People with disabilities like Mr Manning’s can serve
Patrick Manning is disabled. Can we say that out loud? It’s no more shameful than my being gay. Or the quiet Seventh-Day Adventist grandmother and former government worker Catherine Williams being a...
View ArticleA new Carnival mentality needed
Before the Carnival of our politics (as Ricky Singh and others have so aptly framed it) takes back centre stage, let me reflect a bit on the one that just wound down.Mine was incident free. Unless you...
View ArticleGrief, hope, love and activism
My mother had me late. Headed for 90, each birthday closer is indelible. I am the age where answering how old I am constantly requires subtraction. A poem of mine, to appear in a new Caribbean...
View ArticleFlying Injustice
Watching young Trinbagonians exercise nation-building passion and skill is magical. Last week Cydelle Crosby flew to Washington DC and made history. The 21-year-old spoken-word artist brought special...
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THE FETISH OF LAW
A Dutch law student wrote recently, asking why Caribbean countries don’t remove our sodomy laws if we don’t enforce them. Grenada is the only one I’ve seen use its law against “unnatural connexion” in...
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Two ways to tell a rape story
T&T is the land of the nine-day wonder—”media cycle,” modern political strategists call it. Yet, a full month later, reverberations continue from what I spontaneously termed the “baselessness” of...
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Making motherhood real
I was amused to discover that one of the original recordings of the circa 1915 saccharine American song we all learned to parrot as children about the mother with the “heart of purest gold” and “eyes...
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Trinidad on fire…Tobago on fire
Fire is devastating. It hasn’t touched my life, but last weekend reminded me how easily it could.I currently spend a chunk of each day at a wonderfully staffed new Caura Hospital unit operated jointly...
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Doing death
I spent my twenties and thirties at funerals—mostly friends from Aids.Funerals, even without surprise appearances by outside children, are fascinating places to witness the range of contending yet...
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Mrs Joyce Pierre’s daughter
Like Helen Whitener, the St George’s College girl from St Augustine who came home as a US trial judge with her wife this week, I too left Trinidad for America in my teens 35 years ago. Unlike her, I...
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The right not to marry
I so wanted to not write about marriage. Across the Caribbean this week, everyone else was celebrating or hand-wringing over a court decision adding the remaining quarter of the United States and their...
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‘But I am the Minister of Health’
I don’t have HIV. I’m clear, though: my taxes funding diagnostic tests and medication for foreigners with communicable diseases is in my interest. It helps prevent transmission, protecting me and those...
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What do LGBTI voters have to vote for?
Tomorrow’s election seems historic—“Sexual orientation” in a party manifesto for the first time. A transgender candidate attracting international visibility. A safe-seat candidate everyone knows is...
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Taking campaigning to an old low
Low-income women pay VAT like everyone. But coming out the blocks as a candidate in July, PNM Lady vice-chairman Camille Robionson-Regis thought nothing of making access to reproductive health...
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My brief with wayne sturge
“Sturge’s other briefs,” TV6’s chyron read. What a fortnight of headlines for sexy pictures.Darryl Smith’s taunting innuendo on his fellow MP’s masculinity has elicited considerable national...
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Championing a bank, feminism and difficult race talk
I boxed myself into talking about race this Sunday. I really want to write about banking and feminism. Our banks, their inefficient practices, illogical rules, and the zealots they hire to guard our...
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Communication crucial in case of emergency: English please
Last week the banks; this week the airlines.Copa was my beloved carrier. Free alcohol and warm food. Plus, the antidote to connecting through Miami before the American Airlines terminal immigration...
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I’m volunteering to serve, Mr AG
This week, the Attorney General accepted a European Union mission and UWI Law Faculty invitation, as part of a funded human rights strengthening project, to sit on a Human Rights Day panel with senior...
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Shannon Gomes and Aria: Missing the Boat
That Labour Day here commemorates riots that immolated a police officer makes me proud this little place handed flag-and-anthem independence has an official holiday to celebrate the violence,...
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Getting through in 2016
I was on TV this week, reminding the nation’s NGOs don’t just do charity that responds to a world of hardships, but also work to change policy that creates those hardships. I was responding to the...
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