“Sexual citizenship” used to be my favourite big-word. I put it in the title of my op-ed the people in the Commonwealth published. The piece that got Australian Judge Kirby’s knickers in a twist.

The idea of sexual citizenship, which emerged in social and political theorising around the turn of the century, grew out of the recognition that sexuality isn’t just this private thing, but that people’s sexuality and the state bump up against each other in all sorts of ways. Like sodomy laws—which tell two grown people what they can’t agree to do with each other for pleasure. But also laws against rape and sexual violence, laws against sexual harassment, against sex and marriage with minors, where the state steps in to protect people by criminalising “bad sex.”

As citizens, we should be able to expect our states to protect us from harm, or at least provide ways for us to get justice when others harm us. But, increasingly, we also expect our states to support our fulfilment of ourselves. At the least by not meddling in our self-expression and self-determination. Also by levelling differences in opportunity, addressing bias and badmind by those with the power to decide who can access what.

It’s not only laws and punishment, though. More ideally, states also create social policy that does this. Government programmes, incentives, funding initiatives, vision statements. The best example is the so-called “gender policy,” which for all the demonisation and disinformation it elicited about what “gender” is, was at its core simply an effort to lay out national policy for treating with the fact that there are sexual differences in nature, in whether we’re born male, female or intersex. To say what our values and efforts will be as a nation with regard to ensuring fairness in the face of those differences, and how they’ve been handled historically. And a whole lot of things that flow from there, including whether the school system meets our learning needs, how we decide if we want to have children and when, who’s responsible for caring for them, different kinds of violence we’re vulnerable to, and yes who we’re attracted to sexually.

State policy ought to make sex safe and prevent sexual differences from making people unequal. That’s the basic idea about sexual citizenship. But it’s a really unsatisfying way to talk about how, as my Commonwealth Opinion, “Decolonising Sexual Citizenship,” puts it, “society and nation recognise that sexuality is a precious part of personhood.” So increasingly, I and others are falling out of love with “sexual citizenship,” like a good lover you’ve now grown out of, who’s no longer able to hit the spot you need to get to. Furthermore, that spot isn’t just how the state delivers justice with regard to sexuality, but how we make our culture on sexuality just.

Some years ago Rhoda Reddock and her UWI Gender Studies team undertook a somewhat radical project, to study sexual cultures in Trinidad and Tobago. And last year I found myself in a partnership with the Institute for Gender & Development Studies at the St Augustine campus on a project called “A Sexual Culture of Justice,” which is being guided by one of IGDS’s newest faculty members, Bahamian Angelique Nixon. It’s a fascinating initiative the European Commission just invested about TT$1.2 million in over the next three years, which tries to thread together a few core strands of work on sexual cultures of bullying, partner violence, homophobia and policing, and ends with a learning summit where really dissimilar people who’ve participated—eg, a lesbian’s father, a recovering wife-beater, a police corporal, a school principal, a trans sex worker, a youth activist and a sociology professor—can teach each other lessons, and plan joint human rights activities.

What’s fascinating about it is the collaborations it builds between some of the longest-standing and freshest local actors doing work on “sexual cultures” and how it puts the university in an uncommon, but really forward-thinking role, of using its serious implementation capacity as a bridge to funding for innovative programmes that grassroots NGOs developed together over a half-year of planning.

I guess feminism has something to do with that; so does IGDS’s long history of making action research, outreach, public education and community partnerships part of scholarship. It’s a badly needed model for local advocacy groups, who need to recognise each other’s complementary strengths, share resources, and pool capacity if we’re going to make change. It’s also a paradigm within the university for generous collaboration as self-interest.

Equally fascinating is the express commitment by the project, like Reddock’s research, to grounding change, not in imported ideas, but local knowledge and analysis, by documenting working-class LGBTQI lives and grassroots feminist activism, launching a website that makes existing knowledge about Caribbean LGBTQI communities easily accessible, and tuition waivers for a new short course on Caribbean Sexualities.

I’ll be helping with a radio campaign to convince Parliament that protective laws are needed where culture discriminates. But I’m most looking forward to the learning opportunities of working with the surprise coalition whose advocacy led to Mayor Tim Kee’s 2016 resignation, who’ll work with diverse men to champion a culture of gender equality and non-violence in their different communities through workshops and media creation. With youth leaders in the Silver Lining Foundation and young feminists in Womantra on developing knowledge and tools to address the culture of bullying of young people related to sex and gender, and to help families and police fulfil their obligation to ensure justice for those they protect (the Equal Opportunity Commission is partnering here, too). And with building this new organisational culture among NGOs to share key resources and push in the same direction.

Vaughnette Bigford, our local vocal goddess, has a new CD where, says Cathy Shepherd’s Thursday review, she “reinterprets 11 songs from the Trinidad and Tobago calypso, pop, soca and soul songbooks, spanning a 39-year period.” It isn’t on iTunes. It was out for weeks and I still didn’t have it. So I contemplated trekking into downtown Port-of-Spain to Cleve’s, one of the few surviving brick-and-mortar “record stores.” Earl Crosby’s St James store is another, but less and less so; numbers has become their core business, along with re-selling tickets for local shows. The ticket outlet role is a key part of Cleve’s business, too.

Parking and wrecking always deter me from shopping downtown. Even if I shell out for the Parkade, I’m likely to get a spot on the top floors, often exposed to the elements, multiple lifts are likely to be out of order, and there are never signs, so you find out by waiting too long. Then there’s the sheer driving skill to navigate those tight curves, that I’m just no longer interested in trying to master as I age. The same reason I avoid the badly paved, badly laid-out private lots that look like uninsured accidents waiting to happen, with their lean-to booths I imagine will be deserted, and thick chains I imagine will trap my car inside if I reach back a few minutes beyond an unposted closing time.

The needle on the car’s gas gauge was heading for E, rush hour traffic was thickening, but I chanced it, and pulled into a street parking space outside Cleve’s a little before 4. He’d already shuttered the shop and gone home early. Another few weeks would pass before I got the stamina to try again.

The story of Trinidad’s economic advantage is that, against a set of historical relations, in a global capitalist system we don’t control, we figured out smart ways to get oil and gas out of the earth, then how to make gas into an industry. (The story of the parallel cycles of squander continues to be told.) Much of the new chatter (hastened by a global downturn in energy prices) about diversification of our economy beyond enslavement to oil and gas drifts toward the idea of our creative capital—the brilliance that could turn a waste product of that same industry into a musical instrument that became the centre of a swath of cultural and community practices.

In short, the hope is that, in a fashion similar to hydrocarbon resources, we can monetise our cultural resources more effectively.

Besides old people and freshwaters-come-home, everybody knows Trinis don’t buy music, though. Or most creative content, frankly—ask this paper’s business managers. Which is why nobody is selling music any more, Rhynner’s disappeared, and it’s largely Cleve’s and Crosby’s left.

Worse than praedial larceny, young people see digital content on the Internet as something to be shared for free, not as any artist’s intellectual property.

That’s not quite the case with literature, where print books have held their own globally, and recently rallied ahead of digital books. But I still don’t have a well-practised response when people ask how sales of my poetry collection published last year are going.

I don’t have the energy for a lecture about local bookbuying and selling habits—captured in my Facebook pic of unopened boxes of school textbooks blocking the Caribbean literature shelf at a Trincity Mall bookseller—nor the wotlessness to just cuss.

So I was one of those audibly gasping in glee when the upcoming NGC Bocas Lit Fest (don’t miss it—or me several places in it—starting with an LGBT writers’ lime Wednesday night at Euphoria Lounge on Dundonald St) announced Joan Dayal would receive this year’s Henry Swanzy Award for Distinguished Service to Caribbean Literature. Apart from being the nicest person, Dayal has kept the Paper Based Bookshop (literature’s Cleve’s) in operation over 30 years.

Vaughnette’s isn’t the only CD I want. I messaged Collis Duranty, the other local musician I worship—Chike Pilgrim calls him a “musical diadem”—to taunt him.

I’ve been longing to hold a CD from Collis, to put it on replay, ever since I heard the first song by this bearded dude who showed up to sing for free when some USC students asked him—at a debate about gay rights.

I’ve puzzled why for so many years some of the most inspiring and accomplished local vocal compositions outside soca haven’t found a producer.

We had a conversation about how in small spaces like here the little things we do for each other can matter hugely.

But in any thinking about creative industries and economic diversification, how you buy music is both real small and an enormously fundamental thing.

I was in search of yet another CD the other day. Michael Cherrie had told me there’s a cast recording of Derek Walcott and Galt McDermott’s 1970s musical The Joker of Seville on CD After seeing its Little Carib production twice, my family played the vinyl LP and sang along till we wore a groove into the record.

I’ve called Trinidad Theatre Workshop, stopped by a few times, left messages on people’s personal cellphones—to no avail.

Speaking of fallen giants, my last memory of Lloyd Best was him sitting in a car on lower Richmond St, not using his famous term “state of pre-collapse,” but describing it.

What stuns me about our turn to “liberal,” non-ideological democracy in the Caribbean, away from romantic ideas of national development, is why our aspirations remain mired in concrete forms of patronage like highways, box drains, markets, jobs, and how no politician has ever dared run on the promise “We will make things work.”

Nyan Gadsby-Dolly seems among the most competent and media-savvy in Keith Rowley’s Cabinet. Damian Agostini, the wood sculptor whose work (which we know from the pavement of the Queen’s Park Savannah) was seized and destroyed the Port-of-Spain City Corporation may have an earful for her about cultural industries.

But mine has to start with me being able to buy music. (And not having Tobago Jazz and the Bocas Lit Fest on the same weekend.)

I’ve puzzled why for so many years some of the most inspiring and accomplished local vocal compositions outside soca haven’t found a producer. We had a conversation about how in small spaces like here the little things we do for each other can matter hugely.

I deeply admire the spirit of the people of Guyana, a nation that has led the Caribbean on many social policy and protection issues, including ones related to sexuality. So I was puzzled when a young Guyanese friend here in Trinidad told me her mother’s church members back home were chattering excitedly about the upcoming referendum, all eager to mobilise others to turn out to vote against LGBTI rights.

I was very, very puzzled by this idea of people in Caribbean nations, composed of diverse minorities, relishing the idea of voting away the rights or equality of any one group, based on the whims of others. I wondered if our long histories of having had that done to us over and over were no longer on the 21st-century school curriculum. And I puzzled, too, whether having referenda on rights meant we also got to vote on who gets to vote in the next referendum.

What puzzled me more was that I’d read the manifesto promises the Guyanese parties on both sides had made on social equality for LGBTI people in the last election, which were historic for the region. And I was even more puzzled as I began to read the statement the Guyana government sent to the Inter American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) the day after the state participated in a hearing there last month, which started all of this:

“The Government of Guyana has one position on the cross-cutting principles of discrimination towards members of the LGBTI community…we believe ‘the principle of universality admits no exception. Human rights truly are the birthrights of all human beings.’”

