The Liming House

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I am a Soca Warrior

I say win or loose I am a fighter!

I am a Soca Warrior

I come tuh shine meh nationality brighter.

Maximus Dan - Soca Warrior
Up until this point. Up until we football make ah move, we had only one true national philosophy. This self-same ‘Carnival mentality’ we had nurtured for years, we exported and proudly touted it as Trinidad.We also bragged and limed and dined it, sayin’ “Iz Chinidad.”

What has that done? What has the use of mediocrity done to us when used as a tool to forge culture from love and liberty? How will the fires of hope and prayer treat us when we disown self-responsibility? If a Trinidadian refuse tuh claim dey space, what kinna mas it go make? And I use mas tuh describe the procession of people that call this island home. All of us, from now to eternity, chippin’ together in a beat, but on we own chip each.

And look how when we reach Germany, a simple man, a simple artist use words and music to pen a new national philosophy, if we would have it. We could be fighters! Not violent, bloodthirsty people, but fighters. A people who take responsibility for theyself and they actions. A people who, no matter where they go or what they do, they put out their best. It could be on a football field or in the boardroom of Google, anywhere a Trini reach, they will fight. And not fight to disrupt, but fight to organize and arrange. Not senseless fighters, but fighters with a purpose and passion. Fighters who aspire and achieve together.

We will attack

We will defend!

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“I’m sorry, did you say you worked for the…?”

An arched eyebrow, a quizzical look, a quick reappraisal of the dreadlocks, the accent (could she be American? perhaps Welsh?), the attitude, the general foreign-ness.

“Oh! Well!”

And so on, and such like.

It’s not that I’m the only black person in the building, at these conferences I attend, or the events I often cover. It’s just that I’m often the only one not waiting tables, or collecting coats, or generally clearing up the detritus of the Establishment.

Surprise surprise, for I am unaccountably articulate, and bright and clean, and I work in the very heart of a City where “diversity” does not quite look like me.

“So are you going home to Jamaica for the holiday?”

“I’ve never been to Jamaica, but I am looking forward to going back to Trinidad.”

Smile brightly, look them right in the eye.

“So, what do you speak in the Caribbean? African?”

But sometimes you have to blink.

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• Young and black in Babylondon: part four
• Young and black in Babylondon: part one

It wasn’t until I left Trinidad for much colder climes I discovered I was black.

All my life I had been a so-called “red girl” - a racial hybrid with Indian, Caucasian, African and Chinese anscestors.

Mixed, middle-class, prestigiously schooled and commensurately sheltered, I railed against the hyphenated identities adopted by Indo- or Afro- Trinbagonian peers.

“I’m a Trini,” I would insist when faced, as I so often was, with those who demanded to know how I defined myself.

But what did that mean? It was a question with which I struggled. I lacked a defined cultural context.

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To smelt or not to smelt, that is the question.

As a nation, we have been fortunate to have such a vast array of resources at our fingertips, under our lands and seas. Oil is king, but an old king and Natural Gas his relatively reserved queen. Oil is an old king who knows that these are his last days on the throne but pretends like he is not concerned. But we can all see his wrinkles, and we all talk about him behind his back, now that he is old and weak. Ethanol, Hydrogen, and Hybrids are younger, spicier, more attractive. This old king cannot run our nation for much longer and his queen becomes more and more withdrawn, so what then is the solution?

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Trinidadian bloggers continue to impress, inspire, inform and occasionally irritate me.

A gem I discovered today (while googling “doh cater”…) - The Modest Goddess

Her latest post was a reflection on a world in which David Beckham can make £128m to retire in LA:

…it makes you realise that life essentially has no meaning. You take things like flowers and hard work and education and fidelity and you realise they’re all a waste of time. You could have four PhDs and never earn a quarter of what Beckham will earn in a month

Arguments that have been raised before, in many a context. But it was this paragraph that grabbed me in its eloquence and immediacy to my own London experience:

And you go to the grocery and see old men with three things rattling around in a basket who spend the greater part of five minutes counting the coins needed to pay for the things that you know will constitute breakfast, lunch and dinner for the next few days. And you pass the men huddled and bundled under blankets in doorways begging you to spare some money and part of you is still human enough to care but that’s beaten into cowering submission by the part of you that knows by the next day you’ll need that same pound you’re tempted to give away.

But sometimes you still give it away, if only to stay human.

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A thousands words, they say.

In these two pictures, the juxtaposition of the two things that dominate and indeed, define Trinidad & Tobago circa 2007: fetes and death.

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