Sylvia Wynter's Dream

In one moment, on a fairly blue-skied November day, Barbados announces that they are removing the then Queen from their Head of State and would become a republic. I then wasted probably a day’s worth of time listening to ten months of Jamaican critics, opinionated journalists, and of course politicians grinding the topic of the removal of the Queen to the ground. The fiery debates seemed to have run out of fuel around June, but our 60th Anniversary of Independence celebrations carried a parade load of fuel to truck into the debate. Getting a bit annoyed of listening to Beyond the Headlines while stuck in traffic, I switched stations until another fairly blue-skied morning, I saw a message on my phone notifying me of Queen Elizabeth II’s passing.

…and the first thing that came to my mind was “So she couldn’t outlive her son”, which was a popular meme surrounding the Queen at the time. The message that notified me of said death was from a friend on Whatsapp: “Dem say the queen soon croak” (They say that the Queen will soon croak) exactly as written. Suffice to say, I was indifferent to the whole matter, even if said person is the “longest English reigning monarch”. The most emotion I felt were from the memes commenting on her death that flowed out of Reddit, YouTube, and Twitter in less than a day. Any thought about the Queen was relegated behind completing school registration, the small job I acquired on Campus, and making sure I had money to buy food. Eventually, in a conversation with my brother, I began to understand that although her death is something that would be heartbreaking or gratifying for some other people, I could not regard her as any more important than the other four to five Jamaican deaths that would be queued behind hers on Prime Time News. If I have been so desensitized to those deaths, why should I pay more attention to one from across a sea and ocean?

I just can’t bother with the talks about removal of King Charles III now, just get it done with or don’t bother at all.