From India to Trinidad with Love
Earlier this month on May 23 my father said casually:
“Oh, happy arrival day. This is the exact anniversary of the date I brought you to Trinidad from India.” This jogged one of my most favourite memories of arrival to these islands. On my second day in Bishop’s High School in Tobago, I asked a red girl (who tell me to do that?) what language she was speaking. Newly arrived from India I didn’t understand her accent.
Well, I was a puny little thing and she was a tall, strong girl so it was easy for her to lift me up by my collar and say. “Go back to India, you damn Coolie.” At that, I was bewildered.
I said, in my strong Indian accent that I could not be a Coolie because I didn’t lift loads at railway stations. She put me down in disgust. Needless to say, we became great friends and I spent the best childhood anyone could ask for in Tobago.
Fast forward several decades. I am in India with my parents and my not too newly married Trini husband of Indian descent. We are at the train station in Simla.
We hear my father shout “Coolie!” My Trini husband jumps up and says to me looking deeply hurt “Why is your father insulting me.”
My mother and I are in stitches. I tell him “He’s looking for someone to help with our bags. Coolies carry loads.”
“Jeez,” he says,”I don’t get you Indians,” he said, once. “Girls clubbing in shorts, people eating meat, drinking scotch and playing cards during Divali, not fasting.”
“And I don’t get you Trinis,” I said, “I mean why do you wear only salvaars. It comes with a kameez. A top. A salvaar is just the bottom part. And why don’t you vary your Trini Indian food.
There are 27 states in India, thousands of flavours. Why use one generic curry powder so everything tastes the same? Time for an update of Indian politics, literature, food, culture? “Nah,” he said, “We love our Trini Indian culture.”
My husband reminded me over the years over many trips that his time in India reminded him forcefully of his own West Indian identity. He enjoyed being a tourist there. Indians too treated him as an honoured guest but not a countryman.
And so we went on for years— Trini Indian and Indian-born Trini marvelling over how different we are culturally until Trinidad became as close to my heart as it was to his. He understands my critique of T&T comes from a deep love of this place. With that love there is a heightened fear: that our small multicultural islands are in danger of losing our unique tolerance with our new waves of immigration (China, Africa, India, Lebanon, and recently refugees from Venezuela).
We have witnessed how terror, intolerance, corrupt government and the battle for oil and arms has created an unprecedented movement of refugees worldwide. The backlash has been punishing in the West. Donald Trump with his open racism in the US. Windrush and Brexit in the UK, and now Europe Union careening to the right with the terrifying rise of rightwing leaders like Le Pen.
In this context, Trinis have felt that despite the crumbling infrastructure, dodgy corruption index, politics of race (the elephant in the room), crime, the advent of ISIS recruits, falling oil prices, we have something special. Callaloo country. Multiculturism. Tolerance.
Racism, as we all know, comes from economic fear. In bad times groups turn on one another, attack one another. Now more than ever as we teeter over a recession we must develop new muscles of courage, entrepreneurship, education, and a civic sense.
Perhaps it’s time even as we look forward we remember the damage of the brutality of our arrivals of slavery and indentureship into museums so we never ever forget.
Simultaneously we need to celebrate the leaders who ensured our survival, our thriving, in every square in our country. We could have a diversity day to celebrate our remembered heritage.
We will drown if we fail as a multicultural people to row together, shoulder to shoulder towards economic survival. To do so we must collectively develop the muscle of governance, strong institutions, productivity, efficiency, and accountability. We are no longer “survivors”. No longer victims. We are no longer looking to Mother India or Africa to save us or give us a sense of self. We have arrived.