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Despite nigh a lifetime plied within the stifling confines of this sardine-tinned tightly defined little island, I am still not wholly inured to being routinely buttonholed by acquaintances I barely recognise, who betray neither qualms nor misgivings about blithely apprising me of my ‘sighted’ dealings and movements, be they in bright broad daylight or the real deep heat, dark heart, ever dread nether dead of night.
They blatantly parade my tales, not only with a cosy familiarity as bewildering as it is intrusive, but with an uncanny exactitude that I myself could not readily command.
Yet given a milieu self-evidently characterised by ever inquiring minds, prying eyes, searing ears and unwarranted ‘poke-probe’ nosing, it is inconceivable that nobody has heard anything, seen anything, or knows anything regarding the perpetrators of the recent spate of sinister arson attacks.
All the more relevant and apposite therefore, the inference drawn from acquiescence of this type, as depicted in the closing scenes of Alan Parker’s definitive cinematic portrait of racial hatred, ‘Mississippi Burning’.
On having discovered the corpse of an erstwhile innocent bystander who had just hung himself, the chief investigating officer was moved to ruefully conclude: ‘He was guilty. Anyone’s guilty who watches this happen and pretends it isn’t. He was guilty alright, just as guilty as the fanatics who pulled the trigger. Maybe we all are.’
Conversely, were one to empathetically assume the perspective of this silent witness, culpable of having become engulfed in tacit communal collusion, it might well resonate as follows:
Hung-up on right and wrong done
So much taut fraught incurred,
Smelt, felt, seen and heard.
Some clear retrieved, some recess blurred.
Yet of it all too oft demurred,
Never uttered a word,
When perhaps all along,
Sought to have sung the song I ought,
Of right and wrong riven wrought.
Oisin Jones-Dillon
St Paul’s Bay
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