Caribbean Beat — May/June 2019 (#157)

Duty-free locations:
Suriname: J.A. Pengel Luchthaven Zanderij - Aankomst- & Vertrekhal |
Zorg en Hoop | Southdrain - Nickerie | Albina
Guyana: Cheddi Jaggan International Airport | Moleson Creek
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a. Hk. Frederik Derbystraat & Gemenelandsweg 73, Paramaribo - Suriname
p. (597) 422 292 | f. (597) 425 016 | w. www.kings.sr | e. info@kings.sr

HELP PROTECT THE FOOD SUPPLY AND
NATURAL BEAUTY OF THE CARIBBEAN
Declare
Agricultural
Items
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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

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Contents
No. 157 • May/June 2019
70
82
50
EMBARK
IMMERSE
16 Wish you were here
Tobago Cays, St Vincent and the
Grenadines
18 Need to know
Essential info to help you make the
most of May and June across the
Caribbean — from motorsports in
Barbados to a pineapple festival in the
Bahamas and a marathon in Tobago
34 Bookshelf and playlist
Our reading and listening picks
36 screenshots
Trinidadian filmmaker Maya Cozier
talks about her new short, She
Paradise
40 Cookup
Drink up
Chennette cocktails? Falernum
tipples? A creative new generation
of Caribbean drinks specialists is
changing the way we think about
beverages, writes Franka Philip
44 Closeup
Look and look again
Born in Haiti, currently based in Berlin,
Jean-Ulrick Désert may be a citizen of
the world — but his ideas are shaped
by his Caribbean roots. A kind of
discomfort that makes you look closer
is key to this artist’s work, writes
Andre Bagoo
50 Backstory
Wright on
Growing up in Guyana, Letitia Wright
never imagined a Hollywood career.
But after a string of stage and TV roles
and early recognition of her talent,
her casting in the blockbuster movie
Black Panther was the break every
actor hopes for, says Caroline Taylor
57 Own Words
“I’m aware of how fragile
the Caribbean is”
Sir Hilary Beckles, Barbadian
historian, cricket enthusiast, and UWI
vice chancellor, on his intellectual
formation, the role of a Caribbean
university, and the moral imperative
of slavery reparations — as told to
Shelly-Ann Inniss
ARRIVE
60 Offtrack
Kairi wild
Trinidad may be an industrial
powerhouse, but it’s also home
to wildnerness areas with a rich
biodiversity, from forested mountains
to mangrove wetlands. Photographers
Jason Audain and Brendan Delzin
share images and stories capturing
the island’s wild beauty
70 Escape
Back to St Lucia
A childhood visit to St Lucia was a
life-changing experience for Joshua
Surtees — and an introduction to
8 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM

CaribbeanBeat
An MEP publication
the Caribbean, where he’d later make
his home. Returning to St Lucia after
thirty years, what would he learn
about the island and himself?
78 Neighbourhood
St George’s, Grenada
One of the Caribbean’s most
picturesque cities, Grenada’s capital
is full of historic architecture and
stunning views — and is a growing
centre of attraction for lovers of highend
chocolate
80 Bucket List
Blue Lagoon
Just far enough from the bustling
resorts of Jamaica’s north coast to
feel secluded, this expanse of vivid
blue water is a not-so-secret treasure
Editor Nicholas Laughlin
General manager Halcyon Salazar
Design artists Kevon Webster, Kriston Chen
Production manager Jacqueline Smith
Web editor Caroline Taylor
Editorial assistants Shelly-Ann Inniss, Kristine De Abreu
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
Business Development
Representative, Trinidad
Mark-Jason Ramesar
T: (868) 775 6110
E: mark@meppublishers.com
Barbados Sales Representative
Shelly-Ann Inniss
T: (246) 232 5517
E: shelly@meppublishers.com
ENGAGE
82 Green
The parrotfish dilemma
Among the most colourful marine
species, parrotfish play a key role in
keeping reefs and beaches healthy.
They are also delicious, making fishing
bans to protect them unpopular.
Without these protections, learns
Erline Andrews, they may be
overfished into extinction
Media & Editorial Projects Ltd.
6 Prospect Avenue, Maraval, Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago
T: (868) 622 3821/5813/6138 • F: (868) 628 0639
E: caribbean-beat@meppublishers.com
Website: www.meppublishers.com
Read and save issues of Caribbean Beat on your smartphone,
tablet, computer, and favourite digital devices!
86 on this day
Football holiday
When two English football clubs toured
the Caribbean fifty-five years ago,
local teams in Jamaica, Trinidad, and
Barbados were no competition. Haiti
was a different story, writes James
Ferguson
88 puzzles
Enjoy our crossword and more!
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
96 classic
A dip into Caribbean Beat’s archives:
Kerri Gilligan visits Trinidad for the
first time, and meets her sweetheart’s
Tantie . . .
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
9

Cover Guyana-born actress
Letitia Wright, star of Black
Panther
Photo Kwaku Alston,
courtesy IAG Talent
This issue’s contributors include:
Erline Andrews (“The parrotfish dilemma”, page 82)
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.
Jason Audain (“Kairi wild”, page 60) is a self-taught
photographer from Trinidad and Tobago with a
particular interest in Carnival and portrait photography.
He is the recipient of awards from the T&T
Photographic Society and his work has been shown in
T&T’s National Museum.
Andre Bagoo (“Look and look again”, page 44) is a
Trinidadian poet, journalist, and arts writer, author of
four books of poems, most recently Pitch Lake (2017)
and The City of Dreadful Night (2018).
Brendan Delzin (“Kairi wild”, page 60) is a self-taught
photographer and artist from Trinidad and Tobago. From
the green rainforests of Trinidad to the crystal blue seas of
Tobago, he specialises in images of nature.
From an initial background in finance, Shelly-Ann
Inniss (“I’m aware of how fragile the Caribbean is”, page
57) decided to explore her love for writing and media. A
Trinidad-based Barbadian writer and editorial assistant
at Caribbean Beat, she is an explorer and adventureseeker
at heart.
Joshua Surtees (“Back to St Lucia”, page 70) is a British
writer with Jamaican roots. Based in London and Port of
Spain, he writes for international publications including
the UK Guardian and VICE.
WWW.CARIBBEAN-AIRLINES.COM
11

A MESSAGE From OUR CEO
Benus C Mathurin/Shutterstock.com
Carnival time may be coming to an end
for some, and starting for many other
Caribbean islands, but the spirit underlying
our festivals of fun never goes away.
It’s this approach to life — living it to
the fullest — that we are embracing this
year in our celebration of the Caribbean
identity. With the theme of promoting
our culture, our places, and our people,
our latest campaign is well underway,
with support for four regional Carnivals
so far in Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana,
Jamaica, and Suriname. In addition, we
supported the huge Phagwah celebrations
in Guyana and Suriname.
There are many more to come — have
a browse through the Need to Know
section of the magazine, starting on
page 18, for more details of all the amazing
events taking place in May and June.
Plus, see how we can get you there via
the Caribbean Airlines network.
Alongside bringing you the best of the
authentic Caribbean, we’ve also been
making the whole travel experience better
for our customers:
With the July/August vacation fast
approaching, why not check out Caribbean
Vacations and Tours to see if there’s
a vacation package there to suit you?
That’s a great example of Caribbean
Airlines trying to make the travel experience
better for our customers.
Here’s another: following your feedback,
on 15 April we started offering a
twice-weekly non-stop service between
Kingston, Jamaica, and Barbados every
Monday and Friday. The round trip departs
Kingston at 2.50 pm and arrives in Barbados
at 6.25 pm. It then leaves Barbados
at 7.25 pm non-stop to Kingston, arriving
at 9.15 pm.
We’re confident that, with a packed
calendar of business and leisure events on
both islands, there will be strong demand
for the additional flights. Soon we’ll be
announcing other new routes as we look
to make travel more seamless and convenient
across our Caribbean region.
Thank you for your support and for
being a part of this successful movement
#thecaribbeanidentity. 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.
• Our new website is much easier to use on all devices — try it and let us know
what you think
• Caribbean Flight Notifications can keep you informed of any changes to
your flight journey via email and/or SMS alerts — to benefit, just sign up by
opting into our flight notifications system at www.caribbean-airlines.com/#/
notifications
• The Caribbean Airlines Customer ChatBot automatically answers a range of
frequently asked questions, from the status of your flight to queries about
Caribbean Miles, checking-in, duty free, and much more. You also have the
option to speak to a human agent at any time. Chatbot will be available over
many channels, including web chat and social media
• Caribbean Vacations and Tours can save you time and money, as you can
book airfare, hotel transfers, and more in one single, convenient transaction.
Packages can be booked directly with Caribbean Vacations and Tours via
www.vacations.caribbean-airlines.com
Garvin Madera
Chief Executive Officer
12 WWW.CARIBBEAN-AIRLINES.COM

wish you were here
16 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM

Tobago Cays,
St Vincent and the Grenadines
Protected by a national park, the five
uninhabited islets of the Tobago Cays, surrounded
by the clear, intensely blue sea, are
a playground for visitors and a glamourous
backdrop for luxurious yachts. But they’re
also home to some of the Caribbean’s most
pristine coral reefs, teeming with turtles,
starfish, sea fans, and dozens more species.
Larwin/Shutterstock.com
WWW.CARIBBEAN-AIRLINES.COM 17

NEED TO
KNOW
Essential info to help you make the most of
May and June: what to do, where to go, what
to see!
Mike Evans Photography
Don’t Miss
Rally Barbados
On an average day, a drive around Barbados is like a Sunday
afternoon outing: serene, scenic, and mostly nonaggressive.
This all changes from 31 May to 2 June, as speedometers
hit higher dimensions at Sol Rally Barbados, the Caribbean’s
biggest annual motor sports event. Local and international
race cars showcase their velocity and dexterity on the island’s
black carpet. Spectacular night stages start the festivities.
And if you live for speed, clear your diary for the thrilling King
of the Hill event, which returns this year to one of Barbados’s
traditional venues at Stewarts Hill. Cars soaring through the
air and leaving others in the dust attract spectators to every
possible vantage point.
Shelly-Ann Inniss
How to get there? Caribbean Airlines operates several flights daily to Grantley Adams International Airport in
Barbados from destinations in the Caribbean and North America
18
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need to know
Courtesy Cherise Kenion/ Unsplash.com
Courtesy the Grenada Chocolate Festival
Top Five
Spice Island
chocolate
Nutmeg is almost synonymous with Grenada — but
chocolate isn’t far behind, with a rapidly growing market
for the country’s cocoa. For chocolate lovers, the
best introduction is the annual utopia known as the
Grenada Chocolate Festival, running this year from 31
May to 7 June. The Spice Island’s celebrated nutmeg,
cinnamon, and ginger and its equally treasured cocoa
make a distinctively delicious combination. Here are
five ways to stimulate your senses at the festival.
grenadachocolatefest.com
Tree-to-bar day tour
In the great outdoors, your guide explains the potential
flavours of a chocolate bar, showing the tangible links
between the landscape and the subsequent tones in the
chocolate.
Healthy chocolate potions workshops
Might chocolate be one of the secrets of youthfulness?
Compelling beauty workshops facilitated by chocolate
experts will teach you a variety of beauty potions and elixirs.
If you prefer to be pampered, spas linked to the festival have
you covered.
Cocoa yoga
The scent of chocolate has a calming effect — if it can stick
around long enough and not be eaten. At cocoa yoga, you’ll
experience “mindful chocolate-eating meditation” after
your practice.
Mini-salon with international chocolatiers
Chocolatiers lead tastings of their latest creations, or
favourite finds from around the globe.
Cocoa farm tour
Maybe farming isn’t exactly what comes to mind when you
think of getting your hands on chocolate, but if you’d like to
learn about where cocoa actually comes from, this is a great
place to start. Farmers who have worked the land since their
youth guide you through the process of picking the cocoa
pods, fermenting and drying the beans.
Shelly-Ann Inniss
20
WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM

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

need to know
michelle strachan photography
Must Try
Pineapple pleasures
What looks like a giant pinecone with a spiky crown? You guessed it: a pineapple!
One look at a ripe one and your mouth waters. As delicious as they are when raw,
there are many other adventurous ways to consume this sweet, full-flavoured,
juicy fruit. Just ask any Bahamian, or find out for yourself at the Eleuthera
Pineapple Festival, running this year from 6 to 9 June. The island of Eleuthera
is the top pineapple producer in the Bahamas, and this annual festival, running
since 1988, celebrates the spiky fruit in every form. If you can’t make it there,
you can always try your hand at making a pineapple feast in your own kitchen,
with dishes like . . .
Pineapple tart
After one bite, you instinctively know
you want another one. Thankfully, this
Bahamian snack staple is literally as
easy as pie. All you need is a soft pastry
crust filled with pineapple and sugar
glaze, and a latticed upper crust. Place
the pastry in the oven until golden
brown, and try not to eat the whole
thing at once.
Pineapple Upside-Down
Cake
This old-fashioned cake is a classic.
Sliced pineapple lines the bottom of
the baking pan, covered with batter,
then after baking the cake is flipped
for serving. A delectable treat for
special occasions — just like the
pineapple festival itself.
Pineapple Conch Salad
A tangy twist on the Bahamian national
dish. Traditionally, conch salad isn’t
prepared with fruit, but Bahamians
also relish the pineapple version. Close
your eyes, take a bite, and imagine
you’re dining beachfront on one of the
Bahamas’ many idyllic islands
Ingredients
1 large conch, skinned and diced
(substitute lobster if conch isn’t
available)
1 medium onion
½ cup green peppers, diced
½ cup pineapple, diced
½ cup cucumber, diced
1 medium partially ripe tomato, chopped
juice of 2 freshly squeezed limes
juice of half a blood orange
1 teaspoon salt
3 hot peppers (or to taste), minced
Directions
Mix all ingredients and enjoy in a
pineapple shell.
Shelly-Ann Inniss
22
WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM

need to know
Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia
Erosion (2018, installation at
Sargent’s Daughters, NY)
Below Garden (2018, acrylic and
synthetic hair on canvas,
81 x 59 inches)
On View
Deborah Anzinger,
An Unlikely Birth
In the new solo show by Jamaican artist Deborah Anzinger,
which opened in April and runs through August 11, 2019, at
the University of Pennsylvania’s Institute of Contemporary
Art, images refuse to confine themselves to two dimensions:
the artist’s works on canvas sprout forth from the gallery walls,
replicating themselves in sculptural forms. Anzinger, also the
founder of Kingston’s New Local Space (NLS), imagines “at the
intersection of black feminist thought, geography, and space,”
says the ICA, and An Unlikely Birth assembles recent works
in painting, installation, and video. Organic materials meet the
entirely artificial, as Anzinger “offers intimate networks and
alternative ways of being in the world.” The title work, Anzinger
says, refers to the Caribbean’s plantation economy, an “unlikely
birth” in which specific elements of historical exploitation,
social organisation, and bodily labour created a global capitalist
system whose offspring continue to shape contemporary
societies and relationships with multiple inequalities in
their DNA. In her own words, the artist is aiming for “a more
complicated understanding of existence.”
Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia
24
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need to know
Omar Vega/ Getty Images
On the Field
Tek it to dem
The Jamaica national football team is heading to the World Cup finals in France — but this isn’t a throwback to 1998. Nazma Muller
reports on the uphill battle of the Reggae Girlz, who made it to the finals with a little help from Cedella Marley
World Cup football fever will once again strike Jamaicans
everywhere in June, when the national team makes its debut
at the finals in France. But wait? That nuh happen already?
That was the Reggae Boyz — back in 1998. This time, it’s
the Reggae Girlz who will be setting France on fire with their
vibes, at the FIFA Women’s World Cup. And what vibes they
will be! Because this time, dem a come with the Marleys. Yes,
iya. With Cedella Marley as their ambassador, the Jamaica
team is sure to be in the spotlight. And already the former
Melody Maker has roped in her brothers Stephen and Damian
to produce the single “Strike Hard (Reggae Girlz)”.
Cedella Marley has done her daddy — reggae legend Bob
— very proud, first by rescuing the Jamaican women’s football
team from their time in the wilderness, and then taking them
all the way to the top. In 2014, her son brought home a flyer
from his soccer coach. She called the coach, whose daughter
was a national under-seventeen player. The Jamaican
women’s national soccer team was in danger of folding, Marley
learned. “They were getting ready to disband the entire team
just because of the lack of funding,” she recalls. “Although we
know there is funding in the Football Federation — it’s just
that the women were not being prioritised.”
Marley felt passionate about the way the women were
being ignored. “They were very talented, and not being
given an equal opportunity. Never liked that, either, so I just
jumped in and started raising some funds and awareness.”
The issue of women playing football struck a chord with
her. But even with Marley championing their cause, the
players had their doubts that somebody could believe in
them so much. “You could see they were already broken,”
Marley says. “I remember one girl saying to me, ‘You really
believe in us?’ I told her, ‘I believe in you, and it’s a real thing
— a personal thing. I want to see you succeed, and I want the
programme to succeed.’”
26
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So Marley — the CEO of the Bob Marley Foundation
and Tuff Gong International — used her personal brand to
support the “Strike Hard for the Reggae Girlz!” campaign,
to cover the initial costs of training camps, food, travel,
and housing for the twenty-six-woman team.
Last December, Jamaica’s minister of culture,
gender, entertainment and sport, Olivia Grange,
announced four days of celebration to honour the
Reggae Girlz. The activities included a motorcade
through Montego Bay and the parishes of St Catherine,
Kingston, and St Andrew, and a thanksgiving service
at Emancipation Park. Grange said it was important
that the girls be given “a hero’s welcome, and shown
appreciation for their outstanding achievement . . .
We’re asking all Jamaicans to join us in celebrating with
them. We want to make sure they go to France ready
to tek it to dem.”
And, for sure, it won’t be a walk in the park for the
Reggae Girlz: they face Brazil, Australia, and Italy in the
World Cup first round. But this is Jamaica, and not only
are they coming with the Marleys, they’ve even got a
Bunny, too. Not Bunny Wailer (although you never know),
but Khadija “Bunny” Shaw, the top striker for the entire
qualifying tournament and the UK Guardian Footballer of
the Year for 2018. The award from the British newspaper
is given to a player “who has done something truly
remarkable, whether by overcoming adversity, helping
others, or setting a sporting example by acting with
exceptional honesty.”
Shaw’s story includes more than a fair share of tragedy.
She lost three of her seven brothers to gang-related
gun violence in Spanish Town, where she and her eleven
siblings grew up. A fourth brother died in a car accident.
Then, while attending Eastern Florida State College in
2016, she lost two nephews in quick succession: one
was shot, the other electrocuted. Yet through it all she
remained focused, guiding the Reggae Girlz to victory.
“There’s a Jamaican saying: wi likkle but wi tallawah,”
Marley remarks. “We might be small as a country,
but our strength is, of course, in our people and our
qualities. I think every little girl that’s in some school in
the Caribbean that has a dream of doing what we saw
happened” — the Reggae Girlz World Cup qualification —
“now knows that it can be true.
“Four years ago,” Marley adds, “I said this is like a Disney
movie waiting to be made. Hopefully, somebody’s writing
the script. Jamaican women don’t cry. We smile and we
laugh and we go through, but [that] night, I did shed a
tear.”
The 2019 FIFA Women’s World Cup runs from 7
June to 7 July at venues around France. Caribbean
Airlines is the official airline of the Reggae Girlz
St. Catherine, Jamaica | (876) 378-7822 | ks.kasestudios@gmail.com |
KASE
STUDIOS
Weddings
Portraits
Commercials
Cinematography
kase_studios
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need to know
Ready to Wear
Easy breezy
Rotchelle Parris’s energy and sunny personality easily light up a
room. For the past nine years, this self-taught Barbadian designer
has expressed her curiosity and sophisticated creativity through
her fashion label Pink Lemonade by Rotchelle Parris, a resort-wear
clothing line for women. Following the release of her latest collection
in April 2019, Parris talks to Caribbean Beat about her inspirations.
How did you choose the name Pink Lemonade?
I wanted something fun and catchy with a tropical feel — plus
I really love lemonade. Add a dash of vanilla essence, and I’m
satisfied.
Shawn Fields
What inspired this line?
The inspiration comes from the easy-going nature of the
Caribbean. The pieces tend to be vibrant, effortless, timeless, and
stylish.
Daniel Boyce
28
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Shawn Fields Daniel Boyce
Have you always been a fashionista?
I’ve had an avid interest in fashion my whole life — from watching Style
with Elsa Klensch to reading various fashion publications while growing up.
My fashion career started when I bought my sewing machine and taught
myself to sew with the help of books and YouTube videos. Less than a year
later, I debuted my first collection at Barbados Fashion Week in 2010.
What distinguishes your designs from others?
Pink Lemonade by Rotchelle Parris is one hundred per cent Bajan — it is
designed and made in Barbados. Most of my pieces are also made-toorder,
ensuring my clients get the perfect fit.
Do you think Caribbean fashion can hold its own at an
international level?
Definitely. Along with being incredibly talented people, we have unique
experiences and stories to tell through our fashion. This sets us apart from
the rest of the world.
What does the future hold for Pink Lemonade by
Rotchelle Parris?
In June I’m honoured to head to the Caribbean Style and Culture Awards
and Fashion Showcase in Washington, DC, to receive the 2019 Award of
Excellence in Fashion Innovation. A men’s line may also be on the horizon.
For more information, look for Pink Lemonade by Rotchelle Parris at www.pinklemonadebyrp.com or on Instagram
@pinklemonadebyrp
WWW.CARIBBEAN-AIRLINES.COM 29

need to know
The Read
We Mark Your Memory
Over a period of more than eight decades, the movement of
indentured labourers from India across the British Empire reshaped
colonial societies as far-flung as Trinidad and Guyana, Kenya and South
Africa, Mauritius, the Seychelles, Fiji, and Malaysia. Now, a century
after the abolition of the indentureship system, a new anthology of
poems, stories, essays, and memoirs reflects on the personal and
collective legacies of this great movement of peoples. Commissioned
by Commonwealth Writers and edited by David Dabydeen, Maria del
Pilar Kaladeen, and Tina K. Ramnarine, We Mark Your Memory is the
first attempt to bring together “writing from the descendants of
indenture” from such a global range, with twenty-eight writers and
a dozen countries represented. The Caribbean edition, published
by Trinidad-based Peekash Press, debuts in May 2019, the month in
which Indian Arrival Day is commemorated in both T&T and Guyana.
india has left us
By Eddie Bruce-Jones
(for ali b)
india has left us
in this place
smitten with the distance
of an arm’s length
and two soles and palms
laboured of their brown rivulets
leaving roads and rivers etched
back through the powder
whole cartographies savaged
each time we press
the wet mound of atta
we dust our hands so it will not
stick around
to texture the wood
or fill in the space
between the digits,
the heady remembered
lifted into
salty ashen plumes
and so
a map is always orphaned
on the flame
and swallowed by the crisp
of the rising roti
india has left us
alive with a cumin tongue
parched between leafy halves
edged of tattered urdu
clamped beneath a tiny vessel
bronze and mounted
ivory shingles
ashen insides:
tastes
like all the pots, stored away
in cupboards fragranced
by the dead of pepper
seeds for the sapling deciduous
trees harvested somewhere
close to here
in each room
of each house
of metal and wood
an urn
an elephant
three bronze lanterns
long gone cold
on some kitchen window ledge
a riddled hanuman watches us
silently peeling skin
into sacred dust
Rights of Passage
A three-part journey
By Patti-Anne Ali
Part 1
She stands before him
proudly humble
memories of mother’s milk
a fleeting instant on child-like lips
averting eyes of blatant beauty
dark-lashed, earth-brown and almond-shaped
from his elderly, lustfully wheezing gaze.
This place of warm, muddy cows
and powerful rivers
shrill cries of ancient devotion
travelling on gentle breezes
has suddenly
become her jail
and her mother’s voice
an Executioner’s song.
He jingles of money
her family’s saviour
who will wrench her forever
from sun-drenched fields
of innocence and laughter.
She
is eight years old
and about to marry . . .
30
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Part 2
Flames rise and grow
consuming the wood
ferociously.
She feels the heat
through the thin material
that rubs
one last time
against her cringing flesh.
She watches
his age-old body
through the folds of cloth
and billows of bitters-sweet smoke
as flames leap and work their way insidiously
reaching for her.
With pounding heart
seized with terror
zombie-like
she is led to the pyre
and submits screaming
to an agony of tradition.
She is twenty-three
and
about to die . . .
Part 3
Rising from the ashes
of her husband’s funeral pyre
she floats
through time and space
over continents and seas
and after a rocky voyage
on a turbulent, tossing vessel
she lands on the shores of an unchartered land.
Through cane and pain
she dances
her body
the epitome of woman
the pinnacle of motherhood
hips that sway in a timeless dance of light
hips that house the children
slumbering peacefully in her
ample curves.
She dances to the island thump
of a drum called the tassa.
This land feeds her new food
strokes her tumbling cascade of
black hair
with the softest of fragrant, tropical breezes
and introduces her to another
whose hair
is not like hers
and another
whose eyes are not like hers
and another whose skin is not like hers.
Her elders frown
as she gambols playfully
with the others.
But they cannot stop her now.
She is too far ahead
shoulder to shoulder with the
others of this new world
doing things she never did before
and things she has done, since time immemorial
gathering her children beneath her protective gaze
gathering policies to implement her destiny.
The elders
rumble in discontent
pretend she does not exist.
She smiles at her Executioners
choosing to remember
warm, muddy cows and powerful rivers
shrill cries of ancient devotion
travelling on gentle breezes.
She reaches within
for what was born centuries ago
in ancestors
who bled and struggled, loved and lived
and breathes a prayer of gratitude
for these timeless gifts
she will pass onto her children
born in this land
that celebrates the shimmer of her tears
in the light of the sun
and illumines her brightly bejewelled figure
poised
on the threshold of discovery
love
firmly planted in this soil.
She has righted her passage.
She has chosen her luggage.
She voyages on.
For more information, visit peekashpress.com
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31