Then I read further, and got to the part near the bottom where “it was deemed unfit for the legislature to decide on the matter. As such, it was recommended, that the matter be taken to a vote, where the people of Guyana will decide by a referendum on these matters.” So that’s why headlines across Guyanese media were screaming “Homosexuality to Go to Referendum.”

But then I got all the more puzzled. Because I could not remember when any Caribbean government had taken that position on another development or fiscal or foreign or domestic policy issue, apart from constitutional amendments. Instead, I knew a history of Caribbean parliamentarians who had taken leadership on complicated and contentious policy issues.

That 34 years ago Billie Miller had decriminalised abortion in Barbados, ahead of Guyana; and that 26 years ago, Lynden Pindling decriminalised homosexuality in the Bahamas; and that 17 years ago Kamla Persad-Bissessar had prohibited school flogging in Trinidad and Tobago; and that in 2015 Jamaica Mark Golding had decriminalised marijuana in Jamaica. So I thought any Caribbean politician not wanting to take such a decision was really saying he or she was not ready to be a leader.

I was puzzled enough to look back at the results of a professional public opinion poll I had worked on in 2013 with the Barbados-based firm Caribbean Development Research Services (CADRES), on public attitudes to sexual diversity in all three countries, which the United Nations later repeated. And that’s what left me most puzzled of all.

Now, the Guyanese state guaranteeing “enforcement and the system of the protection of every Guyanese citizen, including the LGBTI community” (as the Government statement to the IACHR says) is an obligation, no matter how unpopular it is. However, for the Granger Government, the political stakes of doing the right thing seem pretty low.

The 2013 poll does hold up their view that “much more has to be done regarding a collective and consensual approach and the implementation to fulfil” rights for LGBTI people in Guyana. But what they also make clear is that four out of five Guyanese do not believe people should be discriminated against based on their sexual orientation. And a majority think that homophobia can cause harm to young people (three out of four suicide, and three out of five school absenteeism). The UN called similar figures in T&T “A Mandate to Act.”

And then it made sense. Like Guyanese President David Granger, I was raised Anglican, and taught the Easter story in all four gospels of how Pontius Pilate had Jesus Christ crucified to placate the will of the crowd, although he found no evil in him. And I understood better how good people make tragic historical decisions.

I remembered as well that here in T&T evangelical pastors had boasted in a paid newspaper ad that a prime ministerial candidate had promised them she would put any changes in rights for LGBTI people to a referendum. And I remembered that one had been announced in Parliament in early 2011, on same-sex marriages. Right after the Government’s Senate leader, a Hindu, had invented a 52nd chapter to the book of Leviticus.

But I also recalled that right-thinking citizens, including parliamentarians, had shut the idea down, the people whose rights were being proposed to be voted on had said a loud “No Thank You,” and a planned press conference at the Ministry of Planning on the measure was cancelled.

So I am still holding out faith in the people and leaders of Guyana, and their capacity for regional leadership.

COLIN ROBINSON

I had an unknowing exchange with a news editor recently, someone I have a relationship with but did not know had returned to the newsroom. I was whining about a sensationalistic story I wanted to die because I knew it would “sell papers” (and the broadcast equivalent) but felt it would do no public good, and I feared the sensationalism could easily result in harm.

“Responsible media aren’t in the business of speculation.” My colleague’s grand assurance tasted like something no Trinbagonian media consumer would be a fool to swallow.

“That’s a critical adjective,” I scoffed.

“I might be regretting it actually. Not sure a free press has any duty to be responsible.”

Now that was a whole lot more honest. Wow, that was a whole lot more honest.

What exactly is the role of a free press in a small, diverse, divided, questionably literate society like ours, with its history of inequality and state censorship, with laws that criminalise the use of “obscene language,” with libel laws in flux, and where the state and privately held companies own most media?

But let me bat in my crease, though, and ask you instead to think with me, as I shared last month, about the role of the opinion column? These spaces where I and a privileged few get to say something wrapped between the fish and the dog mess, the ads and the news stories.

These spaces made so much less relevant by blogs and social media, by the Facebook Live. By Rhoda Bharath; by Ranking Kia Boss, whose sensation this paper ranked a lead Sunday story, and who managed to get hundreds of Trinbs to stop working mid-afternoon and use their employers’ Internet and computer equipment to wastefully watch a chair.

I’ve been thinking about what columns like this one do and ought to do, particularly within the Trinidad and Tobago media landscape. When—usually at Carnival time—so many of you come up to me and share that you value or enjoy what I write, I’m never clear why. Perhaps you’ll email and say.

If newspaper readers like you got to decide what kind of writers and writing filled the opinion pages of the dailies, what choice, I wonder, would you make?

Would our fascination with authority, ingrained from the nation’s weaning on “doctor politics,” win out? Would we pick scientists and academics? Would we want columns that were deeply researched and full of educational facts? Or at least pretended to be? Would it be good enough to be a tenured academic and to sleepwrite columns that showed no effort? To masquerade enlightenment by citing dubious sources?

Or would we want entertainment? Bacchanal and speculation. Political commesse. Could wit alone suffice, without the legal exposure for the publishers? That playfulness and irony for which our nation distinguishes itself regionally, which I learned this weekend prompted Wayne Brown (the iconic Trinidadian writer and writing teacher who lived the end of his life in Jamaica) to muse is what makes us superior fiction writers to Jamaicans, whose earnestness makes them better poets.

Should newspaper columns hew closely to public events and public affairs, politics, the economy, policy? Are their essential function as tools of critical national analysis, to be entrusted to those with the breadth—or diversity—of perspective to complement news coverage, to complicate or simplify matters currently in the national debate, to interpret the state of affairs for the reader?

Is diversity itself a core criterion for the columnist lineup? A group of voices who reflect the plural nature of the nation, including those out of the mainstream and in key recalcitrant minorities. Key market demographics, if you’re talking to folks on the business side of the paper.

Should columns follow current affairs? Or would it be enough to tell a good story every week? Some illuminating experience or epiphany from the week gone by, embroidered into a lesson. Inflected by the particularity of the writer’s experience. Essentially, what any good novelist or sermon does. Is our role simply to use our powers of observation for good?

What about disclosure? Is the writer’s life experience the gold? Apart from the advice column’s clumsy dialogue with our love lives, should some opinion writers at least be required to engage with the nation’s emotional life, our longing, our hurts, our fear? Is the column’s duty to put lives on the page, the writer’s or others’?

And what of readers? Is a column a place to be smart? Or are there other venues for that? Should one instead always strive to be simple? I volunteered for a spell in ALTA’s Monday evening Belmont reading circle, where the Guardian was always available. Though I never asked, the students’ reading challenges appeared to have a wide range of causes: cognitive disabilities, migration, sexism, poverty, childhood illness.

The guides sometimes used items in the paper for group reading exercises. The students soon matched my picture in the paper to me. But it always haunts me whether they could understand what I write, and if it’s them I should be writing for.

I spent last week, sometimes wearing a “Readers Wanted” jersey, and steeped in the multi-faceted celebration and contemplation of words and ideas, readers and nation that is the NGC Bocas Lit Fest. (I called it a mangrove in an early column.) Why I write here, and what I ought to be writing, was foremost on my mind. What is on yours?

Last week the Attorney General moved a 49-clause bill that substantially overhauls the 1935 Motor Vehicles and Road Traffic Act. The legislation aims to establish some 100 modern driving offences and improve efficiency of traffic violation enforcement, including legalising red-light cameras, fixed tickets, and a system of licence demerits (points).

As he does with all his bills, Mr Al-Rawi praised this one’s thoughtful and careful drafting. But Senator Dhan Mahabir quickly made fun of the $750 penalty for an improperly attired taxi driver.

I have long criticised our niggling, pedantic approach to traffic enforcement. Our obsession with the idea of imposing rules—which influential people simply evade.

Instead, I’ve advocated more common sense approaches to driving violations, arguing that much of our driving is an adaptation to too many cars on too few roads, and they ought to be embraced as organic innovations.

For instance, why don’t we simply formalise the use of the shoulder during rush hours as a special lane, restricted to high-occupancy vehicles like taxis, or any vehicle with a driver with the skill to cut seamlessly back into the lane to the right.

Part of me, though, is so exhausted by our national culture of impatience on the road that I’m urging Parliament to make all forms of impatient driving an offence. Driving impatiently is far from a single offence.

It has so many distinct local expressions, which we all know well, and many of us practise.

Here are a few key types of impatient driving offences that Mr Al-Rawi has unfortunately overlooked, and which I need either Sen Mahabir or the eminently Oppositional Sen Ramdeen to propose as amendments to the bill.

1—Yellow Fever

For many of us with foreign guests, our first local driving lesson to them is: In Trinidad and Tobago, a yellow light means speed up. Red-light cameras ought to be able to detect acceleration. So fine those motorists who catch the light before it changes red as well.

2—Follow De Leader

It isn’t just one driver who decides she can still follow the cars ahead, even though the traffic light has turned red.

It’s often two or three, each one deciding: if she can, so can I. Let’s double the fine for every successive light-breaker.

3—De Both Ah Dem

This is the offence that most easily induces road rage on my part. It’s the driver who can’t make up his mind which lane is likely to move faster, so he straddles both until it becomes clear. This could also be called Hedging, but that involves a pun on prostrate and prostate.

4—Rampin Cheater

The Diego Martin Highway special. Traffic on the highway has stopped at the light, or the light is about to change. So the clever speedster notices, and quickly gets into the off-ramp lane, so she can nip between the traffic on the cross-street, then back onto the on-ramp on the other side, leaving all the law-abiders seething in her exhaust.

5—Yuh Have Spare Parts At Home?

Stopping at a crosswalk is a discretion for the Trinb driver, a favour we in our killing machines do for a pedestrian—when it moves us.

And, sadly, we need an even stiffer penalty for the driver who’s so determined not to stop, he swerves around the vehicle that has.

6—Heavy T Bumper Jam

Speeding a loaded goods vehicle. Does this require any further elaboration? I think jail ought to be the punishment for the 18-wheeler that broke the Wrightson Rd light and barrelled into the path of my car.

7—Yuh Sticking

This offence takes a few distinct forms. One is the driver behind you who pulls out into the clear lane you were going just about to change into, before you even have a chance to. Moving To De Left.

Another is the car behind you that overtakes you on the left before as you are trying to return safely to the left lane after overtaking.

Jack Up De Back Bumper. A third is the truck that bears down on you when you’re driving in the right lane, and tailgates you with its high beams on, even when traffic prevents you from changing lanes.

The moment an opportunity opens for you to move out of the lane, the driver swiftly executes one of the other versions of the offence.

8—This Is Not An Emergency

Ah yes, the uniformed service members, whose inability to wait in line at the bank, or anywhere else, leads to emergency vehicles that routinely switch on their flashing lights and sirens the minute there’s the smallest traffic jam, then turn them off once the road is clear.

9—Who Reach First, Pass First

And then there’s this. There’s no punishing this one, though. It’s the wonderful hallmark of national driving.

