Eric Gairy, Former Prime Minister of Grenada, Tell His Amazing Story From Beyond the Grave*

by Nathan Ihara

When you look down from the top of Mount St. Catherine, Grenada looks so small, like an emerald, like something you could hold in your hand. It makes you feel powerful living on an island, like a boy building cities in his small bedroom and then stomping them back to rubble. One time, shortly after I became Prime Minister, I traveled with a beautiful woman by helicopter to the small and enchanting island called "Large Island." We were the only humans there. When I shouted my name, it made the world loud. When we were silent, the world was silent. I was like Adam--the first dictator. All food was for my taking. Women were invented for my pleasure. The white sand was created for my feet. Every thought I had became a law of the universe. To live on an island is to be a God. I have felt that inside me since I was young. When I told Parliament, "He who opposes me, opposes God" I was telling the truth. I was telling the truth of islands.

But there is another side to living on an island, a different truth. If you stand on the beach of an island and look out, you do not feel like a God anymore. You see a dove flying out across the water and wonder where he is going, what he knows that you don't know, what he sees that you will never see. You can only think about who lives out there beyond the horizon, you can only think about invaders and outsiders and other worlds. And then you feel like the fish swimming beneath the surface of the water, waiting for the gull to fall out the sky and lift you up into the sky. You are not a God anymore. You are not alone anymore, your thoughts are not laws. Indeed, you are at the mercy of the thoughts of others. You are just waiting for the universe to find you. When Christopher Columbus first saw Grenada, he named it Concepcion--conception, a premise, a dream. This is a fitting name for an island--it is not a thing unto itself, it is only an idea in the mind of an outsider.

Grenada has been visited by outsiders many times--by the French, the British, the Americans, and the extraterrestrials. It was in December of 1977, balmy as always, and I was drinking champagne at my "Evening Palace" in the South of Grenada when a fisherman came to me and whispered in my ear. I instantly arranged for a group of military jeeps to escort me to the stretch of beach where he had made his discovery. There, beneath the soft glow of the milky way, we found an enormous man washed up on the shore, covered in seaweed, mud, and broken coral. At first he was not so impressive--less eerie and exotic than a Portuguese Man-O-War, less frightening than a reef shark. But as we scraped away the mud and debris, as we tried and failed to cut through his elastic bodysuit, as we shined our flashlights in his hooded yellow eyes, the true meaning of his existence began to descend upon us and to quote Gabriel Garcia Marquez's "The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World": Even though we were looking at him there was no room for him in our imagination.

At that moment I ceased to be a dictator. That morning I woke up as the Prime Minister of Grenada, the most impeccably dressed man in the Caribbean, a man who had judged the Miss World competition in 1970, a knight of the United Kingdom, beloved by the United States, a man who signed his letters Dr. E.M. Gairy, O.L., K.G.C., F.R.S.A., J.P. I had once told TIME magazine that "My opponents can't beat me. They are based on negativity. I am positivity. When they hate I love. I send out waves of love to them. I pray for them. They hate me so much they can't eat and sleep. But I laugh, I play tennis. I play cricket. I do yoga exercises. I dance and I am happy inside. Very happy. And I am strong inside. They say that man is afraid to unlock the door to himself. I am not one who has to be afraid. " But as I stared down at this enormous spaceman, I admit I felt afraid. I had lived my whole life as subject, as hero, but in a moment I had become an object. And no one, not me, not my powerful friends--not General Pinochet, not Jimmy Carter, not my dreaded Mongoose Gangs--could do anything to make this dead alien belong to us or obey our orders. I woke up a God and went to bed a specimen, an Earthling.

The next year while I was testifying on the importance that the United Nations establish a prolonged investigation into UFOs and extraterrestrials and attempting to make 1978 declared "The Year of the UFO," Maurice Bishop and The New Jewel Movement overthrew my government. My exile was complete. I had been cast from the garden. I was shocked, but I was not devastated. I spent the whole day wandering around New York City, and it seemed like I had never seen it before. I was continually struck by the faces of the people I passed. I had always seen people's faces as flags, flags of loyalty or flags of resistance, flags of Marxism or flags of capitalism. But now the faces did not look like flags--they looked like faces. I felt like I had spent my whole life in a spotlight on a stage giving a soliloquy into a darkened audience. Suddenly I was in the audience myself, and I could see the texture of the fabric of the curtains, the dust on the fake moon, could hear the shuffling of feet and coughing in the seats behind me. Again to quote Marquez: "When you reach absolute power, there is no contact with reality, and that's the worst kind of solitude there can be. A very powerful person, a dictator, is surrounded by interests and people whose final aim is to isolate him from reality; everything is in concert to isolate him." This is why we it is so important to find alien life. Earthlings are islanders and dictators and are terribly alone--when the flying saucers arrive we will become powerless, as I did, and in our newfound weakness, we will begin to see, we will find ourselves, and we will never be alone again.

Years later in San Diego, after Reagan's "Operation Urgent Fury" had made it safe for me to return to Grenada, I was preparing for my trip home when I received a surprise and secret visit from Jimmy Carter. I had had a second stroke and it took me awhile to recognize him. He had never fully approved of my political actions, but we shared a deeper connection because he had once seen a flying saucer in the skies above Americus, Georgia in 1969 after giving a speech at a Lion's Club. We exchanged pleasantries for awhile, and then he asked me, "Tell me Eric, do you believe in the afterlife?" I could tell by the way he was looking at me, that I seemed in poor health, and that he thought I was not going to live long. I told him that I believed there was a secret universe and in this world there is an island that has no politics, no governments or rulers or subjects, no corruption, no coups, no invasions, no labor unions or secret police. "You're talking about heaven," he said. I just nodded. I shuffled around. I was trying to find my toothbrush. I was wondering if my white suits still fit. But I wasn't thinking about heaven. I was thinking about Atlantis. I was thinking about the Bermuda Triangle. I was thinking about the world inside the hollow center of the Earth.

*I am dead now myself, and as a result I may have made small mistakes in names and dates. There are no references here to check against....