Ronald Thwaites | Walk good, Fred

I mourn Fred Hickling’s passing. He and I started preparatory school together in 1950. His larger-than-life persona, bubbly and inquisitive, budded in those years. Our paths criss-crossed at debating and drama bouts during high-school years, his at Wolmer’s, walking distance from Connolley House, the home and music studio of his stable, middle-class, United Church-rooted family, and mine on the light-blue side of North Street.

Enviably for those of us without such a charisma, Fred blended his sexy stammer and wicked sense of humour (remember that laugh!) to have the hot St Andrew’s girls hanging on to his every approach. He seemed able to read their personalities well from then.

We later contended for the Rhodes Scholarship. His interview came first and from the downstairs of King’s House where the rest of us waited nervously, one could hear the peals of laughter which Freddie induced from the very staid and humourless committee. He had that way with high-ups, distressed patients, pompous people, friends and family. And yes, he could be difficult, very difficult and scathing sometimes.

Professor Fred Hickling was one of the generation suffused with the excitement of Jamaica’s independence project. The optimism was enormous. Plus, for our generation, there were much greater opportunities for hope through excellent education. Fred and I were beneficiaries of the early Common Entrance regimen, and after high school, UCWI was now in full swing and opportunities for study in America and Canada had become greater than before.

All that, and more happening internationally, generated an emotional capacity, for many but not all, to leap over some of the class and race barriers which so obviously fractured Jamaica. There was space to grow now – whether on the Rock or abroad – and there was a land to love, a nation to build.

That heady spirit, the enthusiasm to be creatively disruptive, defined Fred Hickling – and the better part of his generation. A nationalist spirit confident enough to constantly remake itself, fearless, Afrocentric, truthful to history (ours were the first years in which West Indian history was offered by Cambridge Overseas); able to endure disillusionment and disappointment when dreams keep lurching into nightmares, because, in the triumph of Willie Lynch, we defeat ourselves.

Instructive story

Hickling’s story is a good and instructive one. I remember well the upset in traditional quarters at his production, Magnificent Irations, where he used local culture – the music, dance and drama of the rejects we call ‘mad’ people, as therapy to replace the old culture of drug-dependent imprisonment of thousands at Bellevue.

His praxis of relocating mental health treatment to communities rather than in institutions, and empowering community health aides, has been one of the greatest humanising shifts for Jamaicans with mental challenges, then and since.

Who else has had the outrageous courage to help us to see ourselves as we really are, but keep on denying, by telling us that more than half of us are afflicted with some level of psychological dysfunction? He could be troublingly critical and unfailingly compassionate, all at the same time.

For the evidence of widespread social malady couldn’t be clearer, witness our crazy proneness to crime, violence, undisciplined behaviour and depression. The terrifying echo that survives Hickling’s fearful diagnosis is that up to now, little has been advanced as a cure.

Some years ago, through the aegis of CARIMENSA, the institution which Fred nurtured along with his beloved Hilary, Geoffrey Walcott and others, they offered their Dream A World programme of cultural therapy for teachers and children to help reverse the low self-perception and attendant bad behaviour in schools.

The concept and its application was well proven and it should have been scaled up to more if not all institutions of education. The process required a big mental shift but relatively little money. Jamaica is poorer for not yet embracing Fred Hickling’s dream, and therapy, of a new world.

His fierce commitment to his country was the bloodstream enabling whatever Fred Hickling did. I hope that in our distortion of individualism and rejection of life’s purpose as dedication to the common good, we have not broken his mould of nationalism.

Ronald Thwaites is member of parliament for Kingston Central. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com.