AS an anthropologist, I often turn to the vast literature on the Caribbean to understand national hullaballoos and cultural responses. So, here’s your post-Christmas read on spirituality and power in our republic of complex religions and beliefs.
I’m not concerned with the truth of recent allegations that Massy Holdings Ltd mandates employees to attend retreats which include learning to contact the dead and self-heal with white light energy. Instead, let’s look anthropologically at these allegations.
In reportedly undertaking training which included necromancy and Obeah, Massy, which has denied the allegations, would have been as truly Caribbean as a company could be. Culturally speaking, nearly everyone in the region, regardless of officially-identified religion, believes in jumbies, spirit possession, the power of the dead (and veneration of ancestors), seers and divination, and healing practices which are unauthorised by dominant religions.
The roots of the word Obeah are Ashanti, coming from “Obeye” meaning spiritual leaders (sometimes described as witches and wizards), and accessing the occult has long been associated with sourcing strength, building community, providing cures, ensuring justice and causing harm. Historically, African Obeah women and men also held power and prestige, much like Delphi Sphere Consulting seems to have today.
However, engagement with the unseen and energetic are not just African, but also Hindu, Muslim and Christian. Indeed, the spiritual is a domain of what Keith McNeal, scholar of Afro- and Indo-Caribbean transcendental practices, calls “transculturation,” where there is significant mixing and multidimensionality.
Like Carnival, which brings together people of all religions in what soca music often describes as a spiritual experience, belief in the supernatural has become national culture and, translated into business speak, such culture eats strategy for breakfast.
Writing of Hindus, Vidya Naipaul brilliantly nailed the kind of ambition that led Ganesh, the main character in his novel The Mystic Masseur, to turn to mysticism and religious healing. These enabled Ganesh to successfully con his clients, who were willing believers.
Moving from the literary, anthropologist Kumar Mahabir has documented Indo-Muslims’ belief in Sheikh Sadiq, a jinn who possesses people and who is subject to Hindu mantras and Muslim prayers. Mahabir interviewed one 77-year-old lucky enough to see Sheikh Sadiq, whose manifestations were only visible to women.
Reading marvellous realist texts, such as David Dabydeen’s novel Molly and the Muslim Stick (2008), scholar Aliyah Khan describes Mahabir’s interviewee and Dabydeen’s novel as two of many examples of Muslims’ “magical negotiation with indigeneity and environmental space.” In other words, whatever voodoo you do is a mode of becoming and belonging to the Caribbean.
CEPEP-employed Pentecostals believe in healing with hands just as much as middle-class, new-age, Reiki enthusiasts. People drop rum in a corner for the thirsty on the other side. They jharay for jaundice. They put blue bottles and barrels in agricultural gardens to ward off maljo. They mount stickfighting bois and perform secret rituals before becoming visible as jab jabs and blue devils. However, these are typically considered peasant or proletarian customs.
The Massy allegations, had they been true, would have instead revealed how economic elites were (allegedly) just as deep in practices that continue to carry a colonial stigma of backwardness, low culture and illegality. Corner block talk knows it has always been so. Thus, popular response, comprising memes, Tik Tok videos and Christmas lime picong, was hardly condemnatory for Massy execs had simply been shown to be “one of we.”
Upper classes (who were once white elites, but now include an oligarchy of all ethnicities) were brought into intimacy with the everyday and popular; down a notch from air-conditioned and upper-floor financial wizardry. Despite their business-suits and millions, they were just like schoolgirls from Moruga, for whom the paranormal and superstitious were real.
Yet, Massy’s preference for foreign over local Babalawos, pundits and healers, had it been true, would also have been about a capitalist refashioning of Obeah, not as low and disavowed superstition, but as a technology of successful Caribbean modernity.
Elite practices and profits are typically considered mysterious, untrustworthy, corrupt and advantageous. It makes sense then that outcry would be less about dead-dealing and light-healing than misuse of forex, particularly as small and medium businesses have been crippled by lack of access to the very foreign exchange (and successful capitalist modernity) which appeared inequitably available to Massy.
Anthropologist Daniel Miller describes Christmas as the ultimate national festival, celebrated by everyone regardless of religion in ways typically Trinidadian/Tobagonian. It’s a good moment to highlight that, interspersed with such rituals, is a landscape of supernatural ongoings which also expose just how much our divided society secretly shares across class, religion and ethnicity.
IN LESS than a week, we have had Hinduism’s Maha Shivaratri on Saturday night, Carnival on Monday and Tuesday, with its grounding in transplanted African traditions, and now Ash Wednesday and the beginning of the Catholic period of Lent.
These are all spiritual traditions in one way or another, sometimes overlapping in surprising ways and sometimes focused on establishing their opposition.
As a people, we are blessed to have these and other belief systems available to us to understand more about each other and what it means to live together when we may not agree.
At Maha Shivarati, I sat at the Hindu Prachar Kendra, while Pandita Geeta Ji guided rites around the Shiva lingam. Not my family’s religion, but I thought it was beautiful, and felt lucky I could live in a country where anyone could sit and observe another’s sacred traditions.
