Caribbean Beat — May/June 2018 (#151)

Is your Lady Luck
a princess?
Princess Hotels and Casinos
Belize
Ramada Belize City Princess Hotel
Princess Belize City Casino
Princess Freezone Hotel and Casino
Next Night Club – San Ignacio
Elite Night Club – Belize City
Princess San Ignacio Casino
Dominican Republic
Ramada Santo Domingo Princess Hotel
Princess Santo Domingo Casino
Guatemala
Guyana
Ramada Georgetown Princess Hotel
Princess Georgetown Casino
Princess Cinemas and Arcade
Next Night Club – Georgetown
Nicaragua
Princess Nicaragua Casino
Next Night Club – Managua
Panama
Sercotel Panama Princess Hotel
Princess Casino
Saint Maarten
Princess Coliseum Casino
Princess Tropicana Casino
Suriname
Ramada Paramaribo Princess Hotel
Princess Suriname Casino
Princess Paramaribo Casino
Trinidad
Princess Movietowne – Port of Spain
Princess Price Plaza – Chaguanas
Southpark Princess – San Fernando
Next Night Club – San Fernando
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Contents
No. 151 • May/June 2018
44
36
50
EMBARK
IMMERSE
18 Wish you were here
Ireng River, Guyana
21 Datebook
Events around the Caribbean in May
and June, from the first-ever Carnival
in Guyana to Trinidad’s North Coast
Jazz Festival
28 Word of Mouth
Japan’s springtime cherry blossom
festival reminds a visiting Trini of poui
season at home
30 Bookshelf and playlist
This month’s reading and listening
picks
32 Cookup
Some like it hot
It may be the quintessential Trini
condiment, and many can’t imagine a
meal without pepper sauce. Franka
Philip investigates how T&T’s hot
peppers have become internationally
famous for their delicious sear
36 closeup
Full free
Haitian artist Tessa Mars is influenced
by her country’s revolutionary
history as much as her own family’s
intellectual tradition, and her lifelong
fascination with riddles. Her colourful
paintings often feature a semiautobiographical
character named
Tessalines — and deal in complex
ideas about identity and freedom.
Shereen Ali finds out more
42 snapshot
Caribbean by proxy
For sports fans around the world,
the arrival of June means the start of
the 2018 FIFA World Cup finals. No
Caribbean team qualified this year,
James Ferguson writes, but that
doesn’t mean our region won’t be
represented
44 backstory
The story of a city
A childhood encounter with a touring
steelband began Stephen Stuempfle’s
connection with Trinidad. Now the
US scholar has written an illuminating
history of Port of Spain in the era
before Independence. As Judy
Raymond learns, Stuempfle’s research
has only deepened his love for T&T’s
capital
ARRIVE
50 round trip
Love is in the air
For many lovebirds around the world,
the idea of a Caribbean wedding —
making vows on the beach, with a
backdrop of glimmering blue sea
— seems like a dream. And it easily
comes true
58 neighbourhood
Kralendijk, Bonaire
The gateway for dive tourists drawn to
Bonaire’s pristine waters, the island’s
capital has a relaxed charm, and
touches of colourful history
10 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM

CaribbeanBeat
An MEP publication
60 personal tour
“Just drive all around the
island”
Artist Suelin Low Chew Tung shares
her Grenada favourites — beaches,
restaurants, relaxation spots, and
where to find the best local chocolate
ENGAGE
66 plugin
Tech to the people
Founded by scholar Schuyler Esprit,
Dominica’s Create Caribbean was
well on its way to making tech tools
for education available to all. Then
Hurricane Maria hit. Lisa Allen-
Agostini discovers how the digital
humanities project is putting the pieces
back together
Editor Nicholas Laughlin
General manager Halcyon Salazar
Design artists Kevon Webster & Bridget van Dongen
Web editor Caroline Taylor
Editorial assistant Shelly-Ann Inniss
Business Development Manager,
Business Development
Tobago and International
Representative, Trinidad
Evelyn Chung
Mark-Jason Ramesar
T: (868) 684 4409
T: (868) 775 6110
E: evelyn@meppublishers.com
E: mark@meppublishers.com
Barbados Sales Representative
Shelly-Ann Inniss
T: (246) 232 5517
E: shelly@meppublishers.com
68 discover
uncovering a kingdom
It’s one of the Caribbean’s most
resonant historic sites, but surprisingly
little is known about the true history
of Sans-Souci, the palace of Henri
Christophe, writes Erline Andrews.
Now a multinational team of
archaeologists are using high-tech tools
to resurvey the site, and perhaps rewrite
Haitian history
Media & Editorial Projects Ltd.
6 Prospect Avenue, Maraval, Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago
T: (868) 622 3821/5813/6138 • F: (868) 628 0639
E: caribbean-beat@meppublishers.com
Website: www.meppublishers.com
Read and save issues of Caribbean Beat on your smartphone,
tablet, computer, and favourite digital devices!
70 on this day
sin city
It was once known as “the Sodom of
the New World” — until a catastropic
earthquake sent it tumbling into the
sea. On the 500th anniversary of its
founding, James Ferguson recalls the
history of Jamaica’s infamous Port Royal
72 puzzles
Enjoy our crossword, sudoku, and
other brain-teasers!
Printed by Solo Printing Inc., Miami, Florida
Caribbean Beat is published six times a year for Caribbean Airlines by Media & Editorial Projects Ltd. It is also available on
subscription. Copyright © Caribbean Airlines 2018. All rights reserved. ISSN 1680–6158. No part of this magazine may be
reproduced in any form whatsoever without the written permission of the publisher. MEP accepts no responsibility for
content supplied by our advertisers. The views of the advertisers are theirs and do not represent MEP in any way.
Website: www.caribbean-airlines.com
80 classic
A dip into Caribbean Beat’s archives:
Attillah Springer’s explanation of the
art of the meggie
The Caribbean Airlines logo shows a hummingbird in flight. Native to the Caribbean, the hummingbird represents
flight, travel, vibrancy, and colour. It encompasses the spirit of both the region and Caribbean Airlines.
WWW.CARIBBEAN-AIRLINES.COM
11

Cover Caribbean weddings
come in all styles and
traditions — like this Hindu
ceremony, with the bride
garbed in auspicious red
Photo IVASHstudio/
Shutterstock.com
This issue’s contributors
include:
Shereen Ali (“Full free”, page 36) is a freelance writer
who has covered cultural and social issues in Trinidad
since the 1990s as a reporter for three national
newspapers. She enjoys making masks for Carnival and
loves the creative arts in all their forms. She is also a
graphic designer and illustrator.
Writer and journalist Lisa Allen-Agostini (“Tech to
the people”, page 66) co-edited the crime fiction
collection Trinidad Noir (2008) and is the author of
the poetry collection Swallowing the Sky (2015) and
the young adult novel The Chalice Project (2008). Her
latest novel, Home Home, published this year, was a
winner of the 2017 CODE Burt Award for Young Adult
Literature.
Suzanne Bhagan (“A tale of two flowers”, page 28)
is a writer from Trinidad and Tobago. She also blogs
about books and meaningful travel at Hot Foot Trini
(hotfoottrini.com).
Franka Philip (“Some like it hot”, page 32) loves to find
the story behind the story in the food industry. A journalist
for more than twenty years, she has worked in print,
online, and radio in Trinidad and at the BBC in London. At
the start of 2018, Franka co-founded Trini Good Media, a
website that hosts the podcast Talk ’Bout Us.
Judy Raymond (“The story of a city”, page 44) is a
writer and the editor-in-chief of the T&T Newsday, as
well as a former editor of Caribbean Beat. Her most
recent book is The Colour of Shadows: Images of
Caribbean Slavery (2016).
Crown Point, Tobago
Casino/Bar: 868 631-0044/0500
Jade Cafe: 868 6398361
WWW.CARIBBEAN-AIRLINES.COM
13

A MESSAGE From OUR CEO
Andrea De Silva/andreadesilva@gmail.com
Dear Caribbean Airlines passengers,
I have been with Caribbean Airlines for
just over six months. In that time, I’ve met
with employees face to face throughout
our entire network. The interactions
have been enlightening, and the reception
from the teams truly reflected the
professionalism of our people. As we
move forward, we will undertake even
greater innovation which will enable us
to better serve our valued customers
and to attract new customers to experience
the warmth of the Caribbean.
As the airline that knows the
Caribbean best, we actively support
culture in the region and beyond.
So far for 2018, we were the official
airline of the Jamaica and Trinidad and
Tobago Carnivals. We intend to partner
with stakeholders in the destinations
we serve, to be the official airline of
Carnivals and other festivals there.
Please see our Datebook (on page 21)
for a list of Carnivals, festivals and other
events in May and June. Datebook is a
standard feature of this magazine, and
the information is also available online at
www.caribbean-beat.com. Fly with us
to the many events taking place in the
coming months!
In addition to these activities, we are
focused on product development. To
this end, we have introduced Caribbean
Explorer — a fare which allows you to
explore multiple destinations on one
ticket. You may travel using Caribbean
Explorer until 15 June, and again from
Havana, Caribbean Airlines’
newest destination
mid-September, when the fare will
return. This gives you enough time to
plan which islands you will visit!
As you explore, you can do so in
greater comfort using Caribbean Plus.
This extra leg room product within the
economy cabin of the B-737 will afford
you the opportunity to pre-book and
pay for seats with a bit more space. On
the ATR aircraft, you can pre-book and
pay for seats in rows 15 and 16. In addition
to extra leg room, Caribbean Plus
gives you the benefits of earlier boarding,
earlier access to overhead bins,
extra room to recline — and you exit
faster on arrival at your destination.
We are also excited to introduce
Caribbean Upgrade. This easy-touse
service allows economy class
ticket holders to bid for travel on available
Business Class seats. All eligible
customers will receive a Caribbean
Upgrade email seven days prior to
departure, inviting them to bid for available
Business Class seats. All passengers
who bid will be advised 24 to 28
hours before their scheduled departure
whether the bid was successful. Once
the bid is won, the credit card on file will
be charged the relevant amount.
These are some of our value-added
offers to enhance your travel experience.
There will be other promotions as
the year enfolds.
In other news, our “HELLO
CARIBBEAN” campaign, which highlights
the uniqueness of the destinations we
serve, won several advertising awards
from the Caribbean Advertising Federation
(CAF). The CAF awards are the first leg to
competing at the American Advertising
Awards (ADDY) — the world’s largest
advertising competition.
Our Cuba route continues to enjoy
healthy passenger loads, and we are
consistently providing desirable offers.
To experience more of Cuba, you may
also take advantage of tour packages
through our network of travel agents.
We are also working with retail partners
in Trinidad and Tobago and Guyana,
where visitors from Cuba can enjoy
special discounts.
Caribbean Airlines is in transition,
and through the above-mentioned and
other initiatives we will focus on enhancing
customer experience, managing
costs, and enhancing revenue through
innovation and improved value.
Please visit our website at www.
caribbean-airlines.com, become a
fan by liking us on Facebook at www.
facebook.com/caribbeanairlines, and
follow us on Twitter @iflycaribbean.
Thank you for choosing Caribbean
Airlines — we value your business, and
it is our privilege to serve you!
Garvin Medera
Chief Executive Officer
14 WWW.CARIBBEAN-AIRLINES.COM

ADVERTORIAL
Caribbean
Yard Campus
Disrupting the
motor of history
From outside, the view of the Caribbean is of a
single space strewn with islands across the blue
ocean between Europe and the Americas. But
from within, the Caribbean is Derek Walcott’s
broken vase, shards of a fractured past in need of love
and understanding for reassembling the fragments of
a region blown apart by European battles for territory,
conquest, and domination.
More than five hundred years later, the modern
Caribbean still bears the scars of the cataclysmic
encounter between Europe and the Americas from
which it was born. It’s there in the outward gaze tied to
the old social and economic European order, in siloed
neighbours still strangers to each other, and in the
languages that separate its people behind the barriers
of English, Spanish, French, Dutch, and the many
Caribbean creoles spawned by their intimacy with the
languages of the First Nation peoples of the region, of
West Africa and of India, among others.
And yet, beneath the division is a longing for
belonging to a united Caribbean at peace with its past
and in harmony with itself.
The quest for integration has been an uphill battle
against a colonial infrastructure that has proven
extraordinarily resistant to change. Disrupting the
divisive motor of Caribbean history is the challenge that
the Trinidad and Tobago-based Caribbean Yard Campus
(CYC) has set itself.
For Caribbean Yard Campus, self-knowledge is
the starting point of change in the Caribbean. In
approaching the challenge, it confronts the hierarchical
structure of the region’s educational system with
its design of a decentralised network of traditional
knowledge systems.
Launched at a regional gathering of partners last year
at the Lloyd Best Institute in Tunapuna, Trinidad, CYC is
the brainchild of Rawle Gibbons, arts educator and one
of the Caribbean’s foremost playwright/directors. At the
heart of the CYC model is the communal “yard.”
“In the movement of peoples throughout the
Americas, the Yard has been at the core of a lifelong
learning space — from womb to wake — and represents,
therefore, a valuable repository of traditional knowledge
which, if tapped, could contribute significantly to a
culturally coherent path for Caribbean development,”
explained Gibbons.
By creating intersections between traditional
knowledge systems/experts and academic workers,
16

“In the movement of peoples
throughout the Americas, the
Yard has been at the core of a
lifelong learning space”
Caribbean Yard Campus aims to produce culturally
relevant approaches to development challenges in the
region. This interface involves areas of educational
content, methodology, ownership, authority, and,
ultimately, empowerment in a knowledge-based society.
At its launch last year, CYC established a network
of partnerships with people representing communal
yards across the region. These included Mireille and
Louis Marcelin (Sanba Zao) of Lekol San Basilo in Portau-Prince,
Haiti; Amina Meeks, Jamaican storyteller; Ifna
Vrede of the Saramaca Maroon community in Suriname;
and Ovid Williams of the of the Patamona First Peoples
community of Guyana. Among member-yards in
Trinidad and Tobago are the Keylemanjahro School for
the Arts, the Original Whip Masters, Bois Academy, the
National Ramleela Council, Studio 66 Community Arts
Workshop, Agronomics Institute, Pembroke Saraka Yard
of Tobago, and Jouvay Ayiti.
One year into its programme, Caribbean Yard
Campus has established a slate of short courses. These
include “Now You See Me . . . Preserving Community
Memory”, in partnership with the National Archives of
Trinidad and Tobago; “Mas Design and Construction”;
a course on traditional medicine titled “Sweet Broom
and Bitter Bush”; two Caribbean languages, Spanish
and Kweyol; and a hands-on holistic agricultural course
titled “Planting People”.
In line with its mandate to deepen the links between
Caribbean people, CYC has scheduled educational tours
to Cuba and St Lucia in July this year. It will host its next
Caribbean Convois, a gathering of Caribbean yards, in
Haiti in 2020.
For more information, visit
www.caribbeanyardcampus.org or
write to info@caribbeanyardcampus.com
Photography by Michael London
Opposite page School children are introduced to a
range of medicinal plants and craft items produced by
the Santa Rosa First Nations People of T&T by
Cristo Adonis, peyai of its community
Above Jamaican storyteller Amina Meeks-Blackwood,
left, encounters two characters from the Ramleela
Council of T&T at the opening event of the Caribbean
Convois in March last year
Above right Ovid Williams, a member of the
Patamona First Peoples of Guyana, in a presentation
about his community during Caribbean Convois 2017
Right Members of the Original Jab Jabs of Couva,
Trinidad, put on a demonstration of their artform during
Caribbean Yard Campus’s regional launch in Trinidad
17

wish you were here
pete oxford
18 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM

Ireng River, Guyana
The smooth, dark waters of the Ireng flow
from the Pakaraima Mountains down
through the great savannahs of Guyana and
Brazil, forming the boundary between the
two countries. Eventually it joins Brazil’s
Rio Branco, which in turn flows into the Rio
Negro, one of the main tributaries of the
Amazon.
WWW.CARIBBEAN-AIRLINES.COM 19

@eldoradorums
eldorado_rum
@eldoradorums

datebook
Your guide to Caribbean events in May and June, from Guyana’s
debut Carnival to a pineapple festival in the Bahamas
Design Pics Inc/Alamy
Don’t miss . . .
Indian Arrival Day
5 June
Suriname
On this day in 1873, the first East Indian
immigrants disembarked from the Lalla Rookh
and set foot in Dutch Guiana — now called
Suriname. For over forty years, until 1916, more
than 34,000 “Hindustani” labourers travelled
to Suriname, many of them remaining after the
period of their indentureship. Over a century
later, Indo-Surinamese preserve their cultural
traditions and celebrate the arrival of their
forefathers. Concerts of baithak gana songs,
the sharing of Indian cuisine, and the laying
of wreaths and flowers at the Babi and Mai
monument in Paramaribo — memorialising the
mythical first “father and mother” to come to
Suriname — are just some of the festivities.
Indian Arrival Day is also commemorated in
Guyana (5 May) and Trinidad and Tobago (30
May): important occasions to contemplate
where our ancestors came from, and where we
are going.
WWW.CARIBBEAN-AIRLINES.COM
21

datebook
If you’re in . . .
MIAMI
Miami Film Month
Venues around Miami
1 to 30 June
courtesy triniscene.com
Blacqbook/shutterstock.com
TRINIDAD
North Coast Jazz Festival
Blanchisseuse
26 May
northcoastjazz.com
A two-hour drive from Port of Spain
through the verdant hills of the
Northern Range will take you to the
quaint coastal village of Blanchisseuse.
On the surface, the burgeoning bedand-breakfast
community seems
quiet, but it’s a hub for adventure —
hikes, fishing trips, kayaking, and also
the annual North Coast Jazz Festival.
With the slogan “Born Here, Play
Here,” some of T&T’s best musical
acts will perform on stage at the
Blanchisseuse Recreational Ground.
An eclectic combination of artistes
including acoustic bands, soca stars,
jazz sensations, and gospel artistes will
showcase their creativity. Look out for
local favourites Arthur Marcial, Xavier
Strings, Dean Williams and Friends, the
Michael Dingwell Band, Kay Alleyne,
Nyiida Andrews, and Olatunji.
Former Port of Spain mayor Louis
Lee Sing, one of the organisers, says
Blanchisseuse has a lot to offer visitors.
He recommends supporting the art
and craft of the village artisans, trying
Mr Gilbert’s pumpkin ice cream, and of
course taking in the rugged beauty of the
north coast. So, jazz enthusiasts: if you’re
looking for a beach excursion or weekend
getaway, the friendly villagers await.
GUYANA
Carnival
Venues around Guyana
18 to 27 May
In the beginning there was Mashramani
— and it was so nice they’re doing it
twice? Not quite. Guyana’s inaugural
Carnival will hit the streets of
Georgetown this May. Although similar
to Mash — the traditional “celebration
after hard work” following Christmas
guruXOX/shutterstock.com
Miami seems to have it all: beautiful
beaches, vivacious nightlife, historic
architecture, and a vibrant arts scene.
Each month of the year is dedicated
to a tempting activity, too. In June,
moviegoers can enjoy discounted
admission at participating cinemas, as
the city celebrates Film Month. Movies
made in Miami and by local filmmakers
will grace the big screens. Are you a
filmmaker yourself? This might be the
perfect time to shoot or pitch your
film project. Industry stakeholders,
film crews, and executives will be
within reach.
During the year, Miami hosts many
film festivals. Just in time for film
month, for example, the American
Black Film Festival runs from 13 to 17
June. Imagine five action-packed days
of red carpet premieres, masterclasses,
celebrity conversations, tech talks,
exclusive parties, and more, as African-
American culture is celebrated through
film. Lights, camera, action!
and culminating on Republic Day (23
February) — Guyana Carival will be its
own thing, with an exuberant array
of all-inclusive parties, concerts, and
boat rides. Of course, jamming behind
the music trucks on a magnificent day
filled with fun, frolic, and attractive
costumes is an inevitable part of the
experience. Prepare to be hooked!
Event previews by Shelly-Ann Inniss
22 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM

datebook
Marvellous
May
Grand Bahama Junior
International Rugby Festival
Freeport, the Bahamas
Players aged eight to eighteen engage
in a fun-filled weekend of friendly
competition
[11-14 May]
Sea Wave/shutterstock.com
Grenada Chocolate
Festival
grenadachocolatefest.com
It’s the food of the gods.
Experience the infinite
possibilities of the island’s
delicious organically produced
cocoa and chocolate
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16
01
17 1
16
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31
24 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM

Andrew Bickell courtesy the Segway Polo Club of Barbados
Segway Polo in Paradise
Barbados
segwaypoloclubbarbados.org
Teams from various countries
participate in the traditional sport
with a modern twist
[18-21 May]
IMASUB Underwater
Photography Contest
Cuba
The beauty of aquatic
life is captured in Cuba’s
spectacular marine waters
[29 May – 2 June]
Pineapple Festival Bahamas
Gregory Town, North Eleuthera
Four days of pineapple-themed
activities: eating and cooking contests,
pineapple-crazy sports, traditional
games, and more
[31 May – 3 June]
Ends 2 June
maria fernanda gonzalez
Ends 3 June
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31 30 01 02 0
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WWW.CARIBBEAN-AIRLINES.COM
25

datebook
Joy of June
Calabash Literary Festival
Treasure Beach, Jamaica
calabashfestival.org
Music, readings, and storytelling have
inspired roots in Jamaica, with branches
extending to the wider world
[1-3 June]
Marc Bruxelle/shutterstock.com
Placencia Belize Lobsterfest
Over fifty booths will serve up mouthwatering
Belizean cuisine, including an
extensive menu of lobster dishes
[22-24 June]
Pride Toronto
pridetoronto.com
A special Family Pride programme, Trans Pride, the
Dyke March, and the fabulous Pride Parade are in store
at one of the largest Pride celebrations in the world
[22-24 June]
30 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15
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31
Bambú
GIFT SHOP
Rare & exotic arts and crafts
made in the Caribbean
Lovely Caribbean wear, collectibles,
accessories and much more...
#199 Milford Road, Crown Point, Tobago
T. 868-639-8133
E: mariela0767@hotmail.com
EXCELLENT
V I S I O N
OPTOMETRISTS
YOUR BEST EYE CARE PROVIDER
TLH Building, Scarborough. Tobago
Tel. (868) 639-3030
26 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM

St Kitts Music Festival
Venues around St Kitts
stkittsmusicfestival.net
A magical extravaganza of music,
featuring Chakademus & Pliers, Patti
Labelle, Fetty Wap, Nailah Blackman,
Kes the Band, and more stellar artistes
[27 June - 1 July]
teeography courtesy question mark entertainment
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02 0
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WWW.CARIBBEAN-AIRLINES.COM
27

WORD OF MOUTH
Dispatches from our correspondents around the Caribbean and further afield
Shuttertong/shutterstock.com
A tale of
two flowers
On the other side of the world from T&T,
Suzanne Bhagan experiences the Japanese
cherry blossom spring festival, and remembers
the golden poui trees that bloom at home
In the Caribbean, we often take the flowers for granted. They seem to be
always there: hibiscus, bougainvillea, or frangipani blending incongruously
into the tropical landscape. I only realised how much I missed them during
the long, bleak winter months I spent teaching English in Japan.
The Japanese are obsessed with hana, or flowers. Although cherry blossoms
can be found in many temperate regions of the world, they tend to be
synonymous with the land of the rising sun. Every spring, hanami or cherry
blossom viewing becomes a national ritual, and an almost religious experience.
In almost every newspaper or website, you will find meteorological reports
tracking the sakura zensen or cherry blossom front
across the Japanese islands, starting in Okinawa to
the south and ending in Hokkaido to the north.
Hanami is an old Japanese custom that
stretches back to the Nara period (710–794),
when it was enjoyed primarily by members of
the Imperial Court. However, by the Edo period
(1603–1868), cherry blossom mania had caught
on, and it became a popular pastime for regular
Japanese people. During hanami season, locals
flock to parks, castles, and gardens and spread
giant blue tarpaulin sheets under the trees’ frothy
petals. Even when rain and wind scatter the petals
and the ground is drizzled with pink, people still
sit under the cherry trees, opening up limitededition
bento boxes for picnics and guzzling
sakura-flavoured beer.
The cherry blossom obsession runs deep in
Japanese culture and tradition, embodying the
Japanese concept of mono no aware, a gentle
acceptance of the fleeting nature of things. The
flower’s ephemeral beauty has inspired countless
haiku poems and paintings, including the popular
folk song “Sakura, Sakura”:
28 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM

sakura sakura
noyama mo sato mo
mi-watasu kagiri
kasumi ka kumo ka
asahi ni niou
sakura sakura
hana zakari
Cherry blossoms, cherry blossoms,
In fields, mountains, and villages
As far as the eye can see.
Is it mist, or clouds?
Fragrant in the morning sun.
Cherry blossoms, cherry blossoms,
Flowers in full bloom.
Sakura is also significant in Japan because it marks the
beginning of the fiscal and school year. The first day of the
school year at my high school in Tottori prefecture brought
new students with flushed faces, swishy haircuts, and pressed
uniforms. The flowers promised them a fresh slate, with a
host of new friends and new teachers.
When I observed these students, I remembered my own
high school days in Trinidad and Tobago. I remembered that
in the Caribbean we also have a tree that blooms during April
and May every year: the poui.
Jamaican poet Lorna Goodison captures the essence of
the poui, likening it to a woman who blooms briefly for a man
who swiftly deflowers her. In “Poui”, she writes:
She doesn’t put out for anyone.
She waits for HIM
and in the high august heat
he takes her
and their celestial mating
is so intense
that for weeks her rose-gold dress
lies tangled round her feet
and she doesn’t even notice
Like Japan’s sakura, the Caribbean poui shines briefly
before the rainy season’s downpours sweep across
the islands and ruin the bright petals. However, unlike
the sakura’s promise of a new beginning, the poui’s yellow
or pink petals indicate an end. Goodbye to the dry season:
sun-browned grass, the smell of burned sugarcane, kiteflying,
cricket matches, and picnics under intense blue skies.
In particular, the poui is like a death knoll for Caribbean
high school students, signifying the end of carefree days of
liming and the beginning of cramming for CSEC, CAPE, and
final exams in May and June.
Although the Japanese cherry blossom and Caribbean
poui are found in two distinct pockets of the world, both
remind us of the transition of the seasons and the fragility of
life. If we don’t stop to appreciate them, they disappear before
we realise it — and we forever lose the message. n
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29

ookshelf
Tell No-One About This
by Jacob Ross (Peepal Tree Press, 360 pp,
ISBN 9781845233525)
In these collected short stories,
written from 1975 to 2017,
Grenada-born, UK-based
Jacob Ross draws us into
deep contemplations of the
changeable human spirit. His
work reveals a stalwartly feminist
heart: most of the stories busy
themselves with the suffering
and exultation of women.
Some of the best stories layer
intersecting female voices. In
“And There Were No Fireflies”,
Mariana, a bellicose schoolgirl, is dragged to Morne Riposte
by her domineering Aunt Dalene, a woman who has the
remedy to the trouble brewing in bellies and hearts. The
women in Ross’s fictions know there is more than one way
to sell love, to secure or jettison children, to keep gods
in their prayers and deeds. Tell No-One About This knits
narratives with subtle grace: Ross pays attention, and
omits nothing in his keen sight.
Infidelities
by Sonia Farmer (Poinciana Paper Press, 69 pp,
ISBN 9780998915005)
Bahamian Sonia Farmer’s poems
take to the high seas, and take
us along for the journey, giddy
and lustily breathless. Infamous
Irish pirate Anne Bonny, who
plied her trade in the Caribbean
ocean, is immortalised herein:
“She will / let them ask all the
wrong questions because she
will be better at / killing. She will
learn to live in first person.” In
these poems, there are powerful
intimations of women’s grief, women’s erotic navigations,
and women’s uncivilian needs. The songs of seductresses,
pioneers, and untethered souls spill into the recesses this
book carves: to receive it is to drink deep from a well of
naked wanting. With her hands on the captain’s wheel,
Farmer steers Infidelities towards any reader who has, like
Jean Rhys’s Antoinette, asked, “Do you think . . . that I have
slept too long in the moonlight?”
Brother
by David Chariandy (McClelland & Stewart,
192 pp, ISBN 9780771022906)
The tremulous gentleness and
juddering rage of masculinity
lies beneath the surface of
David Chariandy’s Brother, a
novel executed with uncommon
carefulness and quiet dynamism.
Brothers Michael and Francis
come of age in Toronto’s
Scarborough, a community of
immigrant bodies, a place in
which violence and love jostle
for supremacy. Francis, who
narrates Brother, flips the reader
back and forth in time, revealing staggering loss and
consummate tenderness with the language of a man who
has both gained and lost fortune. Winner of the 2017
Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, Brother is a novel
that crucibles and elevates the urgencies of our time.
In language that is measured as grains of rice counted
out for hungry mouths, Chariandy presents the truth of
Canadian survival for people of colour, linking Canada to
the Caribbean in roads of abandonment and return.
Sans Espoir
by Kimelene Carr (Sherell Bernard, 94 pp,
ISBN 9789768271235)
Trinidadian Kimelene Carr ushers
her reader into the vibrant,
titillating unpredictability of life
in sweet, sweet T&T. Sans Espoir
explores intersecting vignettes
of machismo, sexual obsession,
religious fervour, and the
tempestuous madness stirring
at the root of so much human
behaviour. Racing through plot
developments with the breakneck
speed of an illegal drag race, Carr’s
novella aims for high emotional
stakes, combining intrigue, tabanca, and enough commess
to sustain a Caribbean soap opera. Simmering beneath the
predictable plotlines of this tragicomic tale are an unspoken
discontent with the failures of public office, and resignation
to the status quo: both potent lived realities of everyday
Trinbagonians. As the six principal characters of this slender
drama converge at the fictitious Hope Street Hospital, their
movements mirror the sojourns of so many T&T citizens,
hoping for some respite from criminality and injustice.
Reviews by Shivanee Ramlochan, Bookshelf editor
30 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM

playlist
This Is Me
Jeanine S. Ruiz (self-released)
Young Trinidadian keyboardist Jeanine Ruiz
releases her first EP as a musical autobiography
of a life recently begun, and a testament to
her emotional journey thus far. Going through
the song titles — “Ambitious”, “Overthinker”,
“Impulsive”, “Temperamental”, and “Dreamer”
— one can gauge how far she has come and
how far she may go. Listening to the music,
one can hear the subtle influences of style that
have touched her compositions: world fusion
has a new advocate. Admittedly influenced by
Japanese jazz pianist Hiromi Uehara, Ruiz has
a sure-handedness in her playing and a keen
sense of timing and cinematic breath in her
arrangements, which catch a number of genres
without being confusing. This is more than
jazz-influenced trio playing — this debut signals
a potential to inspire a waning instrumental
music-listening audience, here and there, to
stick around to track Ruiz’s continuing musical
journey.
Singles Spotlight
Bayo
Michael Brun featuring Strong G, Baky,
and J. Perry (Kid Coconut)
“Bayo” in Haitian Kweyol means “to give,” and
with this new single from Haiti-born EDM DJ
Michael Brun, Haiti is giving the world a lesson
in what the country is and what it represents
today. A spoken phrase in the song’s music
video translates to “Haiti is like a pulse for the
rest of the world,” and this new wave of music
talent from the first black republic has taken
that statement to heart. Brun, who has a Haitian
father and Guyanese mother, along with fellow
Haitian MCs Strong G, Baky, and J. Perry, also
represents the multi-hued reality of the people
of the island. Not that it matters much, but this
celebratory dance music fused with elements of
indigenous rara and konpa gives an updated look
and sound to an island that has been a centre
of African diaspora culture for centuries. It
recalibrates our concept of modern Haiti. “Bayo”
is that beauty and potential “sonified.”
GEBE Wuk Up
King Kembe (self-released)
Sint Maarten Carnival will happen in May, and
“neither hurricane, nor rain, nor heat, nor
darkness” — with apologies to Herodotus — will
stop the celebrations on the island nation in
its post–Hurricane Irma recovery. And part of
that celebration is the release of new songs
that reflect the Windward Islands’ and Dutch
Caribbean’s take on soca, driven by a high beatsper-minute
rhythm and urgent authentic vibe
devoid of over-sampled electronic sounds.
“GEBE Wuk Up” is a funny ditty about the
unsure and unfortunate encounters of a couple
dancing right through a seemingly familiar
occurrence of electricity blackouts on the island
— GEBE is the government-owned electricity
company. Nothing stops the “wuk up” in the
dark! Reference to regular power cuts in this
season of renewal in Sint Maarten, when the
power company admits to “doing its best to
restore some normality,” is the wry prod that
makes this song unforgettable.
Don’t Make Me Wait
Sting and Shaggy (A&M Records)
Sting, frontman for seminal 1980s band The
Police, joins Mr Boombastic himself, Shaggy,
for a collaboration that has super hit potential
written all over it. This first single off the
forthcoming new joint album 44/876 oozes with
a sure-fire confidence and sonic familiarity that
suggests these two stars are on the right path
for crossover success on the reggae and pop
charts. “Don’t Make Me Wait” has the feeling
of Marley’s “Waiting in Vain” — resisting waiting
must be a Jamaican preoccupation — but the
song lyrics channel the feeling that love can’t be
rushed, and when the time is ripe, good things
will come. Sting’s voice has that timbre that
whispers sexily and rises to pierce at the higher
registers, while Shaggy’s swinging dancehall
chatting has a commanding presence that
makes you listen up and sing along. The result is
a duet that responds positively to the modern
empathetic understanding that all men have to
#WaitForLove.
Reviews by Nigel A. Campbell
WWW.CARIBBEAN-AIRLINES.COM
31

cookup
Some
like it
hot
For many Trinis — and
others in the Caribbean — a
meal isn’t complete without
one essential condiment:
pepper sauce. And T&T’s
hot peppers have become
world famous for their
tongue-searing heat.
Franka Philip reports
Illustration by Shalini Seereeram
Bertie Steuart was an affable Trinidadian
salesman whose passion was sport. He played
cricket, football, table tennis, and tennis. At
the famous Queen’s Park Cricket Club, where
he was a member, he was known as “Sporting
Sam,” and in his youth he represented Trinidad
and Tobago at hockey. But there was a side to Bertie Steuart that
even his wife didn’t know until they’d been married for a long
while — he was a very good cook.
“Bertie had a sweet hand,” says his wife Allana. “I didn’t even
know he could cook until fifteen years into our marriage.” It was
this sweet hand that led Bertie to experiment with making the
product that would come to define his legacy: a tasty pepper
sauce.
It was by accident that Bertie started selling his pepper sauce
in the mid-2000s. When he hired Wayne, a man from his neighbourhood,
as a gardener, he found out he did not have a refrigerator
at home. This bothered Bertie, who decided his family should
raise funds by selling his pepper sauce to buy a fridge for Wayne.
Many hot peppers and three blenders later, Bertie and Allana
realised they were on to something, and decided to start a small
business selling pepper sauce. At first, friends and family were
the main customers, then one day a big restaurant came calling.
“We started by going to small specialty shops, people started
calling us and saying, gosh, I really like the pepper sauce. It
was only when a guy from the American restaurant chain Tony
Roma’s came to us and said, ‘I like this pepper sauce and I’d like
it in the restaurant,’ that we realised how good it really was.”
After Bertie died in 2016, Allana kept the business going.
Nowadays, the Steuarts’ three products — Original Pepper
Sauce, Scorpion Pepper Sauce, and Pimento Sauce — are found
in supermarkets and gourmet food shops across T&T. Bertie’s
is becoming a popular choice for Trinis who live abroad, too,
as more of them take the products back home to colder climes.
Most pepper sauce makers in T&T use Scotch Bonnet,
Scorpion, and Moruga Red peppers. This country’s hot
peppers have a fantastic reputation, not just for their
heat, but for their deep flavour.
One farmer who has won international plaudits for his peppers
is Nawaz Karim. The thirty-four-year-old, who supplies
pepper makers like Bertie’s, has won awards in North America
for his produce. In a 2016 interview with the T&T Guardian, he
explained the reach of his crop. “Hot peppers from our farm
in Trinidad were voted by buyers as the best in New York and
Miami. Buyers there had also been importing peppers from
Mexico and Costa Rica. We ship out between two hundred and
three hundred forty-pound bags of peppers twice a week. Our
aim is to increase this to between eight hundred and 1,200 bags.”
The Moruga Red is a creation of the Caribbean Agricultural
Research and Development Institute (CARDI), which is
dedicated to improving and diversifying strains of agricultural
products in the Caribbean. Karim’s Moruga Reds have about
one quarter the heat of the Scorpion, which is listed among the
world’s hottest peppers. Karim says they are popular because of
their “nice sting and strong flavour.”
32 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM

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Some of the world’s hottest peppers originate in
Trinidad. Websites for hot pepper specialists like
Pepperhead.com and Pepperscale.com have listed
the Moruga Scorpion, Seven-Pot Barrackpore,
Seven-Pot Jonah, Seven-Pot Brain Strain, and
Seven-Pot Douglah (a.k.a. Chocolate Seven-Pot)
varieties as among the world’s fiercest. Many of
these peppers are not sold to the public, as they’re
used as components of products like pepper spray
and barnacle-resistant paints for the marine
industry.
But Trinidad’s peppers are also a huge draw
for pepper sauce makers in other countries,
like the UK.
Hot and spicy peppers have been a longtime
obsession for Mark Gevaux, the East
Londoner known as “The Ribman.” I first met
Gevaux in London around 2010, on a trip to
Brick Lane in search of the legendary Jewishstyle
bagel filled with hot salt beef. I got my bagel,
but I also discovered Gevaux’s stall, where he sells
pulled pork sandwiches and tasty ribs every Sunday.
What I wasn’t prepared for was his exceptional
pepper sauce, with the cheeky name Holy F*ck. It
was one of the best I’d ever tasted.
Some of the world’s hottest
peppers originate in
Trinidad. Websites for hot
pepper specialists have
listed the Moruga Scorpion
and other varieties as
among the world’s fiercest
“Most of the time I felt like I was born in the
wrong country,” says Gevaux of his hot pepper
obsession. “I’ve always liked hot stuff, but when I
was growing up thirty-five years ago, there wasn’t
that much around. You had to go to an Indian
restaurant to get your spice kick.”
Gevaux started his business after being let
go from his butchery job. He started selling his
slow-cooked ribs at farmers’ markets, and began
making hot sauces when he couldn’t find a good
store-bought option. He disliked what he describes
as the overuse of vinegar in most of the sauces on
the shelf, and the taste he was after was simple:
pepper and spices.
By trial and error, he eventually found the right
formula, and the perfect combination of peppers.
That was the product he called Holy F*ck, named
because Gevaux noticed it was “one of the first
How hot is hot?
The Scoville Scale is a measure, named after Wilbur
L. Scoville, of the chilli pepper’s heat. Put simply,
it measures the concentration of the chemical
compound capsaicin. Capsaicin is the beautiful
natural chemical that brings the heat and makes
your forehead sweat, your tongue burn, and your
stomach ache. To measure the concentration of
capsaicin, a solution of a chilli pepper’s extract is
diluted in sugar water until the “heat” is no longer
detectable to a panel of tasters. A rating of zero
Scoville Heat Units (SHUs) means there is no heat
detectable.
To illustrate how hot some peppers are, pure
capsaicin is 16,000,000 SHU. Relative to that, the
Moruga Scorpion measures 2,009,231 SHU and the
Scotch Bonnet comes in with a rating of 325,000 SHU.
things customers would say after tasting it for the first time.”
As his popularity grew, Gevaux needed to quickly find an alternative venue
for making his sauce. “I used to make it at home, about twenty or thirty bottles
at a time. I had to stop, because my neighbours would complain — they’d be
coughing up their lungs in the lift, the pepper was so strong,” he says with a
laugh.
Over the years, The Ribman has produced three more pepper sauces,
Christ on a Bike, Holy Mother of God, and Judas Is Scary Hot — the latter
two eliciting raised eyebrows from his Roman Catholic wife. And, of course,
Gevaux uses Caribbean peppers as the base for his sauces.
“The best peppers for many sauces are Scotch Bonnets, because of the
fruity heat. It’s just amazing, I love it,” he says. “I think most people can tolerate
it if cooked right. Scotch Bonnets are a fantastic and beautiful pepper.” He
also uses Trinidad’s Moruga Scorpions, Dorset Nagas, and Carolina Reapers.
Gevaux says a lot of his customers are from pepper-loving cultures —
Indians, Africans, and West Indians. He hopes to reach a wider audience, as
his sauces will soon be distributed to butchers’ shops all across the UK.
Servicing the diaspora is a tempting prospect for the folks at Bertie’s also,
but at the moment they have enough of a challenge to keep the domestic
market satisfied.
In 2017, the supply of fresh peppers in Trinidad was compromised by flooding
caused by Tropical Storm Bret in June and other freak flooding incidents
later in the year. There is also a shortage of foreign exchange that has affected
glass bottle manufacturers.
“If we were lucky enough to get into another market, and they said they
liked the product and wanted a container a month, it’s not only the peppers —
where are we getting the bottles, the caps? We would now have to buy years’
supplies of that,” Allana Steuart says. “We have to organise ourselves within
this small territory to make sure we have it covered, and start working more
closely with farmers when we see the opportunity.”
So for now, foreign-based pepper sauce connoisseurs will just have to ask
for someone to throw a couple of bottles in their suitcase if they want their
Bertie’s fix. n
34
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Immerse
courtesy tessa mars
36 Closeup
Full free
42 Snapshot
Caribbean by proxy
44 Backstory
The story of a city
Pi Piti, by Tessa Mars (2017, mixed media on canvas, 20.32 cm x 15.24 cm)