The game of rushing to see who will get through the single clear lane on our many narrow streets, no matter which side the obstruction is on.

And the endless flow of vehicles that follows the one that wins the game.

Poetry filled up NAPA last month-end. Fuller than the grandstand for Dimanche Gras. Grandmothers. A tassa section. A screaming posse from Tobago. $200-a-ticket poetry.

Now the biggest single event of the national literature calendar, the finale of the annual BocasLitFest is a competition among young “spoken word” poets for prizes and appearance fees (provided by First Citizens) that this year leapt from $36,000 to $88,000, rivalling the festival’s US$16,000 prize money for leading Caribbean authors of the best books annually.

Spoken word’s multiple roots wind through several Black Atlantic vocal traditions, among them 1970s dub poetry, rapso, and of course rap and hip-hop, African-American popular music forms whose decline of musicality and dominance of lyricism, along with a cleverness of rhythmic and lyrical form, signal a breathtaking rise in popular literacy and social expression among youth globally.

Our local movement’s most immediate influences may be the North American “slam” competitions on which Caribbean immigrants like Roger Bonair-Agard and Jamaican Staceyann Chin have left their signature and its early machinery was a number of open mic frameworks—I’m aware of Gillian Moor’s Songshine, Skeeto Amos’s One Mic, and UWeSpeak at the St Augustine campus’s old undercroft.

Ask: Where calypso gone? And I answer: Here. Lament the barren monotony of the rented, headwrap-clutching calypso, the generational decline in soca lyrics from Maestro to Iwer and JW—I will show you a fascinating landscape of vocal fertility.

Anyone can strive to be a spoken word poet, too. School tours, intercol competitions, and support for tertiary campus activities at both UWI and USC, are providing incentive and infrastructure for this corner of imaginative productivity. These are organised, along with the National Poetry Slam, by the seven-year-old 2 Cents Movement, which has risen to an uneasy dominance of the scene, in collaboration with the Bocas festival and various international, corporate and state donors. The achievements of this youth organisation, an employer of eight, are impressive, whether by the yardstick of youth entrepreneurship, or of corporate social responsibility in the creative industries. Sadly, locally, that’s more cause for hate than celebration.

It’s not all sweetness and light, though. There are deep creative ruts in the movement and the national slam that are increasingly being called out. The judges—every year a majority are expat and foreign writers visiting for Bocas, quite likely to miss key nuances—praised the 13 finalists’ bravery in engaging taboos, and their local inventiveness with form (cadences of speechband and robbertalk pop up delightfully from time to time). But the panel yearned for more complexity and experimentation with language, more discipline and chromatics in delivery (they said less shouting and running overtime), and less self-referential work.

The two semifinals of the competition often see the most brilliant work, with many in the final unable to equal work that got them in. This year’s semis, Kyle Hernandez performed a consistently comedic piece, largely for its delightful self-consciousness that it was a customer service experience at a branch of the title sponsor; evoking his diabetic mother’s faith in his winning in the final wasn’t nearly enough. Others’ risk-taking was more complicated.

One of the most stunning departures of this year’s competition was Brendon O’Brien’s use of the stage in both semis and finals to allege sexual predation and intimate partner violence by other performers. Another semis hit was last year’s tabanca-paean to newscaster Desha Rambajan by Seth Sylvester, the eventual winner with another poem that seemed judged more for its autobiography than craft.

Yet truth-telling is a complicated factor in the competition. Nineteen-year-old Alexandra Stewart, second-place winner this year—the first in which women (both teenagers) took both top spots—ought to have placed before now. Her choice of contemplative work cuts against the masculine grain of blunt and witty syncopation in the genre, though some of her pieces have been so similar to seem formulaic. This final she pondered the weight of poetry, that it is not casually commissioned or without consequence. A poet opens more than her mouth. She imagined a girl who wanted a poem on rape, which is like an unfinished simile, and she wondered if the poem should say her or I.

Many of us have noted how sexuality and violence—along with family—have come to overwhelm the poets’ themes in recent years. As the judges applauded, this means men and women are exploring rape, homosexuality, domestic abuse, toxic masculinity, gun violence. On the one hand, evidence of the issues dominating the young participants’ lives presents a difficult responsibility for the 2 Cents managers in responding to jaw-dropping performances that present trauma as autobiography.

On the other hand, like other particular themes dominant in earlier years—absentee fathers, forceripe schoolgirls—the performers are equally often encoding stereotypes they imagine, rather than offering nuanced representations from their own experiences. Homosexuality is always tortured. Men enact women experiencing men’s violence. The work, often melodramatic and limited in empathy, constricts instead of expanding understanding of the issue.

This year, Michael Logie opened the competition sharing the death wish of a death-row prisoner raped as a boy, who has killed a man over another gratuitous rape attempt. Like defending champion Sylvester’s tale of normalised sexual violence against women, he told an insistent story, with only an occasional illumination of poetry.

But not every story needs to be beautiful, O’Brien urged.

• More on the other eight performances and the 2 Cents Movement next week.

In an expressive culture like ours, so firmly rooted in piercing oral irony and spontaneous joking—one that produces incredible, unpolished sensations like Rankin Kia Boss—it’s a shame our stage comedy hasn’t grown away from its old-school West Indian roots in physical comedy, where you can see the punchline coming at you from two miles away. T&T ought to have a booming stand-up comedy market, doing year-round what calypso does during Carnival. While Rachel Price has numerous peers on the street, she has virtually none on the stage.

Last week I began exploring some of the roles of the First Citizens National Poetry Slam, beyond the stage, money, and 1,100-strong audience it provided this year for young poets. How it is helping build an impressive youth organisation. And incidentally identifying, in performers’ misunderstandings or memory of trauma, critical areas for healing and cultural transformation in young people’s lives. A list of this year’s poems’ themes: murder, self-mutilation, rape, sexual predation, absent fathers—taken up by Marcus Millette—losing parents, lifethreatening illness, corruption, dysfunctional schooling—articulated by Emmanuel Villafana—racism.

One staple of the Slam is its straight-outta-Morvant MC duo—Vin Williams, halting and deadpan; and effusive, buck-and-gap-toothed Thaddy Boom. Some patrons have grown weary of their repartee, some of it well-worn—like the move where an impish Boom hugs up the married, straight-laced Vin on stage, and teases him about his comfort with his masculinity.

Part of a consistent focus on audience feedback and self-evaluation, Slam patrons were asked to weigh in on the duo’s future. But I’m hungry for more spaces for humour like Vin and Boom’s. Even Slam competitors who choose to be playful tend to large, ROTFLOL-type punchlines over subtler wit. I welcome the reliable space the Slam provides the pair.

While dominated by young voices—some of the youngest of which emerged winners this year—the Slam still provides space for older performers. A few years ago Selwyn Wiltshire, around 80, made the semi-finals.

Derron Sandy and Idrees Saleem, two veterans on the cusp of their thirties, who each bring with them screaming, female fan followings, were both in this year’s final.

Sandy’s semi-final work was a powerfully dark meditation by a “spare-parts” man hawking his products to the maimed citizens of a nation beset by violence—and rape. But neither poet’s final performance—of work that reflected pointedly on poetry and themselves, and self-consciously referenced the enhanced prizemoney—reached the standard of which he is capable.

Indeed, Saleem drew a remark from the judges after throwing words at his competitors. Both are among the competitors who best use irony and play—and Saleem is, by most accounts, the most virtuosic performer on the spoken-word scene.

But the Slam has, in general, seen little creative use of movement or the stage, with performers largely anchored safely to the mic. Saleem’s winning 2014 performance, in fact, was criticised by the losers for its reliance on choreography and sound.

So it was refreshing to witness Camryn Bruno’s nod from the Slam judges this year largely celebrated. The 18-year-old Tobagonian highschooler’s winning offering was the one performance that—however simply–was in any way kinetic.

Using familiar representations of the robotic motions and diction of a machine, she reflected on the pervasive numbers game that is life in a place with a code of conduct in corruption—from the way the national lotteries hypnotise the poor, to the hopelessly diminishing chances of landing an HDC house.

Another young woman, who most likely was placed at the other end of the rankings, wowed the audience perhaps as much. Despite “bussing” three times, D’Izraiel Billy was determined to get through, and recall every word of, a vocally-complicated piece with both quiet puns and the classic alliterations of the genre in tumbling transitions from “Vetsin” to “vexing” to “vex thing.”

The kindness of the Slam’s audiences when competitors collapse in this way is as striking as its contrast with the harshness of so much of what is being performed. Billy’s work was itself deeply troubling, and parts of her lyrics—as well her appearance in a red satin dress with chopsticks in her hair—enacted ethnic stereotypes of Chinese, even as it sought to complicate them.

Even when they showed their dexterity with the classic beats of the genre, all five of the women among the 13 finalists performed work that called you to lean in and listen. Deja Lewis and Shineque Saunders wrote work about disability and mental health, Saunders evoking childhood memories of faith practice.

It is one of the ways in which faith seems to have found a new place in the Slam which—like a similar phase in calypso recently—once saw several students from the Adventist University of the Southern Caribbean performing unpoetic tributes to God and faith. A semifinals cameo by last year’s champion Seth Sylvester, though lyrically weak, had a similar texture to Saunders’.

“Honesty don’t win slams,” Saleem spat back at rival poet Brendon O’Brien, in what seemed on the surface a Sparrow-Melody picong duel, but represented a coded engagement with something far more serious. Idrees was impugning as corrupt the idea of making a powerful story appear truthful to win a competition.

But, in fact, doing that is precisely what making art is.

Next year, if no one asks me to judge, I’m competing.

People shouldn’t only end up in this column only when I sing a calypso on them. Whether it’s Cydelle Crosby, Collis Duranty, Joan Dayal, Vaughnette Bigford, Marlon Bascombe, Joyce Pierre, Nickolai Salcedo, Sonja Dumas, Vin and Boom, Suzette and her daughter Candace, or Ms Merritt at bMobile, this is equally a space for praisesongs.

So this week I am celebrating Dike Rostant.

I’m not like Seth Sylvester. With the exception perhaps of Gyasi Merrique, I find it hard to get excited about our local broadcasters. But with a face made for TV and a voice made for radio, you can’t help but lean in when you first encounter Rostant over the airwaves. Our initial meeting was on the Good Morning T&T set, where he hosted regularly after Senator Paul Richards resigned. It was one of those sleep-deprived, too early morning slots no guest wants. But Rostant woke me up; he was poised, prepared, engaged.

Another occasion when I got up to watch this new talent, he played calypsoes during the breaks. And, like DJ Rawkus when he stood near me at the foot of the stage at David Rudder’s birthday concert singing every word of every song, I asked myself: Who is this young man?

So I was thrilled to hear his baritone filling up my car the other day, this time on radio, anchoring Talk City’s morning magazine, Frontline, chatting up old ladies, doing informative interviews and playing more local music. This week, after he had me on the show, I got a chance to sit down and ask him directly just who this calypso lover with the careful diction and the sultry tone is.

His vision as a broadcaster, he shared, centres on the idea that there are some stories that have not yet been told—or told in a way people can access. So, let me tell a little of his story.

At 36, he’s older than he looks, a father of three children, seven, six and six, married to a woman he’s known since he was a teenager. His on-air days go back to announcing on NBN, the closure of which, he says, pushed him out of the nest and into a summer programme at the Caribbean Institute of Media & Communication (CARIMAC) on UWI’s Mona campus. A role hosting the July 2014 Lara Promenade tribute to Nelson Mandela proved a point of re-entry, following the couple’s decision to move back home to allow their kids a connection to family through hugs instead of Skype, after nine years following each other around the Caribbean.

Gasparillo is an enormous part of his grounding. Happy Hill. Where everyone eats fire, dances, plays drums, so much so that he never realised growing up that not everyone does. Where stickfighting happens across from the market. Vos Government, he answers, sharing his primary school when asked where he went to school. Presentation Chaguanas was a convenience, a single trip each day for both him and his father, the principal—a man often mistaken by parents who’d come to look for him at home after school, bareback and cutting grass, much like he would be on mornings before school during his childhood. Margaret and Simon’s child, Rostant called himself throughout our interview; then later called back to draw attention to his mother’s death when he was 14, and share how that too grounded him. She scored music for people who couldn’t read it, and some of those compositions ended up in the Caribbean Hymnal.

When pressed about whether his firm embrace of creole culture is something remarkable, he says he is just old people children.

In addition to Gasparillo, I also see the contours of the years doing community education and cultural outreach at Montserrat’s volcano observatory and with Belize’s national institutions. Jamaica was where he learned to ascribe value to culture, he says, citing Rex Nettleford’s marvellous word smadification, the verb, in my opinion for the rights concept of “human dignity.”

Although, he says, he really wants to get out from being “in front” of the microphone, and to provide a platform for people to have conversations about themselves, it’s Rostant’s voice that is one of his most powerful talents. Uttering a opening line offstage at the start of a “Man Better Man” production landed him a stint on SportsMax.

Rostant doesn’t want to voice other people’s stories, and ask them if they agree, however; his goal is to have a person tell their own story: “The nation needs to work to look in the mirror and be glad with who we see.”

On over-full airwaves where mediocrity, nonchalance, ignorance and crassness crowd each other out, Dike Rostant is a delight any media house should treasure and put to good use.

I’m probably not an innocent observer of the ongoing high drama in the judiciary cascading from the most recent appointments to the high court bench. But let me pretend to be one—and not just a lazy columnist who should be a more diligent investigator who digs up the political and personal backstories to the brouhaha for my reader.

Any ignorant observer of the spectacle, which has consumed the bar and bench in a justice system widely experienced as dysfunctional, has got to also be asking the question that has been persistently haunting me over the past month:

How would the resignation or removal of the current Chief Justice and of the entire Judicial and Legal Services Commission (JLSC) at once (including the Public Service Commission member serving ex officio) improve access to justice for anyone?

It is a version of an earlier question I had been asking: Whatever sins had been committed by her or by others in her elevation to the high court, how on earth would embarrassing and removing Marcia Ayers-Caesar from the bench do anyone justice?

In addition to these two simple questions, I have two simple, puzzling observations. On April 26, accused prisoners in cases abandoned by the former Chief Magistrate rioted in the court building—and media reporting left one wondering how and by whom this was incited. When it was proposed that Mi’Lady stoop back down as Her Worship to discharge her pending matters, there was hue and cry and pedantic argument that this was illegal and impossible. Yet, when it was decreed that all of these matters would start “de novo,” in the Latin legalese, there was as loud an uproar that this was unjust and would be overturned in law.

The entire issue of the JLSC appointments is throbbing with the appearance of not being what it seems to be, of something else altogether begging to be discovered beneath its surface. And lingering under there also is the disciplinary matter involving the Police Commissioner’s wife (elevated simultaneous with Ms Ayers-Caesar from the magistracy) over a bail determination in which she intervened, a matter overseen by a Presidential nominee on the bench “perilously close” to his own elevation, as Senior Counsel Martin Daly and Eminent Citizen Reginald Dumas have framed it with considerable intrigue. If any current affair begs for investigative reporting, it is this one; and it was made all the more opaque by the media’s removal from Thursday’s Law Association votes of no confidence in the CJ and JLSC.

There have been accusations of disingenuousness and misrepresentation aimed at both the Chief Justice and former Chief Magistrate. But citizens like me would like more honesty from all sides.

It’s not hard to imagine lawyerly greed motivating objections to anything. “First we kill all the lawyers”—we learn words for this distrust even in English class. Some of the loudest advocates of justice and transparency in this affair seem no more honest than Dick the Butcher, the original speaker of Shakespeare’s words.

Schoolchildren would also be easily confused as to why members of the bar have focused their sights on the symbolic gesture of declaring a lack of confidence and undermining the effectiveness of key leaders of the justice system. I welcome accountability in the judiciary, and believe there’s not enough of it. But the voices calling for heads to roll don’t sound like reformers, and several aren’t even trying to.

The public needs to keep asking what exactly is going on here. What interests are at stake among those calling for the CJ and JLSC to leave? And to keep the advocates as accountable as they’d like to hold those in power in the judiciary. These “champions” have no credibility in my eyes unless they show sincere regard for the sufferers of the system. Whoever is at fault for the current mess, I don’t see any evidence of how the proposed remedies involve a plan to leave things in less chaos than there is now.

Notwithstanding all the hubris he is famous for, the expensive, inconvenient splendour of the law term opening, despite all the innuendo, the CJ is a man who is young, smart and visionary. I admire his judgments. And at the very least rhetorically—though there is evidence of more than that—the current Chief Justice has championed commonsense court reforms. What is also clear is that these have been resisted by the bar with the same stubbornness as the West Port-of-Spain traffic plan. So have Parliamentary efforts at justice system reform. Worse, some of those ended up with scandals like Section 34.

I don’t think, either, that this is about democratic immaturity, our rush to cannibalise those we’ve put on pedestals, instead of seeking other forms of atonement when they err—a motivation fraught with old ideas about who really ought to be on them.

There’s something else. But one conclusion that’s easy to draw is that little of this seems to be about justice.

I welcome accountability in the judiciary, and believe there’s not enough of it. But the voices calling for heads to roll don’t sound like reformers, and several aren’t even trying to.

Somebody’s 17-year-old son hailed me up some time ago.

On one of the popular gay hookup/dating sites. They restrict membership to people over 18. He seemed a really normal young man, so far as I can tell. He had ambition, self-awareness, two parents. Oh, no, I don’t know them at all.

He lost his virginity, he shared, in Form 4, to a 37-year-old divorced man on Facebook. The man was slow and attentive, and had a box of condoms. But he’s been scarce since. Nothing the youth said indicated he felt tricked, coerced or used. He’d had a couple sexual experiences since.

He didn’t tell me his real age. I found out for myself. Facebook. After he’d asked me if I wanted him to send me nudes.

He’s an adult now.

It’s not the first time. Nor will it be the last a teenager reaches out to me for sex. It’s often not the only thing they want. Often it’s not the real thing they want. But for many, they just can’t imagine any other way to engage or be close with another gay man. Another man. Some want a father. Yes, they say it themselves. Some want connection with someone they trust to keep their secret, who can answer questions, who can end their loneliness. Many of them could teach me quite a few things themselves.

I don’t think young men have found me as a result of my activism or media appearances. Or because I write in the paper shamelessly and incidentally about being a gay man. I’d like to believe that both of those are powerful acts of service that are transforming young people’s lives. But most of these youths’ lives are untouched by any of those. They don’t know “who I am.”

I can relate, though. I was doing the same thing they are—forty years ago. Begging teachers who seemed gay for sex. Before I got that bold, showing up at custodial figures’ houses with confessional letters. Those experiences taught me two valuable lessons: To say no to sex with these beautiful young men without too much difficulty. And to remember the powerful impact the men who let me into their lives had on me as a teenager: the permission it gave me to be me. To live.

I don’t recall being engaged online by teens clearly out for a payday or I thought were dangerous. On the contrary, what troubled me is how much they were putting themselves in harm’s way. I hope I am not teaching them self-hate, but I find myself awkwardly lecturing them about being less trusting of “men like me.”

These, after all, are the young people we’re supposed to be protecting from the predatory homosexuals. If their parents and teachers and pastors—if their youth organisations—had better tools to affirm and support their healthy development as gay men—if they were doing half as good a job as me—these kids would still be on sex sites, but I want to believe they would be on there with less neediness and more guidance.

I ask to meet the parents. I’m convinced most families already know these children are gay. But they themselves rarely can be convinced it’s safe to name even what’s already known. Occasionally I do get to meet a mom. One of them is an amazing woman who loves her son incredibly. Despite the homophobia she had been given as her only tool for dealing with his sexuality, she found others. I’ve been lucky to witness her growth as a parent.

Increasingly, there are local resources young people can turn to that offer clinical expertise and social space: Safe Space, supported by UWI’s counselling service; the Silver Lining Foundation; and now BelongTT. But many I refer there are cautious about meeting others within their own social network for fear of losing privacy.

Colm Imbert (or maybe the same hacked profile that mocked the Princes Town MP) blocked me when I threatened to bring young LGBTI people to his office so he’d meet the people he was making cheap jokes about on Facebook. I try to poke fun at him as often as possible. But he deserves credit for insisting when the People’s Partnership passed the Children Act that we can’t criminalise young people for uncoerced intimacy with other young people close in age. They agreed.

Except if they’re of the same sex.

So one of the ironies of the law is if one of these young men under 18 has sex with me, I alone go to jail. But if he has sex with another young person 16 or 17, he’s criminally liable. For life imprisonment.

The AG repeatedly promised to take up two pieces of unfinished business from the 2012 Children Act: child marriage, which he sealed up Friday night; and this gender inequality in treating with uncoerced sex between minors. UNC MP Barry Padarath is on record supporting the latter in the Joint Select Committee on the Family & Children Division legislation, where advocates hoped to fix it. Mr Al-Rawi wanted to give it more time and thought. It’s been a year.

Going even further, and making it safe and legal for grown men to romance each other, also, means they’d have no need to turn to vulnerable young men they think will keep their secret. That way, the law makes intergenerational sex far costlier than finding people of the same age.

Attillah Springer had the quote of the week.

It broke through what seemed a national competition for the most offensive or inane public comment on missionary Roman Catholic priest Father Clyde Harvey being robbed in a church, threatened with kidnapping, and left hog-tied. We as Trinis are so much more profound at picong than poignancy.

One leader of a respectable Christian denomination saw the final straw in our moral decline: the wicked attacking God himself.

Kamla shamelessly politicised things, comparing armed bandits’ threats to the priest’s life to PNM politicians’ criticisms of Sat Maharaj’s insistence Hindus be allowed to marry pubescent girls. Our Prime Minister (who desperately needs a press secretary if Maxie is not up to the job) resorted to shaming and blaming the young men’s parents.

And Wayne Chance. He went on and on or longer than broadcast standards ought to allow, certainly longer than I could stomach, about demon seed, a sort of supernatural theory that violence is spawned from semen of blighted men in the wombs of young women in their communities.

Even Fr Harvey’s own responses—to a media he knows is careless and sensational—served to redo some of the damage he pointed out is at the root of the endemic violence and alienation he rightfully noted had merely crossed the door of his presbytery.

There was so much stupidity recklessly trumpeted last week that I began to wonder if this column would enter the competition itself. Whether I am being as laughably naive and simplistic in my own analysis of the significance of what happened. My sentiment that our responses last week demonstrate most poignantly what is wrong with the country—where we reach, as Attillah reflected on. Not the church break-in, or threats to the life of a priest widely seen by the middle class as the champion of the communities his attackers come from, and the minister of East Port-of- Spain.

Attillah wrote back to the hand-wringing Cassandras’ wails that “Trinidad gone through.” She offered that any such conclusion ought to be attributed, not to the proliferation of young men toting guns, but instead to the failure of more of us to be Clyde Harveys.

It was brilliant.

But I don’t agree. I think it is far, far simpler than that. And more complicated.

First, the stock images on newspaper covers, following the incident, of the gold-robed priest over an altar, on which stood a gold-plated lectern, ought to help us better understand how the young men failed to distinguish between his institution and others. And we forget how recently the man being extolled today so unthinkingly as an icon of goodness was demonised by many as a politically dangerous radical.

But, fundamentally, it isn’t about us being as Mother Theresa as we’ve made Clyde into. About keeping injustice in place and being sacrificially charitable to those lesser.

It’s that we have all committed to replicating a society passed on to us after servitude and colonialism that remains devoted to devaluing some people’s humanity. The simple and challenging root of almost everything we suffer is the fact that we all collude actively in reproducing and justifying inequality in needless ways, in order to see ourselves as better—or even better-behaved. It’s the font of all the violence—of the alienation from each other in this tiny place that enables the excess of the violence—despite our immense wealth and talent and Carnival-like capacity for energy and production. Judging and excluding some group of people is the point of our every institution, the fabric of our social lives. Getting through is a privilege, a favour, a grease hand; not a right.

Finding a way to share the nation’s heritage and liberty has eluded us. We struggle to imagine a value system focused on inclusion, on inherent worth; and find ourselves constantly distracted by rituals and etiquettes that should not matter. It’s why the Education Minister thinks teaching penmanship a more important obligation for his ministry in a digital age than sexuality education. Why Krysis’s politeness matters more than officers’ corruption. Why we’ve become righteously obsessed with the protocol and race of a handful of judicial appointments as a failure of governance, in ways we never have for the hundreds the justice system fails—as both victims and accused.

On the one hand, the everyday opportunities to undo this in every small transaction—at service counters, at intersections, in classrooms, on judicial benches, in families, in barbershops and nail salons—are boundless.

On the other hand, the immenseness of our failure to make building a nation of fairness and opportunity central to law, public service and public education is staggering, and requires systemic change and aggressive leadership.

The lives of all young bad boys matter. Deeply. They ought to matter more to us than to their gang lords. They will not kill each other out; nor will corrupt police. They are all very human. As human as we are. No one else is responsible for them but us. We can cling to self-righteousness and neglect, blame and old-fashioned stupidities. We can have many more weeks of prayerful lament.

Until we all invest meaningfully in the futures of the families of the young men who grew up to attack Fr Clyde, in the young girls who grow up to be their mothers—as long as young black people see people their prime minister calls young black leaders spending $59,000 of the VAT they pay on a week of phone calls, or $92,000 on a weekend in Tobago, nothing much will matter to us but violence.

It’s that we have all committed to replicating a society passed on to us after servitude and colonialism that remains devoted to devaluing some people’s humanity. The simple and challenging root of almost everything we suffer is the fact that we all collude actively in reproducing and justifying inequality in needless ways, in order to see ourselves as better—or even better-behaved.

I’ve been writing about Black men and boys a lot.

One, who walked into a room with several others seven years ago saying they wanted to be LGBT allies, told me he wants to write a newspaper column. So, as a sort of Take Our Sons to Work exercise, he’s writing this week’s with me.

I chose Brendon. He wasn’t a son I’d made and have to love no matter how he turns out. He wasn’t a ward of a home I was choosing, like the St Michael’s boys who came awkwardly through my house as a youth, because he’s “disadvantaged.”

I chose him because he was smart and whole and open and daring—and incredibly well-brought-up. A dark-skinned, knottyhead Black youthman who walked with pride despite the fashions he didn’t have.

At 19, he had things he stood for. Values that didn’t come from Jesus or some external code.

He was this marvel of nature, this testament to what Black boys born in Sea Lots from female-headed households could turn into. (We argue over this.)

But he was this brilliant piece of Black manhood, this wholeness, this puzzle as to precisely why some Black boys turn out ethical and ambitious, intimate and polite. Full of self-worth and decency.

Okay, so it probably wasn’t really that way. Not nearly that magical or noble. Nor is he.

He was full of tardiness and borrowing, frustratingness and teenagery. And I probably really invested as much as I did because I secretly hoped he’d turn out gay eventually—just needed space.

Ironically, though, the closeness we’ve enjoyed might not have been feasible were he not unattracted.

I gave him opportunities and attention I didn’t give family or young gay volunteers who jealously felt these rightfully were theirs. And in many ways what seemed like his bravery in championing gay rights was privilege.

When he walks home through the streets wearing his favourite “Homosexual Agenda” jersey like it’s just clothes, he doesn’t walk with a body battling shame inside itself. When he’s faced stigma, it’s confrontation over a cause he supported, not his right to exist.

Still, there was something so striking about his embrace of difference and justice, it made you wonder if it was just nalve—his core sense of self-confidence, notwithstanding stories he’d occasionally share of trauma or hardship.

His story might hardly be remarkable were he a Black man my age; but in one generation he’s become testament to what Black boys could be, but aren’t.

Though I wonder if he’d have been one of those bright boys for whom what made sense in 1970 was going up in the hills.

The relationship has been incredibly rewarding. As someone who chose not to parent full-time, midlife is teaching me that raising children and caring for others are hardly as selfless as they seem, but really important things we do for our own sense of connection and importance, and our economic futures.

I don’t know when mentoring Brendon ended and family began. But too early one Sunday, my sister and I found ourselves in Curepe, watching him be youth preacher in Holy Saviour’s pulpit.

It isn’t at all true that you can’t choose your family. I know this because I chose my father; bypassing all the toxic masculinity of my own life to find nurturance and support from a man who did not have children of his own.

This fact is made more incredible to me given the tragically small number of nurturing men, and even fewer fathers.

There are, however, many like my abusive, womanising grandfather, or my almost entirely absent father.

I’ve written whole poems about those kinds of men, most of them the men of my family. For a long time, the line that rang most true of masculinity to me was “Men are made of monster parts.”

It may be true that I had already chosen the man that I wanted to be long before Colin and I adopted each other. When he asks who is responsible for raising a young man as brilliant as me, I still defiantly say I did this myself.

But I think to raise someone is to show them that the person they’ve decided to be, even when it’s sort of ridiculous, has love and acceptance and support.

Especially when that thing they want to be is as ridiculously measureless as to be a “good man.” In that way, I hadn’t been raised at all until I met this person that saw the man I wanted to be and wanted to help me.

He provided for me, not with money, but always with his hours and listening ears. He reminded me that charity also meant offering honest opinions and even heartbreaking emotions.

This is by no means a denial by me that there are a lot of often complex feelings wrapped up in masculinity, bound so tightly that many feel gagged from even the language of crying.

For someone to create a home for a young man to share, in this island where men should quicker kill than cry (and for it to be another man to boot) is a blessing.

I can give thanks for the mentor I chose, with tears, and know this doesn’t make me any less a man. Perhaps that’s a true man, even.

Dearest Jenny: Vee posted on Facebook last week. And I quickly switched on the flatscreen. To Parliament TV. There you were. Dressed to the nines on Channel 11, as always. In a lovely, lacy African brownish thing, with matching gele.

Leading off resumption of debate on Wayne Sturge’s private motion calling on you and your Government to deal with the increasing and unacceptable levels of violent crime in Trinidad and Tobago. A motion senators have been debating a few hours a month over the past five months. Twenty so far. With more to come. After watching yours, though, I can’t bear to watch another.

I rewound to the start of your 22? minutes to hear all of it. And, to my utter amazement even though I had been warned, you did go there. Twice.

First you noted that some crimes—and you singled out ones, “crimes of passion” you called them, which overwhelmingly affect women—no Government can put any systems in place to prevent. I guess there’s no sense then in having a Gender Affairs unit spending money on putting in place systems and education to change how boys and men see killing women they love as unavoidable, or to protect those women.

But, to save you face, later in the week the Prime Minister’s remarks acknowledged that we can’t do much of anything either to prevent people slitting other people’s throats when they rob them. As befits his office, from time to time he makes public comments about the latest incident of unacceptable and outrageous crime. One such incident earlier this month affecting “one of our beloved persons of the cloth,” as you called him, the PM attributed to parents.

I noticed you kept looking at the pages on your desk, so I don’t think what you said was extemporaneous. You, too, talked about bad parents. And as you did, you went there again. One of the “olden, golden” “values of yesteryear,” you called it. As you waxed wistfully about licks. Including your own.

For the 180 decades since Emancipation, this has been a powerful fantasy of formerly enslaved peoples. To whip others. It is what we know solves everything. We think of it with such profound nostalgia that when we speak of it, it turns up the corners of our mouths.

I had also tuned into what you called “the other place” the Friday before and the day after viewing you. Watching the taunts, name-calling and unruliness, the comments about where people slept and had houses, about Crixless hand swinging, I couldn’t help but daydream sentimentally myself.

Imagining those chalky one-room schoolhouses, the different classes partitioned from each other by standing blackboards, in which our generation learned our most durable lessons about human dignity and the exercise of power.

Each bark of Silence or Order, every invitation to take a walk outside, each rise in intonation at the end of Members, every assertion of the authority of the House, strummed the irresistible memory to the fundamentalisms impressed into the palms and seats of our childhoods, as the singular method to attain decency and order.

And in that moment, I went there with you, and you inspired the most brilliant legislative idea I’ve had in the longest while— For an amendment to the Representation of the People Act.

If an adult of any race, as you recalled, could flog a neighbour’s child, to ensure its goodness and rightness; it follows that any voter in an MP’s constituency or a neighbouring one ought to be able to beat their Member of Parliament.

Nothing else has worked, after all. Election after election, post-Independence liberal democracy has delivered us the same harden, troublesome representatives, telling tales on each other for five whole years, or bawling “But all ah we tief.” What better way to manage the rampant profligacy, ineffectiveness and unaccountability that have overtaken national governance? Criminality and corruption among politicians will now be a thing of the past. Licks like MPs.

The last Prime Minister shuffled and reshuffled, and it made no difference. Yours laments his “young Cabinet,” whose members’ wilful waste is a clarion call for a box behind the ears and a forced recital of “Do Not Throw Upon The Floor.” In your household or mine, as profound a misunderstanding as theirs of the value of things would inevitably have resulted in strokes: for Darryl at 44, for being old enough to know better; for Shamfa, 35, so she would know not to do so again. Fitzie ought to be able to reminisce in his dotage, grateful for the licking that made him a better Minister of Works.

You remember our elders’ system of Beat First and Ask Questions Later? Even Members with pending matters would get a cut tail. We are viscerally familiar, as well, with the deep indignity of sending one child to fetch the instrument to beat another. So Gerald can cut the guava whip for Marlene. And she can fetch the skinny belt, the one that really stings, for him. They deserve each other.

Licks, after all, is what we know with the certainty of tradition is a solution for everything. The thing we feel confident would have prevented every current social ill. It is a currency we know better than the price of our freedom.

To the 12- and 13-year-olds who didn’t pass for “prestige schools” last week, and to those who love and parent them:

You are the people who matter to me most right now. And to a lot of other people I know. You are my future. You are the nation. I’m celebrating your resilience; and I’m advocating for what this country owes you. So I’ve asked a few people I know, who’ve walked the path you are about to, to share some words with you. And with the policymakers who ought to make you the centre of educational resource allocation. Come back next week to read a few more.

HR Ian Roach, an Independent Senator since 2013, attended Diego Martin North Secondary School & St Mary’s College.

The attraction for me was half-day school. I was not interested in school. Remember we used to get half-day for cricket—imagine for the rest of your secondary life, half-day. That would be just fantastic. Little did I know that my mother had plans for me: I had lessons until five.

I was always into sports. I came from a home with eight siblings. Education, discipline and manners were the cornerstone of my upbringing. And hard work. That is what drove me. Even though you may not have passed for your first choice at the first go, that is not the be all and end all of life. After that I went to UWI. I did two degrees, history and law. I went to Columbia University on a full scholarship, also to Warwick University on a full scholarship. I was in Africa, Zaire. In my first two years as a young attorney, I got a Commonwealth scholarship.

The short answer to success is the benefit of family. Once you have that support, I think anything is possible. You’re born ordinary, but with the right nurturing you can achieve extraordinarily.

This one-exam to determine the early life of a child is oppressive and does more harm than good. In Finland, they start school later than we do and the success rate is higher. They put emphasis on all levels of school, on the quality of teaching and the environment. This rote, one-cap-fits-all…people have different timing: I’ve known guys who went to St Mary’s and ended up leaving with one pass. There must be a better way of assessing people on an individual basis, revising our system, especially to meet today’s demands when there are so many more opportunities, careers, and people don’t have to be put into this straightbox from so early o’clock if you pass for a prestige school, get your CAPE. There are so many different ways of bringing out the best in students, tutoring without injuring students. A lot more emphasis needs to be on psychology and socialising of children.

Sabrina Mowlah-Baksh, two-term City Councillor and 2012-13 Deputy Mayor of San Fernando, attended Marabella South & Pleasantville Secondary Schools.

The revelation that I was not a “prestige school” graduate is most times met with utter amazement, followed by the remark, “But you behave like a Naps girl!” This baffling reaction insults not only my ethos but devalues the richness of my experiences at Marabella Junior Secondary and Pleasantville Senior Comprehensive Schools. I make no bones about it, I had the best teachers ever. The richness of interactions with diverse peers stimulated notions of community and society still relevant to my life today. This I consider to be a “prestige experience.”

In my view, the richness rather than the physical space of the experience is more valuable. My initial quest for self-validation was prompted by wanting to exit a state of poverty, which impacted how I was viewed and treated as a result. The devaluing of non-prestigious schools is not only harmful but cruel. What is problematic is our value systems and the sources of those values. I have had the privilege to work regionally and internationally, to influence policy, to represent my people and country. This gives great credence to the individual that I am, because of and not despite being a “Secondary School girl.” I own it and affirm the experience. Big up to all students!

Westmin James, Deputy Dean of the Faculty of Law at the University of the West Indies Cave Hill campus, attended Mucurapo West, St James & Tranquility Government Secondary Schools

SEA is but one chapter in your life story; it’s not your whole story.

I did SEA (then called Common Entrance) 25 years ago at the age of 11, with great expectations. I was expecting to go to my first-choice school, Trinity College, a school an uncle who I looked up to attended. I had skipped Standard 4 and was doing well on my practice tests, so I felt confident.

To say I was disappointed was an understatement when, instead of my first choice, I passed for Mucurapo Junior Secondary School, a school that was not even one of my choices. I cried long and hard, all the way home, and for weeks thereafter. At that age, for me there could be no worse feeling. I was not only disappointed in myself, but seriously believed that I ruined the rest of my life.

I, however, did not let those results be my whole story. I worked incredibly hard, and with the assistance of teachers who saw potential in me, my family, and some great family friends, after Mucurapo Junior Secondary I moved on to St James Government Secondary, where I sat my CXC’s. I then moved on to A-Levels at Tranquility Government Secondary School. I was subsequently accepted into the Faculty of Law at the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill, from where I graduated with First Class Honours, being one of only three to attain that distinction that year. I went on to obtain a Masters of Law degree on scholarship at the University of Cambridge in England; and later a Legal Education Certificate at the Hugh Wooding Law School.

I practised law at a leading chambers in Trinidad, before I joined the Faculty of Law at UWI at the Cave Hill campus as a lecturer.

While I accept that my results did not define me, we as a nation must acknowledge the structural disadvantages that so many suffer leading up to and as a result of this exam, and so must strive to do better for all our children.

My last column couldn’t fit all the inspiring post-SEA messages for families with children bound for the nation’s lowest-ranked secondary schools that I received from a generation of high achievers who’ve graduated from them. The Skeetes, teachers themselves, highlight again the power of parenting and how committed people, who staffed those schools in their early years, make a powerful difference.

Gerald & Geraldine Skeete attended Marabella West and San Fernando East Secondary Schools. “I have always been proud to state that I am a product of the junior secondary school system. I have been doing so for the past 30-plus years of my teaching career, especially during school graduations and when SEA results are released.

This has been to give words of encouragement to students and parents that “the world is not lost” if a child attends a junior secondary or other non-prestigious school. It’s not the school you pass for, but what you do when you get there. I always relate to them that my sister and I are among many others who have passed through the system and were able to attain high achievement despite the negative labelling of these schools by many in society.

I am very thankful that my mother supported my sister and me when we both decided to attend junior secondary school despite having a second chance at writing the Common Entrance examination. Today I know she is very happy and proud of all our achievements.”

“My twin brother holds a BEd degree, is a senior teacher at a primary school and is a District Commissioner in the Boy Scout movement. I have a PhD in Literatures in English and lecture at The University of the West Indies, and have also taught at the primary and secondary levels. These accomplishments are the results of us both having had a good formal education, supported by good parenting. I have encountered students from all walks of life who have done well through sheer grit and ambition regardless of the secondary school they had passed for.

“Trinidad and Tobago is a classist society where education is closely linked to social status. It will take a long time to undo the ingrained biases associated with secondary school placements, which are also considered to be indicators of intelligence. Because our attitudes play a major part in effecting change, these factors need to be taken into consideration in determining the reformation of education policy and assessment practices even as more opportunities for, and mass democratisation of, schooling in our country continue to flourish.”

But these stories, many caution—even their narrators—betray the students who cannot read them with their families and who will find in their schools, violence, neglect and teachers who do not resemble those in the stories.

Keron King, PhD, a criminologist, attended St Joseph and St Augustine Secondary Schools. “SEA is a representation of everything wrong with our education system. It is stressful, it disfigures true education, and it sends a message to the vast majority of our 11-year-olds that you have failed. In 1995, I was one of those 11-year-olds. Before Common Entrance I hadn’t really internalised failure, nor did I consider myself less than. I don’t remember much about the day I got my results. Just the intense feeling of failure.

“My classmates who had supportive parents made it out okay. But those who came from homes that either did not value education, or did not have time or know-how to offer the assistance, did not. Most of my friends are employed in exploitative situations or one of the arms of national security. Not because they believe in public safety, but because it’s the most secure job you can get with five passes.

“I would say my teachers at “Gustine” and “Curepe” were equally competent as prestige school teachers. But there were a few of them who did not believe in us. I remember my Maths teacher telling my class in Form 5 (we did not have any Maths teacher in Form 4) that none of us would pass. He was almost right: one person passed. My colleagues all shared horror stories of teachers who never came to class or just got tired of trying to manage a class of 34 boys and girls who all had significant family challenges.

“The typical underperforming state-run schools are not places to send students. A teacher at one of mine said she wouldn’t even send a dog to that school now.

“I don’t agree with this narrative that we all can make it regardless of the school. That is not my experience; most of us do not make it. Regardless of how one defines ‘make it.’ Most of my classmates did not get a full CXC certificate. Most of us still do not quite understand mathematics; many still cannot write, read for understanding, or think critically. We have huge gaps in our knowledge, which by itself isn’t bad, as knowledge can always be attained. But most of us have very low self-esteem and it significantly influences our adult lives.

“At a tertiary institution where I teach, few of my students went to a prestige school. Most underperformed at secondary school, and a constant variable amongst them all is lack of belief in their ability to learn, excel and produce high quality work. I feel privileged to work with them. But this system is destroying many of us every year and we need to put an end to it.”

I’ve deeply appreciated the rich ongoing public debate over the SEA, and the growing agreement that the status quo must change. Yet many commentators demonstrate how deeply wedded to inequality and stratification as ways of life we are that we can’t imagine another.

Archbishop Joe sends me, though. I will miss him. Each time a Government minister tries to hide their own backwardness under his cassock, he lifts it and chases them away. When Kamla blamed Catholics for her cowardice to repeal criminalisation of homosexuality, he called her reckless and went on radio to say his Church does not oppose decriminalisation.

When Bishop Burke and Brother Harry took to the airwaves, touting a majority IRO position in support of retaining child marriage, he labelled it legalised statutory rape. Last week the recessive Education Minister, boasting he’s as old as Common Entrance, hid behind the Concordat and Constitution and offered his version of what Marsha Riley dubbed “I did Common Entrance and I turned out fine.”

It’s violence to children, said his faith leader. And so is social promotion of those unprepared for secondary school.

Child marriage is gone. I have faith for the other two.

Last week the Port-of-Spain City Council moved to implement a clever proposal at least two years old to make Queen St pay tribute to 1977 Miss Universe “Penny” Commissiong. Clever in that the street would now be “Queen Janelle Commissiong St.”

Like the sputtering father-to-son call I received the year before, asking if I wasn’t proud to be Trinidadian, moments after Hasely Crawford won the Olympic 100m race in Montreal, Penny’s victory was one of those childhood moments you never forget. You remember where you were. You remember the emotion. You remember your family members’ expressions. Colour televisions were not yet in the average home. I was on school vacation in a house in All Fields Crown Trace in Tobago.

We’ve given Commissiong our nation’s highest award (then still named the Trinity Cross), put her face on a postage stamp, and her name on the side of a DC-9 plane. There was some resistance then that the award demanded greater merit that the dubious achievement of her small nose and straightened hair fitting a European aesthetic adjudged by random foreigners, after parading in a bathsuit and a Carnival costume. The fact she’d spent formative years in Brooklyn also arose. But in my universe at least, these were small voices drowned out by the national pride that we’d produced the only Black woman to win—and the year after Crawford’s gold! We had a Jamaican sense of our international importance.

Perhaps such pride and significance should be grounded in different things, in greater self-confidence. But Penny has gone on to become a widely beloved and engaged figure locally.

Municipal councils in places I’ve lived abroad spend significant time passing ordinances to give streets new, tributary names. Our effort seemed modest, inventive and welcome, a way of claiming a capital street for a queen of our own—without imposing postal drama or the burden of changing letterheads.

It would still be Queen St. Who knows or cares which European monarch it was originally named for, anyway? Wasn’t it Calle de San Luís before the British erased that name and slapped the nondescript reference on it? Hadn’t Marine Square and independence and the Prince of Port of Spain already barbergreened King St into oblivion? And if Charlotte was queen at the time, isn’t her name already etched onto another immortal thoroughfare from which I couldn’t imagine it being removed? And isn’t all this simply the exercise of history, the history of how place names change, which people like Michael Anthony get to uncover?

But all of a sudden Anthony was falsely raising alarms in the press that they were trying to name it “Penny St,” how unfortunate, one can’t change history that way, is Trinidad going to be renamed next, and isn’t the English language a relic of colonialism too. People were joking the Atlantic would be named Billy Ocean; the Express was editorialising about national placenaming policy; and I was scratching my head.

Then unexpectedly I found myself straddling two completely different social media conversations. One featured a young lesbian tickled at any dragging of the old queen, in dialogue with an AfroTrinbagonian man invoking the structural violence embedded in the urban landscape we move through daily, cataloguing in historical detail outrageous racial violence committed by the people whose names weigh it down.

In the other, light-skinned people of different races echoed each other’s grief and alarm at the erasure of a colonial heritage (some claimed as their own) by philistine administrators, for sake of a trivial nationalism. They acknowledged history’s violence, but argued Black and Indian people’s names should go only on new things; to do otherwise is to destroy history. (On nothing with any established value, I thought.) Reversal of colonisers’ renaming is acceptable only to restore an aboriginal name. People invoked rationality, but I felt a stunning sense of loss of patrimony. And I recalled the resistance I had never listened to to removing another royal’s name from Mandela Park.

Here, I thought, was Shabaka Kambon and Claudius Fergus’s Cross Rhodes Freedom Project come alive—an interesting Caribbean initiative to bring to a crossroads thinking about how roads and public spaces embody “an unacceptably casual treatment of colonial violence.” That power and its history matter.

I thought, too about our nine-days-wonder “Parts Unknown” episode. But the recognition that I was in both Facebook threads gave me hope. What I found remarkable—even in how my own impassioned responses led to a private message urging me to calm down—is how we fail to listen to each other’s histories, to hear each other’s feelings. That in getting justice and policy right, what people feel matters more than reason. That what so prevents us from sewing a nation together from the patches it remains is both conversation and recognition of how our core social structures embed violence within them.

I’ve wondered, too, in fiction about how: “Naming was such a funny thing, the moon thought, staring down into the long teeth and gums of the Orinoco delta and thinking back to before sea flowed through the Serpent’s Mouth to the west and the island was part of the mainland and not deserving of a name. It also seemed it was a matter, like Columbus, of naming what you imagined or hoped, not that something truly was its name. The moon knew that it was namelessness that produced imagination.”

Imagine if, instead of purposeless rendering of street names into Spanish on signs, they recorded the naming history of the thoroughfare. That may be asking too much. I visited the City Corporation website, and was momentarily excited to find a page title “History.” It’s blank. Perhaps that’s where Mr Anthony’s energy is best deployed.

Speaking of renaming, I got some names wrong last week: Gerald and Geraldine Skeete attended Marabella South and San Fernando West Secondary Schools.

There were some fascinating comments by Government parliamentarians this week in Antigua.

It’s a place I have in-laws, but have only set foot in the airport. Taking LIAT to Dominica, you literally fly over that island, looking down at it, land at Antigua’s VC Bird Airport, teeter down the plane stairs with your hand luggage, walk across the steaming tarmac into the passenger terminal, take off your shoes and belt, take out your laptop, go through security and the x-ray scanner, put it all back in and on, walk back across the same tarmac, to the same plane, with the same crew, for the connecting flight to Douglas-Charles airport. I think the airline collects a passenger terminal fee in your ticket for the government.

Antigua’s government in power, like those here, has over the past few years made promising noises again and again about human rights and ending legal discrimination against LGBTI people, but lacked political courage to enact any. They’ve got the same pair of sodomy laws as us, since much of the Eastern Caribbean followed our 1986 model when we led the region in reforming sexual offences into a consolidated postcolonial statute. After Antigua’s 1995 reforms, in 2005 they also drafted legislation, similar to our 2000 Equal Opportunity Act, which has not become law.

Their House Speaker for ten years, now Opposition party chair, published a 1998 lesbian-themed novel while teaching in New York. I helped organise a book party for Considering Venus, which is still in print.

But Antigua & Barbuda is still a small place where regional LGBTI advocacy efforts have always struggled to find local partners willing to be visible and to lead efforts to push through the openings for change that, like here, seem to pop up with predictable regularity. Every so often, when one does, I get phoned into a live radio show panel there, usually alongside Antiguan women working on a range of gender justice issues.

Some of those folks felt especially under siege this week. Banners went up across the capital, St Johns, to celebrate the 60th anniversary of Carnival. In rainbow colours.

The colours of the national Festivals Commission, Paul Aflak, the businessman who got the government contract, explained. (For my part, I thought they were just a lovely Eastern Caribbean madras plaid.) Antigua’s most famous lesbian exile poked fun. The usual public debates ensued, with all the damage they always do to the people whose humanity is in the crosshairs.

EP Chet Greene, Minister of Trade, Commerce and Industry, Sports, Culture and National Festivals (who, I discovered, has legally named four of his children Chett II, Chet III, Chette, Chet-Lhyn—a form of indecency itself) deemed the banners’ resemblance to the international LGBTI symbol “most uncaring and most irresponsible.” And down they came.

Next up was the Prime Minister. Reacting to provocations posted on his Facebook wall by the father of an Opposition parliamentarian he’s taken to court (including the encouragement to “spend some quality time with your Dear wife”), Hon Gaston Browne had this response: “Sir, you are behaving like an anti-man. Why are you defacing my page with your idiocy?”

Browne has refused to take back or regret the word, defended the right to speak freely and make jokes without people taking it to the media, and said the remark was not intended as disrespect to LGBTI people, but being blown out of proportion. “I make no apology. Whoever LGBT wants to take that up, it’s their business.”

“There is a crisis brewing in Antigua,” a local activist I don’t think I know wrote to me. “The Prime Minister has shown his true colour, and citizens are now feeling emboldened by this. Can you bring awareness to this?”
Any such “crisis” was “manufactured,” the PM was already arguing, in those words.

Then one of the women, an activist who’d hosted a radio show I’d appeared on stepped forward. Browne appointed the 33-year-old to his Senate backbench less than six months ago, when he dismissed a union leader for opposing government legislation.

“I am not trying to disparage the good prime minister as…he is someone I respect,” Aziza Lake told the media bravely, “but…I will have to respectfully disagree with him using that phrase.” She noted how such remarks by the nation’s highest officeholders would be internalised by young LGBTI Antiguans. Lake joins Bajan trade minister Donville Inniss, who took issue publicly in May with his Cabinet drainage colleague Dennis Lowe’s obsession with the Opposition Leader’s childlessness.

Too often, Lake said, because they are not in others’ shoes, people do not know the power behind their speech.

It was a lesson in short supply locally when Guyanese Calvin Hailey was charged for sexual assault last week. News media published the name and facility of the physician who rectally examined his accuser.

People I thought I respected eagerly joined a loud social media chorus, deeply invested in their moral authority to shame and discredit a Tobagonian student whose life they know nothing about. Straight people, who paint homosexuals as predators all the time, seemed desperately afraid we could in fact be rapists: because then men could be raped. And we carelessly made it harder for any man in future to dare seek formal justice for sexual assault. I truly wanted to lose faith in Caribbean gender justice. And then there was Aziza, a young woman I barely know, in that place I know so little about, Antigua, doing what was simple and right and brave. And it gave me hope.

Her Prime Minister noted cynically that if he truly had issues with LGBTI matters, he would never have appointed Lake a Senator in the first place. Imagine if every Parliamentarian in her place acted on that.

Brendan Bain won a pyrrhic victory in Jamaican court against the University of the West Indies. He got three months salary. And UWI had breached his freedom of expression.

Driving through downtown Kingston, past the leading newspaper’s offices, my colleagues dissuaded me from stopping, going upstairs, and spooking the editors: “Duppy come fi visit!”

“Duppies dupe UWI,” a smug Jamaica Gleaner headline three years ago had termed the 30 or so NGOs who’d written the University saying Bain had lost the moral capacity to lead the regional HIV response.

The paper contacted several of us, and verified we existed. But the credibility of those with small voices is as easily made as it is broken by our so-called “epistemic institutions,” those that control what people know and think.

The paper’s sad gesture was part of a fascinating social response to uncommon bravery by another epistemic institution, UWI—which I habitually ridicule for exactly the opposite, its deliberate fogeyishness and bureaucracy.

Its old-boy doctor-leaders had summoned the integrity to fire one of their own, in response to complaints by sex work groups, people with HIV, small NGOs, gays, people whose voices don’t normally count.

In fact, whose freedom to express themselves, or sometimes even assert their opinion, is often resisted.

In another response to Bain’s firing, Christians, dressed in black, had gagged themselves and held campus protests about his free speech.

What speech was this?

UWI had given the medical professor a post-retirement contract to continue leading Mona-headquartered, United States-funded human resource development initiatives created through the regional HIV co-ordination mechanism, PANCAP.

They valued Bain enough to offer him TT$39,000 a month; and he represented the University in regional HIV decision making forums.

A year before, the Trinidadian doctor—so soft-spoken that I had long assumed, when I worked for his initiative, that he was gay—had surprised everyone. He accepted an invitation from some other institutions, ones that get to say both what’s real and what’s cosmic.

Churches, which were fighting to keep laws that criminalise gay sexual expression on the books. Bain became an expert court witness in a Belize case that eventually found such laws unconstitutional.

