thepancollective

You want fries with that shake?

One of the things I've been trying to come to terms with in Trinidad again is the men. After a few years of silent appreciation (unless I made a trip to Peckham or Brixton markets where the population of Caribbean men was very present and reassuringly vocal) I'm having to re-learn how to deal with the constant commentary.
The fact that every man from the crack pipe smoking vagrants in front of the bank in Port of Spain, to the coconut vendor to the well suited bank worker thinks he can address me in the following ways:
"Psst"
"Darkie"
"Rassie"
and then proceed to make sundry comments, depending on what I'm wearing, or if they have a penchant for dreads, but usually the comments take the predictable lines of, I could play in those locks all day, family, or your bamsee looking real nice in them pants, etc etc.
Usually I keep my head straight, trying not to wince or worse turn around and slap the commentator.
The problem is of course, that there are women who respond to these ludicrous summons, out of habit or because they just don't have the self-confidence to do anything else but feel flattered if a man pays them the same compliment he's paid to every single women who's gone past him for the day.
I wonder what the point of it is.  Why do men think that we need their reassurance?  Why do they think that we want to know what base thoughts they are thinking. And really now, is that supposed to make me interested in you.  Am I supposed to drop everything I'm doing to stop and have a really interesting and enlightening conversation with you? 
Now the truth is, Trinidad is hot woman capital.  I know this because I always feel inadequate in the face of all these annoyingly stunning of all shapes and shades.  So I guess the drive by 'suitings' is the Trini man's primitive version of speed dating. 
The general attitude in the Caribbean is that this is just machoman-ism at it's most harmless. We women have to just put up with it. It's just some harmless fun. The other day when I confronted a suitor by asking him what else he really had to offer me but his unclean teeth, he got very upset and defensive as if I was the one who had infringed on his rights to walk down the street without being harassed.  He just couldn't understand why I wouldn't want someone, just some arbitrary man on the road side that he wouldn't mind 'resting it' on me. But with rapes so high, incest and child abuse and domestic violence, suiting takes on a very sinister kind of tone.  We Caribbean women must deal with being objects for a whole society of men and not ever dare speak out against them. 
In the end I gave up, he couldn't justify his behaviour and he was also too big for me to clout so I moved on, seething. 
It can't be a healthy habit.  It's not cute and most of the time it's not even funny, witty or well-meaning.  It's not about appreciating the beauty of the women of this country, but a really subtle attempt at undermining our independence and our sense of who we are.

you could call it mobile radio

So there we were taking the scenic route down to the south of the island.  We were driving through the plains of Central Trinidad, enjoying the breeze and the sight of gayaps - a collective effort in which residents of a community come out and help a neighbour build a house.  Food and rum and music flow freely and everyone is doing something.
I'm  not sure exactly where we were and then all of a sudden I caught sight of a some commotion in the middle of a field. I thought it was a Hindu wedding, but it was just under a tent literally in the middle of a canefield, one side shooting up fire blackened stalks, the other dotted with white egrets picking gracefully through the freshly ploughed dirt for lunch. One of the fellars in the car says it's a mike competition. Huh?  Us town people never hear about that. We keep driving but of course by now half my body is hanging out of the car.  So we forget about the meeting that we're already half hour late for and head back to check out the mike competition.
It's the strangest thing. Anybody who's ever lived outside of the city should be familiar with the cars and their loudspeakers. They are particularly popular for funeral announcements but they really kick in around election time. It's really the ultimate form of noise pollution, which is why, I guess they have the competitions for these in the middle of a canefield. It's also a kind of mobile radio station that caters to the peculiar needs of the community it serves.
In the mike competition it's not just about the power of the mike.  Some of the speakers atop the cars are slamming. Fancy paint jobs and interesting depictions of life.  Some carry the name of the owners, others say things like 'No Fear' and 'Bomb'.  It's a very masculine space, rum and beers flow and there's a lot of loud shouting.
However they were all blasting the sort of nasal and elegiac Bollywood film standards that took me    back to my childhood growing up in San Juan, listening to Lata Mangeshkar and other luminaries popular Indian music that filtered into my experience of life. 
We walked in, in the middle of a heated discussion about if judges from the audience should be used.  Would the audience ajudicators be clued into what the main judges were listening for?  I couldn't really tell.
It's a really refreshing to discover a whole new aspect of Trinidad culture by accident. I mean I knew these mike cars existed and they are still a very formidable means of communication in rural areas, but I didn't know this was an art that was taken so seriously by its practitioners.
It's a little surreal to be in 33 degree heat in the middle of a canefield with ghazals blasting into the universe. It would be interesting to investigate the connection of this form of communication to India. Was it always an exclusively  Indian Trinidadian thing?
Seeing as I was one of three women in the field I was invited to the finals of the mike competition, which is going to be held at the Hindu Credit Union's headquarters at 10.30 on Tuesday, which is Indian Arrival Day. No coincidence surely.   The melancholy tunes, the New World men with old world inflections.  Displaced people making a new life for themselves having crossed the Kala Pani.
My cultural education continues...

Mango Dawn

It's just after six a.m. The sun is now peeping shyly over the Santa Cruz hills. The sky is a washed clean blue, that holds promise of another hot day.
I'm standing under the cool dark shade of my julie mango tree looking for my breakfast.
You can’t live on an island and not love mangoes. It's almost treacherous. Funnily enough, mangoes aren't indigenous to the Caribbean, they were brought here by European colonisers in the 18th century from Asia. I come from a long line of mango lovers and have been known to beg, borrow, steal and con younger more gullible members of my mango peon family out of their fruit.
Our Julie bears fruit all year round, but right now at the opening of the mango season she is laden with yellow pink flowers. Higher up, the starch tree is similarly adorned and I can barely contain my anticipation at the imminent arrival of the avocado season ( a little aside about the avocado tree- for years it bore no fruit, until one year just before the season, my mother walked up to the tree and threatened to chop it down, after which we've been enjoying the biggest, most buttery avocadoes on earth)
Mango season for me is the most fertile time of the year. Around the same time, flamboyant trees and poui trees set fire to mountain sides. And in my backyard I marvel at how lucky I am to not have to pay for these gifts. Back in Babylon-don I used to pay £3 sometimes for what passed as a good mango by European standards. If you were lucky, you might get a half decent one in Sheperd's Bush market on a Saturday morning. The problem with the Euro mangoes however, was that they just smell of box, when half of the enjoyment of a mango is the smell of it. It is a smoky, sweet aromatherapy called home.
Usually I start off the day with a Julie. This is the queen of mangoes. It's creamy but stringy. I like to choose a light green, supple to the touch, a tangy sweet that is not too ripe.
When it comes to starch mangoes, I prefer the ripe and slightly stale, a few black spots on its skin. But these starches are not just rare, they also congregate right at the top of the tree, leaving them prey to the many birds that pass through my yard. I'm usually standing under the tree shaking my fists at saucy kiskadees, who I swear are showing off on me with their wings and for spite they litter the garden floor with gouged mango carcasses to further anger me.
But this morning the mango gods smiled on me. I am lucky to receive a gift of not one, but two perfect, ripe and miraculously unbruised starches that are just sitting in a bed of leaves in the shade.
Rich in Vitamin A, B and C, as well as potassium, calcium and iron. They're not just a nutritious treat. This morning my mangoes remind me to always say thanks for even the simplest of blessings.

more fire

I was just reading a report in the Guardian UK on feminist bloggers and it was making the point that the female blogosphere is West-centric. The writer, Kira Cochrane, questions the demographics of the feminist bloggers. "The blogs reflect second-wave ideas of consciousness raising and the personal as political (many women write about their experiences of rape and sexual assault), but there's a question mark over how this feeds into grass-roots activism."

I'm not sure what definition of feminism they're working with, but I suppose they wouldn't consider the bloghers in the Caribbean as being overtly and politically feminist? Do we even consider ourselves as feminists?

I think Caribbean women are still wary of the term feminist because we hang in between this precarious balance of matrifocality and 'macho-manism.'  It's an identity that I myself have grappled with, not just because I have a problem with labels, but also because I always thought there was nowhere within all the feminist ideological paradigms in which I could fit comfortably.  More and more however we are coming to terms with notions of Black feminism and organizations like Cafra are making an effort to research and document the region's feminists, whether academic or community activist.

The problem, as I was saying last month when the celebration of International Women's Day came up, we still have no real women's movement in Trinidad.  There are organisations that stand out in my mind:  The Sistren Collective in Jamaica and Red Thread in Guyana.  Red Thread, in particular, has stayed at the forefront of organising grassroots women, across ethnic barriers. But we are lagging behind and desperately need to have a consistent and clear voice of women's action and lobbying.  Or perhaps it is because feminism as a movment in the West is so consumed with the academic, the esoteric discourse, or the focus on political action rather than building from the ground up.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that we shouldn't underestimate the value of our voices.  It's easy to overlook the observations of women who are living and interacting on so many different levels in their own realities and still taking time to analyse and more importantly, document these interactions.  These are not, I suppose, a true idea of feminist discourse.  I anticipate, however, this will change:  in the same way that in Caribbean history, the diaries and journals of plantation owner's wives are now considered to be legitimate and reliable historical texts, that give a more intimate (and I daresay, colourful) idea of life back then.

That said, I do think it’s time that we Caribbean women bloggers get more vocal about things going on in our society, particularly as it applies to women. Women are the backbone of our society and surprise surprise we don’t get the attention, support we deserve. So I guess we just have to start claiming it.

Those of us who have access to the technology need to share it with our sisters who don’t.  Tell their stories because in a lot of ways they are our own.

for the babies

Although I set out a black outfit, I didn't manage to leave the house yesterday.

A combination of too much work and also, I guess a bit of fear. I was terrified that Trinis wouldn't have heeded the call to wear black. That people would have dismissed the call and gone on with life as usual.  That I would go out and be more angry and upset about this Sean Luke thing.

So I stayed home, watching BBC, watching dead Palestinian children.  It's easier that way.  To think that the death isn't happening in your back yard.  To think that such barbarism won't ever touch your home.   But it does and it has and it will continue to do so, because we still don't know the value of our children.

In the evening, my niece and nephews came over.  Loud and energetic, climbing all over me, making me exasperated and happy and tired and hoarse all at the same time.  I can't imagine someone wanting to destroy such light.  We watch some cartoons and after a much arguing and bribing with promises of snacks, I switch to the news.  The newsreader is wearing black.  Sean Luke's picture comes up on screen.  The nephews watch and we share a rare moment of stillness and silence.

"Everybody talking about Sean Luke." Shomari says, I guess to let me know that they know but that they too can't make sense of it.   The moment passes.  I switch back to cartoons and the boys sigh with relief.  They go back to being their sweet, loud, funny, innocent selves again.  But I still feel powerless to protect them against the real monsters that live, not under beds or in a far off place with Anansi.

never get weary yet

On Sunday hundreds of women turned out in a mass show of support for the people of the South-western peninsula of Trinidad where the government plans to allow the building of two aluminum smelter plants.  Industrial issues don't affect women, right?  Furthermore, we don't think that country people can articulate the issues that affect them.

I’ve been attending meetings with community members who are against the introduction of the smelters in their community.  Rural women have been arming themselves with information, in cases where the so-called powers that be think that they don't have a right to it.  It's really inspiring to see how they operate. They're organised and focused. They're doing their research and getting their children involved too.  And on top of all of that they're just really wonderful people.  Everytime I go down to Chatham I leave with a bag I can't carry full of fruits, yams, coconuts.

I look into the future and it alarms me to think that these people's lives will be destroyed for profits that will not come to them.   Because what these woman represent is a vision of Trinidad and Tobago that maybe we who live in the city areas don't get a chance to see very much of.   And maybe I'm being naive and nostalgic, but it's the kind of Trinidad that I want to save.  That I want us to maintain, even as we strive for development.

It's almost a cliché, this notion of the strong Caribbean woman.  Whose back is broad to carry the weight of emotion, family and community.  But if women are the culture bearers, the nurturers, the ones with the responsibility for future generations, then it stands to reason that we take a stand on what we do to the natural environment.

river lime

It's a national pasttime.  On a weekend or a public holiday, shed the constrictions of a hectic work week, forget your high heel shoes and abandon city life.  Pack your car and head for the mountains.  The Northern Range of the island is criss-crossed by clear rivers and some astonishing waterfalls.

The river lime is an important thing to Trinis, particularly in the East and particularly to the Indian population.  It's not uncommon to see a river lime in progress, a pot of curried duck bubbling on a tradition three stone wood fire and lots of rum flowing.  When the combined heat of pepper, the fire under the pot and the fire in the rum get to the limers, they head for the water.  It hits your skin with a startling coolness that refreshes and cleanses and rejuvenates.

We didn't do a typical river lime this Saturday. My sister friend and her family who know these hills as well as their Carib ancestors. 

We left Arima in the early afternoon, climbing through the mountains into a cloud of mist that transforms the ridge into some surreal landscape, full of the sounds of unseen birds and the rustling of ferns.  We got to the river and began to walk upstream in search of the water fall.

Rivers here are well-revered by practitioners of traditional religions.  It's not uncommon to turn up at a river bank and witness a spectacular and moving ceremony of Baptist, Orisa, Hindu devotees paying obeisance to river spirits, which are usually feminine.

It makes sense, I think as I traverse the Marianne River.  The nature of this river as it cuts a path through the mountains is round and sensuous. Tempestuous in parts, deep green pools in others. Curves and secret hiding places.  Soothing the city chlorine out of my skin, I am pleasantly surprised at how the water softens me.

We walk along a path cut and maintained by a shaman.  And I feel like I'm walking through history.  This place remains fairly untouched by the hands of industrialisation and the noise of too many irreverent river limers.

We hear the waterfall long before we can see it. It is an insistent roar, spitting spray when we finally get around the corner and face its majesty. We go for a closer look and I shed my clothes and head for the deep green pool that receives the full brunt of the water fall.  It's cold here, colder than downriver.  We dance about, not daring experience the fullness of the water.  The wind begins to blow, whipping up the water and making the roar even louder in my ears. I feel I need to sing a song for Osun, Lady of the Rivers, of fertility and grace and love. Just to say thanks for being so beautiful.  The sun comes out and my heart sings.  We head back at sunset.  It's still raining at the top of the mountain.  We drive through a thick bank of clouds, awed again by how much more vibrant the forest greens look in the twilight.  Night falls and fireflies come out to light our way.