By Dr Velon John
Saint Lucia is an independent nation but it has a Queen: Her Majesty. Can the two occupy the same geographical, national and societal space?
Isn’t attempting to have the two making a mockery of the one and a prostitution of the other? Who or what is being prostituted?
Whatever conclusion you arrive at there is a condition of perversity that taints the juxtaposition of the two. The Lucian context is implicit. Hence a sublime and functional isolationism has to be the reality that obtains.
If indeed we hold on to the presently dubious notion of our independence, then the legitimacy of our national posture needs to be surgically sanitised. The Queen must go.
The relationship between a State and a Queen is not a symbolic one: it is fundamental, substantive and existential, for it goes to the definition of a people in terms of who and what they are and how intrinsically they perceive themselves in terms of their being and becoming, metaphysically.
She the Queen perceives her people as subjects and her people see her as a glorious and majestic entity superior to themselves. There isn’t even a sanguinary nexus to make the relationship of regal servitude palatable and even dignified. But yet we on a quotidian basis implore of our highest deity the salvation and protection of Queen (GOD SAVE THE QUEEN) even before members of our domestic clan.
And so the question that needs to be asked is, Why is it this individual and collective genuflection does not offend our sensibilities in terms of our honour, dignity, self-esteem and our very human nobility?
Why are governments (some) that personify and reflect the will of the people so hesitant in relieving us of the shackles that we blindly embrace? We are a black people as opposed to a black nation; the former is a fact the latter a social construct, and yet we seem to have some difficulty in sublimating the facticity of the pulchritude of our very negritude.
The question is why?
With this black prime minister and his black government, the time has come for blackness to reign supreme; and that all of the arms and extensions of government in the exercise of its sovereign power be reflective of that which makes us who and what we are as a people; a nation of black human beings.
Black is indeed beautiful.
Can we then have a Black Queen?? Or should we on an enlightened and evolutionary level of thought embrace our black president?
To be or not to be a Republic!
