You can imagine, then, with what intensity I silently sang it this Carnival, the silver irons the boys were beating seeming to sing with me even as “Ushkay” down on the ground with his eyes shut tight kept seeing what he calls his “beautiful demons”, the man, totally sane except during his Carnival life, talking and laughing with his invisible companions, wraiths and human dancing and gesticulating as the big African drums softly tip-toed to and then boomed out a climax.

Listen, you have to understand that when I say there hasn’t been a single Minshall mas at which I have not sung “Sayamanda” I mean that there hasn’t been a single such occasion when I have not sang it for most of the whole of the Carnival Tuesday the song, to me, fitting the Carnival like a tank-top on Destra, Tanker catching the tempo to a “T”.

Dropped dead on Carnival Friday he is not here to bear witness but God strike me down dead now if I lie when I tell you that I choreographed my own “Sayamanda” dance and while I am shy about my singing (not so sure that I can carry a note) I am proud, inordinately perhaps, about my dancing so I have danced my “Sayamanda” dance all over the place not least to a packed house in the Little Carib Andre, smilingly, playing as I got up from among the audience and walked just off centre-stage to show all and sundry just how much “Sayamanda” meant to me.

I want to argue that if Andre had not written a single song other than “Sayamanda” it would have been enough to have earned him a place on the pantheon here. But, of course, he wrote many more and while, as I have said, “Sayamanda” used to move me to get up and dance it was but one of the Tanker tunes to have impacted on me one way or the other. “Jumbie Call”, God knows why, makes me sloppily sentimental, tears following that haunting flute and as for that “went away and come back home song”, well, I might be wrong but to me it defiantly celebrates Andre’s recognition of the blackness that is in all of us (just as is the browness).

The thing is, for those of you who came in late, was that the thing was for many people of colour (ha!) to run away from T&T after the “Black Power” turmoil of ’70 and thereabouts and I can’t remember if Andre actually left to live in London, though I think he did, and I don’t know what happened to him over there, it might have just hit him that given his antecedents he didn’t have to argue his Trinidadianness with anyone, but he came back and the song exploded like dynamite among Trinidadians, black, white, brown, sapodilla and all, this song of Trini affirmation and I think that was the time when Trinidadians really embraced him to their breasts—not least by black-till-dey-blue Trinidadians who were moved by his decision to come back home to them which, of course, is really to all of us.

Since, then, I swear Andre Tanker has had a permanently warm place in the hearts of Trinidadians and I can think, off-hand and on-the spot, of ten of my friends who will cite a different Tanker tune as being their favourite (“Morena Osha”, “Children of the Big Bang,” “Basement Party,” “Hosanna,” “Steelband Times”...) while I, of course and in my usual way, cheat by citing, corpus opus, the whole body of his work, genuinely impressed as I am by the range and variety although even as I write I seem to see “Smokey Joe” looking at me accusingly and aggrievedly, No matter, the truth of the matter is that such was the longevity of the man’s musical career that he appealed both to the flower pot (ha!) people like me to today’s hip-hop/dance-hall/rapso generation, “Ben Lion” bringing him back on the Carnival stage and I remember his bemused look when I accosted him to ask:

“Andre, you mean you actually jumping up on stage with Manwarren and dem!?”

Listen, it was only after I saw Wendell and the other two of the 3-Canal threesome doing what they had to do in the band, midway during the big Carnival day, that I finally shook off the dark funk that gripped me since the midnight telephone call that told me of his death, those red cheeks of his fooling me into thinking that cherubs didn’t die young if, indeed, they died at all. As usual, however, I have been helped along the way by the wisdom of my extended family, the first of whom was my banker friend Carol Joseph who reacted to my saying:

“Poor Andre! To have gone so suddenly,” thus:

“You mean ‘poor us’. He went suddenly without drawn-out suffering so is we who have been devastated!”

And then there was Pat Bishop who might have been speaking to me directly over the radio during the course of the Panorama finals when she observed in the face of a speaker stammering over his “Andre is” and “Andre was” that:

“Andre was a musician and music doesn’t die so Andre is.” 

Sing the song, then, sister:

“Chain of music across the word, SAYAMANDA, ring the bell. PALANG, PALANG!”