Caribbean Beat — March/April 2019 (#156)

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ADVERTORIAL
Welcome to the exhilirating Tobago Jazz Experience
Everything you need to know about Tobago’s premiere musical event
The Tobago Jazz Experience, as it’s now known, was started under another name in 2004 as a private
sector initiative, and ran for five consecutive years until 2008. World-renowned artistes like Elton
John, Sting, LL Cool J, and Diana Ross were some of the marquee names featured in the
previous Tobago Jazz Festival.
By 2009, the Tobago House of Assembly (THA) took hold of the reins. Recognising that over
the years patrons had come to enjoy more than just the scintillating headline acts gracing the
main stages, the festival was rebranded the Tobago Jazz Experience. This new version has
become an annual pilgrimage for family and friends who look forward to the easy-going vibe
on the island with one of the most iconic beaches in the world, Pigeon Point.
The Tobago Festivals Commission (TFC), the revitalised entity charged with sole responsibility
for putting on the event, brought us the 2018 edition of the Tobago Jazz Experience, where
audiences were treated to the music and moves of Michael Jackson-reincarnate, Ne-Yo; driven into
a frenzy by Fantasia, American Idol winner turned international crowd pleaser; and serenaded under the
stars by neo-soul exponent, Anthony Hamilton.
Not to be outdone, the 2019 edition of the Tobago Jazz Experience promises to be no less exhilarating, with one of
the world’s most beloved crooners, Michael Bolton, confirmed as a headline act. The other marquee performers are
yet to be named — however, if the TFC’s short but impactful track record is any indication, we can expect that Bolton
will be accompanied by similar star power over the course of the Tobago Jazz Experience, running
from 25 to 28 April.
TFC Executive Chairman George Leacock, former national basketballer and sport administrator,
can be an intimidating personality for the fainthearted to interact with on a regular
basis. But his lifelong love affair with Carnival, and Tobago’s culture on the whole, makes
him the ideal person to charge the lead into such unfamiliar territory. As the founder of the
island’s first radio station, he knows all too well the challenges of forging a path where
none previously existed.
The Tobago Festivals Commission’s mandate
Other than the Tobago Jazz Experience, this iteration of the Tobago Festivals Commission has
been charged with managing all of Tobago’s other major festivals, including Carnival, Best Village, the Tobago Dragon
Boat Festival, Tobago Heritage Festival, and Tobago Blue Food Festival. A new feature event on the region’s sport tourism
calendar, the Pan Am Dragon Boat Club Crew Championships, carded for 22 to 24 March, is also under the purview
of the TFC.
Under the vigilant eye of the board, the TFC has adopted as its watchwords Economical, Efficient, and Exciting, with
a view to putting on events that are lean in their use of available resources, yet still entertaining for patrons. Though a
young organisation, the TFC is poised to chart a new course in festival management and event tourism. With a dynamic,
innovative team of youthful professionals under the stewardship of an eclectic Executive Chairman with a business
acumen like no other, it is clear that only the sky is limit.

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Contents
No. 156 • March/April 2019
80
57
50
EMBARK
IMMERSE
20 Wish you were here
Andromeda Gardens, Barbados
22 Need to know
Essential info to help you make the
most of March and April across the
Caribbean — from music festivals
to Holi poems to Jamaica’s Champs
athletics extravaganza
40 Bookshelf and playlist
Our reading and listening picks
44 screenshots
Antiguan filmmaker Shabier Kirchner
talks about his new short, Dadli
46 Cookup
Resurrection rice
Brought to Trinidad from West Africa
via the United States, Moruga hill rice
was a staple of the Merikin community
for generations, writes Franka Philip.
Now entrepreneur Mark Forgenie
wants to make this traditional food
available to all
50 Closeup
Queen of queens
T&T’s self-proclaimed Queen of
Bacchanal is a Carnival mainstay. But,
two decades into her career, Destra
Garcia remains underestimated by
local fans and critics, argues Nigel
A. Campbell
57 Panorama
Stories of steel
Carnival is the season of steelpan.
But behind the Panorama stage,
the future of T&T’s national
musical instrument will be shaped
by administrators, craftspeople,
arrangers, and educators — like
these men and women profiled
by writer Sharmain Baboolal and
photographer Mark Lyndersay
70 backstory
Forever prima
How did Havana come to be one of
the world’s leading centres of classical
ballet? Nazma Muller tells the story
of prima donna assoluta Alicia Alonso,
and her influence on generations of
Cuban dancers
74 snapshot
The inheritance of loss
Trinidadian filmmaker Mariel Brown
set out to make a straightforward
documentary about her writer father.
But as Unfinished Sentences evolved,
it turned into a nuanced exploration
of grief, family, and artistic ambition,
writes Georgia Popplewell
ARRIVE
80 Destination
Seven days in Tobago
A mere week could never be enough
to savour all the pleasure of Tobago
— but Nixon Nelson suggests a
seven-day sampler, from beaches to
waterfalls to Store Bay’s curried crab
12 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM

CaribbeanBeat
An MEP publication
90 Offtrack
Makonaima’s treasure
Karasabai, a Macushi community in
Guyana’s Pakaraima Mountains, is
rich in wildlife and legend alike, writes
Annette Arjoon-Martins
94 Personal tour
Good prospect
From architectural landmarks to a
growing foodie scene, the Brooklyn
neighbourhood of Prospect Heights
— home to Trinidad-born architect
Roxanne Ryce-Paul — may be rapidly
gentrifying, but it still holds on to
elements of its history
98 Home ground
Home to Antigua
Returning to Antigua after eight years
away, Bridget van Dongen couldn’t
wait to re-introduce herself to the
island that made itself her home
ENGAGE
106 Discover
As deep as it goes
The portion of the sea below two
hundred metres is our planet’s biggest
habitat, and the least known. Erline
Andrews meets Trinidadian marine
biologist Diva Amon, pioneering deepsea
research in our region
Business Development Manager,
Tobago and International
Evelyn Chung
T: (868) 684 4409
E: evelyn@meppublishers.com
Business Development
Representative, Trinidad
Tracy Farrag
T: (868) 318 1996
E: tracy@meppublishers.com
Editor Nicholas Laughlin
General manager Halcyon Salazar
Design artist Kevon Webster
Production manager Jacqueline Smith
Web editor Caroline Taylor
Editorial assistant Shelly-Ann Inniss
Media & Editorial Projects Ltd.
Business Development
Representative, Trinidad
Mark-Jason Ramesar
T: (868) 775 6110
E: mark@meppublishers.com
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
Barbados Sales Representative
Shelly-Ann Inniss
T: (246) 232 5517
E: shelly@meppublishers.com
Read and save issues of Caribbean Beat on your smartphone,
tablet, computer, and favourite digital devices!
110 on this day
A flag on the island
When a British military force landed in
Anguilla fifty years ago, it was a strangely
anachronistic moment in Caribbean
colonial history — but one that
Anguillans welcomed with open arms,
suggests James Ferguson
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 2019. 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
112 puzzles
Enjoy our crossword and more!
120 classic
A dip into Caribbean Beat’s archives:
Kellie Magnus on Kingston’s “running
commentary”
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
13

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email: tobagoresorts@gmail.com

Cover The eye-catching
fruit of the Clusia tree,
known locally as the
autograph tree or parrotapple,
in the rainforest of
Tobago’s Main Ridge
Photo Sean Drakes/Alamy
Stock Photo
01 05
2019
MAY
MAY
This issue’s contributors include:
Erline Andrews (“As deep as it goes”, page 106) is an
award-winning Trinidadian journalist. She is a regular
contributor to Caribbean Beat and her work has
also appeared in other publications in T&T and the
US, including the Chicago Tribune and the Christian
Science Monitor.
Sharmain Baboolal (“Stories of steel”, page 57) is a
Trinidadian journalist and broadcaster with thirty-seven
years’ experience working from Port of Spain. She was
awarded T&T’s Humming Bird Medal (Gold) in 2012.
Nigel A. Campbell (“Queen of queens”, page 50) is an
entertainment writer, reviewer, and music businessman
based in Trinidad and Tobago, focused on expanding
the appeal of island music globally.
Mark Lyndersay (“Stories of steel”, page 57) is a
Trinidadian photographer and journalist. His BitDepth
is the longest running newspaper column reporting on
technology in the country.
Georgia Popplewell (“The inheritance of loss”, page 74)
is a media producer, journalist, and editor from Trinidad
and Tobago, who is currently managing director of the
international citizen media project Global Voices.
In our January/February 2019
issue, the photograph of maswoman
Tracy Sankar-Charleau on
page 67 was incorrectly credited
to photographer Jason Audain.
The image should have been
credited to Maria Nunes.
Apologies to both photographers
for this error.
WWW.CARIBBEAN-AIRLINES.COM
15

A MESSAGE From OUR CEO
“We must push one common intention, for a better life in the region.”
— Dr Leroy Calliste, “the Black Stalin”
Welcome to Caribbean Airlines — your
authentic Caribbean air carrier! Thank
you for flying with us.
It’s the time of year many of us look
forward to, when the spirit of Trinidad
and Tobago Carnival fills us with feelings
of festivity and freedom. The sounds,
the sights, the music, and the energy of
the world’s greatest street party have to
be experienced to be believed. All the
details of this and many other wonderful
festivals and events that form part of
the Caribbean calendar can be found in
the Need to Know section of this magazine
on page 22.
One of the great aspects of our festivals
is that they are a shared occasion,
made complete by the sense of togetherness
with one’s “Caribbean family.”
This concept is at the core of Caribbean
Airlines’ new campaign for 2019: the
Caribbean Identity. In the words of calypsonian
Dr Leroy Calliste, the Black Stalin,
in his seminal song “Caribbean Man”, “first
of all your people need their identity.” The
Caribbean Identity is the culture and the
spirit of our many diverse nations, united
by a shared sea and our similar and
powerful heritage. It is an affirmation of
what makes the Caribbean people and
region unique.
Our campaign will showcase the very
best of the Caribbean, reflected across
our airline, from branding to community
activities to our presence at festivals
and major events in the destinations we
serve.
We begin with our partnership with
Trinidad and Tobago Carnival, which we
are supporting in a number of ways, with
sponsorship of:
• The Red Cross Children’s Carnival
• Caribbean Airlines Skiffle Steel
Orchestra
• The National Carnival Commission
of Trinidad and Tobago (NCC)
• Pan Trinbago
• International soca icon Machel
Montano’s signature event, Machel
Monday, and his G.O.A.T (Greatest
of All Time) Carnival Tour 2019,
which will take soca music and the
Caribbean Airlines brand to the
world
The Caribbean Identity campaign was
rolled out to all Caribbean Airlines destinations
in February, including Guyana,
where we were the Official Airline of
Mashramani and will soon be the Official
Airline of Guyana Carnival in May.
In Jamaica, Caribbean Airlines is
the Official Airline of the Reggae Girlz,
the first Caribbean team to reach the
FIFA Women’s World Cup. We are also
a sponsor for Reggae Sumfest, one of
the largest reggae music festivals in the
world.
Also coming soon in 2019 is the
Caribbean Airlines Mobile app, which will
revolutionise your travel experience with
us. In addition, soon you’ll be able to
book your entire vacation, including hotel
and other options, with Caribbean Vacations
and Tours — the latest expansion
of our product offering.
Our technology partner for this
exciting initiative is Busy Rooms, who
will supply a state-of-the-art booking
system and platform where you can
book specially crafted vacation packages.
We are passionate about creating
world-class vacation experiences
for you, right here in the Caribbean
and throughout the world. Caribbean
Airlines looks forward to collaborating
with tourist boards, hotel associations,
and tour operator associations across
the region, as we market various destinations
through our new Caribbean
Vacations and Tours.
In the meantime, please check out our
LIMBO Fare promotion, which offers low
fares aimed at encouraging you to visit
new destinations and to re-visit some of
your favourites.
Caribbean Airlines is your airline, your
brand — we belong to you, the people
of the region. Our connection with the
Caribbean goes beyond the thousands
of people we transport every day. Our
connection speaks proudly and loudly to
the vibrancy of our cultures, the energy
of our music, the splendour of our landscapes
— and, of course, the heart of
you, the people.
Thank you for choosing the authentic
Caribbean air carrier. Please take your
complimentary copy of Caribbean Beat
magazine as a tangible memoir of your
travel with us.
You can find us at www.caribbeanairlines.com,
on Facebook, Twitter, and
Instagram @iflycaribbean.
Garvin Medera
Chief Executive Officer
16 WWW.CARIBBEAN-AIRLINES.COM

wish you were here
Andromeda Gardens, Barbados
In 1954, when Iris Bannochie began planting a sixacre
garden on family property near Bathsheba, no
one could have guessed it would become one of the
Caribbean’s horticultural treasures. Named for the
heroine of Ancient Greek myth, and now owned by
the National Trust of Barbados, Andromeda Gardens
is a lush retreat perched on a hillside above the
island’s dramatic east coast, with a collection of over
six hundred tropical plants.
20 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM

WWW.CARIBBEAN-AIRLINES.COM 21
Andre Donawa Photography

NEED TO
KNOW
Essential info to help you make the most of
March and April: what to do, where to go, what
to see!
courtesy CLAY J’Ouvert
Don’t Miss
J’Ouvert in
T&T
Vibrations from music trucks jumpstart
your biorhythm early on Carnival
Monday morning (4 March), the true
start of Trinidad and Tobago’s annual
festival. Mud, paint, powder, and
chocolate cover your skin, honouring
the rituals of J’Ouvert. Joyful shrieks
announce those about to get dirtied.
From 4 am to after sunrise, revellers
dance and chip through the streets
to soca, pan, and brass music. And the
action is not just in “town”: outside
Port of Spain, J’Ouvert flourishes in
communities around the twin islands,
from San Juan to Couva, Arima to San
Fernando, Scarborough to Point Fortin.
The J’Ouvert bug is contagious — just
watch the smiling bystanders who are
now gloriously anointed.
Shelly-Ann Inniss
How to get there? Caribbean
Airlines operates numerous flights
daily to Piarco International Airport
in Trinidad from destinations in the
Caribbean and North America
22
WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM

need to know
Melinda Nagy/Shutterstock.com
Top Five
In the groove
From the waves lapping at our shores to our rhythmic
accents, the Caribbean is a naturally musical archipelago.
And brilliant dry season weather brings a chorus of amazing
music festivals across the islands, where international
celebrities headline alongside treasured local talent. Here are
five of the best in March and April, to add the right notes to
your travel plans.
SXMusic Festival
13 to 17 March, St Martin
For five days, escape into an alternate universe like a movie
set, with your closest friends carefree and forever dancing
to music by over fifty world-class house and techno DJs.
sxmfestival.com
Jazz Artists on the Greens
6 April, Trinidad
Carnival is over, but the musical energy still thrives, in a
different genre, with no shortage of Creole jazz and smooth
jazz, jazz fusion, and more. Relax on your blankets to the
sounds of artistes from St Lucia, Cuba, and T&T.
jaotg.com
Tobago Jazz Experience
25 to 28 April
Why don’t we paint the town, and all that jazz!
Tobago’s annual musical bonanza is filled with dynamic
performances inviting you to leave your troubles at the gate.
tobagojazzexperience.com
Carriacou Maroon and String Band Music Festival
26 to 28 April
You won’t want to wake up from this dream. Steeped
in African traditions, the festival presents an allround
experience of Maroon culture, food, and music
in an atmosphere where strangers become friends.
carriacoumaroon.com
Barbados Reggae Festival
27 to 30 April
Barbados might not be your first thought for reggae, but if
you’re looking for a fix, this festival has all the ingredients.
Listen out for Bajan artist Buggy Nhakente alongside
international talent in this completely immersive experience.
thebarbadosreggaefestival.com
24 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM

SAVING HER LIFE
TAKES ALLIES
With our Caribbean allies, the SickKids-Caribbean Initiative is transforming the diagnosis and
care of children with cancer and blood disorders in six Caribbean countries. But to fund the
Initiative, we rely on our philanthropic allies: donors who’ve given $1 million CAD each. Thanks
to their remarkable generosity, we’ve screened 57,790 babies for sickle cell disease. We’ve
trained 27 nurses and three fellows. And we’ve built seven telemedicine facilities, connecting
Caribbean health-care professionals to each other, to SickKids, and to the world.
THANK YOU TO THESE GENEROUS DONORS:
Wes and Christine Hall McCaig Magee Family LesLois Shaw Foundation
Join us: sickkidsfoundation.com/caribbean

need to know
Ready to Wear
Keep it clean
As each new year begins, a fresh start is a
common and hopeful resolution. For 2019,
Trinidadian clothing label The Cloth, led by
designer Robert Young, has offered a new
collection called Clean Slate, with no expiry date.
For over three decades, The Cloth has been
known for its storytelling through intense colours
and intricate appliqué, but Clean Slate offers a
pared-down look. “It deconstructs our heritage,
our patterns, and these saltwater boundaries, to
figure out how we can move a little differently,”
says the label. These sophisticated minimalist
designs — executed in light Baltic flax linens, with
special attention to the finer details — speak for
themselves. You too may be inspired to find a
different voice, while staying true to your origins.
For more information and the full Clean
Slate lookbook, visit thecloth.com
Photography courtesy
The Cloth
Models, from left: Gabriella
Bernard, Laura-Lee Williams,
and Glenesia Wilson
26
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WWW.CARIBBEAN-AIRLINES.COM
27

need to know
On View
Sharjah Biennial 14
At first, a bleak and empty desert
landscape, where reddish sand
stretches to the horizon. A group of
men arrive, dressed in identical white
shirts and grey trousers, and a series
of pickups deliver building materials:
bricks, ropes, iron poles. The men
start to erect a scaffolding structure.
Gradually it rises to form a cube, three
storeys above the sand. What kind
of construction might this be, in the
middle of nowhere, a roofless object
that seems more like an abstract
instigated by the Trinidadian artist in
the desert of Sharjah, commissioned by
the Sharjah Biennial, and ultimately paid
for by the state coffers of the small but
immensely wealthy Persian Gulf state,
one of the United Arab Emirates.
Running since 1993, the Sharjah
Biennial is the biggest contemporary
art event in the Gulf states. In its
fourteenth iteration — running from 7
March to 10 June, 2019 — it assembles
more than eighty artists and includes
over sixty newly commissioned works.
on a common factor in the histories
of the Caribbean and the Persian Gulf:
“transplanted labour.” His structure
in the desert was “obviously not a real
construction site.” Rather, it was an
experiment. “I wanted to see, and to
listen to, who would be doing the actual
work” — specifically, the workmen who
wittingly participated in the project
were labourers from South Asia, who
make up much of Sharjah’s labour
force. “I realised that everyone involved,
including myself, in this act of labour, was
from an elsewhere,” Cozier says. “Some
children appeared and were playing
around all over our chosen temporary
site. They were behaving as if we were
disturbing their playground or backyard.”
Courtesy Christopher Cozier/Sharjah Art Foundation
Still from elsewheres
are beginnings and
endings (video, 2019), by
Christopher Cozier
sculpture than a habitable dwelling?
But the men aren’t alone: a ragtag
bunch of small boys wander around,
alternately observing and ignoring the
workmen’s labour. These scenes of
mysterious activity are intercut with
abrupt jumps, either back or forward
in chronology, to the time before the
scaffolding was built or perhaps after it
was dismantled.
elsewheres are beginnings and
endings is a video work by Christopher
Cozier (produced in collaboration
with Maya Cozier and Shari Petti),
documenting a ritual of labour
Under the general title Leaving the
Echo Chamber, the Biennial is divided
into three distinct exhibitions, one
of them organised by Guadeloupean
curator Claire Tancons, known for her
engagement with artists working in
Caribbean performance traditions.
Tancons’s “open platform of migrant
images and fugitive forms” features
works by artists from around the
globe, including Cuban Carlos Martiel
and Puerto Rico’s Jennifer Allora and
Guillermo Calzadilla.
Invited to create a new work in this
context, Christopher Cozier reflected
It remains for the Biennial audience
— drawn from a jetsetting global art
elite — to put the pieces together, or
perhaps to merely acknowledge a fact
we ought to already know. Behind the
smooth, shiny surfaces of capitalism
and its cultural manifestations, the
hardest, dirtiest labour that makes it
all possible is done by men and women
from elsewhere, working for minimum
wages — often invisible, silent, ignored,
until someone pulls back the veil.
Philip Sander
28 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM

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Tortola — International Motors; St Lucia — JQ Motors Ltd.; Suriname — Rudisa Motor N.V.
www.mercedes-benzcaribbean.com

need to know
How You Say
Nautical
lingo
The fine weather of March and April
comes with a slew of regattas across
the Caribbean, from Antigua to Bequia
to the British Virgin Islands. The
exhilaration of slicing through the
water and the flapping of sails in the
wind entice many landlubbers — but if
you’ve never set foot on a boat, some
of the crew’s language may confuse
you. Here’s a handy guide for those
who can’t even tell mast from sail.
Bow or stern?
Let’s start with the most
basic of basics: the bow is
the front of the vessel, and
the stern is the back
Port or starboard?
Facing the bow, port is your left, while
starboard is your right
Heeling
When the boat tilts into the water, due to the
force of the wind
Gybe
To change direction by turning the
stern of the boat through the wind,
in order for the wind to come from
the other side of the vessel
Tack
Your nautical course relative to
the wind: if it’s blowing over
the port side, you are on a
port tack. To tack as a verb,
however, is to change
direction by turning the
bow of the boat through
the wind
Dima Oris/Shutterstock.com
Ready about!
Prepare the boat for tacking!
Man overboard!
Hope you’re wearing your lifejacket . . .
30 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM

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need to know
Doha
There are many provinces in British Guiana:
some queer, some miserable, depending
LightField Studios/Shutterstock.com
on your own eyes. Everyone knows
the wondrous village
Golden Fleece in Esiquibo District.
Where Pandit Paramanand resides
is renowned both here and abroad.
Again I bow before Rama; also I bow
The Read
Lalbihari Sharma’s
Holi Songs
In 1916, a small pamphlet of verses with the title Damra Phag
Bahar was published in Bombay. Its author, Lalbihari Sharma, had
left India some years before, bound for what was then British
Guiana, as an indentured labourer. No one knows exactly how
many copies of Sharma’s pamphlet were actually printed, how far
it circulated, or why this pioneering publication — the only known
literary work written by an indentured labourer in the Anglophone
Caribbean — was eventually forgotten.
But not forever: a century later, in a sequence of events
combining sheer luck with archival doggedness, researcher Gaiutra
Bahadur unearthed a fragile copy of Sharma’s verses at the
British Library, and passed the text along to Guyanese-American
poet Rajiv Mohabir. Capable in Bhojpuri — the native tongue of
both Sharma and his own grandmother — Mohabir produced a
translation now published as I Even Regret Night: Holi Songs
of Demerara (Kaya Press), giving today’s readers thrilling,
tantalising glimpses of life in a plantation community in the era of
indentureship.
Sharma’s Holi Songs, as the title suggests, are verses intended
to be sung in the month of the Hindu festival of Holi, usually called
Phagwah (its Bhopuri name) in the Caribbean. These songs, Mohabir
writes, “remind you of comfort, of home, of the gods — and that
this suffering is temporary” — drawing on traditional devotional
poetry, Sharma’s memories of his youth in India, and the landscape
of Guyana’s Demerara coast, where he created a new life for himself,
and a new home.
before the wise one’s feet,
the foundations of my life.
Chautal
The bright Sita gained Rama’s dark body
as a husband. Adorned in jewels,
her friends sent her off
to the garden to distract her.
Rama and Lakshman’s hearts
now hers. Sita opened
her mouth but no sound came out,
looking around she saw her friends
and blushed. Praying to the goddess
her face flushed. Beholding Sita’s blush
Rama’s stalwart heart stirred.
Sita’s face like the moon. Ram’s eyes
like chakor birds, there in the garden
Sita’s friends burned with jealousy.
Bringing flowers, the brothers depart.
Ulara
Lalbihari says, “Rama’s feet won my heart.”
My love, do not vex.
What I say
And what I don’t say
Is only what I’ve seen.
What use is anger?
Celebrated in Guyana, Suriname, Trinidad, and other parts of the Caribbean in late March this year, Phagwah — also
known as Holi — is the Hindu spring festival, an extravaganza of coloured liquid and powders, music and merriment.
32
WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM

need to know
Kevona Davis of Edwin Allen
High School won the girls’
100m and 200m races, both
in records times, at CHAMPS
2018
Gilbert Bellamy/Photosbybellamy
On the Field
Calling all CHAMPS
Kellie Magnus explains why Jamaica’s high school athletics championships
loom large on the sports calendar — and predict future Olympic stardom
Maybe it’s the statues of track legends
that adorn the grounds of Jamaica’s
National Stadium. Olympic medalist
Don Quarrie stands guard at the
entrance, while Arthur Wint, Herb
McKenley, Merlene Ottey, and Usain
Bolt beckon athletes from other points
of the complex. Maybe it’s the rhythm
of history — decades of tradition, glory,
and sweat baked into the floor and
walls of the McDonald Tunnel, through
which the athletes pour onto the track.
Maybe it’s the hopes and dreams of an
audience 35,000 strong, who strain the
stadium’s capacity and roar athletes
on to break records with astonishing
predictability. Whatever the reason,
when the stadium opens on 26 March,
the expectation for greatness will
already have been set.
Its official name is the ISSA/
Grace Kennedy Boys and Girls
Championships. Jamaican track
fans know it as CHAMPS. In 2019,
the five-day carnival of running
celebrates its 109th year. Hosted by
the Inter-Secondary Schools Sports
Association, CHAMPS is the premier
high school athletic competition in
the Caribbean, and the biggest high
school athletic event in the world. The
Boys Championships began in 1910
as a competition between a handful
of prominent high schools at another
storied Kingston location — the cricket
grounds at Sabina Park. The Girls
Championships started in 1914, settling
into an annual schedule in the 1960s.
The two were merged in 1999.
The result is a solid week of athletic
excellence with sprint events (100m,
200m, 400m, 800m, 100m/110m
hurdles) and the 1500 arranged by class
and gender. Open distance events
including the 5,000m and the 2,000m
steeplechase and a full array of field
events — high jump, long jump, triple
jump, pole vault, discus, shot put, and
javelin (girls only), plus the heptathlon
— round out the schedule. Then there
are the relays — hotly contested
4x100s, 4x400s, and medleys featuring
Jamaica’s top thirty-two teams, their
places won by times at sanctioned
meets on the country’s grueling high
school athletics calendar.
High school loyalties run deep in
Jamaica, and the CHAMPS trophy tops
the list of local prizes worth bragging
rights. The three-thousand-plus
athletes who will take to the track
this March represent more than one
hundred schools. But in 109 years, only
sixteen schools have won a CHAMPS
title. Longstanding rivals Kingston
College and Calabar High School will
resume their battle this year, with
Calabar looking to extend their sevenyear
winning streak and add another
precious title to the three they need
to surpass KC as the boys’ school with
the most CHAMPS titles. Meanwhile,
recent Girls Champs’ powerhouse
Edwin Allen High School will need many
more wins to surpass Vere Technical’s
twenty-two.
But while loyal alums come for the
contest, most of the crowd in the
stadium comes for the show. Qualifying
and finishing times at CHAMPS,
particularly in Class 1 (ages sixteen to
nineteen) rival those of any international
track meet. The 2018 staging
saw twenty-one record-breaking
performances. And each year reveals a
new cast of athletics stars likely to shine
in Jamaica’s already bright constellation
for decades to come.
34
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need to know
Finding the rhythm at the
New Fire Festival’s drum
circle
Joshua Cazoe, Courtesy NEW FIRE festival
Word of Mouth
Light a New Fire
Shelly-Ann Inniss learns how a Trinidadian music festival with green roots tries to
spread a hopeful message of change
Picture the lush grounds of a historic
cocoa estate in Trinidad’s Maracas
Valley. Surrounded by natural rainforest
and the meandering Acono River, yogis
do their practice. Nearby, artists focus
on their canvases, people shop for
innovative goods at an artisan’s market,
while others play games or participate
in workshops of all kinds. Meanwhile,
from a vibrantly decorated stage, the
lyrics and harmonies of musicians and
poets fill the air.
This is the vibe audiences have
come to anticipate at the New Fire
Festival, which returns this year to the
beautiful Ortinola Estate (running from
12 to 14 April), for a weekend of fun,
feel-good activities that manage to do
good, too.
The brainchild of the Trinidad and
Tobago Bridge Initiative — a non-profit
connecting people through sustainable
cultural, environmental, and economic
practices — New Fire blazes with a
solid lineup of musical acts. For 2019,
that means performances from Isasha,
Nex Chapta, Caleb Hart, Jivanna, and
festival favourite Freetown Collective.
True star power will come from calypso
legend David Rudder, who will headline
as the new “Master of Fire.” The
Ortinola stage, it’s safe to say, will be lit.
Then there’s the everything else that
makes New Fire a full-day experience:
you can watch belly dancing, make
your own up-cycled jewelry, try moko
jumbie stiltwalking or capoeira, and
more. To help you shed your cares
and find your inner spark, experts will
lead sessions in art therapy, dance and
drama therapy, aromatherapy, and even
horse therapy. And if it all sounds so
good you never want to leave — or if
you just want a chance to be one with
nature, unplugged from social media and
everyday noise — New Fire caters for
that, too, with colourful tents creating a
camping area.
Zero waste is the goal throughout
the festival, with single-use plastics
banned by organisers. Audiences and
campers are encouraged to bring
their own reusable water bottles, and
vendors will gladly fill your reusable
food containers. Unlike your average
Trini fete, New Fire is “based on
environmentalism and sustainability,”
says festival director Elize Rostant.
Fire is an element of transformation,
the organisers remind us, and every
year New Fire tries to influence lives
in a fun, positive way, appealing to
the community-minded, and anyone
interested in safeguarding our planet
and environment. For New Fire regulars,
the festival has become a pilgrimage
they anticipate year after year.
This is the dream: that in this
ever-complicated life we live, there’s
another world away from the everyday.
One where happiness is not faked,
inner peace is not compromised,
and positive energy flourishes. You
can breathe fresh air, be mindful of
the environment, learn and develop
sustainable life skills, relax and enjoy
stellar entertainment — above all, try
something new. Sounds a little farfetched?
Just maybe, the New Fire
Festival is the fuel you need to ignite
that hopeful flame.
36
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Escape the
ordinary. Discover
Hyatt Regency
Trinidad.
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need to know
Calvert Jones, Courtesy St Vincent and the Grenadines Tourism Authority
Datebook
More highlights of March and
April across the Caribbean
St Vincent and the Grenadines National Heroes and Heritage
Month
March
Traditional food, concerts, and a host of cultural activities celebrate
SVG’s heritage (above), all month long. On Indigenous People’s Day,
commemorations take place on the Grenadine island of Balliceaux
St Patrick’s Day, Montserrat
17 March
Don your green and join the joyful
masses in parades, a soca monarch
competition, the St Patrick’s Cultural
Pageant, and a Freedom Run and Walk
around the Caribbean’s Emerald Isle
Oistins Fish Festival, Barbados
20 to 22 April
Every Easter weekend in the fishing
village of Oistins, families come
together for karaoke, boat races, road
tennis competitions — and, of course,
food. Do you think you can eat the
most fish cakes?
Delphi/Shutterstock.com
Easter, around the Caribbean
21 April
Each island has its own cherished
Easter traditions — from kite
tournaments in Trinidad to a rodeo in
Guyana, Easter bun in Jamaica, and
goat-racing in Tobago
Jamaica Carnival
25 to 28 April
Throughout the season, Jamaican and
international soca and dancehall artists
headline fetes. Charge up with high-energy,
fun-filled events in Kingston and Ocho
Rios, and get ready to crush the road!
Fusion Adventure Races,
Trinidad
27 April
Athletes discover the hidden treasures
of the island from a unique perspective
as they compete in an adventure race
through the forest, starting at Maracas
Bay on Trinidad’s scenic north coast
38 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM

JOIN US FOR
Carriacou Regatta Festival
2-5 August 2019
Spicemas Carnival
7-13 August 2019

ookshelf
Unwritten: Caribbean Poems After the First World War
edited by Karen McCarthy Woolf (Nine Arches Press, 124 pp, ISBN 9781911027294)
If war songs praise bloodied heroes, then
the unsung ballads of martial engagement
point to those soldiers blotted out of
the hymnals. So it has largely, historically,
been, in Britain’s paltry recognition of the
Caribbean servicemen of the First World
War. The 1915 British West Indies Regiment,
the BWIR, enlisted roughly fifteen thousand
men across eleven battalions: many of
those men never made it home.
Who would the black Caribbean Siegfried
Sassoons and Wilfred Owens have been,
if allowed prominence to tell their own
stories? Unwritten — which assembles ten
commissioned poets and one essayist,
from the Caribbean and its diaspora —
speaks into history’s silencing void, pulling
WWI testimonies, fragments, and elegies
into contemporary verse. These poems strive not only to
describe our maligned military volunteers, but to imagine
what they might have said, and what their loved ones might
have endured. Potent among these is Guyanese-Grenadian-
British Malika Booker’s “Her Silent Wake”, which chillingly
centres a mother’s loss of her war-slain
son, a mother who seethes, “that bitch of a
stepmother England built a forest / of bones
for rats to feast on succulent black men, the
scent of her / actions rancid as hell.”
Though they speak in the main of families
and lineages long deceased, the poems
in this anthology are blisteringly, tenderly
stitched through with the personal. Take
Trinidadian Jay T. John’s stirring, powerfully
sentimental imagining of the pioneering
social worker Audrey Jeffers, “There
are days where my hands”, which names
Jeffers’s home street, summoning the
domestic anchor of “Aunt Sherry’s gallery,
where pools of / cool cotton lay draped
before us, when a pricked finger was the
only / worry of blood.”
Unwritten doesn’t wrestle the poetic crown from Wilfred
Owen or his brethren. It demonstrates, with all the resonant
urgency of a mission long past due, that black Caribbean
post-war survival needs — deserves — its own soldiers’ and
storytellers’ crowns here, too.
Theory
by Dionne Brand (Knopf Canada, 240 pp, ISBN
9780735274235)
Teoria, a graduate student
mired in the completion of
an increasingly elaborate PhD
thesis, is easily distracted from
the purity of academic purpose
by three very different, sensually
compelling women lovers. A
novel of scholarly frustration and
heartbreak hullabaloo might be
desiccated in anyone but Dionne
Brand’s hands: Theory, a genrecrumpling
philosophy of a story,
shows up the dustiest, most
terminally hidden corners of the human heart, and reveals
the aching limitations of a thinker’s intellect. Looking up
at the window of one of their lovers, Teoria nocturnally
muses, “Does she see me there, dressed in paper, dressed
in the cuts on my fingers from turning pages?” Don’t be
surprised if this sharp, erudite novel, as much thought
experiment as it is institutional critique, keeps you up late
at night with your own ponderings on unfinished romances
and languishing dissertations.
The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story
by Edwidge Danticat (Graywolf Press, 200 pp,
ISBN 9781555977771)
“Sometimes we must become
our own holy places, roaming
cathedrals, and memory
mausoleums,” pronounces
Edwidge Danticat. No stranger
in experiencing ultimate
loss, and writing it on the
page, the Haitian-American
novelist and essayist guides
us through the sepulchral
cloisters of mortality through
the testimonies of others.
Using the lives, deaths, and
creations of Gabriel García Márquez, Sylvia Plath, Ta-
Nehisi Coates, Audre Lorde, and others both perished
and present, Danticat reveals the underpinnings of our
obsession with passing on, peering into portals such as
the rise of self-penned obituaries, and the ravaging grief
left in suicide’s wake. When the author describes her own
mother’s death from cancer, her sorrowful gratitude leaks
with illuminating light.
40 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM

ookshelf Q&A
The Ice Migration
by Jacqueline Crooks (Peepal Tree Press, 144 pp,
ISBN 9781845233587)
As daringly necessary a series
of stories about cross-border
movements as Britain presently
needs, The Ice Migration sinks
its roots into the land, exploring
the intertwined bloodlines of an
Indo-Jamaican family caught up
in the rigours of indentureship.
Spanning a century of slavery’s
clutches, migration as escape
route, duppies who work
mischief and offer comforts
alongside the living, and the
keeping and shattering of secrets, these tales are acts of
ambitious cartography, showing in exquisite diction how
spirits converge where unfinished business — and blood
debts — linger, haunting the earth as much as those who
walk it. From the bullock carts of Calcutta to the rag-andbone
man’s Southall horse and cart, we are transported by
these tellings.
Forged from the Love: Colin Laird,
Caribbean Architect
by Robert Clarke (The Colin Laird Project, 196 pp, ISBN
9789768280107)
“I was first completely
enthralled by his drawings, which
I considered artworks,” says
architect Sean Leonard upon
discovering technical designs by
Colin Laird. Architecture as art of
the most socially engaged order:
this was Laird’s driving ethos,
proof of which lies in his literal
landmarks of our Caribbean.
Clarke’s assiduous research
reveals the distinguished
socialist’s commitment to leaving public and private space
better-equipped to serve the needs of all people, from
politicians to proletariat. As much visual treasury as moving
biography, Forged from the Love presents handwritten
letters and family photographs alongside other touching
ephemera. Laird’s legacy lives on, in buildings as much as in
the progressive goodwill his architecture inspired.
Reviews by Shivanee Ramlochan, Bookshelf editor
Jamaican-British poet
Raymond Antrobus talks
to Shivanee Ramlochan
about how hearing loss
has primed him to write
deep-reaching poems, in
his debut collection The
Perseverance (Penned
in the Margins, 91 pp,
ISBN 9781908058522).
The Perseverance bravely and unapologetically
demands space for D/deaf voices. How do you
hope readers will hearken to this call?
My writing process for this book was a “project of listening,”
given how much time I spent with all the voices in it. I hope
I manage to inspire others to care as much about listening
as they do about speaking. When I first worked with CODA
(Children of Deaf Adults) ten years ago, I noticed how deaf
awareness gave them patience and a presence that made
them (generally) wiser than their years. The book directly
addresses hearing people and points out ways that their
culture doesn’t consider us, but I hope it also celebrates our
presence in the world.
Your poems are bridges spanning worlds of
experiences: D/deafness, dislocation, the
difficulty of family trauma. Tell us about how
you construct these bridges.
The Perseverance is in conversation with lots of poets and
poems I admire that also grapple with loss and trauma. From
Hannah Lowe, Kei Miller, and James Berry to Shara McCallum
and Linton Kwesi Johnson, Caribbean poets inform my
poetics heavily, as do deaf poets like Ilya Kaminsky, Meg
Day, and Raymond Luczak. Also, John Betjeman’s poem
“Portrait of a Deaf Man” showed me you could portray a
deaf person powerfully but also truthfully in a poem. If I’ve
been successful, then The Perseverance is no more about
deafness than it is about communication, connection,
language, education, and family.
Do languages of love persist for you, in music
as in poems?
Records and tapes my parents played while I was growing
up influenced my poetics. Becoming a teacher really gave
me perspective in how lucky I was to have parents who were
curious about the world and wanted me to question things
— not everyone gets that. The building of my language of
love probably came from music, because there was always
something playing when I entered my parents’ houses (they
lived separately). This means Prince Far I, the Heptones, Nina
Simone, and Bob Marley are sounds associated with my homes,
and therefore an important part of my language of love.
WWW.CARIBBEAN-AIRLINES.COM
41

