Tag Archives: culture

The Power of the Pen

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.

Guns and Gramaxone

Based on police records from 1991-2000, the study shows that 68.2 per cent of the homicides perpetrated in Trinididad and Tobago during that period were by Afro-Trinidadians and that 79.2 per cent of the suicides were by Indo-Trinidadians.

[Source: Trinidad Express, April 23 2006]

Ooh. Softly, softly.

The study in question was conducted by one “Dr Gerard Hutchinson of the Mt Hope Psychiatric Unit.”

This is hugely interesting and massively political.

Continue reading Guns and Gramaxone

Roll It Gyal

If you are looking for condoms and don’t want to go to a pharmacy, you can pick one up at your favourite watering hole, club, barber shop, hairdressing salon …or even boutique.

A campaign by Population Services International (PSI) and its Caribbean affiliate, Society for Family Health (SFH), is making condoms widely available and accessible to all sexually-active people in T&T.

[Source: Laura Dowrich-Phillips in the Guardian, April 13 2006]

I’m floored.

Continue reading Roll It Gyal