Diary of a mothering worker. May 3, 2023.

Post 502.

OVER THE weekend, the NGC Bocas Lit Fest gathered more than 100 novelists, short-story writers, biographers and poets to exuberantly celebrate books.

There was a glittering wealth of writing from the Caribbean, and from TT. In-person or online, one could hear readings from recent publications and backstories from this generation of award-winning Caribbean authors as they are ascending a global stage. Up close and personal, the connection to both writers and their work felt wonderfully intimate and familiar, so typical of us in these small islands.

While the One Caribbean Media (OCM) award, symbolising the most commended book of the festival, went to Ayana Lloyd Banwo for her outstanding novel, When We Were Birds, the poetry prize went to Anthony Joseph for his recent collection, Sonnets for Albert, which captures his memories of his father in snapshots of vivid verse. The non-fiction prize was awarded to Ira Mathur’s epic transnational autobiography, Love the Dark Days.

These are just a handful of the nuggets that comprise the entire treasure of what we are producing through home-grown creativity, hard work, talent, mentorship and ambition.

Circling the national library’s atrium in-between sessions, I pressed close to booksellers’ tables like a candy store window, trying to decide which books to buy. Such choices were a question of space; I’ve no more empty bookshelves even after agonizingly whittling down by about seven boxes to mostly Caribbean literature. However, deciding on the hard sweet or the soft toffee was also a matter of money. I was like a child clenching precious pennies.

Books are expensive.

Perhaps if they were more affordable, more men would buy them instead of guns, carrying smaller ones rolled in their back pocket to read instead of killing time rolling weed. Perhaps if Caribbean books were more accessible, we might see each other’s outward violence and inner confusions more compassionately, finding characters in novels or descriptions in poems that enable us to recognise and forgive even ourselves.

Booksellers may make sales, but their trade is a labour of love, hardly making the profit they should, perhaps explaining why we have more rum shops than bookshops – places to drown loneliness and sorrows rather than be steadied by the humanity of shared desires and fears.

Contributing to this situation is a senseless tax on books imposed by the present government in February 2016. Educational materials such as school texts and exercise books are exempt. However, the cost of literature, even locally produced, was increased.

At the time, the finance minister described the tax regime as fiscal policy, not social policy, but that’s merely a mirage. All taxation reflects an assessment of social needs and priorities as well as principles of who should contribute and how.

For example, VAT applies equally to all consumers, whether rich or poor, and is therefore inequitable. In contrast, property and income tax should raise greater revenue from the wealthy, and be graduated rather than flat, meaning the rich should be taxed at higher rates than the poor, always.

At the time, booksellers protested. Prof Bridget Brereton described the decision to tax literature as strange, surprising and disappointing. She wrote, “VAT will be applied to all ‘literary books’ – this means novels of all kinds, modern and classics; volumes of short stories, plays and poetry; non-fiction books (biographies and autobiographies, works on social and natural sciences and his­tory, books about art and music).”

Recently, a sort of literary renaissance has taken place in TT and the Carib­bean, with more local or regional authors publishing novels, short stories and poetry, and winning big awards, too, as well as interesting non-fiction books of all kinds. Do we want to reduce their market by ma­king their books more costly?

Richie Sookhai, then president of the Chaguanas Chamber of Industry and Commerce, rightly observed, “This cannot be the way forward in a society where low levels of literacy can be cited as contributing factors in crime, poverty and social mobility.

“One of the ways we encourage pride in country is by reading about our history, about those who went before us and the great literature produced by our own writers like the Naipauls, Selvon, Lovelace. When we put that out of the reach of our children and the wider population, we do our country no service.”

And so it continues today. Caribbean literature, blooming in our midst, can transform our reality. Yet, as long as they are taxed as a luxury, people are least likely to choose books with their precious pennies.

 

Diary of a mothering worker. May 7, 2019.

Post 332.

On Sunday, in front of an audience of over a thousand, three young women topped the annual First Citizens National Poetry Slam Final for the first time in eight years.
Remember their names, for often we don’t remember our own poets, despite poetry’s power to save lives, inspire action, and document history as it is being lived.

Alexandra Stewart, whose piece last year represented the voice of our planet advocating for ecological conservation, placed first this time. I thought she well deserved the big prize of $50 000. She was my choice of winner for her poem had a clear message, didn’t over-use rhyme, felt authentic, was well-paced, kept within time, and showed straight up good writing and delivery.

Ironically, it was about the disrespect shown to poets when they are asked to perform for free, or for less than they need to even make ends meet. This is real and all artists in T and T can relate to budgets that include all the costs, but none for musicians and poetry. Her delivery kept it to the point. Artists also have to eat.

Earning second place, Shineque Saunders wrote an emotional piece about being separated from her mother who migrates to help her family survive. Shineque played her mom’s different voices in creative ways, creating a British accent and different name for the woman who migrated and a Trinbagonian accent for the one who remained, eventually bringing the stories of the two together to highlight the sacrifices mothers make again and again for their children. It spoke to a common reality for many today, represented confidently with both drama and flow.

Finally, Deneka Thomas, last year’s winner, placed third with a poem about the character of La Diablesse, showing us how rape can turn women into supposed-monsters. La Diablesse’s typical characterization as seducer of men isn’t just a story of sexuality and danger, but also one of negotiating power out of sexual violence and trauma, one we little hear because this character has remained so demonized and yet so silent in folklore. Redeeming such voices, through style and play, is a feminist act of turning words to power.

As a younger generation stepping in where Paula Obe, Lisa Allen-Agostini, Dara Njeri, Carol Hosein, Ivory Hayes, myself and others once held stage lights, it’s brilliant to see young women nurtured by 2 Cents Movement and, soon coming out of the school tours, setting the standard for spoken word on stage.

The story of young women championing at performance poetry has reasons for capturing our attention. The stage in the Caribbean has always been male-dominated, the lyrics “man” is still a resilient archetype, and so many women who have carried the spoken word movement over these decades and their very names have disappeared from its history.

Spoken word spaces have always been progressive, with young men also advocating an end to violence, speaking about tumultuous or disappointing relationships with their fathers, highlighting child sexual abuse, and analyzing poverty and injustice and much more. Yet, these are also spaces where young women can point to continuing politics of male privilege and the resilient nuances of a boys’ club.

On and off stage, there’s a story of women’s experience as performance poets that remains to be negotiated, transformed and told. That they exist in a community of young men also willing to challenge patriarchal religious authority, ego and silences speaks to the potential of another generation to right earlier wrongs.

The National Poetry Slam is a gathering of another generation’s politics and vision. It’s a gayelle of their lyricism. It feels youthful and fresh, leaving you, not just alive, but hopeful that others care enough to put the world’s challenges to pen and then to perform their call at a microphone.

As part of the wider NGC Bocas Lit Fest’s readings from poets and writers of all kinds, it’s a signal that out there, regardless of your class or sex or sexual orientation or age or race, all you need are words and, like one of those from among us who have been published or are young veterans of the stage, you too can write.

You too can step up to the mic.

 

 

 

 

Diary of a mothering worker. May 1, 2019.

Post 331.

THIS EVENING, Bocas Lit Festival and Commonwealth Writers will be launching the collection, We Mark Your Memory: Writings from the Descendants of Indenture, at the Writers’ Centre on Alcazar Street, Port of Spain, from 6.30 o’clock.

The collection commemorates the centenary of the end of indentureship and includes writing from South Africa, Sri Lanka, Fiji, Mauritius and Samoa. It’s powerful to be included in a space with those from other places where indentured workers turned exploitation into opportunities, making new lives and birthing new lineages and stories.
Indian indentureship has transformed our landscape in the Caribbean, and these voices evoke its afterlife 100 years on. Writers in the collection from TT include Patti-Ann Ali, Kevin Jared Hosein, Suzanne Bhagan, Stella Chong Sing, Fawzia Muradali Kane, and Jennifer Rahim, diverse voices marking different kinds of memories.

My own piece, titled “Chutney Love,” was written in 1996 and I used to perform it in my younger days in the rapso movement. The year 1995 was a richly complex moment in our recent political history. The rise of the UNC evoked the dashed hopes of 1986. For some, “it was Indian time now” as chorused by graffiti on the bus route, seen every time a maxi passed by.

It was also the year of chutney music continuing to “douglarise” Carnival, following the boundary-breaking entry of Drupatee Ragoonai in the 1980s and then others, from Chris Garcia to Sonny Mann, to Brother Marvin who continued the mixing of Indian and African rhythms and music started by those like Ras Shorty I.

Finally, Indo-Caribbean women’s writing and scholarship blossomed in these years. Theirs was a turn to words that at the same time turned away from ideals of purity as, in both bodies and in lyrics, women began to play up feminist politics of power and pleasure.

The poem’s lines, written when I was inspired by these developments at just 22 years old, bring together rapso’s commitment to performing poetry in the language we speak everyday with my own negotiations with Indianness, femininity, sexuality, political consciousness, and cross-race and anti-imperialist solidarities for “we both cross water for empire/ And ever since we lan up here together/ Is with only one history that we grow.”

“I ent nobody bowjie/ No promised dulahin” are the opening lines in the second verse, “But when de tassa start to roll up/ Beta, dem lyrics yuh have, I done write myself in.”
This tradition of Indian women writing themselves into Indo-Caribbean culture and history can be traced at least as far back as Indian women’s arrival, but was brought with them from India, through the depots and onto the ships.

These women’s voices can be heard in everything from letters to court documents to ship records, all leaving an echo in our own contemporary pressing against imposed roles and rules, and in our continued aspirations for self-determined lives.

As one example, just this Saturday, rolling through Plum Road with Prof Brinsley Samaroo, pre-eminent historian of Indo-Caribbean experience, Ziya and I ended up at St Isadore Estate, and stood in the very places where Bheeknee once stood. Born 1869, Bheeknee came to Trinidad on July 31, 1874, on the ship the Golden Fleece, with her mother and her baby brother. Her father had died aboard. She was just five years old.

When she was 13, George Kernahan, a sailor on the Golden Fleece, who had later begun working as an estate manager, found and took her to live with him, fathering several children. He was a spendthrift and alcoholic who eventually became blind. Meanwhile Bheeknee went on to frugally manage their money and to eventually purchase 500 acres of land – what became the estate we were now standing on.

She was so astute that she had ponds dug from natural springs, installing huge pipes and ensuring a fresh water supply while running a successful cocoa estate. Later, when Kernahan lost the estate to debtors, Bheeknee moved the family a few miles away where she had bought more than 30 acres without him knowing. Her house still stands there today. A jahaji bahen with no education who accomplished brilliant achievements through will to survive before her death in 1934. I’ll be remembering her today, and how history lives in words as much as in our landscape.

As we mark memories, whether from 1917, 1934 or 1995, come hear pieces read by their authors, all descendants of indenture, writing ourselves in. Like most Bocas’ events, the launch is free and all are welcome.