playlist
Keshav & Rakka present
Badang! Riddim
Various artists (Badang! Records/Monk Music Co.)
Trinidad Carnival is here, and the sounds of
Carnival are at their peak. A notable feature this
year is the predominance of the riddim — one
musical bed for multiple singers to exploit with
unique songs or lyrics — as the driver of the frenzy.
Another feature is the globalisation of soca, with
the introduction of producers from outside the
Caribbean exploring this music and distributing
it for other Carnivals worldwide. DJ Rakka from
Belgium has teamed up with UK-based Trinidadian
producer Keshav Chandradathsingh to create a
skeletal drum-centric riddim that allows for the
words of a number of major soca artists to “ride.”
Rhythm more than harmony drives this music,
prosody more than melodic variation is the key
to hooking audiences. The stars are all out on
this EP: superstar Machel Montano, chart topper
Kevin Lyttle, lyrical geniuses Chromatics and MX
Prime, and hot steppers Olatunji and Ricardo Drue
make up the cast.
The Complete Cuban Jam
Sessions
Various artists (Craft Recordings)
Between 1956 and 1964, the major Cuban record
label Panart captured the sounds and descargas
— improvised musical jam sessions — of the most
innovative native musicians on the island. With
the freedom of jazz and the soul of Cuba, this is
“a stylistic and historic panorama of Cuban music,
from big band son montuno to Afro-Cuban rumba,
mambo, cha-cha-chá, and country acoustic guajira
music,” as described by compilation label Craft
Recordings. This bit of history is here remastered
for a new generation and collected in a five-LP box
set (five CDs are another option), offering a unique
glimpse of the zeitgeist of the nation during and
after the Cuban Revolution, which nationalised
Cuban culture and record companies. Legends
of Cuban music recorded in that loose setting
include mambo co-creators (and brothers) bassist
Israel “Cachao” and pianist Orestes “Macho” López,
alongside jazz drummer Guillermo Barreto and
other pioneers. A keepsake for the ages.
Single Spotlight
Rag Storm
Super Blue, featuring 3 Canal (Chinese
Laundry Music)
The music of Trinidad Carnival changed forever in
1991, when Austin Lyons — known to the world
as Super Blue — instructed masqueraders to “get
something and wave.” The energy and focus of the
Road March tune — of which Super Blue already
had three — became anthemic signals to abandon
one’s inhibitions and “mash up the place.” Since
1980, when he won his first Road March, until the
present, his is the template followed by just about
every soca singer trying to get the attention of the
masses. In 2019, alongside seminal rapso group
3 Canal, Super Blue is describing what will be the
inevitable outcome when ears hear this jam: “Jump
and jump up / Jump and rag up / Is mas’ and tempo
/ When Super leh go.” In other words, this music will
have bodies defying gravity while enthusiastically
twirling bandanas. The world welcomes the rebirth
of Super Blue, who in the early 2000s descended
into “hell,” with the battle scars of a vocal rasp as a
reminder that he is forever the party soca king.
XtraOrdinary
Triple Kay International (self-released)
Dominica’s Carnival, or Mas Domnik, is a pre-
Lenten festival like Trinidad and Tobago’s, and
in 2019 the music of local favourites Triple
Kay International is the soundtrack for revelry.
The band, which performs zouk, compas,
reggae, cadence, dancehall, and — in this case
— Dominica’s native bouyon music, squares
up against any naysayers who think they could
outrank it. “Who’s coming with me / On this epic
journey / To build a legacy / To be extraordinary?
/ We bigger than, better than, better than any
competition / Competition flat!” Confidence
indeed, but when a sample from Queen’s “We
Are the Champions” invades the chorus —
not once, but twice — you know this is not
arrogance, but a tongue-in-cheek retort to
everyone that you have to come good to even
be on the same page. As a musical mélange of
creole fiddle, saxophone, and drums alongside
modern drums and keyboards, the sound
resonates like a Trinidad power soca — but with
that instrumentation, you know Dominica’s
originality is ever present.
Reviews by Nigel A. Campbell
42 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM

eyond ordinary...
...Explore the extraordinary Caribbean island.
Unspoilt, untouched, undiscovered Tobago
TobagoBeyond.com | #101ReasonsTobago

screenshots
courtesy rathaus films
“I would love
to break down
the way we’ve
been taught to
tell stories”
As a New York–based cinematographer, Antigua’s Shabier Kirchner has
been making a name for himself shooting films for other filmmakers on
the US indie scene. He’s worked on a number of acclaimed features,
and last year the film-industry magazine Variety put him on its list of
ten cinematographers to watch.
Recently, Kirchner got the opportunity to turn his camera on his
homeland, in the service of telling his own cinematic story. Set in
the neighbourhood of The Point, adjacent to Antigua and Barbuda’s
capital St John’s, Dadli — the title is the familiar form of Wadadli,
Antigua’s indigenous name — is an entrancing sensorial experience, an
impressionistic assemblage of assorted
shots of people, places, and things. One
of the film’s subjects, the teenaged
Tiquan, provides a poignant voiceover
narration about life in The Point, and
thus some semblance of a story.
Conventional storytelling isn’t
the point, however: Dadli draws its
power from the cumulative effect
of its imagery, the camera capturing
everyone and everything it sees with a
piercing empathy. Jonathan Ali speaks
to Kirchner about filming this almost
accidental project.
How did Dadli come about?
I got hired as part of the second-unit
team on this feature film, Wendy [by
US director Benh Zeitlin]. We were
shooting on film, and before we started
I decided to refresh myself with the
format. So I called my first AC [assistant
camera] and we got ourselves a 16-mm
camera and two cans of film and went
to a village in Antigua called The Point.
And I decided to document. I had no
idea anything was going to come from
that. It wasn’t until after Wendy that I
revisited the footage.
What is it about The Point that made
you shoot there?
The Point has an interesting history.
It’s the last tenement yard system that
exists in Antigua. It’s also one of the first
villages where the slaves revolted — the
slaves were made to live on top of their
burial grounds. Today it’s one of the
poorest areas, but it shares a port with
cruise ships. So there’s this interesting
duality between the history of the island
and present-day tourism. Currently the
government is bulldozing the area,
turning it into commercial fisheries, so
it was a great time to archive it.
How did Tiquan come to be the voice
of the film?
While I was shooting this test footage,
there was no agenda. I wasn’t looking for
a main character. We weren’t recording
sound, so there weren’t any interviews. I
was just walking around shooting things
that were interesting. It wasn’t until
many months later that we realised
there was this boy who kept appearing
in the footage. So Tiquan became the
force behind the narrative. After we
had an idea of what we wanted the
film to be, we tracked him down and
interviewed him.
Dadli provides an impressionistic
viewing experience rather than a
conventionally told story. Does one
form of filmmaking hold a particular
appeal over the other for you?
In the not-so-exact words of [French
filmmaker] Robert Bresson, there are
two types of cinema: the type that
employs plot and narrative to drive
the story, and the type that employs
the camera to do so. I’ve always been
attracted to the latter. This project in
particular was purely the camera.
Having made Dadli, are you planning
on making more of your own films in
the Caribbean?
It’s all I think about, really. I would love to
break down the way we’ve been taught
to tell stories. The Caribbean is so full
of untold narratives, I would love to
share as many as I can with the world.
My production company, Rathaus, has
optioned a book by a Caribbean author
that is currently in development.
Dadli
Directors: Shabier Kirchner and Elise
Tyler
Antigua and Barbuda
14 minutes
44
WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM

cookup
As children, Mark Forgenie and
his brother would play in the
“coffin” under his grandparents’
home. This eight-foot-long chest
was actually a rice box, where
his uncles would store the rice
farmed on the many acres of land his family worked
in Moruga, deep in south Trinidad.
At Christmas time, this large box would be filled
with rice, and it would fall to Mark and his brother
to scoop it out and process it for older relatives to
cook. “We’d put it in the mortar and pound it for
a good forty-five minutes to shell it out, then we’d
throw it up and fan it until it was clean,” Forgenie
recalls. “That would always break up the rice, but
you’d get nice red rice that way.
“The tradition was, from the start of December
through January we would eat rice on a Sunday.
On Saturdays, we would pound the rice and the
men would cook the ‘Creole rice’ in different
ways. A lot of times with coconut milk. Sometimes
they would parch it with bene [sesame seeds] and
sometimes with bird peppers.”
This rice Forgenie grew up eating is African
Oryza glaberrima, known locally as Moruga hill
rice. It was introduced to Trinidad by the Merikins,
a group of African-American soldiers who fought
for the British in the War of 1812. Forgenie himself
is a descendant of the Merikins. The soldiers were
each given several acres of land in Trinidad as their
reward for fighting for the Crown. The rice — native
to West Africa — had previously been grown in the
Carolinas and the state of Georgia, where many
of these soldiers were born. It was grown by the
Merikins because of its hardiness and long shelflife.
This red rice has never been a mainstream
product in Trinidad, as it’s grown and consumed
mainly in Moruga and surrounding areas. For
years, hill rice production and consumption was in
decline — something Forgenie realised only when
his father suffered a health crisis in 2009.
“My father had a small stroke, he had a clot on
his brain,” Forgenie says. “The neurosurgeon, who
is from Moruga, told my Dad he had to change his
lifestyle — my Dad loved to eat bacon, pudding,
and ham every morning, so his cholesterol was too
high.” As part of his recovery, the doctor mandated
that the elder Forgenie drink porridge made from
hill rice twice a day.
At the time, Forgenie was living in north
Trinidad. He dropped everything to head to
Moruga to his uncle’s home. When he got there,
he expected the rice box to be full — but, to his
dismay, there were just five pounds of rice.
Resurrection
For generations, communities in
south Trinidad have grown a special
variety of hill rice brought from Africa,
with a unique flavour and health
benefits. When entrepreneur Mark
Forgenie learned that the Moruga
hill rice he grew up eating was about
to disappear, he saw an opportunity.
Franka Philip investigates
Illustration by Shalini Seereeram
rice
“I grew up knowing these boxes to have four
hundred pounds of rice, so I was shocked. I asked
him what was wrong, why was there no rice.” Forgenie
recalls. “He told me ‘none of your cousins are
interested, everybody is either working offshore,
driving maxi taxi — nobody wants to work the
land, nobody is interested in the rice.’”
Forgenie thought this situation was unique to
his family, but he soon discovered the lack of interest
in farming the rice was widespread in Moruga.
He had not known this tradition, this “unique
thing” he had grown up with, was dying.
And how could he know? At the age of eighteen,
Forgenie left Trinidad and headed to Britain,
46 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM

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47

where he joined the Merchant Navy. He spent
eleven years working on tankers in the Middle
East, Southeast Asia, and South America — far
from verdant and fertile Moruga. He returned
to Trinidad in 2003, launched his own marine
services company, and took up residence near
Port of Spain. Rice farming was the furthest thing
from his mind.
After speaking with his uncles at the time of
his father’s illness, Forgenie started exploring the
reasons why hill rice had declined so badly, and
sought to rediscover for himself the art of rice
farming. His first stop was the farm of Miss Patrice,
an eighty-six-year-old woman.
“I was working for myself, so I had the time,”
Forgenie says. “For two months, I would drive
down on a weekend, stay at my family’s house
in Basse Terre, and go see what Miss Patrice was
doing. Soon enough, I realised that rice work is so
labour intensive, it just turns you off.”
“The tradition was, from the start of
December through January we would eat
rice on a Sunday,” says Mark Forgenie
But he was not dissuaded. Inspired by what
his father’s neurosurgeon had told him about the
benefits of hill rice, Forgenie felt he had to do something.
“Dr Maharaj never did the research, but
had anecdotal evidence from his stroke patients
who used the rice as a porridge every morning
and evening as part of their therapy. He said they
recovered in half the usual time, and ninety per
cent of them recovered. I realised there was a
medical and scientific thing about this rice, that’s
not like other rice.”
So, since 2009, when his father had that stroke,
Forgenie — supported by his wife Cassie
— has been literally travelling the world to
find ways to make the farming of Moruga hill rice
more efficient and profitable. He set up Vista Dorado
Estates on his family’s land, with the belief that
farming could be made easier if there was equipment
suited to the hilly terrain of Moruga. “I knew the
answer was mechanisation, but there was no research
about it. I went to the Ministry of Agriculture and
they said they tried it, but they failed.”
He was told by ministry officials that he should
expect to fail as well, as there was no equipment on
the market that could help. Forgenie was amazed
at the negativity. However, once you meet Mark
Forgenie, it doesn’t take long to recognise that he’s
passionate, determined, and extremely astute.
After failed experiments with local heavy
equipment distributors, Forgenie sat down and
drew a model of the kind of equipment he felt was
needed for the terrain in Moruga. His quest for the
right equipment took him to China, where he met
with a company who bought one of his designs.
They were so impressed, they took it into mass
production, and Forgenie is now the Caribbean
distributor.
Having solved that part of the equation, it was
all systems go. The Forgenies set out their plans for
getting Moruga hill rice into the mainstream, via
their company Caribbean Sea and Air Marketing.
They worked closely with government agencies,
and developed highly positive relationships with the
Intellectual Property Office and ExportTT, Trinidad
and Tobago’s national export facilitation agency.
ExportTT helped the Forgenies with courses
in key areas like the principles of packaging and
labelling. And in 2018, Caribbean Sea and Air
Marketing received a TT$317,000 grant from the
Ministry of Trade to improve technology in their
manufacturing process.
“As an outsider, someone who never grew up
in Moruga, I wondered, why is this rice not on the
shelves?” says Cassie Forgenie. “We had to package
the rice professionally, because traditionally,
it was sold in a paper bag at the San Fernando
Market.”
She explains that a major turning point came at
T&T’s 2018 Trade and Investment Convention, one
of the biggest trade shows in the Caribbean. Here
the Forgenies met with officials from S.M. Jaleel,
a beverage company that sells their drinks up the
Caribbean and through the Caribbean diaspora.
The result was an international distribution agreement
for Moruga hill rice. You can now find Vista
Dorado Moruga hill rice on the shelves at all major
supermarkets in T&T.
I’ve tried the rice myself, and I can attest to
its delicious nutty flavour, particularly enhanced
when cooked with coconut milk and bay leaf.
Vista Dorado’s lineup includes plain rice as well
as varieties flavoured with geera, lemon pepper,
and even Scorpion pepper, for adventurous types.
You can also try that healthy porridge, made with
ground rice flavoured with cocoa, nutmeg, and
other spices. A small cookbook is in the works.
After the Forgenies received their government
grant, an editorial in the T&T Newsday called it
“a healthy serving of good sense, reminding us
of how our unique place in the world, our unique
history, can be leveraged as a resource to return
us to the path of economic growth.” Plus, Moruga
hill rice is delicious — a winning formula in the
ongoing campaign to make the most of indigenous
Caribbean foodways. n
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Immerse
Rick Rudnicki/Alamy Stock Photo
50 Closeup
Queen of queens
57 Panorama
Stories of steel
70 Backstory
Forever prima
74 Snapshot
The inheritance of loss
Carnival season brings renewed attention — and anxiety — to the state of the steelpan, T&T’s national musical instrument

closeup
Queen
of queens
She’s the self-proclaimed Queen of
Bacchanal, and a reliable favourite on
T&T’s Carnival scene. But, twenty years
into her career, local fans and critics still
underestimate the unstoppable Destra
Garcia, writes Nigel A. Campbell. As
the music industry evolves, he argues,
it’s time to rethink what we mean by
“biggest” and “best” — and acknowledge
Destra’s international reputation
Photography by Frame Photography,
courtesy Bamboo Entertainment
Last October, the US National Public
Radio website published an essay
declaring Trinidadian soca star Destra
Garcia the “liberator of revelry.” That
essay was part of a series “dedicated
to recasting the popular music canon
in more inclusive — and accurate — ways” in order
to “challenge the usual definitions of influence.”
Destra is “broadening the sound of soca,”
argued writer Keryce Chelsi Henry — an external
viewpoint that illustrates something taken for
granted in Trinidad and Tobago: Destra Garcia
is the bellwether among women soca artists in
the music industry. The reach of her influence,
I’d argue, has made this soca star a music icon
outside her native country, even dwarfing her local
reputation. And that influence is no longer centred
on Trinidad Carnival. Destra is now international
and perennial.
To suggest subjective classifications like “best”
or “biggest,” it’s useful to have the imprimatur of
some objective measurements. In this modern
age of music, when data is king and “likes” and
“follows” matter more than universally diminishing
record sales, Destra — with her entire catalogue
on all the major digital music platforms — has the
numbers that matter. They make a solid case for her
ascension beyond her self-declared role as “Queen
of Bacchanal” to the more apt title “Queen of Soca.”
Looking at the numbers on popular social media
platforms like Instagram and Facebook, Destra is
indeed the queen, with metrics beyond other women
soca stars like Alison Hinds and Fay-Ann Lyons,
rising talent Nailah Blackman, or even calypso
legend Calypso Rose. Only soca superstar Machel
Montano betters her on Instagram, while Destra is
the clear leader on Facebook among all performing
soca artists worldwide, with over 323,000 followers,
as of December 2018. That includes a strong fan
base in the Caribbean diaspora worldwide.
Even so, soca’s popularity, and the stars who
make this music regional if not global, are still
operating within confined niche markets, even
as the sound and rhythm of soca are tapped by
today’s urban pop stars as a sonic bed for charttopping
hits. The social media numbers for the
most popular soca artists pale in comparison to the
major artists of other genres: Bajan Rihanna has
close to 80 million followers on Facebook, while
Trinidad-born Nicki Minaj has 41 million, and
Cardi B — of Trinidadian and Dominican parents,
and arguably the hottest thing right now — is just
beginning, notching just over six million followers
on the platform.
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As for Destra, she may have a bigger impact regionally and in
the diaspora than at home in Trinidad. The Fader, the high-profile
music magazine based in New York City, noted in a 2016 review
of her career that Destra “tours globally year-round, connecting
with her international fan base via trilingual capabilities — she
speaks English, Spanish, and French — and the universal
language of wining.” That universal appeal is endorsed by her
tireless touring — in 2017, she fell from a stage in Bermuda,
breaking her ankle, but continued touring and performing, wearing
a cast. She has headlined festivals and other events in the
US and Canada, the Netherlands, every island in the Caribbean
archipelago, Guyana and Venezuela on the South American
mainland, and even in Dubai. The global marketplace is her
oyster, and soca is her ticket to the world.
Destra went to primary and secondary school in Woodbrook
and then St James, on the other side of Port of Spain, and in
that milieu, she excelled at singing calypsos in the various
competitions organised for school children by organisations like
the National Carnival Commission. She remembers that initial
breakthrough. “My teacher, Janice Roach, was the one that
found I had a good voice, a good tone, and she found that I was
brave. She wrote my very first calypso, ‘Common Entrance’, and
entered me in the primary schools’ competition. And I won. My
Born and raised in the tough Laventille district of east Port
of Spain, Destra Garcia is both a product of her community
and a patient student of an industry that rewards the
deserving and confines the ordinary to the pages of journeyman
chronicles. The late V.S. Naipaul wrote that “small places with
simple economies bred small people with simple destinies.” Some
Caribbean people — like Destra — take such a statement as a
challenge, rather than an indictment.
The reach of Destra’s influence has
made this soca star a music icon
outside of her native country, even
dwarfing her local reputation
52 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM

first try, my first attempt at singing in public after she trained
me to use the microphone.
“I was only ten,” she continues. “It was just an eye-opener
to me. I enjoyed the attention, I enjoyed the applause, I enjoyed
being on that stage, and I never looked back.” The spirit of that
early mentorship paid major dividends during her secondary
school years, when she enjoyed an unprecedented winning
streak, this time composing her own calypsos.
While her school provided the foundation for a career, her
family and their influence built the framework. The Garcia
home was a house of music: Destra’s mother was into soul,
her father was into Bob Marley, her grandparents were into
old-time kaiso. Her relatives included working musicians
playing steelpan and jazz. That “good voice” Destra’s teacher
Miss Roach heard was touched by all these musical connections,
as well as church and gospel music, developing into a
signature powerhouse vocal instrument instantly recognisable
among soca fans.
Once Destra left school, she began to experiment with
R&B in both solo and girl-group formats, and was sought
out to record tracks to be “shopped” abroad by an American
A&R executive. An unplanned setback with that project led
her to “try soca.” An initial partnership with singer Third Bass
While her school provided the foundation
for a career, her family and their
influence built the framework. The
Garcia home was a house of music
on the track “Just a Friend” began her professional soca career
in 1999, leading to frontline vocal roles in the bands Roy Cape
All Stars and Atlantik, before she struck out on her own. Destra
Garcia the music businesswoman was born. As accolades began
to pile up, there could be no turning back — but the slings and
arrows of the professional soca circuit lay ahead.
The plight of women soca artists in a music sector and genre
dominated by men was quickly obvious. “We have to work twice
as hard as men to actually reach on their level,” Destra says. “And
sometimes we are on their level, but we’re still not on their level
in terms of how the world sees it . . . At the end of the day, you
do what you need to do: you remember who you are, you stay
focused, and you go out there and just get it done,” she explains.
Over the years, she sometimes displayed a perturbing selfdoubt
and awe under the pressure of the soca competition stage,
but was steely, determined, and even bellicose when confronted.
She reflected on that reputation in a television interview: “In the
past, a lot of people have said, Oh, Destra has a hot temper. Destra’s
mouth too hot.” A media darling one day, a target for derision
the next. Those days are over, she says, now that she is a mother.
Some might argue Destra is yet to achieve the two most
important measures of soca stardom in Trinidad and
Tobago: a Road March title, for the most popular song on
the road during Carnival, and a Soca Monarch crown. It raised
questions in 2003 when she was unexpectedly “denied” the Road
March for her anthem It’s Carnival — a hit to this day in Carnivals
the world over. Her “rival” — or, more accurately, her colleague
in the soca fraternity — Fay-Ann Lyons has both titles, plus a
distribution deal with US-based label VP Records that should
guarantee some chart action for her albums.
Yet this seems to not matter to the cognoscenti, or to Destra’s
fans, who dote on her every offering for the annual Carnival
celebration. The key to her domination is the near-universal adulation
for her among the network of Caribbean and international
Carnivals that ape the ethos of T&T’s annual celebration. Then
there’s Destra’s impact on the performance aesthetics of many
younger soca singers.
Back in 2006, Caribbean Beat described Destra as “perky and
girlish, a Trinidadian version of an American pop princess . . . her
stage act is G-rated, but still just sexy enough for her to maintain
credibility on the Carnival scene.” In 2019, the twentieth year
of her career, not much has changed, except now the curves
are real. Her public image is iconic — voluptuous, sultry — and
unmatched by new interlopers on the soca scene. And in that
two-decade career, Destra has had one reliable hit a year, including
classics like 2015’s “Lucy”.
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53

So how has Destra survived all these years? Establishing a
footprint outside the home market early in one’s career pays
dividends in the segmented global music marketplace. The
importance of “the brand” in the new music industry has not
escaped her. Amazingly — or confusingly, if you are new to her
music — Destra Garcia boasts three distinct brand identities,
or three alter egos: Destra, the soca queen who launched her
career in 2009; Lucy, her wild-child avatar from the hit song;
and Queen of Bacchanal (or QoB), the fashion icon who “does
mash up de place.”
The question of “escaping” her Laventille roots still subliminally
resonates in her music. Laventille was and is a crucible of
creativity for original Trinidadian culture. But there is a perpetual
battle among Caribbean artists over “keeping it real” — not diluting
the brand with obvious crossover elements. Over the years,
Destra’s brand of crossover soca has deliberately interpolated
elements from global pop music. “It’s Carnival”, written by Kernal
Roberts, liberally samples Cyndi Lauper’s hit “Time After Time”;
2004’s “Bonnie and Clyde” draws on 1980s Norwegian pop group
a-ha’s “Take On Me”. The results have resonated in the international
advertising and marketing sector. Captain Morgan’s Parrot
Bay Rum used “Bonnie and Clyde” as the theme music for a TV ad
campaign in the US, for instance, while Digicel signed Destra as its
first woman endorser in the Caribbean in 2006. Even the island of
Antigua, a leading wedding and honeymoon destination, wanted
to cash in on her fame by suggesting that her nuptials would be
held there in 2018 (a claim denied by the artist).
54 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM

Ten essential Destra tracks
It’s Carnival (2003):
The international anthem of
Caribbean Carnival ever since.
A winner in everyone’s book
Mash Up (2004):
Rapid-fire instructions that
drive feters to, well, mash up
the place
Bonnie and Clyde (2004):
On the surface, a song of
desire for a long-lost one,
but actually about a rag that
was lost at Carnival. Allegory
gone wild
I Dare You (2007):
The ultimate come-on, if
you’re able. Permission is
granted
Bacchanal (2009):
An anthem for Carnival
that suggests we leave our
inhibitions at home
Cool It Down (2011):
A production by the Bajan
team D’ Red Boyz that finds
a melodic centre outside of
Trinidad influences
Call My Name (2012):
A reminder to her fans that
she is the elixir for their
happiness
Keep on Wukkin’ (2012):
The perfect tune for a couple
to wine to. The groove
is addictive, instructions
included
Lucy (2015):
It’s either an autobiography
in song or an invitation for
women listeners to proudly
connect with their inner wild
child
Family (2018):
A soca star recognising who
is by her side through thick
and thin. Danceable, too
And corporate entities and tourist boards aren’t the only
ones seeking out some of Destra’s musical energy. Both Nicki
Minaj and Broadway star Heather Headley have spoken of their
interest in potential collaborations. “Destra’s got a great, great
voice,” Headley said, “and it would be fun at some point to just
sit down and figure it out.” The T&T diaspora and our stars in it
have heard that powerful, clear voice.
Journeys to the top never follow a straight line. In Destra’s
case, her path has followed the ups and downs of a life shaped
equally by island influence and the DNA of family and ambition.
Where it matters, the apparently ageless Destra Garcia is
already a global player — and her ability to fascinate audiences
everywhere in the excitement of soca music is the key to a future
that won’t be slowing down soon. n
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55

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© 2019 KPMG, a Trinidad and Tobago partnership and a member firm of the KPMG
network of independent member firms affiliated with KPMG International Cooperative
(“KPMG International”), a Swiss entity. All rights reserved.
56
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panorama
Stories
of steel
The steelpan is one of Trinidad and Tobago’s proudest
achievements, and there’s no bigger event in the national
calendar than the Panorama competition finals on Carnival
Saturday night. But if the invention of the pan in the 1940s and
the adventures of the early steelbands are the stuff of both
legend and history, the instrument’s survival in the present
day — and the survival of the communities that have grown up
in and around panyards — is a matter of science, education,
economics, and, yes, politics. Behind the glory of the Panorama
stage are the many stories of the organisers, administrators,
craftspeople, composers, and arrangers who will steward the
steelpan into the future — like the women and men profiled
in the following pages by writer Sharmain Baboolal and
photographer Mark Lyndersay
A modern touch: notes on a
new steelpan are marked using
pre-cut magnetic stencils.
Roland Harragin’s pan tuning
factory delivers small runs of
instruments now, but maintains
a tradition of hand-crafting of
the instrument that reaches
back to its beginnings in
Trinidad and Tobago
57

The president
Growing up in Tobago, Beverly Ramsey Moore was banned from
the panyard mere feet from her family home. It was no place for a
girl, people said. Half a century later, she proved that the panyard —
like the boardroom — is definitely the place for a woman, with her
groundbreaking election as president of Pan Trinbago
lthough it was just five footsteps away from
A
the front door of her childhood family home,
Beverley Ramsey Moore was banned from
entering the Katzenjammers Steel Orchestra
panyard, pioneered by her father and uncles in
Black Rock, Tobago. Half a century ago, a panyard was very
much a man’s world.
Rather, it was in the privacy of his bedroom that Ramsey
Moore’s father Hugh taught his eldest daughter to play Michael
Jackson’s “Ben” on the tenor pan, when she was just fourteen
years old. “In those dark days,” she recalls, “it was taboo.”
Four decades later, in October 2018,
Ramsey Moore was elected president
For years, Beverly
Ramsey Moore had
tapped on the ceiling,
until the glass shattered
with her runaway victory
of Pan Trinbago, the umbrella body for
steelbands in Trinidad and Tobago — the
first women to hold this challenging
office. For years, she had tapped on the
ceiling, until the glass shattered with her
runaway victory against “an army of men
who think it belongs to them,” as the nowfifty-eight-year-old
grandmother puts it.
Once again, she went against her
father’s advice. “Why don’t you leave those people alone?” Hugh
Ramsey asked, knowing the controversy that led to the bankruptcy
and near collapse of Pan Trinbago. “I am a fighter. I want
to help to fix it. Daddy, I am a game changer,” Ramsey Moore
replied, reminding him of her track record.
A relentless dedication to community service had evolved
into a career in politics, as Ramsey Moore served two terms as
representative for Black Rock in the Tobago House of Assembly,
from 1996 to 2000. Then she was called on to help Katzenjammers,
the “family” steelband. The gender taboo was a thing of
the past, but her attempts to reorganise were still a battle.
Ramsey Moore’s narrative about “human capital development”
did not sit well with the few remaining members of the
steelband, but she earned the right to proceed, by one vote.
Over the years, she pulled the Katzenjammers community back
together, until they earned the title of Medium Band Champions
in the National Panorama competition in 2011 and 2012.
By then, Ramsey Moore had moved on from being a band
representative to a role as the only woman on the Pan Trinbago
executive, encouraged by her peers because of her outspokenness
at meetings.
Was there a point of weakness when she thought, this is not a
woman’s business? “Never!” is her emphatic reply. “I see myself
as my family. We are leaders in the Black
Rock community, and I fear no foe,” she
explains. In the Pan Trinbago boardroom
she was confronted with toxic masculinity,
but she stood firm. “I knew they did
not know what they were doing, but I kept
on insisting on a structure, openness, and
good governance.”
Now she finds herself at the helm of
Pan Trinbago and T&T’s entire pan community,
staring into a financial abyss.
In her first ninety days, she came under enormous pressure
from both the T&T government and Pan Trinbago’s member
steelbands. She shrugs.
Navigating the 2019 Carnival season and Panorama competition
is the first order of business. But there is heavy rebuilding
work to be done, in the interest of not only financial survival, but
better governance and accountability. For one thing, Ramsey
Moore has promised to strip apart the constitution under which
she was voted into office and repair the organisation’s weaknesses.
“When communities embrace the steelbands once again,
they won’t have the challenges they now face,” she says, ready
for the uphill climb. A woman’s work is never done.
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ow do you breathe life into metal? With a hammer.
H
When Roland Harragin was learning the
art of steelpan half a century ago, the process
was written nowhere. It was a matter of trial
and error, and the most intriguing musical instrument of the
twentieth century was developed along with the tools used to
lovingly coax music from steel. It was and is a perfect balance of
the scientific and the spiritual for the men who have made tens of
thousands of instruments without a blueprint. “When you come
to a hammer and say you are looking for a note, it has to be inside
of you for it to come out,” says Harragin.
The molecular structure of the steel, the degree of heat, and
the measurements of the notes on any of the nine pans, ranging
from tenor to bass, can now be learned in a structured way,
because of the cornerstones laid by tuners like Ellie Manette and
Anthony Williams, along with second-generation craftsmen like
Harragin. “Those before me got an inspiration” he says. “They
were scorned by society and stayed in the backwaters to create
this instrument.”
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The tuner
Born the year before the steelpan
made its international debut,
Roland Harragin has spent his life
perfecting the science and art
of crafting pans, tending steel
to create beautiful notes. Skilled
tuners are a dying breed in T&T,
he says — and how will pan survive
without them?
Harragin himself has crafted steel drums in Europe,
North America, and Japan, and for at least fourteen different
steelbands in T&T. He’s also the builder of the G-pans used by
Trinidad and Tobago’s National Steel Symphony Orchestra. Still,
he believes, “we have only scratched the surface . . . When I die,
all my technical knowledge is going with me, because it is not
documented.”
Born in 1950 and growing up on Schuller Street in east Port
of Spain, Harragin became associated early on with the Joyland
Steel Orchestra. The steelpan was in its rudimentary form, intro-
duced to the wider world at the Festival of Britain in 1951, where
the Trinidad All Steel Percussion Orchestra (TASPO) performed
to amazed audiences. “Everyone was experimenting,” Harragin
recalls, “and hid things from one another, so you could not go
around anybody to learn to tune a pan . . . It was really noisy,
because there were no harmonics, and the sound was irritating
to society, but the guys who were developing the instrument
were not seeing that.”
In 1968, after hearing a performance by Pan Am North Stars
at Queen’s Hall in Port of Spain, the visiting British professor
John Russell introduced the idea of concert pitch — a consistent
standard for tuning musical instruments — to the pan community.
“It made us on par with any orchestra in the world,”
Harragin explains, “and the sound was further enhanced in 1970,
when Rudolph Charles chromed the pan and created different
instruments.”
Without skilled tuners, there is no steelpan. “But very few
people know how to make the instruments from scratch,”
Harragin says. “Now, we are in a crisis here in Trinidad. We do
not have a drum factory to turn out the same metal consistently,
and we will never have it even in my lifetime,” he predicts.
“All the strides are taking place in the Midwest USA. They
will do it better, because they have the time, the money, and the
technical know-how.
“The whole world wants this, and here at home we are losing
our key people, with their knowledge,” Harragin says — on a
pessimistic note, after a lifetime of making music possible.
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The
metal men
oland Harragin doesn’t like his raw materials.
R
He isn’t happy with locally manufactured
steel drums, because they lack the precise
and robust seal of factory-made metal containers
intended to contain industrial liquids.
But he also doesn’t care for repurposed drums previously
used for chemicals — he calls them “poison drums,” with a
distinct sneer, and won’t work with them.
And when Harragin realised he no longer liked “making
morning” — working until dawn to mass-produce drums for
steelbands across T&T — he scaled back an operation that
once piled up drums as high as the first floor of his Belmont
home to just fifteen to twenty instruments a month.
He does like his team, though, and is particularly fond of
the Codrington brothers, Kaijah and Kareem, part of a pan
family led by their father Cary. The work they do emphasises
hand craft.
Pans are forged with hammers and chisels, a process
that’s approached with a jeweller’s respect for materials
and executed with a mix of intuition, tactile response, and a
decades-old tradition of metallurgy.
The steady process of sinking the
drum begins with a mallet covered
with duct tape, shown here, then
continues with a pneumatic
hammer after the basic shape
is achieved. This speeds up the
smoothing process from hours to
minutes
Mark Lyndersay
62
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Kaijah Codrington marks
the surface of the steel
drum prior to sinking it
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Roland Harrington has
created templates to mark
the segments of each type of
drum. This one will become a
double tenor
The Codrington brothers
work together to mark off
the note segments on the
sunken steel surface
64 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM

To create the notes on the drum’s
surface, the metal surrounding
each note segment is hammered in,
leaving the raised bumps that are
responsible for the music. Special
care is taken to separate the
resonance of each note segment,
so that it doesn’t bleed into the
one next to it
The cut and shaped drum
is heated prior to tuning, to
temper the steel and remove
any impurities from its surface.
For all but bass drums,
Harrington uses both ends
of the steel drum to create
instruments, but occasionally
the steel will fail, ruining the
instrument while it’s being
made. The gas-fired rig
completes the burning of the
steel in less than five minutes.
The drum will then be tuned,
chromed, and fine-tuned again
before it’s ready for its new
owner
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The teacher
Traditionally, in T&T’s steelpan community, music is learned by ear
and preserved in individual memory. But the scarcity of written
documentation means that musical innovations of the past are
often inaccessible. Music professor Mia Gormandy-Benjamin is
working to change that, and train a generation of pan musicians
with the skills to create a true archive of pan
ow are we supposed to continue as a society if we
don’t know the ideas of our pioneers?” asks Mia
Gormandy-Benjamin. “How are we supposed to
develop and create new ideas if we do not know
what the old ones are? If they have it locked up?”
For Gormandy-Benjamin, these aren’t rhetorical questions:
“
H
rather, they form part of the foundation for her work as assistant
professor of music at the University of Trinidad and Tobago
(UTT), where she trains a rising generation of steelpan musicians
— laying the ground for what she hopes
will be a tectonic shift in steelband culture.
To harness the boundless energy of
young steelpan students, making them a
part of that change, Gormandy-Benjamin
is well prepared. Pan has been the focus
of her academic life, including twelve
years in the United States, starting when
she embarked on her journey at Northern
Illinois University as a teenager in 2005.
Confident with a résumé that already
included performances in the US, Austria,
and Australia, the young Gormandy-
Benjamin quickly learned that, although she was among the best
that Trinidad had to offer, she had to up her game.
Eventually, the award-winning 4.0 GPA student — who was
NIU’s Most Outstanding Woman of the Year for 2011, when she
graduated with a master’s degree in steelpan performance —
found new purpose when she decided to pursue a doctorate. “I
chose topics that involved the steelpan in Trinidad,” she says. “I
found that a lot of information I was looking for wasn’t readily
available, until my teacher suggested I study ethnomusicology.
Her academic quest led her to Florida State University, where
“How are we supposed
to develop and create
new ideas if we do not
know what the old
ones are?” asks Mia
Gormandy-Benjamin
she became the first steelpan player awarded a grant by the
American Musicological Society, to do research for her dissertation
on pan in Japan.
“Going abroad was eye-opening,” Gormandy-Benjamin
recalls. “In Trinidad, we think we are the land of steelpan, and
we are the only ones to play. In the United States, there are
more steelbands than we have in Trinidad, and steelpan teachers
have resources to get assistance. In Japan, like elsewhere,
there is a hunger for our rich cultural history.” At home, meanwhile,
a lack of access to formal musical
training and documentation limits the
development of many promising pan
players.
Gormandy-Benjamin is working to
change that. At UTT’s performing arts
academy in Port of Spain, she engages her
students to help shape a bank of information
through PanNotation, an online database.
“Students won’t just have access to
it, but can have their research papers or
performances published,” she explains
with enthusiasm.
The surge of musically literate students entering the panyards
— a domain where for decades players prided themselves
on learning “by ear” — means a significant and growing change
in the steelpan fraternity. Whereas in the past — as recently as
the 1990s — landmark music from Panorama winners was transcribed
and sold overseas with no permission from the steelband
virtuosos, the new corps of trained musicians can transcribe
and document the arrangements created each year, keeping
it in T&T’s archives: a resource for composers, arrangers, and
musicians of the future.
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67

The arranger
When Renegades won the 2018 National Panorama
Competition, it signalled a return to victorious form for the
legendary steelband — and a career highlight for Duvonne
Stewart, one of the most talented and ambitious of the new
generation of pan arrangers
“
I
take a song about a minute and ten seconds in
duration, and turn forty-eight bars into three
hundred bars of music, with sheer creativity of
self-spontaneous arrangement with nine different
voices applied through the steelband,” says
Duvonne Stewart, summarising the all-important role of musical
arranger.
“I have etched my name in a space where it cannot be erased
anymore,” declares the forty-two-yearold,
whose sixteen years as an arranger
have earned him twenty-one competition
victories — but none as meaningful as
bringing the 2018 National Panorama title
home to the BP Renegades, the band that
bred and nurtured him after he left his
home in Tobago and moved to Trinidad at
the age of nineteen.
It was Renegades’ first Panorama victory
in the seven years — an almost Biblical
term — since Stewart was handed the
band’s arranger’s baton, previous carried
by the late and legendary Jit Samaroo,
whom Stewart idolised when he was a player with Renegades in
the 1990s. In the nine years from 1989 to 1997, under Samaroo’s
direction, Renegades won the Panorama title six times.
Stewart’s talent is homegrown, but it was during a three-month
stint at the University of Nantes in France, where he taught a
series of masterclasses, that he truly blossomed. “I was thinking, I
am the best, until I landed in Paris in 2002 and threw my ego into
the River Seine and started from scratch,” he says.
On returning to T&T, Stewart’s ambitions were translated
into a series of Panorama victories with bands in the east, north,
“I am trying to send
the message clearly,”
says Duvonne Stewart,
“without trying to be
difficult, or two or three
notches above the
average listener”
and south of Trinidad, while he steadily earned respect in the
international steelband diaspora as well, arranging for bands
in Britain and the United States and engaging students at the
University of Liverpool and Howard University in Washington,
DC. “I could see the transition process of a new generation of
arrangers,” he recalls. “Somebody had to open that door.
“In the 80s and 90s the arrangements that came from the
virtuosos were very technical to articulate,” says Stewart. But
now, “A new generation has evolved. Raw.
Uncut. Unplugged. I am trying to send
the message clearly, without trying to be
difficult, or two or three notches above
the average listener, without them being
misled.”
For last year’s Panorama, Stewart created
a phenomenal arrangement of “Year
for Love”, a statement song by Aaron
“Voice” St Louis about gang warfare in
east Port of Spain, which has claimed
several lives close to the Renegades family.
“I want to tell the story real and true,”
Stewart says.
And in 2019, he is once again treating with a fundamental
problem in his community: the male-female relationship. “It’s
the reality for families that reside around the band, and I will
paint that picture with my music,” Stewart promises. At the
Renegades panyard in Port of Spain, he’s assembled a cadre of
international players from bands he has arranged for in the US,
Britain, France, Japan, and St Vincent.
And he’s ready to step into the hallowed halls of T&T’s music
history: this era, he boldly predicts, will come to be called the
Duvonne Dynasty, taking up the mantle of earlier virtuosos. n
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69

ackstory
History and Art Collection/Alamy Stock Photo
Forever
prima
For decades, Cuba has been considered one of the world’s leading
centres of classical ballet — which is partly thanks to the efforts,
inspiration, and sheer talent of Alicia Alonso, the country’s first
prima ballerina assoluta and co-founder of the world-acclaimed
Ballet Nacional de Cuba. Nazma Muller tells the story of this
international dance legend, still going strong at ninety-seven
70
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separate surgeries she spent two years recovering, confined to
her bed for long periods. Fernando helped his wife to “learn” new
roles by demonstrating her steps with her fingers.
Alonso returned to New York and the Ballet Theatre in
1943. Unexpectedly, and almost immediately, she was asked to
replace the company’s injured prima ballerina and dance the
lead in Giselle — one of the most challenging roles in the classical
repertoire. Despite her severe vision problems, requiring the use
Unexpectedly, Alonso was asked
to replace the company’s injured
prima ballerina and dance the
lead in Giselle — one of the most
challenging roles in the classical
repertoire
Opposite page Alicia
Alonso and Reyes
Fernández in Giselle, 1960
Left Cuba’s Ballet Nacional
performing in 1974
Keystone Pictures USA/Alamy Stock Photo
Beneath the chandeliers of Havana’s Gran Teatro
Nacional, the packed rows buzzed with anticipation.
Then a murmuring spread through the crowd, and
suddenly everyone was on their feet applauding,
as the grand dame of Cuban ballet was led to her
seat. The standing ovation for Cuba’s first prima
ballerina assoluta, Alicia Alonso, was a spontaneous outpouring of
respect for the woman who, along with her husband and brotherin-law,
created the world-acclaimed Ballet Nacional de Cuba.
It may seem strange that this salsa-loving people embraced
ballet — Cuba is the first and only Caribbean country to produce
a world-class company. Like so much that is Cuban, the Ballet
Nacional is the result of grit, innovation, and passion. The love
affair between Alicia and Fernando Alonso gave birth to a style
of ballet that mesmerised the world.
As iconic as Fidel Castro himself, Alicia Ernestina de la Caridad
del Cobre Martínez y del Hoyo, born on 21 December, 1921,
is loved and respected by the Cuban people for her contribution
to the arts. As a child, she studied flamenco in Spain, then ballet
in Havana, where she met her future husband, a fellow ballet student.
As a teenager, she was so dedicated to her craft, Fernando
recalled, that she would answer the door in pointe shoes.
When Fernando moved to New York City in 1937, Alicia, sixteen
years old, managed to join him, and the two subsequently
married. A year later, she enrolled at the School of American
Ballet, taking a break to give birth to their daughter Laura the
following year. In 1938, she made her US debut in the musical
comedy Great Lady, and in 1939 she joined George Balanchine’s
Ballet Caravan.
In 1940, Alonso moved to the newly formed Ballet Theatre
(later the American Ballet Theatre), but after just one year she
suffered what might have been a death blow to her career, when
her right retina detached during a performance. After three
of extra-bright lights to guide her during performances, Alonso
stunned the critics with her spellbinding portrayal. A legendary
career was now under way.
Giselle remained one of Alsonso’s signature roles, alongside
other classics like Swan Lake and Sleeping Beauty.
Promoted to principal dancer of the Ballet Theatre,
she remained with the company for five years before starting
to tour as a guest dancer with partner Igor Youskevitch. Over
the next fourteen years, her performances took her around the
world, dancing at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow and the Kirov
in Leningrad — the first Western dancer to perform in the Soviet
Union — as well as the Paris Opera, with an annual guest role
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71

In July 2018, the Ballet Nacional
de Cuba was declared part of the
cultural heritage of Cuba . . . “where
the tradition of theatrical dance
merges with the essential features
of the national culture”
Young dancers of the
Ballet Nacional
with the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo from 1955 to 1959. Her own
company, co-founded in Havana with Fernando and his brother
Alberto in 1948, was renamed Ballet de Cuba in 1955, but closed
the following year because of financial difficulties.
Then came 1959, the Cuban Revolution, and the rise to power
of Fidel Castro. A supporter of the revolution, Alonso was given
a grant of US$200,000 by Castro to found a new dance school,
the Ballet Nacional de Cuba, where her husband joined her in
training a new generation of talent.
Fernando was an innovative teacher. Combining his understanding
of physics, kinesiology, and anatomy with traditional
ballet training, he was instrumental in developing the Cuban
style of ballet, which couples classical rigour with the physicality
of Latin dance. His experience of coaching Alicia through her
near-blindness also influenced his method, which included a
balance exercise where dancers had to shut their eyes.
He had studied techniques from France, Italy, Denmark, Russia,
and Britain, which he used to develop his own methodology.
The resulting Cuban technique has its origins in the Russian
Vaganova method, which emphasises the entire body. The torso
is the foundation of all movement, so the dancer is trained to have
a strong and well-aligned torso. Movements are achieved through
control of the core, so actions are very clean and precise. What
distinguishes the Cuban method from the others is its romantic
feel. It also combines high Russian extensions and jumps with
intricate Italian footwork, French arm artistry, and British attention
to detail, adding expressiveness and drama to classical ballet
movements. The Cuban method revolutionised ballet, you might
say, with its superb technique and impeccable footwork.
As a symbol of Cuban artistic achievement, the Ballet Nacional
was allowed to tour the world, performing its renditions of classics
like Les Sylphides, Coppélia, and, of course, its signature work,
Giselle. The US barred the company from performing during the
Cold War, prompting the dance critic for the New York Times, Clive
Barnes — who saw the Cubans perform in Canada in 1971 — to
write, “We may be so struck by the way they dance Swan Lake
that as a nation we may spontaneously demand Fidel Castro as
president.”
Alongside her role as teacher and mentor, Alonso continued
to dance, into her eighth decade. In 1995, at the age of seventytwo,
she gave her last performance. Four years later, UNESCO
awarded her the Pablo Picasso Medal for notable contributions
to arts or culture. The Ballet Nacional itself received the Grand
Prix at the Paris International Festival of Dance in 1970.
Cuban government funding for the Ballet Nacional
continues to this day. The directors scour the island for
gifted students, searching Cuba’s fourteen provinces
for children with aptitude for the art: musicality, good body
proportions, and the ability to follow simple steps. The training
is intense, with students required to dance from 7 am to 1.30 pm,
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Prisma by Dukas Presseagentur GmbH/Alamy Stock Photo
their studies covering character dances, folklore, African dances,
historical dances, salon dances — even a bit of piano, French, and
music sight-reading. And Alicia Alonso herself — now ninetyseven
— remains at the helm.
During the eight years of their training, Ballet Nacional students
receive financial support from the government. If they become
one of the forty professionals the school turns out annually, they
earn a salary on par with that of doctors and skilled workers. Boys
are encouraged to audition as much as girls — and, despite Cuban
machismo, many have become professional dancers, encouraged
by the rewards of being part of the Ballet Nacional.
Case en pointe is Carlos Acosta, perhaps the most famous
ballet dancer today. Born in Havana, he trained at the Ballet
Nacional before joining Britain’s Royal Ballet in 1998, and has
achieved a stellar international career, while also founding the
dance company Acosta Danza in Cuba.
In July 2018, in celebration of its seventieth anniversary, the
Ballet Nacional de Cuba was declared part of the cultural heritage
of Cuba. The declaration was signed by Minister of Culture
Abel Prieto. The document recognises the Ballet Nacional as
“the ultimate expression of the Cuban school of ballet, which has
achieved its own physiognomy where the tradition of theatrical
dance merges with the essential features of the national culture.”
If you need further evidence of Cuba’s central role in contemporary
ballet, consider the biennial International Ballet Festival
of Havana, founded in 1960 and now named in honour of Alicia
Alonso. Leading companies, dancers, and choreographers from
around the world have taken the stage at the Gran Teatro,
with performances including 198 world premieres to date. It’s
an extraordinary example of ballet’s essential combination of
tradition and innovation — and its presiding presence is still the
prima ballerina assoluta herself. n
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73

snapshot
In the opening sequence of Unfinished Sentences, over fauxgrainy
footage of two little girls playing on a beach in the
golden light, the narrator relates an anecdote from her
childhood. She’s talking to her father, reminding him of
the time she and her sister were visiting him in Jamaica
and he asked them to each write a story. She wrote hers
from the point of view of a crab who drowns after being placed in
a bucket of water. After reading the story, the father explained that
she couldn’t write about herself drowning, because she’d be dead.
The narrator is filmmaker Mariel Brown, and she recalls that
moment as the dawning of her awareness of death. But it’s also a
formative — and strikingly un-writerly — bit of creative advice,
a case of a father’s anxieties overriding his artistic impulses.
A dead narrator is a perfectly acceptable literary device, but
an eight-year-old child must first learn the rules of life. It’s a
dilemma with which many parents would probably identify: how
to educate a child without stifling her creativity or invalidating
her view of the world?
Brown’s father is the late Trinidadian writer Wayne Brown,
and the film that premiered at the International Film Festival
of Panama in April 2018 is not the one she originally set out to
make. “It was a completely irrational project from start to finish,”
she tells me, months later.
Not long after Wayne succumbed to lung cancer in 2009, at
age sixty-five, Mariel, stricken with grief and panic — “I was
terrified that all of his friends were going to die any minute now,”
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The
inheritance
of loss
Unfinished Sentences began
as a straightforward biography
of filmmaker Mariel Brown’s
late father, the Trinidadian
writer Wayne Brown. But over
the film’s eight-year evolution,
writes Georgia Popplewell,
it turned into a nuanced
exploration of grief, family
trauma, and the ambitions and
fears of the budding artist
Photography courtesy Savant Films
Unfinished Sentences
includes re-enactment
scenes featuring actor
Renaldo Frederick (left) as
Wayne Brown, and Che and
Alessan dra Jar dine as his
young daughters
she says — feverishly began interviewing his contemporaries,
thinking she would make a biographical documentary about her
father as a literary figure.
Grief was also taking an unpredictable toll. Behind the
compulsion to memorialise her father was the fact that he had
almost literally disappeared from her imagination. “I’m looking
for him in my memory,” she says, “and I’m not finding him, and
I’m wanting to talk to him.”
Around 2013, with hours of interviews with the likes of writers
Ian McDonald, Edward Baugh, Mervyn Morris, B.C. Pires, and
Rachel Manley under her belt, Mariel realised she was “being
led down the road of including myself.” She resisted that impulse
for a long time. “Because I started out as a journalist, the idea
of putting myself into the story was anathema to me,” she says.
“I was desperate to make sure the film wasn’t self-indulgent. I
didn’t want it to be just a little film about me and Daddy.”
Whether a film is “little” or “big” depends less on the
subject than on the depth and quality of the themes it
explores. Unfinished Sentences is about a literary figure
who deserved to be better known. It’s about how human beings
are shaped by place and circumstance and race and history.
But it’s also about a special — and difficult — relationship,
which is set up early in the film with the recounting of Mariel’s
origin story. She is the first of Wayne’s two children, born after
her British mother, Megan Hopkyn-Rees, had suffered a series of
miscarriages. According to family lore, Wayne conjured Mariel
into existence — “He seemed to write me into being,” she says
in the film’s narration — assuring Megan that as soon as they
moved to England she’d have a successful pregnancy.
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Unfinished Sentences
cast and crew filming a
scene at the Trinidad
Yachting Association
Mariel embraces the story wholeheartedly — who wouldn’t
want to be the product of art and magic? “I do believe Daddy
was prescient,” she tells me. “That, in a way, is what made the
relationship so hard. It became sort of a burden. Up to my teens
I loved the fact that I was special.”
Unlike her younger sister Saffrey, who once said to Wayne
“I don’t need to read you — you’re my father,” Mariel chose a
career as a filmmaker, further cementing Wayne’s role in her
life as creative touchstone. In the film, she refers to him as “a
landmark by which I could always find myself. If you were to die,
I would surely lose my way.”
Few of the interviews Mariel did in that initial rush to immortalise
her father made it into the final version of the film, which
required a new set of questions
to be asked. She re-interviewed
her mother and her father’s
close friend Rachel Manley.
Her younger sister Saffrey
would become one of the film’s
key figures.
Mariel already knew a great
deal about her father’s life. “He
was incredibly communicative
with Saffrey and me,” she
tells me, “which was unusual among West Indian men of his
generation.” Wayne also left a meticulous archive that included
both letters he’d received and carbon copies of ones he had
written. “There were folders of literary letters, Rachel letters,
Tony letters [from the late Jamaican poet Anthony McNeill],”
Mariel says. There was also a “Sas and Boo” folder, containing
letters he’d exchanged with his two daughters. Several of the
“Boo” letters — that was his pet name for Mariel — are quoted
in the film.
Along with the writer’s sense of posterity, Mariel attributes
Wayne’s compulsion to collect and catalogue to the fact that
he was the last descendant of his family. “The Vincent Brown
line ended with Daddy, and I guess he felt a great responsibility
to keep things.” Also present in Wayne’s trove were the letters
between him and a Scottish pen pal named Rhona, with whom
he had corresponded in his late teenage years and early twenties.
The portrait that emerges of
Unfinished Sentences’ two main
subjects is rich and emotionally
complex, which means it isn’t
always flattering
In the 1990s, Rhona tracked Wayne down and wrote to him that
she was downsizing her possessions; she offered to send him the
letters he’d written to her. For Mariel, these letters were documentary
gold, giving her access to her father as a young person
“discovering poetry, meeting Derek Walcott . . . the struggle
within his family.”
The film recounts the trauma of Wayne’s early life: the death
of his mother just days after his birth, and later of the aunt who
raised him; of his family’s upper-middle-class preoccupation
with skin colour and its effect on a boy who happened to be
born darker than was desirable; his fraught relationship with his
father, a renowned jurist. “The loss of his mother was probably
the most profound loss that stayed with him for his life,” says
Mariel. “Death was a constant
in his life, and death is everywhere
in his work.”
Unfinished Sentences traces
the trajectory of Wayne and
Mariel’s relationship as childhood
reverence gives way to
what Mariel comes to see as
a wilful refusal on her father’s
part to accept the person she’s
becoming. It weaves interviews,
readings of Wayne’s prose and poetry and letters by Trinidadian
actors Nigel Scott and Nikolai Salcedo, and Mariel’s narration
together with visuals of family photos, image-and-text animations,
and home-movie-style reenactments of moments from the lives
of the family, featuring Renaldo Frederick and Sophie Wight as
convincing stand-ins for a younger Wayne and Megan.
There are only a few glimpses of the actual Wayne in
action, from an interview Mariel filmed in 2004. He’s already
white-haired, wielding a packet of Benson and Hedges with a
chain-smoker’s absentminded dexterity. That, plus some audio
from a 1987 radio interview with an unnamed journalist, provide
the only instances in the film of Wayne as a living person, of
his deep, measured voice with its cadences of educated Port of
Spain. On her last trip to see him in Jamaica, Mariel took along
her camera equipment, hoping to interview him again. But it was
too late: during her visit Wayne would die.
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Filmmaker Mariel Brown and
voice actor Nikolai Salcedo
in the recording studio
The portrait that emerges of Unfinished Sentences’ two main
subjects is rich and emotionally complex, which means it
isn’t always flattering. Mariel’s mother Megan and younger
sister Saffrey, in particular, don’t pull punches in their assessments
of the two.
“You were always a drama queen,” Megan says early in
the film. Saffrey puts part of the blame for the difficulty of the
relationship on Mariel’s alleged inability to let things go. Megan
recounts Wayne’s fear, on their return to Trinidad, of being perceived
by his peers as being the kind of man who would engage
in housework or child care.
The Jamaican poet Mervyn
Morris is obviously choosing
his words carefully when he
says that Wayne was “pretty
sure who were his friends.”
As she grows older and
more aware of her father’s
relative fame and talent as a
poet and writer, Mariel has
to acknowledge that this talent hasn’t translated into material
success, which makes her anxious about her own future as a
filmmaker. The narration and excerpts from their letters to each
other chronicle the sometimes brutal antagonism that develops
between them as Mariel grows up. “You tore me to shreds with
your words,” Mariel says in the film, “as though the I that I was
meant to become had already been decided by you, and you
were angry with the person I was actually becoming. How could
you know who that would be?”
Unfinished Sentences took eight years to make, and its painstaking
evolution is evident in the film’s nuance and quality.
As she grows older, Mariel Brown has
to acknowledge that her father’s
literary talent hasn’t translated into
a material success
Mariel says the feedback she received after showing a rough
cut first to a group of friends and colleagues (myself included)
in Trinidad, and then at Primera Mirada, the works-in-progress
section of the International Festival of Panama, was critical.
“Getting notes will be something I’ll definitely do on the next
project,” she says.
Another first was working with actors on the reenactments. “I
enjoyed engaging in a fully creative process and pushing myself.
As I move forward, this is the kind of the direction I want to go
more in.” Also “revelatory” was the collaboration with composer
Francesco Emmanuel, and
working for the first time with
a professional sound designer.
For Mariel, unveiling this
very personal film to a wider
audience was understandably
daunting. “I was nervous
about whether it would reach
people,” she tells me, “whether
it would connect, whether it
worked on that level.” In her hotel room before the first screening
in Panama, she felt physically sick.
“It was after [that] first screening that I got a sense that it was
working and connecting with people on many different levels, in
terms of family relationships, in terms of grief, in terms of living a
life of creativity . . . in terms of anxiety and mental instability,” she
says. “I was astonished and delighted by the kinds of questions I
got in the Q&A and afterwards, when people kept coming up to
me and talking about their own experiences of being a struggling
writer, struggling to commit to that, suffering with crippling
anxiety. All these stories emerged. And that made me feel brave.” n
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ARRIVE
dbimages/Alamy Stock Photo
80 Destination
Seven days in Tobago
90 Offtrack
Makonaima’s treasure
94
98
Personal Tour
Good prospect
Home Ground
Home to Antigua
Antigua’s Nelson’s Dockyard, a haven for sailing ships for centuries

destination
Seven days
in Tobago
Could a week ever be enough to savour the delights of
Tobago, one of the Caribbean’s most picturesque islands?
Nixon Nelson gives it a try
Just twenty-five miles long by six wide,
a daub of brilliant green on the map of
the blue Caribbean Sea, Tobago may
seem like the kind of place you can get
to know in just a few days. But there’s
more to Trinidad’s littler sister isle
than at first meets the eye. These hundred square
miles conceal more secret nooks and little-known
pleasures than you’d expect, and it can take years
— decades — to experience them all. Just ask
those visitors who’ve returned here, again and
again, unable to get Tobago out of their heads.
(Why’d you want to?)
We can’t all give everything up for a life on the
beach, and the average Tobago visitor must tear
herself away long before she’s ready. Yet there’s
no reason you can’t experience the full diversity
of this extraordinary island on a week-long trip —
without running yourself ragged. Here’s a sevenday
itinerary to show you Tobago’s best.
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Day one
We know the number one reason
you came to Tobago: the glorious
beaches. So no dithering: your
first day should definitely be spent
finding and savouring your ideal
stretch of tree-shaded sand and
expanse of glimmering water.
Head up the Leeward Coast,
past Plymouth, and explore the
succession of quiet, uncrowded
bays — Castara, Englishman’s
Bay, Parlatuvier, Bloody Bay, Man
o’ War Bay — where on a good
day you’ll have the beach almost
to yourself, far from the madding
crowds around Crown Point.
The brilliant blue waters
of Parlatuvier Bay
Michaela Arjoon
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81