closeup
Full free
The bright colours and apparently quirky
characters in her paintings belie the
complicated ideas — about identity, history,
and freedom — explored by Haitian artist
Tessa Mars. Her country’s revolutionary
history and her own family’s intellectual
heritage inform Mars’s work, writes
Shereen Ali, as does her obsession with
solving problems and riddles
Ideas ripple like silent barracudas beneath the surface of Tessa Mars’s paintings.
And those ideas — about identity, womanhood, and Haitian culture — are
challenging some conventions of what it means to be a free woman in Haiti.
In one painting (Dream of Freedom, Dream of Death, 2016), a naked woman
with red horns and blue-green scales on her arms and legs stares at you
squarely in the face, while she holds a machete plunged between her own
breasts. Mysterious stars radiate from behind her back. This startling image is
perhaps Mars’s best known. The figure, whom Tessa calls “Tessalines”, is based on
a stylised, magical version of the artist herself, merged with Vodou references and
memories of the revolutionary figure of Jean-Jacques Dessalines (1758–1806), the
first ruler of an independent Haiti. And you’d better beware: because Tessalines is a
free warrior woman, with two enormous bull’s horns on her head, wielding a sharp
cutlass she is unafraid to use.
“This character of Tessalines I first created in Trinidad, where I spent three
months at a residency at Alice Yard in 2015,” says Mars, speaking via Skype from
her home in Port-au-Prince. “Tessalines is an alter ego, a fusion of myself and characteristics
of the father of the Haitian revolution, Dessalines. So she is about finding
my hero, my revolutionary side, and trying to place myself in Haitian history”, Mars
explains.
“But in this painting, my starting point was the Declaration of Independence,
when the formerly enslaved people were declaring that they would rather live free or
die. And I was interested in what that might mean for us today.
“What does freedom mean for us in contemporary Haitian society?” asks Mars.
“We have historical freedom from the coloniser, but we are facing new forms of
dependency from outside, whether economic or political . . . I also started to think
about the freedom of self-expression, which is the freedom to express your identity
to the fullest, and the risks that are associated with that, because whatever you may
36 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM

Courtesy Tessa Mars
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37

Previous page
Converstion with Hector
H (2015, acrylic on canvas,
65.3 x 65.3 cm)
Above Tessa Mars at work
in her studio
Above right The artist’s
mother, writer Kettly Mars
Right Tessa Mars’s greatgrandfather,
Jean-Price
Mars
choose to express that is outside of what people
consider the norms, there is potential for [a kind of]
death to come with it, due to misunderstandings or
rejection of what you show to the world.”
It can be a social death, or a very literal death,
the artist says, because you can still die in Haiti
today for expressing political views. She mentions
corruption, and how much easier it is to just go
with the flow than to be critical of things that are
going wrong. She says although everyone knows
about some issues, people are afraid to discuss
them out loud. She notes that although Haitian
politicians of today often try to identify with Haiti’s
heroic past, it can also be a way to avoid talking
about real issues: patriotic discourse can often
mask issues of present-day poverty and misery.
She asks: “What does Independence translate to
for the youth of Haiti right now? Although we are
fighters, many Haitians are fleeing from the island,
fleeing from the first black republic.”
Despite this, Mars feels great pride in her
Haitian identity, and in the proud legacy of
freedom-fighting: Haiti is the only country
in modern times where enslaved people successfully
took their freedom by force, during the Revolution
between 1791 and 1804.
“I was born and raised in Haiti,” says Mars. “I
grew up in Port-au-Prince. I still live in the same
home where I was born, which has been in our family
for multiple generations. I grew up in a family of
thinkers in Haiti, and the family name is associated
with literature.”
Her mother is the celebrated Haitian poet and
novelist Kettly Mars, whose 2010 novel Saisons
Courtesy Tessa Mars
sauvages (Savage Seasons) explores the malevolent
dictatorship of François Duvalier. Meanwhile, the
famous Haitian ethnographer, doctor, politician,
and diplomat Jean Price-Mars (1876–1969), who
championed the Négritude movement in Haiti
and was the first prominent defender of Vodou as
a religion, was Tessa Mars’s great-grandfather on
her father’s side.
“The need to connect with the African/
black part of our cultural heritage was one of the
most important aspects of his legacy for me,” Mars
says, speaking of his influence. “Jean Price-Mars
studied and did research as a scientist, while
my approach is more intuitive. I am interested
in learning more and understanding where the
traditions come from, and their meaning, but I’ve
gone ‘native’ in a way, and I am more interested in
exploring and experiencing them for myself, and
translating this for others through visual means.”
This family heritage profoundly shaped how
Mars grew up, how she saw the world, and how
she chose to become an artist at the age of seventeen.
She credits her willingness to explore and
courtesy haitian history blog courtesy wikimedia
38 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM

We Are Here II: Dieunie
Taking Root (2016, acrylic
on canvas, 40 x 30 cm)
experiment to the intellectual openness of her
upbringing. “I grew up with the freedom of reading
whatever material I found. I could discover and
understand things for myself. My parents always
encouraged any creative activity, although I didn’t
really decide to be an artist until my last day of
high school.”
As a child, Mars recalls, she’d always liked making
and fixing things. “I just liked doing things with
my hands . . . If my bicycle was broken, I would
find different tools to make it work. It was never a
good repair, but the bike still worked! I liked to find
solutions to physical problems, and make my own
answers to those riddles.”
One of the biggest riddles she addresses in
her artwork is the riddle of her own identity: as
a Haitian, as a woman, as a Vodou believer, and
as an Afro-Caribbean person living in a society
fractured by colonialism and often obsessed with
emigration. Her work through visual metaphors
often confronts thorny issues such as violence, the
need to preserve memories, the risks of expressing
your opinions freely, or the contrast between
Haitians’ historical dream of freedom and current
realities.
We Are Here II: Dieunie Taking Root is
a painting Mars made in 2016. It
shows a clothed woman suspended
underground next to large, deep-probing roots.
Tiny shoots emerge from these massive roots,
just starting to sprout. While the woman’s head is
barely above the ground, the rest of her body is still
buried beneath the surface. It has a scary, surreal,
drowning feel to it.
This painting happened after Tessa Mars got
to know a Haitian immigrant struggling to make
a new life for herself in Aruba: “She was cleaning
a lady’s house where I was doing a residency. I
asked her about her life.” The encounter led Mars
to reflect on the challenges of being uprooted, and
the struggle to put down new roots in another
The character of
“Tessalines” is a free warrior
woman, with two enormous
bull’s horns on her head,
wielding a sharp cutlass she
is unafraid to use
Courtesy Tessa Mars
society. “It can be like you are drowning . . . Just
keeping your head above water [is difficult],” she
comments.
There are upbeat paintings, too. Mars’s 2015
painting Nan Rara (with Marching Band) has a far
more playful, cheeky feel, with a happy, naked
woman celebrating herself — all she wears is a
colourful cloth snake/penis, a shak-shak, a pair
of sunglasses, and a toothy grin. She could be any
happy reveller during Carnival, except for the fact
that she dispenses with a costume, and bares it all.
She seems like a happy, modern, Haitian version of
the Stone Age Venus of Willendorf statuette, a universal
symbol of fertility, confidence, and creative
possibility. Mars says taking pleasure in the flesh
can be part of celebrating a joyful appreciation of
yourself, of taking power, and being whoever you
want to be.
Mars admires other young contemporary
artists from the Caribbean, such as Jamaican
Ebony Patterson, Sheena Rose from Barbados,
and Kelly Sinnapah Mary from Guadeloupe. She’s
also influenced by Haitian precursors. Another of
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39

her paintings with beautiful colours and a sense
of magical realism is Conversation with Hector
H, from 2015. It is Mars’s homage to one of her
favourite artists, Hector Hyppolite (1894–1948),
who painted Maitresse Erzulie in 1948. Hyppolite
was a third-generation Vodou priest who worked
as a shoemaker and house painter before taking
up fine art. Mars’s painting portrays herself connecting
with nature and the spirit world through
a magical-looking tree, on which mysterious,
brightly coloured birds and insects rest.
Mars’s formal art career began with a degree
in visual arts from Université Rennes 2 in France,
in 2006. She then worked as a cultural projects
coordinator in Haiti at Fondation AfricAméricA.
Her first exhibit was in 2009, at the Georges
Liautaud Museum in Port-au-Prince, and since
then her work has been shown in Canada, France,
Italy, and the United States. Since 2013 she has
focused on her own artistic career, with recent
work questioning the role of history, customs, and
beliefs in building an individual’s identity. She says
her work now also questions notions of patriotism
and sovereignty in Haiti.
“What does Independence translate to for
the youth of Haiti right now?” asks Tessa
Mars. “Although we are fighters, many
Haitians are fleeing from the island, fleeing
from the first black republic”
Above left Grann A (2017,
mixed media on canvas,
20.32 x 20.32 cm)
Above right Grann U
(2017, mixed media on
canvas, 20.32 x 20.32 cm)
Below left Papa (2017,
mixed media on canvas,
20.32 x 15.24 cm)
Courtesy Tessa Mars
Below right Papa R (2017,
mixed media on canvas,
20.32 x 15.24 cm)
All from the series Those I
Know, Those I Don’t Know:
Dead Aunts and Uncles
40 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM

Courtesy Tessa Mars
yellow ochres, and Caribbean blues. She uses
acrylic paints on canvas in a broadly figurative,
flat, symbolic style, with nods to conventional volume
techniques through light shading. Sometimes
her paintings are made of contour shapes filled
with flat, bright areas of contrasting colours or
textures, rather like a jigsaw puzzle, or even a quilt
stitched together from different elements. At other
times, her images — generally of an individual on
a huge blank or mono-coloured background — are
cartoon-like and graphic, with Vodou, historical,
and personal symbolism converging to declare an
attitude or express a feeling or visual comment.
These paintings summon themes that range
from the very personal need to feel beautiful in
one’s own skin, whatever shape or colour that might
Detail and installation view
of Dress Rehearsal (2017,
mixed media on paper,
dimensions variable)
She has benefitted from five short-term arts
residencies in Aruba, Port of Spain, Quebec, Paris,
and New York, which helped her develop her ideas.
Right now, her big project is working towards a
November 2018 solo exhibition in Port-au-Prince,
to showcase work made during foreign residencies.
In March and April 2018, Mars took part in a
group show in Brooklyn, showing work she made
during her New York residency. Among the pieces
she showed there was her Dress Rehearsal, made of
paper-doll versions of Tessalines in different poses,
as she gets ready to wage war. Mars says this work
celebrates the Battle of Vertières, the last major
battle of the Second War of Haitian Independence,
fought on 18 November, 1803, between formerly
enslaved African people and Napoleon’s French
forces. But Dress Rehearsal is also about bringing
that heritage into one’s own home and daily life,
as we wage our daily battles: “You have the duty of
memory. It is a way of empowering yourself.”
Many of Mars’s paintings share vibrant reds,
Courtesy Tessa Mars
These paintings summon
themes that range from the
very personal need to feel
beautiful in one’s own skin,
to ideas about courage and
overcoming past or present
trauma
be, to ideas about courage and overcoming past or
present trauma. “What interests me about Tessa,”
says veteran artist and arts writer Christopher
Cozier of Trinidad, “is her use of her body and self
as image and sign/symbol to tell her own stories
. . . I think many women in the region have done
this in the past, like, for example, Irénée Shaw’s
earlier work that caused so much consternation
and anxiety in the early 1990s. I am interested in
that struggle for women artists, since the time of
Sybil Atteck [1911–1975] here in Trinidad.” Cozier
asks: “What happens when women take back their
representation on their own terms?”
For Tessa Mars, the answer is clear: art is her
way to tell stories of female empowerment, as well
as to question the status quo and creatively interrogate
her world. n
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41

snapshot
As the 2018 FIFA
World Cup opens in
June — and despite
recent international
controversies with host
Russia — football fans
across the Caribbean will
be tuned in. Except this
year there’s no Caribbean
team to root for — but
there’ll certainly be
Caribbean players, writes
James Ferguson
Caribbean
by proxy
Photography by AGIF/Shutterstock.com
Born in Jamaica, Raheem
Sterling played for England
in the 2014 FIFA World Cup
This year’s FIFA World Cup finals in Russia have almost everything:
eight groups of four nations playing at twelve venues spread across the
world’s largest country, the prospect of controversial video assistant
referee technology, and, finally, a strong whiff of resurrected Cold War
tensions. Only one thing, arguably, is missing — a standard bearer from
the Caribbean.
But, in truth, it has been a while since the region had a representative at a final — in
the shape of Trinidad and Tobago in 2006. And I suppose it’s also worth admitting that
participation by Caribbean nations in World Cup finals has been rather patchy. Cuba
was present in France eighty years ago, in 1938 (and received an 8–0 thrashing from
Sweden), while Haiti made it to West Germany in 1974 and briefly led Italy by a goal to
nil before losing 3–1 and then succumbing by 7–0 to Poland. It then took twenty-four
years for Jamaica’s Reggae Boyz to qualify for France 1998, ending with a creditable
42 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM

2–1 victory over Japan, followed by the
Soca Warriors, who did well to hold Sweden
to a goalless draw before losing twice.
But with no Caribbean nation present
in Russia, there is certainly no shortage of
Caribbean influence among those nations
that have reached the final stages. This
is largely a question of history, with the
countries that once possessed colonies
in the region or who maintain overseas
territories there benefitting from a pool
of Caribbean or Caribbean-descended
footballing talent.
Take England, for example. Although,
at the time of writing, the World Cup
squad has not been officially announced,
it’s quite probable that at least six of the
final twenty-three-man group will be of
Caribbean heritage. Manchester City’s
Raheem Sterling is one of the few players
to have been born there, originating from
the tough Maverley district of Jamaica’s
capital, Kingston, before moving with his
mother to London, aged five. More common
is the experience of a player such
as Daniel Sturridge, currently on loan at
West Bromwich Albion from Liverpool.
All four of his grandparents were Jamaicaborn,
and came to the UK as part of the
“Windrush generation” of Caribbean
migrants who settled in the 1950s and 60s.
Family links remain strong, and Sturridge
is a frequent visitor to Jamaica, where he
has played an important part in funding an
educational charity in Portmore.
The Jamaican football authorities have
sometimes tried to recruit distant but eligible
sons and grandsons into the national
team, as was the case with Robbie Earle
and Jason Euell in the 1998 World Cup
finals. But all too often, the lure of playing
for England is too strong, as when in 2015
left back Danny Rose declined such an
invitation from the Jamaican Football
Federation. He and Kyler Walker, also of
Jamaican heritage, will probably have a
part to play in Russia. But if Jamaica leads
the way in boasting links to the current
England squad — Theo Walcott, Alex
Oxlade-Chamberlain, and Nathan Redmond
are just a few more with such connections
— other Caribbean nations can
also lay claim to generational footballing
pedigree. Liverpool’s Nathaniel Clyne,
for instance, is of Grenadian ancestry,
while Ruben Loftus-Cheek, whose father
migrated from Guyana, is part of a larger
footballing family including half-brothers
Carl and Leon Cort, who played for the
Guyana national team.
If most of the
Caribbean’s
footballing diaspora
is concentrated in
Europe, there are still
small and sometimes
strange outposts
nearer to home
Where would French football
be, you might ask, without
the input over the years of
Caribbean-born or Caribbean-descended
players such as Thierry Henry, Lilian
Thuram, and William Gallas? Like England,
France was a major protagonist in the
transatlantic slave economy, but rather than
granting its former colonies independence,
it incorporated them into the French nation
as overseas departments. Players born in
Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Guyane, or
with parents or grandparents from these
territories, are hence French, many of the
latter growing up in the gritty workingclass
suburbs that surround Paris. Anthony
Martial, who plays for Manchester United,
is of Guadeloupean descent and was
born in the suburb of Massy, not far from
Thierry Henry’s hometown of Les Ulis,
where the local football club has turned
out a succession of stars, including Henry,
Martial, and Senegal-born Patrice Evra.
The current crop of French Caribbean
footballers originates from all over the
French mainland, with most of them
now second-generation migrants from
the overseas departments. Real Madrid
centre-back Raphaël Varane was born
in the northern city of Lille after his
father Gaston left Martinique in search of
work in 1976. Alexandre Lacazette, who
currently plies his trade at Arsenal, is
known by friends as “Gwada”, in tribute
to the island of Guadeloupe, from which
his parents Alfred and Rose migrated to
Lyon. But in a more recent development,
players with French Caribbean roots are
now facing increased competition from
those descended from other parts of
France’s former empire. Likely starters in
Russia will be a formidable combination
of Paul Pogba (Guinea), Kylian Mbappé
(Cameroon), and N’Golo Kanté (Mali).
Holland’s unexpected failure to qualify
means that spectators will miss out on
that country’s plethora of Caribbeandescended
talent. Of Surinamese background
are Giorginio Wijnaldum (Liverpool)
and Michel Vorm (Tottenham),
while Leroy Fer (Swansea) has parents
from Curaçao. They follow in an illustrious
line of footballers from Suriname that
includes names such as Edgar Davids,
Frank Rijkaard, and Ruud Gullitt.
If most of the Caribbean’s footballing
diaspora is concentrated in Europe,
there are still small and sometimes
strange outposts nearer to home. Firsttime
Central American qualifiers Panama
have recently featured players with such
non-Latin surnames as Harold Cummings,
Armando Cooper, and Alfredo Stephens.
These are the descendants of Jamaicans
who moved to the isthmus in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
to work on the construction of the Panama
Canal. While many of the estimated
100,000 labourers returned home, some
remained, and became integrated into
Panamanian society. And next door, Costa
Rica’s 2018 squad is likely to include
ex-Arsenal forward Joel Campbell and
Rodney Wallace, names that look back
to the nineteenth-century migration of
thousands of Jamaicans to work on a
railway project.
So while there may be no Caribbean
team in Russia this year, there are many
players whose roots lie in the region, and
its long history of movement and migration.
Whoever wins the cup — and France
is among the favourites — there will
be much to interest viewers across the
region, and many will of course support
Brazil. But perhaps we should also not
forget that it was Trinidad and Tobago’s
2–1 qualifying round victory that put the
superpower United States out of the finals
for the first time in thirty-two years . . . n
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43

ackstory
The story
of a city
Stephen Stuempfle’s connection to Port of Spain
began with a chance childhood encounter with
a touring steelband. Now, decades later, the US
scholar has published an ambitious and highly
readable account of Trinidad and Tobago’s capital
from the late nineteenth century to Independence.
As Judy Raymond learns, Stuempfle sees Port of
Spain as a cultural hotbed full of potential
44 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM

Eastern downtown Port of
Spain from the Laventille Hills,
in the cocoa boom era. Prince
Street leads to Brunswick
(later renamed Woodford)
Square, with Trinity Cathedral
to the left. Postcard published
by G.G. Belgrave
courtesy historymiami museum/stephen stuempfle
courtesy stephen stuempfle
In the twilight, wild deer tiptoe between the trees outside
Stephen Stuempfle’s suburban home in Bloomington, not far
from the sprawling, equally leafy campus of the University
of Indiana, where he works as an ethnomusicologist.
But in his head, Stuempfle walks the streets of Port
of Spain. He’s written a book about the city, published in
April by the University of the West Indies Press: Port of Spain:
The Construction of a Caribbean City, 1888–1962. Almost five
hundred pages long, it covers the period from Trinidad’s cocoa
boom to Independence, an era that stretched, he explains, from
“the height of British power at the turn of the twentieth century
through decolonisation.” Thus Port of Spain’s evolution into a
modern capital city “was interrelated, both practically and symbolically,
with the building of a society and a new nation-state.”
Though Stuempfle is an academic — and he does include
some theorising about cities and development — this book is
Stuempfle knows Port of Spain well: he
lived in Calcutta Street, in the city’s
western St James district, from 1987,
while researching his PhD thesis on
steelpan
hugely readable. It’s a compilation of deliciously detailed portraits
of the people, areas, buildings, and events that featured
in Port of Spain’s growth and change in that period, such as the
American army taking over King George V Park as a camp in
the Second World War, and the campaign promoting the ultramodern
building materials (reinforced concrete, aluminium
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45

courtesy Alma Jordan Library, University of the West Indies/stephen stuempfle
louvres, and tiled floors!) of Diamond Vale to lure house-buyers
to this spanking-new dormitory suburb. All these vivid minutiae
are set against the social and political events of the day that led
to them.
Stuempfle records, for instance, how engaged the people of
Port of Spain were with plans for a war memorial, eventually
erected in 1924. First came a debate — from 1916 — over
placing it downtown on Broadway or uptown in the “Little
Savannah” (the latter won out; it’s now Memorial Park). Then
there were squabbles over whether a black sentry (from the West
India Regiment) or white (from the Merchants’ and Planters’
Many of the buildings
Stuempfle writes about
have been torn down or
merely ignored to the
point where they collapse
from sheer neglect; his
book is, inadvertently, a
memorial to many
Contingent) should be posted at a more
prominent corner for the unveiling (the
latter almost refused to turn up at all if
not given pride of place, but eventually conceded). Later there
was ardent discussion of whether citizens should salute or lift
their hats as they passed: the inhabitants, of all classes, were
enormously proud of the memorial.
Stuempfle resurrects the forgotten career of architect Herbert
Brinsley, who changed the city as dramatically as George Brown
before him and Colin Laird afterwards. Brinsley, who flourished
in the 1930s, designed the Globe Cinema, a new hall for Bishop
Anstey High School, the Neal and Massy Garage, the Alston
Building, the Treasury Building, the Electricity Board’s transfer
station at Frederick and Park Streets, and many houses. The
Above Marine (later
Independence) Square at
Frederick Street, before
1895. Postcard published
by Muir, Marshall and
Company
Right Plan of barrack yards
inside the block of Queen,
Charlotte, and George
Streets, below the Eastern
Market. Detail from sheet
eight of Insurance Plan of
Port of Spain, Trinidad, by
Chas. E. Goad
46

stories of Queen’s Hall, the city’s cinemas, the Art Deco renovation
of the Queen’s Park Hotel, the deep-water harbour, the city
corporation’s 1914 silver jubilee celebrations — Stuempfle tells
all with a zeal that makes them fascinating.
He himself knows Port of Spain well: he lived in Calcutta
Street, in the city’s western St James district, from 1987,
while researching his PhD thesis on steelpan. He enjoyed
the liveliness of the neighbourhood, “from the late-night food on
the Western Main Road to the annual observance of Hosay.” He
got around by taxi, careful to learn the protocols: “I worked hard to
gain competence as a taxi passenger: learning the names of spots
along the road, knowing when to request a drop (not too soon, not
too late), and understanding when to proffer payment (depending
on the size of your bill and other factors).” He also met his future
wife, Denise, during his eighteen months in Trinidad, and though
they live in the US, they return regularly to visit family and friends.
Stuempfle’s first, indirect encounter with Trinidad came
much earlier, through steelpan: when he was about ten, Tripoli
came to perform in his home town of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.
Though not particularly musically talented himself, he was
fascinated. He later began visiting Brooklyn for the Labour
Day Carnival, did a course in the folklore department of the
University of Pennsylvania that included Caribbean music,
and discovered that Tobagonian folklorist and anthropologist
J.D. Elder had done his doctorate on Trinidadian music there.
Stuempfle himself studied the social dynamics and symbolism
of pan; a version of his doctoral thesis was published in 1995 as
The Steelband Movement: The Forging of a National Art in Trinidad
and Tobago. In what reads now like a harbinger of this new
courtesy Digital Library of the Caribbean/stephen stuempfle
book, it begins with an affectionate description of Laventille
Hill and its view over the city, in the days when Desperadoes’
panyard was still perched near the summit, and the panmen —
once regarded as badjohns themselves — hadn’t yet fled their
own territory for fear of gang-related crime.
That book is more academic than this one, though Stuempfle
was a curator at the Historical Museum of Southern Florida
in Miami for over a decade, and has been at the University
of Indiana since 2008: it’s the headquarters of the Society for
Ethnomusicology, of which he is executive director.
But Port of Spain, though scholarly, is a labour of love.
Stuempfle began researching it (in his own time and at his own
expense) in 2005. At that time, the city was changing rapidly,
and “like many people, I was astonished by the disappearance of
large portions of the built environment. I then tried to figure out
how to write a book that would capture something of the city’s
unique geography, architecture, and way of life.”
During his earlier sojourn in Trinidad, Stuempfle had spent
time in panyards, gone to steelband events, and interviewed
panmen. The years of work on this book entailed walking the
city streets taking photos, as well as documentary research at
the National Archives, the University of the West Indies, and the
National Library. Military sources at the US National Archives
and the New York Public Library enriched his account of how the
Americans commandeered large chunks of the capital, as well
as the better-remembered airbases in northeast Trinidad and
the naval base at the northwestern peninsula of Chaguaramas.
He draws extensively, too, on local newspapers and on fiction
by V.S. Naipaul, Samuel Selvon, and Ralph de Boissière, as well
as nineteenth-century visitors such as Anthony Trollope and
Charles Kingsley.
Stuempfle began writing in 2012, making time for this private
passion alongside his job on campus. His next project is on
an even grander scale: “a study of general patterns in Trinidad’s
basic landscapes, including forests, plantations, villages, and
towns,” and examining, as he did with the capital city, how
its people regarded and shaped their environments during the
twentieth century.
The most surprising part of his research, he says, was the
“rhetoric of progress . . . shared by people of very different
socioeconomic backgrounds and political views. Many people
believed they could improve themselves in the city and also
improve the city itself,” he found. “There was a strong sense of
civic consciousness and pride.”
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47

That optimism is also the most surprising thing about the
book. Although not a native, Stuempfle shares much of
its past inhabitants’ feeling about the city — probably
more than many of those who live or work in it now, or the
conservationists close to despair over successive governments’
indifference to the city’s and the country’s built heritage. Many
of the buildings Stuempfle writes about have been torn down
or merely ignored to the point where they collapse from sheer
neglect; his book is, inadvertently, a memorial to many. Yet he still
sees Port of Spain as “a city of extraordinary cultural vitality,” and
writes of it with an undaunted, infectious enthusiasm.
His own favourite area is Belmont, in the nineteenth century
the home of free Africans, and later a respectable working-class
district. Stuempfle admires “its long history of communitybuilding
and its dense landscape of houses and narrow streets,
which helps foster social interaction. Also, my wife grew up
there during the 1950s and 1960s, and I love listening to her stories
about her home on Erthig Road, the neighbourhood families,
the local shops, and the Carnival masquerades.”
He also “greatly appreciates” the Botanic Gardens, established
over two hundred years ago by Governor Sir Ralph
Woodford, once a source of great pride, and even now quietly
Above Port of Spain’s New City
Hall, completed 1961. Postcard
published by H.O. Thomas
Below Queen’s Park Hotel, with
the Art Deco central addition
completed 1939. Postcard
published by Y. De Lima & Co.
Stuempfle’s own favourite area is
Belmont, in the nineteenth century
the home of free Africans, and later a
respectable working-class district
courtesy stephen stuempfle
courtesy Alma Jordan Library, University
of the West Indies/ stephen stuempfle
cherished. “The gardens’ botanists and caretakers do excellent
work,” he says — perhaps overstating the case a little — and
adding, significantly, “the grounds remain the quietest place in
Port of Spain.”
Stuempfle retains his touching faith in the city’s people
and the theory that, sometimes consciously, sometimes not,
they shaped Port of Spain to suit their needs and desires.
That view of its history also extends to its future. His own
love of the city, he says, “continues to deepen the more I
learn about it,” although he understands why living in it
year-round can be stressful (he doesn’t list the reasons, such
as crime, potholes, lack of parking space, traffic, inadequate
drainage, an erratic water supply . . . the list can seem
endless). Stuempfle even believes Port of Spain’s future is
brighter than its past.
“The goodwill and resourcefulness of the city’s inhabitants,”
he says, “will eventually prevail over the violence and destructiveness.”
n
48 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM

ARRIVE
Oscar C. Williams/shutterstock.com
50
Round Trip
Love is in the air
58 Neighbourhood
Kralendijk, Bonaire
60
Personal Tour
“Just drive all around
the island”
Grenada, the Spice Island, is increasingly famous for its cocoa and chocolate, too

ound trip
Love is
in the air
A wedding on the beach, an island
honeymoon — for many people, they
sound like a dream. But in the Caribbean,
it’s a dream that easily comes true
Historic Fort King George
overlooking Scarborough in
Tobago makes a regal setting for
any couple’s wedding photos
50 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM

A
warm breeze blows off
the sea, and the brilliant
blue water is fringed by
gently crashing waves.
Barefoot, sand between
your toes, you gaze into
the eyes of your beloved, and say “I do.”
Your friends and family cheer, the rum
punch starts to flow, and you dance the
night away under a canopy of tropical
stars.
It may sound too good to be true, but
here in the Caribbean, it’s not. Wedding
tourism is growing across the islands,
and sometimes locals also want the fullblown
romantic experience of reciting
their vows against the backdrop of the
glittering Caribbean Sea.
Luckily, there’s any number of hotels
and resorts that can throw you a dream
wedding, professional planners who can
create your own unique special day,
designers to provide dresses and suits
— or bikinis and trunks, if you take a
less formal route — and caterers to keep
you fed and watered, island style.
Then when the big day — and the big
night! — are over, you have your pick
of honeymoon experiences. Maybe you
want to explore a historic city full of
music and art, or get out into nature, or
snuggle into an island cruise. Or maybe
you just want to lock yourself away in
your cabana, answering the door only for
room service. There are so many ways to
make your romantic dream come true.
relatestudios.com
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51

Seventeenth-century St Nicholas
Abbey in Barbados is a storybook
backdrop for an unexpected
proposal
Barbados Tourism Marketing Inc/ visitbarbados.org
52 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM

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53

That diamond sparkles even
brighter under the golden
Jamaican sun. Syrece Francis
and her bridesmaids Monique
Donaldson, Keisha Amato, and
Marsha-Lee Hutchinson share
the excitement in Kingston’s
Hope Gardens
Kason Stephenson/Kase Studios
54 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM

A candlelit dinner for two, on the
beach in Antigua — no better
way to start the honeymoon
JoshoJosho /shutterstock.com
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55

Most Caribbean countries welcome
wedding tourists, but as you plan your
big day, make sure you investigate the
formal requirements to be legally wed,
which vary from country to country.
Your travel agent or the local tourist
board should be able to provide all
the information you need, including
necessary documents. n
IVASHstudio /shutterstock.com
The historic palaces of Old
Havana, alive with the sound
of Cuban music, are even more
exciting to explore with the right
company
56 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM

FULL SERVICE
UNCOMPLICATED
TOBAGO
WEDDING CATERING
@cafecocotobago
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868.790.8030
niceandsweettgo@gmail.com
www.niceandsweettgo.com
Weddings,
Romantic Occasions,
Breakfast, Graduations,
Family Reunions, Catering etc.
1st left off Pigeon Point Rd.
Crown Point, Tobago
Tel: (868) 639-0996
reservations@cafe-coco.biz
Intimate Tobago Weddings
create memories in paradise
Book your venue for:
Weddings, Christenings, Anniversaries, and other events
Packages include
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(868) 660 7748/395 8330
Black Rock • Tobago • Tel: 868-639-0361
www.stonehavenvillas.com
reservations@stonehavenvillas.com
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57

neighbourhood
andy troy/shutterstock.com
Paulo MIguel costa/shutterstock.com
Kralendijk,
Bonaire
Built around a seventeenth-century fort,
Bonaire’s capital is as quiet as it is colourful,
and a gateway for visitors drawn to the island’s
extraordinary dive sites
Streetscape
With a population of just over three
thousand and few buildings over two
storeys tall, Kralendijk has an atmosphere
some call sleepy, others call laidback.
The downtown area — “Playa,” to
most locals — is a short stretch of often
brightly painted buildings with shops
and offices. On the seafront, Wilheminaplein
— Wilhemina Square, named for
the former Dutch queen — looks over
the turquoise waters of the harbour, and
is also the location of a small vegetable
market with austere columns and arches.
The town lighthouse and the Catholic
church, St Bernard’s, are painted the
same eye-catching orange. Just beside
the church, the Terramar Museum gives
a concise overview of Bonaire’s history,
including archaeological artefacts.
Saturday excursion
Saturday is market day in many parts
of the Caribbean, and for Bonaireans
that means heading to the small inland
town of Rincon, about seven miles north
of Kralendijk (above left). The weekly
market is a cornucopia of fruits and vegetables,
local delicacies and crafts, flowers
and garden plants, and much more.
When you’re done shopping, explore the
town, Bonaire’s oldest surviving settlement
(founded in the sixteenth century).
58 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM

jung hsuan/shutterstock.com
procy/shutterstock.com
Take the plunge
The pristine waters surrounding the
island — sometimes described as ginclear
— and its coral reefs teeming with
marine species, heavily protected since
the early 1970s, make Bonaire one of the
world’s top dive sites, on every scuba
enthusiast’s bucket list. Numerous dive
shops in Kralendijk offer equipment, lessons,
and tours — and, of course, snorkelling
is a good option for those who
prefer to stick to the surface. There are
amazing dive experiences to be had even
within sight of the Kralendijk waterfront.
And if you’re a sociable diver, there’s no
better time to get wet than during the
annual Bonaire Dive Week, running from
26 May to 2 June this year, with a nonstop
programme of activities in and out
of the water.
Look up
An absence of smoke-spewing heavy
industry and relatively little light pollution
mean Bonaire has unusually clear night
skies — so much so that locals talk about
their “Sky Park,” the nightly overhead
display of heavenly bodies. The undeveloped
eastern side of the island is the best
place for stargazing, and Bonaire’s location
near the equator means that, depending
on the time of year, you can see both
Northern and Southern Hemisphere stars
in a single night. So walk with your star
chart — or the digital equivalent on your
smartphone.
A pinch of salt
The perfect Bonaire souvenir? Locally produced sea salt, from the salt pans on the
coast south of Kralendijk (above). You can buy it coarse or finely ground, in jars,
pouches or boxes — and if you’re too useless in the kitchen even to boil water, you
can also find sea salt–infused bath and body products, too. Long after your visit, you
can fill your tub at home and pretend you’re soaking in Bonaire’s crystal waters.
History
Inhabited since about 1,000 CE by the
indigenous Caiquetios — whose intriguing
petroglyphs and rock paintings are
still to be found in caves around the
island — Bonaire was first visited by the
Spanish in 1499. Seizing the island in
1636, Dutch settlers built Fort Oranje to
protect their new colony, and the town
of Kralendijk — “coral dyke” — grew up
around it. For generations, the harvesting of sea salt
was the leading industry, with backbreaking labour
provided by enslaved Africans, under grim conditions,
until Emancipation in 1862.
During the Second Word War, Bonaire was
the location of a US air base and internment
camp for Germans, and many locals worked
as sailors on board oil tankers. A war memorial
in Kralendijk honours those who lost
their lives in U-boat attacks. After the war,
like many other Caribbean islands, Bonaire
turned towards tourism, with
a special focus on diving.
Co-ordinates
12.1º N 68.25º W
Sea level
BONAIRE
Kralendijk
Caribbean Airlines operates daily flights to and from its headquarters at
Piarco International Airport in Trinidad, with connections on other airlines
to Flamingo International Airport in Bonaire
andy troy/shutterstock.com
gail johnson/shutterstock.com
WWW.CARIBBEAN-AIRLINES.COM
59

personal tour
Artist Suelin Low
Chew Tung offers
a tour of her home
island, Grenada, from
beaches to hiking to
the best place to buy
local chocolate
“Just
drive all
around
the island”
charles hossle, courtesy suelin low chew tung
Born and bred in Trinidad,
artist and writer Suelin
Low Chew Tung moved
to Grenada in 1988, and
has become a mover and
shaker in the art scene of
her adopted home.
As a Caribbean person of mixed
heritage — Chinese, African, and Iberian
— Low Chew Tung makes artworks that
revolve around questions of identity,
culture, history, and tradition, and take
the form of mixed media painting, drawings,
and collages. She also illustrates
children’s books.
A lover of travel, Low Chew Tung has
participated in artist’s residencies all over
the world, where she has successfully
introduced Grenadian art and culture
to broader audiences. One particular
trip proved life-changing: in 2013, on a
residency in Haiti, Low Chew Tung met
the Haitian artist Jean Renel Pierre Louis
(a.k.a. Prensnelo). Inspired to start her
own residency programme in Grenada,
Low Chew Tung invited Prensnelo, who
ended up extending his stay — and the
pair were married in July 2014.
Together they now run San Souci Arts
Studio (SSAS), which provides learning
space, a gallery, and self-directed artists’
residencies, ranging in length from two
weeks to a month. These residencies
help promote transnational creative
exchanges, and allow visiting artists time
to undertake new work in visual arts and
writing.
In her spare time, Low Chew Tung
attempts to grow pakchoi, and enjoys
getting together with her family (all thirty
of them) for marathon lunches.
Here’s her personal tour of Grenada.
60 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM

Start with a swim
“I prefer to swim at Morne Rouge — the
smaller bay is close to the world-famous
Grand Anse, but I prefer its serenity for
recharging.
“Other beaches I love: La Sagesse,
with its black sand, and Paradise Beach in
Carriacou.”
Wilmar Photography/Alamy
WWW.CARIBBEAN-AIRLINES.COM 61

courtesy art fabrik
Adventure time
“For a day-trip adventure, I recommend hashing with the Hash House
Harriers on Saturdays. It’s a cross-country run-walk that offers many
opportunities for photos of flora, fauna, hidden treasures, and far-flung
places, as well of people falling into rivers and streams — and, at the
end of the course, drinking your fill of beer at a village rumshop. I’ve
done this trek three times!
“For the not-so-athletic: a tour of our three or four chocolate
factories, and the few ad hoc parish museums, including the one at the
Westerhall rum distillery — with tastings!”
Treat yourself
“The best place to buy a special Grenadian
gift is Art Fabrik on Young Street, in
St George’s. Or, for chocoholics, there’s
the Grenada House of Chocolate across
the street.
“To see and buy contemporary art, Art
Upstairs Gallery, the Susan Mains Gallery,
and the Grenada Arts Council all offer
shows and events. And of course my studio,
the Sans Souci Arts Studio, is where
people can see and buy my own work.”
credit
meagan marchant/shutterstock.com
marci paravia/shutterstock.com
Advertorial
Welcome to the “Spice Isle” of the Caribbean, where everything is
nice! A familiar greeting as you enter the Palladian styled resort. At
the Grenadian by Rex Resorts, a relaxing and memorable stay is
guaranteed as you enjoy this property’s sandy white beach, salt water
lakes, hospitable service, and scrumptious food. We’d love to have you
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Hungry yet?
“For a simple lunch, try the special soup
from Chopstix in Grand Anse. Belmont
Estate does a fantastic buffet, and Good
Food in Grenville makes a great take-away
oil down.
“My favourites for a sumptuous dinner:
Le Phare Bleu, Le Chateau, and Coconut
Beach restaurants.”
62 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM

claudio306/shutterstock.com
Time to unwind
“When I had a car, my favourite way to de-stress
was to just drive all around the island, stopping to
take photos, and buy a drink from the area rumshop
— lots of those! I found that refreshed my spirit and
helped me to reconnect with my island.
“These days I take the local bus to Grand Etang
Forest Reserve, to sit by the lake or walk in the
rainforest, then have tea with my sister, who lives
nearby. She raises chickens, rabbits, and goats,
while her husband makes artisanal bread baked in
a wood-burning oven that they both designed and
built.
“When I’m really in need of a total break, I take
the ferry to Carriacou.” n
Caribbean Airlines operates daily flights to
Maurice Bishop International Airport in Grenada,
with connections to other destinations in the
Caribbean and North America
We can make your
dreams of owning a home
in Grenada a Reality.
C 2 1 G R E N A D A . C O M
T. +1 473 440 5227
M. +1 473 415 5228
E. paula@c21grenada.com
Grand Anse, St. George, Grenada
64 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM

ENGAGE
Daniel-Alvarez/shutterstock.com
66 Plugin
Tech to the people
68 Discover
Uncovering a kingdom
70
On This Day
Sin city
The palace of Sans-Souci in Haiti, one of the Caribbean’s most significant historical sites

plugin
Tech
to the
people
Create Caribbean, a digital humanities
project based in Dominica, works to make
tech tools for education and research
available to all. When Hurricane Maria hit
in September 2017, the project lost its
headquarters and equipment — but with
many helping hands, founder Schuyler
Esprit is putting the pieces back together.
Lisa Allen-Agostini reports
Photograph courtesy Schuyler Esprit
Digital humanities are
a blossoming field
in the Caribbean. In
projects like Anthurium,
an open-access
online Caribbean studies
journal, and sx archipelagos, a publishing,
review, and scholarship project of
the print journal Small Axe, scholars have
been steadily increasing their use of technology
in the study and dissemination of
literature, art, history, and other areas in
the humanities.
In Dominica, for example, Create
Caribbean has been doing its part to
use tech to further goals in teaching and
cultural preservation. Dr Schuyler Esprit
founded the NGO at Dominica State
College, and since 2014 it has been a part
of the educational landscape in her home
island and the wider region.
Esprit, who holds a PhD in English
literature from a US university, baffled
her family and friends when she walked
away from her promising teaching
career in Washington, DC, to return to
her homeland after thirteen years away.
But the work she’s managed to do in the
intervening years has converted them —
as well as ordinary Dominicans, and the
government, too.
Create Caribbean’s projects include
developing apps, games, and technological
solutions to share research and educational
work. Take, for example, the multimedia
Dominica History web project. It targets
users who are in primary and secondary
school, telling stories of Dominica’s heritage
with colourful digital artwork and tools
like an interactive timeline. There’s also
Create and Code, a camp to teach children
between ages seven and sixteen how to
write code, do digital research, and use
the Internet responsibly. Another project is
Carisealand, a collaboration with Grenadabased
writer Oonya Kempadoo, which
seeks to bring together research on the
Caribbean environment and preservation.
Create Caribbean also provides
research support to the public (for a fee),
and to Dominica State College students,
faculty, and staff (for free), plus grantwriting,
documentation, copywriting,
web development, and design as part of
the services it offers to the public. And all
this work is done with interns, who are
active, highly visible team members.
Esprit teaches digital humanities
research at Dominica State College,
where Create Caribbean is housed, and
where she is also registrar and dean of
academic affairs. She says Create Caribbean
has also been drawing community
support, particularly from her alma
mater, Convent High School.
Then September 2017 brought an
immense setback, as Hurricane
Maria struck Dominica, damaging
or destroying ninety-five per cent of
the island’s buildings, including the
Create Caribbean office. It also destroyed
equipment Esprit had paid for out of her
own pocket — the organisation is largely
self-funded. Create Caribbean suffered
US$30,000 in damage, all told.
“When Maria happened and our building
got severely damaged,” Esprit recalls,
“Convent High School opened their doors
to me and the Create team, and allowed
me to spend time with the students, getting
[us] back on our feet psychologically and
emotionally, and to motivate us to get back
to our work as part of the recovery and
rebuilding process. We used space at the
school for about six consecutive weeks after
66 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM

esearch process, and the presentation.
She felt empowered that she could be on
that stage presenting a project one day.”
The result? “She now does much of our
animation work at Create Caribbean.”
Esprit’s family and friends are over the
shock, and fully supportive of her mission
now. “Once I knew what Create Caribbean
was, what it would look like and how it
would work, they were right on board.
Create Caribbean’s comprehensive
web site will include a “Support
Us” page by the time this article
is in print. Following Hurricane
Maria, they need to replace all their
furniture and equipment. The
organisation welcomes donations
of cash and in kind. To give or to
find out more about its work, visit
createcaribbean.org.
All of Create Caribbean’s work is done with interns,
who are active, highly visible team members
the storm for our basic operations, and we
continue to use their space for our programming
and showcasing of our projects.”
Students feel the love, Esprit explains.
“The relationship between Create Caribbean
and that school is so strong that one
of my current research interns began her
journey to the programme by meeting
me in the hallway during her very first
week of school at Dominica State College,
and asking to become part of what
we do. I asked her what she knew about
us. Although she was not sure exactly
what digital humanities was or how we
tackle research, she was excited by her
experience of seeing the work presented
when she was a student in our audience
at high school. She was especially
fascinated by the way the student interns
had full control of their content, design,
Both my parents were actively involved.
My father built furniture and volunteered
as tour guide on our history/nature hikes,
my mother cooked for our Create and Code
camps, my aunts with whom I was raised
spent a lot of money ensuring that I had
many of the material resources I needed to
make this work, including hosting a group
of seven at their home in New York City for
our college tour and culture exchange trip
in 2016. My siblings are moral support of
the best kind, and my sisters have provided
material and emotional support as I go
through the growing pains.”
She adds, “At no time has anyone in
my family questioned my desire to study
literature, my desire to work for a cause
like cultural preservation, that is so
important and passionate to me, or my
choice to live and work in the Caribbean,
even when they were worried and afraid.
And I am immensely grateful for a family
that has proven it’s possible to break the
Caribbean stereotype by which parents
measure their children’s success — doctor,
lawyer, businessman.” n
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67

discover
Uncovering
a kingdom
The ruined palace of Sans-Souci near
Haiti’s north coast is one of the Caribbean’s
most momentous historical sites — and
surprisingly little is known about life there
under King Henri Christophe in the early
nineteenth century. But now a multinational
team of archaeologists are using high-tech
tools to completely resurvey the site, and
potentially rewrite a chapter of Haitian
history. Erline Andrews finds out more
Image courtesy Katie Simon, Centre for Advanced Spatial Technology,
University of Arkansas
Haiti may have the most
intriguing history of all
the Caribbean islands.
Evidence of this is
in the ruins of lavish
architecture — a palace
and a fortress — strewn across the landscape
of its far north, near the city of Cap-Haïtien.
The Sans-Souci palace stretches
along rolling hills above the town of
Milot. It’s one of nine palaces built by
Henri Christophe, the second of three
post-Revolution Haitian monarchs in the
nineteenth century, who fought alongside
Haitian liberator Toussaint L’Ouverture
before establishing the State of Haiti
in the north after the country was split
by civil war. (The Republic of Haiti in
the south was governed by his nemesis
Alexandre Pétion.)
Christophe — or Henri I, as he renamed
himself — set up a feudal system with
its own nobility, and amassed immense
wealth for himself and his kingdom, before
a stroke weakened his ability to maintain
his iron-fist control and he committed
suicide in 1820.
During Christophe’s short reign,
Sans-Souci was the site of elaborate
gardens decorated with opulent fountains
and Grecian statues, magnificent balls
attended by splendidly dressed people,
wide and winding staircases, expansive
terraces, ornate furnishings, a large
library with tens of thousands of books
(even though it’s said that Christophe was
illiterate), a prince’s residence, a network
of administrative buildings, stables, a
hospital, and a prison. They were all the
elements one would have seen in the
royal palaces of Europe. But most of the
residents of Sans-Souci were black.
Much has been written about
Christophe and post-revolutionary Haiti.
He was the subject of the first play written
by Derek Walcott. But many facts remain
disputed, and there’s still a lot to learn.
“It’s a surprisingly poorly understood
period of Haiti’s history,” says Professor
J. Cameron Monroe of the University of
California, Santa Cruz. “I say surprising
because it’s the moment right after the
Revolution — the most momentous event
in the history of the Western hemisphere.”
68 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM

Monroe is leading a team of archaeologists
who are currently working to add to
the world’s knowledge about that pivotal
period in the first nation to be governed by
the formerly enslaved. “I’m not the only
person who’s interested in the kingdom of
Haiti right now,” he says. “There are many
historians who are starting to really comb
through the archives for evidence that
people have ignored for quite some time.”
The work has more than academic
importance. Sans-Souci and another of
Christophe’s edifices, the imposing Citadelle
— located atop the mountain behind
the palace and accessible by hiking or
horseback — were designated UNESCO
World Heritage sites in 1982, and are key
parts of plans to develop the country’s
tourism.
Monroe — who specialises in West
Africa and the African diaspora around
the colonial period — was looking for a
new project after wrapping up
years of work on the Dahomey
kingdom in Benin, and pitched a
project on Sans-Souci to Haitian
authorities.
“I said, I don’t do tourism.
That’s not my skill set. But what
I can do is help you understand
the site,” he explains. “I can go in
and map the site and document
the site, and we can excavate in
targeted places. That would give you a
sense of what’s there — so, for example, if
you want to develop the site, if you want
to put in the ticket booth, if you want to
put in toilets for tourists, [you’ll know]
where to dig or not to dig.”
Since 2015, Monroe’s team of around
six — made up of Americans
and Haitians— has been working
through funding from US research grants.
It was important to him, Monroe says,
that he didn’t look like one of the many
opportunists who descended on the
country after the 2010 earthquake to
“make a buck.”
The team have collected more than
fourteen thousand artefact fragments
and around 1,300 animal bone fragments,
pieces of an archaeological puzzle that,
once analysed, will throw light on the
lives of Christophe and his subjects.
“He’s building this European-style
palace and he’s encouraging everybody
to wear these elaborate European-style
military uniforms and styles of dress,”
says Monroe, explaining one seeming
contraction in Christophe’s behaviour.
“He’s bringing European music into his
court. He really is sending the message to
everybody around the Atlantic world that
Haiti is a modern nation state on par with
all of its contemporaries.
“But when nobody’s looking,” Monroe
adds, “he’s eating Afro-Caribbean cuisine.
They’re cooking food in clay pots
and they’re cooking the kinds of food that
people of Afro-Caribbean heritage would
immediately identify as familiar.”
The team’s work so far — building on
archaeological surveys done in the 1980s
by Haiti’s Institute for Protection of the
National Patrimony — has also uncovered
different layers of construction,
which suggest parts of the palace were
built, broken down, and rebuilt. “The
Much has been written about
Henri Christophe and postrevolutionary
Haiti. But many
facts remain disputed, and
there’s still a lot to learn
impression I get is that this is a man who
could not stop building, and who could
not be satisfied with anything,” Monroe
says of Christophe. “He built something,
changed his mind, built over it, and
changed his mind again. That impresses
me — the fact that he’s able to coordinate
enough labour and enough resources to
invest in this massive effort.”
In additional to traditional excavation,
Monroe and his team, in collaboration with
experts from the University of Arkansas,
have used technology that facilitates
“non-invasive” archaeology — that is, no
excavating. It’s called ground penetrating
radar, or GPR. “It sends a high-density
radar wave into the earth, and then if you
find any walls or foundations or trash pits
or floors — anything archaeological —
under the surface, it bounces back. Then
you can process that radar data into a map
that shows you anomalies across the site,”
Monroe explains.
“We use that strategy so that we don’t
have to dig so much. It’s a very costeffective
way of going to a site, scanning it
for subsurface remains, and then you can be
very targeted in where you excavate. Otherwise,
you sort of have to dig all over the
place to make sure there’s nothing there.”
The idea of a kingdom in the
Caribbean may now seem strange and
egomaniacal, but at the time it was what
formerly enslaved Haitians were most
familiar with, both from observing their
past European masters and from how
societies had been organised in Africa.
“At the time, republics were kind
of a weird idea. There were kingdoms
everywhere!” says Monroe. “Napoleon
was an emperor. We don’t turn our noses
up at Napoleon for choosing to be an
emperor and for getting rid of the French
Republic.”
Christophe’s suicide was the end of his
monarchy, and the beginning of the end of
the great structures he built. The
palace was ransacked, parts of it
burned and otherwise destroyed,
tiles and other decorative pieces
of architecture carted off. An
earthquake in 1842 inflicted even
more damage. Monroe found that
for all Christophe’s obsession with
buildings, he didn’t build them to
withstand strong quakes. “One of
the biggest problems we found is
the foundations are incredibly shallow.
“We were excavating one room — it
was a two-storey building, probably
twenty feet high — and the foundation
went down about five centimetres,” Monroe
says. “It was literally just built on top
of a pile of rubble that was used to flatten
the surface, and then they built a tiny,
little foundation and put massive walls on
top of that. So an earthquake hits that and
it’s just going to jiggle like jello and the
whole thing falls over.”
This made the building vulnerable
then — and now. The destruction of the
magnificent National Palace, the president’s
residence in Port-au-Prince, by the
2010 earthquake spurred an interest in
protecting the country’s monuments that
helped make Monroe’s efforts welcome.
“I’m terrified what would happen if
Cap-Haïtien gets struck by an earthquake
like the one in Port-au-Prince,” he says.
“The site might not exist in ten years.
That’s a worry of mine.” n
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69

on this day
Sin city
Five hundred years ago, in 1518, Spanish colonisers in Jamaica
established a settlement on the sand spit protecting Kingston
Harbour — and thus began the story of Port Royal, “the Sodom of
the New World.” James Ferguson recalls its dramatic history
Illustration by Rohan Mitchell
A
forty-minute drive or
ferry ride takes you from
Jamaica’s hectic capital
of Kingston to a very
different “city.” This
is Port Royal, today a
sleepy and slightly scruffy fishing village,
where half-ruined brick-built forts and
warehouses stand among modest homes
and wharves for vessels both humble
and luxurious. It is situated on the tip
of the nine-mile sand spit known as the
Palisadoes, which offers natural protection
to Kingston’s harbour by almost entirely
closing it off from the Caribbean Sea. It is
this strategic position, controlling access
to the city and its port, that has determined
Port Royal’s history as a naval base and
pirates’ lair, and it is its geological situation
on a narrow sandbar that determined its
catastrophic demise.
Indigenous Taino communities had
established fishing settlements on what
they called Caguay or Caguaya from
time immemorial, but with the arrival of
Christopher Columbus in 1494 and ensuing
Spanish colonisation, they were virtually
extinct within two centuries. The
Spanish recognised that the Palisadoes
was an ideal location for repairing and
cleaning boats’ hulls (a process known as
careening), and so in 1518 — precisely five
hundred years ago — the site of presentday
Port Royal was officially founded as
Cayo de Carena, probably little more than
a cluster of timber warehouses.
Spain’s colonial plans for Jamaica
were distinctly unambitious, especially
when none of the hoped-for gold was to
be found. There was some agriculture
and small-scale African slavery was
introduced, but the island’s main role was
as a refitting and supply base for the more
lucrative colonies on the South American
mainland. It was hence no great surprise
that the small Spanish population put
up scant resistance to an English invasion
in May 1655, led by General Robert
Venables, whose earlier attack on more
populous Spanish Santo Domingo had
been easily repulsed. Jamaica was second
State-sponsored criminality fuelled the
spectacular rise of Port Royal, attracting
merchants and conmen as well as pirates from
many nations
best within the terms of Oliver Cromwell’s
land-grabbing “Western Design,” but it
gave the English an important toehold in
the New World, and in 1670 the Treaty of
Madrid ceded the island to England.
The arrival of the English rapidly and
dramatically changed the face of the tiny
Spanish settlement on the sand spit. At
first, they anglicised its Taino name to
Cagway (there is still a Cagway Street),
but soon after Cromwell’s death in 1658
it was renamed Port Royal. By 1659,
there were reportedly about two hundred
shops, houses, and warehouses built
around a central fort, and thirty years
later six forts were in place to defend the
town from Spanish reprisals and French
invasion. From a population of 740 in
1662, the town had expanded to house
some seven thousand people, including
2,500 slaves. According to UNESCO:
Centred on the slave trade as well as
export of sugar and raw materials, Port
Royal became the mercantile hub of the
Caribbean and the most economically
important English port in the Americas.
The city boasted merchants, artisans,
tradesmen, captains, slaves, and
notorious pirates who all participated
in an expansive business network. It
had a governor’s house, king’s house
(court of chancery), four churches, and
a cathedral.
Effectively the capital of Jamaica
(Kingston was still open countryside),
Port Royal also enjoyed a less than
salubrious reputation. This was largely
because the town’s authorities actively
encouraged privateers or buccaneers
to operate from the protected port,
attacking and looting Spanish, French, or
70 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM

Dutch ships. Piracy was hence officially
sanctioned by England, and the booty
was shared between the Crown and the
town’s resident buccaneers. One notorious
pirate, Henry Morgan, led successful
assaults on Spanish settlements such as
Portobello on the mainland, returning
with huge amounts of money and valuables.
He was rewarded by being made
lieutenant governor of Jamaica.
State-sponsored criminality fuelled
the spectacular rise of Port Royal,
attracting merchants and conmen as
well as pirates from many nations.
Writing in 1682, Francis Hanson was
amazed at the wealth he observed: “bars
and cakes of Gold, wedges and pigs
of Silver, Pistoles, Pieces of Eight and
several other Coyns of both Mettles,
with store of wrought Plate, Jewels, rich
Pearl Necklaces and of Pearl unsorted or
undrill’d several Bushels . . .” Needless
to say, such ostentatious opulence did
little to promote good behaviour, and the
town became a byword for immorality
and decadence, “the Sodom of the New
World,” filled with cutthroats and prostitutes.
A disapproving historian, Charles
Leslie, noted of the privateers:
Wine and women drained their wealth
to such a degree that . . . some of them
became reduced to beggary. They have
been known to spend 2 or 3,000 pieces
of eight in one night; and one gave
a strumpet 500 to see her naked. They
used to buy a pipe of wine, place it in the
street, and oblige everyone that passed
to drink.
With the appointment of Henry Morgan
as lieutenant governor, pirate culture
ironically began to decline, and antipiracy
legislation was harshly enforced
with the hangings of Calico Jack and others.
The slave trade became increasingly
important as privateering diminished,
while the arrival of facilities for the Royal
Navy suggested that Port Royal was facing
a very different future.
Nature, it seemed, had other ideas.
On 7 June, 1672, a massive
earthquake hit the whole of
Jamaica, causing extensive damage and
loss of life. But Port Royal, on its sand
spit, was particularly vulnerable, as the
quake was followed by a violent tsunami
which swept through the town. The heavy
brick buildings whose foundations stood
on sand often collapsed as large parts
of the Palisadoes were washed away.
In what scientists call liquefaction, the
ground became a saturated quicksand,
as a survivor reported: “I saw the earth
open and swallow a multitude of people;
and the sea mounting in upon us over
the fortification.” At least three thousand
people perished immediately, with
perhaps as many again in ensuing
epidemics. Only a third of the town
remained unsubmerged.
Many believed that divine retribution
had been visited
on the “wickedest
city on
earth.” Whatever
the case, the
disaster was certainly exacerbated by an
unstable geological situation, overcrowding,
and inappropriate architecture. Port
Royal was quite literally built on shifting
sands. As a result, the focus of urban
development shifted to the more solid site
of Kingston, founded that year as a tented
camp for homeless survivors. By 1716, it
was the largest town in Jamaica, and in
1872 it became the island’s capital.
Attempts to rebuild Port Royal were
obstructed by fire, hurricanes, and cholera.
The Royal Navy, however, viewed
the site as strategically important, and a
dockyard, hospital, and warehouses were
built in the eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries. But the end came on 14
January, 1907, with another earthquake,
which shattered the remaining buildings,
shaking one — the so-called Giddy House
— into a bizarre tilted posture.
Today, half a millennium after its
founding, Port Royal remains a rather
melancholy place, but a treasure trove for
underwater archaeologists. It may have
failed in its bid to become a UNESCO
World Heritage Site, but its historic associations
and aura of nefariousness remain
compelling. n
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71

puzzles
1 2 3 4 5
Caribbean Crossword
6 7 8
9
Across
6 Palace of a Haitian king [4,5]
8 This letter comes first, in Greek [4]
10 Random knowledge [5]
11 Filled pasta [7]
12 Most moist and soft [9]
14 Consumed [3]
16 Gratifies [7]
17 Tells again [6]
19 What’s left after fire [3]
20 Pirate [8]
24 Whirling sufi [7]
25 A bee’s home, maybe? [6]
27 Beelzebub, for instance [5]
28 After-wedding vacation [9]
Down
1 Den [4]
2 Ladies’ man [9]
3 Baby oaks [6]
4 It runs in your veins [5]
5 Haitian general who became Henri I [10]
7 Port of Spain’s main park [8]
9 Adam’s wife [3]
13 In Kingston Harbour, location of Port Royal [10]
15 Undersea ruins [9]
10 11
12 13 14
16 17 18
19 20 21
22 23
24 25 26
27 28
18 Verify [7]
21 Loosen, as in bra [6]
22 Fiery crime [5]
23 Emcee prop [3]
26 Hotel accommodation [4]
15
Spot the Difference
by James Hackett
There are 10 differences
between these two
pictures. How many can
you spot?
Spot the Difference andswers
The colours of the roof are different; there are more details on the rooftop; the porch has different colour paint; there are details on the banana
leaves; there are more plants in the image on the right; there is more detail on one of the porch doors; the rain is falling in different directions; one
of the bushes on the right has more texture; the clouds in the background are different; there is a line below the porch in the image on the left.
72 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM

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Caribbean Beat Magazine
Very easy 9x9 sudoku puzzle
Sudoku 9x9 - Puzzle 4 of 5 - Very Easy
Caribbean Beat Magazine
Hard 6x6 mini sudoku puzzle
Sudoku 6x6 - Puzzle 4 of 5 - Hard
by www.sudoku-puzzle.net
Fill the empty square with numbers
from 1 to 9 so that each row, each
column, and each 3x3 box contains
all of the numbers from 1 to 9. For
the mini sudoku use numbers from
1 to 6.
If the puzzle you want to do
has already been filled in, just
ask your flight attendant for a
new copy of the magazine!
7 2 6 4
5 6 9 1 8
1 9 7
4 3 9 6 1
6 2 8
2 5 8 1 4
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8 4 5 9
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Word Search
Sudoku
Mini Sudoku
Sudoku 6x6 - Solution 4 of 5 - Hard
Sudoku 9x9 - Solution 4 of 5 - Very Easy
5 2 6 4 1 3
3 4 1 2 6 5
9 3 7 2 8 6 1 4 5
5 4 6 9 1 7 8 3 2
S N K S M
8 1 2 5 4 3 6 9 7
4 7 8 3 5 9 2 6 1
1 6 3 7 2 4 5 8 9
2 5 9 8 6 1 3 7 4
3 9 5 6 7 2 4 1 8
6 2 4 1 9 8 7 5 3
7 8 1 4 3 5 9 2 6
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D S F E S T I V A L K C M T E
O C O F O L K L O R E A I A A
P O W O R L D C U P B N D X R
1 5 2 6 3 4
6 3 4 1 5 2
4 6 5 3 2 1
2 1 3 5 4 6
E M O N 28 H O N E Y M O O N
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P V P H H A I T I A N V W I T
S
6
T
10
1
L
W
2
A
3
A N 7 S S O U C I 8 A L P H A
I A M O 9 E O R
R I V I A 11 R A V I O L I
B
4
C
5
E I O N B R I D E S M A I D H
L L U T O N G U E P H S F B Q
S
12
P
16
P
13
A N N E D S
O N G I E S T 14 A T E
A N S W
15 O
L E A S E S 17 R E 18 C A P S
A
19
I H R E O H
S H B
20 U
21 C C A N E E R
D
24
A A
22 M
23 N K F
E R V I S H 25 A P I A R
O S C O G R O
D
27
26 Y
A R C H E O L O G I C A L R R
F Q G E O R G E N L A L A E A
G L I S C O R P I O N M E F U
Ä E I P P A N Y A R D E Q I A
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Northbound
737 onboard Entertainment
MAY
Southbound
Marvel Studios’ Black Panther
T’Challa returns home to Wakanda to take his place as king,
but when a powerful old enemy reappears, his mettle as king
— and Black Panther — is tested.
Chadwick Boseman, Michael B. Jordan, Lupita Nyong’o • director: Ryan
Coogler • action, adventure • PG-13 • 134 minutes
Peter Rabbit
When Old McGregor dies, Peter Rabbit takes over his house.
But chaos ensues when McGregor’s nephew comes to claim
his inheritance.
Daisy Ridley, Margot Robbie, Ross Byrne • director: Will Gluck • family,
animation • PG • 95 minutes
Northbound
JUNE
Southbound
The Greatest Showman
P.T. Barnum rises from rags to riches in this musical spectacular,
busting through the drudgery of everyday life into a
realm of wonder and joy.
Hugh Jackman, Zac Efron, Michelle Williams • director: Michael Gracey •
drama, musical • PG • 104 minutes
The Post
Katherine Graham and Ben Bradlee race to expose a massive
cover-up of government secrets that spans three decades
and four US presidents.
Meryl Streep, Tom Hanks, Sarah Paulson • director: Steven Spielberg •
drama, thriller • PG-13 • 115 minutes
Channel 5 • The Hits
Channel 6 • Soft Hits
Channel 7 • Concert Hall
Audio Channels
Channel 8 • East Indian Fusion
Channel 9 • Irie Vibes
Channel 10 • Jazz Sessions
Channel 11 • Kaiso Kaiso
Channel 12 • Steelband Jamboree

classic
Meggie 101
Illustration by
James Hackett
A dip into the magazine archives: first published
in May/June 2004, here’s Attillah Springer on
the art of the meggie
My name is Attillah,
and I love to give
meggies. Don’t look
surprised. I’m not the
only one. Meggiemania
is alive and
well in Trinidad, and spreading across
the Trini diaspora — and also infecting
those unfortunate foreign souls who find
themselves liming with meggie masters
like myself.
If you don’t know what a meggie is,
take a look at the illustration. The meggie
is a gesture produced by bringing the tips
of the thumb and four slightly arched
fingers together, which is then pointed in
the direction of the recipient — a simple
yet deadly tool of subterfuge and derision.
Trinidad and Tobago is a country that
seems obsessed with insults, considering
the many words we have to describe various
forms of put-down: picong, fatigue,
mamaguy. But in the face of robber talk
and rum shop antics, the meggie stands
out as a means of effectively silencing
your opponent — or at least refocusing
the laughter away from your bad hair day,
or the toothless granny who is giving you
all her attention. In other words, sticks
and stones can break your bones, and
sometimes words can hurt too. But a
perfectly-timed meggie — well, that can
just be a stroke of pure genius.
As the megg-er, the aim is to make
the megg-ee (that is, the person being
megged) actually look at your hand —
take the meggie right in the face. This
only sounds easy. New ways must be
found to catch a master of the meggie
arts, the professional always on the lookout
for a surprise meg.
What I especially love to do is meg
someone who hasn’t been megged in a
while (perhaps their friends are not cool
enough, or perhaps they’ve lived away from
other idle Trinis for way too long). They
are easy targets. You can catch them with
the simplest of lines. “Aye, this is yours?”
You look a little concerned, gesture with
your head, and position your hand in a
way suggesting that they have forgotten a
particularly valuable possession. Then bam!
They catch sight of the meg formation.
There is a fleeting look of shock, their
mouths form perfect “O”s, and you can
almost see their minds flashing back to
their last meggie, which they probably
got from a little girl with two plaits in a
schoolyard.
They may say, in a particularly annoying
imitation of a seven-year-old voice,
“That’s four fingers and a thumb, and
that’s dumb,” but they don’t really mean it.
Secretly, they are plotting revenge,
thinking of ways to get you back.
If you know what a meggie is, you’d
assume that I’d have left this unhealthy
obsession behind when I graduated from
primary school. In fact, it was when I
came into the working world that the
meggie became an invaluable form of
entertainment and solace, a harmless
enough way to get back at colleagues and
also infuriate friends.
A fellow meggie master in London
advised me the other day that I needed
to find out more about the origins of my
pastime. For some mysterious reason,
there seems to be no serious academic
research into the meggie phenomenon.
Perhaps someone at UWI needs to rectify
this. What’s certain is that, considering the
demographics of most meggie masters,
the meg evolved in some Trini schoolyard
sometime in the 1970s, and by the 1980s
was universally recognised by undertwenties.
And chances are that anywhere a
few idle young Trinbagonians are gathered
you will find an outbreak of meggies.
Apart from the ordinary meggie,
there are interesting hybrids. Meggie-bysatellite
and super-meggie, as well as the
more eclectic meggie-doing-sit-ups-on-amirror,
or meggie-drinking-orange-juicethrough-a-straw.
Meggies have gone tech
too. There are text-megs, e-megs, and I’ve
just finished drafting a letter lobbying for
a meggie emoticon.
I’ve also decided that the meggie needs
to tour the world, and am in the process of
photographing it at major landmarks. So
far I have meggie climbs the Great Wall of
China, meggie sails the Adriatic, meggie
does Habana Vieja, meggie on the cycle
track at the Queen’s Park Oval, meggie in
Halfway Tree, and meggie on the London
Underground.
One thing, though — they can make
you a little paranoid. Forget worms and
viruses. I’m loath to open attachments
lest there be a meggie lurking within. n
80 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM