Caribbean Beat — March/April 2019 (#156)

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