Post 203.
We spent Sunday morning carefully observing wildlife in Chaguaramas, all the while grieving their demise under Dr. Bhoe Tewarie’s leadership as Minister. Getting home wet from a spring, I felt it was a miracle that Ziya could walk amidst such great biodiversity, and Trinidad’s human and natural history.
Walk with me.
Just to the left of the turn to go into Macaripe Mail Road, next to the sea and along the Cuesa river wetlands, live a family of small crocodilians called Caimans. If you go quietly, you can see them resting. Development is planning for both now and for future generations, so including their habitat in planning isn’t an idealist, environmentalist wish. It is sustainable development and the right thing to do, especially in Chagaramas, for Ziya’s children will never have the experience she did if we submit to Dr. Tewarie’s piped dreams.
Filled-in and concretized land, and a freshwater waterpark are to be established on the same spot through private leases. This will destroy the precious little habitat that those caiman have a right to, and compromise the rights of public open space enjoyed by Baptists, Hindus, and those of all classes who freely access this state land for recreation. It will also exploit an aquifer for the most unsustainable uses imaginable at a time of global water crisis.
As I left the caiman, I looked up at the sign of what was planned, after closed-door conversations Dr. Tewarie had with private investors, and wondered if any of them ever saw those caiman or cared about habitat, future generations, precious fresh water, or Town and Country Planning approvals.
Keep walking.
The view of the sea will be cut off from the proposed new Guave Road, past the military museum, and will instead be accessible through businesses profiting from a mall and marina restaurants. These plans were made before the new Chagaramas Development Authority 2015 master plan was formulated and were forcibly misfit in, under the title of CDA ‘fixed projects’. Yet, the Town and Country Planning (Chaguaramas) Development Order created the CDA to follow the 1974 Statutory land use plan, which should only be replaced by Parliamentary and public agreement, and which clearly classes the coastline here as a public open space. Dr. Tewarie and the CDA know this, but fences are going up anyway. Have all the planning approvals have been obtained? Why not? Why do you think that the Minister of Planning and Sustainable Development is pursuing such an unsustainable dream?
Chagaramas’ forests are intended to be a “National Park”. Will the CDA again allow open-air fetes, such as by Ceasar’s Army, in, of all places, the Tucker valley “bamboo cathedral” in the middle of the wider National Park? If so, what will happen to the howler monkeys Ziya watched, not caged in the zoo, but free? Will businesses continue to operate as if the garbage growing around them, filling the streams, is in the Park’s best interest? Will extending the golf course from nine holes to eighteen plus high-density residential housing provide the buffers this national park needs? And imagine the military establishing a panorama of bright industrial level lights around its fenced off football field at the Tucker Valley youth camp, in the last “dark zones” in the western Northern Range. Such human hubris is disallowed because of the harm it causes to species in this ecology, but it continues, unregulated and irresponsibly.
Zi ecountered a furry, placid, pink-toed tarantula, Blue Emperor, Postman, Bamboo Page and other butterflies, two Green-banded Urania moths, a plica plica lizard, a tiny black and white striped frog, bats, a yellow and green ladybird, a hawk and cornbirds. Yesterday she told me, trees are a kind of school.
Is the next generation voiceless in the face of Minister Tewarie’s elite model, out of time with the publicly accessible heritage and biodiversity of Chagaramas, and sustainable planning across the planet? The Minister could have extended rather than destroyed biodiversity along the coast, and been sensitive not to big money, but the long-term interest of people of Trinidad and Tobago.
As Zi also now knows, it’s under Dr. Tewarie’s leadership that those caiman will be no more once tractors start to roll.
Post 202.
In 1999, Nesha Haniff wrote that “Indian women’s writings are only now emerging and the scholarship by Indian women on Indian women is slowly developing.” Almost twenty years later, enough of that writing now exists for a new generation of scholars to look back at it and ask a number of questions. How does it enable us to think about life today? What does it contribute to the Caribbean intellectual tradition? How has it defined feminism? What are its radical elements? What does it say about sexuality, race, family, religion, empowerment and more?
Most people think Indo-Caribbean women have not produced a lot or even particularly important scholarship, and that it is now coming into voice. But, it isn’t that the scholarship has been missing, it is that it has been marginal to how the region and its gender relations have been thought about.
Even as only a starting point, I want researchers to know that that Indians in the Caribbean can’t be studied as if this scholarship doesn’t exist, and neither can mixed and complex societies like Trinidad, Guyana and Suriname, and even others like Jamaica and Martinique.
This means getting to know the research about the intersections of gender, race and region along with generation and nation. It means getting to know how its concepts draw on myths and traditions, using words like ‘matikor’, ‘bindi’, ‘jahajin’ and ‘dougla’ to create theory, or ways of explaining who we have been, are becoming and should be. It means asking how the work of those creating art or writing books, or the lives of pioneering women negotiating power relations, from family life to business to politics, can be documented using the frames that Indo-Caribbean feminist scholarship offers for reflecting on our ambitions, struggles and communities.
For these ideas to turn into the collective conversation that it should, with others in and beyond the region, eighteen scholars are being brought together here to present their research. They are doing so in order to examine the Indo-Caribbean feminist scholarship that exists, and to show its contribution as well as how it can be advanced, nuanced or completely revised. Those scholars will presenting at UWI on November 5-6, 2015, on be everything from dance to literature, from sexuality to masculinity, from religion to family, and from visual art to violence in Indo-Caribbean life.
I am hoping that bringing them together here makes Trinidad and Tobago a leader in mentoring and producing knowledge about Indo-Caribbean, Dougla and Caribbean feminisms. I am hoping that it helps us to recognize and shape how a new generation of scholars is writing about Indian womanhoods and manhoods, from the ground up rather than importing theory. I am hoping that the publication of these papers in 2016 will shape Indo-Caribbean research on women and gender relations for at least the next decade.
To make this happen, I’ve spent these last weeks asking those in business to support the flight/hotel costs of one or more of the scholars who will be presenting on those two days, supplementing funds raised through university research grants. This way, there’s a collaborative investment by a wider community in producing much needed knowledge about Indo-Caribbean contemporary life, particularly women’s lives, and an investment in the intellectual leadership of our young women scholars.
It’s been a challenge. Most understand the importance of giving to charity, sports or even medical research. Social science, which studies family, culture, changes to tradition, power inequalities, and how we relate to each other in contemporary life, seems less urgent. Good at teaching and writing, rather than fundraising for research, I’ve also surprised myself by how shy I feel about confidently convincing those who can easily give funds why they should do so. Care for this project is forcing my skills to grow.
The scholarship I’ve read since beginning research on Indo-Trinidadian girlhood fifteen years ago has shaped the woman and scholar that I’ve become. My vision is to give back to the younger, emerging scholars documenting and explaining ideas, theories and experiences over the next fifteen years. If you can connect to that vision and want to help make such contemporary, collaborative, Indo-Caribbean feminist research a reality, don’t hesitate to contact me.
grrlscene 