A Call for Submissions

Call for poetry submissions:

What for: An online portal for the reading and discovery of the work of West Indian/West Indian heritage writers of poems at:

 http://pentuhpaper.wordpress.com/

What we are looking for: Unpublished works that explore images of so-called Caribbean-ness and do something with them — invert them, twist them, crack them open. Baptise them or make them anew. Works that tread unfamiliar territory — or familiar ones. Works that spill out from that dark place in your mind and relieve the pressure of compression inside of your heart.

Avant-garde, experimental and radical verse are all welcome. Dabblers of journal verse are welcome. Bring yourself — with words.

Of particular interest are poems pertaining to themes of identity, gender, gender roles and sexuality.

Please indicate upon submission, if you would prefer to use a nom de plume. Please include a brief biographical sketch or simply, nationality information. Authors retain all original rights to their work.

For further inquiry, to hear more about this venture or to submit work, please e-mail creativecommess[at] gmail [dot] com

coco dance festival; continuum dance project

sonja dumas’ continuum dance project (proud "we" for me) performs strange tale of an island shade @ the coco dance festival tomorrow+friday 8pm. strange tale… is a work we showed still-in-progress @ cottontree foundation and trinidad theatre workshop (little stuff + big stuff) earlier this year, it’s now done and one of my favourites i been in, up there with noble douglas’ why bach, why not? (totally different reasons). i love the movement and the text we explore, love the music used, and think it addresses shit we should all be thinking about…

COCO dance festival 2009
Contemporary Choreographers’ Collective
Featuring the choreography of Rachel Lee, Elvis Radgman, Makeda Thomas, Dave Williams, Abeo Jackson, Nicole Wesley, Sonja Dumas, Anika Marcelle and Northwest Laventille
Thursday, October 15th at 8:00 pm
Friday, October 16th at 8:00 pm
Queen’s Hall, St. Ann’s
All tickets $100
Available from participating groups and Queen’s Hall

walk good.

full disclosure: this post is, once again, excerpted from one @ sweet trini’s urban folk tales.

life imitating art?

it’s been suggested of late that i modeled my trinidad noir protagonist on myself even more than i intended (clear+conscious choice) and pointed out later that i seem to be living my fiction. the very fictitiousness of the work suddenly comes under suspicion. i don’t argue because i don’t necessarily care what brings revelation, once it comes, inspiration attendant. but nobody should die in the real story…

meanwhile, in unrelated news, i hear grims get nominated for a cacique award for the yet-unblogged-by-me 2009 3canal carnival show joy+fire lighting design. he also designing lights for the upcoming 3canal show freedom.com; i stage managing and directing some, featuring members of the gutta crew. and in related news, since isoke’s griot productions came into existence to facilitate our gutta reading, we running with it, starting with a full production of gutta beautiful as soon as we can- big tings a gwan!- and want to create our 2nd (multidisciplinary) show from scratch (me+isoke as co- artistic directors)- we have a company burning for worthwhile projects and timing already sends collaborators our way…

after freedom.com but before gutta, i’m in something with continuum dance project- check it:

Continuum has Something for the Little and Something for the Big

Continuum Dance Project will present its second venture for 2009 entitled “little stuff & big stuff” at the Trinidad Theatre Workshop in Belmont on Saturday, August 8 and Sunday, August 9. There will be two performances each day – the “Once Upon a Caribbean Time” stories for children will take place at 4pm, and Experimenta, a series of solos and group works by the company, begins at 7pm.

 Artistic Director, Sonja Dumas, who is the writer and creator of the CD entitled Once Upon a Caribbean Time from which the children’s stories will be adapted, is equally excited about the prospect of encouraging budding choreographers in Experimenta. “There is always room for new thinkers and movers in dance,” she said, “and their efforts should be encouraged.” Dumas will also present two of her own works – Vapse and The Strange Tale of an Island Shade. The latter is a work in progress. Continuum Dance Project, which had its first public performance in 2004, is a creative laboratory that uses movement as its main tool of performance exploration in a contemporary context.

Admission to the Once Upon A Caribbean Time show is $30 for children and $20 for adults. General admission to Experimenta is $40. Reservations can be made by calling the Trinidad Theatre Workshop at 624-8502. Patrons are asked to pay at the door.

so, plenty wuk to get back to, not all mentioned here, but all good. but as we talking entertainment industry, a brief comment on the shabba ranks + buju banton concert in the savannah the other day before i go: plenty baby powder, limacol, marijuana, cigarette, hemp smoke- not enough buju.

walk good.

full disclosure: this post is excerpted from one over @ "sweet trini’s urban folk tales".