Scan world news, this is a time when religions, whether Christianity, Hinduism or Islam, are being increasingly led by divisive politics, where our differences become a basis for excluding, putting down or fomenting mistrust and violence.
It’s growing globally, whether in India, Iran or the US, and those women and men are here too. They are in the churches that stop people from seeing their family if they don’t also belong.
They are in temples and mosques, where orthodoxy matters more than human beings, practising humility, and considering that, maybe, we take different paths to shared destinations. By contrast, I’m interested in those who are open to finding connection, rather than moral superiority.
I was intrigued to see Visham Bhimull’s linking of Shivaratri and Carnival. Both are events which are guided by a lunar calendar. However, Bhimull makes other connections, such as between Shiva, also known as Nataraj or Lord of Dance, and Carnival.
He also suggested that Shiva’s other identity as “Someshwar” is associated with intoxication, as are these two days. Finally, he pointed to co-occurrences with the colour blue as associated with Lord Shiva and with blue devils, who also carry tridents, and are horned like Shiva’s sacred bull, Nandi.
I’m not here getting into a debate about whether such associations are valid nor am I establishing whether or not I agree with these suggestions. I appreciate the space they offer for us to consider who we are in relation to each other, and perhaps see our differences and similarities in new ways, regardless of our race, creed or religion.
There are people who think that only Hindus can discuss Hinduism or only Muslims can discuss Islam or only Christians discuss Christianity. They are one step away from saying that only those who agree with them can speak at all. Beware.
I almost never agree with Archbishop Jason Gordon. Actually, put differently, I disagree with him (and the Catholic position) on a number of human rights and women’s rights issues, and I often despair that so many have to live by positions which I think are prejudiced, harmful and discriminatory.
However, I thought the archbishop’s comments about Carnival, as published in the Catholic News on January 26, were expressed in ways that created points of agreement even among those who may have very different values.
He described Carnival in terms of a multi-layered tapestry in which there was much deserving of celebration. He spoke of the art and discipline of pan, which gives us a glimpse of how we can forge a nation from the ground up in communities as pan sides do. He criticised fetes, but also described concern for the turn to simply importing costumes from China.
I disagreed with his final conclusion, that Carnival doesn’t have a morality of its own – which I think is apparent in mas-making as in pan, but we do agree that it holds up a mirror to society. I appreciated his nuanced considerations and a tone that was more than condemnatory. More than the religious, I have faith in those who can see that others may have different interpretations, practices or paths, but are willing to journey to common ground beyond only their own ideology.
As we begin a different season in our calendar, we have another opportunity in Lent, just as we have at sacred days on the Hindu and Muslim calendars, to invite others in, to reasonably dialogue about what we each bring, and to find words and images that provide examples to consider. We may not always agree, but surely we can see value in thinking about our connections to each other.
AS THE voices of Freetown Collective and Mical Teja echo from the hills and reverberate across the country, there are hardly better words to describe the moment.
After two years without Carnival, there is a florescence of joy and creativity like when dawn pierces a long and unnatural dark, splitting an entire horizon with a radiance that awakens. To paraphrase familiar wisdom, weeping may endure for the night, but joy cometh J’Ouvert morning.
We are a population that experienced the longest lockdown in the region, and we all know someone wracked by the alienation, despair, grief and loss that Covid-19 wrought.
Today, we are survivors, letting our beloved dead rise from where our bodies have held them close, for they were miracles formed of Earth who could guide like the stars.
Wandering our earthly heaven now, no doubt wary of spectres the likes of Picton, Chacon and Abercromby, are ancestors who will be looking and listening, judging and urging as we cast our mortal burdens on the streets of cities, villages and towns. They too are ghostly vibrations, given shape among us by the wind, shimmering heat and Sahara dust.
Blaxx, Mighty Shadow, Black Stalin, Brother Resistance, Anil Bheem, Singing Francine, Singing Sandra, Bomber and Explainer. Prof Gordon Rohlehr, who made calypso music his lifelong companion. Bless them, every one.
Lionel Jagessar senior, whose spirit will be watching his legacy brought to town for the first time. Studying his final drawings come to life, may he nod with fatherly approval. Ameen. Amen. Om Shanti. Bless us, every one.
We survivors, emerging on the other side of the pandemic’s portal with all our squabbles, imperfections, doubts and hungers smoking blue-black like still-burning debris, are close enough to Carnival Monday and Tuesday to feel its gravitational pull. It’s a pull toward pleasure for its own sake and to occupy a brief spectacular version of ourselves.
Honest people working hard trying to make sense in a world gone mad, sings Freetown. Sometimes, those assigned to toil scrape together the privilege of ascendance through something, anything, to feel good. For them, with all its human and costumed beauty, with all that it offers to escape morning headlines, killing sprees and cost-of-living tribulations, mas has come again.
