The Liming House

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(Pace India.Arie)

I started growing my locs five years ago. Since then, I’ve fielded a host of questions from friendsfamilyclassmatescolleaguesrandomstrangers, including but not limited to:

- Do you wash it?

- How do you wash it?

- Can I touch it?

- Does it itch?

- Is it real?

- Does it hurt?

- Don’t you miss your real hair?

- Are you a Rasta?

- Why did you do it?

This last question, now as then, is the hardest to answer. My responses have varied, depending on the questioner, the context of our relationship and how I felt that day. I lacked a substantive, definite, “because.” I didn’t have “the answer” that the questioner - and I - was looking for.

Then I read this response to a column by Steven “Freakanomics” Levitt on the economic disadvantages of “sounding black” and of having a “black” or “Asian” name:

But if you’re intelligent and hard working, shouldn’t your resume get you in the door no matter what name is at the top? No, you’re saying. The world doesn’t work like that. But couldn’t it be said that the more HR people who encounter intelligent, hardworking people with names like Shaniqua Keisha Jones, the more people will stop pre-judging people with names like Shaniqua Keisha Jones.

Ditto “sounding black,” having a southern accent or a clearly Asian name. Deleting these things could be construed as self-hate, denial or disingenuousness. Is it better to be sneaky, calculating and take a “by any means necessary” approach in the workforce? Is “sounding black” something people need to apologize for? Do the people who “sound black” need to “invest in” the ability to sound more white? How best to bust a stereotype? By playing into it? Or defying it?

My hair is about defying stereotypes. To plagiarize myself,

I’m a twenty-something overachieving chick with dreadlocks and a predilection for wearing Converse to work

So there it is. I am my hair. I am challenging, I am defiant, I do not apologize.

And the next time some Wall Street multimillionaire or Oxbridge-educated middle-aged perpetually entitled white British editor encounters a twenty-something <insertracehere> woman from the Caribbean, or someone with locs, he will pause.

He will pause because he will remember someone else who was more than the stereotype.

Someone who was more than just her hair, or her ancestry, or her age, or her gender, or her accent, or her taste in shoes.

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I'm always fascinated (and sometimes irked) by outsiders' perceptions of Trinidad and Tobago. In this video, which I rediscovered while trawling through my inbox, Andrew Zimmern chronicles his encounters with dasheen, pig tail, callaloo and "baconshark".

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“Seriously?”

That word, that exclamation, that question-almost-rhetorical, defines my reaction to the Trinidad I have witnessed over the past two weeks.

Women wearing knee-high leather boots on a sweltering hot day? Seriously? A Maserati roaring past on the highway? Seriously? Seven dollars for a loaf of bread? Eight dollars for chewing gum? Seriously?

And so on, and so forth.

We are trying so hard to be Miami, London, New York - any where but here, and everyone but ourselves.

But these are trappings only, because those leather boots must trod garbage-strewn streets and that Maserati must contend with potholes aplenty.

And I - don’t quite know how I feel about this. Incredulity prevails.

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To this day I regret not interviewing John La Rose before he died.

I regret not following through on a proposed project which would have chronicled the lives of different generations of Trinbagonians in London - The New Lonely Londoners: a documentary by Fred and sin

I regret the botched handling and inevitable collapse of a similar but separate venture, the hours and goodwill wasted, the stories that go untold.

I regret the steady erosion of our cultural heritage, fading with the memories of our elder and elderly practitioners.

Oui, je regrette beaucoup.

Because even as we fret about the loss of our historic architecture, we are losing the architects of our history.

But we do not need to lose them forever, not if we archive those lives.

We need to preserve the interviews we do have with our past and present icons, and the videos, the books, the letters, the music, the lectures, the newspaper articles, the blog posts, the photographs, the podcasts - our collective memory.

But it’s not just about preservation - it’s also about dissemination, about sharing those memoirs and re-telling those tales.

Which is why I was delighted to discover that the complete archives of both Caribbean Beat and the Caribbean Review of Books will soon be freely available online.

This is outstanding effort by MEP, and an amazing resource.

I have lists, scribbled in various small black notebooks, of people I’d like to know more about, books I must read, music I must listen to, articles I must find. (Hello, my name is sin, and I am addicted to data.)

Like this one, written in 2005: “X-Ref article on Trini filmmaker London in Caribbean Beat March 99.”

Soon, I will be able to cross that item off the list (and hopefully, remember why I underlined it three times in green ink).

But where do I go to find the texts of the lectures given by CLR James? Where are Eric Williams’s speeches? And Noor Hassanali’s? Where can I find early recordings by Lord Shorty? Where can I find copies of The Beacon or The Minerva Review? Where are the stories about the hanging of Michael X?

For I have searched and researched and I have found nothing; my lists grow longer and the gaps in our collective memory grow wider.

I regret not having interviewed John La Rose. But Horace Ové did - and he recorded it. Now, if only I could find a copy of his Dream to Change The World….

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Trinidad’s internet elite have a new rallying cry: Save the Boissiere House.

There’s even a Facebook group and an online petition devoted to the cause, so you know they mean business.

Boissiere House, located at 12 Queen’s Park West in Port of Spain, is one of the last remnants of a dying breed: a beautiful piece of creole “gingerbread” architecture, characterised by intricate and elegant fretwork.

The house is being offered for sale - asking price US$10m - but as Nicholas Laughlin points out (via Newsday):

Any private buyer willing to pay that will almost certainly bulldoze it and build an office block or posh condominiums to recoup their investment.

He’s right, of course.

And since Boissiere House does not enjoy the status of a heritage site, said property developer would be immune from legal challenge.

And if this old house is destroyed, it would not be the first time art, architecture and history would have been sacrificed to progress, and not least in this country.

I am a big believer in conserving and celebrating Trinidad’s architectural heritage, and I’m not just referring to landmarks like Boissiere. Because all over Trinidad - from Aripita Avenue to Vistabella - beautiful old houses languish in disrepair, or are broken down in order to construct office blocks or social housing.

Land in this country is not yet so scarce as to make such destruction anything but wanton; and our contempt for our built enviornment reeks of nouveau riche incivility.

Architecture matters. Consider Jeremy Taylor’s recent post over at Notes from Port of Spain, in which he declaims the the “dirty concrete” of the Central Bank, and the “ramshackle dockfront.”

Says he:

The buildings are dramatically out of scale and out of style with the rest of the city, and they speak of money, power, and facelessness, a truly ominous combination. They say that someone in this mad little island aspires to make us like Miami or New York by building skyscrapers; someone has the wild idea that development can be represented by size.

And have you really looked at the architecture of these buildings? It is so bad, so impersonal and anonymous, that truly these buildings could be set down in any city in the world, and it really wouldn’t matter which. There is not a shred of Caribbean in them, not the faintest echo of Trinidadian-ness: no awareness of a tropical, almost equatorial climate, no thought of energy saving, no anxiety about the sea rising and spilling over the waterfront.

They are just big, blank, anonymous, unimaginative, uncreative. In a word, gross. Without taste, without elegance, without grace. Just big. Just expensive.

Exactly. As architect Rudlynne Roberts told Newsday:

The worth of [Boissiere] is in its architecture. Its method of construction, design and layout tells us how people lived during that time.

And more than that, the building is beautiful - unlike the unrelenting concrete monoliths local developers and government seem to equate with progress.

Nicholas Laughlin wants to “persuade the government that the Boissiere House is a crucial and irreplaceable part of our national heritage, that it must be bought by the state, restored, and put to appropriate public use.”

He also offers a list of practical suggestions, including:

- Tell people the Boissiere House is in danger.
- Forward this blog post to everyone you know who might be concerned.
- If you have a blog, write your own post there, or link to this.
- Write a letter to the editor.
- If you work in the media, try to get your newspaper or station to run a story.
- If you own a camera, stop by 12 Queen’s Park West, take some photos, post them online, or just forward them to friends.
- If you know someone in the Ministry of Culture, tell them you’re concerned and ask them to speak to their superior about saving the Boissiere House.
- Call Town and Country and urge them not to give planning permission for a new building on this site.
- Call the National Trust and ask what you can do to help.
- If you know a politician of any party on any level, tell them you’re concerned and ask them to talk to their party leadership.
- Read about the history of the house in Olga Mavrogordato’s book Voices in the Street, or John Newel Lewis’s book Ajoupa, and share this with others.
- Come to the event we’re planning at Alice Yard next week Friday to discuss why this and other historic buildings are worth preserving.
- Email me (my address is in the sidebar to the right) and tell me you’d like to be on a mailing list to hear about further efforts. A website is on its way, also an online petition.
- If you know a member of the Boissiere family that owns the house, ask them to consider putting a no-demolition clause in the sale contract, or to negotiate with the government to arrive at a reasonable sale price that might make it easier to save the building.
- And if you are a multi-millionaire property developer, consider doing something truly enlightened: buy the house, pay to have it restored, put it to some use that will not damage its fabric.
- Finally: ask yourself if you’d be willing to stand in the hot sun with a placard, if it comes to that.

It may well come to that.

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I have the right

• not to justify my existence in this world
• not to keep the races separate within me
• not to be responsible for people’s discomfort with my physical ambiguity
• not to justify my ethnic legitimacy
• to identify myself differently than strangers expect me to identify
• to identity myself differently than how my parents identity me
• to identify myself differently than my brothers and sisters
• to identify myself differently in different situations
• to create a vocabulary to communicate about being multiracial
• to change my identity over my lifetime–and more than once
• to have loyalties and identify with more than one group of people
• to freely chooose whom I befriend and love

By Maria P. P. Root (via Light-skinn-ed Girl)

This is a thought-provoking piece of work, with which I can at least partially identify. So much of the discussion about “mixed-race issues” is limited to the experience of bi-racial (white/black) people living in the US of A; the “Bill of Rights” is broader in scope.

Some of its declarations I have always taken for granted - never have I had to justify my existence, for instance. And the phrase “physically ambiguous” is downright amusing.

But it made me realise that I don’t know how my parents self-identify, and nor do I know how they would describe my siblings and I.

And I have had to justify my ethnic legitimacy, on more than one occasion and to the gamut of family, friends and the parents of former paramours.

It’s a strange thing to be a victim of generic racism. It sounds absurd, but I have always wanted to ask, when faced with such discrimination, which part of me most offends.

In other words, is it because I is black? Or is it because I am not Indian/Chinese/White enough?

(Or, more recently, is it because I’m a twenty-something overachieving chick with dreadlocks and a predilection for wearing Converse to work? Hmm.)

I have never felt (insert ethnic grouping here) enough.

Still, I have had more experience of Trinidad’s version of black and Indian culture than I have had exposure to my Chinese and White heritage. But I am comfortable with none of these. In situations that are purely one or the other, I have always felt ill at ease.

When I donned a shalwar to attend a Divali celebration at my highschool, eyebrows were raised.

When, in my younger days, I was briefly part of the tennis-playing set, I didn’t quite fit in with rivals at tournaments in Port of Spain and environs, and that wasn’t just because they were way better than I. We didn’t speak the same language - and if you’ve ever hung out with the Westmoorings crew, you’ll know what I mean.

Total lack of Chinese-related anecdotes is sufficiently telling, methinks.

I have no real, first-hand experience of what it is like to be white/Indian/Chinese in Trinidad.

Nor do I know what blackness means, as much as I use it as political shorthand for my identification with issues of racism, discrimination and other minority concerns.

Does that make my claim to these multiple strands of history less valid? Am I less authentic because I exercise my right to tick “Other”?

Nothing like an identity crisis on a Friday afternoon.

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Why are .tt domains so expensive?

According to the breakdown over at ttnic, theliminghouse.tt would cost USD $500 upront, and then an additional USD $500 every five years, from the third year after registration.

And that’s if it were registered from a local (i.e. Trinbagonian) address; applications from a foreign address would cost twice that. Ouch.

None of the limers here have that kind of cash to splash out on a domain name (though donations are welcome…), but Matthew “Wordpress” Mullenweg does - and he’s now the proud owner of ma.tt.

Mr Mullenweg blogged about his .tt acquisition, and some of his observations are worth highlighting.

Like the “90s-era” design of the ttnic site.

And the fact that

…to register a domain in Trinidad/Tobago you have to do an international wire to their bank, they don’t accept credit cards…

Or this little tidbit:

So about two weeks ago I went to the bank, wired the money to their foreign account and then… didn’t hear anything for a week. At first I wondered if I had been scammed 419-style, but then I got an email from their admin that everything was set up.

I’m sorry, but that is just - ghetto.

It is not even remotely acceptable that setting up a domain should require a trek to one’s bank, particularly when one is already having to cough up several hundred dollars. And having to wait a week for confirmation? Really?

This is a fine point, given the crimedrugsfailinginfrastructurepoliticalgimmickryetc with which Trinbagonians already have to contend.

It is also indicative of how much work there is to be done before T&T can truly call itself developed.

The road is long.