“gutta beautiful” staged reading saturday

found ourselves a whitegirl for our staged reading of gutta beautiful, so we orn like boil corn.

i’m thrilled with the cast and starting to get excited about saturday, cornerbar 4pm:

gutta beautiful tells the searing story of lola, a young black woman who finds herself at a crossroads in love and life after discovering her own role in her man’s choice to surrender to popular culture and the drug trade economy. lola’s journey, as well as michael’s and her girlfriends suga sweet and orchid transcend time, exploring the history of love and life for people of colour.

"the play represents both the imaginary and fantastic landscape of our collective psyche and the hard-core physical reality of our daily lives,” says playwright, nina a. mercer.

cast: isoke edwards-najeeullah, tracey lucas, tonya evans, mandisa granderson, muhammad muwakil, nickolai salcedo, sophie wight.

parental guidance strongly suggested; mature content.

about the author: born and raised in washington, d.c. and now residing in new york, nina angela mercer is a playwright, essayist, fiction writer and visual artist. her play, gutta beautiful has been produced at d.c.’s warehouse theatre (2005), and for d.c.’s first capital fringe festival at the woolly mammoth theatre (2006). she received her m.f.a. from american university and studied transnational feminist literature of the 20th century in the english doctoral program at the university of maryland. she has taught at american university, university of maryland, and howard university, and is also the founder and artistic director of ocean ana rising, inc., a non-profit arts incubator and outreach project. nina is the proud mother of two daughters.

walk good.

ps: i eh forget mj, just don’t think we really need any more commentary.

casting+art

and now, the last words you thought you’d hear me say: i need a white woman.
i’m directing a staged reading of the excellent play gutta beautiful this month and have 1 role still uncast- i need a white female to read 1 of the characters, so any whitegirls or people in the company of whitegirls interested in acting, please let me know asap*- it’s a good role, dark humour, reading supposed to be month-end.
plus, darren cheewah’s 1st solo art exhibit runs (june17th, happy birthday chee!) this week until july17th @ the republic of sydenham art gallery, sydenham avenue, st.anns: wednesdays-fridays 10am-4pm, saturdays+sundays 10am-noon (621.3970 for private viewing appointments mondays+tuesdays) all pieces on sale! and when he done that, i should be finally getting new ink!
there’s an erotic art exhibit happening around town, too, i may read something for its spoken word/poetry event- more details as i have them.
on the other side, mourning the loss of a friend- i didn’t blog about $hok’s ill health because in the same weird way i couldn’t seem to see him, i didn’t know what to say about it. denial, i suppose, which evaporated yesterday when i saw him still+small, except for his gargantuan hands, in his casket and realised i was in much worse shape than previously realised. now i wish i’d written about him when he was still with us. but i can still say he was always entertaining, wildly talented, and will be missed. biglove sheldon, wherever you are, enjoy the music.
walk good.

*full disclosure: something very similar to this post is up @ sweet trini’s urban folk tales, which is where you can contact me (comment/email) with interested whitegirls*.

lilliput theatre presents lagahoo

“take the yampee from a dog’s eye, put it in yours, and look through the keyhole at midnight,” to see lagahoo. or come to queens hall the weekend of may15-17 when lilliput theatre takes the stage.
this year’s production investigates local folklore through one of our lesser-known, more elusive characters, using traditional and contemporary storytelling to ask questions that nobody seems to have answers for anymore. do you know what to do when you see a lagahoo?
lilliput theatre’s lagahoo started as all their shows do, with a junior carnival band designed by merylle mahabir. from the concept that sparked the costume design, ideas were hatched and nurtured and developed into a script by the drama class, asking and attempting to answer questions about lagahoo and his contemporaries in today’s world. artistic director, producer and choreographer noble douglas and director wendell manwarren have led lilliput on a journey of discovery – discovery that today’s youth don’t know trinbagonian folklore as in times past, and discovery of the secrets and stories that await the brave soul willing to listen, maljo beads clutched tightly, just in case.
lagahoo is a shape-shifter versed in the dark arts, but little else is known about the extent of lagahoo’s capabilities. what we do know is that lagahoo could be anybody, your boss, your teacher, your friend, your family…maybe we all have something of the lagahoo in us, waiting to be released.
but when nobody whispers about lagahoo in the dark of night anymore, when nobody tells the stories, can lagahoo continue to exist? does the shape-shifter assume a new form in keeping with the times, no longer known as lagahoo but manifest as some new danger? what happens to folklore characters when nobody believes in them? do they simply fade away or do they strike back?

walk good.

A Short Drop

It seems like wherever enclaves of people from different cultures are found, vestiges of our home and the culture from whence we came soon follow. Like roti shops and mini-buses. When I was an undergrad, you could take a ride from my campus in North Miami, all the way to downtown Miami (and back) for one dollar each way on the local jitney. The benefits meant that you weren’t limited to the schedule of the Miami-Dade city transport system, nor limited to their routes which didn’t necessarily go everywhere that people might want to go. The jitney ride in North Miami functioned as a main source of transportation (as well as supplemental to other public transport ) for large numbers of people including college students within the area. Here was where you were summoned onto an already full mini-bus by a nodding driver assuring you that there is room, while you scanned the darkly tinted windows with slight skepticism.

The thing is, you never really knew until you actually got on. Then you did, only to survey the hodge-podge of arms and knees, tightly folded legs, rapid fire kreyol over the sounds of kompa–with increasing doubt; while from his perch behind the steering wheel, you were solidly assured by the driver, that there was indeed a place for you, deep in the belly of the mini-bus. You just had to keep going. Eventually you’d find the space, sandwiched between two strangers, tightly squeezed on either side. When I was riding the jitney, there were still mini-buses with no buzzer, so you had to holler from the back over the din and once in a while, between the animated conversations and the music, the driver did miss your stop. But these people beside you, these people you only knew from this ride, would always help, passing on the call for “stop!” from person to person and mouth-to-mouth, like a verbal smoke signal until we came to rest. Even people that did not know English well, knew how to yell stop on the jitney.

Throughout the developing world, you can find versions of the mini-bus as a cultural variation of the government created transportation system. There is always something subversive about the way in which they function as a means of getting people around. These small mini-buses cramming as many people inside as they can, undercutting the cost of other transport in some places and/or providing flexibility of routes in others. They are privately owned and in many cases, this mysterious individual (s) is sometimes not even the person who is doing all the driving. In many parts of the developing world, mini-buses are part of a larger cultural representation of everyday life, in a way that other modes of transport supposedly are not. Or at least they are, in a different way.

In a large Western metropolis like New York city for example, city buses and other kinds of public state transport don’t function in the exact same way as the mini-bus, since you would find a successful mortgage broker riding next to a blue-collar worker, on the same train on any given day. In the developing world, mini-bus culture (and there usually is one), especially in the Caribbean (and Africa) is indicative of the other social and socio-economic forces at play as well. So much so that you can find people in Trinidad, who proudly declare that “they never take public transport” before (specifically maxis, and least of all a PTSC bus) because this fact is representative of being in a certain socio-economic class that is not dependent (or never has been) on public transport. Which means you are one of those people who has your own car and when you didn’t, you’re used to get dropped around all the time.

I want to feel like in 2009, you would still be hard-pressed to find someone who has never taken a maxi before but from what I’ve heard, that’s not true. Never taken a maxi? And okay with that? Never experienced the hustle of an ambitious tout in City Gate saying he had a special seat, just for you. Never been privy to the random conversational encounters on a maxi. Never been in the front seat of a maxi, music blaring loudly while barreling down the priority bus route at break-neck speed, with the breeze whipping at your face. Never had to dodge a bottom in yuh face after shuffling yuh own bottom around for seats on a maxi. In Trinidad, there are more and more cars on the road and we’re building more and more walls, around ourselves (literal and otherwise) to shut undesirables out, so there’s a whole section of people for whom, maxi taking just will not do. As to safety concerns, I would reckon that hopping a maxi from somewhere to town and back in the day, would still be somewhat safer than doing so in a flashy car. Plus in actuality if you ask certain kinds of people who don’t take maxis, why they don’t, it has less to do with being safe, than the notion of being cheek-on-jowl with the masses. The problem is being in close quarters, like, say a “bread van” maxi, with de marrish and de parrish.