In fetes, panyards and concerts, people are together singing by the hundreds and thousands. Hearts and arms open, and giving performers their own lyrics back to them on stage. A crowd of strangers, of every different creed and race, but who share a love that has them raising their voices in the air. Surely, such pure vibration and sheer magic is also how we give praise.
Music is lifting people and flooding bodies of all kinds with an energy and release that is visceral enough to feel. It’s taking away people’s pain, after so much of it these past years. It’s also a unifying power come down, one that we missed having in our midst. We are reminded why how we vote hasn’t divided us more. It’s because of how we party.
Not everyone has to love mas in our multi-ethnic and multi-religious society. Nor does everyone have to understand why and how it matters to some, why and how it can be art, why and how it can feel like freedom, or why and when it matters.
We don’t all worship in the same way. We don’t all heal the same. We don’t all love the same. There are those who, judgmentally, only see the “immoral, lewd or offensive” in Carnival, often from afar, but mas is a getaway spirit that comes on its own terms, again and again. Just so, unapologetic and unafraid.
Here, in the home we traverse with so much fear, the atmosphere of daily life like bitter aloes, where we feel so let down and so taken for granted, mas has arrived to fill some of what people need.
In our imperfect republic, inequalities, exclusions, mismanagement, lies and poverty of the imagination remain, like ropes that separate. Ash Wednesday will return us to smoke and mirrors at media briefings, and money wasted by the millions, never to be distributed as it should be. This death of joy, this killing of togetherness, this attack on our future is more immoral than bottoms in the road and more scandalous than a free woman.
On Monday, ‘foreday morning will find me playing St Peter, waiting at heaven’s gate. All who must get send to burn in the fires of hell. Mas has come again. Santimanitay.
ON SUNDAY the Express’s front-page photo featured Renella Alfred, who comes from the famous Alfred family from Couva, playing jab jab. The caption described her as the Whip Princess, sticking out her coloured tongue as part of her portrayal. However, this banal description failed to convey what Renella was bringing to town through her mas, which is her invocation of the Hindu goddess Mother Kali.
This is easy to miss unless you are thinking about Indianness in the Caribbean, and how it is being practised beyond the Sanskritisation of Hindu life as authorised by religious texts and authorities. It speaks to how Indian women in Trinidad and Tobago take up mas in ways that breathe life into post-indenture feminist legacies.
When Indians arrived in the Caribbean, they brought an eclectic range of cultural and religious practices, and a pantheon of goddesses whose spiritual power confronted European patriarchal belief systems, where God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit and disciples were conceived of as male. African religious traditions with, for example, a pantheon of female orishas such as Yemaya, Oshun and Oya, similarly offered an alternative cosmology of feminine divinity and energy.
Stereotypically, Hinduism and Carnival are cast as oppositional. One is associated with purity and the other with sin. However, mas making among Indians in TT tells a different story of mas being played to express a sense of spirituality, reverence for ancestry, devotion to discipline and respect for aesthetic forms of connection.
Among traditional mas makers, mas is a deeply sacred moral universe full of ritual, which is not opposed to being Indian or Hindu. In fact, mas making in the lives of Indo-Caribbeans weaves together all of these, brilliantly and creatively defining the afterlife of indenture, and redefining creolisation.
For Hindus who understand how village youth can play the sacred roles of Ram and Sita for Ramleela, mas becomes another stage for a leela (or play) about an epic journey and experience of exile, morality as it confronts the demonic, gender and sexual tensions, and legacies of Indian presence in the Caribbean.
The concept of “post-indenture feminist legacies” refers to the spiritual and cultural traditions, artefacts, myths, symbols and imagined possibilities brought from India in jahaji and jahajin bundles (creolised as “georgie bundle”) which, today, are being drawn on by women – and not just Indian women – to express feminine power and feminisms.
As Lisa Outar and I describe in the edited collection, Indo-Caribbean Feminist Thought, such woman-centred world-making articulates “a feminist praxis where Indian gendered experiences in the Caribbean are not marginal, while being understood in ways centred in a politics of solidarity across ethnicity, class, gender, sexualities, and nation” (2016, 2). Praxis describes more than action. It means action, portrayal or performance grounded in considered thought and reflection.
It is a profoundly philosophical contribution and, in the Caribbean, we don’t just do philosophy through lyrics and music. We do it through the sacred, and the clashing and combining of belief systems or cosmologies; through gender and sexuality, which has long been defined by struggle against authorities that demarcate the good, holy and respectable from the polluting, profane and improper; and through embodiment, or the pleasures of how we assert our right to exist, and affirm the value and joy of our sovereign selves, with our bodies.
The photo also showed her wearing a “nath” or nose ring with a chain connected to her hair. The nath is associated with bridehood and childbirth, and goddess Parvati, but also with Parvati’s incarnations as goddess Durga, a warrior goddess, and goddess Kali, who emerges from within Durga to destroy the demonic with her dance of destruction. The nath is also a symbol of Indian femininity, hardly seen outside of weddings and Divali, or in mas.
