crime

A Hurricane of Eyelashes.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 1 Comment

There are times I truly wonder about the Caribbean region. It seems that the world spins more slowly in this little equatorial region, seemingly immune to advancements that aren’t at least 20 years old. As more people travel from the region to other parts of the world, they see it too.

It’s peculiar to watch world events unfolding, with advances in science and technology, where people from the Caribbean or with Caribbean roots play their role. Their nations are quick to claim them, though for the most part these achievements were individual. They’ll show up in local newspapers from time to time, a beacon of hope for the youth who have hope and an insult to those who don’t.

Which have hope? Which do not? I cannot say. To have hope is a strange curse in some ways, to be able to find ways beyond the curtailment of one’s socioeconomic position. To have hope is to dream, and while the Caribbean is a place many dream of visiting, so many times I have seen dreams die beneath the wheels of the corroded wheels that colonial powers left behind. Yet there is hope.

These individuals navigated beyond the shores of land masses in the equatorial regions of the Western hemisphere to find their shoulders against larger wheels, but not alone. They are part of a group of people that work together, though sometimes it does not seem that way, to press forward and impress upon the future the sculpture of a collective dream.

And then, those left behind, the masses, must look to them to claim vicarious success.

This does not differ much from the others from around the world who do the same. Yet, one does not truly understand the level of effort it takes to get past the escape velocity of the Caribbean’s inertia. I have seen it. I have done it, too, but my escape velocity was easier because of the accident of geography of my birth, but I know what it takes, I have seen what it takes, and I also know that what it gives sometimes is a fleeting fame in a local newspaper riddled with myopia of Caribbean bureaucracy.

On Saturday, perusing a newspaper someone left at a coffee shop, I came across this.

The jokes write themselves. This was my introduction to Roosevelt Skerrit, the CARICOM Chairman. It’s unfair, so I ask he not be judged by this unfortunate article. The meat of the article could easily have become about buying local, but I sense that he most emphatically expounded those fake eyelashes.

It’s not a bad hook, really, but I’d suggest it was a misguided hook.

My immediate thought was that there must be a lot of fake eyelashes in Dominica, which must be a real liability during hurricane season – but I know women from Dominica, and not one of them I know wore fake eyelashes that I could tell. Maybe the escape velocity of Dominica costs fake eyelashes. But when you drill down to his point – which the headline distracts from – we get to some interesting issues.

He’s talking about how men rob, steal and kill to maintain high maintenance women. This, coming from any politician, is at best mildly amusing, but if we can get past that the headline attacks the women for buying fake eyelashes, his point is that high maintenance women indirectly cause crime because men have to maintain them. He did not make the point, maybe that it’s because men feel they need to maintain them.

Let me tell you a secret, my fellow men, and ladies, I don’t care if you hear: You don’t need high maintenance women. That should be the crux of the message to men, and that it has to be repeated after millenia of we men going after high maintenance women tells us that it’s not likely to change any time soon. He didn’t talk about the media glamorizing high maintenance women (whose ass broke the Internet?), he didn’t talk about the media glamorizing supporting high maintenance women as some twisted rite of manhood. That battle has been lost, Pandora long escaped, because it’s an unfortunate aspect of human nature.

Women who want powerful men are taught to use their assets, and men are taught to get women with such assets they must be powerful. The question is really about what is considered ‘powerful’, maybe, and politicians as a group make the case for this more visibly than criminals, where there is a difference between the two.

Speaking for myself – I’m beginning to wonder exactly how many fake eyelashes it will take to change an economy, or reduce crime. Or start a hurricane. Or stop one.

Noise Pollution in Trinidad and Tobago.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 3 Comments

Generally speaking, I like to go to sleep early so that I can get up earlier than the rest of Trinidad and Tobago and read, think and write. It’s not a bad way to live, really, and since crime is a constant issue in T&T, it’s also likely a safer way to live.