In Trini we have our maxi taxis and in Guyana you can find the “mini bus” as well. In fact, throughout the Caribbean they exist, all over Africa, as well as regions in South and Central America. In South Africa they’re called “combis.” A friend informed me that in Cuba, the Dominican Republic and Puerto-Rico, they’re called “guaguas.” In the Vanity Fair 2007 Africa issue, I read Binyavanya Wainaina’s description of the Kenyan “matatus” as “anarchic public transport vehicles,” embodying the “edgy and beautiful” enterprising spirit of a transforming African country economy. These “Isuzu mini-buses,” these “loud, aggressive vehicles” reminded me of the red, yellow, green and maroon-band maxi taxis on the streets of Trinidad in their heyday. Nowadays, maxi drivers and owners in Trinidad have their own association or representative body, which is very active in attempting to regulate the ply of drivers and conductors. The rides themselves are relatively tamed down, compared to the excess of the earlier years where you might find a fuzzy, faux fur interior detailing inside on the roof, black lights in a maxi and more than enough bass to feel it reverberating deep inside your chest.

But during the late eighties and exploding in the early to mid-nineties, maxi culture flourished in a way that made them the scourge of everyone from school principals to middle-class parents. They represented a vehicular hustle, propelled by young brash men of color, driving and touting and jostling for passengers (and sex). From the school children liming late in town for subsequent runs of their favorite maxi, the branding of certain maxis as popular rides, to the epic pong of the bass line pulsating through the whole maxi and disturbing the peace, the dub, the dub lyrics, the school girls breaking biche to get whisked away by maxi men, the ambitious tout wetting some school girl’s ears with his own (or borrowed) lyrics, the tout shuffling through wads of cash to lure some teenager/s astray, the allegations of these big hard-back men being on the prowl, the tout who allegedly had HIV and was spreading it wantonly to school girls all over the place.

These stories and others like them are part of the maxi culture in our society, particularly ones exposing the seedy sexual underside of maxi culture. It’s Trini street culture. Trini urban culture. And just Trini culture–all stemming from a ride down the road in a red-band maxi. You can find similar sentiments and stories permeating all throughout our region of the supposed ills of mini-bus culture and the complaints about the drivers. What is it about these buses? That they are clearly indispensable is a fact. But also because of the way in which public transport, by its very design, forces the converging of different layers of people (even within the same socio-economic bracket) into a confined space. Everyone cannot have a car after all. So they do create an actual socio-cultural space while providing a real necessity and a service to the population.

red-band maxi in Trinidad

Classic footage below of calypsonian Bally’s equally classic “Maxi Dub,” describing his dislike  of the youths’ maxi-culture and especially the loud dub music they play that he cannot decipher!

Hot Wuk in the Dancehall: What’s Sex Got to do With It?

The tagline on Lily Allen’s myspace profile page currently says “most people don’t know how to make love” and let’s just say for the sake of this here blog, that she is right. As opposed to being prudish, as some people may have taken it, what she is really poking fun at, is the popular discourse on sex, commonly seen in today’s popular culture. “Making love” and all its inherent connotations is nowhere near as in vogue as, “fucking.”

Even Fifty Cent’s not into it and that’s saying a lot. (Insert irony here). For reference, see that oft-cited line from “In da Club,” which says, “I’m into having sex, I ain’t into making love.” So, Lily as a pop artist herself and a young female operating in that world–well she probably understands this just as well as anyone. It’s quite interesting that she is a young female critiquing sex so brazenly and unabashedly. Yet also unsurprising. It seems that where heterosexual relations are concerned, it’s okay for women to do this. Men however, like Fifty, must never, ever bemoan the absence of “love-making” in their life. That’s just not cool. Right?

Now one of the problems with investigating the extent of pop cultural influences (or dancehall cultural influences for that matter), has to do with the fact that there’s a huge barrier to confront, when it comes to asking persons about their sexual attitudes and preferences. Then what they might actually be willing to admit about it. This versus what really goes on in the confines of anyone’s bedroom, which in actuality, is anyone’s guess. Then one must also consider the fact that young people (and/or the young at heart for that matter) form a large contingent of those very people who you want to ask about the relevance and impact of pop cultural definitions on their own bedroom behavior. And of course, no one wants to think about young people having sex, far less for discussing it (even though they clearly are). Worse yet, if we connect this all back to the pervasiveness of celebrities and pop cultural utterances. Wait, celebrities have influence?

