Let Soualiga Breathe

The opening of Parliament carries tradition, pageantry, and the weight of history. It also carries stiffness, a formality frozen in a time that is not 2025. Keep the hats, they are fabulous; set the rest free. Our national rituals should feel like us, sound like us, move like us. Too often they do not. The result: pretty, but boring optics, zero soul.

We are missing some Soualiga spice. Tradition need not mean repetition, tradition can mean renewal. That begins with what we show the world when we say our parliamentary year has begun.

Perhaps our representatives can step into the chamber wearing the work of local designers and fashionistas, fabric that tells a story, patterns that carry our memory. Perhaps the gallery should not be a roll call of high councils of state, judges and the like. Fill those seats with elders who built the island, USM students who will inherit it, teachers who tend it, and connoisseurs of the arts who give it color.

Keep the red carpet, then line the road with our traditional trees, a living aisle for the people’s business. Slow the march that sometimes looks like a funeral, lift the mood, and let “St. Martin Is My Home” by Lino play.

Invite the Governor, because he is "one-ah-we", then hand the podium to senior students to read the plans for each ministry, clear and brave. Imagine the accountability that follows when young voices carry government promises into the record. Imagine the Council of Ministers and MPs hearing their goals reflected by the very generation who must live with them.

Our ceremonies must start reflecting who we are, not how they prefer to see us. In a country still learning to recognize itself, and a generation that will love Soualiga only if we teach it, live it, and pass it on, every civic moment is a chance to mirror our identity. The teams who stage the opening are St. Martiners, not caretakers of a template, give them permission to be creative, to be Soualigan, to design a rite that feels like home.

This will not discard respect, it will ground it.

Keep dignity, add warmth.

Keep order, add culture.

Keep form, add life.

So let Soualiga breathe. With "St. Martin is my Home" playing in the background, let the Parliamentary year open like a door to our own house, and let our house be filled with us.