Argyle Falls is the most
celebrated of Tobago’s
waterfalls
Nicolas RINALDO/shutterstock.com
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Day two
Having seen Tobago’s Leeward
side, let’s take the Windward
Road and investigate the more
rugged Atlantic-facing coast. Just
before the village of Roxborough,
turn inland towards Argyle Falls,
the best known and tallest of the
numerous waterfalls that rush
through Tobago’s forested hills. A
short hike brings you to the foot of
Argyle’s three levels of cascades,
with their small pools perfect for
an invigorating plunge.
Day three
Did Argyle give you a hankering to
see more of Tobago’s lush interior?
The rainforest of the island’s Main
Ridge, protected by law since
1776, is home to an estimated one
hundred bird species, including
six different hummingbirds, plus
manakins, trogons, and motmots.
Well-maintained trails allow you
to plunge into nature, and most
hotels or tour companies can
introduce you to a knowledgeable
guide. Take your hiking boots and
binoculars!
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The houses of Scarborough ascend
their hill overlooking the harbour
Day four
Day five
robertharding/Alamy Stock Photo
After experiencing some serious nature, let’s
take a day to explore Tobago’s human history.
Start in Scarborough, the island’s capital, with
its colourful houses ranging up the slopes
above the harbour. At the top of (aptly named)
Fort Street, you’ll find Tobago’s best preserved
historical site, Fort King George. Built by the
French in 1781 as one of the island’s chief
defences, the hilltop fort was later renamed
for King George III after the British recaptured
the island. Today’s fort-museum includes
preserved historic buildings, a collection of
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century cannon,
and amazing views of the bay below.
Now head out of Scarborough towards
Plymouth, one of Tobago’s most historically
fascinating sites. In the seventeenth century, a
group of colonists from what was then called
the Duchy of Courland — today’s Latvia —
established a settlement here. The unapologetically
modernist Courland Monument commemorates
this chapter of the island’s history.
Nearby Fort James has a commanding view of
Courland Bay, and near its entrance you’ll find
the curiosity known to locals as the Mystery
Tombstone. Here lie Betty Stiven and her infant
child, deceased in 1783, and memorialised with
a riddle which has entertained passersby for
over two centuries.
Pigeon
Point
Store Bay
All this gallivanting works up an appetite, and it’s also nice to
have a day where you just stay put. There are worse places to
be lazy than popular Store Bay, a long stone’s throw from the
airport at Crown Point and almost always busy. Still, the gently
curving beach is just big enough to evade the crowds (except
perhaps on weekends), and this is also the place to experience
one of Tobago’s essential culinary delicacies, curried crab and
dumplings. The simple food huts above the bay — named for
their various, but invariably female, proprietors — offer friendly
conversation and home-style food. Be warned, there is no prim
way to eat curried crab: this is a hands-on, shell-crunching,
sauce-dripping dish, at least if you enjoy it the right way.
Plymouth
Englishman’s
Bay Parlatuvier
Castara Bay
TOBAGO
Scarborough
Man o’ War Bay
Speyside
Charlotteville
84
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JADE MONKEY
EAT
Bambú
GIFT & COFFEE SHOP
Rare & exotic arts and crafts
made in the Caribbean
Now GRAB & GO healthy meals
PLAY
#199 Milford Road, Crown Point, Tobago
T. 868-639-8133
E: mariela0767@hotmail.com
DRINK
CAFÉ • casino • bar
CROWN POINT TOBAGO
CASINO/BAR: 868 631-0044/0500
JADE CAFÉ: 868 639-8361
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85

imageBROKER/Alamy Stock Photo
86
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Day six
Celebrated for its dive sites, Tobago may not boast the water
clarity of some other Caribbean islands to the north. But the
outflowing silt from Venezuela’s Orinoco River which can
sometimes cloud Tobago’s waters also provides rich nutrients
that feed the extraordinary marine diversity of the island’s
reefs. The best way to see this for yourself is a diving or
snorkelling expedition, which you can arrange through one
of Tobago’s highly experienced dive operators. Whether your
primary interest is coral, fish species, or shipwreck exploration,
there’s a site for every level of scuba experience. Manta
rays, sea turtles, and the world’s biggest brain coral all await
you below the surface.
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87

Day seven
Michaela Arjoon
Sometimes the best plan is to end as you started — with
a blissful day at the beach, and after a week in Tobago
you’ve probably figured out your personal favourite. But
don’t miss a visit to Pigeon Point, even if it’s the island’s
ultimate tourism cliché. There’s good reason why this
long, palm-fringed, sandy stretch is Tobago’s classic postcard
view. And the best time to take it all in just might be
sunset, as the sky turns brilliant hues of pink and orange
behind the Pigeon Point jetty. The sea laps gently at your
feel, the beverage in your hand is still frosty, and probably
you’re already dreaming of your next visit — because, no,
seven days in Tobago could never be enough. n
ADVERTORIALS
Tropikist Hotel
Gently nestled against the warm, calm, turquoise waters
of the Caribbean Sea, Tropikist Beach Resort is beautifully
landscaped on five acres of luscious gardens, with its own
private beachfront, two pools, and a breathtaking view of
the setting sun, making it a perfect choice for your ideal
Caribbean vacation, for both local and international guests.
Jade Monkey
Located in Crown Point, Jade Monkey Casino, Bar, and Café
is, as the locals say, “de best place to lime” in Tobago. The
bar, known for its packed dance floor, is open every day of
the week. Next door is the café, which specialises in various
succulent seafood dishes. We also have the most popular
casino on the island, filled with a wide choice of slot machines
and roulette and card games. Each night there are cash
giveaways, free drinks, and dinner available. So next time
you’re in Tobago, don’t hesitate to stop by.
Flambowl
An Asian-style grill offering delicious hibachi bowls with rice
or noodles and your choice of vegetables in several unique
Asian sauces with a local splendour, plus gourmet burgers,
hot dogs, cheese steak sandwiches, and lots more. Come
taste a new way to customise your grill experience.
Skewers
A unique Middle Eastern grill serving Arabic-style cuisine
infused with delectable local flavour. We offer all the meats
served with traditional tasty Arabic sides, all with an exquisite
local flair. Experience the unrivalled taste of Skewers, with
over a decade of consistent perfection.
Shaw Park Complex
Home to stunning local art and a stellar event team who
ensure an exceptional and tailored experience for every
guest, the 5,000-capacity Shaw Park Complex is a modern
centre for the arts which features both theatre and
conferencing capabilities.
Relax… Rejuvenate… Reconnect
• Warm friendly service
• Peaceful cosy rooms
• Fabulous restaurant
• Organic kitchen garden
• Yoga, tai-chi and massage
• Live band on weekends
• small, intimate, weddings,
retreats and events
Come home to yourself… come home
to Kariwak… where Tobago begins.
868 639 8442
info@kariwak.com
www.kariwak.com
@kariwakvillage
88 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM

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89

offtrack
courtesy reel guyana
Makonaima’s
treasure
In the foothills of the Pakaraima Mountains, near Guyana’s
geographical heart, the community of Karasabai may seem
isolated on the map, but it’s an epicentre for lovers of
wildlife and adventure, writes Annette Arjoon-Martins —
and it’s also rich in folklore and legend
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Karasabai’s Kezee Eco
Lodge is named for the
rare sun parakeet, which
can be found nearby
A T L
A N
T I C
L A
O C
E A N
U E
E z
V E N
PAKARAIMA
MOUNTAINS
georgetown
S
U R
KARASABAI
I N
Lethem
A
M
E
B R A
Z I L
Karasabai is celebrated
among serious birders:
it’s one of the few places
where the endangered sun
parakeet can be found in
the wild
The Guiana Shield, a two-billion-year-old geological
formation spread across six countries, is well
known to adventurers and scientists as an ecoregion
of global significance, with a rich biodiversity.
Stretched across the middle of this shield lies
Guyana itself, a country crisscrossed by rivers,
dotted with hundreds of waterfalls, with expansive pristine rainforests
and towering mountains.
Most impressive of these are the Pakaraimas, a vast expanse
of flat-topped mountains spread across the borders between
Venezuela, Brazil, and Guyana. Just south of the Pakaraima
range, surrounded by breathtaking landscapes, rich biodiversity,
and fascinating folklore, is the indigenous community of
Karasabai — an emerging destination for community-led and
-owned tourism.
Karasabai is a key place in the folklore of Guyana’s indigenous
Macushi people, intertwined with the mythical personality of
Makonaima. One of the legendary visitors to Earth from whom
indigenous peoples are descended, Makonaima had a twin
brother named Pia, and a group of sisters collectively called the
Pakaraimas. The “Tales of Makonaima’s Children” are Macushi
creation stories, and here you’ll find the legend of how Karasabai
got its name.
In Macushi, kala sa means “treasure chest” and pai refers to the
deepest part of a body of water, such as a river or lake. The story,
handed down through generations, is that Makonaima passed by
a creek where a treasure chest was located, and chose to turn it
into stone. (Local belief is that anything that crossed Makanoima’s
path, and which he did not want to be lost, was simply petrified.)
The bay of the creek where the petrified treasure chest lies — the
kala sa pai — is now called Karasabai.
Today, Karasabai is celebrated among serious birders for a
different reason: it’s one of the few places globally, and the only
location in Guyana, where the endangered sun parakeet (Aratinga
solstitialis) can be found in the wild. Known locally as the kezee,
or “flying jewels,” the sun parakeet is an important motif in
Karasabai’s tourism identity — for example, lending its name to
the brand-new Kezee Eco Lodge at the foot of a nearby mountain.
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Dedicated birders like to start early, and the sun parakeet
tour calls for a sunrise start and a short journey by 4x4 across
the savannahs, skilfully navigating around the large termite
mounds which stand like silent sentinels. Next comes a two-hour
boat trip on the Ireng River, meandering through the valleys of
spectacular mountains offering stunning vistas, high and low,
for miles on end. Puffs of noisy blue-and-gold and red-andgreen
macaws emerge from the mist-covered, thickly-forested
riverbanks, and fly low overhead. Finally, the “flying jewels”
appear, in flocks of dozens, making intermittent stops to feed on
wild fruits on either side of the river. The boat captain masterfully
manoeuvres his small vessel, following the birds to ensure
photos or videos.
The riverbanks are dotted with pristine sandbanks, perfect
nesting and basking sites for giant river turtles. And since the
Ireng is a tributary of the Amazon, lucky visitors may also spot
a very rare and much-prized pink river-dolphin (Inia geoffrensis).
The boat captain knows the most frequented pools, and is
also adept at communicating with the dolphins to increase the
chance of visitors getting that glimpse of a lifetime.
For the more adventurous, Karasabai also offers opportunities
for mountaineering, with a variety of peaks of various sizes
and terrain, depending on levels of skill. The most popular
mountain hike is on Saddle Back Mountain, with a cleared trail
and a benab rest stop, and the added attraction of a cave full
of archaeological treasures.
The Pakaraima mountains are considered deeply
spiritual territory by Guyana’s indigenous peoples — not only
for their rich cultural value, but also for the provision of natural
resources. In indigenous culture, lucky charms — known
locally as binas — are used extensively for catching fish and
game, and sometimes, it is believed, even a husband or wife.
To the northwest of Karasabai is one particular mountain
where the binas for everything are said to be found. Many
moons ago, stories say, there was a big flood which affected
The Pakaraima mountains are
considered deeply spiritual territory
by Guyana’s indigenous peoples
the indigenous peoples and all the animals in the area. They
sought refuge on top of this particular mountain, but there
were tensions within the group and they fought among themselves.
Those that died, both humans and animals, grew back
as plants which are now known as binas. For example, if a deer
was killed and came back as a plant, it can now be used to
catch deer. Ordinary persons are prohibited from visiting the
mountain to collect the binas: only the Shaman, who possesses
the power to calm down the animal and human spirits, can
perform this task.
WaterFrame/Alamy Stock Photo
The rare pink riverdolphin,
which visitors to
Karasabai can sometimes
spot in the Ireng River
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A sociable species, the sun
parakeet is usually found
in flocks of up to thirty
individuals
Travel tip
The best time to visit Karasabai?
Dry season weather makes overland
travel easier, and the village is the
first stop for the annual North
Pakaraimas Mountain Safari, around
Easter.
Another local landmark with its own
folklore is Tiger Pond, with its Macushi
name derived from the words ludule
(“tiger”) and kuppu (“pond”). When the
pond is displeased, some believe, a white
cat emerges from the water and attacks
young children. The terrible sounds that
sometimes emanate from the pond are
also bad omens.
You may hear stories like these,
perhaps, on a tour through Karasabai’s
lush cassava farms to witness farine and
cassava bread production, and to sample
the potent local alcoholic beverage known
as piwari. On sale is a wide range of handicraft,
including intricately carved woodwork
pieces depicting the various animals
you may have encountered on your visit.
Hand-carved from a prized wood known
locally as “tigerwood” for its distinctive
patterns, beautiful jewellery boxes are
adorned with the forms of the giant river
otter and — yes — the sun parakeet. Or
look for one of the detailed needlework
panels made by Karasabai’s craftswomen,
each requiring hours of delicate work.
A splendid sun parakeet rendered in
coloured thread may be just the keepsake
to remind you, years later, of a visit to this
corner of Guyana shrouded in legend. n
imageBROKER/Alamy Stock Photo
Caribbean Airlines operates
daily flights to Cheddi Jagan
International Airport in Guyana from
destinations in the Caribbean and
North America. Local airlines operate
daily flights from Georgetown to
Lethem, with overland connections
via bus or 4x4 to Karasabai
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93

personal tour
Stuart Monk/Shutterstock.com
Good
Prospect
courtesy the brooklyn museum
The Brooklyn neighbourhood of
Prospect Heights is home to cultural
institutions, a thriving foodie scene,
and a Caribbean community still holding
on despite rampant gentrification. It’s
also home to Trinidad-born architect
Roxanne Ryce-Paul, who reveals the
hints she shares with visiting friends
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Like the rest of Brooklyn, the neighbourhood
known today as Prospect
Heights was once the territory of
the indigenous Lenape, and then a
landscape of Dutch colonial farms.
In the mid nineteenth century, as
Brooklyn — still an independent city — began to
sprawl inland from its harbour, the famed landscape
architect Frederick Law Olmsted laid out
526-acre Prospect Park, and the Brooklyn city fathers
established a series of cultural institutions
nearby, to rival Manhattan’s. The neighbourhood
of brownstone townhouses and grand apartment
buildings on the slope immediately north of the
park soon became known as Prospect Heights.
In the second half of the twentieth century, the
traditionally Irish, Italian, and Jewish residents of
Prospect Heights were largely replaced by African-
Americans and migrants from the Caribbean. The
Caribbean influence is still obvious in the neighbourhood’s
streets, with Jamaican and Trinidadian
accents never out of earshot, soca music blasting
from the occasional passing car, and the annual
Labour Day Carnival parade route running along
Eastern Parkway.
But, as with most New York City neighbourhoods
with good housing stock and subway access,
the past fifteen years have seen another major
demographic shift. Priced out of Manhattan, young
and mostly white professionals have flocked to
the neighbourhood, and all the characteristics of
gentrification have followed.
When Trinidad-born architect Roxanne Ryce-
Paul and her partner, artist Nicolas Touron, moved
to Prospect Heights in 2001, it was still very much a Caribbean-feeling place. Specialising
in urban planning, historic preservation, and sustainable architecture, Ryce-Paul
currently works at the NYC Department of Design and Construction, which means
a daily commute north to Queens. But on weekends she enjoys spending time in her
home neighbourhood, learning more about its architectural history and little-known
Caribbean connections, and sharing them with visiting friends. Her personal tour of
Prospect Heights leans heavily on its cultural riches — and its diverse culinary scene.
Opposite page The Brooklyn Museum
(above) has the second-largest collection
of artworks in New York City — including the
sculpture Martinique Woman (below), by
Malvina Hoffman
Above The monumental
Art Deco entrance of the Brooklyn Central
Library
Leonard Zhukovsky/Shutterstock.com
Start with the landmarks
Eastern Parkway, Prospect Heights’ southern boundary, is
where you’ll find some of Brooklyn’s grandest public buildings.
The Brooklyn Museum of Art, says Ryce-Paul, “is the NYC
public museum where you can see yourself represented as artist
and as subject, regardless of who you are and from where you
have come.” She singles out two favourite artworks among the
museum’s collection (the second largest in New York City): Martinique
Woman (1928), a sculpture by the American artist Malvina
Hoffmann, and A Storm in the Rocky Mountains, Mt Rosalie (1866),
a monumentally scaled landscape painting by Albert Bierstadt.
A short walk away, the Art Deco headquarters of the
Brooklyn Central Library is “one of the most magnificent buildings
in the city,” says Ryce-Paul. “The gold leaf relief at the
entrance beckons, the plaza receives, and the curved façade
embraces the book lover. It also excels by hosting a diverse and
compelling range of services and programming for the community.
I like to walk through the building on my way home just
to feel Brooklyn.”
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The library faces right onto Grand Army Plaza, the vast ovalshaped
entrance to Prospect Park that also serves as a memorial
to the Union Army in the US Civil War. It includes a triumphal
arch of stone with bronze sculptures. Ryce-Paul tells visitors to
look closely at the group of soldiers depicted on the arch’s righthand
side: in the foreground you can see an African-American
soldier, rarely depicted in Civil War memorials.
Work up an appetite
Grand Army Plaza is also a good place to start a foodie’s
exploration of Prospect Heights, thanks to the popular Saturday
Farmer’s Market. “Provisions are priced higher than neighbourhood
food and drink,” says Ryce-Paul, “but the produce are
just-picked fresh — eggs, bakery goods, meat, pickles all arrive
that morning from upstate New York and rural New Jersey.
GrowNYC’s Food Scrap Composting then collects your farmer’s
market food waste to replenish the earth and grow more food.
Closed loop!”
Ryce-Paul and Touron (who’s a former chef) enjoy cooking at
home, with organic produce from the farmer’s market and the
nearby Park Slope Food Co-op. But when they’re in the mood
to eat out, there’s no shortage of options within a few blocks of
their apartment.
“Cheryl’s Global Soul [on Underhill Avenue] is where you must
be first thing on Sunday morning — only to discover as you turn
the corner that all of Prospect Heights is there before you for
brunch, no joke.” When she’s in the mood for Caribbean food?
“When you can’t be in Trinidad, you eat at Sugarcane [on Flatbush
Avenue].” And Japanese is a longtime favourite. “Geido [Flatbush
Avenue] does much more than excellent sushi. There is Japanese
home-style donburi, ramen, soba, izakaya — and the pickled
vegetables and ginger are some of the best ever.” A few blocks
away, “Chuko [Vanderbilt Avenue] is radicalising
vintage Japanese. No sushi here, but you can do a
side-by-side tasting test of traditional versus avantgarde
Japanese culinary delights.”
When the weather is hot? Ryce-Paul strolls
over to nearby Crown Heights and Island Pops
[Nostrand Avenue], run by Trinis Khalid and Shelly
Hamid. “Boozy lollies, snowcone, Mackeson
chocolate or orange bitters ice-cream . . . The other
day, in a Guinness caramel ice-cream delirium, I
dreamed pennacool on the menu.”
Green days
Manhattan’s Central Park is world-famous, but
true Brooklynites will tell you that was merely
Olmsted’s warm-up for his true masterpiece,
Prospect Park, with its rolling Long Meadow, a
rugged forested section called The Ravine, and
lake and boathouse. That’s the place to “make
friends with the greedy swans and wild geese,”
says Ryce-Paul, while in the summertime Breezy
Hill is where you’ll find the collection of trendy
food trucks called Smorgasburg.
But her number-one spot for relaxing outdoors
is the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, tucked between
Prospect Park and the Brooklyn Museum.
Founded in 1910, it boasts a celebrated Japanese
Felix Lipov/Shuterstock.com
Left The bronze sculptures
on the triumphal arch in Grand
Army Plaza include a depiction
of an African-American soldier
Opposite page Springtime in
the Brooklyn Botanic Garden:
cherry trees in bloom
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NattyC/Shutterstock.com
Garden, a collection of plants inspired by Shakespeare’s plays
and poems, and an esplanade of cherry trees that turns into a
rioting froth of pink blossoms in the spring. When it’s cold, the
tropical greenhouse — with cocoa and coffee trees, heliconias,
and even a mango tree — remind Ryce-Paul of home. “Then
there is the racoon tree, where we have, over many years, seen
new little families emerge from a hole in the trunk.”
Culture-hopping
The Brooklyn Academy of Music (or BAM) in Fort Greene — a
short journey north from Prospect Heights by subway or even
on foot — is one of NYC’s most innovative performing arts
venues, with a year-round programme including theatre, opera,
and film. “A prominent start to the summer is Dance Africa,”
says Ryce-Paul, “which is as much a community celebration as
a presentation of the dance arts of the African diaspora. In the
autumn, there is the Next Wave Festival” — twelve weeks of
groundbreaking performances — “and the BAM Rose Cinema
screens new and emerging films.”
Prospect Heights is also home to two small but beloved
independent bookshops — “thriving despite the relentless
charge from characterless retail that sells everything and
leaves you empty.” Café con Libros [on Prospect Place] is
a feminist community bookstore, “really just an extension
of home, when you invite friends over. Warm, intellectually
stimulating, human.” Three blocks over, Unnameable Books
[Vanderbilt Avenue] “passes under the radar until you know it
and it knows you — then there is no reason to buy a book from
Amazon, ever again.” One friend who visits Brooklyn annually
is notorious for leaving Unnameable with a stack of at least a
dozen books, every time.
Caribbean Airlines operates several flights daily to
New York City’s John F. Kennedy International Airport
from Trinidad, Guyana, and Jamaica, with connections to
other Caribbean destinations
WWW.CARIBBEAN-AIRLINES.COM
97

home ground
Home to
Antigua
Returning to Antigua after eight years,
Bridget van Dongen couldn’t wait to reexperience
the sights and delights of the
island she’s come to call home. Here’s her
itinerary for a mini-vacation that shows
you Antigua at its best
Eight years ago, I took a chance, and moved with my family from
Antigua to Trinidad. Two months ago, we came back home.
While I wasn’t born in Antigua, I lived here for twelve years from
the age of twenty-four. I met my husband here, and our daughter
was born in Antigua. I became a naturalised citizen. We had a
mostly good life with problems here and there.
So why did I leave? This magazine is one reason — during my eight years
in Trinidad I was part of the editorial team for Caribbean Beat. But I never
stopped thinking of Antigua as home — and, eventually, I decided the life I
wanted for my family was here. The very day we returned, I knew we’d made
the right decision. Since being back, we’ve won a pub quiz, had a curry lime for
old friends, and I had the chance to play tourist with my friend Nikita, visiting
from New York, which helped me to re-acquaint myself with my home.
On Nikita’s first day here, we started with a drive around the island. Starting
from Halcyon Heights, on the hill above Dickenson Bay, we drove through
the outskirts of St John’s, the capital, down to Jolly Harbour, on the west coast.
Antigua’s recently had a lot of rain, according to my friends, so the countryside
is lovely and green, with thousands of pale yellow butterflies everywhere. At
Jolly Harbour we stopped for our first dip in the sea. The colour of the sea on
that side of the island ranges from bright turquoise blue to a milky teal colour
when the groundswells stir up the powder-white
sand. Nikita wanted to stop and relax, and it was
tempting, but I was on a mission. I wanted to get
to Falmouth Harbour by lunchtime, as there was a
specific place I’d been dying to visit.
But first there was the drive around the south
end of Antigua. We drove past Darkwood Beach
and remarked that we had to come back to try
the Swash Inflatable Water Park, anchored just
offshore. Then we turned through Urlings and
Old Road, stopping to purchase some bananas
and what is still, to me, the sweetest pineapple
in the world, the Antiguan Black. Old Road joins
the main road to English Harbour at Swetes, right
98 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM

mbrand85/Shutterstock.com
in front of the church of Our Lady of Perpetual
Hope — painted Pepto-Bismol pink, an unmissable
landmark.
Cresting Horsford Hill, we finally saw the
magnificent vista of Falmouth Harbour with its
yachts at anchor, a sight I’d really missed. As we
descended to the coast, I told Nikita about the
time, many years ago, when a hurricane caused a
landslide on that very hill, which everyone around
pitched in to help clear — including my friend
Caroline and me. A few years ago, Caroline and
her husband Simon opened Papa’s by the Sea in
Falmouth, with a beautiful setting right on the
water. The beer was ice-cold and our lunch was
delicious. When I remarked on the irony of a New
Yorker ordering a roti from a British chef in Antigua,
Nikita just kept chewing.
Leaving Falmouth, we drove past Willoughby
Bay, through Bethesda. Apparently eight
years away means misremembering certain
roads, as I’d intended to navigate us to Devil’s
Bridge, but we ended up instead on the road past
Potswork Dam, the largest water catchment in
Antigua. When I realised we’d taken a wrong turn,
I rang my friend who runs PAAWS, an animal
rescue organisation, in Parham — a village with
a history as Antigua’s first British colonial capital,
The view down to English
Harbour
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99

BANANA PANCAKE/Alamy Stock Photo
Cresting Horsford Hill, we finally saw the
magnificent vista of Falmouth Harbour with its
yachts at anchor, a sight I’d really missed
founded in 1632. Nikita loves animals, and PAAWS
allows visitors to the island the opportunity to play
with the rescues. We spent a bittersweet half hour
playing with puppies and dogs, and lamenting that
we couldn’t take them all home with us.
On our way home, we hit up Dickenson Bay —
which, since I left, has become even more commercialised,
with nearly every inch covered in beach
chairs to rent. But that doesn’t take away from the
loveliness of the water. So while Nikita enjoyed
himself on a jet-ski and paddle board, I took a
swim: the way every day in Antigua ought to end.
The next day was dive day. Nikita is an
avid scuba diver. He’s dived all over the
Caribbean, from Mexico to the Dominican
Republic to Tobago — so there’s no way he would
have missed out on Antigua.
We booked a dive with Indigo Divers in Jolly
Harbour. Don McIntosh is an old friend, and he
invited me to join them on a two-tank dive on
Cades Reef, off the southwest coast. The last
time I’d dived was in Tobago, where I was a little
disappointed with the day’s murky conditions.
Cades Reef was a different story: the water clarity
was amazing, and we saw a wide variety of
fish and coral. I thought we’d spot more lionfish,
but we glimpsed only one, which our divemaster
tried to spear, but just missed. She told us that
because divers often kill the lionfish — a harmful
invasive species — and leave them for other fish
100 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM

nikita prokhorov
to eat, there are often black-tipped sharks hanging
around the dive sites, but we weren’t lucky
enough to see one. I did, however, manage to
brush up against some fire coral. In all my years of
living in the Caribbean and exploring its waters,
I’d successfully avoided a close encounter with
fire coral, and I’m glad — because weeks later my
arm was still enflamed and itching.
The next few days were beach days, including
that promised visit to the Swash Water Park. It’s
a great way to tire out over-energetic kids (and
adults). I was exhausted within fifteen minutes, but
my daughter and Nikita had a blast for a full hour.
We also hosted a housewarming curry lime
for a few friends, with lots of beer, rum, and
laughter — and, of course, a Trinidadian chicken
curry cooked by my husband. In true smallisland
fashion, I’d contacted someone on Facebook
for something totally unrelated, and when I
mentioned we’d be visiting Roti King in St John’s
for the dhalpuri, this total stranger mentioned
that his Guyanese mother made roti also. While
it wasn’t quite as good as the ones from Ali’s in
St James in Trinidad — sorry, mom! — it still
mopped up that delicious curry and everyone
loved the meal.
Opposite page The
Copper and Lumber
Store, one of the historic
buildings in Nelson’s
Dockyard
Above The Pillars of
Hercules
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101

Two days before Nikita flew back to New
York, we took another trip around the
island, this time by sea. Adventure Antigua
offers various boat tours, but my favourite has
always been the Xtreme Circumnav. The staff
on the boat were super-friendly, though the day
started overcast and slightly chilly. All along the
way, our guides pointed out areas of interest on the
mainland, sharing tidbits of history.
The sun was peeking out by the time we stopped
for lunch at Green Island. The menu was simple
but delectable: barbequed chicken and pasta with
salad, plus, I’m told, the best banana bread in
Antigua. After lunch came a fast run down the east
coast and into English Harbour — Antigua’s most
celebrated historical site, and one of only a handful
of working Georgian dockyards left in the world, a
safe haven from storms for centuries. Named for
the Royal Navy’s Admiral Horatio Nelson, who was
stationed here from 1784 to 1787, Nelson’s Dockyard
has a fascinating history, with well-preserved
heritage buildings and a museum.
We kept count of superyachts
and multi-million-dollar homes
on the shore, pretending they
belonged to us. Doesn’t hurt
to dream, right?
Dickenson Bay
Darkwood Beach
Jolly Harbour
St John’s
AntiGua
Rendezvous Bay
Falmouth Harbour
English Harbour
Willoughby Bay
Green Island
After a brief history lesson, we moored off the Pillars of Hercules, an
unusual natural limestone formation at the mouth of English Harbour. It was
time for some snorkelling. By now the sun had fully emerged and the water
had warmed up, so we all stayed in as long as we could. Our last stop before
home was Rendezvous Bay, for rum punch (delicious and quite strong), and
then a run around the southwest coast, back up to Dickenson Bay. Along the
way, we kept count of superyachts and multi-million-dollar homes on the
shore, pretending they belonged to us. Doesn’t hurt to dream, right?
While it was a lot of fun playing tourist, by the time you read this, I’ll have
started a new job (or begged for my old job back at the magazine). My minivacation
was a great reminder why so many people come to Antigua to enjoy
the tourist lifestyle. But when I sip my coffee each morning and look out at the
incredible view from my balcony, I know the decision to move back to Antigua
may have taken a while to make — but it’s one I won’t regret.
The delicious view from
Green Island
John King/Alamy Stock Photo
102 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM

C
M
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with ten triathlons available for every skill set, from
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feature for 2019 will see a triathlon also being held in
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the race is the perfect opportunity for those who
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May brings the popular Run in Paradise Half
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runners and walkers from around the world. The
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104 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM

ENGAGE
Mickyteam/Shutterstock.com
106 Discover
As deep as it goes
110
On This Day
A flag on the island
Hydromedusae jellyfish are among the creatures that inhabit the deep sea, the region below two hundred metres

discover
courtesy NOAA Office of Ocean Exploration and Research
Diva Ammon retrieving a new species
of deep-sea sponge collected from
the Marianas region of the Pacific
As
deep
as it
goes
The deep sea — defined as parts of the
ocean below two hundred metres — is our
planet’s biggest habitat, and also its least
known. Caribbean islands are surrounded
by the deep sea, but few of our scientists
have the resources to explore the region.
Erline Andrews meets Trinidadian marine
biologist Diva Amon, who’s working to
change that
106 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM

“
I
went
had a window in my cabin,
to the Antarctic one
year,” says Diva Amon. “I
and I was brushing my teeth
one morning, looking out the
window, and all of a sudden
I just saw this thing go by. I was, like, ‘What
was that?’”
“I looked out the window,” she continues,
“and there were so many penguins
outside swimming away, doing their
thing. There were penguins around the
ship every day.”
Amon’s job gives her experiences that
are the stuff of dreams and movies. Back
home in Trinidad for the holidays, she’s
seated on the couch in the living room
of her Maraval house, describing life on
board a marine research ship.
“There were humpback whales literally
where that chair is every day,” she
says, pointing. “People don’t get to do that
on a day-to-day basis.”
Amon is the only deep-sea biologist in
the Caribbean — which is disturbing, considering
the importance of the deep sea.
More than two hundred metres beneath
the surface of the ocean, pitch black,
high-pressured, and extremely cold, this
region is the earth’s largest habitat, teeming
with life, much of it undiscovered.
It helps regulate the world’s climate
and cycle the nutrients that support the
marine life many people depend on for
their livelihood.
In 2014, Amon was part of a team that
explored the deep sea around the country
of her birth, Trinidad and Tobago, for only
the second time in history. It was the first
time Caribbean scientists were involved.
Caribbean nationals’ lack of involvement
with the depths of the ocean is sadly
ironic, because the history of deep-sea
exploration is intertwined with that of the
Caribbean, T&T in particular.
The first real mission to observe life in
the deep sea was launched off the coast of
Bermuda in 1934. The scientist involved,
American William Beebe, used a spherical
vessel called the Bathysphere, and set
a record at the time for the deepest dive
by a human being. He later founded a
research station in Trinidad, and died and
was buried on the island in 1962.
The expense and expertise needed to
carry out deep-sea exploration are partly
why it’s rare in small, poor countries.
But this makes it no less necessary in
these places than in big, rich countries.
The 2014 expedition — on board the
American research ship Nautilus and
using remotely operated vehicles (ROVs)
which carried cameras rather than human
beings to the deep sea — explored areas
off the coast of T&T and Grenada over
fourteen days.
A subsequent paper co-authored by
Amon and other members of the team
argued that as oil-and gas-producing T&T
moves towards deep-sea drilling, it is
necessary to try to better understand the
possible impact of such activity on that
environment. The expedition also looked
at parts of Grenada’s Kick ’em Jenny, the
only active underwater volcano in the
Caribbean, which scientists are anxious
to learn more about.
At the Trinidad sites, the expedition
found more than eighty species of animal,
including five that were newly discovered,
and unusually large mussels and tube
worms. In a video about the experience,
Trinidadian marine biologist and UWI
lecturer Judith Gobin, who helped organise
the trip, held a sub-sandwich-sized
mussel that she said was the largest ever
found. “We don’t do deep-sea research in
the Caribbean, because nobody will fund
it at the moment, but Diva and I are trying
to change that,” Gobin says.
The creatures were found around
areas called cold seeps, where methane
sprouts from cracks in the sea floor
and feeds the bacteria that sustain the
deep-sea food chain. Cold seeps are
associated with petroleum deposits.
Previous research suggests there may be
as many as eighty-five off the east coast of
Trinidad alone. “This should be something
we’re proud of,” says Amon. “Just
like we’re proud of our Caroni Swamp
and the beautiful birds that live there, and
the important role that mangroves play. It
should be the same for the deep sea.
“There are so many species there,”
she adds, “probably loads that are new to
science, some that could have properties
that could help us at some point in the
future. Apart from all that, they’re just
incredibly beautiful.”
Amon, now thirty-one, traces her
own interest in the sea back to
her early childhood. “My parents
took me to the beach all the time, and I just
became fascinated with the ocean,” she
says. Amon, her father, and her younger
sister also sailed competitively.
Her fascination with the marine environment
was reflected in her academic
performance. A graduate of St Joseph’s
Convent in Port of Spain, she earned the
second-highest mark in the world in the
Cambridge A-level geography exam. She
“Because the deep ocean has been so far
removed from the average person . . . next to
no one knows that deep-sea mining is on the
horizon,” says Diva Ammon
was awarded a national scholarship and
studied at the University of Southampton,
where she learned about the deep sea for
the first time.
Over her career, Amon has taken part
in fifteen deep-sea expeditions, eight of
them in the Caribbean and its environs.
Most of the explorations were conducted
using ROVs. Three times she descended
the depths herself in machines called submersibles.
On every trip, she and other
researchers have discovered new animals
and information about the deep sea.
Amon is currently on a fellowship at
the Natural History Museum in London.
Before that, she was one of a team of scientists
exploring the Clarion-Clipperton
Zone (CCZ), a 4.5 million-square-kilo-
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107

Descending into the depths in the
submersible Nadir, off the St Peter
and St Paul Rocks in the mid-Atlantic,
off the coast of Brazil
Courtesy Novus Select
metre stretch of the Pacific Ocean under
international jurisdiction. Corporations
are eager to begin mining the deep sea
for precious metals found mainly around
structures called hydrothermal vents.
Like cold seeps, the vents are formed
from chemical-rich fluid escaping fissures
in the sea floor, and they support
immense biodiversity. The International
Seabed Authority is currently coming up
with mining rules and regulations. Amon
and other scientists were hired by one
British company to find out as much as
they could about the marine life and their
habitats in the zone.
“Because the deep ocean has been so
far removed from the average person, that
out-of-sight, out-of-mind characteristic
means that next to no one knows that
deep-sea mining is on the horizon, that
our oceans may be changed irreparably in
the future, and it can change our environment
irrevocably,” she says.
It’s a major story, with Amon quoted in
a slew of media reports over the last year.
And the prominence of voices like Amon’s
is important.
Caribbean nationals’ lack of involvement with the
depths of the ocean is sadly ironic, because the
history of deep-sea exploration is intertwined
with that of the Caribbean, T&T in particular
“Because only rich, developed countries
are able to do deep-sea science,
it means that the deep-sea community
is predominantly white,” she explains.
“Now there’s this global conversation
about managing and conserving our
oceans, and many people are missing
from that conversation.”
So Amon has conceived a venture
called My Deep Sea, My Backyard — a oneyear
project that provides scientists in
Kiribati (a small Pacific island nation) and
T&T with deep-sea research cameras,
ROVs, and training in how to use them.
It exposes the public, especially kids, to
the wonders of the deep sea around their
home islands. The project is sponsored
by the National Geographic Society,
the Inter-American Development Bank,
the University of the West Indies, and
other organisations, and is working in
conjunction with SpeSeas, an NGO Amon
co-founded last year with other T&T
scientists and environmentalists.
“We hope we will take everything
we’ve learned in the year the project runs
for — all the good and all the bad — and
make a model that can then be rolled
out to other developing countries,” says
Amon, who was given the first-ever
Award for Excellence in Deep-Sea
Research from the International Seabed
Authority last year.
The project, Amon says, is really
about showing young people “you can do
this too. Anybody can, if given the right
resources.” n
108 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM

HELP PROTECT THE FOOD SUPPLY AND
NATURAL BEAUTY OF THE CARIBBEAN
Declare
Agricultural
Items
1
3
2
6
4 5
7 8
.com
9 10 11
12 13 14 15
16 17 18
19
20 21
22
23
24 25 26
27
29
U.S. Department of Agriculture
U.S. Customs and Border Protection
Caribbean Plant Health Directors Forum
28
ACROSS
3. The chosen spokesperson for the Don’t Pack a
Pest program.
6. Pests and disease can be transported through
_______.
9. U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP)
conduct inspections at various _______ of entry
that are pathways for the introduction of pests and
disease.
11. Unsuspecting _______ bring in food, plants
and other agricultural items containing harmful
pests and diseases.
12. Approximately 50,000 species of plants and
animals have _______ the United States.
14. Any good that is made from animal or plant
materials is an _______ item.
16. Passenger _______ is a critical component of
the Don’t Pack a Pest program.
17. Visit DontPackaPest.com to _______ yourself
on prohibited items.
20. The global economy spends $1.4 trillion
annually combating _______ species.
21. Straw hats and other woven goods can carry
the red palm _______ which causes severe
damage to palms and banana trees.
23. Is the Caribbean spokesperson for the don’t
pack a pest program.
25. A _______ dog is trained to target a specific
odor, thereby locating prohibited items.
26. Unprocessed _______ like carved masks and
other handicrafts can potentially harbor invasive
insects.
27. The Asian citrus psyllid is a vector that
carries huanglongbing, also known as _______
greening disease and arrived in the U.S. on
imported items.
28. Help _______ our food supply.
29. Each year these types of pests destroy
about 13 percent of the U.S. potential crop
production, that’s a value of about $33 million.
DOWN
1. The giant African land _______ is one of the
most damaging pests in the world because it
consumes at least 500 types of plants, can cause
structural damage, and can transmit disease.
2. Even one piece of _______can transport
harmful pests.
4. If you do not declare agricultural items, you
can be subject to _______ between $1,100 and
$60,000.
5. An invasive species can be any kind of living
organism, or even an organism's seeds or eggsnot
native to an _______ and causes harm.
7. Before traveling with agricultural items you
should ask yourself can I _______ it?
8. _______ all food and agriculture items when
you enter the United States or other countries.
10. Agricultural risks grow with the ever increasing
amount of this.
13. The USDA and state departments of
agriculture work together to _______ introduced
pests.
15. All agricultural items are subject to _______,
to try and detect and prevent the unintentional
spread of harmful invasives.
18. An acronym meaning animal and plant health
inspection service.
19. More that 110 CBP agriculture _______ teams
provide screening for agricultural goods.
22. APHIS and PPQ are acronyms meaning
animal and plant health inspection service
and plant protection and quarantine which are a
part of what U.S. federal department?
24. When you travel please remember Don't
_______ a Pest!
25. On an typical day CBP inspectors will _______
352 pests at U.S. ports of entry and 4,638
quarantinable materials, including plants, meat,
animal byproducts, and soil.
ANSWER KEY
ACROSS 3. Linus 6. travel 9. ports 11. travelers 12. invaded 14. agricultural 16. awareness 17. educate 20. invasive 21. mite 23. Sassy 25. detector 26. wood 27. citrus 28. protect 29. insect
DOWN 1. snail 2. fruit 4. penalties 5. ecosystem 7. bring 8. declare 10. trade 13. eradicate 15. inspection 18. APHIS 19. canine 22. USDA 24. pack 25. discover

on this day
A flag on
the island
Fifty years ago, a British military force
landed on a tiny Caribbean island — to
be welcomed with open arms. The
“invasion” of Anguilla was an odd and
maybe anachronistic moment in the
Caribbean’s colonial history — but,
James Ferguson suggests, it left
Anguillans with exactly what they
wanted: a version of independence
Illustration by Rohan Mitchell
From Haiti’s revolution of 1791 to the more peaceful mass
movements of the 1930s onwards in the English-speaking colonies,
the modern history of the Caribbean has been determined by a
rejection of foreign rule and a desire for independence. While not
all territories have opted for autonomy, the great majority have,
creating nation states out of colonial dependencies. Few citizens
of the contemporary Caribbean would want to turn the clock back and find
themselves ruled from London or Madrid.
Needless to say, of course, there is always an exception to prove the rule,
and here it takes the form of a direct appeal to the former colonial power to
re-establish control over the territory in question. I can think of only two such
cases in the Caribbean. The first occurred in 1861, when the president of the
Dominican Republic, confronted by political chaos and bankruptcy, asked
Queen Isabella II of Spain to reconvert the country into a Spanish colony after
seventeen years of independence (the US and France had already declined
the offer). It ended messily: after two years of inept and repressive colonial
administration, a popular insurrection turned into guerrilla war, and the Spanish
were finally kicked out for good in 1865.
The second case was much more recent, and featured a tiny, formerly
British colony, best known today for its stunning beaches and luxury resorts:
Anguilla. And this incident bizarrely culminated
fifty years ago, on 19 March, 1969, with a British
military invasion of the island.
Anguilla had long been a remote outpost
among Britain’s Caribbean possessions. Small
and mostly arid, it was not suited to plantationbased
agriculture, and as such had fewer enslaved
Africans than nearby islands. The French made
a couple of half-hearted attempts to seize it, but
the British retained control from its first colonisation
in 1650. Its insignificance was illustrated by
the fact that it was not considered worthy of its
own governor, and was administered first from
Antigua and then, from 1825, from St Kitts. This
arrangement fuelled resentment, as Anguillans
viewed the legislative union as inefficient and discriminatory.
A petition of 1872 requesting direct
rule from London was ignored.
A further cost-cutting exercise in 1882 saw
Anguilla pulled into the three-island union of
St Kitts-Nevis-Anguilla, part of the Leeward
Islands Federation. Nobody, however, thought to
consult the people of Anguilla, who endured great
hardships and mass emigration due to famines and
the shockwaves of the 1930s Great Depression.
The British persisted with the three-island model,
first as a crown colony in 1956 and then as a selfgoverning
associated state in 1967. This effectively
handed over control of Anguilla to the majority
legislators in St Kitts.
This unwanted alignment was to prove a
tipping point in Nevis and Anguilla, which both
viewed themselves as deprived of resources and
development by the biggest of the three islands.
In one instance, Canada had donated funds for
a pier to be built in Anguilla. The money went to
St Kitts, where the pier was duly constructed
instead. The premier of St Kitts-Nevis-Anguilla
was Robert Bradshaw, a tough veteran trade unionist,
who seemingly had little time for Anguilla. “I
will not rest,” he allegedly once said, “until I have
reduced that place to a desert.” Discontent simmered
in Nevis even after the granting of limited
self-rule, but in Anguilla, where no such concession
was made, anger would soon turn into open revolt.
110 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM

Three months after the official celebration of associated statehood in
February 1967, a group of locals ejected seventeen Kittitian policemen
from Anguilla, thereby removing whatever authority Premier Bradshaw
thought he had. A provisional government was formed, the Union Jack was
raised over the police station, and a referendum rather unambiguously recorded
1,813 votes in favour of secession from the new state and five against. Attempts
were made by Britain to resolve the impasse, but most Anguillans remained
resolutely opposed to rule from St Kitts. Robert Bradshaw, meanwhile, furious
that a group of Anguillans had staged an abortive kidnapping attempt on him,
claimed that Anguilla had been infiltrated by the US mafia, and demanded that
Britain invade and stop the secession movement.
An air of farce was rapidly surrounding proceedings when another
overwhelming referendum result was followed by Anguilla declaring itself
an independent republic, with Ronald Webster as its leader. This prompted a
visit on 11 March, 1969, from a British junior minister, William Whitlock, in
search of an “interim agreement.” His mission was not a success. He snubbed
Webster and patronised those who had turned out to greet him by having
his staff distribute leaflets outlining British proposals — in the words of a
local journalist, “as a farmer might throw corn to fowl.” After a few armed
supporters of Webster turned up, Whitlock decided to call it a day and flee.
With Anguilla now a rogue state, it faced the military might of imperial
Britain, which arrived eight days later in the form of 135 troops from
2nd Battalion, the Parachute Regiment, and forty Metropolitan Police
officers. Disembarking into smaller vessels from a frigate (there was,
of course, no pier) in the pre-dawn darkness,
they were momentarily alarmed
to see flashes coming from the beach.
But these were not gunshots, but
the flash bulbs of photographers,
many foreign, who had been
tipped off about the “invasion”
named Operation Sheepskin.
In fact, there was no resistance whatsoever, not
least because the return of the British was precisely
what the Anguillans wanted. The paratroopers
were soon replaced by unarmed personnel from
the Royal Engineers. One policeman recalled,
“The vast majority of Anguillans were very nice
to us and we very quickly dispensed with carrying
arms and reverted to our more normal situation —
that of being Bobbies, policing by consent.” Many
could not believe their luck at being posted to this
friendly, if undeveloped, island.
The incident was widely mocked around
the world as the ailing British Empire’s “Bay of
Piglets.” But the people of Anguilla were to have
the last laugh. In 1976 the island was given its
own constitution, and on 19 December, 1980, it
was formally separated from St Kitts-Nevis as a
British dependency, a status it retains today —
renamed as a British overseas territory. The
Anguillans finally achieved their aim — and,
into the bargain, the massive infrastructural
improvements carried out by the Royal
Engineers and largely paid for by London paved
the way for the island’s transformation from
an impoverished backwater into today’s
tourist mecca. n
With Anguilla now
a rogue state, it
faced the military
might of imperial
Britain, which
arrived in the form
of 135 troops from
2nd Battalion,
the Parachute
Regiment, and forty
Metropolitan Police
officers
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111

puzzles
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
Caribbean Crossword
8 9
Across
8 She keeps up the pace for twenty-six miles [10]
9 Smaller than small [4]
10 Traditional re-enactment on Trinidad’s Carnival
Friday [9]
11 Yes, that suitcase is mine! [5]
13 Country occupied by settlers [6]
14 A charitable gift [8]
15 Tending to intrude [8]
18 Imaginary demons [6]
20 Marine species bad for coral reefs [8]
23 The Caribbean’s ballet capital [6]
25 Rascal or scoundrel [5]
26 Underwater vehicle [9]
28 Galvanised metal [4]
29 Fleshy-leaved plants [10]
Down
1 Little biscuit made with ground almonds [8]
2 This grass grows as tall as a tree [6]
3 Runny eyes [6]
4 Bare a horse [8]
5 That was another time [3]
6 Fit for the track [8]
7 Deep blue grows on trees [6]
12 Not for but against [4]
16 I declare [8]
10 11
13 14
15 16 17 18 19
20 21 22 23 24
25 26
27
28 29
17 Bird of scarlet reputation [4]
19 Worth more than the paper it’s printed on [8]
21 Reminds you of something famous [6]
22 Meaty loin [6]
23 Made you laugh [6]
24 Skip these to the chorus [6]
27 How you measure your tyre pressure [3]
12
Spot the Difference by Gregory St Bernard There are 13 differences between these two pictures.
How many can you spot?
Spot the Difference answers
Chequered flag is narrower; black and white squares on flag are swapped; horns of old goat in red vest are longer; “AT” printed on old goat’s vest
is changed to “4”; hair of female goat in pink shorts is longer; female goat’s top is longer; red balisier plant is added to background; running goat’s
pants are shorter; grass in running goat’s mouth is shorter; running goat’s necklace is removed; right pincer of blue crab with trophy is raised; blue
crab’s glasses are removed; purple crab with red sneakers is replaced by red crab with purple sneakers.
112 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM

Antarctic
arranger
biennial
Bolshoi
cassava
crab
creek
depression
dive
drum
dumpling
Easter
Giselle
granite
Holi
kite
Word Search
mas
mussel
Panorama
panyard
parakeet
pier
pineapple
poet
prima donna
queen
script
slipper
soca
tenor
torso
vent
B Q X P A N O R A M A O M Z E
S O C A O S L I P P E R A H Z
R P L H O L I D U M P L I N G
G R B S P A R A K E E T M A S
D I K H H T E N O R A A U S P
E M A I P O M D I V E R S C G
P A P N T I I V A T E R S R R
R D A M T E N S Q T D A E I A
E O N G L A S E S Q R N L P N
S N Y T I A R A A F U G P T I
S N A O C S E C C P M E I B T
I A R R G V E N T R P R E U E
O B D S N D K L N I A L R N L
N S P O E T F G L W C B E C N
X B I E N N I A L E C R E E K
Sudoku
Caribbean Beat Magazine
Medium 9x9 sudoku puzzle
Sudoku 9x9 - Puzzle 4 of 5 - Medium
Caribbean Beat Magazine
Hard 6x6 mini sudoku puzzle
Sudoku 6x6 - Puzzle 3 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!
2 7 1 5
5 6
8 6 2 3
5 2 7 3 6
8 2
3 4 8 9 1
1 9 7 5
7 4
6 3 5 9
www.sudoku-puzzles.net
4
5
2 1
3 2 6
1 2 3
1
www.sudoku-puzzles.net
www.sudoku-puzzle.net
Solutions
Caribbean Crossword
Word Search
Sudoku
Mini Sudoku
Sudoku 6x6 - Solution 3 of 5 - Hard
Sudoku 9x9 - Solution 4 of 5 - Medium
2 4 3 6 5 1
6 1 5 4 3 2
6 2 4 7 3 1 8 5 9
5 1 3 8 9 4 2 7 6
9 7 8 6 5 2 3 4 1
B Q X P A N O R A M A O M Z E
1 5 9 2 7 3 4 6 8
4 8 7 5 1 6 9 2 3
2 3 6 4 8 9 7 1 5
3 4 1 9 6 7 5 8 2
7 9 5 1 2 8 6 3 4
8 6 2 3 4 5 1 9 7
www.sudoku-puzzles.net
S O C A O S L I P P E R A H Z
R P L H O L I D U M P L I N G
G R B S P A R A K E E T M A S
4 2 6 3 1 5
3 5 1 2 6 4
1 6 4 5 2 3
5 3 2 1 4 6
www.sudoku-puzzles.net
M
8
C
10
M
1
B
2
R
3
C E I H R S E
U
4
A R A T H O N E R 9 T I N Y
I N C 29 S U C C U L E N T S
C M E S A H D
A N B O U L A Y 11 C L A I M
E
5
A
6
7
I
D I K H H T E N O R A A U S P
E M A I P O M D I V E R S C G
C
13
I
15
R O M D 12 A E G
O L O N Y 14 D O N A T I O N
O L T I
N V 16 17
18
A S I V E I
N C U B
19 I
L
20
I
21
N B A
O N F I S H
22 H
23 A 24 V A N A
R
25
C O S A U E K
O G U E 26 S U B M A R I N E
N N 27 P N O S O
Z
28
X B I E N N I A L E C R E E K
N S P O E T F G L W C B E C N
P A P N T I I V A T E R S R R
R D A M T E N S Q T D A E I A
E O N G L A S E S Q R N L P N
S N Y T I A R A A F U G P T I
S N A O C S E C C P M E I B T
I A R R G V E N T R P R E U E
O B D S N D K L N I A L R N L
Caribbean Beat Magazine
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Caribbean Beat Magazine
113

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Ticket Office: Paramaribo Express, N.V. Wagenwegstraat
36, Paramaribo
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classic
Running
commentary
James Hackett
Kellie Magnus describes the soundtrack
to a Kingston run — first published in our
March/April 2006 issue
Every great run has a soundtrack.
When I first fell in love with running,
it was scored by my favourite
songs. In those pre-iPod days, I ran
with a CD belt, so each run took on the
mood of whatever album I grabbed
on the way out the door. Saucy, tempo runs to Carlos
Santana. Slow, contemplative runs to Monty Alexander.
Speedwork to a medley of old funk jams.
But then I decided to train for the New York City
Triathlon, a road race with a strict no-music policy.
I tuned in to a completely different soundtrack
— the sound of my feet hitting the pavement, the
rhythm of my own breathing.
When I lived in Manhattan, my running
soundtrack was mostly of my own making, save for
the occasional honk of a car horn, the dreaded sound
of a faster runner’s footsteps coming up behind me
— or, worse, the shout of “On your left” as he or she
went by. I ran mostly in Central Park or on the West
Side Path, where my usual eight-minute-mile pace
attracted no attention and gave me enough chances
to yell my own gleeful “On your left.”
Now I live and run in Kingston. And there’s a
whole new soundtrack to get used to.
“Yes, Fitness.”
“Gwan through, Veronica.”
“Lawd Jesus. Done now, man. You a go run off
the good batty weh God give you.”
I’m running laps in Kingston’s Emancipation
Park when I realise the commentary is directed at
me. I am not a morning person, and I hate to run
on a treadmill. I like to run at night to purge the
day’s drama from my body. And I like to run alone.
If I could, I’d run on the street, but the first time I
tried this, at dusk one evening, my intended long
run turned into speedwork as a madman chased me
down Constant Spring Road. That leaves me with
Emancipation Park — a flat, paved, five-hundredmetre
loop that stays open till 11 pm, and comes
with ample lighting — and a pool of commentators
who would do well on the European circuit.
Most of my fellow park users turn out for a walk. Young couples stroll arm
in arm. Groups of friends walk briskly. There are usually just a few joggers,
and very few women run. I rarely hear threatening footsteps, but the commentary
comes in a steady torrent. Respect, concern, even anger — the comments
are as varied as the people who deliver them.
“Looking good, my girl.”
“Yow, da gyal yah can run.”
“She nuh hah nuh man? If she did have a man, she wouldn’t a run so.”
At first the commentary threw me off. I ran with a hat pulled low over my
face, no matter how late it was, and I would slow down apologetically to pass
walkers. Now that I’ve tuned in to it, I use it to gauge how well I’m doing. On
a slow day, I attract no attention. On average days, I get a nod and a “Yes,
Runner.” There’s a simplicity and an elegance to “Runner.” It used to be my
favourite title until one fast Friday night, when I was upgraded to “Runnist.”
I could go back to running with music, but I’ve grown accustomed to the
unpredictability of my very own Greek chorus. Like the perfect dancehall
song, their rapid-fire delivery and lyrical dexterity ride the rhythm of my
breathing and footfalls. Sometimes I struggle to keep my form, as on a recent
Sunday afternoon when I ran by a bridal party posing for pictures.
Bridesmaid 1: She nuh know seh if she run so fast she a go tired.
Bridesmaid 2: If you did do likkle a dat, you frock wouldn’ tight so.
One evening during the World Championships I was running in a yellow
tank and black shorts, a hastily borrowed green scrunchie in my hair. I ran by
a group of elderly women walking.
“Poor soul, she mussi never make the team.”
Late one Monday night, I’m on mile seven of an eight-mile run when I hear
footsteps. I look over my shoulder and see a blond man, mid-forties, bearing
down on me. His gait and pace tell me he’s a runner. His presence in this park
tells me he’s a tourist. I pull to the right to let him pass but as he goes by I
change my mind and adjust my pace to stay just off his left shoulder.
We pass a group of four men walking.
“She keeping up with him.”
I pass the tourist. He passes me. I stay off his shoulder. Three loops later,
we pass the men in the same spot.
“Stay with him, my girl.” It is whispered urgently, as though there were a
stake in the outcome.
A thousand metres later, I am still off the tourist’s shoulder. I am at the end of
my planned run. I am tired. But I look up and see the group of men just ahead.
I mutter “Left,” and pull by. Neither the tourist nor his legs answer.
I sprint by the group.
“Yes, my girl. Show him, yes.”
“Show him seh is Jamaica him deh.” n
120 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM

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