an authoritative figure, was clearly intended, in his mind and that of his listeners, to bring about misfortune through some 'higher' power.
To deny that Hezekiah's peroration was intended as a 'curse', as Diocesan Administrator Fr. Christian Pereira has done, is simply to demonstrate that the media have more commitment to the truth than priests.
But that is hardly surprising. Grice's criteria could easily be posted as a guideline for all good reportage and commentary. And, in Beyond Belief, VS Naipaul asserts, "Good or valuable writing is more than just a technical skill; it depends on a certain moral wholeness in the writer. The writer who lines up with any big public cause like Communism or Islam, with its pronounced taboos, has very soon to falsify. The writer who lies is betraying his calling; only the second-rate do that."
This is why there is no great writer who is a religious fundamentalist or political ideologue. It is why a group like the Hindu Writers Forum does not actually have any real writers in it. It is why even intellectual politicians write so execrably. Because a true writer's first commitment is to the truth: and this is why a writer has to be far more moral than any priest.
Naipaul's assertion also suggests why in modern societies writers, although lacking in all practical power, have always been perceived as threats by politicians and other demagogues. I don't want to make too much of this since writers, whether novelists or newspaper columnists, generally have an exaggerated idea of their own importance. Nonetheless, when a society reaches a stage where Attorney-Generals bring cases against themselves and where pastors pose as PhDs, the writer, by reminding us that words have true meanings and false meanings, becomes a crucial peg in a civilised frame.
Copyright©2001 Kevin Baldeosingh