I’m not straight
That’s me trying to be presidential. As is appropriate to today’s solemn occasion.By my reckoning, today marks publication of my 120th Guardian column. And, of my own reckoning, it is my last.It’s been...
View ArticleBlamelust
The young woman, she said, took her entire family in the Jagessars’ 2018 San Fernando Carnival band last Monday. Six of them. Three generations.Her five-month-old son had been a hit, she said, at...
View ArticleOne rule of calypso
By now Voice should be calypso monarch, ushered into last night’s Savannah final by Skinner Park’s wave of voices, despite an audio catastrophe of a Kaiso Fiesta performance, with a punctuated vocal...
View ArticleWining in others’ shoes
My New York readers recall how parts of our stories can vanish. How we need to stubbornly re-tell them. It’s the youthman at the end, who shifts the narrative, who’s disappeared again. Like panman...
View ArticleHeaven on fire!
I’ve never written this column in tears before. I know I am crying because David Mitchell has died. Yet I do not fully know why I am crying. Death calls on you to reckon the measure of your loss; and...
View ArticleMih pardners an dem
Several pardners of mine had some really memorable things to say this week.BC Pires hit a classically offensive six, touching the ball with “If you can measure Trinidad’s compassion viciously...
View ArticleSchools that smadify
Remember my story how five years ago, swaying beneath the stage of his Savannah temple, David Rudder lost my attention, as my pores raised watching this 20-something near me singing each word by...
View ArticleAn answer for Fitzyto
I’d met the member just once, at a church panel that had made news, where he’d disagreed with the hosting pastor, insisting he would shame and coerce his child away from homosexuality. As our shaking...
View ArticleThe danger of forgetting
I’ve been wanting to contemplate our particular Nativity-season art form. Not parang. The Christmas smut.How, as Hindus locally celebrate Christmas, while Seventh-Day Adventists and Jehovah’s Witnesses...
View ArticleBelieving in Santa Claus
I believe Santa Claus had stopped coming to my house by the time we moved to Diamond Vale. I turned eight here.He’s such a funny type. Most of the years that he comes with a bang, children just don’t...
View ArticleThe Diamond Vale house
The next-door neighbour strolled towards us, across his front lawn, up to our chain-link fence, holding what everybody once called a HiLo bag, and his shovel. “Don’t look at what I’m doing,” he...
View ArticleIt good for him
In a shooting with all the hallmarks of a bias crime, a well-loved trans woman, a performer, an HIV worker, a community advocate, was murdered Tuesday. Sasha Fierce she chose to be called.2017 Murder...
View ArticleThe law in our hands
The acting CoP strutted and fretted about his stage, full of sound and fury about lawlessness. Nikki Crosby was vomiting, tearful and prayerful. Both came to my American Thanksgiving dinner—over my...
View ArticleImagining we are responsible for change
I hope somebody deals with that,” Angela Davis mused from the stage.Thursday night was emotional. Some of it was a combined frustration at technology and humanity. Bad GPS, plus my inexperience with...
View ArticleBuilding stronger families
Everyone who is single (other than you and me) is single for a reason. The adventure of dating someone is to eventually discover that reason. People capable of relationships—are in them.By the time...
View ArticleTrumpistanity
“Why we going there,” Rudder asked 30 years ago. And we really didn’t answer. “St Ann’s!”It was tomorrow night a year ago. The first Tuesday after November 1st. Well, the wee hours of...
View ArticleMe too
This month, media in the United States told stories about two well-kept secrets: twenty years of long rumoured sexual predation of women in his industry by New York movie mogul Harvey Weinstein. And a...
View ArticleTo construct from morning
May Martin Joseph rest in peace. Patrick Manning’s seven-year national security minister haunted me watching the budget debated. Able within an election cycle to do little that eased citizens’ daily...
View ArticleFreshwater ethics
You know them.All over Facebook. With trenchant opinions. About everything political or moral in TTO. Full of know-it-all prescriptions. About what happens everywhere. Or nihilism. About what will...
View ArticleYou watch dat video?
Sextapes just aren’t news. I made that point when I returned to these pages ten months ago. I want to try to make it again.As many people began their sentences this week, I am no fan of Shamfa Cudjoe....
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