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When I first left home, six years ago, I was resolved not to come back.

Why should I? Trinidad, I declared, held nothing but bacchanal and botheration.

I felt stifled there, and bored. I didn’t fit in. I needed to leave.

So I left, and like so many other West Indians abroad, discovered that I didn’t quite fit in anywhere else either.

But at least here - France, the UK, the US - I was challenged and stimulated and free.

And now I’m going back.

Because I’ve spent the past half a decade evangelizing about the need for Caribbean nationals to return to our home countries and give back to the islands that so desperately need our talent, intelligence and experience.

Because I don’t want to be one of those outraged expats who opines on everything and changes nothing.

Because I’m tired of the cold.

Because my love is there.

But I’m terrified.

Because my work, which I utterly adore, is here. Because here I have achieved, and scaled heights otherwise impossible to conceive.

Because my life, for the past six years, has been here.

And because I’m not sure I can change anything, really. And I’ll probably feel stifled there, and bored.

Because, as Miss Melanie Johncilla wrote in a letter to the editor (via Jumbie’s Watch), of “the complacency of a society, the sheer acceptance that comes along with ‘the Trini way.’”

We sit as a people and just accept. We accept poor customer service because “that’s what you go get in this country.” We accept spates of violence, we accept fear, we accept pedantic “medical researchers” who prolong petty spats for the sheer sake of it.

We accept domestic violence, we accept sexism, we accept old white man a the father, we accept our position as developing and we accept inferiority.

We are a nation of lazy acceptors. If the waitress is talking on her cellphone while serving me, “that’s just how things are in this country; we not in America, you know.”

But kick up a fuss and try to educate and move this beloved Trinidad forward—I dare you. Because all you get in response is: “Oh gosh, relax nah lady. We in Trinidad. Calm yuhself. That’s how things does be.”

And yes, those are some of the factors that pushed me to leave. Those “narrow minds” that continue to insist that we “are not old enough, not old-school enough, and not ‘Trini’ enough.”

Isn’t that an irony? They feel they cannot affect change as they would want to because “it’s Trinidad, nepotism rules, is who you know and what hue you have.”

And that attitude is pervasive, and pernicious. The TrinBago Blog also reproduced this letter, which prompted “ponnoxx” to retort:

Trinidad and Tobago’s laid back mentality is that which makes us unique. However, I must admit that there are departments which need to be tightened such as healthcare but our society is what others aspire to reach. Trinbago’s society heads towards happiness and not towrds efficiency like the US. It is not necessarily a bad thing. The reason why we are experiencing so much crime is (assumingly) as a direct result of deportation. Criminals who are seasoned in a more rigid efficient society. They literally brought back more efficient criminals into our society. Brain Drain for us and they have a Criminal drain straight in our frontyard. I Love my country just how is.

Sigh.

It’s the same for Jamaicans abroad, according to a young lady who wrote to the Jamaica Gleaner (via Francis Wade’s blog):

During my studies overseas, I also encouraged my fellow Jamaicans, who were in various graduate fields all over the United States, to return home after completing their studies, as their skills would be very beneficial to Jamaica’s development.

This was done in an effort to help secure Jamaica’s future, as I am very passionate about my country and its success, and I am hoping to become intimately involved in the future of Jamaica.

They, however, expressed that they had no desire to return home with the escalation of crime and violence and economic turmoil. They also strongly believe that with their educational background, Jamaica would not be able to offer them suitable jobs and compensation.

So, when are we going to do something about this increasing epidemic of our educated Jamaican people who have no desire to return home because of this lack of jobs and compensation? When are statements such as, “You are overqualified for the position”, going to be obsolete? Are we forever to remain in the shadows of developed countries and continuously lose our educated and skilled people to them?

I have very high hopes and dreams for Jamaica, but how can I be of assistance if I am not given the opportunity to do so? How can I effectively convince my fellow educated and qualified Jamaicans to return home and help to develop our home if I cannot even get job interviews?

Yes. Yes. Exactly.

But I’m going back, and taking it one baby step at a time.

We’ll see how it goes.

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I try. I try not to generalize about the state of Trinbagonian media, to say nothing of our “journalism.”

Why? The standard caveat - many of those I consider most worthy are journalists, writers, bloggers, reporters, television personalities, producers. But they tend to be exceptional.

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It started with a phone call.

“Yuh hear about the terrorists? Some Trinidadians and a Guyanese wanted to blow up JFK.”

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