Sometimes there are parties/fetes that can be loud, but simply going inside deals with that issue normally. Last night, however, was not the case. Last night, as I lay in bed, I could hear the DJ from about half a kilometer away, across a highway, wishing Charlotte a happy birthday, and that there was some sort of surprise.

Behind closed doors and windows, I shouldn’t be hearing a damn thing about Charlotte from that far away.

In a real country, one might call the police and make a complaint that would be acted on, but not in Trinidad and Tobago. No, the police need to get a hold of the EMA (Environmental Management Agency) for such complaints, and the EMA has to come and set up equipment to see if the level of noise breaks some threshold. There is no immediacy to it.

Then again, one can offer, there is no real immediacy in Trinidad and Tobago about anything, but everyone wants to demand it. What might happen if there was? Maybe the police would see other things that might pique their interest, but this is all likely by design.

It’s an odd thing when those who demand consideration for themselves have no consideration for others. There’s a term for that.

Charlotte’s 21 by the way, and there’s no earthly reason I should know that. I am fairly certain, however, that she and her friends will be buying hearing aids sooner or later.

From the Islands.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ Leave a comment

It’s not often I switch my focus to Trinidad and Tobago, though I live here. In the minutiae, it’s always very busy with cars going to and fro in a rush to go stand in some form of line somewhere, or to drop children off to a school, or to go to the nearest KFC so they can get to the front of the line and then decide what they want to get.

There is a charm to it, the lilting accent Trinis are famous for a form of spoken poetry, an evolving pidgin that has all but lost some of it’s French Creole roots. When I grew up here, ‘oui!‘ was still but rarely used to end sentences, now replaced with the English, ‘yes!’. Language changes. The lilt does not.

This was a lyrical land, though it’s hard to see it now. Waves of subversive lyrics would cast spells over the populace, not direct enough to be offensive to those in authority, but understood well enough that they became popular, were sung, and parts of the lyrics often injected in conversation as a subversive poke at whatever needed to be poked at. There was always plenty.

Nowadays, it’s difficult to find that in lyrics. I won’t say it’s impossible, I simply haven’t heard much of it other than David Rudder, perhaps the last popular spokesperson of that world. Now it’s clamoring bass with witty lyrics like, “Wave your hand in the air!”. Such originality lost in paradise.

As a teenager, I saw promise in the magazines I impatiently waited for. I would wait for my Uncle’s subscriptions to Time Magazine and National Geographic to go visit him, as I could, and I would read hungrily these missives from the rest of the world about the dawn of an Information Age. There was promise, there was a future. Oddly, at the dawn of the Information Age, in a tropical nation, those who were in authority were afraid of sunlight. They still are. Transparency, making decisions based on data, seems like a version of magic considered evil by some.

On returning to Trinidad and Tobago again and again over the decades, I saw what could only be described as arrested development. I saw it as a tidal pool, something I wrote about. I still do. And looking at Trinidad and Tobago through the lens of the future of artificial intelligence, I see a self-inflicted artificial extinction as more people from Trinidad and Tobago will go abroad to join the global economy.

The wheels of government, when they move in the right direction, move too slow and for political reasons. The impatient world will not stop or turn around for Trinidad and Tobago, it will press forward even as I imagine political parties will try to leverage ChatGPT to stay in power – because that seems all they wish to do. Education isn’t what it used to be while crime has people huddled on WhatsApp chats sharing video of shootings, attempted home invasions and standard political nonsense.

All this nation knows is self-congratulating bureaucracy in most regards. Perhaps the red on the flag has come to symbolize the red tape.

Yet there is hope. I’m not sure where it comes from, but that’s the spirit of hope. It’s peculiar to see a nation I grew up in so hopeless, but when I grew up was imperfect too – and maybe because dinosaurs will not die the future will not come. Generations of promises broken have taught the younger generations distrust, generations of not opening the economy beyond distinct special interests has left an economy closed to all but those who pay the tolls through political donation.

But it is not that different from the rest of the world. Not the world piped into flat screens by Hollywood, or the BBC, which even ring hollow in parts of their nations.

What is different is the capacity to change things.

2018: Trinidad and Tobago Carnival Begins.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 2 Comments

UntitledA lone drunk walks down the trace where I live, shouting, “Pay the devil jab jab” at 3 a.m. this morning – lost from a J’ouvert somewhere in South Oropouche, I’m sure, where WASA water flows more slowly than puncheon rum. Where WASA, in fixing things, inordinately breaks something else.

It’s the start of Carnival 2018. There are plenty of people out there right now enjoying all the festivities, and there will be many more. Celebrities like Trevor Noah are around, giving local performers their 15 seconds of fame in the Internet age.

It’s not my thing. To say that out loud, or dare write it, is seen as a travesty by some. But really, it’s not my thing. I haven’t enjoyed Carnival since the late 1980s as a young man full of hormonal energy – not that I haven’t tried, or others have not tried to have me do so.

Right now, photographers I know are out there getting brilliant shots of Trinidad and Tobago’s greatest event. One, Sarita Rampersad (unrelated), even took even more pictures of people on mobile phones, which you can see in an album properly titled (Dis)connected Mas. Global Voices interviewed her in 2016 about the same thing – we can see that it hasn’t had much of an effect on what people do. This year, they went with her ‘Steups emoji‘ which – and Sarita knows this – I see in a different way, as do a few others, but it is something. And a steups is appropriate when selfies and phones are disconnecting people from the most extroverted event in Trinidad and Tobago.

Because that’s what extroverts do these days, too. Where is the line between extroversion and narcissism? There isn’t any; there’s just overlap. It’s also odd to explore in the context of what we decide to share of ourselves. I’m neither, yet I share plenty that I wish to. There is room for exploration here, introspection, and some thoughtfulness.

But it’s Carnival – seen by some to be the antithesis of thoughtfulness. I know better. There are very thoughtful people out there, the vast majority, keeping things fun and real – which should be the focus. It’s escapism that comes from new found ‘freedom’ – a debatable topic if you look around Trinidad and Tobago and the financial chains that burden so many, where the hand that you hold is more often than not the hand that holds you down. That’s global, though.

Yet the news, even internationally, talked about the squelching of a terrorist threat – locally you can see the smoothing over of it; Newsday, Trinidad Express, Trinidad Guardian. The facts are lacking; now 7 men have been held last I checked. One target was allegedly the U.S. Embassy (how original) – internationally, CNN covered the story and put the U.S. military on top of things. Local police are saying otherwise, smoothing that over, while I first read about the potential threat from a British source. It’s anybody’s game. In the end, though, nothing is actually publicly known except how many were held – and one has to wonder why it made the news in the first place until one considers that it creates fear, uncertainty and doubt. That spread like wildfire on WhatsApp groups.

But T&T has short term memory loss, which leads to not being able to remember much in the long term. Until something happens. Or happens again. And then short term memory loss happens again – even in local media. Trevor Noah showed up. What terrorists? How is this not on Global Voices yet?

Never fear. The Trinidad and Tobago Police Service are keeping everyone safe and secure from 8,000 lbs of Venezualan dasheen. The guns and drugs come from the very same place, but the dasheen problem is real enough to local farmers. Unfortunately, because of the lack of dealing with drugs and guns – people have theories on why – the Minister of Agriculture was mocked for supporting the police here even though violent crime isn’t his jurisdiction.

We’ll all sleep better with that contraband dasheen off the streets.

It’s a comedy that writes itself into tears. We won’t even get into ‘tiefing a wine‘, a strange thing given the culture of Trinidad and Tobago, where outfits for Carnival get smaller every year and costs for them go up. Where suggestive dancing is encouraged; where some say only men ‘tief a wine’. We know better. Yes, it can be construed as assault.

Don’t hug me without consent, by the way. With an accusation, I can get you sent to jail for assault.

And until Ash Wednesday jail, Trinidad and Tobago will forget all of this. As it should.

But on Wednesday, will it remember?