To the court he “testified that there is a higher degree of HIV and cancer among men who have sex with men,” a Jamaica Observer news story last week reported. And my media frustration rose in my temples again.

But perhaps journalists who’ve consistently failed to report what Bain actually told the court should be forgiven. The testimony that got the regional groups with the small voices and stigmatised reputations so upset is really, really hard to report in a daily newspaper. I myself am stumped.

Essentially, Bain—as an expert, remember—offered the court two descriptions of intimate behaviour: one between a man and a woman; and one between two men.

The first hit key things most modern adults know happen: kiss, fondle, vaginal, oral, anal, orgasm.

The second, without a single reference to any study, or any quantification whatsoever, ends up in a very different world of keywords like fist, rim, golden, felch, and I left some out.

In the Caribbean, many of our institutions still adhere to the colonial ethos that devaluing some people’s humanity over others—especially on the basis of sex—is how we should build a moral society.

But PANCAP, like other institutions that plan and fund the global HIV response, holds as a principle that cultural work, to transform the groups most vulnerable to HIV into ones believed to hold human dignity, is critical to ending the epidemic.

As Bain’s written testimony—and its groundless effort to stigmatise non-heterosexual sex—started circulating in mid-2013, many in the HIV field lost confidence in his reputation.

PANCAP’s leaders sought to engage him on his extraordinary court testimony but, instead of having a dialogue, he stepped aside from his leadership in the body.

International donors who controlled the UWI programme’s pursestrings grumbled openly. Yet, Jamaican media—and Bain’s attorneys at trial—sought to minimise these concerns as some small, questionable groups’. The groups whose decency Bain had already painted as questionable with his “expert” authority. In a case about their rights to sexual self-expression.

No one had prevented Bain’s court testimony, which he made clear was in his personal capacity, however much of his authority came from the University.

But everyone who thought he needed to go agreed that he’d hurt the regional HIV response, and damaged the University’s reputation.

Most onlookers, though, relied on the story being told in the press. That narrative was that uppity gays’ undue influence was threatening academic freedom. No media reported the unacademic opinion Bain had told the Belize court.

UWI bargained with Bain. He promised to leave his contract early. Then changed his mind. So they released him from it.

Bain sued UWI. He wanted his job back. Five kinds of damages. Pay beyond the date funding was pulled, after the drama his testimony incited.

And, surprise: A finding UWI had defamed him. A declaration his rights to freedom of expression were breached. His professional credibility had been threatened.

He was subjected to stigma. Witnesses testified to their outrage at his treatment. Wow!

At the end of the day, I got to feel proud of UWI, who made some historically powerful affirmations of its commitment to the people with the small voices.

That, I’ve concluded, is what I do best here. Small stories that I think in the telling become enlarged. Today I wanted to tell the story of a family, about how the US Embassy in Port-of-Spain denied a widowed parent a visa to go to a child’s university graduation. Valedictorian. Elite college. First in the family to go.

The student made the long public transit trek out to my home in suburban Maryland for a visit that lasted a cup of tea. As we walked to the irregular bus my visitor would need to take back to the subway, I was told the story. Immediately I knew it was a story that needed to be re-told.

But some stories are too small. That story would end here. Not even filling one column down the page. The story was merely the end of another story. So I needed to tell a bigger story. About why the denial cut so deep. About how I came to tell the story. About the words I learned to tell the story.

Not all the stories seemed to belong to me to tell, though. And they did not want to be told.

There is another very small story. It is, likewise, a story I have been unable to tell, because it is so small. I have tried to tell it over and over, and it stays small. It is a story about my mother.

There is another story of my mother. One I am not ready to tell because it is harder. It, too, may not be mine to tell but I will tell it anyway. Though, to tell the truth, it has slithered out in places already. It is the prelude to the story I tell today. It is the story how my mother grew up knowing how to hide shame. But I will not tell it today.

The story today is really just that: that my mother hid her shame from me. It starts and ends there. I learned the story from a man who lives with me. I have known him almost all his life. He had grown sullen and surly. I tortured him why. And it all came out: the small story. Of shame.

The shame he shared with my mother. The shame they would pull out and swap, the old, wisened woman and the young angry man who did not know how to hide his shame. The shame about me.

Do not speak to me in public. God destroyed two cities.

A man I have known all his life.

Your mother is ashamed.

The mother I had known all my life. She and I had struggled. I knew she had been ashamed. But I imagined that I had won. That I had changed her heart. My family was her family. Or so it seemed. He drove her car. She bought him presents. Attended his funeral.

One day she spoke quietly of her faith. And I became very puzzled. And angry. I had never listened carefully enough to know: that I had won her heart. But I had not changed her heart. She showed me her heart. And in another part of it she hid her shame.

I had no words then. I had anger.

I had no words either when the young man told me my mother was ashamed. I had no words for my mother. But I understood. I understood how much I was loved. Love he could not understand. Understand enough to hide his shame. All I wanted to tell her is: you are careless with him; he is young and does not know to hide his shame. I wondered, though, if that is a lesson that ought to be taught.

My mother loved me, so she hid her shame. From me. That is the whole story. I will talk about my mother’s shame another day. Today is not the day.

The small story of my mother’s shame is also too small to fill this space. So I will tell another small story. A story I had also wanted to tell today. It is a story about grief. But it is not a story about shame.

It is a story of my first visit to the student’s campus. After my visa had expired and I was living here illegally. A story of the friend I had spent that weekend visiting. The story of how we met. Two young, black English-speakers at a Puerto Rican funeral parlour in Brooklyn. At a homegoing filled with shame. And silence. How we spoke.

A story about his mother, of whom he was not ashamed. Of his visits to see her, institutionalised in Brooklyn. Of his younger brother who became ill first. Of how he, older, had been fine for years after, how he’d stopped taking the meds because he wanted to feel. The cycle of hospitalising him. The homelessness. The helplessness. The story of how young he died. How fresh the loss still feels, how complicated, how much it needs words.

Gerard’s story is not my story. But it is a story I dare to tell. It is a story of my grief. How it attaches to other people’s stories. Stories I cannot tell.

I had taken out all the names from the story I was to tell today. But some stories are not mine to tell.

I will still tell my mother’s story. But not today.

“I see a more visible gay life and I know fellow Trinis who are out in one way or another—something I couldn’t say before I left for Canada all those years ago. In a way, I envy that they have stayed and prevailed among our own—and didn’t run, like I did.”

Natasha Barsotti paid this loving tribute to local activists’ and their work in a review last Monday of Maria Govan’s film set in Paramin and Blanchisseuse, Play the Devil.

It is a tribute to the power of imagination. To those who—unlike older generations—have not learned the things they could not imagine.

To those who imagine that choices for those born in the Caribbean are larger than the two our region’s “it” writer of the moment, Jamaican Marlon James, offered in a 2015 New York Times magazine essay, as he came out as gay.

“I knew I had to leave my home country—whether in a coffin or on a plane,” the editors’ subhead paraphrased James.

Barsotti’s words honour those who do not have the choice to do either of these. Who have to live. Here.

My activist politics have always been a politics of imagination. That it’s more important to teach ourselves to widen our imagination to encompass the change we need to realise to live here—than it is to invest in ensuring the imagination of our lives (or the place we live) is so narrow that we are guaranteed rescue, by other places, or judges.

Like activists, the job of artists is to provide us imagination—to give you, in Audre Lorde’s phrase I shared here in March, “words you do not yet have.”

That is why James’ essay drove me to Facebook-whining, the moment I finished it, how that narrow narrative of the Caribbean “exhausts and enrages me.” Galled that one of the most irreverent provocateurs against stereotypes of the region would slip into so cant a reduction of the complexity of sexual citizenship. (In his non-fiction, at least.)

It is also my critique of Govan’s gay-themed feature film, which followed fellow Bahamian Kareem Mortimer’s 2010 Children of God as the darling of the T&T Film Festival—cinematographically beautiful—lead roles played by foreign actors—and ending in death. A frustrating inability by our most applauded artists to imagine Caribbean LGBTQI life differently—seven years apart.

Who is responsible for the stubbornness of this idea that if one does not leave the region one dies—spiritually or in the flesh, as an artist or queer person? An idea thoroughly useless to anyone who stays. Or ends up going back. To homophobes staying and dying artless deaths in Embacadere and Enterprise.

I know Barsotti’s envy well. It overwhelmed me hugging Godfrey Sealy under a century-old baobab in Bandabou, Curaçao, 20 years ago. Lone US resident at a groundbreaking gathering of 70 LGBTQI Caribbean activists, I joined the weeping end to its spiritual ceremony, blubbering my jealousy “of all of this” into Sealy’s ear.

It was my third trip back in one year after 14 in exile. It was the year another writer, Staceyann Chin, left the Caribbean. In a video tribute 16 years later, she shared similar emotions.

“I certainly have nothing but deep admiration, deep—even—envy for the people who stayed, for the people who carved a life out for themselves there on the island…You have come such a long way, and you’ve done it without those of us who ran. And I have all kinds of complicated feelings about that. But at the heart of it, at the belly of it, is mad love and admiration.”

She spoke of the bravery of sexy, swag young Jamaicans “with rings in places no one can mention,” whom she invoked to “keep making sure we show up with what it is you prescribe”—the role for those who “ran.” Perhaps Sealy was saying nothing different in 1997, even as he ridiculed my similar sentimentality. “Jealous? I jealous of you. I want your job.”

There are two endings to tell this story.

In one, it’s a time when everywhere imagination is failing, the ability to believe politics changes anything growing smaller and smaller. When I imagine Keith Rowley calls the election this year. Before rivers of political sludge snaking toward him meet and overflow? To plant a new crop of MPs in the desert one looks out at from the Parliament gallery? When, as he offered in Pt Fortin, voters discover there are no new options.

A time when, to paraphrase a recent newspaper ad, government has so little to offer citizens that creating equality of opportunity to crime and retrenchment is the best idea. Yet, even that is withheld. A time to imagine it is time to run, to reach toward jealousy instead of imagination, to retire to the hillside of another place and follow young people’s prescriptions. A time when those other places are making themselves smaller, when Donald Trump makes Robert Mugabe seem statesmanlike.

The second ending is different.

It’s this talented, working student, a 20-year-old visual artist and writer building a creative practice he calls artivism, whom I’d discovered week-before-last. Who shares Thursday that his is the Letter of the Day in the Jamaican papers. With the same “sense of pride,” the letter talks of “what it meant to be young, black, and gay,” to participate in a Pride festival that drew thousands. Followed by his email address.

And I panic. Remembering young Trinbagonians who, year after year, showed bravery for the cameras on the International Day Against Homophobia, only to be punished by their families, I quickly message colleagues, lament his youthful carelessness, beg them to protect his safety.

They dress me down. I have shown up with the wrong remedy. As an old man “constantly instilling fear.” Imagination is what is prescribed.

Before this ending, I had not been able to imagine this young man.