This is a repost from a indie zine/website called Topsoil that I used to run with Dennis Allen and Lisa Allen-Agostini at the turn of the millennium.
Recipe for a Fig Oil Republic
1 Reasonable Size Republic
1 (step)Father of Nation/ 1 Perpetual Opposition Leader cum Prime Minister (These Ingredients interchangeable)
1 Political Party/fete, Wannabe opposition
1 Handful of ungrateful illiterate black people from Laventille
1 Tall and dark person to identify them
1 Cane Belt
1 Two Seat Powerbase (step)Sister Island
Backbiting, conspiracy and mauvais langue a must
Method:
Mix dictatorship and opposition and let raise for juice for five years. Set crust over bottom of melting pot. Spread layer of humanity. Soak some 90’s cynical indifference.
Place in the tropical sunshine to bake.
Dry mix illegal drug profits, twenty odd years of exorbitant oil revenues. Sprinkle with doomed State Enterprises, religious fanatics with large guns and good legal aid, non-elected Ministers with grandiose personal financial agendas and the island sub-state of psuedo-caucasian BougTowers (just left of Bmer Gardens); blend until the impoverished middle class starts turning vagrants.
Separate into enough servings to feed greedy foreign interests.
Soak cane belt in curry and cheap flour and marinate with duty free imported liquor. When State’s bitter rhetoric rises to the top, separate noisier unmonied dissidents with own agendas (they might sour the whole pot).
Throw everything together and blend with narco-interdiction boat propellers for one election.
Pour over crust and set oven for post colonial. (You’ll know its done when a maxi taxi driver becomes Chief Financial Comptroller of a Transportation Enterprise).
Spice liberally with backbiting, conspiracy and mauvais langue
Serve Cold and Hard to a gullible public that would take anything.
Garnish with bullshit lyrics and small cheap cars.
Makes enough for about a million, million & a half or thereabouts.
Preserve remains with weekly tabloid headlines.