need to know
Pavel1964/ Shutterstock.com
Datebook
More highlights of May and June across the
Caribbean
European Film Festival, Trinidad
14 to 28 May
Whether the issue is the environment and climate change, or
migration and other human rights issues, the EFF has never
been afraid to tackle those topics that affect everyone.
And not to worry if you’re not a linguist — the films are all
subtitled. www.facebook.com/tnteff
Guyana Carnival
17 to 27 May
Are you ready for the road? Booming music and vibrant
costume sections created by local and regional fashion
designers will take over the streets in one of the youngest
Carnivals in the Caribbean. Expect hyped-up performances
from some of your favourite soca artistes at the all-inclusive
fetes, concerts, boat ride, and more.
guyanacarnival592.com
Sea to Sea Marathon, Tobago
18 to 19 May
Conquering the run from the Caribbean Sea to
the Atlantic Ocean through Tobago’s ancient
rainforest, picturesque villages, and the capital
city Scarborough is definitely worth a year of bragging
rights. seatoseamarathon.com
Antigua and Barbuda Sport Fishing Tournament
8 to 9 June
Time and patience are the keys to the US$100,000
prize, awarded to anyone who breaks the marlin record.
antiguabarbudasportsfishing.com
St Kitts Music Festival
27 to 29 June
When the music takes over, it can be an intoxicating yet
surreal feeling. Imagine genres fused together in ways you’ve
never heard. Hits of yesteryear riding the wind with the lyrics
and melodies of the present day. Sean Paul, Jason Derulo,
John Legend, Biggie Irie, Tarrus Riley, Dionne Warwick, and
Regina Belle are no strangers to the stage at Warner Park
Stadium. stkittsmusicfestival.com
32
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ookshelf
Golden Child
by Claire Adam (Faber & Faber, 272 pp, ISBN 9780571339808)
Peter and Paul Deyalsingh are twin
brothers, growing up in 1980s Trinidad,
and they are as different in ambition
as two boys could ever be. Different,
too, are the ambitions of their parents,
petroleum worker Clyde and homemaker
Joy, for their sons. Peter is their
“golden child”: an academically gifted
prodigy on whose shoulders weigh the
hope for not only a government scholarship,
but the Gold Medal, which confers
opportunity and respectability for both
recipient and family. Paul, having been
told he is “slightly retarded” by contrast,
seems most content in his world of
wilderness roaming and forest jaunts. It
isn’t hard for Paul to disappear into the
dense bush that surrounds the Deyalsinghs’
rural home. A day comes when
he vanishes, and does not return when
called.
Trinidad-born, UK-based Claire Adam’s debut teems with
quiet power. You won’t find grand flourishes of language here.
The novel is composed with a deadly elegance, trimmed with
subtlety that serves to make its secrets pulse with painful,
palpable strength. Every rustling leaf in
the undergrowth matters in this magisterially
paced saga. Every blade of grass
gleams.
A complex novel provides its reader
with difficult choices. Golden Child
buckles you into an emotional briefcase
of catch-22s. Clyde, who strives
to make the best decisions for both his
children, is a complex, unforgettably
rendered patriarch, a man who wades
into deeper, murkier ethical terrain with
each choice he makes. As he grimly
muses, “They have two kinds of men in
the world . . . One kind works hard and
brings all the money home and gives it
to his wife to spend on the house and
children. The other kind doesn’t do that.
And nobody can control which kind of
father they get.”
Here is a debut that does what so
many other new releases claim to do, but don’t — it breaks
new ground. Adam strikes under the very bedrock of complacency,
revealing what we will — and won’t — do for our
children, and to ourselves.
How to Love a Jamaican
by Alexia Arthurs (Ballantine Books, 256 pp, ISBN
9781524799205)
“Caribbean mothers want
to eat their daughters,” one
woman says in the opening
story of How to Love a
Jamaican. In these tales laced
with good food, mermaids, and
old, beloved Bibles, Arthurs
tugs on the navel strings of
women connected through
blood, beauty, and the tidal
pull of home. In the title story,
ginger tea and gizzard are
backdrops to a marriage’s seasonal
rhythms, and the secrets
of fatherhood and forgiveness it contains. “Bad Behaviour”
sees a sexually burgeoning teen sent back to Jamaica,
to be sorted out by her “old-time granny.” Her lessons
are learning to make fry dumplings, chicken foot soup,
and sweet potato pudding: proof that some education
can simmer in a cast-iron pot, till it’s ready to be served.
Arthurs plates her short fiction with spice and savour.
Black Leopard, Red Wolf
by Marlon James (Riverhead Books, 640 pp, ISBN
9780735220171)
Lost the plot a couple hundred
pages in? Never fear.
Black Leopard, Red Wolf, first
in the Dark Star Trilogy, delivers
more than one seamless
narrative, and more than
one sleepless night spent
following its tributaries of
genre-limboing mystery, fable,
and dark adventure. Marlon
James’s prose is on rhapsodic,
unfettered display here: alternately
gut-punching, dizzying,
and sobbingly intense. The
language of the novel drives us through a search for a
missing child, past a tableau of abusive fathers, politically
motivated members of the feline kingdom, generations
of trauma, gender fluidity, and reams of actual viscera.
Our protagonist Tracker, a mysterious career sleuth with
a nose of gold, is a stunning enigma — just like the rest of
this unputdownable yarn.
34 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM

Wordplanting
by Kendel Hippolyte (Peepal Tree Press, 64 pp,
ISBN 9781845234355)
St Lucian poet Kendel
Hippolyte’s seventh collection
regards tenderly and contemplatively,
as do many poems
set in a writer’s later years, the
steps that lead to the afterlife.
A well-earned wisdom
facing down death is in these
verses, and yet the poems in
Wordplanting are so generously
activated by what keeps
us incandescently, immutably
alive. In “Harp”, a ruminant elder
finds himself out of step and sync with the dancehall of
the current generation, yet soldiers on stalwartly in paeans
of song, made to bruk down Babylon’s walls. Even the
most domestic of these poems lilts with music, proof that
poetry about home spaces is no less powerful in a masterful
griot’s hands. Taking us from foreign cities to the
depths of the unlit sea, Hippolyte is calling us all into our
own power, with soaring wonder.
The Slave Master of Trinidad
by Selwyn R. Cudjoe (University of Massachusetts
Press, 384 pp, ISBN 9781625343703)
William Hardin Burnley cut
a hard, unforgiving figure
against the backdrop of the
nineteenth-century Caribbean,
dominating Trinidad’s
slave-owning society. A proponent
of entrenched racism,
a ruthless representative of
the concerns of the British
Empire, Burnley ferociously
agitated against emancipation,
saying it was madness “to
suppose that African savages
could be beneficially, either
for themselves or the community, governed by the same
code as English labourers.” Cudjoe’s scholarship in The
Slave Master of Trinidad is a lucid, expressive mechanism,
unveiling heinous doctrines that were normalised through
Atlantic slave commerce. This impressive character study
of Burnley in his era reveals how one man became a titan of
industry while wielding the bloodiest of ledgers.
Reviews by Shivanee Ramlochan, Bookshelf editor
WWW.CARIBBEAN-AIRLINES.COM
35

playlist
G.O.A.T.
Machel Montano (Monk Music)
Soca is now the Caribbean’s de facto festival
music. Machel Montano’s wish to take soca to
the universe is partly on its way to that destination.
And with this album, which includes
the 2019 T&T Carnival Road March “Famalay”,
the soca superstar is now doing the things that
make a global music industry take notice. An
album of nineteen tracks fits easily into the
modern music streaming environment, and his
widespread collaborations with Caribbean and
US artists like Super Blue, Bunji Garlin, Skinny
Fabulous, and Ashanti point to an understanding
that this music is bigger than one island.
St Lucian Dennery Segment, Dominican
bouyon, Jamaican dancehall, and vocal colours
from Belize and Martinique all accent the
hybridity that is evident in modern Caribbean
music. Now is really the time for a rekindling of
our greatness as Caribbean folk, and G.O.A.T.,
Montano’s forty-fifth album in his over-threedecade
career, is the template for our collective
significance.
Rise of the Protester
Reginald Cyntje (self-released)
In a series of splendid jazz albums, trombonist
and composer Reginald Cyntje has been musically
chronicling the range of human emotions,
and providing a musical engagement with the
human spirit, the soul, the cerebral self. An intelligent
understanding of ourselves culminates in
this new recording, Rise of the Protester, which
documents the resistance of the “hue man”
to bondage, to deprivation, to prejudice, and
to injustice in both Caribbean and American
spaces, reflecting Cyntje’s multiple heritages as
a Dominican raised in the US Virgin Islands, and
now living in the United States. Taking his cues
from a historical record of resistance, literal and
figurative — from the likes of Harriet Tubman and
“Queen” Mary Thomas of St Croix to Malcolm
X and others — Cyntje’s evolution of protest
is given gravitas with music that engages the
urgent rhythms of Caribbean movement and the
contemplative space of jazz. This is by no means
mournful dissonance, but a joyous celebration of
spirit wanting to be free.
Single Spotlight
Shy
M.R.I. featuring Tico (On Lock Records)
“Modern dancehall” is a genre term created by
digital musical platforms to make sense of a
new wave of Electronic Dance Music (EDM) with
more than a hint of Caribbean rhythm and vibe.
Some call it CDM. On a first listen, this new single
by M.R.I sounds minimalist, but grows as the
drum and bass percolate with that syncopated
rhythm so characteristic of Caribbean music.
Singer Tico adds a vocal that sounds just about
right in this setting to make bodies move on a
dance floor — not too loud to overwhelm, highpitched
and clear enough to hear. “Shy” is a simple
ditty about a guy’s self-awareness that his
banter is weak because of apparent diffidence,
and the recognition that this dilemma can lead
to solitary nights and days. The Trinidad-based
On Lock Record’s tag line is “Caribbean roots,
global sound,” and this song just about has all
those elements.
My Good Day
Ronald “Boo” Hinkson (Zephryn Records)
St Lucian music icon and guitarist Ronald “Boo”
Hinkson has a career equivalent to that of an
ambassador for his native island and its annual
jazz festival. The languid pleasures of Caribbean
life are mirrored in the tropical smooth jazz feel
of this song. Featuring the vocals of Irvin “Ace”
Loctar and Shannon Pinel, and Hinkson’s “signature
feathery touch,” this song’s inspirational
message of hope and gratitude is made clearer
when you grasp the relationship between our
Caribbean realities and the vision of the tourist
brochure. “Survival is the triumph of stubbornness,”
said St Lucian poet Derek Walcott, and in
these lyrics, you get the sense that a good day
is just around the corner from a series of regular
bad yesterdays. The jazz guitar in the hands of
giants like Wes Montgomery and George Benson
became the smooth sonic antidote to melancholy,
and Hinkson merrily continues that tradition
here.
Reviews by Nigel A. Campbell
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37

screenshots
courtesy Maya Cozier
“I’ve sat through
enough films where the
directors get the female
characters wrong”
A star is born — almost — in the short Trinidad and Tobago film She Paradise.
It’s the story of Sparkle (Onessa Nestor), a young woman desperate to be a
soca dancer. Lacking in self-confidence, she botches her first audition with a
dance troupe. The brash, extroverted Mica (Cheneka Clifford) takes her under
her wing, eventually leading to a climactic moment in the spotlight for Sparkle
to show what she’s got.
Directed by Maya Cozier, She Paradise is a prelude to a feature-length version
of the film currently in production. It’s a bracingly unsentimental distaff
drama, one attuned to the complexities and joys of young women’s friendships
with one another. It’s also sensitive to the working-class realities of its
characters, a quality that was on display in Short Drop (2016), Cozier’s previous,
prizewinning short. Here Cozier tells Jonathan Ali about bringing She Paradise
— the short and feature — to the screen.
She Paradise considers themes of
girlhood and female camaraderie
through a Carnival-and-soca context.
Which came first, the wish to
make a Carnival film or the desire to
explore these themes?
I think I was initially driven by wanting to
tell a story that felt like the experiences
of my girlfriends and me growing up. It
was an exciting time of self-discovery,
loss, heartbreak — and it all happened
against the backdrop of a contemporary
Caribbean space.
The film is set within a working-class
milieu. What draws you to this world,
and how do you approach it in terms
of being authentic to people’s lived
experiences?
I was an introverted child, so early friendships
have really impacted my work. My
best friend, who I met at dance class
when I was six, danced as a way to find
escape from her lived experiences.
The first film I ever made in college was
about that friend. Also, my co-writer
Melina Brown and I interviewed dancers
before developing the film’s characters
and crafting the story. That process
helped us tell a story that feels authentic
to these women’s lives. I think that’s
the most important thing for me to
accomplish as a director, because I’ve sat
through enough films where the directors
get the female characters all wrong.
Watching the film, there’s this sense
— not fully verbalised or shown —
that the competitive, even mercenary,
world of dance these young
women are in is on a continuum that
also includes the world of sex work.
I would never judge women for their
decisions. I also don’t want to sentimentalise
the sexuality of the dancers
in the film. I know how my friends and
I felt when we danced on stage for
Carnival, and it’s a liberating and empowering
experience. Of course we’re doing
it within the culture of a misogynistic
male space, and those are issues that
I grapple with in the short film and the
feature-length version.
Your leads give contrasting, convincing
performances. How did you
cast them?
We put out an open call for actors/
dancers and personally invited some
dancers to the audition. Cheneka
and Onessa are both from [the dance
troupe] Malick Folk Performers. They
had no prior acting experience, but their
lives are so close to the actual characters
that it works. Onessa and Cheneka
are also friends in reality, and they have
the same friendship dynamic of their
characters. Cheneka is the theatrical,
self-assured friend and Onessa is the
more reserved, introspective friend.
The feature-length version of She
Paradise will be your first feature.
What do you see as being key to
making it a success?
I don’t want to give away too much, but
if I can challenge the way people think
about consent and sexual harassment,
I’ll feel like I’ve accomplished something
with this film. If I can demystify some
preconceptions of Caribbean girlhood,
I’ll feel like I’ve accomplished something.
I think making a film that feels real and
authentic is successful. If I can tell a
story that makes audiences, regardless
of where they are in the world, relate
this film to their personal experiences,
I’ll feel like I’ve accomplished something.
She Paradise
Director: Maya Cozier
Trinidad and Tobago
15 minutes
38
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cookup
Drink up
Not so long ago, says Franka Philip, Caribbean drinkers’ choice of
alcoholic beverages was all about getting tipsy. But a new generation
of drinks connoisseurs are more interested in unique flavour profiles
and the history behind their tipple. Meet some of the creative
mixologists who are changing the way we sip our cocktails
Illustration by Shalini Seereeram
ME
Hear nah, allyuh, last night I had a cocktail
that a guy made with chenette. It was bess!
FRIEND 1
Wha? Chenette? Dat not computing!!!
FRIEND 2
A chenette cocktail, yuh say?
ME
I dunno how he extracted the juice from
chenette, but damn, the cocktail was
awesome! It was one of the most exciting
things I tasted here in Barbados, that win!
FRIEND 1
I cyah imagine chennette with any kinda alcohol,
but if you say it was good . . .
Yes, dear reader, that was a snippet of an actual
WhatsApp chat I had with some friends back
in Trinidad while I was attending the 2018
Barbados Food and Rum Festival. I came
away from the festival’s signature rum event,
“A Taste of the Exotic”, with one thing on my
mind: Jamaal Bowen’s drink called Guinep Guinep, Ahaaa Ahaaa.
Guinep — known in some parts of the Caribbean as chenette,
and in Barbados as ackee — is a fruit with a hard seed covered
with a layer of juicy pulp. It definitely isn’t the first fruit you’d
think of for making a cocktail, but if you know of Jamaal Bowen’s
reputation for adventure, then it’s not so surprising.
Bowen, one of the Caribbean’s top mixologists, is taking
drinks culture to a new level. He’s part of a global movement of
drinks magicians who are incorporating exotic flavour profiles
by using unusual fruits, vegetables, spices, and herbs.
When I tell the award-winning Bajan mixologist that several
months later I still have the taste of his chenette cocktail in my
mind, he laughs. “If I give you a drink that has mango or passion
fruit or banana, it’s something you are so accustomed to, you
might link it to another drink, but it probably isn’t a standout
experience,” he explains. “I try to do something different from
the others — so, for example, I think about using things you
would have eaten during childhood or things you quicker think
about eating than drinking.
“When I do drinks for certain events, like Barbados Food
and Rum,” he continues, “I focus on making you, the patron, feel
you’re having an experience that you can have only with me.”
Bowen is an enthusiastic proponent of using local ingredients
to create new drinks with different and unique flavour profiles. He
jokes, “It’s easier to think about the ingredients I haven’t used.”
As we speak on the phone, I hear him moving around his lab,
bottles clinking as he looks on the shelves for a few of the concoctions
he’s made. “I have salted sea grape, salted gooseberry,
hog plum, soursop and cinnamon, dunks, tamarind, ‘five and
five’ (five fingers and five spices), and a whole lot of stuff. These
ingredients and these flavour profiles are what give us the edge.”
In Trinidad, meanwhile, Martin James is also challenging
himself to use local items and cheaper ingredients to take his
mixology game to a new level. Many of the herbs and other
flavourings he uses come from his own backyard.
“My mixologist friends would come and admire the garden,”
he says. “At one time I had six different types of mint, several
40 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM

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41

varieties of basil. I started to use the herbs for infusions and
then I started doing shrubs” — acidulated concoctions of fruit,
aromatics, sugar, and vinegar — “and other experiments.”
James is part of a mixology collective called Artistic Bar
Concepts. The team of six works at all levels in the food and drink
industry. They recognise that people are moving away from sweet
frozen cocktails in search of fresh and more natural options. This
inspired James to use teas in his drink creations. “People in the
Caribbean are accustomed to teas, but only in one way. We have
been doing tea-flavoured cocktails that are fresh, close to natural,
and offer a unique drink experience,” he explains.
“We’ve observed that while there are some people who have
lots of money to spend, in this economy, there are more who
have limited budgets but want to still enjoy a good drink when
they do go out,” he adds. “We want to use ingredients that are
cost-effective, and tea is one of them. I created a wild hibiscus
and blueberry cordial and paired it with gin, a spirit that Trinis
are just getting used to again.”
Barbadian mixologist Jamaal Bowen
is an enthusiastic proponent of
using local ingredients to create new
drinks with unique flavour profiles
According to James, this is a time of great changes in the
drinks industry. “Long ago, the thing would be for people to
drink to get ‘tight,’ but that’s not the case anymore. People want
an overall good experience that doesn’t include being sick the
next morning.”
Rafael Reyes — who works with drinks giant Diageo, and
travels extensively training bartenders and mixologists all over
Latin America and the Caribbean — agrees. “We don’t want
people to drink more, we want them to drink better. This is why
we invest so much in staff and bartender training worldwide,”
Reyes says.
“Globally, people are now not only more conscious about
what they drink, but conscious about the effort behind the drink
itself. In other words, we no longer drink to get drunk, we drink
to enjoy the quality of the liquid and appreciate the experience
of a tailor-made drink.”
Trends in drinks culture evolve quickly, and every spirit and
beverage maker is working hard to capture the market of millennials,
who are definitely not drinking the way their parents did.
Nowadays, tequila and gin are the biggest sellers on the world
market. Reyes explains that drinkers are more interested in “the
craft element” these spirits have as part of their production.
“People no longer want to drink something just to drink,” he
says. “They want to equally enjoy the story behind the brand and
their unique processes. Gins and tequilas offer just that.”
Though both spirits are becoming big hits in the rest of the
world, local favourites vary depending on where you are
in the Caribbean. According to Jamaal Bowen, falernum
is all the rage in Barbados right now. This liqueur, dating back to
the eighteenth century and said to be invented by Bajans, is limebased
with added sugar and spices.
“Falernum is trending not just in Barbados,” says Bowen.
“If you walk into any bar in the US or the UK and you say you
have a bottle of falernum, you will see how quickly bartenders
will gravitate towards you and try to get the bottle off you. It’s
amazing.”
Bowen adds, “There’s a cocktail called Grind and Toil that’s
made of kola tonic, falernum, and lime juice or grapefruit juice —
depending on how acidic you want the drink to be. The falernum
and the kola tonic are supposed to be the sweeteners in the
drink. It’s very simple and easy, and the good thing is that you
can find all the ingredients for the drink in any bar in Barbados.
The drink is shaken and strained into a martini glass. You serve
it straight up, and the garnish is very simple — use either a fresh
lime wheel or a dehydrated lime wheel. Add to that some locally
made kola tonic bitters, and you have a classic drink that’s total
Bajan.”
Bowen said Bajans love their “straight” drinks, particularly
rum. “We are not necessarily a mixed drinks culture, it’s something
we are growing into.” He explains that cocktails are more
likely to be drunk at fetes and all-inclusive events like Taste
of the Exotic, at which chefs work with mixologists to develop
cocktails to complement their meals.
Drinks culture is a huge deal in Trinidad and Tobago, and
always has been. During the annual Carnival — which fell in
early March this year — the major drinks distributors run extensive
campaigns for weeks, each aimed at making a respective
product “the drink of the Carnival.”
One particular drink, the classic aperitif Campari, spread its
colourful banners and merchandise all over the festival — you
couldn’t turn around at a Carnival event and not see a distinctive
red Campari cup in someone’s hand. But after all that marketing,
has Campari with its bitter flavour won over the taste buds of a
people who love their drinks sweet and strong? Only time will
tell. Beyond the fetes and the marketing, mixologists say that
while drinkers are sometimes enticed to try these products, what
people are really after is a unique drinking experience.
I’ll give the last word to Rafael Reyes, who takes a big-picture
view. “We have been serving the same blended, colourful ‘allinclusive’–style
cocktails for years, and kind of got stuck there,”
he says. “However, the palate of the people vacationing in our
countries has changed, and they look for more crafted cocktails
and complex flavours. I believe that in the region we should
evolve and diversify our style of cocktails to cater for these
needs — but keeping our Caribbean flair.” n
Jamaal Bowen runs the Top Shelf Bar Academy in
Bridgetown, Barbados. Check them out on Instagram
at @TopShelfBA. You can also check out the latest bar
tricks with Martin James at @trinibarchef and Rafael
Reyes at @reyesoncocktails.
42 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM

Immerse
Picture Capital/ Alamy Stock Photo
44 Closeup
Look and look again
50 Backstory
Wright on
57
Own Words
“I’m aware of how fragile
the Caribbean is”
Letitia Wright’s Hollywood career has taken her far from her birthplace in Guyana — but the actress is proud of her roots

closeup
Neque mittatis margaritas Vestras ante
porcos (Do Not Cast Pearls Before Swine)
(2016, mixed media installation at the Gold
Thread Gallery, Belfast, UK)
44 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM

Look and
look again
After fleeing “Papa Doc” Duvalier’s
Haiti with his parents, artist Jean-
Ulrick Désert’s restless life has
made him a world citizen — but his
Caribbean roots deeply inform his
work, as Andre Bagoo discovers.
And a certain disorientation is part
of what he offers his viewers
Photography courtesy Jean-Ulrick Désert
He tells me of his plans: a solo presentation
here, a biennale there, a group show or two.
A constellation of ever-evolving projects,
revolving around an artist who is himself
always changing, just as his work makes us
look and look again.
“I prefer to create art that is initially familiar and comforting,
before allowing any of the nuance to elicit a discomfort that may
reorient the viewer to break away from our shared myopia,” he
tells me via email. In other words, look. And look again. We are
in the world of Jean-Ulrick Désert.
How to describe his background? Born in Haiti during the
era of dictator François “Papa Doc” Duvalier, Désert left
as a child with his family, who took refuge in the United
States. Eventually, he studied architecture at Cooper Union and
Columbia University in New York City.
“I have a formal education as an architect — two degrees in
fact — which were fortunately better for creating conceptual
art rather than building buildings,” Désert says. “I have at times
argued that scale exists in art as it does in architecture, and
every artwork has its own appropriate scale. The artist must
intuit what that is as she or he creates it.”
WWW.CARIBBEAN-AIRLINES.COM
45

The Burqa Project: On the Borders of
My Dreams I Encountered My Double’s
Ghost (2002, mixed media installation,
dimensions variable)
The scale of Désert’s own career can seem limitless. The
label “immigrant” and the narrative of his birth then flight
from Haiti cannot fully capture the polyglot nature of his
outlook. New York, Paris, Berlin — he’s lived in many places.
His work has travelled even farther: to Amsterdam, Brussels,
Ghent, Guadeloupe, Havana, Martinique, Munich, Rotterdam,
Senegal. He’s strolled the Piazza San Marco in Venice during
a flood tide, roamed the oak forests of Hamburg wearing
lederhosen. When we met for the first time, in Belfast in 2016,
he was wearing a kilt and waistcoat — tall, with a salt and pepper
beard, bespectacled and striking, at times stopping traffic,
but not really paying much heed as he talked about his work
in Caribbean Queer Visualities, a groundbreaking exhibition of
LGBTQ artists from the region.
But though Désert may identify as a Caribbean national,
when he talks about his family fleeing Duvalier — whose des-
When Jean-Ulrick Désert talks about
his family fleeing “Papa Doc” Duvalier,
it’s clear he harbours anxiety about
the politics of any kind of regionalism
46 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM

potic regime used a death squad called the Tontons Macoutes to
kill opponents — it’s clear he harbours anxiety about the politics
of any kind of regionalism, any kind of label.
“We were thrown into exile,” he says. “We lived in the Brazilian
Embassy [in Port-au-Prince] for a number of months until the
president’s birthday, when we were able to escape for the airport,
making our way from Haiti to New York. One more day, all three
of us would have been murdered.”
But some traumas cannot be outrun.
“My mother is still very reticent to talk about it,” Désert says.
“This is from what I pieced together from my father. Their marriage
would eventually suffer and fall apart by the time we were
living in the States. Even when my mom got divorced and she
returned [to Haiti], she was immediately arrested and stopped
at the airport, because we were still on a blacklist. Relatives
had their businesses compromised. We had to abandon all our
properties, leaving me no physical legacy.” He adds, “but the
cultural legacy cannot be erased.”
That legacy finds expression in work that shows up the falseness
of the nation state. “The restrictive consequences of legal
borders that define nations and its citizenry are inescapable
today more than ever,” Désert once told the curator and art
writer Clelia Coussonnet. “It is for me the elephant in the room.”
A
striking example of how all these ideas intersect is The
Burqa Project: On the Borders of My Dreams I Encountered
My Double’s Ghost (2002). Désert gives us a pageant of
four burqas, which are the floor-length garments worn in public
by some Muslim women. Each burqa bears the pattern of the
national flag of one of the G4 nations: the US, Britain, France,
and Germany. Have the flags been turned into burqas? Or have
burqas been turned into flags? Which came first? The artist does
not give us too much. He leaves room for us to engage with ideas.
He knows the burqa evokes different reactions, depending on
the viewer. He builds the complex effect of this work on our own
complex reactions. A person who is afraid of the sight of a burqa
might question whether we are being invited to fear the power of
the G4. Do both sides of the non-Muslim and Muslim worlds not
share the same fears of each other? And what does that common
fear tell us about our shared humanity?
Equally, a person with no suspicion of the burqa might see
a more hopeful window display: here are symbols of Islam and
the West co-existing, a reminder of the ties between Islam and
Western society, as well as a vision of a future in which the idea
of Islam is not inconsistent with the ideals represented by the G4.
“There is usually some interplay between signs and symbols
in my art which makes it old-school and familiar for many,”
Désert tells me by email. “I am less interested in my own ‘ah-ha’
moment, but rather the ‘ah-ha’ moment of the viewer experiencing
an artwork through their interpretations.”
Another multifaceted work is central to his perspective. In
Neque Mittatis Margaritas Vestras Ante Porcos (Do Not Cast Pearls
Before Swine), his 2016 work for the Caribbean Queer Visualities
show, Désert filled a room with white balloons that took on
a pearl-like sheen. Between the balloons were party banners
in rainbow colours, spelling out different translations of the
The artist does not give us too much.
He leaves room for us to engage with
ideas
proverb of the title. There is an air of celebration, as though at
a birthday gathering, but the inability to understand some of
the text makes you question: what is being celebrated? With
so many rowbacks in relation to LGBTQ rights now appearing
possible, is the artist questioning whether past celebration was
too early? Juxtaposition of joy with the weary tone of the titular
proverb also invites us to scrutinise further. The reference to
casting pearls before swine makes us consider the value of the
individual in the face of the collective, reminding us of the imagery
of George Orwell’s Animal Farm and also the contradictory
edicts of the Bible.
But look again. “Pig play” is a term sometimes used in the
gay community to describe a range of ribald sex acts. The artist
Artist Jean-Ulrick Désert
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47

Sky above Port-au-Prince Haiti 18°32’21”N 72°20’6”W 12 Jan 2010 21:53 UTC, from The Goddess Constellations series (2011, textile, pins, embossed
metal-foil, 300 x 300 cm)
might be questioning whether one’s identity should be moored to
one’s sexual activity — whether freedom must come at the price
of the loss of complexity.
I don’t think Désert wants us to chose one interpretation over
another. Rather, he wants the ritual of the encounter with the
work to itself become charged with a kind of poetry, opening
possibilities, pushing us to new and multiple realisations.
“What I aim to achieve in/through my artworks continues
to evolve with the times in which we live,” he writes. “The artist
is a political actor, and with it [comes] the burden and privilege
of having a voice. Therefore I ask myself what is the current or
continued relevance of any creation, local or global. I attest to a
Roman Catholic upbringing in the sense that objects of beauty
are often at the service of Christian ritual. So are words and so
is space.”
Space takes on dramatic meaning in one of Désert’s most
memorable works. Sky above Port-au-Prince Haiti 18°32’21”N
72°20’6”W 12 Jan 2010 21:53 UTC is part of a series called
The Goddess Constellations. Each piece in the series picks a specific
historical moment and reproduces the constellations at a specific
time on that given day. Blood red velour papers on foam are
covered with pins and embossed metal-foil circles, each a small
silvery orb carrying Josephine Baker’s image. The overall effect:
looking into the stars but seeing red.
For Sky above Port-au-Prince Haiti, Désert approximates the
positions of the stars at the moment of the deadly earthquake of
2010. Immediately, W.H. Auden’s poem “The More Loving One”
comes to mind, with its opening lines: “Looking up at the stars, I
know quite well / That, for all they care, I can go to hell.”
We are being asked to consider the indifference of the universe
to man’s fate; the sport of Thomas Hardy’s president of
the immortals; the cruelty of history; the endless machinations
of race-thinking. We are all in the gutter, Oscar Wilde said, but
some of us at looking at the stars.
Désert has us stare into maddening truths and asks us to
make sense of his poems of beauty and rage.
So look. And look again. n
48 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM

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49

ackstory
Wright on
As a child in Guyana, Letitia Wright
could not have known she’d grow up
to be an award-winning actress, star
of international blockbuster films like
Black Panther. Her parents might have
preferred a career in medicine or law — but
once the acting bug bit her, Wright did
everything it took to build the career of her
dreams, even despite her struggles with
depression, writes Caroline Taylor
Despite a cast brimming with
award-winning Hollywood legends,
there was scarcely a Black
Panther review that didn’t effusively
single out Guyanese-British
actress Letitia Wright — playing
the title character’s science whiz little sister, Shuri
— as the film’s scene-stealing breakout star.
Born on Halloween in 1993, Wright migrated
with her family from Guyana to Tottenham, north
London, when she was seven. Unsurprisingly, it
was a culture shock — from the climate to the
people. “As Guyanese, we are accustomed to saying
good morning and good afternoon to everyone
. . . close to our neighbours, helping each other out,
and trying to be united despite our situation. But
when I came to England, everyone avoided you,
locked themselves away indoors, and nobody said
hello to each other,” she recalls.
The requisite adjustment to her new home also
sowed the early seeds of her acting talent. The
children at her primary school would laugh at her
accent. So, with the steely determination that would
come to characterise many other major moments of
her life, she resolved to transform how she sounded.
That’s not to say that the Guyanese accent is no
more. She can still slip back into it at will — not
least, she jokes, when her mother is in the room.
But it wasn’t until she saw the 2006 film Akeelah
and the Bee — starring young black actress Keke
Palmer as an eleven-year-old national spelling bee
competitor — that the acting bug really took hold.
“[Akeelah] looked like me, she was positive, she
just wanted to contribute,” Wright says. “I wanted
to tell stories like that . . . I wanted to be captured
in a weird camera thing that records.”
Convinced this was the path for her, she set
about making it happen — despite her family’s
resistance. “When I grew up in Guyana, we didn’t
have an acting industry,” she explains. “We’re
more focused on the academic side of things —
being a lawyer or a doctor or a teacher.” But in
Britain, there was one shining exception: “We had
this amazing show called Desmond’s, about this
Guyanese man and his wife — they have a barbershop
in Peckham . . . And this is a hit show. I grew
up on Desmond’s, and he represented Guyana. He
made us proud,” she told Ebony last year.
50
WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM

kwaku alston photography, Inc.
WWW.CARIBBEAN-AIRLINES.COM 51

Letitia Wright’s
breakout role: Shuri,
sister of Black Panther’s
protagonist
Inspired, undeterred, and still in her mid-teens,
Wright took her first job — selling a magazine
door to door — to pay for her headshots, eventually
moving on to study at the Identity School of
Acting, and signing on with their Identity Agency
Group. From there, small film and TV parts began
to flow in, as did the recognition. For her role in
My Brother the Devil, Screen International named
her one of their 2012 UK Stars of Tomorrow. Urban
Hymn (2015) helped her catch the attention of
Marvel, Steven Spielberg (who cast her in last
year’s Ready Player One), and the British Academy
of Film and Television Awards (BAFTA), who
named her one of their 2015 Breakthrough Brits.
That year, Wright also starred in the West End
production of Black Panther co-star Danai Gurira’s
play Eclipsed. In what she calls “a strange triangulation,”
when the play was mounted later that year
in New York City, the role went to another Black
Panther colleague — Oscar winner Lupita Nyong’o.
© Marvel Studios 2018
52 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM

There was a near-undeniable momentum
to her career at this point. But it was very
much in doubt for Wright herself. By the age
of twenty, Wright’s struggle with depression was
becoming insurmountable. At breaking point, and
unable to withstand the pressure she was putting on
herself, she turned down the chance to work with
Nicole Kidman, and was prepared to give it all up for
good. “I saw myself in a deep state of depression and
I literally wanted to quit acting,” Wright said when
accepting an award in February. “The only thing that
pulled me out of it was God, my belief, my faith, and
my family — and an email from BAFTA asking me to
become part of the BAFTA Breakthrough Brits. And I
was like, let me try again.”
She’s become one of the growing number of
stars to openly share their struggles with depression,
frequently taking the opportunity to encourage
others. “For me, I just speak on it, because
maybe there’s that kid that’s seventeen, locked up
“I rep Guyana wherever I go . . . it’s an honour
to do that for my country”
in their room like I was, and thinking that they can’t
make a contribution to the world, and having these
negative thoughts — and seeing me talk about it
and saying that I actually flipped it and flipped my
mindset,” she told Access Hollywood. “Now I’m in a
positive space, and they can get there too.”
What followed in 2018, after she had turned that
corner, was a torrent of accolades for her work in
both Black Mirror and Black Panther — nominations
for Primetime Emmy, Saturn, Teen Choice, BET,
MTV, EDA Female Focus, and Black Reel awards.
Fandango crowned her their Highest Box Office
Earning Actor of 2018, based on US box office
earnings. She also came full circle at the 2019
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53

Letitia Wright with her Black Panther
co-stars Lupita Nyong’o and Chadwick
Boseman
© Marvel Studios 2018
BAFTAs, winning the prestigious EE Rising Star
Award. “I don’t want validation to come about from
awards,” she told ET, “but when it does happen,
it’s a lovely little nudge that says, ‘Hey, kid, you’re
going in the right direction.’”
Despite her meteoric rise and the intensity
of the spotlight focused on her, Wright
remains grounded. It helps to be able to call
on colleagues for advice, including Naomie
Harris — a fellow Brit with Caribbean (Jamaican
and Trinidadian) parents. “I asked her how she
has dealt with fame, and she said to me that how
you carry yourself is how people will treat you
. . . If you remain humble and just treat everybody
with love, then people will relate to you more,
and you won’t have that whole ‘Oh my god, I’m a
celebrity’ thing.”
Wright also takes pride in the enthusiastic
response of people back home in Guyana, even if it
is a bit overwhelming at times. “I rep Guyana wherever
I go,” she says. “I’m really happy that people
are supporting . . . I just hope that it continues to
inspire people — it’s an honour to do that for my
country.”
So what’s next for this rising star? She currently
appears in Marvel’s blockbuster Avengers:
Endgame, and she seems a shoo-in for the
sequel to Black Panther, which is in development.
She’s been cast as the lead in two other projects:
the English-language adaptation of the 2017 French
comedy Le Brio, co-produced by John Legend’s Get
Lifted Film Company, as well as the forthcoming
sci-fi love story Hold Back the Stars, alongside fellow
Identity School of Acting alum John Boyega. She
also features in the Guava Island project alongside
Donald “Childish Gambino” Glover and Rihanna.
Anyone who knows exactly what it is or when it will
be released is staying mum.
But she has no plans to sit and wait for films
to come to her. Wright is committed to making as
many indies as she can, and — taking inspiration
from people like Viola Davis and fellow Black
Panther star Michael B. Jordan — is resolved to
Wright has become one of the growing
number of stars to openly share their
struggles with depression, frequently taking
the opportunity to encourage others
learn more about producing so she can bring to
life the diverse stories she wants to see on screen.
She also has a list of directors she’d like to work
with (she’s already checked off a few) — Ava
DuVernay, Lynne Ramsay, and Spielberg again,
but on a larger role.
For Wright, all of this is merely part of how she
wants her life to unfold. It’s a purpose and motivation
she explains with a profound simplicity: “I try
to let the light that’s within me shine to others, and
hopefully they identify their own light — and they
shine too.” n
54 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM

own words
“I’m aware
of how fragile
the Caribbean is”
Sir Hilary Beckles, Barbadian
historian, UWI vice chancellor,
and reparations activist,
on finding his West Indian
identity, his obsession with
economic development, and
the global movement towards
slavery reparations — as told
to Shelly-Ann Inniss
Photography courtesy the University of the
West Indies
I
was a Windrush child, raised by my maternal
grandmother before I migrated to England in
the late 1950s. She was a Pentecostal pastor
in Redmans Village Pentecostal Church,
Barbados, and she expected me to follow
her into the pulpit. I actually feel evangelical
at times when I stand at the lectern. I knew I was
going to be involved in aspects of the black journey.
I knew I was going to write about it and speak about
it. I imagine her saying, “You see!”
As a teenager, I was a conscious activist in the
West Indian community in Birmingham, England. I
got involved in the Pan-African and Anti-Apartheid
Movements very early. By the time I got to the
University of Hull at age seventeen, I’d written a
few unpublished novels — they were terrible. I
have one of them to this day, under lock and key.
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57

I was heavily influenced by James Baldwin, who’d impactfully narrated the
experience of the black community in the United States, especially those who
had migrated from the southern states to flee racism and found themselves in
the big cities. I was captivated and very keen about how West Indians were
becoming West Indian as well.
I’d never met another West Indian before migrating to England. If your
identity was Barbadian, you found yourself as a minority in the black community.
We had to blend into our West Indian-ness, and eventually, it became
my predominant identity. I wanted to talk about things like that. I wanted to be
an activist, perhaps in the political context. I suppose from my teenage years
I was global in my thinking.
“If reparations takes another hundred years,
then it will be consistent with our history”
When I came back to the Caribbean, my passion was for the advancement
of the University of the West Indies. While I am not a graduate of UWI in a
legal sense, I am a graduate intellectually. As a student in England, the books
and essays I studied came out of UWI. The writings of Derek Walcott, Rex
Nettleford, George Beckford, Lloyd Best, and other Caribbean intellectuals
were framing my consciousness. When I came to UWI, having completed my
doctorate, I felt at home immediately, because I was surrounded by the people
whose work I had been studying. It felt spiritual.
Every opportunity I get, I play cricket, too. When I was the principal at
Cave Hill, I was probably the only principal in the world who had to compete
with students for a place on the field. I went to practice, did trials and drills to
prove my eligibility. I enjoyed that. Here I am in my late fifties, and when I left
there three years ago, I was still on the cricket team. It gave me an opportunity
to stay close to young people, hear their voices, and socialise with them in an
informal setting. I still have that intimacy with my students.
I live in a society where I see challenges and issues, and my first impulse is
to research the background of the crisis and write about it. I’m happiest when
sitting at my desk with beautiful sheets of white paper and lots of coloured pens.
I have a pen fetish — hundreds are in my desk drawers. Anything I do, I write it
longhand first, then go on the computer. It’s a ritual. I use different colour inks
based on my mood. It gives me tremendous pleasure and fulfilment.
When I joined UWI as a lecturer, I was twenty-four years old. I haven’t
left. I became the youngest professor in UWI’s history at thirty-five. I
was mentored, nurtured, groomed, and criticised, so I could get better.
I took from UWI everything that it could give, and it was my time to give back.
One day, Sir Alister McIntyre, who was vice chancellor at the time, invited
me to be a pro-VC. At first, I was deeply ambivalent, as it meant I’d have to
stop teaching and writing and enter administration full-time. Writing was
something I was always doing — novels, history books, and eventually stage
plays. McIntyre said administrators who can bring passion and vision are just
as important as writers and researchers for the university to survive and move
to a higher level. I felt a responsibility.
I inherited a tremendous legacy from previous vice chancellors. Most of
them had different views on how the university should proceed. My views are
closest to Sir W. Arthur Lewis, the first VC, and Sir Alister McIntyre, my mentor
— both economic historians. We believe in the transformational power of
UWI to build Caribbean resilience, and to open a future we can then pursue
as a Caribbean nation with a sustainable culture. I’m aware of how fragile
and vulnerable the Caribbean is. I believe UWI is
a major plank on which it must be built. My role
is to participate with my colleagues in creating a
twenty-first-century university — to reengineer,
restructure, reorganise, and give it a new vision
and mandate. We’re making significant headway,
too. UWI is now ranked among the top five per cent
best universities in the world.
The last fifty years, we’ve built the Caribbean out
of the colonial rubble. The issues in front of us this
time are very different. An important role of UWI
is to help clarify this historic moment and develop
conversations about the next half-century. It’s an
internal and external process, because the university
itself must be strengthened to do this task. My
focus was always on economic development and
the role that education can play in the economic
transformation of our societies. I go to bed and wake
up thinking about it. How can UWI play an even
greater role in pushing the Caribbean out of this
recession and achieve economic growth?
Reparations is connected to economic
development. I’ve always sought to balance
my multiple roles. I’m the vice president of the
UNESCO Global Slave Routes project, the chairman
of the CARICOM Reparations Commission, along
with other hats. I’m responsible for developing
a framework for the research of slavery on a
global basis. I spend a lot of time in Africa, Latin
America, and Asia looking at how black slavery was
globalised. Everything is connected. Britain has a
role to play in putting back some of the money it
milked from the Caribbean for its own development.
Having achieved its own transformation, we’ve been
left with the results of that extraction. I believe we
have a right! Britain should return to the scene of
the crime, and participate in cleaning up the mess
it left behind.
Everywhere people were colonised, reparations
committees are springing up. We’re part of a global
transformation. This century will witness the
escalation of the search for reparatory justice. I’m
happy, from a Caribbean perspective, to be playing
our part in the global transformation.
Reparations is not an overnight issue. It took
us the entire nineteenth century to uproot slavery.
Haiti was the first country to abolish slavery
legally in 1804, Brazil was the last in 1888. Then
it took another 150 years to get independence in
the Caribbean. The next phase is reparations. If it
takes another hundred years, then it will be consistent
with our history. The longer the haul, the
more energetic you should become. As a university
educator in a Caribbean where the majority of our
people were enslaved, indentured, and colonised,
it is my duty to stand up for them. n
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ARRIVE
roberthardin/alamy stock photo
60 Offtrack
Kairi wild
70 Escape
Back to St Lucia
70 Neighbourhood
St George’s, Grenada
80
Bucket List
Blue Lagoon, Jamaica
Soufrière, on St Lucia’s southwest coast