By naming herself the “Whip Princess,” Renella has elevated her royal status in mas “lore” as above that of secular law, challenging the State’s monopoly over violence. She is also defying male religious prerogative over when and how she can be Indian, woman and Hindu. Finally, she is douglarising Carnival, continuing an Indian presence that shaped sokah itself.
All that I have described and more is in Renella Alfred’s sacred invocation of Mother Kali in Carnival. Such combining is important because many of our ancestors were brought to be violently exploited and dehumanised in what was meant to be a labour and conversion camp. Yet, in such mas is also our painstaking crafting of a society of beautiful, powerful, equal and free human beings.
CARNIVAL cannot pass without calypso and soca flinging up issues of gender and sexuality.
Patrice Robert’s tribute to Penguin comes at a highly contested moment in the negotiation of contemporary manhood, in a region transformed by Caribbean feminist struggle for social justice and a male backlash which retributively accuses women of becoming too powerful.
Yet, feminist transformation also made it possible to speak positively about men’s emotions and allowing boys to cry, men’s emotional fragility under the rigid mask of manhood, and men as human beings who embody qualities of gentleness as well as strength. In this context, there are complex, contradictory and even problematic meanings in engaging Penguin’s Soft Man today.
Much has been written about this 1984 Calypso Monarch winner which documents the threatened status of the erect penis or phallus, or stickman’s bois, as the ultimate representation of manhood and its dominance over women.
Such dominance included a division of household roles into masculine and feminine, such that a soft man was also undesirable because of his failure to live up to an ideal of tough masculinity, instead becoming associated with the emotional and domestic responsibilities expected of women.
In calypso, the threat to the phallus and its sexual potency was frequently portrayed in terms of an emasculating female demand, power and sexuality. Indeed, softness was a kind of death or castration, leaving men aberrant and unwanted. This became particularly risky in a changing world where women were becoming more educationally and occupationally dominant, sexually assertive, difficult to subordinate and unwilling to settle.
As the doyen of calypso scholarship, Prof Gordon Rohlehr, has written, fulfilment of manhood was about having a sturdier bois than rivals, sexually satisfying women with the strength of one’s “boy,” and fulfilling the superior role of a warrior-king-cocksman.
Thus, Penguin’s advice was that women don’t like a man who is easily ruled and advantaged. Instead, a man must “lead/supply all his woman’s needs/never let his yard get weeds/dig the soil and plant the seeds.” In other words, be macho, head the family, be a provider, have frequent sex, and prove virility through impregnation.
In Patrice’s 2023 version, she is a glitteringly hypersexualised and strong black woman surrounded by sweaty, bare-chested, muscular brown and black men, some of whom are soldering in a machine shop while sparks fly. Presumably, this representation of working-class masculinity depicts what remains hard and desirable, though she seems derisive of them all.
Repeatedly, she is shown hanging by her arms while a macho man (or one with such ambitions) throws punches (that do not land) at her stomach while she smirks at his impotence. There’s sexual harassment leading to a woman lashing down a (short)man, who slapped her bottom, while other men laugh at him. The soft man is the one who should have come to her defence, but meekly surrendered, even in a fight he could have won.
The song’s lyrics declare that bacchanal-loving, thirsty, irresponsible, promiscuous, poor, violent and garrulous men are all equally scorned. An incompetent man who makes a woman change a tyre is labelled soft. Patrice further details her defiance of men who tell her what to do by doing the opposite and telling them to hush.
It’s reminiscent of Sojourner Truth’s 1851 “Ain’t I a Woman” speech when Patrice declares, “I name Woman.” It’s also in the tradition of women calypsonians. In Reddock’s 2004 collection, Rohlehr writes of Calypso Rose’s “persistent rejection” of lovers “who drink heavily, beat women, indulge in rough sex that is close to rape, and, in addition, exist like parasites off the earnings of the working woman.”
Similarly, Patrice lists men whom women love, including those who rough up, cuss and beat them. She distances herself from such enfeebled women and unsatisfactory men, declaring her superiority through what Rohlehr describes as the derisive, “mocking scrutiny of a woman’s eye.”
Here, Patrice is a stickfighter shaming men of broken bois although they comprise different characteristics from Penguin’s original. She is commentator, protester, “rebel against male sexism” and “confident celebrant of her own sexuality…now open in the challenge she poses to the old patriarchal structures” even as she wields its stereotypes.
To return to Rohlehr’s brilliant phrasing, “What phallus, however well-inflated or intentioned, would not quail beneath such withering and contemptuous scrutiny?” Such withering, or an inability to withstand a “running report” on the quality of manhood’s performance, renders a man soft, unsuccessful and out-of-step in a 21st century, gendered gayelle. Such ongoing contestation is the story this calypso tells.
HAZEL BROWN was a gift to the Caribbean and the world. She was a world-changer.
She was everything she was known to be: fierce, sharp, caring, enthusiastic, tireless, visionary, difficult, single-minded, loving, creative, curious, dramatic, insightful, empowering, cantankerous, generous, strategic, joyful, inspiring, determined, deeply political and absolutely one of a kind.
For nearly 30 years, I learned and grew from just listening and watching her, from being in the spaces she created and nurtured, and from being encouraged, instructed and mentored time and again. To know her was to learn from her.
She was always full of plans and ideas. She had an encyclopaedic insider knowledge of Caribbean feminist history because she had been thinking, watching, listening and influencing for 50 years, and was a pioneer of her generation from TT, allied with similar Caribbean women and men from across the region.
There is hardly an issue about which she wasn’t concerned or didn’t speak out at one time or another. Her analysis and advocacy was intersectional before the term became popular, because she was aghast at injustice of any kind.
She was unapologetically for the rights and empowerment of women and girls, domestic workers, low-income consumers, breast-feeding mothers, women in local government, housewives, and so many more.
She was a pan-Africanist even as she consistently gathered against the alienating tide of racial stereotyping and division.
As a young Indian woman who grew up in her shadow, she treated me as one of her daughters, with affection and patience, knowing I’d do whatever she told me to do, and I think feeling a sense of accomplishment when it was very clear I was trying to walk in her footsteps, something I think she felt about all the young people she influenced. We had laughs, connection, serious discussions and times when I hope I made her proud.
Hazel would often talk about how she understood the power of the State, and local government, from sitting in Port of Spain City Council meetings when she was ten years old. She had a scholarship from the mayor’s office to attend school and he would have to sign her report card at the end of term. So she would sit listening until it was her turn for his attention, thus gaining her first understanding of politics.
In June, I called her so she could tell Zi this wonderful story. Seventy years separated them, and Hazel was sharing a memory from when she was Ziya’s age, which I hoped would both inspire and educate. What a gift to have heard that story from Hazel herself, I told Zi, not yet knowing how true those words would be.
I came of age with her as an ever-present advocate, organiser, writer, protester, baby-doll masquerader, marcher, global leader and truly fearless Caribbean woman. With her goes a feminist era in which she lived and which she helped define. Today, the world isn’t the same. She was a gift we had for a time.
I know she knew how much I admired and appreciated her, and how much affection and respect I had for her. The journey was full of lessons and love.
I cannot imagine her resting, now that she is freed of her body. I can only see her shaking us up in the night so we wake with a fervour to get up in the morning and take our placards to the road. I can only imagine her appearing in spirit in the shimmering heat amidst her beloved baby dolls on a Carnival day. I can only picture her rattling the visitors’ gallery in the Parliament when politicians do foolishness.
I know I will sense her in the wind on International Women’s Day. I think I will hear her voice in my ear for decades, telling me what I should do, what we must do. I cannot imagine her, even gone from this life, without her boots on. She had a fighting spirit that I do not think would be ready to move on when there is still so much to be done.
I send her family, friends and sisters in struggle and diverse allies my sincerest condolences.
May we continue to fight in her name, with her spirit and with the sense of power she wanted us to know was ours. Then, I think, her indomitable spirit may agree to rest in peace.
Hazel Brown, I mourn and celebrate you. I thank you. You live on in us. We know there is still much work to do.
…………
Original Post September 22, 2022.
It’s taken me some time to find the words and I am not yet certain these are the right ones. Hazel Brown was a gift to the Caribbean and the world. She was a world changer.
She was everything she was known to be: fierce, sharp, caring, enthusiastic, tireless, visionary, difficult, single-minded, loving, creative, curious, dramatic, insightful, empowering, cantankerous, generous, strategic, joyful, inspiring, determined, deeply political, and absolutely one-of-a-kind.
For nearly thirty years, I learned and grew from just listening and watching her, from being in the spaces she created and nurtured, and from being encouraged and instructed and mentored time and again. To know her was to learn from her.
She was always full of plans and ideas. She had an encyclopaedic insider knowledge of Caribbean feminist history because she had been thinking, watching, listening and organising for fifty years, and was a pioneer of her generation from Trinidad and Tobago, allied with similar Caribbean women and men from around the region.
There is hardly an issue about which she wasn’t concerned or didn’t speak out at one time or another. Her analysis and advocacy was intersectional before the term became popular, because she was aghast at injustice of any kind. She was unapologetically for the rights and empowerment of women and girls, domestic workers, low-income consumers, breast-feeding mothers, women in local government, housewives, and so many more. She was a pan-Africanist even as she consistently organised against the alienating tide of racial stereotyping and division.
As a young Indian woman who grew up under her shadow, she treated me as one of her daughters, with affection and patience, knowing I’d do whatever she told me to do, and I think feeling a sense of accomplishment when it was very clear I was trying to walk in her footsteps, something I think she felt about all the young people she influenced. We had many laughs, many moments of connection, many serious discussions, and moments when I hope I made her proud.
Sending her family, friends, sisters in struggle and diverse allies my sincerest condolences. I came of age with her as an ever-present advocate, organiser, writer, protestor, baby-doll masquerader, marcher, global leader and truly fearless Caribbean woman. With her goes a feminist era in which she lived and which she helped define. Today, the world isn’t the same. She was a gift we had for a time.
I know she knew how much I admired and appreciated her, and how much affection and respect I had for her. The journey with her was full of lessons and love.
I cannot imagine her resting, now that she is freed of her body. I can only see her shaking us up in the night so we wake with a fervour to get up in the morning and take our placards to the road. I can only imagine her appearing in spirit in the shimmering heat amidst her beloved baby dolls on a Carnival day. I can only picture her rattling the visitors’ gallery in the Parliament when politicians doing foolishness. I know I will sense her in the wind on International Women’s Day. I think I will hear her voice in my ear for decades, telling me what I should do, what we must do. I cannot imagine her, even gone from this life, without her boots on. She had a fighting spirit that I do not think would be ready to move on when there is still so much to be done.
May we continue to fight in her name, with her spirit and with the sense of power she wanted us to know was ours. Then, I think, her indomitable spirit may agree to rest in peace. Hazel Brown, I mourn and celebrate you. I thank you. You live on in us. We know there is still much work to do.
Minshall mas meeting Brother Resistance on the Road. Carnival 2018.
THIS week couldn’t pass without honouring Lutalo Masimba, better known as Brother Resistance. Although there is much that can be said about his life history and his involvement in the calypso community, I’m writing today from my own memories.
When a giant passes on, each of us remembers him or her in deeply personal ways; these are not just icons of nation-building, but individuals who enter hearts and give voice.
It’s also important for us to challenge over-determining representations of our society as divided by race, whether in how we vote or how we fete, with stories of when we connect across ethnic and other differences.
There won’t be many Indian women writing about the impact that Brother Resistance, with his radical decolonial and African consciousness, had on them in the late 1990s and early 2000s, decades after the 1970s Black Power slogan, “Indians and Africans Unite” was declared.
It speaks to a legacy born in those earlier decades that still vibrates today.
In 1998, I was in a fete somewhere, having just returned from university, and first saw Ataklan perform his hit tune Flambeau. How to become part of his community of lyricists and what I understood then as spoken-word or poetry performers? He sent me to Brother Resistance.
Resistance was generous and welcoming.
He had a gentle, affable humility that made you feel all that mattered was your interest in words and riddim and Trinbago. I think the man could make anyone feel there was something in him or her that deserved kindness and respect.
You would see his broad smile beam down from his easy height, so sweet to picture now, whenever anyone was interested in rapso. He encouraged anyone he saw with passion, talent or just love for our culture, regardless of age, race, class or experience.
He invited me to join a six-week training, called Breaking New Ground, organised by the Rapso Co-ordinating Committee, which introduced us to Lancelot Layne, Cheryl Byron, Karega Mandela, Wendell Manwarren, Sheldon Blackman, Brother Book, the Network Rapso Riddum Band, Sister Ava, drummer Wayne “Lion” Osuna and so many others.
Rapso was ascendent then, having been amplified by the success of the artistes from Kiskadee Karavan, by Rituals Music recordings, by the beginning years of 3canal and the youthful sounds of Ras Shorty I’s children’s Jamoo music.
Town was alive with words and rhymes, sounds of drumming and chanting, and another generation’s sense of this home-grown genre’s power.
Breaking New Ground was history, theatre, poetry, respect for the arts, mentorship and belief in being the embrace from which young blood emerged.
We’d stand in a circle in the old Fire Station or in Little Carib Theatre, holding hands, and there would be an invocation, ending with, “Jah! Rastafari!” In this African space, I was aware of my race and class, as there were no other young Indian women there. Yet it was a community where I was always welcomed.
Brother Resistance and others were centring the young people who came to them in their own distinctive philosophy of belonging to a self-determining Caribbean and nation. There was always a parallel poetry and spoken word scene, but it wasn’t deliberately grassroots, streetwise, for the people and against the dread exploitation and dehumanisation of Babylon system.
Those who were mimicking dancehall or rap were encouraged to sound as we speak and to wordplay in the way of mas characters. At the end of those weeks, we were sent up on a stage, and entrusted to continue the politics of rapso warriors.
I’ve delayed this column for a long time, intimidated by the challenge of writing in homage to my long-time friend and ally, Colin Robinson. We don’t always agree, but it’s impossible not to love Colin, his ironic sense of humour and counter-intuitive analyses of jostling over power, his detailed eye for clever strategy, and easy flow of insights and wise words.
More than ten years ago, Colin gave a speech I’ll never forget. It was on reproductive rights, but he somehow wove in Spiritual Baptists, LBGTI folk and others you wouldn’t think share the same cause. If all who understood discrimination or life at the margins of state law and social acceptance were able to connect to each other’s desires for inclusion, then we could strengthen each other’s struggle to equally belong as many different bodies.
In another decade-old memory, I arrived at a UNC rally and was captured by the sight of the CAISO logo flying in the sea of yellow. Colin was there, with CAISO’s “6 in 6” campaign which advocated for six policy and leadership steps on sexual orientation and gender identity in six months after the May 24, 2010, election. It was a bold insertion of a right to citizenship, but a hard day for the young people accompanying Colin who encountered homophobia which he had to mentor them through.
In the decade that has followed, there have been innumerable examples of Colin’s pathbreaking courage and his sensitive mentorship, and his insistence that marginalised people can make “liveable lives” in the Caribbean. He’s kept his eye on key goals, constantly refining language, reach, movement-building, leadership and actions to transform unjust power. There are core values he’s returned to again and again. For me, they are his legacy, the path he’s imagined is our best route. I asked him about them a few months ago.
What follows are excerpts from that conversation, focusing on Colin’s politics of relationship-building and his call for us to be imaginative in the ways we claim and we create ourselves.
In Colin’s words, “If we can build relationships that can be sustained across our differences, we have a basis for sharing the nation. We must show up and earn value among others by being in solidarity. The strategic route to equality and inclusion is not rights claims, which can get you there, but can’t get you there in a sustainable way. When you make a claim, somebody has to lose and that’s the challenge. It’s based on pressure, it’s contingent, it’s not values-driven or sustainable. Rights fulfilment is about focusing on how to sustain the fulfilment of rights and not just the claim. Feminist nationalism, sharinglothe nation, is based on shared values and a different approach to power through listening, seeing yourself in other people’s stories.
“We have to put out values that people find themselves in, practise patience and solidarity and forgiveness that doesn’t enable abuse of power and patriarchy, but cements those relationships. Allies don’t speak for you, they listen to your dreams and concerns. Listening can be transformative. Constant attention to solidarity starts with listening to each other’s dreams of belonging. When you show up in relationships, it is transformative.
“Imagination is as central to liberation as power. If you can’t imagine it, it doesn’t exist. The power of revolution is imagining the world as it doesn’t yet exist. We have to imagine the Caribbean imaginatively. And that’s where we fail, we imagine, but not imaginatively enough. Imagination and innovation are everywhere but not in relation to the most enduring structures of justice in our lives.
“We turn instead to order. Procedural justice and human rights is still a favour, somebody you know, a niceness. It’s not a core vision, there is still a distributive idea that we don’t all get it. We don’t know how to create a system that creates procedural fairness, we cannot imagine systems that enable. Our imaginations are around order, violence and punishment, we value rules above justice. That’s the frustration.
“We have not been able to imagine an economy and structures that are enabling, it’s still outside of the order, in Carnival, at the side of the road. Imagine is the one thing that humans do. The constant turn to authoritarianism is undermining the most valuable resource we have, which is our innovativeness.
“We put things together in a way that they have not been put before. Whether it is in terms of art or technology or society, we innovate. We have an ability to imagine futures that are not the present. It’s also about how to enter the world that way, that political work is about imagination and transformation. Imagine the future you want to create.”
Colin, our gratitude for your dreams and guidance, laughter and words. They enable so many of us to walk a path you’ve imagined, coming closer to achieving relationships of loving freedom with each other, and believing, with optimism and creativity, that it can and will happen.
Carnival is interwoven with our lives, but representations of it tend to focus on the public and performative. Our narratives also emphasize the big Carnival bands and big musical names. However, as we close this season, I’d like to reflect instead on the little stories we don’t see, particularly in relation to children and family.
On Carnival Friday, Ziya won her school Calypso Monarch competition with her entry, ‘Send Parents Back to School’.
The song was produced by her dad, Lyndon ‘Stonez’ Livingstone, who is a long time DJ and producer. Born into Trinidad and Tobago’s spoken word movement through Rapso in 1998, but having moved away from both poetry and performing as work and motherhood took over, I get a connection to the past through writing calypsos for Zi.
Though our marriage has moved on since the days when he would produce for me, when a DJ and a poet have a daughter, we get to nurture an intergenerational love and engagement with local culture. We also get to be better people and parents from having to come together each year to cooperate for her. Through the growing pains of creating new relationships and definitions of ourselves, it’s no small truth to say that calypso has helped to keep our sense of family together.
For a long time, we looked at our shy, cautious and hesitant child, and wondered if she would grow into her confidence. Now in her fifth year of a little school competition, and her second win, I was amazed to see a blossoming nine-year-old command her school stage; her stance powerful, her delivery strong and her performance bold.
She wanted the prize money, to buy Lego and mint gum, she had developed a sense of ambition and competition, and she was increasingly willing to take risks publicly. Other parents may have similar stories of Carnival’s opportunities for confidence-building, and may be able to say this about drama and sports, but it was calypso that did it for Zi.
There may be much to debate about the value and legacy of these last weeks, but this is one quiet and small story that Carnival has left with me. It’s like this around the country, in pan sides filled with youth, in family mas camps where children learn about the spiritedness of masquerade while still at the breast, in musical homes where young bards begin to follow in elders’ footsteps.
In each of these, there are not simply stories of fete and wine and rum. There are also real moments of separated parents sharing common commitment and joy; of little children learning about Carnival as hard work, shared effort and a labour of love; and the awkwardness of self-doubt blooming into new-found capacity to aspire and achieve.
