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Dissing Bertie, toward the end and beyond

No place for geniuses... steelpan innovator disrespected

by Les Slater - Journalist & Former Highlanders Arranger

“... this wasn’t some anonymous John Public about whose apartment the government’s Housing Development Corp. came on hardball strong, right after we had said our goodbyes. This was a trail-blazing genius who, from quite early, never accepted that the steelpan should rank as some inferior stepchild among musical instruments, who always set his sights on what lay beyond the horizon”

—Les Slater, Director of the of the Folk Arts Institute of Trinidad and Tobago

Bertie Marshall and Franklyn Ollivierre
The late Bertie Marshall (left) and the late Franklyn Ollivierre (right)

Trinidad and Tobago - The state chose the immediate aftermath of Bertie Marshall’s passing to place an exclamation point on its well established indifference to (phony embrace of, if you prefer) steel band culture and the extraordinary individuals who have stood above the rest in the measure of our indebtedness for their input. Bertie was among those anointed few. This obviously mattered little to the folks who were about the state’s business following his death.

Some issues surrounding Bertie’s living circumstances had become news fodder when a couple of government ministers, in what they presumably considered a mission of mercy, had visited him at his home in Harpe Place, Port of Spain a few months prior to his death. There was, first of all, a letter sent to Bertie threatening eviction for rent allegedly due for the government housing unit he occupied. This was correspondence erroneously dispatched since the man’s rent had for years been customarily paid up for each year, at the beginning of the year. That administrative sloppiness aside, there was the matter of old age pension, to which Bertie at age 76 was entitled and had applied for but wasn’t receiving. There was the matter, too, of outstanding salary earned for work done a few years earlier at the University of Trinidad and Tobago. Despite the ostensibly goodwill “gallery” session by the then minister of multiculturalism and others at Bertie’s residence, and promises publicly made to effect a fix, nothing of the sort happened in ensuing months.

Later, with Bertie seriously ill and hospitalized, came word that another government minister wanted to present him with a check from a “Special Achievement” fund. The family, gun-shy and rightly annoyed after the prior photo-op routine that produced zilch, and which they said had made Bertie appear destitute when he was in fact merely requesting income to which he was entitled, responded that they were not interested in any such benevolence if it came couched in the same grandstanding maneuvers as before. That response surely a proud, stand-up moment for dignity in the pan ranks.

The state would, not surprisingly, do the godfather bit after Bertie succumbed on October 17, announcing it would underwrite the cost of the funeral. But like the proverbial cow and pail of milk, the state wasn’t about to have this posthumous phase circumscribed by genuine magnanimity and compassion.

Two days after his funeral, the family of Bertie Marshall would find themselves scrambling to remove all his personal effects from the apartment in order to comply with a deadline imposed by the state. God forbid that Bertie’s daughter hadn’t had cause to interact with the government housing people and been made aware of these marching orders, the family could conceivably have been padlocked out of what had been this incredibly gifted man’s residence since the early 1980s.

The bond between Bertie and myself went back many years, well beyond the period in the early 1960s of our collaborative endeavors creating music for Highlanders. The relationship extended to childhood years when Bertie, a few years my elder and a next-door neighbor, was tantamount to a bigger brother. All of which is by way of saying the personal obligation I felt to be present for his last rites was a deep-seated one. And in parts of the recent narrative, both preceding and following Bertie’s demise, I found myself repeatedly driven to referencing the title of a 1960s movie, Town Without Pity. I mean, this wasn’t some anonymous John Public about whose apartment the government’s Housing Development Corp. came on hardball strong, right after we had said our goodbyes. This was a trail-blazing genius who, from quite early, never accepted that the steelpan should rank as some inferior stepchild among musical instruments, who always set his sights on what lay beyond the horizon. Never mind that rent had been paid through the end of the year, and even with all the media publicity about Bertie’s situation, in the land where the steelpan gets a formal “national instrument” designation, are we so steeped in degenerate behavior that disrespect on that scale is routinely visited upon the likes of a Bertie Marshall? Are the outer limits of our civility defined by such crudeness?

Les Slater
Les Slater

Sadly, to the ongoing concern of some of us who bear witness, we know that’s exactly how it’s been, how it is. We know that in the land of its birth the pan is a long way from over-leaping its pigeonholed status. And we know that what’s fundamental to that process seriously getting underway, across-the-board respect, remains missing. Bertie Marshall’s final chapter only reaffirmed a societal cluelessness about pan that should be deeply troubling, but isn’t.

 

Les Slater is the Director of the Folk Arts Institute of Trinidad and Tobago

contact: Les Slater

click for more on Bertie Marshall

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