Review by Nicholas Laughlin
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| Thank God It's Friday, by B.C. Pires Review by Nicholas Laughlin |
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[Published in Caribbean Beat,
November/December 2005] Thank God It's Friday: A Collection of Some of the Best Columns by B.C. Pires Maverick Marketing ISBN 976-8194-48-0 On the first Friday after Carnival 1988--as the NAR government fell apart and the populace reeled from the blows of the recent budget and speculated about currency devaluation--readers of the Trinidad Express were jolted by the appearance on the op-ed pages of a new column called “Thank God It’s Friday”, written by a young attorney-turned-journalist, B.C. Pires. Here was a man who hadn’t learned there were some things you just didn’t say in the daily press. To call him “irreverent” is too reverent; Pires was just plain rude, mocking the pretensions and lambasting the hypocrisies of politicians, priests, and the populace at large. He won’t last long at that game, some of those early readers must have thought, but “Thank God It’s Friday” ran with few interruptions, in three different newspapers, for 15 years--half a generation, as Pires puts it, and it’s no exaggeration to say (as his back-cover blurb does) that the column “changed journalism in Trinidad and Tobago permanently”. What made Pires required reading, even for those he most scandalised, was his outspoken humour. It’s not just that Pires wrote what everyone else was too prudent to write; it’s that he crafted a style both blunt and swift (like a badjohn’s bois) that could swoop from the most delicate irony to the silliest punch-line in the time it takes the average person just to think about scratching his head. And he was never short of material. Trinidad and Tobago in the NAR years and beyond was a satirist’s land of Cockaigne: the renaissance of racial politics, the 1990 “coup” and its long aftermath, the politicians’ increasingly frantic antics, and the monster “dose of salts” of our second energy boom. The country was in a bad way, people said at the time the column first appeared. It seems that the more things change, the more is so they stay. (In “Claiming Your Steak”, written about a decade ago, Pires visits the supermarket and encounters boxes of frozen beef “direct from Miami” on “special” for $60, and muses that “$60 is a full week’s grocery budget for some people”. Well, Port of Spain’s newest upscale restaurant, on the ground floor of the waterfront headquarters of a foreign energy company, has $1,000 steaks on its menu. How’s that for inflation? Or should I say provokation?) In 2004, after two million tirelessly stinging words and every kind of backlash short of actual blows, “Thank God It’s Friday” came to an end. No newspaper wanted it; maybe the Trini sense of humour had finally worn thin. Undaunted, Pires has collected 97 of his pieces in this volume, fronted by a Warhol-esque montage of portraits of the author ranging from hungry novice to grizzled veteran. Thank God It’s Friday has some trouble with typos, and the section titles, borrowed from famous books, are unexpectedly twee, but my biggest complaint is that the individual columns are undated and arranged thematically, with no hint of chronology. It makes it impossible to properly appreciate the evolution one of contemporary Trinidad’s iconic literary inventions. For, if pontificator Pound was right and “literature is news that stays news”, then at their very best the TGIF columns are literature, descendents of a line that goes back at least as far as Addison, Steele, and Johnson. And the most enduring creation of the writer Basil Pires may be the character B.C. Pires: tatler, rambler, and idler rolled into one, with the wit of a calypsonian, the assurance of a boy from Saints, and an anger fed by a genuine sense of decency. This B.C. makes you laugh out loud at inconvenient moments, sometimes makes your blood boil; and at blessed moments he can even bring you to tears, when he looks without sentimentality at this madness called Trinidad and sees the maverick joy that, if anything can, might be our salvation. At the end of a piece about the legacy of 1990, he writes, “remember: Andre plays Cascadia tonight / so we must be doing something right”. This is a man who is nowhere near giving up. B.C. could only have come from a place like Trinidad. Thank God for that, and thank God for him. |
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