The death of Whitney Houston has affected me. Badly. The suddenness has worsened the feeling. To many she will be just another celebrity whose life petered out tragically. I expect that there will be regret and reflection and the world will move on. I know that her music will never die.
I know this because I have been fortunate to have travelled to most parts of the world. In mud huts in Ahmedabad in India, restaurants in Melbourne, Australia, coaches in England, the streets of Soweto and all across the Caribbean I have observed people of all cultures and classes engrossed in, enjoying and being ministered to by the music of three musical prophets whose voices and aura were divinely touched: Bob Marley, Michael Jackson and Whitney Houston.
As my consciousness developed as a human being in the late 1980s and early 1990s Whitney’s music comforted me, enlightened me and built me as a man. I can speak of her playful allure or quote the lyrics of her songs endlessly but that is not the point. She ministered to me, not even so much with her incomparable vocals and range but with her grace, poise, strength, decisiveness, elegance and composure. She was not a sex symbol, nor was her music superficial. Whitney Houston was regal. She embodied woman.
In delivering her music through those cassettes, worn tired on my Sony walkman as I rode the length and breadth of Vergenoegen and neighbouring East Bank Essequibo villages, the West Coast of Demerara and occasionally Georgetown, Whitney lectured to my heart about the strength and beauty of woman and of the black woman in particular.
Whitney Houston played no insignificant role in cultivating in me as a man respect for women. Nowadays I read and learn of the abuse and torture of our women and I am filled with dread. A society has lost its way when it beats and destroys its mothers. This behaviour, I am convinced is because instead of glorifying the wholesomeness that was Whitney Houston’s music we spend millions on soulless garbage reality television and such like.
Whitney had deep flaws which eventually ruined her life. People turn to drugs and alcohol to escape hurt and inadequacy. Whitney ought not have hurt. This cruel world failed a sister and left her to leave us in a cold, lonely hotel room.
The greatest tragedy of her life may very well be not that she succumbed to drugs and alcohol but that privately she was the opposite of what her music and musical persona were.
Flawed though she was she gave the world, through her genius, more than we may ever tabulate. And yet the world failed her. This careless, selfish world failed another woman, another mother, another sister. We failed to rescue her from her hurt, perhaps she was beyond help, I have reservations in accepting that as no man is beyond redemption. She is gone in flesh but finally at peace, somewhere better where love and care reign.
Her legacy remains and will forever live.
In Oprah Winfrey I see Whitney. In Michelle Obama I see Whitney. In Ruth Osman-Rose I see Whitney. In Lauren Hill I see Whitney. In my Dominican friend Mahalla Piper I see Whitney. In Kesaundra Alves I see Whitney. In Minnet Bacchus I see Whitney. In Kari Heron and Heather Anne Pinnock I see Whitney. Most of all I see Whitney in two of my life’s heroes – my high school English teacher and mentor Dion Glasgow and Tamara Khan, my wife.
On the day before I got married less than two months ago I had to fill a church form which asked why I wanted to get married to Tammy. I thought it to be such a silly question. It was not a matter in which I felt I had a choice and so I wrote what came naturally and instinctively – that it was ‘ordained’. It is no coincidence that I am married to a beautiful, elegant, regal, decisive, strong, composed black woman of poise and grace. That journey, for me, began with Whitney.
