The Liming House

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Finally watched The Bank Job, the plot of which depends heavily upon the activities of one Michael de Freitas, better known as Michael X - black power activist, pimp, and murderer.

Michael X was born and bred in Trinidad, a fact which the film continually acknowledges. Am thus extremely irritated by the thick Jamaican accent adopted by the actor who portrayed Mr X, and by the similarly alien accents of other supposed Trinidadians in the flick.

Discrepancies like these irk me, but after several years of living in London and having to contend with such ignorance on an epic scale, I have ceased to be surprised.

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“Guess where she works!”

He, a tall beautiful dread, considered me for a moment. “Give me a clue.”

“Well, she’s a journalist,” said my loctician, while I squirmed in a mixture of ouch-you’re-pulling-my-hair and embarrassment.

“Aha! The Voice!” he said, referring to the UK’s major “Afro-Caribbean” newspaper.

“No, try again.”

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“You from Trinidad! But you not half-caste!”

“I’m sorry?”

Walking out of Brixton tube station and into the rain, my forlorn pink umbrella, long conquered by the wind, hanging uselessly by my side.

“Excuse me miss!”

The voice, polite and distinctly not English, cut through the insistent chorus of skunkweedtravelcardsgetyourhighgrade.

I paused. An older man, in his 60s, and dressed in the fashion of the dapper older man, smiled at me, umbrella extended in greeting. “No sense in getting the locs wet. Come, I walk you to the bus stop.”

“You are very kind,” I said, awkwardly, guiltily thrusting one hand into my pocket to check that my wallet was still there.

“You from Trinidad! But you not half-caste!”

“I’m sorry?” I said, deafened by the wind and the rain and Brixtonian confusion.

“You not half-caste - you know, dougla, mixed!”

“Oh! Oh, yes, haha!”

There was my bus, there was I stammering out the usual explanation, taken aback by the phrase, wondering at the implications.

“Thank you, that was very kind.”

I ran.

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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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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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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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“3.. 2.. 1..”
“Happy new year,” J quipped, rolling her eyes.
I quirked an eyebrow in her direction. “Oh, come on. Humour me.”
“Face it M, the phone is not going to ring. And your endless countdowns are - well, they kinda sad actually.”
“Har de har.” I tossed the cell phone onto the bed and arranged myself on the floor of the bedroom.
“He said he was going to call.”
“And God said let there be light. Get over it, he”s not going to call, you”re not going to get back together and Creationism is a charming myth.”
“You still go to church though.”
“True. Damned Catholic guilt.”

When in the course of human events, the oppressed find it necessary to dissolve the political and psychological bonds which have joined them to the oppressor, revolutionaries have a choice to pick up either a pen or a gun. The true revolutionaries pick up a pen because they realize that violence truly begets violence and that any solution that is brought about by bloodshed will only be temporary; the powerful will change positions and the gorillas are in charge again.

[Geoffrey Philip, "Happy Birthday Sam Selvon", May 20 2006]

That paragraph hit me for six.

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Written for The Beaver, the newspaper of the Students’ Union of the London School of Economics
–

“The music is the message.”

Such were the words of Glen Da Costa, acclaimed saxophonist and one of the many talented musicians to have played with that mighty trio of Nesta Robert Marley, Peter Mackintosh and Neville Livingston. He is lounging on a tattered leather couch in a small, smoky dressing room backstage at the Shepherds Bush Empire.

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