"Don’t fool yourself. English isn’t inherently superior, or easier to learn, or more sonically pleasing. Its international usage comes from forceful assimilation and a legacy of colonialistic injection. It isn’t a deed that one should take pride in."

my uncle left this comment on his friend’s Facebook status, a white British man who was bragging about how easy it is to be a native English speaker when trekking to different nations. (via maarnayeri)

(via one-valhalla)

"One of the things which keeps us alive, meaning which prevents us from succumbing to all the bad experiences an immigrant can have, is nostalgia, our memory of what we like best about ourselves. That is home. Because of this you carry Barbados or Trinidad in your heart, in your body, in your soul with a relentlessness which Trinidadians who have never lived abroad take for granted."

Austin Clarke, “Food for West Indian Thought”, interview with Aneiksha Baksh, 2002.

"A concept of people or place does not arrive out of the blue. How you come to think of where you are, and of your relation to where you are, is dependent on the character and nature of the power of where you are."

George Lamming, “Concepts of the Caribbean

Old Trinidad 1948

"Where morning meets light, we rise.
Where waves meet sand, we swim
Where wind meets hill, we run
Where sound meets color, we hide
Where years meet story, we see
Where darkness meets night, we dream. We dream"

Rachel Isadora, Caribbean Dream (via caribbeancivilisation)

"You can squelch into mangroves with the teenage boys at full moon and come back with a crocus bag full of big blue crabs, or help the fishermen pull in their nets at dawn and get as much fish as you want in return. You can collect dasheen leaves and make a wonderful soup with crab and coconut milk … You can drink the water in which the fishermen boil little black barnacles they scrape from rocky outcroppings, and get a hard-on when you want a hard-on. You can drink the water in which fishermen’s wives boil soursop leaves, sleep like a stone, and forget you had a hard-on. You can drink milk in which sea moss has been boiled and claim you always have a hard-on."

Like Heaven, by Niala Maharaj

 

(via caribbeancivilisation)

"

As we celebrate our 50th Anniversary as a nation, we are faced with two opposing value systems, each striving to emerge as the dominant culture. The first speaks to a spirit of collaboration and community exemplified in the fellowship of religious institutions; in the unity and camaraderie of the steelband; in the supportive organisation of the sou-sou; in the healing influence of the panchayat; in the socially-nurturing role enacted by many business and professional bodies, and in the benevolence of our richly varied world of NGOs and organisations of civil society.

In sharp contrast, and posing a growing threat to the first, is a value system based on rampant individualism - a value system characterised by a spirit of intimidation and lawlessness, and one that finds expressing acts of violence, brutality and the exploitation of the disadvantaged and the voiceless. Regrettably, for many of us “tolerance” has become synonymous with indifference; and these reckless, lawless, dysfunctional patterns of behaviour are treated as examples of “Trini” culture that we condemn in private but accept as par for the course.

[…]My Fellow Citizens, We cannot and must not be indifferent to the ravages of social injustice and marginalisation. As the United Nations document Social Justice in an Open World, published in 2006, bluntly reminds us “__________ neglect of the pursuit of social justice in all its dimensions translates into de facto acceptance of a future marred by violence, repression and chaos.”

[…]All children need bread and shelter. But a true home, of course, is more and that. Children also need love and order and, because they are not born knowing the difference between right and wrong, home is a place where they can begin to develop a moral sense.

The observation of Aristotle, the Philosopher is pertinent, he stated that, “it is the peculiarity of man, in comparison with the rest of the animal world, that he alone possesses a perception of good and evil, of the just and the unjust, and of other qualities, and it is association in these things which makes family.

"

- President of Trinidad and Tobago, Anthony TA Carmona

Earthquake

such great stretches of dreamscape

such lines of all too familiar lines

                                         staved in

caved in so the filthy wake resounds with the notion

of the pair of us? What of the pair of us?

Pretty much the tale of the family surviving disaster:

“In the ancient serpent stink of our blood we got clear

of the valley; the village loosed stone lions roaring at our heels.”

Sleep, troubled sleep, the troubled waking of the heart

yours on top of mine chipped dishes stacked in the pitching sink

of noontides.

What then of words? Grinding them together to summon up the void

as night insects grind their crazed wing cases?

Caught caught caught unequivocally caught

caught caught caught

                     head over heels into the abyss

                     for no good reason

except for the sudden faint steadfastness

of our own true names, our own amazing names

that had hitherto been consigned to a realm of forgetfulness

itself quite tumbledown.

(Translated, from the French, by Paul Muldoon.)

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/poetry/2010/01/25/100125po_poem_cesaire#ixzz2NHmizWkn

Notebook of a Return to the Native Land [excerpt]

At the end of daybreak… Beat it, I said to him, you cop, you lousy pig, beat it, I detest the flunkies of order and the cockchafers of hope. Beat it, evil grigri, you bedbug of a petty monk.

Read more

Blues

Those five or six young guys
lunched on the stoop
that oven-hot summer night
whistled me over. Nice
and friendly. So, I stop.
MacDougal or Christopher
Street in chains of light.

A summer festival. Or some
saint’s. I wasn’t too far from
home, but not too bright
for a nigger, and not too dark.
I figured we were all
one, wop, nigger, jew,
besides, this wasn’t Central Park.
I’m coming on too strong? You figure
right! They beat this yellow nigger
black and blue.

Yeah. During all this, scared
on case one used a knife,
I hung my olive-green, just-bought
sports coat on a fire plug.
I did nothing. They fought
each other, really. Life
gives them a few kcks,
that’s all. The spades, the spicks.

My face smashed in, my bloddy mug
pouring, my olive-branch jacket saved
from cuts and tears,
I crawled four flights upstairs.
Sprawled in the gutter, I
remember a few watchers waved
loudly, and one kid’s mother shouting
like ‘Jackie’ or ‘Terry,’
‘now that’s enough!’
It’s nothing really.
They don’t get enough love.

You know they wouldn’t kill
you. Just playing rough,
like young Americans will.
Still it taught me somthing
about love. If it’s so tough,
forget it. 


- Derek Walcott