The Pearl of The Caribbean – FINAL PART

An Unlikely Hero.

EPIC movies or novels usually involve a hero embarking on a quest to bring back the medicine, the elixir, the sword, the critical piece of information or technology needed to restore the physical and spiritual health of the community. The hero is usually a character seemingly unsuited for the task, one whom most people would have thought incapable of heroic deeds; or someone with serious flaws that under normal circumstances would disqualify them for the quest.

Notwithstanding what has been said about Allen Chastanet, he may well turn out to be the hero who helps turn things around for Vieux Fort and enable Vieux Fort to realize its great potential, who takes Vieux Fort where none other has dared to venture, who captures the elixir so vital for Vieux Fort’s development. Sir George Charles, champion of the people’s right to self-determination, didn’t do it; Sir John Compton, the Father of the Nation, didn’t do it; Dr. Kenny Anthony, the anointed saviour, didn’t do it; Stephenson King, the caretaker Prime Minister, didn’t do it. So all eyes must be on Allen Chastanet.

Like the archetypal hero, Chastanet has serious flaws. Although he has a great facility with words, he has a penchant to misquote; he isn’t conversant in his country’s mother tongue, many question his St. Lucianess and affinity with the people, and his ambition may be at odds with his capabilities.

However, for most of his life Chastanet has been an outsider. Growing up in St. Lucia as an almost white child and the son of a wealthy businessman must have set him apart from the rest of his people, rendering him an outsider within his own country. As an English-speaking teenager and young adult attending school in a foreign land whose official language was different from his own, he was an outsider within an outsider. Returning to St. Lucia he may have become even more of an outsider in his own country because on top of his skin tone and wealth, his non-St. Lucianess would have increased and he would have acquired a foreignness from living abroad.

But what has this outsider business have to do with Chastanet taking Vieux Fort places. Well, though this outsider status may be painful and lonely, as an outsider one gets special vantage points of the societies one becomes part of, and one is forced to go internal, to search for answers why one is different. But this habit of critical, honest, objective analysis that one develops from analysing oneself is in turn applied to society in general. Thus Chastanet’s outsider status may allow him to look at things in a more dispassionate manner, may allow him to think outside the box. This combined with his great ambition and the need to prove himself, to command the respect of his peers, may equip and propel him to do for Vieux Fort what none of his predecessors have come close to doing, to go beyond footpaths, drains, promenades, sidewalks, and STEP programmes, and bring quality jobs and real economic development to Vieux Fort. In other words the stage may be set, all the ingredients may be in place, for Chastanet to lead Vieux Fort to greatness.

But as in the epic narratives the hero doesn’t go it alone. In the beginning he usually needs a sage to clarify the quest at hand and set him off in the right direction. At critical junctures along the way allies pop up to provide guidance and point out pitfalls. Sometimes he even needs or is accompanied by jesters, sidekicks, who keep him humane, who prevent him from taking himself too seriously. To succeed on this quest the Prime Minister needs to consult and seek the guidance of community leaders and organizations, he needs to consult with the community, understand their aspirations, and how they want their communities to develop. He needs to treat the community as an equal partner in the development process. He needs to realize the approach taken with DSH is a false start.

Getting rid of Vieux Fort’s recreation spaces is a false start; giving away the county’s sovereignty to a foreign entity is a false start; selling off the whole of Pointe Sable Beach thus effectively denying St. Lucians access to the beach is a false start; giving away some of the country’s most valuable and strategic assets and demanding nothing in return is a false start; displacing Bruceville residents without a credible relocation plan that includes compensation and replacement land is a false start; relocating the Vieux Fort landfill to the abandoned pumice mine at Grace/La Retraite is a false start; not enabling St. Lucians to buy at least up to 20% of shares in the development is a false start; not ensuring that the developer deposits a certain percentage of CIP receipts, enterprise profits and horse race and casino betting receipts in a Vieux Fort Development Fund is a false start; not preparing a comprehensive development and land use plan for Vieux Fort before embarking on any large scale development project is a false start.

The heroes of the epics never sell the land from under their people, rather they go where no others have gone before to capture and cleanse the land for the people. In this great drama, the battle lines are set, the ball is in Chastanet’s court. There is DSH the dominion, backed by potentially 251 Chinese billionaires and by no less personages than the Prince and Queen of England, that want to gobble up Vieux Fort’s choicest lands and deny the people access to their beaches and recreation parks; there are tricksters embodied in the likes of Rick Wayne the Prime Minister maker, Juke Bois the radio personality, and Nicole McDonald the press secretary, to test him, to set him off track, to derail him; there are gatekeepers like Invest St. Lucia, blocking information, disallowing any local investor a piece of the pie.

Indeed, the tricksters are in full force. In response to the marches, town hall meetings, and petitions of the protesters, the tricksters are holding town hall meetings of their own, to give the impression that they are consulting with the people, and to attempt to discredit the protestors, intimating that the protestors have ulterior motives, that they are being disingenuous; all this when most of the objections to DSH is based on the agreements signed by the Prime Minister. But it’s all a farce. At their town hall meetings the tricksters are providing little information, and are deflecting most questions with the propaganda that the agreements weren’t actually signed, that they were just an understanding.

Perhaps the sham of the tricksters thinly disguised Vieux Fort town hall meeting was best epitomized when, in the middle of Mr. Julius James’ question, a member of the audience came and booed in his mic, which led to a shoving match, and the intruder eventually punching Mr. James in the stomach, causing the meeting to come to a premature close. This, when one would be hard pressed to find another Vieux Fortian or St. Lucian who has earned a greater right to question what is happening in Vieux Fort. For Julius James is a born and raised son of Vieux Fort, a community, social, political, and cultural activist, the executive director of the Southern Tourism Development Corporation, a former Chairman of the Vieux Fort Town Council, founder of such community groups as the Seyans folk choir, Vyé-Fo – MouvmanAnsanm, and the Vieux Fort Tourism Development Group, and more recently the Vieux Fort Concerned Citizens Coalition for Change (VFCCCC). He is a recipient of the Saint Lucia Les Pitons Medal (Silver) for long and meritorious Community service, and jointly with the St. Lucia National Trust he has just secured a grant from 5Cs for the restoration and preservation of Pointe Sable Beach. Clearly, if there were one Vieux FortianChastanet should have consulted about the DSH project, it would have had to be Julius James. Yet instead of seeking his counsel, he is being booed and punched. Clearly, this is a false start.

The ball is in Chastanet’s court. What will he be? A villain or a hero? What side will he choose? The side of DSH and facilitate the foreign dominion in taking the land from the people, or the side of his country and go where no other has gone before and take Vieux Fort and the country to new heights? Will he be a man of the people, part of the solution to the people’s problems? Or will he choose to be the enemy of the people, helping a foreign dominion trample the rights of the people, steal their sovereignty, deny them their patrimony? It doesn’t help that instead of meeting with Vieux Fortians, the people who will be most affected by the development, he travelled 4217 miles to London to consult with those who are not in a position to grasp the full implications of DSH.

Vieux Fortians, the protestors included, are probably waiting with bated breath to see whether Chastanet chooses to be the villain, or the hero who not only saves the land from the jaws of DSH, but causes the land to flow with milk and honey

The Pearl of the Caribbean is a ten part article on the DSH agreements. Born and raised in Vieux Fort, Dr. Anderson Reynolds is an economist and an award-winning author. His third book, The Stall Keeper, a novel set in Vieux Fort using the American World War II occupation of the town as backdrop, will be published first quarter of 2017.