Letter to the Editor - President Michel was right |09 February 2016
Please allow me to explain some misunderstanding that is going round in our media about President Michel’s remarks in one of the side meetings at the United Nations last year when he remarked that we “grow fish” in Seychelles. Colloquially speaking he is correct because we grow our own teachers, our own doctors and engineers and so on.
The word “grow” in this context means we associate our activities of culturing, creating and moulding our own requirements. The word “grow” is not solely associated with plants, vegetables, trees and herbs which emerge from the soil or water in aqua-culture.
There was a time when some people associated the word “grow” to plants and other things growing from the soil only until aqua-culture was developed and today we tend to use the word “culture” many times more than the word “grow”.
In In-vitro-fertilisation (IVF) we “grow” or “culture” the sperm of a man with the egg of a woman thus creating a baby in a test tube then we implant the contents into a woman’s womb for the baby to increase in size and develop pending delivery nine months later, sometimes sooner.
I am one of the founders of the University of Seychelles and we worked for two years to create UniSey and I have spoken and written English for 51 years in the UK and I can tell you that President Michel was right. We do “grow” fish and we “dialogue” with the ocean.
All the fun that is being made in the media and particularly on social media and kids at school about President Michel’s remarks only goes to show that we do not understand the English language because we think in Creole therefore we translate English into Creole directly in our thinking. You may be interested to learn that the human mind thinks in only one language, your prime language.
The human mind can only think of only one thing at any given time. Despite common belief the human mind is not multi-tasking; it is single-tasking just like a computer but it can handle a great number of different items one at a time and at great speeds. This gives the impression of multi-tasking. Your prime language is the language you use most of the time and even when you speak another language you are translating the other language into your prime language in your mind.
The other habit that gives your listener or reader a clue as to what is your prime language is you bring into your conversation words from your prime language when you are speaking or writing another language. In all the newspapers and speeches you will find Creole words thrown into an English article or speech because the writer’s mind is thinking in Creole not in English.
You may think the writer is doing this to make his/her point clearer, no, it is a habitual behaviour that comes through automatically. Therefore we should look deeper into things before we make fun or throw scorn at what we do not fully comprehend.
Turning to President Michel’s second remark that “we dialogue with the ocean” which has also gone viral on Social Media, again this is colloquially correct. People dialogue with God and God does not reply and they have never seen God and we call it prayers which in fact is self-hypnosis.
God, we are told, is everywhere yet we congregate in church to pray in a group, why? If you research into Extra Sensory Perception (ESP) you will find that the mind can achieve many things we do not yet understand. ESP is a new science and one day we will understand that the human mind can communicate without a telephone line, semaphore flags or light waves or being in the same room at the same time. Faith healers have developed a way of curing someone without medicines or being present.
In a group prayer the minds of every one present is concentrated towards achieving an objective and the combined mind energy will achieve the group’s objective. What about two people who do not speak each other’s language and yet using body language they can communicate?
Fishermen talk to the ocean; some pray that the ocean will yield a good catch for them as they sail out towards their fishing grounds. Most mariners dialogue with the ocean especially when they have a troubled mind or they have received bad news from home. My mother used to speak to her plants and flowers and they bloomed beyond all expectations and people told her that she had “green fingers”; nothing to do with her fingers the plants could feel her love and appreciated the care she gave them and in return they grew beautiful and big as a reward for her love.
I have watched the video on Face book and I do not see anything that President Michel said that is worth the fuss. He was insistent in making his point and he wanted his point understood by his audience. May be Seychellois should practice speaking more English because when our ministers and senior officials get up to make a speech in English it comes out pretty awful. Their pronunciations, diction and choice of words are abysmal.
Now we have grounds to laugh at them and make fun of them. In my view English should be our prime language, French second and Creole third. When our young people will grow up and travel around the world as some of us have done they will discover that they can get on anywhere in the world if they can speak good English and they will also find that French is a good second language to have but Creole -- unless you travel to Mauritius, Louisiana, St. Lucia, Martinique, Dominica, Haiti, Guadeloupe, St. Martin, Saint-Barthélemy, French Guiana, Belize, and Trinidad & Tobago -- is of no use.
So before you laugh at others take a good look in the mirror at yourself and dialogue with yourself and you will see what response you get back. You will be surprised at what the mirror will reflect back to you.
Try and deliver a speech in front of a mirror or video yourself delivering a speech, which is what we do at The Academy of High Performance when we carry our Public Speaking Courses and I can tell you President Michel would come out top grade in our Academy for his speech delivery.
You may not agree with the contents of his speech which is fine, we have to nurture divergent views in a democratic society, but the way he delivers his speech is of a global standard. President Michel has his faults so do I and so do you but at the end of the day we must give credit where credit is due and that makes us a real person.
Please do not misunderstand the English language and let us give James Michel the credit he deserves. Where he has gone wrong we have the right to criticise but where he is right we must give him credit. President James Michel and Sir James Mancham are our best Global Citizens and neither of them should be fighting a domestic election, this is a waste of talents and we do not have a great deal to spare and no one can deny that James Michel works hard and he is doing a very difficult job. It is not easy to be a President especially a President of Seychellois because we do not yet appreciate divergent views and existence of other fellow beings.
We think the world revolves around Seychelles, we are insular and we sing songs about ourselves and our country more than any other nation except North Korea and we put posters on every lamp post to remind ourselves that we love Seychelles. James Michel has made mistakes, of course, but do you know something the more you do the more mistakes you make; it is Sod’s Law or the Law of Average.
If you sit with your fingers up your preverbal and do nothing and just criticise at what other people do you will make no mistakes but then you will achieve a big fat zero. The world is full of people in that category. But those of us, who toil day and sometime well into the small hours of the night make things happen, achieve a great deal and bring some happiness to some people and some meaning to our existence on this Planet Earth and if we can find it in our heart to be kind to our fellow being and to all the animals and plants that share this planet with us we will have had a good life before we are invited to shake hands with St Peter or Lucifer.
Barry Laine FCIM, FInst SMM, MCMI, MBSCH
www.academyofhighperformance.sc