So, what’s in a word anyway? Whether you make love, have sex, fuck or what have you? Plenty. Mainly because of the sub text and the meaning that we put behind the words. I suppose I am more concerned with what these terms mean for our attitudes toward sex and sexuality. We understand this too, so as a result, there is a distinct difference that we all attach to someone singing/saying, “so come make love to me” compared to “sit down pon it, sit down pon it.” The two being invitations/descriptions for the same activity nonetheless.

Along with music, dances today, can tell a lot about our attitudes toward sex and sexuality. As cultural norms shift and change, we can see a lot of these ideas reflected in the dances that we do. Dancing has long been linked to sex and for good reasons too. That’s why the local religious zealots flood the Trinidad and Tobago newspapers with letters after each Carnival season complaining about the display of wanton wining on tv and in pictorial spreads. That’s also why certain members of the so-called prestige convent schools in Trinidad have “no contact” dances. I mean, a sweet flex in a party can be one of the most sexually charged episodes in life! But we cannot have the convent girls getting all aroused now can we?

From the American public’s furor over Elvis Presley’s hip gyrations to the “perreo” dances of Latino youth which have scandalized many an abuela I’ve heard—dancing and sex go hand in hand. The explosion of new dances to dancehall music is especially telling as well. Partner dancing with another person (or on them for that matter) is steadily falling away to increasingly popular independent dances, in unison with a group perhaps but essentially solitary acts of “raging bull,” “tek way yuhself” and anything more current that I don’t know the name of.

Long gone are our parents’ days of “rent-a-tile” or even the sweaty May fair flex of yesteryear when somebody had yuh on lock on a wall somewhere taking a wine. Sure, there have always been specific “dances” connected to certain dancehall songs but nowadays, the advent of dances seems to have exploded into epic proportions. Either they are coming out faster or I just couldn’t be bothered but they seem plentiful and awful hard to keep track of. Some of these new dances are hyper-sexualized beyond compare. On top of all this, the majority seem devoid of any contact with another human being with only a few exceptions. Most interestingly is watching the ways in which these “ravers clavers” affect the dynamics of a crowd in a party.

I mean you either know the new dance that came out in Jamaica like, that very morning, or you just don’t. This creates an interesting invisible boundary, with everybody else on one side and those who know the dance on the other. Those are the people who astutely execute the new dances plus it’s also a definite cultural marker. Sort of like Trinis in a party whenever “Trini to the bone” comes on. (Many other West Indians know and do these dances too but you catch my drift). People can do these new dances too for a very, very, very, long time before they decide to go hold on to another individual. Gone too are sessions filled with endlessly having to dance with another person and at least, maybe ask them for one dance. Either you do that or hold down somebody for the greater part of the night to save yourself the pressure.

Certainly, you can always find females holding their own in the midst of all this but most noticeably in the “passa-passa” type moves. As for where passa-passa is concerned, all this “hot fuck”-ing and simulated sex (bad sex at that) leaves me wondering how all these things are affecting male ideas of sex. So many young men see their dancing skills as representative of their virility. This being representative of their skill, an extension of their sexual self even. Thus they think it’s really cute to pick up a girl and ram her like a human jackhammer in a circle of people.

If you’re a female in or near that kind of dance circle, prepare to have your body swamped and owned. And you’d better be malleable like the dough of a pretzel. The sexual aggro of dancehall dejays’ lyrics today and their accompanying dances are at an all time high. I’ve heard many people I know say with regard to this issue, that dancing cannot possibly get any dirtier. We’ve all heard about porn and the impact it has in aiding in the objectification of women as purely sexual beings and what about these dances that form the basis of a kind of creative expression as well as sexual expression? What connections if any, can be drawn from young men who choose to wipe the floor with a female back for their dancing/pseudo sexual pleasure or those who think it’s cool to do so? What messages does this send to young women?

I like to consider myself an advocate for healthy, responsible, sexual behavior and attitudes (should one choose to go that route). As well as trying to empower people along the way while they’re at it. Yet, our patriarchal society makes it much easier for men to do so but unacceptable for women. Females are constantly oppressed by societal pressure and various conventions that make it difficult for sexually active (and or potentially sexually active) young women to become equipped with the tools: mentally, physically, emotionally and otherwise so that they might experience balanced, sexually fulfilled lives.

Codes of behavior reinforced by music and other forms of pop culture like some acted out in dances–make it difficult as well. “No gyal cah sit down pon mi head/ If a gyal try dat she dead” and all that stuff. Yet in hip-hop, it’s cool to “lick it like a lollipop.” Meanwhile girls in passa-passa type dances are supposed to “tek buddy” and “tek it” very well. They earn kudos for doing this well. Men are encouraged to give it–hard. Devoid of much of anything else. Somewhere along the lines of having someone “tump up yuh pussy like a punching bag” or “dug out (like) dirt.” Which might very well be someone’s preference but this should not by any means, completely presumptively define sexual expression nor should it by default, define some female’s sexual experience, just because she happens to be female. Female sexual organs do not need to be solely defined by how well they can (potentially) receive a hundred stabs (or less, or more). Just listening to that Aidonia song makes my vagina hurt.

Songs like, “She loves me” by Serani aptly set the contemporary dancehall love-song bar quite um, high, with his descriptions of sex without emotion, specifically to quote him, “fucking.” And this is with his girl. Lyrics infused with anger, bordering on violent because that just makes for better sex in the end for him and presumably, her:

“So baby girl I’m gonna get you undressed
I know you like it when I give you rough sex
bend over let me hold you from your neck, piss me off and let mi get upset
I bet you know what’s gonna come next
no fore play, no kiss, no caress upon mi shoulder a weh yuh gonna put your legs,
we gonna have the best make-up sex, the way that she fucks me,
The way that she carry on, she know that it turns me on
She knows that I love her ,
The way that I fuck her and I know that it turns her on
The way that I carry on.”

So…um yeah. That sounds simply, wonderful. Now how you choose to define and express your own sexual experience, is your own personal decision at the end of the day but I don’t think that any kind of absence of consideration for your partner is ever a good thing. Consideration in intimacy is never, ever a bad thing people. Or in life in general. Yet we see this expressed time and time again and encouraged repeatedly. Plus if you’re giving it to her hard, while you’re at it, that’s even more ideal. This seems to be the only acceptable form of sexual expression for men that we ever hear about frequently. Appropriations of bedroom activity from a male view often reference borderline violent imagery and violent metaphors where the phallus might be akin to a nine millimeter for example. Plus all the onomatopoeic sounds that we hear lyrically always allude to the hardness and severity of certain bedroom activities. The amount of times that you hear sexual references in dancehall in this manner are astounding. Whether it’s getting “beat, ram, fling, pump up, jack up, jab, dig, dagger, stab,” among others frequently used.

Many men and women out there easily transfer these reinforced ideas from the dancehall into the bedroom. It doesn’t help that the majority of rap and dancehall songs epitomize successful sex from the standpoint of a man (many times sung by a man as well). Thus a session is successful because of what a man gave and ideally how hard it was given. The biggest problem with all these men and djs singing about what they think a woman wants and likes is twofold: anyone who has ever browsed certain women’s magazines for example, can see how the pervasive discourse on sex, encourages women to do whatever it takes to keep her man happy first and foremost. Not necessarily because she enjoys doing whatever it may take.

Secondly, because many popular masculine expressions of male heterosexual sexuality do not make allowances for things like consideration, love, tenderness and vulnerability, I cannot help but think that the man’s point of view is a bit affected by this quandary. Is that what women really what or just what men are allowed to express that women want? So yes, sex sells in music as in everything else but despite our personal and private choices, we should all be conscientious of the ways in which sex and sexuality are presented, packaged, sold and consumed by us all. Inevitably I fear, certain ideas become internalized and burnt into the fabric of our consciousness. I am not too sure that we would all want that—or should want that.

