Poui Spring
We were sitting around a dinner table, in Port-of- Spain, six friends, some old, some reunited. Outside, in this dry season, the super warm moon was suspended over Trinidad.
Shell pink and blanched white poui broke off from their abundance and fell softly to the ground.
“What do you think of when you think of the culture of Trinidad?” I asked my host. I was thinking of a video I was sent over Carnival while I was in Cuba. In it, a man who raised an eager stranger to his groin and the two gnashed loins vigorously at one another, she gyrating obligingly. The man let her go abruptly. It was third-rate near porn at best. Art, and human connection did not enter the equation.
There was jeering. Reductive. How was this sold as “we culture” by mas makers who charged a pound of flesh for this nothingness? We have an amazing culture— raw natural talent oozing from the pores of our people. We saw it at Carnival, at Kings and Queens, at pan, in traditional calypso, in traditional mas.
It doesn’t compensate for our rage or our killing fields. What did we identify with as our culture? That began a long and rowdy discussion between us all.
We had been speaking of the culture of Cuba, marvelling at the zero crime there, the ban of porn, the softness in the people’s faces (despite their harsh history), the absence of guns; absence of a sense of dispossession so present in all our citizens.
Cuba has no natural resources, has suffered through trade sanctions over 60 years and innovatively survived extinction using this free thing called kindness to others, music, fresh produce, preserving old buildings, and land where tobacco is grown, to attract tourists, so beautifully that several areas are UNESCO world heritage sites.
A country where at night you could peer into some of the crumbling buildings and look inside what you could only imagine as a cavern of poverty and frustration, and yet their culture, of education and absence of rage produces jazz, art, poetry, and a population so educated (65 universities for a population of 11 million) and so healthy they live longer than any of us in the region.
The world may be shocked at the terrorist in New Zealand who murdered 50 people last week, but tell a fellow Trini that 516 were murdered in cold blood in Trinidad last year, and no one blinks.
We speak in horror of Cuba’s executions since Castro took over— more than 2,000 over a period of 60 years. In Trinidad, a similar number were murdered, in just four years to their 60.
We must lobby to get rid of the tag of being known globally as the 12th most dangerous place in the world—run by gangs. We are halfway there with the strongest Police Commissioner we’ve had in a long time.
If the PM of New Zealand has shown us that if she can put a sweeping gun ban in her country just six days after an act of terrorism, why can’t we do so after decades of butchery? A 2017 Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) report has shown that although we spend more than double that of any in our region on crime, we have the lowest detection rate of any of our neighbours.
Police work alone isn’t cutting it. If the world weeps for 50 innocents who lost their lives in New Zealand, can our politicians not create a culture of civility that remembers the thousands of people butchered every two years in our country? We must demand a culture of education and responsible parenting so rigorous we will raise children to job opportunities in Carnival, trade, education, science, innovation, jobs, and technology. We will stop feeding hungry gang leaders with lost boys.
We will reduce the rage and murder. Drugs and guns will lose their potency as new worlds open up for our young people.
I went around the table as the night drew to a close, and asked everyone what Trinidad’s culture meant to them. They spoke of tolerance, the landscape, a sense of home, humour, education, partying like one.
We can start by rousing our battle weary and impotently angry selves to be outraged on behalf of our thousands of fellow citizens murdered with fresh horror at the killing fields around us.
It could be our poui spring.