Good to see you again. Glad you enjoy the Limes.Back in 2008, I wrote a piece that argued thus, on the subject of my preferred “hairstyle”: 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 [...]
I wrote this, elsewhere, three months ago: I am a stranger. I am estranged. I am a person without a country, without people, without kin. I rely more often on the kindness of strangers than the loyalty of friends. I watch those I love and loved and lost create lives in which I play no [...]
“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 [...]
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 [...]
It started with a phone call. “Yuh hear about the terrorists? Some Trinidadians and a Guyanese wanted to blow up JFK.”