meanwhile, back in trinidad, the adventure never stops…

been meaning since i settled, to post about “the state of things” back here in sweet trini but that seems to not be how i operate- the more i want to post about something, the less it happens. plus, “the state of things” not really my style, anyway.
but i at least wanted to say out loud that i’m (still) happy to be home. so many people wondered why i made this move, expressed doubts at my continued desire to be here, as though i didn’t come home while i was away and see for myself, as though i didn’t pay attention to the state of things while i was gone, as though i didn’t have the determination to do the things i always (repeat, always) said i intended to do, as though i never said i never wanted to leave in the 1st place, as though where i was wasn’t worse politically and otherwise, as though is enough to say “it have nuttin for we here” without making the effort to stick around and create something for we here- like they doh know me at all.
talk all you want about the crime+traffic + traffic+crime- i spent 10years in washington dc, sometime murder-capital-usa, 5 of them in the trinidad neighbourhood(dc); trinidad w.i. have nothing on traffic+crime i ent see already, from the bullet that buss through our window casing, cutting its less-than-parabolic trajectory through our bedroom, and lodged itself in our guestroom closet within the 1st 9months of owning (or rather, owing the bank for) our dc house, to war crimes committed by a gov’t that trusts it can make anything true by saying it often enough because it wukkin for them thus far. kidnapping may be (currently) bigger in sweet trini than trinidad dc but we lived in crime central, sharing our neighbourhood with the biggest dealer with the best stash in the city, bullet-studded turf wars, and swat teams, where police capture criminals (the few occasions they do) using their cars to bounce them down in the road. we learned the difference between firecrackers and gunfire by listening to it zinging by our doors+windows while ducking in the living room, knowing fully that bullets do sometimes strike the same place twice while luck might not. we even had the prerequisite pipers doing shit like breaking into a car to steal a box of dead on our street.
so i not saying everything sweet in trini but it still worth my time+effort to help make something more of this island with such potential, and if i fighting up somewhere, better fight up here where i still actually have hope for people, love for this place, plus navel string drawing tighter, pulling me to work to improve our lot instead of running to deceptively greener pastures that only offer more of the same, and worse, without our best weather and food and beach and music and mas and the sweetness that still here under the shit to soften the blows.
we sold our trinidad dc house in april and came home; a friend still living blocks from our (s)old place wrote me in mid-july that while: “…coming down mt. olivet [ave] one night last week from home depot…one of those rarer occasions when the traffic turning right onto west virginia [ave] was longer and backed-up so i took the left lane across west virginia to turn onto montello [our old street] and came across 2cop cars, at least 4officers. there was a car ahead of me, they were getting carded. officer asked me to see my id…i showed it to him and he said i didn’t live in the neighborhood and should go around. i said, what’s the problem? he said, with so many deaths in the area they were carding everyone going into the neighborhood and suggested i went around. i told him i know the neighborhood very well and would take my chances and he permitted me through. there were more cops sitting on penn [ave] who didn’t stop me and another cop @ the other end of montello near florida [ave]. it was the clearest i’ve ever seen montello of people. quiet and clear, and creepy. that park (the community center) down montello from 1425 [was our house] has a tree on the corner with all kinda memorial stuff from where one person was murdered. that was the only night i had to deal with the roadblocks, but saw the cop lights from down 12th [street] at least 1other night. otherwise i live just far away enough that the roadblocks didn’t affect me. so many killings (8 or 9) in the trinidad neighborhood in the last few weeks that the city set up a roadblock to monitor the neighborhood for 6days…”
and this was before the supreme court reversed the dc gun ban…he blogged about his experience, including heavy police prescence circling his non-trinidad block, and a washington post article explaining the police justification and justifiably angry civilian response; less than 24hours later a shooter opened fire in our old neighbourhood, wounding 7 and killing 1 (visiting minor), delivering an excuse to maintain the unconstitutional roadblocks in trinidad, dc.
i feel baddish for the couple that bought our house, but they can fight their fight on behalf of their people; i’ll be here fightin’ up with mine in sweet trini.
walk good.

disclosure: this post is also over @ sweet trini’s urban folk tales.

reading frenzy

trinidad noir reading went very well, even with my coming down with a cold the morning of, watching with horror what i thought was just morning sniffles develop into loss of hearing in 1 ear and the ability to breathe with my mouth closed. i even had a massive sneezing fit @ the venue while the 1st author read, so i was terrified until i was done that i’d just fill the microphone with sniffles, sneezes, snorting and other phlegmy phrases, but as soon as i apologised in advance for my sniffles and launched my story (after being pleasingly intro’d as “edgy”), i was somehow fine. people said i read well (plenty compliments for john on my vocal delivery) and have one of the strong stories in the collection, i was asked to sign books, and even had the pleasure of my mother telling me i was good (extremely rare), plus i pulled off a voice-over today, delivering 3 completely different takes in no time without sounding like i still can’t hear myself or breathe properly. so i feel like crap but work wukkin’…
walk good.

disclosure: this post is also @ sweet trini’s urban folk tales.