offtrack
Kairi wild
Trinidad is the Caribbean’s most industralised island, thanks to
its oil and gas fields, but a surprisingly large part of its landmass
remains forested and relatively wild. From the steep slopes and
plunging waterfalls of the Northern Range to the mangrove
forests and lagoons of the Caroni and Nariva Swamps, the island
is a rich habitat for flora and fauna, full of thrills for nature- and
adventure-loving visitors — as you can see in this portfolio by
photographers Jason Audain and Brendan Delzin
60
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A view along Trinidad’s north coast,
looking east from Paramin across
vertiginous forested slopes dotted with
flaming immortelle trees. Photographer
Jason Audain remembers the moment:
“It was taken at sunrise while we were
passing through the [Paramin] track. The
angle was epic, and I needed to capture it
to make the moment last.”
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62
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A scarlet ibis (Eudocimus ruber),
national bird of Trinidad, wings past a
flock of feeding American flamingos
(Phoenicopterus ruber) in the Caroni
Swamp. “It was my first time seeing
flamingos,” recalls Jason Audain. “We
were at the bird sanctuary from around
5 am. We saw the sun rise, and I noticed
the ibis by itself. It saw me, then flew
away. I followed it, and kept snapping.”
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A spectacled caiman (Caiman
crocodilus) waits in silence, camouflaged
among mangroves. “All I could see
were its eyes,” says photographer
Brendan Delzin. “I slowly and cautiously
approached, trying not to startle him. In
a couple seconds, he realised I was not
there to harm him. Only a few feet apart,
we made eye contact, observing each
other.”
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The Balandra waterfall near Trinidad’s
northeast coast, near Matura. “Early
morning is the best time for this hike,”
says Jason Audain. “My intention
was to capture the sun hitting the
waterfalls. It was mystical.”
66
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A neon-hued orange cup fungus
(Cookeina sp.) along a trail on Mt Bleu,
a peak in the Northern Range near the
village of Brasso Seco. “I spend a lot of
my time in the forest,” says Brendan
Delzin. “Green is the most dominant
colour, so when I see something that’s a
different shade or tone, my eyes tend to
focus on it immediately.”
The brilliant green fronds of a small
Mexican umbrella fern (Sticherus bifidus)
stand out among dry vegetation in the
hills of Paramin. Jason Audain remembers
that day’s hike as arduous. “On a scale of
one to ten, I’d rate it one hundred. The
green fern stood out in the midst of this
arid pathway. You wouldn’t believe there
was a tiny waterfall nearby.”
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68
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Getting close to nature doesn’t always mean hiking
to somewhere remote: in the very heart of Port
of Spain, the Botanical Gardens are an oasis for
wildlife, like this iridescent Euglossa orchid bee.
“It was jumping from flower to flower,” says Jason
Audain, “and then it settled and posed for me. I got
lucky with this photo opportunity. I was really going
to the gardens to capture a praying mantis.”
Caribbean Airlines operates
numerous daily flights to its hub at
Piarco International Airport in Trinidad
from destinations in the Caribbean and
North and South America
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escape
Back to
St Lucia
Thirty years ago, a childhood holiday in
St Lucia changed his ideas about the
Caribbean. Returning as an adult, what
would Joshua Surtees discover about how
the island, and he himself, had changed?
BlueOrange Studio/Shutterstock.com
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The sheltered bay between the Pitons,
St Lucia’s iconic twin peaks
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71

A quiet day on the jetty
courtesy the St Lucia Tourism Authority
My childhood memories of a summer in
St Lucia have never left me. As a six-year-old
from London, being suddenly transported
from cold, grey streets to lush, rampant
nature and a vibrant, jocular culture left
indelible images emblazoned on my mind. It
still surprises me how vividly I can see it all without even having
to close my eyes.
Colourful minibuses crammed with people hurtling along
winding roads. Ice-cream sellers wheeling wooden trolleys full
of rum-and-raisin. The women in the Sulphur Springs bathing
my baby sister in the bubbling volcanic water. Locals sternly
warning us not to touch the manchineel trees. Giant breadfruit
falling on the ground and rotting where they fell. Stalk-eyed
crabs scuttling towards us on the beach at dusk. Eating mangoes
in the sea. My first roti. Swimming all day, pounded by waves.
Boys catching crayfish in the stream. The hammering of the rain
on the galvanised roof.
It was the summer of 1986, and my mother took me and my
siblings on our first and only family holiday outside Europe.
Normally, our summers meant packing our car with camping
equipment, crossing the English Channel, and driving down to
the south of France for two weeks in a tent.
In St Lucia, we stayed for the entire school holiday in a house
with a small pig farm on a piece of verdant, overgrown land
overlooking Vieux Fort. The house belonged to my mother’s
72 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM

As a six-year-old from London,
being suddenly transported from
cold, grey streets to lush, rampant
nature left indelible images
emblazoned on my mind
friend’s father. My mum had managed to scrape together
enough money for our plane tickets on the understanding
that we had a free roof over our heads, not too far from a
beach. As it turned out, the beach was a good half-hour’s
walk every morning across open fields, where my brother
would invariably turn over a cowpat with his shoe, to inspect
the underside.
Mum’s friend — a St Lucian woman named Rose, who
lived in Stoke Newington in northeast London — was
somewhat estranged from her father. When we arrived in
Vieux Fort, we discovered why. He was wildly eccentric,
bad-tempered, and a drinker. A comical looking character,
stick-thin with wispy hair and thick glasses, “Jockey”, as he
was known, would nudge wandering cows out of his path with
the bumper of his rusty old jeep. One day, he sliced open the
stomach of a dead field mouse and showed us its intestines to
see what it had been feeding on. Another day, his dog Lucy
got ill and, thinking she’d been poisoned, Jockey decided the
antidote was more poison — with disastrous effects.
These dramas simply added to the wonder of that
Antillean awakening in my young life. At an age when memories
were beginning to be permanently formed, exposure
to the delights of the Caribbean must have shaped my later
desire to move to the region.
Rodney Bay
Castries
ST LUCIA
Soufrière
Pitons
Sulphur Springs
Vieux Fort
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73

The view from the summit of
Gros Piton: forest dotted with
immortelle and coconut trees
BANANA PANCAKE/Alamy Stock Photo
But it was over thirty years before I finally returned to
St Lucia, intrigued to know if everything I’d heard about
tourism development in the intervening decades had
changed the island I remembered.
Arriving as a writer in my late thirties, being picked up by
airport transfer and taken to the stunning boutique eco-resorts
of Fond Doux and Ladera, nestled in the Pitons UNESCO World
Heritage site, was vastly different to my childhood arrival.
Back then, after a long flight from London on which my travelsick
brother had puked on an old woman’s dress, we descended
the plane down a wooden staircase
on wheels and were hit by a
humid tropical night air that filled
my lungs and thoughts with the
promise of adventure. We drove
down pitch-black country lanes
through swarms of fireflies to a
house with a tin roof that became
our home for the next six weeks.
The Vieux Fort I remembered
was a place preserved not so
much in aspic but in mango chutney. There’d been a constant
chatter and murmur in the streets and a buzz in the air. Barefoot
boys played football on pitches where the grass had worn thin,
whooping and crying out. Drivers tooted hellos. The smell of
curried meat wafted all about.
Had this all gone, I wondered? Vanished beneath golf courses,
all-inclusive resorts, and marinas? Before my trip, I spoke to Anna
Walcott-Hardy, daughter of St Lucia’s most celebrated author, the
The Vieux Fort I remembered was
a place preserved not so much
in aspic but in mango chutney.
There’d been a constant chatter
and murmur in the streets
late Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott, who told me Vieux Fort was
one of the few places left that kept its “old-world magic.”
I’d retained an image of its rugged fields with small cow herds
grazing, houses dotted over gently rising hills, rivers overflowing
in the heavy rain, and streams that trickled through overgrown
wildernesses. Back then, the virtually empty beaches had strong
waves but no tourists. At weekends, locals came to play volleyball.
From behind Jockey’s house, we could see the airport and the
jumbo jets slowly descending from the sky onto the solitary landing
strip. We would play a game, first to spot if the plane was a
Pan Am or TWA — airlines from
a bygone age.
Returning as an adult, I was
pleased to see Vieux Fort still
encased in a metaphorical preserve.
Unlike Rodney Bay, with
its shopping mall and buses dropping
off British, Canadian, and
American tourists, or Soufrière,
where the cinema where I once
saw a karate film had been turned
into a backpackers’ bar, or even Castries, where cruise ships the
size of palaces disgorge flip-flopped holidaymakers in search of
fridge magnets, Vieux Fort is still a town set up for local people
going about their daily business.
Along Clarke Street, the main road running downtown from
the airport, are solicitors’ firms, beauty parlours, mobile phone
shops, barbershops, and just a handful of food places. The Food
Hut is a wooden shack painted lime green and run by a woman
74 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM

Westend61 GmbH/Alamy Stock Photo
named Antonia and her friendly staff. I stopped to watch the
world go by over a hearty lunch of stew pork washed down with
the local Piton beer.
After two days dining at places like Boucan in Hotel Chocolat
(where the menu is entirely chocolate-based) and breakfasting at
Ladera, overlooking acres of spectacular rainforest in Soufrière,
Antonia’s was a different kind of fare — this was soul food.
Vieux Fort doesn’t just look, feel, and taste different to the rest
of the island, it sounds it, too. You won’t hear hustlers asking if you
want a jet ski or boat ride. Locals are friendly but uninterested in
the tourist trade. You’ll derive more entertainment in ten minutes
standing around the taxi stand listening to the drivers gossip or
play dominoes than in an entire week in a foreign-owned resort.
I wandered down to the fishing port, where young men
scaled, cleaned, and gutted fish whose names were written on
numbered stalls in Creole: “taza” (kingfish), “bétjin” (barracuda),
“chatou” (octopus), “kamo” (freshwater fish), “lanbi” (conch),
and “ton” (tuna).
I passed one or two small churches, but nothing like the abundance
of evangelical church halls you see travelling through
the steep inland hills, with names like Sisters of the Sorrowful
Mother Convent and Revival Tabernacle. Outside the beautiful
white-and-carmine–painted edifice of St Paul’s Anglican Church
I heard a man with a loudspeaker exclaiming jovially, “February
is Black History Month — take down that picture of a white
Jesus!”
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Ralph.Broer/Shutterstock.com
Left Chaloupe Bay on St Lucia’s
rugged Atlantic coast
Above The island’s lush
mountains are streaked with
rushing streams
With a tide of nostalgia beginning to flow, I decided to
retrace my footsteps and see if I could find Jockey’s old
house in the quiet backroads of La Resource.
“It’s by the cemetery,” people told me as I slowed down to
ask directions. A beaming old lady handed me a bag of fruit
that might have been sapotes, and pointed me onward through
charming residential streets where the houses ranged from
pretty to grandiose to ramshackle, until eventually I found a
narrow footpath leading through soft grass and trees where a
grey pony was tied up. At the end of the path was a house with
a verandah, surrounded by overgrown gardens. Stacked-up
chicken coops and creeping honeysuckle vines cluttered the
scene.
I knew it was Jockey’s place, but it didn’t fit with the idyllic
images I had stored away. I called out, but nobody came. Eventually
a woman emerged from a house whose owners must have
bought or annexed part of Jockey’s land. She told me Jockey’s
brother lived there now, but he was out.
I wondered where the crayfish stream was, or the pigsty my
brother would follow the farmhands to at six o’clock each morning
to feed the pigs, smell their strangely satisfying stink, and
scratch their hard, scaly, hairy backs with a stick.
What used to be open land all around the house now had
several houses built nearby. My memories were of being far
from any other human contact. Perhaps it was the vantage point
of adulthood versus youth. Further down the road were even a
couple of parlour shops.
Driving down a dusty track into a cul-de-sac, I saw houses
made of unfinished breezeblock with broken windows and
rusting corrugated iron surrounding them, acting as makeshift
perimeter fences. The billionaires with their yachts and multinational
travel companies to the north were notably absent in
the south.
And yet the tranquillity of the place was something marvellous.
As I made my way back to the airport to check in, I passed
families sitting on their front steps, bougainvillea bushes blowing
back and forth in the breeze, a winding creek passing below
a bridge, mechanics taking a break in the mid-afternoon sun,
schoolchildren laughing in a playground. I realised that here
indeed remained that magical old world that Derek Walcott’s
daughter spoke of. n
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77

neighbourhood
Danita Delimont / Alamy Stock Photo
courtesy House of Chocolate Grenada Museum
Sonix Productions Courtesy Pure Grenada Tourism Authority
Chocolate fix
In recent years, a handful of local chocolatiers have
started making world-class chocolate products
from Grenada’s excellent cocoa, which historically
was mostly exported. These bean-to-bar artisans
are scattered across the island, but you can find
their products in the heart of St George’s at House
of Chocolate Grenada, a hybrid museum-emporium
with exhibits on the history of cocoa farming on the
island, plus a café where you can enjoy chocolate
treats on the spot and a gift shop where you can
stock up on bars from the Grenada Chocolate
Factory, Belmont Estate, Crayfish Bay Organics,
and others — perfect presents to take home for
friends, if you can resist devouring them yourself.
St George’s,
Grenada
Long considered one of the Caribbean’s most
picturesque cities, Grenada’s capital rises above
its harbour in a series of terraces, with historic
churches for a skyline and beautiful Grande Anse
a long stone’s throw to the south
Streetscape
Surrounding the sheltered natural harbour called the Carenage,
St George’s is a city of slopes, its streets rising in terraces towards
the heights of Hospital Hill. To the west, the city stretches out along
a small but steep promontory, with eighteenth-century Fort George
at its tip, and the 650-foot Sendall Tunnel offering motorised traffic
a shortcut. The pavements here are likely to be flights of steps, and
at the heart of the city a blind junction requires a policeman to keep
cars moving along. Ornate French Creole houses with balconies and
fretwork vie with elegant English Georgian buildings. Perched above
the harbour, a trio of nineteenth-century churches — Methodist,
Anglican, and Roman Catholic, in order of age — still form St George’s
skyline. Though many of the city’s historic buildings were damaged by
Hurricane Ivan in 2004, restoration work has returned most to service.
78 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM

Santhosh Varghese/Shutterstock.com
Pawel Kazmierczak/Shutterstock.com
Spice it up
It’s hard to spend a day in the Spice Island and
not taste a hint of nutmeg: it’s ubiquitous in the
island’s cuisine, and sometimes it seems the very
breeze coming down from the hills carries its
scent. A fifth of the world’s nutmeg is grown on
this single island, and if you love a dash of the
freshly grated spice in your desserts or drinks —
who doesn’t? — this is the place to stock up on
whole nutmegs, whether at a traditional market
or in a grocery. Look out too for delicious nutmeg
jam, another perfect souvenir: as you spread it on
toast for breakfast, the scent will take you back to
Grenada’s green hills.
A rescue remembered
For over fifty years, a statue
called Christ of the Deep on the
St George’s waterfront has
served as a convenient landmark,
and a memorial to a
tragedy averted by the heroic
efforts of ordinary Grenadians.
On 22 October, 1961, the Italian
liner Bianca C, a regular visitor
to St George’s, caught fire in the
harbour, with over six hundred
passengers and crew on board.
As the alarm was raised, dozens
of boats — from luxury yachts
to small fishing vessels —
formed a rescue flotilla. With
the exception of three crewmen injured in the initial explosion, everyone
was rescued — and housed and fed for two weeks, through the efforts of
many Grenadian volunteers. The statue was a thank-you gift from the Bianca
C’s owners — and the wreck itself (above) is now a famous if challenging dive
site off Grenada’s southwestern coast.
History
Founded in 1650 by settlers from Martinique as Port Louis, St George’s soon
acquired a fort on its promontory — originally named Fort Royale — as the
French colonists waged battle against the indigenous Caribs. When Grenada
was ceded to Britain in 1763, the town was renamed for the patron saint
of England. Long the island’s chief port, and one of the Caribbean’s bestsheltered
anchorages, St George’s also served a stint as capital of the British
Windward Islands. Independence came to Grenada in 1974. Four years later,
the New Jewel Movement led by Maurice Bishop seized power from dictatorial
prime minister Eric Gairy, launching the Grenada Revolution. Fort
George was the site of the Revolution’s bloodiest and most tragic moment in
1983, when a NJM faction arrested and executed Bishop — shot against a
wall inside the fort with seven others.
Another blow to the city came in 2004 when the first hurricane in half a
century struck Grenada. Category Three Hurricane Ivan damaged ninety
per cent of Grenada’s houses alongside many St George’s landmarks.
Recovery took years.
courtesy Pure Grenada Tourism Authority
Beach time
Just a mile south of St George’s is one of the Caribbean’s
most famous beaches: the long, golden expanse of Grande
Anse, lined with big resorts, small guesthouses, restaurants,
and every other kind of tourism amenity — but none rising
above the height of the coconut trees. The calm bay is perfect
for swimming and watersports, and there’s no shortage
of beachfront bars for sunset cocktails. But if you’re looking
for a slightly more secluded swim, head one bay south to
horseshoe-shaped Morne Rouge, which hasn’t yet been
built up from end to end.
St George’s
Grenada
Co-ordinates
12º N 61.75º W
Sea level
Caribbean Airlines operates regular flights to Maurice Bishop International Airport in Grenada from Trinidad, with
connections to other destinations in the Caribbean and North and South America
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79

ucket list
ajlatan/Shutterstock.com
courtesy the tobago house of assembly
Blue
Lagoon
This tranquil expanse
of glistening blue water,
surrounded by lushly
forested slopes, is a notso-secret
treasure of
Jamaica’s north coast
East of the town of Port Antonio, near the quietest stretch of Jamaica’s
north coast, the Blue Lagoon is no secret, but it feels a world away
from the bustle of Kingston and the crowded resorts of Ocho Rios or
Montego Bay. The geology of St Thomas Parish is responsible for this natural
beauty-spot: the lagoon is actually a limestone sinkhole, fed by cold freshwater
streams and open to the tides of the Caribbean Sea. If this sheltered expanse of
water surrounded by forest seems timeless, it’s also constantly changing: visitors
often remark how the lagoon’s clear waters vary in hue from bright turquoise to
deep ultramarine as the sun and clouds move overhead, and the unpredictable
variations of cold and warm currents gives a specially refreshing edge to a swim
here. For generations, locals shared the myth that the lagoon is bottomless, but
marine scientists have more recently offered evidence to the contrary: it’s been
measured at 170 feet deep. A raft tour is a good way to explore without plunging
in — and your guide will be happy to share other Blue Lagoon legends, like the
one about the mysterious sea creature said to lurk in its depths..
J A M A I C A
Blue Lagoon
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ENGAGE
Damsea/Shutterstock.com
82 Green
The parrotfish dilemma
110
On This Day
Football holiday
Parrotfish species bring vibrant colour to coral reefs — and help keep them healthy, too

Five months before the protest, the DR government instituted
a two-year ban on catching parrotfish, a popular delicacy
in that country and other parts of the Caribbean. The fish have
become the focus of environmental campaigns because of their
key role in maintaining coral reefs in the region. Fishermen
opposed the ban, and when state authorities confiscated five
hundred pounds of illegally caught parrotfish in Puerto Plata,
violence erupted.
“We don’t know if it’s going to be renewed,” Ruben Torres, a
coral reef researcher and conservationist from the DR, says of
the ban, which expires later this year. “The minister who made
that resolution is out . . . so a lot of people think it’s not going to
be renewed.”
The DR’s former environment minister, Francisco Domíngreen
It’s the kind of scene you associate with opposition to
oppressive regimes or police brutality. Thick black smoke
rises above burning appliances and other chunks of debris
dumped in the street by protesters. A crowd of onlookers
stands by.
This dramatic event — captured in a 2017 photo taken
in the city of Puerto Plata on the Dominican Republic’s north
coast — had an unassuming catalyst: a herbivorous fish that usually
doesn’t get more than half a metre long, and spends much
of its time eating algae or sleeping. Its fused, protruding teeth
give it the appearance of having a beak, and earn it the common
name parrotfish. (There are over ninety species, all belonging
to the zoological Family Scaridae, and found in tropical oceans
around the world.)
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The
parrotfish
dilemma
The colourful parrotfish plays a
key role in keeping coral reefs and
beaches healthy. Unfortunately,
it’s also delicious — and attempts
at fishing bans have been
unpopular. But if parrotfish
populations aren’t protected,
they may be overfished into
extinction, writes Erline
Andrews — to the detriment of
beaches and local livelihoods
Photography by Richard Whitcombe/Shutterstock.com
guez, had a resolve in dealing with the issue that other leaders
in the region seem to lack. “They can sell other species of fish,”
Dominguez said in response to the protest. His words were
reported in Dominican Today. “If we don’t do something now,” he
went on, “we will soon have extinguished these fish that help the
corals and the beaches so much.”
The parrotfish dilemma is the latest example of what can
happen when an environmental concern conflicts with human
economic interests. Last year, Jamaican authorities came close to
a ban on catching parrotfish before abandoning the idea. They’re
now considering other solutions, including a seasonal ban.
In the meantime, the dramatic degradation of Caribbean
coral reefs that has been happening for the last four decades
continues. A 2014 report from the Global Coral Reef Monitoring
Network — the most comprehensive assessment of the state of
reefs in the region — alarmed conservationists and contributed
to a sense of urgency around the issue. The report noted coral
reefs in the Caribbean have been reduced by more than fifty per
cent since the 1970s.
Corals are animals themselves, and provide food and shelter
to a wide variety of the oceans’ inhabitants. They act as a buffer
protecting beaches from wave erosion, and in this way and
through their own beauty support the tourism industry, which
is important to many Caribbean countries. The Mesoamerican
Barrier Reef in the Caribbean is the second largest in the world,
and supports much biodiversity.
In addition to consuming algae that can poison the reefs
and keep them from reproducing, parrotfish contribute to the
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83

To eat or not to eat
Back in our July/August 2014 issue, we ran the following
sustainable seafood chart, offering tips for readers on which
marine species you should try to avoid, for environmental
or health reasons, and which you can feel free to enjoy.
Many species are in trouble due to over-fishing, and are
now endangered globally. Plus, many commercial fishing
methods are destructive to marine habitats. So next time
you’re ordering at a restaurant or shopping at your local
supermarket or fish vendor, keep these lists in mind!
Compiled by Robin Ramdeen and Amy Deacon of Papa
Bois Conservation
YES
Lionfish
As an invasive species,
lionfish is the ultimate
sustainable choice — and
tasty too. It is typically
harvested by spearfishing,
so has no bycatch problem.
Flying fish
Fast-growing, short-lived,
fast-reproducing, and tasty,
these fish are fairly resilient
to fishing pressure.
Dolphin/mahi mahi
Not to be confused with the
mammal! This fish is fairly
resistant to fishing pressure,
due to early maturity and
prolific spawning.
Squid/calamari
Relatively resilient to fishing
pressure, as they grow fast
and reproduce at a young age.
Carite
Matures fairly quickly and
produces high numbers of
THINK TWICE
Lobster
Although naturally resilient
to fishing pressure, they are
overexploited in many parts
of the Caribbean. Experts
recommend a minimum
length of 9 cm (from
between eyes to beginning
of tail).
Tuna
Pelagic longliners overfish
tuna, despite local methods
tending to be more
sustainable. Ask how it was
caught before ordering —
trolled hook and line is best.
Conch
Slow-moving and easy to
harvest, but there are now
offspring, making it resilient to
fishing pressure.
Tilapia
Not strictly “seafood,” as
they’re farmed in freshwater
international concerns about
declines in numbers of wild
conch. However, farmed
conch is available on some
islands — ask first.
Kingfish
Seem to be relatively
resilient to fishing. However,
stock assessments are
scarce, so the status of the
population is unknown.
Cro cro/Atlantic croaker
Populations thought to be
healthy, but ask about fishing
methods before selecting;
seine-caught is a much
better choice than trawler or
gillnet-caught fish.
Jack
Check if caught by handline
ponds. However, this means it
has zero impact on the marine
environment.
Wahoo
Grows and reproduces quickly.
creation and maintenance of beaches by chewing up bits of the
corals’ exoskeleton and excreting sand particles.
“Healthy corals are increasingly rare on the intensively
studied reefs of the Florida reef tract, US Virgin Islands, and
Jamaica,” the GCRMN report said. “Concerns have mounted to
the point that many NGOs have given up on Caribbean reefs and
moved their attentions elsewhere.”
Those who oppose bans, and other policies that could
negatively affect people who earn their living by fishing,
point to other factors that have caused the denuding of
Caribbean reefs, like climate change and hurricanes. But while
the GCRMN report found that climate change was an impending
threat, the evidence points to local human activities — heavy
tourism and overfishing of the herbivores that eat reef-killing
algae — as the main causes of the problem. These same phenomena
make it difficult for the reefs to recover from hurricane
damage, as they have been doing for centuries. Still, the political
will to ban the catching of parrotfish may just not be there.
“It’s beyond urgent,” says Mark Tupper, a marine sciences
professor at the University of Trinidad and Tobago, describing
the state of Caribbean coral reefs. “I first started diving in the
Caribbean in 1986 — thirty-three years ago. And sometimes I
want to cry when I get in the water around here,” he continues.
“It doesn’t look like it used to look at all. In fact, some of the reefs
where I used to dive in Barbados back in the mid-80s, when I
was doing my Master’s degree there, they don’t exist anymore.
They’re literally gone, smashed into rubble, buried in sand. You
wouldn’t even know there was ever a reef there.”
The GCRMN report urged governments in the region to
“develop and implement adaptive legislation and regulations to
ensure that threats to coral reefs are systematically addressed.”
“Fishing employs a lot of people, but it’s a lower-income job,”
says Tupper. “And most of the islands, even though they’re in the
middle of the sea and they’ve got all this fishing going on . . . it’s
a tiny fraction of their GDP,” says Tupper.
Authorities in Belize, Bonaire, the Bahamas, Bermuda, and
Turks and Caicos — where dive-tourism and therefore coral reefs
play a bigger role in the economy — have taken steps to protect
parrotfish, from outright bans to outlawing fishing techniques,
like fish traps, that are more likely to catch herbivorous fish.
Other countries in the region are at various stages of considering
the problem.
“There are good fish alternatives that won’t destroy the
84 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM

efore ordering — if not,
it was likely caught using
coral-damaging fishing
methods.
NO
Shark
Most have a long
generation time, mature
late, and have few
offspring. This makes
them very vulnerable to
overfishing.
Shrimp
Shrimp tend to be caught
by trawling, which means
high levels of bycatch as
well as causing damage to
the marine environment.
Swordfish
Data deficient in South
Atlantic. Usually fished
using longline methods
which have high levels of
bycatch (including sharks
and turtles).
Snapper
These reef-fish are
susceptible to fishing
pressure, and tend to be
over-exploited.
Marlin
Often caught as bycatch
in longline fisheries,
and considered to be a
threatened species.
Parrotfish
These have been
severely overfished in
the Caribbean, putting
the health of coral reef
ecosystems in jeopardy.
Grouper
A popular fish that is
susceptible to overfishing.
reefs,” says Robert Steneck, professor of oceanography,
marine biology, and marine policy at the University of Maine.
“Throughout the Caribbean, the real cash cow are lobsters.
By not fishing parrotfish, other things of greater value, like
lobsters, would do better.”
There’s also the fact that the beaches that corals protect
support the livelihoods of many people in the Caribbean.
“Negril loses a metre of beach every year,” says Jamaican
marine scientist Danielle Kitson. “Again, because of loss of
healthy reefs.”
Finding alternatives to catching and eating parrotfish
doesn’t only make economic sense, it’s inevitable, say
researchers. The reason some fishermen have become
dependent on parrotfish is that other species were overfished
to the point where there are not enough of them for fishermen
to earn a living.
Gregor Hodgson, founder and senior advisor at the Los
Angeles–based global NGO Reef Check Foundation, offers
a radical suggestion: that Caribbean fishermen be taught
to rear tilapia via aquaculture. “They’re going to be making
much more money from that,” he says. “Particularly in a place
like Jamaica or Haiti, where there are so few fish left.” n
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85