As so many want for their children, we wanted Ziya to learn about what it means to speak up for her generation and to connect to others so that they can see their reality in what she advocates. We wanted her to see that a hook is a clear message which can signify an historical moment. We wanted her to know that the more she knew about her country is the more resonant her voice could be across time. We wanted her to know that social commentary had to be more than a lament, it had to capture imagination while being accessible to anyone willing to listen.
So, we kept the lyrics simple:
Children, what to say? Like Trinbago gone astray. Crime and violence is the rule. Send parents back to school!
Like adults forget all their learned. Set bad example with no concern. We fed up, fed up not being safe. Parents must learn how to behave.
So put on your uniform, shine your shoes. We giving tests and homework too. First class is basic civics, and revision until the country fix.
Ting a ling ling. School bell ring. Too much adults misbehaving. Ting a ling ling. School bell ring. Back to school every morning!
Tell Gary Griffith, we have a plan to fight criminals across the land, teach about the country we should have, put the future in parents’ school bag!
Children, what to say? Like Trinbago gone astray. Crime and violence is the rule. Send parents back to school!
As critics cross swords over what was wasted and gained, this is a story of Carnival’s possibilities for togetherness and growth. As a grateful mother of a little girl, this is therefore also a small ode to kaiso.
As Carnival takes over airwaves, we can explore its representations of music, culture and sexual pleasure. These representations are often contradictory, drawing us into debate. They are sometimes more important than first appears, charting a historical moment, or highlighting generational change or US influence, or showing what adolescents, tuned in on Instagram and Youtube, are learning from us about empowerment and gender.
Destra’s recently released ‘Rum and Soca’ video is an intriguing mix of representations that signal much about our time. The video’s narrative is basically like the African-American movie, ‘Girls Trip’, which is a story of women’s friendship and a wild weekend of dancing, drinking, and romancing to excess.
This narrative is at home here in Trinidad and Tobago, with its long history of “girls’ limes”, and women drinking and wining with each other in fetes and on the road. It’s a welcome story as there are far too few videos of women enjoying themselves without performing at men’s command or for men’s pleasure or to attract men or as backdrop to a dominant male voice. “Party done” may have been the last time women were out like this on their own.
There are almost no men in Destra’s video and none on the mic. Those in the scenes are mere background to the social intimacy that affirms a right to woman-centred fun. The take up of a particular brand of consumer and celebrity feminism in Port of Spain is symbolized by the wealth and status of a limo, mansion, long blond wig and closet full of clothes combined with the Carnivalesque bacchanal of bam bam, and its emphasis on women’s licentious freedom as empowerment.
There’s much to say about such empowerment. It seems to be symbolized by drinking to excess, a privilege traditionally reserved for men. Destra herself has at least eight drinks, and I found myself wondering about the messages to adolescent girls. Such drinking has historically costed those who may find themselves assaulted and then blamed for getting to a point where they can’t remember their last name. Such risks of victim blaming are real and I wondered about the counter warning to young women that excessive alcohol consumption easily turns a sense of power into vulnerability.
The drunkenness is simply Destra keeping up. Men have been triumphing such excess for decades, from “Drunk and Disorderly” to “Rum till I Die”, and it’s debatable whether it’s fair to hold women to a higher standard. Indeed, one can argue that the video is also an Afro-creole version of a matikor, the Caribbean’s longest and most iconic historical expression of rum-drinking, women-only wining and queer potential in a safe space created by women themselves.
Yet, one can’t be naïve about alcohol marketing in the Caribbean. Only four brands are visible in the video. It’s almost blatantly an extended Angostura ad, following in the footsteps of Machel, who introduced advertising for his own rum into his repertoire of songs, because scraping the barrel in this way as an artist makes good business sense. Company branding conflated with cultural production should compel us to question the role that alcohol companies play in sponsoring and profiteering from fetes, bands, artists and videos, and encouraging young adults to become drinkers.
In these videos and in Destra’s, women are also holding hands, near kissing, and touching bodies in ways that blur the line between heterosexuality, bisexuality and lesbianism, or in ways that ‘queer’ being straight. Whether it’s alcohol, or sexual experimentation, or sexual fluidity, Destra’s video can be simultaneously read as straight and gay, as deliberately ambiguous, and as defying easy identity labels.
Such queering has a long history in the region. Yet, for lesbians in Trinidad and Tobago, same-sex desire isn’t something that happens when you’re drunk or that is about a night out. It’s an identity that isn’t taken on and off, and still carries great social stigma. One can only hope that women celebrities’ openness to ambiguity, play and enjoyment normalises challenges to homophobia and an inclusive world for women beyond its rules.
Cultural representations of empowerment, sexuality, womanhood and feminism in the Caribbean can be problematic as well as emancipatory, but shouldn’t simply be dismissed. Signs of our times, and their shifts and debates, continue to come in Carnival music.
grrlscene 