on this day
Football
holiday
Fifty-five years ago, for the first time ever, two English football
clubs toured the Caribbean. The visitors bested local teams
in Jamaica, Trinidad, and Barbados with ease, but Haiti was a
different matter. James Ferguson tells the story of this littleremembered
chapter of Caribbean sports history
Illustration by Rohan Mitchell
For many British football fans
like me, the close season,
that ten-week gap between
the FA Cup final in May
and the new season’s start
in August, stretches like an
eternity. Of course, there’s cricket and
Wimbledon, but even these (and I have
no desire to provoke cricket aficionados)
cannot compensate for the abrupt
withdrawal of the football fix. Every four
years there is the World Cup, of course, and
then two years later the European UEFA
championship — and let us not forget the
local CONCACAF Gold Cup in June and
July this year, which includes Trinidad and
Tobago — but even with all these events, it
is easy to miss the rituals, the anticipation,
the pain, and the occasional pleasure of
following your own team.
Yet in recent years the long wait
between seasons seems to have shortened,
as the phenomenon of the “preseason”
has become more prominent.
This is essentially a three- to four-week
period before the real games begin,
during which clubs play a series of
friendly matches. And as football, and in
particular the English Premier League,
has become a massive global brand, so
these games have become a vital part
of marketing clubs to audiences around
the world. Many matches are televised,
but clubs often tour abroad, seeking to
raise their profile and increase their fan
base. Asia, above all, is viewed as the key
market, and hence Manchester United
might play Paris Saint-Germain in Seoul,
or Arsenal take on Real Madrid in Hong
Kong. Sponsorship, TV rights, gambling,
and replica shirt sales are all component
parts of the lucrative travelling circus.
Unfortunately, history does not record
how many shirts were sold or bets placed
when two English First Division clubs (the
Premier League had yet to be invented)
toured the three independent Caribbean
nations of Haiti, Jamaica, and Trinidad
and Tobago and what was still the British
colony of Barbados in May and June
1964, fifty-five years ago. Cricket tours
were by now commonplace, but this was
the first time that top-tier English football
clubs had visited the region. It seems
that Chelsea, who had finished fifth, and
Wolverhampton Wanderers (sixteenth)
wanted to combine some exotic sightseeing
with a regular schedule of matches —
five between themselves and a further six
with local sides. That made eleven games
in seventeen days: hardly a relaxing
holiday, only three weeks after the season
had ended. As Jamaica’s Daily Gleaner
observed, both clubs had three aims:
“Firstly to boost British soccer, secondly
to do all they can to help their footballing
hosts, thirdly to beat each other.”
Though by no means the billionaire’s
plaything of today (the players
reportedly earned £9 5s per week),
Chelsea were a formidable side managed
by the experienced Scotsman Tommy
Docherty. In their first match against a
Barbados XI, reported Bajan John Fraser,
Chelsea “won handsomely, and although
our team played to their best, the difference
in pace and skill was evident. Lloyd Seale
was in goal and had his thumb broken
as the pace of a shot from outside the
area was so much faster than he had ever
experienced.” The result was 7-0. And this
pattern continued as Chelsea travelled
through Trinidad (5-0) and the Jamaican
parish of St James (15-0). Only against a
stronger Jamaican national team did they
concede a goal (4-1).
86 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM

part of the Barbados team that was
thrashed 7-0 by Chelsea. Quite sensibly,
he decided to abandon any such plans
and turn his attention to cricket. He went
on to play twenty-one Tests and eight
One-Day Internationals for the West
Indies as an all-rounder.
One of the more bizarre incidents
occurred off the pitch, as recalled by
Wolves and England striker Ray Crawford
in his 2007 autobiography. “I was drinking
a long rum and Coke one evening in the
bar of the hotel both teams were staying
at, when Docherty came over for a chat.
He didn’t beat about the bush before asking
if I would like to join Chelsea, adding
that he would throw Barry Bridges in
as part-exchange.” Now this, in today’s
football parlance, is known as “tapping
up,” and is severely frowned upon and
punished by the sport’s governing body,
FIFA. (Coincidentally, Chelsea were
implicated in two tappingup
cases in 2005 and
2009.) To his credit,
Crawford replied
that he was flattered
but declined the offer,
citing loyalty to Wolves and
Stan Cullis.
Wolves had a similarly easy time
against Trinidad, in what wolvesheroes.
com describes as “a 4-0 win in a downpour
which left the pitch treacherous and
the uncovered 12,000 crowd thoroughly
soaked.” They then beat Jamaica 8-4 in
an entertaining encounter. As for the all-
English matches, Chelsea won three and
Wolves two, with a cumulative score of
11-9 to Chelsea.
The final leg of the tour was in “Papa
Doc” Duvalier’s Haiti, where the two
English clubs competed with the national
side in the grandly named Tournoi
Angleterre-Haiti, sponsored by Dubonnet,
French importer of bitter oranges
from Haiti for its famous aperitif. Here
things were altogether less straightforward
for the English visitors, as they
faced a team that was emerging as one
of the leading forces within CONCACAF.
Wolves managed a 1-1 draw in front of a
crowd of 13,000 in Port-au-Prince, and
then lost 2-0 to Chelsea. Wolvesheroes.
com recalls, “What with a spectacular
downpour and the sight of even the
In Haiti, things were altogether less straightforward
for the English visitors, as they faced a team that
was emerging as one of the leading forces within
CONCACAF
groundsmen carrying revolvers, Wolves’
players weren’t sorry to leave the island!”
Chelsea fared even worse against Haiti,
losing 2-1 in a match that was abandoned
in the sixty-eighth minute due to a torrential
tropical downpour.
Both squads arrived safely back
in London on 9 June, and the
tour was promptly forgotten.
Wolves’ manager Stan Cullis dismissively
described the football as “variable,”
and most of the players showed little
enthusiasm for their experience. But
the tour did have other, more longlasting
repercussions. Keith Boyce, who
harboured footballing aspirations, was
He may well have come to regret his
integrity, since Cullis was surprisingly
sacked in September 1964 after sixteen
years in charge. Wolves were duly
relegated, while Chelsea finished the
1964–65 season in third place, qualifying
for the European Inter-Cities Fairs Cup.
Crawford moved to nearby West Bromwich
Albion in January 1965.
As luck — or misfortune — would
have it, Wolves’ opening game of that
new season was at home . . . against
Chelsea. They lost 3-0. With a start
like that, Wolves supporters may have
reasonably concluded that perhaps the
close season does sometimes have its
advantages. n
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87

puzzles
Zoomers
Word Search
constellation
Biswas
fort
runway
cocktail
chancellor
arrival
hero
sand
banana
parrotfish
burqa
humid
square
Bocas
barbershop
club
landmark
Chipsters
team
Grenada
manchineel
dancer
pen
philosophical
pholourie
Windrush
firefly
Piton
relic
jacamar
CONCACAF
flag
role
debut
rainforest
P O H S R E B R A B U R Q A R
A H F O R T K R A M D N A L O
R S I M A E T F E M S B C Y L
R U R L B R A M A C A J U N L
O R E S O O A N P C N R O L E
T D F A X S C I E B A A O U C
F N L N D H O A N Y A C D T N
I I Y D I A T P S F A N N B A
S W E N T F N U H A O W A O H
H R E L I C L E B I W R N N C
H E R O S Q U A R E C S E U A
L I A T K C O C G G D A I S R
L A V I R R A D I M U H L B T
Y P I T O N P H O L O U R I E
N O I T A L L E T S N O C E D
Spot the Difference
by James Hackett
There are 10 differences between
these two pictures. How many can
you spot?
88 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM

Sun Mix
Caribbean Crossword
Across
1 Conversation starter [2]
2 People who study ancient
inscriptions [11]
10 This tropical flower brings sprays of
colour [13]
11 Immunising fluid [5]
12 St Lucia’s southernmost town [9]
13 Marvel’s most regal superhero? [12]
15 Call your mother! [2]
17 The one who got away? [2]
18 No amateur [12]
22 From dusk to dawn [9]
24 A joining-up — or an island in the
Grenadines [5]
26 Some call these green vegetables
“lady’s fingers” [5]
28 The loneliest number [3]
29 Philosophy suffix [3]
30 Necessary amends [11]
31 This Mister was TV’s famous
talking horse [2]
Down
1 Old-time train hoppers [5]
3 Strategic team athlete [9]
4 Just add tonic [3]
5 Fancy old name for a meal [7]
6 DNA shape [5]
7 After rhyme, try [6]
8 A touch of the absurd [7]
9 What Jamaica’s Reggae Girlz play [8]
12 On the way [3]
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
10
8 9
11 12
13 14 15
17 18 19 20
21
22 23 24 25
26 27 28 29
30 31
13 This art show comes every other
year [8]
14 Having the finest palate [9]
16 Duller than dull [7]
19 One way the pendulum swings [3]
20 Italian gentlemen [7]
21 Refuse to notice [6]
23 Latin earth [5]
25 Wanderer [5]
27 Where you go to be pampered [3]
16
If the puzzle you want to do has already been filled in, just ask
your flight attendant for a new copy of the magazine!
Sunshine Solutions
Caribbean Crossword
Word Search
Spot the Difference
P O H S R E B R A B U R Q A R
S M
A H F O R T K R A M D N A L O
27 28 29
O N E I
R S I M A E T F E M S B C Y L
R U R L B R A M A C A J U N L
O R E S O O A N P C N R O L E
L 26 O K R A S
A N E N R P O
H
1
I G H 23 T L O N G 24 U N I O 25
N
T D F A X S C I E B A A O U C
F N L N D H O A N Y A C D T N
I I Y D I A T P S F A N N B A
B
10
S
11
B
13
O S
I 2 E
3 P I 4 G R 5 A P 6 H E 7 R S
8
L I L E E 9
F
O U G A I N V I L L E A O
O R Y M I S O
E R U M 12 V I E U X F O R T
E A I N N B
L A C K P A N T H 14 E R M
16
I L E P I
15 A
L
E
17
X 18 P R O 19 F E 20 S S I O N A L
N I
21
R I C S
N
22
L A V I R R A D I M U H L B T
L I A T K C O C G G D A I S R
The father’s eyebrows are different; the father’s turban has
different details; the mother’s eyes are looking in different
directions; there is different detailing on the mother’s left
shoulder; the mother on the left has bangles; the son’s hair is
different; there is different detailing on the son’s dhoti; the
mother’s feet are different; the mother’s sari has a different
pattern; the father’s elbow is different.
S W E N T F N U H A O W A O H
H R E L I C L E B I W R N N C
Y P I T O N P H O L O U R I E
E R R P R A D A
N O I T A L L E T S N O C E D
R
30
E P A R A T I O N S E
31 D
H E R O S Q U A R E C S E U A
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89

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before you travel,
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classic
Don’t buy
shoes
Kerri Gilligan came to Trinidad for the first
time when she fell in love. Then she met her
sweetheart’s Tantie . . . Originally published in
our May/June 2005 issue
I’d never been to Trinidad before. I
was born and bred in London, and
everything I knew about Trinidad
came from Frankie, my Trini
boyfriend.
We were coming to visit his
Tantie, the lady he’d grown up with. I
couldn’t wait to see the endless beaches,
the wild fetes with all those intricate
bottom-to-crotch dance moves. First
impression, though, was that Port of Spain
was a lot more like Miami than a tropical
beach resort — and what’s with the traffic
jams? Add some rain, and I could still be
on the M25.
Thankfully, surprises were something
our relationship was full of — up till now,
all on the good side of the fence.
Another good shock was pepper. When
we got to Tantie’s house and I first opened
the kitchen cupboard, there was pepper
everywhere, in small bottles, big bottles,
little decanters, medium-size saucers.
There were bird peppers brewing in jars,
scotch bonnets in the fridge, aging pepper
sauce in the larder.
The problem is, I don’t like pepper at all.
My stomach always says no. Frankie, on
the other hand, eats peppers raw, spreads
the sauce on crackers and bread, or just
bursts whole ones into his stew. Thankfully,
love does funny things to people,
and he found ways to live without pepper.
Then there was Tantie herself — a
matriarch of the old school, witty yet stern,
loving yet bossy, funny but serious. “Girl,
you will love my Tantie,” Frankie had told
me. “She go show you how tings done in
Trini.”
Not one to rain on my man’s parade,
and pleased to make a good impression,
I bonded with Tants like peas in a pod,
or maybe more like rice and callaloo —
because she soon began to smother me.
After days spent teaching me to cook
crab, make that dreaded pepper sauce,
and darn Frankie’s socks, Tantie asked me
what I’d like to do next. I was born with
the gift of shopping, so when all else fails
I know where to turn. And if it ain’t on the
sale rack, well, it might as well be, because
I’ll take it anyway!
So we left Frankie at home and went
to the mall. I felt this was my chance to
impress Tantie with a few presents for her
beloved nephew.
First stop — the suit shop. I knew
Frankie needed a leather belt, and there
was the perfect one. “Tants, what do you
think of this?”
“Miss lady,” replied my aunt-to-be,
“you buy a belt for a man and he will cut
your tail.”
“Oh,” I said, mouth falling open.
I saw some baggy pants. “Hey, Tantie,
Frankie will look great in these, don’t you
think?”
“Like my boy have real big stones,” she
screamed, turning every head in the shop.
I turned the bright red only true Englishwomen
can.
What about new shoes, I thought —
surely those are safe. I picked up a lovely
pair in Frankie’s size. “Tantie, I’m going to
buy these for Frankie — he needs a new
pair for work.”
“Girl, what dey feeding you up there in
snow-land?” she asked sternly. “You doh
know you never buy a man a new pair of
shoes? He will just walk out on you.”
I fast realised my impressive shopping
skills were being trumped by Tantie’s even
more impressive one-liners. I thought I’d
give it one more try, and reached for an
impressive wallet by the counter. I couldn’t
go wrong with a wallet, could I?
“How you could give him an empty
wallet? It have no picture inside, no money.
The no money is real bad luck, so change
dat! And get a picture to put inside. It’s an
old spell to make a man yours. You girls
today doh know nothing.”
Scolded, and worried I might never buy
anything again, I thought my only hope
was to throw myself on her mercy.
“Tants,” I whispered, “what’s the right
thing to buy?”
“Buy him some jockey shorts. Make
sure he wear dem, and den nail them to a
tree. He will never leave you.”
So, officer, that’s why I’m here in the
Savannah in the middle of the night with
these underpants and a hammer. Honestly.
That’s how it happened. I haven’t hurt anyone.
Frankie is safe at home with Tantie. n
James Hackett
96 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM