THE ACCUMULATION OF CAPITAL AND THE SHIFTING CONSTRUCTION OF DIFFERENCE:

EXAMINING THE RELATIONS OF COLONIALISM, POST-COLONIALISM AND NEO-

COLONIALISM IN TRINIDAD

By

Dylan Brian Rum Kerrigan

Submitted to the

Faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences

of American University

in Partial Fulfillment of

the Requirements for the Degree

of Doctor of Philosophy

In

Anthropology

Chair:

William Leap ~-~ ~~vi/~ David Vine

Dean of College ~{\\ Ill~\;) Date

2010 American University Washington, D. C. 20016

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For my parents and their parents. THE ACCUMULATION OF CAPITAL AND THE SHIFTING CONSTRUCTION OF

DIFFERENCE: EXAMINING THE RELATIONS OF COLONIALISM, POST­

COLONIALISM AND NEO-COLONIALISM IN TRINIDAD

BY

Dylan Brian Rum Kerrigan

ABSTRACT

How were social groups made in the colonial encounter? Do they persist into the present? Are social groups remade by post-colonialism? How are social groups produced in the neo-colonial moment? What is the relationship between socio-cultural mixture in

Trinidad, group formation and the accumulation of capital?

To illustrate how the economic structure and socio-cultural foundations of colonialism in Trinidad relate to the inequality of capitalism today this dissertation provides a social history of the shifting construction of difference in Woodbrook,

Trinidad. This history highlights various forms of difference making and links them to the maintenance and negotiation of the interests of capital accumulation. These forms of difference making include the production of racial hierarchy, the generative contradiction of cultural assimilation and cultural resistance, the stratification of Carnival, the role of

Afro-Saxon "organic intellectuals," and, today, the production of fear. To provide a narrative for this history the project examines the motion of capital in the island and its

ii consistent triumph over labour across the cultural, economic and political movements identified as colonialism, post-colonialism and neo-colonialism.

The dissertation concludes in present day Woodbrook, an urban district of Port of

Spain, Trinidad's capital, to illustrate how the colonial logic of divide and conquer intersects with contemporary class politics to exacerbate social stratification, economic division and the continued exclusion of the "masses" from the "people."

iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I want to thank all my family, friends and colleagues who gave me the self-belief, strength and patience to find sanity and happiness in my work. To Professor Bill Leap I want to say thank you for your gamble on me and for your consistent support throughout my time in Washington, DC both personally and professionally. To Professor Brett

Williams I want to say thank you for your patience and determination. I remember fighting against your insights into the importance and relevance of class politics. What I first swept away I now see as central part of any and all politics. To Professor David

Vine, could there be a nicer and more encouraging scholar? If there is I have not met them yet. To my dad thanks for all the reading and great advice. To my mum thank you for everything.

I also want to say thank you to all the people in Trinidad and elsewhere who helped me to talk through my ideas. These include Jason A, Eamon, Derek, Marc, Akemi,

Scotty Rah, James, Gillian, Skye, Nicholas, Parveen, Sandy, Kelly, Tiffany, Sheldon,

Dave, Lyle, Krystal, Carrie, Dunstan, Ben, Veronica, Yesenia, Jose, Eskay, Che, Sarah,

Shreen, Caroline, Stuart, Sammy, Rima, Sherisse, Jason R, Ralph, Larry, Chris, Richard,

Tom, Michael, Alex, Aunty Cathy, Uncle Des, Aunty Pat, Uncle Willan, Lesley Gill,

Scott Lash, Laura Bear, Salvador Vidal-Ortiz, Daphne Philips, Kanaan Nambiar, Sue

Taylor, Rachel Watkins, Sabiyha Prince and others. What I have written is synthesized through all your great ideas, insights and questions.

IV To all the students I have taught across three different universities I want to say thank you for teaching me about what I most enjoy and in the process helping me to work through a lot of this dissertation. To the Anthropology department at AU, and not least

Jacki Daddona and Stacey Terrell, who have always made me feel at home a long way from home, your warmth and familiarity was much appreciated. Also thank you to

Harjant, Sarah, Nell, Naomi, Jennifer, Elijah, Jennie, Rodolfo and all my AU pals. To my family in Spain, Trinidad, Tobago, the UK and the US, you have given me such endless supplies of love, support and encouragement I am truly blessed and privileged. To Lani for being the best friend I could ever have. And to Charissa, who fifteen years ago one

J' ouvert morning - covered from head to toe in mud and paint - first introduced me to

Wood brook, and who sadly left us well ahead of her time. Thank you.

v TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT ...... ii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ...... iv

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS ...... x

LIST OF MAPS ...... xi

Chapter

ONE: INTRODUCTION: THE ACCUMULATION OF CAPITAL AND THE SHIFTING CONSTRUCTION OF DIFFERENCE ...... 1

Approach ...... 6

Defining Colonialism, Post-Colonialism and Neo-Colonialism ...... 12

Summary of Chapters...... 18

TWO: FIELDWORK EXPERIENCE AND METHODOLOGY ...... 22

Trinidad and Tobago ...... 34

Woodbrook ...... 36

THREE: THE COLONIAL ENCOUNTER AND ITS LEGACY: RACIAL HIERARCHY ...... 43

The Cedula of 1783 ...... 57

British Colonial Rule ...... 64

Pre-Emancipation "African" Labour ...... 68

Vl "White" Labour ...... 73

"East Indian" Labour ...... 77

Colonialism, Automatic Solidarity and the Making of Social Groups in Trinidad ...... 82

FOUR: LITERATURE REVIEW: TRINIDAD CARNIVAL AS AN "INDIGENOUS INTELLECTUAL DEVICE" ...... 85

19th Century Trinidad Carnival: What's Behind a Masque? ...... 97

Pierrots and Pierrot Grenades ...... :...... 97

Negue Jadin ...... 100

The Burrokeet and Soumary ...... 102

The Dame Lorraine...... 104

Early 20th Century Dragons and Changes in Carnival ...... 105

Summary ...... 106

FIVE: SOLIDARITY, ASSIMILATION AND THE FOUNDATIONS OF "TRINIDADIAN" IDENTITY ...... 108

Trinidad and Crown Colony Rule ...... 108

Emancipation and Residential Mixture in Port of Spain ...... 120

Jamette Carnival and Barrack Life ...... 124

East Indian Arrival and Further

Examples of Transculturation ...... 129

The 1880s -1900s and the Emerging "Trinidadian" Identity ...... 136

The "Masses" and the "People" ...... 146

Postscript: Solidarity and Assimilation ...... 151

Vll SIX: WOODBROOK AND THE VICTORIAN TWILIGHT ...... 154

The End of a Sugar Economy...... 15 5

The Siegert Connection ...... 159

The Cocoa Economy ...... 164

The Afro-Saxon Elite ...... 169

A Historical Bloc ...... 171

Intellectuals ...... 174

Capt. Cipriani: "Britain's Best Policeman in the Colonies?" ...... 179

An Organic Intellectual ...... 191

SEVEN: WOODBROOK ON THE PATH TO INDEPENDENCE: INTERSECTIONS OF CLASS, ETHNICITY AND RACE IN 20rn CENTURY URBANTRINIDAD ...... 195

In Her Own Words: Mary's Childhood (1930- 1950) ...... 196

Analysis ...... 199

Schools, Churches and Cliques ...... 200

Sexuality, gender and race ...... 203

Nationalist Culture ...... 205

Camival ...... 210

Summary ...... 211

In Her Own Words: Cherry's Childhood (1950- 1970) ...... 215

Analysis ...... 218

Community and Interaction ...... 218

Carnival and George Bailey ...... 220

Race, Class and Cliques ...... 223

Vlll Eric Williams, the University of Woodford Square and Protecting the Interests of Capital...... 225

Fallen Heroes ...... 231

Postscript: 1980s-1990s Woodbrook and the Territorialisation of Petro-Capital ...... 233

EIGHT: WOODBROOK TODAY: ETHNIC FLUIDITY, CLASS CONFLICT AND VIOLENCE ...... 237

Racial and Ethnic Fluidity: An Afternoon on the "Rehab" ...... 238

Carnival in Woodbrook as an "Indigenous Intellectual Device" ...... 246

Woodbrook Today ...... 250

The Colonial Logic of Divide and Conquer ...... 252

Fear and the Production of Difference ...... 257

Individualism and Difference Making ...... 261

Neo-colonialism in Trinidad ...... 263

Conclusion ...... 265

NINE: FINAL THOUGHTS ...... 266

A Contribution to Caribbean Scholarship ...... 268

REFERENCES ...... 272

lX LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

FIGURE

1. 'Crobar' on Ariapita Avenue ...... 39

2. Casino on Ariapita A venue ...... 40

3. Bar and Restaurant 'More Vino' on Ariapita Avenue ...... 40

4. Gated House on Fitt Street...... 41

5. 'One Woodbrook Place' Rises on the Western Side of Woodbrook ...... 41

6. Empty and Run Down Lots on Roberts Street...... 42

7. Stephen Derek's Mas Camp on Buller Street...... 42

x LIST OF MAPS

Map

I. Map of Caribbean ...... 36

2. Port of Spain and its Environs ...... 37

XI CHAPTER ONE:

INTRODUCTION: THE ACCUMULATION OF CAPITAL AND

THE SHIFTING CONSTRUCTION OF DIFFERENCE

"When we take proper account of colonialism and neo­ colonialism, it becomes clear that liberal capitalism and neoliberalism are zero-sum games" - Couze Venn (2009)

"Human beings are their historical condition, human life is its historical process, the human person is her or his fractured history" - Burton Sankeralli (2001)

"The purpose of a myth is to provide a logical model capable of overcoming a contradiction" - Claude Levi­ Strauss ( 1986)

Writing in the American Anthropologist of 1957 Daniel Crowley identified thirteen national, racial and religious groups in Trinidad. Crowley's list, in the hierarchal form he perceived, was:

1. Foreign Whites

2. Local whites

3. Coloureds, of French origin and Roman Catholic religion

4. Coloureds of English origin and Anglican, Presbyterian, or other non-

evangelical Protestant religion

5. Coloured from other West Indian islands

1 2

6. Chinese and Chinese-Creoles

7. Portuguese

8. Negroes, Black, or Creoles

9. Spanish-speaking Venezuelans and "Spanishy" local-born people

10. Syrians and Lebanese

11. East Indians who have been converted to Christianity

12. Muslims

13. Hindus (Crowley 1957:817:24).

Reviewing this material led me to think about how social groupings are made.

How do people become essentialised, named, represented as good/bad and who has/had the power to do this? Are social groupings such as White, Coloured, and Black reflective of local experience or a reflection of a relationship of power? And if they reflect a relationship of power, to what end is the reflection useful and mobilised in the interests of economic dominance? The dissertation is concerned with these questions in relation to the history of Trinidad.

While Crowley noted hierarchy based on race, ethnicity, colour and religion, he also identified a process of "differential acculturation." Crowley argued:

These vertical groups, for all their distinctness, are not functionally exclusive or 'watertight' ... all the members of any group know something of the other groups and many members are as proficient in the cultural activities of other groups as their own. [Crowley cited in Meighoo 2006:8].

At this opening juncture, "all the members of any group know[ing] something of the other groups and many members [being] as proficient in the cultural activities of other groups as their own," I suggest can be read against Crowley's implication of homogenous 3

and definable groups existent and existing in Trinidad local history and culture (and found in the census, older sociological texts and everyday language). Specifically, recognising that these "groups" were neither "watertight" nor "functionally exclusive" can support a reading of the ethnic, racial, religious and class mixing of individuals too.

Such a duality - between mixture and solidity - is a good description of experiences I had on a social football space called the "Rehab" where I spent much time while doing fieldwork. Four times a week, every week for over a year, I interacted with urban Trinidadian men from Woodbrook1 and elsewhere, aged fifteen to fifty five, who represented the various colours, social "groups" and economic levels on the island. Fifty years after Crowley was in Trinidad the majority of the labels2 these men used to describe and hail each other were words for different races, ethnicities, colours and groupings that would in other nations like the United Kingdom or the United States often be deemed racist and problematic. In this male Trinidadian social space of sport and recreation the names were used humorously and thrown around with no offense seemingly taken. This does not mean social hierarchy on the island and the urban area where I lived does not

1 Woodbrook, is a well-known part of the Trinidadian capital of Port of Spain. Formerly a residential suburb, and home for a time to many recognised people in the story of Trinidadian history - Capt. Cipriani, V.S. Naipaul, Audrey Jeffers, George Bailey, Beryl McBurnie, Ranjit Kumar, Eric 1 Williams, Ellie Manette. - upon which local, nationalist and post-colonial politics of the 20 h century was built. Today Woodbrook is best known for its neon lit "strip" with many mas camps, casinos, restaurants, bars and offices.

2 Common ethnic nicknames and labels I recorded in the field (with their phenotypical appearance in brackets) included; darkie (Afro), reds (light brown/mixed), dougla (Indo/Afro mix), chinee (Chinese), mammoo (Indo), nigga (Afro), creole (T&T born - dark/light brown/mixed), red-man (light brown/mixed), high-brown (light brown/mixed), white-boy (foreigner), potogee (T&T white/Portuguese), beti (lndo­ female), French-creole (T&T born white), old-blood (mixed), limey (foreigner), hakwai (Afro/Chinese), chindian (Chinese/Indo), Spanish (mixed), ras (Afro-hair), shabine (mixed) chigro (Afro/Chinese) and cocoa-panyol (light skin mixed). On the whole both men and women across classes used these ethnic nicknames they were not gender or class specific. 4

exist. Rather, in what I learned from fieldwork, I would suggest class conflict and solidarity blur Crowley's thirteen-tier racialised hierarchy as neo-colonialism today constructs difference in Trinidad by access to wealth and whom one knows. The accumulation of capital and the shifting construction of difference have produced in urban Trinidad today a situation of economic inequality.

In and around Woodbrook there are many symbols of such inequality. SUV's only for some, expensive and beyond the reach of the majority of Trinidadians, with their drivers perched higher than most, looking down on the masses; segregated fetes, concerts and Carnival with differently priced tiers offering different levels of entertainment; the all-inclusive masquerade band (band meaning a large 1,000/10,000 group of people) - so labelled because it means all drinks, security costs, costumes, music fees and other

Carnival necessities are covered in one price - that is more accurately the all-exclusive band because the price of participation - today anywhere between TT$3000 - $5000, more than the average monthly wage, effectively excludes (and there are beefy bouncers

3 to enforce this segregation) the many who want to "play mas" ; and responses to a severe murder rate4 and a general fear of crime where those with wealth wall themselves off

3 "Playin mas" is the local Trinidadian expression for "playing a Carnival masquerade": the act of taking part in Carnival. Peter Minshall, the Carnival designer has said, "In addition to looking at how a mas happens, we can examine how the society, the culture, speaks about it. In Trinidad, we inevitably speak of 'playing a mas'. We do not say, 'What mas are you going to wear?'. We say, 'Wha' mas yuh goin' an play?' And the mas we play even in the most fun of bands, has a character, a sense of dramatic personage, or mood, or symbolic representation. We do not say, 'I am wearing a Flamenco costume', as if we were going to a fancy dress ball, we say, 'Ah playin' a Flamenco dancer."'

4 As the first page of the executive summary of the Small Arms Survey (Townsend 2009) published by the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva notes, "In the last decade, gun-related homicides in Trinidad and Tobago (T & T) have risen about 1,000 per cent ... On a per capita basis, the eastern districts of Port of Spain are among the most dangerous places on the planet and, as a whole, the murder rate for Port of Spain is comparable to that of Baghdad." 5

from the masses in gated communities and with the help of private security firms to produce new forms of difference-making and social stratification because protective measures such as private security are a lifestyle only those with wealth can afford

(Caldeira 2000, Kochiyama N. D.).

In this setting race, colour and ethnicity as central mechanisms of difference- making today as they were in the colonial past and as some still claim (Black 1976:77-84,

Horowitz 2005, Premdas 1993, Munasinghe 2001) felt inadequate. On the Rehab differences based on distinctions in skin-colour, heritage and culture appeared more like a mechanism of cohesion and solidarity much like the "banal nationalism" and community building described by Michael Billig (1995). Nonetheless, social stratification tied to economic inequality is a central element of urban Trinidad both in the recent past and today (Braithwaite 1953, Ryan 1981, Bourne 2008). As such, my research centred on the historical construction of economic inequality in Port of Spain and how the questions I asked on page 1 about social groupings relate to the situation of social stratification and economic division I saw.

To understand this present economic inequality in multicultural Woodbrook, and the structural violence5 (Galtung 1967, Farmer 2004) of this situation the project required

5 "Structural violence, a term coined by Johan Galtung and by liberation theologians during the 1960s, describes social structures - economic, political, legal, religious, and cultural - that stop individuals, groups, and societies from reaching their full potential. In its general usage, the word violence often conveys a physical image; however, according to Galtung, it is the "avoidable impairment of fundamental human needs or ... the impairment of human life, which lowers the actual degree to which someone is able to meet their needs below that which would otherwise be possible." Structural violence is often embedded in longstanding "ubiquitous social structures, normalized by stable institutions and regular experience." Because they seem so ordinary in our ways of understanding the world, they appear almost invisible. Disparate access to resources, political power, education, health care, and legal standing are just a few examples. The idea of structural violence is link~d very closely to social irljustice and the social machinery of oppression" (Farmer, Nizeye, Stulac, and Keshavjee, 2006). 6

an understanding of local history and the relationship of colonialism, post-colonialism and neo-colonialism in the intellectual, socio-economic and residential formation of the island. To tell such a story I borrowed the observation from the late Trinidadian scholar

Lloyd Best and his account of "automatic solidarity" (2001). To paraphrase, he asked, what is the response of people who have been transplanted from many different places and forced to wear the straightjacket of slavery, indenture and colonialism? Let us imagine how the island came to be populated: the various migratory movements, the general historical framework of how groups came and went, who came before and after, and who had the power to define history and describe the process of social integration. In telling the story in Best's terms, this project is able to examine how the economic structure and cultural foundations of colonialism relate to the current economic inequality and cronyism of modem Port of Spain. Such an analysis suggests neo-colonialism and its structural violence were laid in the colonial encounter (Fanon 1967, Cesaire 1972), took root in the post-colonial era and produce specific social justice consequences in the present for a multicultural society like Trinidad. The analysis relates the colonial logic of divide and rule with the structural violence of global capitalism in Woodbrook today.

Approach

The approach taken is more social history than ethnography. It combines local

Caribbean based theory, the examination of historical representations of Trinidad, the memories of local residents of Woodbrook, and ethnographic research in the present. It illustrates that the socio-economic inequalities laid down by and through colonialism in 7

the past extend through a process of constant negotiation (Hall 1985) into the neoliberal present and need to be included in accounts of urban violence, division and race politics today.

Theoretically, the project posits Fernando Ortiz's (2003 [1947]) concept of

"transculturation" as a product of Lloyd Best's (2001) notion of "automatic solidarity."

This causality positions both as foundational principles of social interaction in urban

Trinidad that problematise neat positivistic representations of class, race and ethnic politics both today and in the past that in anti-colonial terms Aime Cesaire would say are part of the ideological framework of capitalist society and its hierarchal ethos for social

6 groupings and structure (1992:175) typical ofmodemity .

Transculturation was an improvement on the anthropological stalwart of the time,

"acculturation," and its one sided connotation of cultural change (Newson 1976:4).

Transculturation, implied far more give and take, it is a concept of process, implying that

6 For the purposes of this project the modernist paradigm of the West is divisible into two mutually reinforcing schema: one an intellectual perspective, the other an adaptive strategy or political economy. In the first sense we are talking about a certain form of imagination, logic and system of reasoning. In the second sense wealth generated and accumulated through the application of racialised hierarchy. At first glance the paradigm is one awash with difference; multiple nations, professions and choices. More accurately however, the paradigm describes life and the world in singular form. As supporters of multicultural discourse are only too aware, it is not difference that defines the Modernist world and its system of production but homogeneity and sameness (Argyrou 2002, Unger 2007). The lie is one of a sameness of history, direction and economic motive. "Our" ('the universal world') reason for existence and the explanation of it is based solely on ideas about the world conceived in the Enlightenment­ produced Western hemisphere of the 19th and 20th centuries which gained authority through the supposed uniformity of human values such as capitalist exchange, progress and democracy, not to mention economic classes. This assemblage has bequeathed a certain cultural logic to all sciences one that includes the notion that Western development was and is positive for the colonised. Since the 1960s anthropologies around the world have tried to fight the essentialising power of these Euro-American knowledge practices (Nader 1972). As the Euro-American university system has moved out into other parts of the globe whose development we are told has followed a particular historical reality in relation to our own (ignoring certain differences of history, population and economy), this logic has infiltrated the minds of local scholars and concepts. This logic places distinct life experiences into one, overarching and holistic epistemology and story about the evolution of the world. 8

when different bodies of knowledge, ways of life and experience meet, over time people built, whether consciously or not new forms of culture and ethno-genetic 7 relations. The point to acknowledge here is that transculturation is a process of mixture with the onus placed on a varied dialogical process (Bakhtin 1984): "to express the highly varied phenomena that. .. come about ... as a result of the extremely complex transmutations of culture ... real history is the history of its intermeshed transculturations" (Ortiz 2003:98).

For Ortiz then, transculturation was not about acquiring another culture, adapting and assimilating certain ways, but rather it was about mixture and everything changing, perhaps very slowly, under such interaction. Transculturation can then be suggested in

Trinidad as the process that emerged and emerges from Lloyd Best' particular historical scenario of "automatic solidarity" (2001) and was in certain ways mobilised in the continued triumph of capital over labour.

In the Caribbean "creolisation" theory (Brathwaite8 1974) - the existence of a specific kind of acculturation and interculturation involving the assimilation first to

7 Traditionally, studies in human biodiversity define populations in the context of typological racial models. Such racial models are imprecise generalizations and social constructs that fail to capture important local patterns of human biodiversity (Jackson 2008). An ethnogenetic perspective dissolves assumptions about racial 'groups.' They can no-longer be "bounded biological entities that move about or stay put while maintaining their constitution over time. Biologically, there has been a constant flow of people and genes over such variously constructed ethno-linguistic boundaries" (Homburg 2005).

8 Brathwaite discussed creolisation as a cultural process which "for the purposes of clarification may be divided into two aspects of itself: ac/culturation ... and inter/culturation"(Brathwaite 1974:5). Acculturation refers to a process of explicit engagement between one culture and another by force and example, which is achieved by a power relationship obtained through the subordination of the slave to the European. In order to survive, the dominated are forced to adopt elements from the dominant, which includes the very notion of separate racial groupings and the general rules of accommodation between the groups. Interculturation is an implicit form of engagement. It refers to the "unplanned, unstructured but osmotic relationship"(l 974:5), which results from the overt process of acculturation. Interculturation occurred on many levels and is an important part of the process of creolisation. The intimate area of sexual relationships between white men and black female slaves is an example of the process of interculturation at 9

Western ways and then to a local Caribbean Afro-Saxon culture - does not adequately

express the cultural developments that have occurred in Trinidad during the last 150

years. Transculturation, while still not adopted in many circles,9 adds to the situation of

cultural assimilation by expressing that the conjuncture of the various Amerindian,

European, African and Asian worlds in Trinidad, in an echo of Daniel Crowley's

differential and plural acculturation concepts of the 1950s, created cultural obstacles for

class power uniquely Trinidadian (still alive and well in local spaces like the Rehab) that

needed to be negotiated.

To extend these Caribbean-based concepts oftransculturation and automatic

solidarity beyond their authors' usage the project combined the thoughts of C. L. R.

James and Antonio Gramsci. 10 In a conversation between the social justice observations

work; "the ramifications of personal relationships (need for a mistress, imitate the paradigm) brought new, unexpected exchanges into each groups repertoire of behaviour" (1974:21). 9 While more in sociology than in anthropology "the failure of the term to be adopted may be explained perhaps by the continued emphasis of acculturation studies on the nature of the changes that have occurred in one cultural group, generally the subordinate one, with practically no discussion of the nature of the dominant culture or of the cultural changes that were consequent upon contact" (Newson 1976:4).

10 I am not the first person to note the similarities between Gramsci and James (St Louis 2007). To be precise however, Gramsci is mobilised in addition to Caribbean informed theory because of his general "anti" politics and for his insights into the growth, development and operation of cultural change under the weight of class politics. While he is not from the Caribbean he spoke to and from a similar position of oppression that populations in former colonies experienced (Gramsci 1994). A point St Louis notes as others have (Bogues 1997: 1-2) in his analysis of CLR James' critique of modernity. "[T]here is a strong , and yet incomplete, association between James and Gramsci and their concerns with the multiplicitious forms of power that traverse various social categories and cultural processes. Gramsci's understanding of the mutating hegemonic power of a ruling class within a historical bloc presents an important parallel with James' thought, because it recognises the fluidity of political management across the entirety of society. Indeed, Gramsci's crucial understanding of the formation of 'common sense' as a fragmented set of folkloric statements that, taken together, constitute customary group dispositions is, in its specific form, germane to James' project of critiquing and dismantling the multilayered orders of colonial dominance ... In Gramscian terms, James identifies the colonial project of social unification and popular consent as a political project that is in part a moral undertaking, continually expanded through barely perceptible means. The 'myth' of the superiority of the coloniser and inferiority of the colonised then acts as a self-regulating normative social discourse and moral statement that reinforces colonial dominance and reproduces cultural hegemony" (2007:73). 10

of James and the theory of Gramsci, the project describes the rise of a local Gramscian historical bloc and the connective role played by various local "intellectuals" at various moments in organising particular Western, metropolitan values in the consolidation of first post-colonial and then neo-colonial class power within this bloc.

The project illustrates the motion of the historical bloc through an echo of Marx's dialectical method via David Harvey (2007) that builds on the assumption that the

"internalisation of contradictions is generative." In acknowledging that the motion of a contradiction between cultural resistance and cultural assimilation relates to the foundations of historical process, the expansion of capital, and modern society in

Trinidad, in the chapters that follow the dissertation explores how the construction of a shifting racial-ethnic and class hierarchy in T &T and specifically in Woodbrook, is a mechanism in the development and expansion of Western liberal capitalism. The project also illustrates on an interpersonal level that this construction of difference has real, tangible effects in the economic opportunities of male lives in Woodbrook. As we will see such effects are defined not by simple ideas of hard work and individual endeavour - those are often myths about success - but by the social standing, status and connections gained through social cliques built of family, schooling, and friends whose social power and intergenerational wealth I suggest has been derived historically and support the interests of capital.

Such theoretical extension offers an explanation for current community tensions that unites modern global capitalism with local social inequalities positioning the story of 11

Woodbrook today and its long social history within the wider story ofEuro-American11 global hegemony and the consolidation of global class power. In that sense, it should be understood as an argument against the exploitation of global capitalism both today and historically. This story confronts the myth that colonial mechanisms of control and capture such as pauperisation, dispossession and hierarchy disappeared and ended with the arrival of independence.

The approach is not an endeavour to discredit or refute much excellent historical work on Trinidad that recreates a stratified picture of the past through the lens of race and class (Brereton 1979, Singh 1994, Sudarna 1980), and the group relations produced; rather it is an exercise to appreciate how day-to-day experience in Woodbrook is shaped by specific intersections of local and global histories, traditions, and conditions that today blur racial, ethnic and colour hierarchy and replace it with class conflict and cronyism.

This analysis can help us to understand contemporary urban Trinidad and critique neo- colonial explanations about ethnic tension and racial violence, and in their place offer an account of wealth creation and the process of pauperisation12 as fundamental mechanisms

11 "Euro-American" in this project is a specific worldview (Weltanschauung) and intellectual canon stressing European and North American voices. The British Social Anthropological tradition, plus the French and German, plus the North American four fields would all fall under this umbrella term. Euro­ American is not an identifier amongst the different ethnicities existent within the US. Neither is it solely referring to white individuals, but rather to an intellectual tradition that has, over centuries, had many white-male-heterosexual voices speak for the world. The term comes from leftist and Marxist discussions of geopolitics (important to note not solely the European or North American Marxist traditions), usually in the context of"Euro-American hegemony." It has a specific historical reference: to the rise of US power in the world immediately after World War II, the fall of the British empire and the rise of the Cold War, an historical movement with a specific intellectual tradition, which - for the record - has many positive parts and ideas as well as problematic ones.

12 As Venn notes "poverty is the result of a process of the production of the poor, through mechanisms established for the transfer of wealth that creates the categories of rich and poor, and that economies unless limited by circumscribing rules, operate as zero-sum games of winners and losers. In Deleuze and Guattari's terms, such mechanisms are 'apparatuses of capture"' (Venn 2009:208). 12

of social inequality at the bottom of much of the violence and fear experienced in

Woodbrook today.

Defining Colonialism, Post-Colonialism and Neo-Colonialism

Colonialism, "the practice of domination, which involves the subjugation of one

people to another" (Kohn 2008) is an encounter of actual violence, symbolic violence and

the production of racial hierarchy. Such a definition highlights the consistent trope and

mechanism of difference making throughout Western colonialism and its representation

of historical actualities to divide populations into groups (Williams 1962, Wolf 1982,

Hulme 1986, Reid 2009:xi) and most specifically generally two groups - good and bad13

(Chatterjee 1993). This binary tells of a colonial cultural logic beset by the use of race, 14

racism and an ideology of white supremacy in the production and maintenance of

inequality. Whether positive or negative, the process of "othering" inherent in

13 This narrative where those who are benevolent, easy to control and deemed to be potential allies are essentialised as "noble savages," while those less passive and who understood the initial encounter with Europeans in indigenous cultural terms, resisting, and challenging this new worldview, essentialised as cannibalistic and violent is a common tale of modernity found in other sites like the US narrative ofNative­ American Indians who were either "noble savages" or "fierce scalpers." Lander (2009) notes that one of the fundamental assumptions of Eurocentric knowledge is the construction of multiple and repeated divisions or oppositions. The most characteristic and significant of these-but not the only ones, to be sure-include the basic, hierarchical dualisms of "reason and body, subject and object, culture and nature, masculine and feminine."

14 "Race" is a central term in Trinidadian history so it is worthwhile defining here how this project understands the term. As is common in anthropological theory "race" is recognised as a biological fallacy and a "social construction" with conceptual limitations. Nonetheless, it has material presence in the world, and is both used by the public and used in social analysis. As such, like Trinidadian scholar Rhoda Reddock, I use race "to refer to socially constructed groupings differentiated by phenotype, physical features and area of origin" and the term "racialisation" to refer to the "dynamic process where social relations between people have been structured by the signification of human biological characteristics in such a way as to define and construct differentiated social collectivities" (Reddock 2007). 13

colonialism, as it exploited raw materials, cash crops and human labour in its vast project of enslavement, mercantilism, and murder, manufactured and constructed difference in the service of political control. The violent "othering" of colonialism both symbolic and actual in addition to a simplification of difference puts colonial ideologies of race and ethnic hierarchy deep into the historical record:

Contrary to the Eurocentric perspective, race, gender, sexuality, spirituality, and epistemology are not additive elements to the economic and political structures of the capitalist world-system, but an integral, entangled and constitutive part of the entangled whole European modern/colonial capitalist/patriarchal world-system. European patriarchy and European notions of sexuality, epistemology and spirituality were exported to the rest of the world through colonial expansion as the hegemonic criteria to racialize, classify and pathologize the rest of the world's population within a sliding scale of superior and inferior races. [Grosfogul 2009:20-21].

Post-Colonialism is defined as an economic and cultural movement that involves the socio-economic assimilation and class consolidation of indigenous colonial elites and local masses in the successful expansion of global capitalism. It is the era before and after

Independence in which foreign elites are replaced by local ones, such as the "Afro-

15 Saxons " in Trinidad, and the former colonial powers manage to export their internal problem and conflict between rich and poor "from the national to the international stage"

(Nkrumah 1966: 1-2). It is a period where the local populations of former colonies are seduced by political talk of rapid socio-economic development and progress but instead experience underdevelopment, dependency and persistent subordination to the politics, beliefs and political economy of former colonial masters and also the predominantly white settler nations like the United States, Canada, and Australia. This last point

15 Lloyd Best invented the term to describe the post-colonial elite and British West Indians in the island who had internalised the values of their former masters. 14

highlights the continued salience in the post-colonial era of the racial hierarchy and ideology of white supremacy produced in the original colonial encounter. In this definition, it is evidence that the post-colonial era not only failed to redress the violent legacies, both symbolic and real of colonialism, but also inscribed within the foundations of post-colonialism a cultural logic of racism tied to transnational forms of wealth creation and economic inequality. As such it becomes clear that the prefix "post" in post­ colonialism, implying succession and a break with the former colonial period is disingenuous because there is substantial continuity between the eras with a relationship of domination and subordination maintained through control of the international marketplace, culture industries and local political leaders educated in and by the metropole.

Neo-Colonialism is the maintenance and extension of global economic and social inequality in present ex-colonies and into their future. In particular, it extends the colonial logic of racism and the economic exploitation of colonialism into the 21st century in three central ways. Firstly, it reproduces the colonial worldview of racialised hierarchy in new forms connected to class and wealth (Thomas 2006) that build on the historical racism, exclusion, and structural violence of both colonialism and global capitalism. This can be described as a form of ideological boundary policing across national borders on a global scale that consolidates (Harvey 2005) the group integrity and cohesion of those with wealth and their supposed superiority over those without it through economic, socio­ cultural and/or military means. Secondly, neo-colonialism continues to plunder the raw materials and economic potential of ex-colonies in a process that promotes social and 15

economic underdevelopment locally in a further stage of imperialism (often called globalisation) extended through transnational relationships with corporations, governments and organisations such as Petroleum companies, the World Bank and the

US military (Fanon 1963, Nkrumah 1966, Amin 1973, Rodney 1981, Ayres and Clark

1998). As K wame Nkrumah put it: "The essence of neo-colonialism is that the State which is subject to it is, in theory, independent and has all the outward trappings of international sovereignty. In reality its economic system and thus its political policy is directed from outside" (1966: 1). Thirdly, neo-colonialism is also about erasure. It is the social power to determine what are viable social systems or not, who are potential political leaders or not, what are acceptable ideas or not, and thus to erase potential alternatives to the unjust contradictions and oppressive social hierarchies embedded in capitalism.

Finally, it is worth defining and historically locating capitalism and its relationship to colonialism. Firstly, many scholars do not agree on what capitalism means. As such, my definition of capitalism and how I see its relationship and collision with colonialism is not meant as a final word but as both a guide for how it is understood in this project and as a starting point for further discussion. Specifically, I see capitalism from a Caribbean point of view and in a tradition of such Caribbean scholars as Eric

Williams (1944), Frantz Fanon (1963), Hilary Beckles (1997)- all individuals born and raised in the Caribbean, and how their lives, works and background engaged Marx to stretch his ideas.

The originality of the colonial context is that economic reality, inequality, and the immense difference of ways of life never come to mask the human realities. When 16

you examine at close quarters the colonial context, it is evident that what parcels out the world is to begin with the fact of belonging to or not belonging to a given race, a given species. In the colonies the economic substructure is also a superstructure. The cause is the consequence; you are rich because you are white, you are white because you are rich. This is why Marxist analysis should always be slightly stretched every time we have to do with the colonial problem. [Fanon 1963:40].

Marx's project ( 1978, 1996) was a scientific understanding of how a capitalist mode of production or "capitalism" - with its wages system, class exploitation, labour- power as a commodity, production of surplus value and profit, trade prices on the world market and other features - works. It is called "Capitalism" because the capitalists

"capitalise" their investment, their profits, their capital, in setting up and reinvesting it in

"means of production" - plantations, factories, mines, labour, transport, technology and communication systems - for the purpose of profits and this form of production expanded all over the world. In the Caribbean in particular:

Capitalist political economy found expression during the 16th and 17th centuries in a proliferation of mercantilist tracts on trade, finance, and manufacturing; their authors preached the values of large-scale production, surplus generation and the accumulation of wealth through foreign trade. The plantation developed as evidence of institutional commitment to these principles, and in opposition to the traditional culture of peasant production which was considered backward and ruinous to a modem nation. [Beckles 1997:778].

This description of events illuminates the relationship between colonialism and capitalism in the Caribbean. The relation can be described as a collision16 and overlap where indentured labour first from the mother country, then from the locally colonised populations and then enslaved labour from Africa, alongside capital and credit from

Europe in the 1th century, produced crops, food and raw materials (commodities) that

16 "Capitalism neither evolves mechanically from what precedes it, nor does it necessarily dissolve it. Indeed, so far from banishing pre-capitalist forms, it not only coexists with them but buttresses them, and even on occasions devilishly conjures them up ex nihilo" (Foster-Carter 1978:51) 17

were exported from the colonies and imported by Europeans facilitated by a global network of brokers, financiers and agents (Marx 1996:54-55, Beckles 1997:778-779).

The profits produced by such trade (exchange) and investment (finance) produced vast amounts of surplus value (profit) that were reinvested to produce ever more capital and provided capitalists with economic power that they leveraged politically to protect the continued salience and validity of this form of economic system around the world.

In Trinidad, due to particular historical circumstances, such as the island's relative absence from the international slave trade until the late 18th century and an absence of

"estate farming," this collision and relation, occurred with different timings and particular specifics. That said, the collision and relationship between colonialism and capitalism in

Trinidad did unfold from the 1750s into and throughout the 19th century and into the mid-

201h century . This situation is more fully explored in chapters 2 and 4.

This dissertation explores this history and then suggests that the social structures imposed by colonialism, capitalist relations and the motion of capital itself were internalised and relate to specific post-colonial and neo-colonial forms that shaped and shape the construction of difference in Trinidad and Tobago. The project provides a sense of how the colonial, the post-colonial and the neo-colonial relate to each other and offers a narrative of the conduits, ideas, persons, mechanisms and representations that produce continuity and extend past forms of oppression into the present. 18

Summary of Chapters

Chapter two is an overview of my fieldwork experience and methodology.

Chapter three examines the colonial encounter and its legacy of racial hierarchy.

The chapter concentrates to a large degree on what took place in Trinidad between 1500 and 1800, and follows the line of enquiry stressed by Lloyd Best - How did the island come to be populated? What were the various migratory movements, the general historical framework of how groups came and went? Who came before and after, and who had the power to define history and describe the process of social integration? The chapter also examines the logic of capital in this primary colonial era and context.

Imagining 17 these events and logic illustrates how the construction of racialised difference and hierarchy can be viewed as a mechanism of Empire building and a foundational element in the development of transnational capital accumulation. 18

17 Historians tell stories of the past. These are "partial truths." The most revered proponents of this historical endeavour find their work stands in for the past. Over time those version of events regarded as most accurate and truthful become the benchmark through which the present is understood. As others like Trouillot (1992), Chaturvedi (2007) and Chaterjee (1991) show this process of writing a people's "roots" is far from objective no matter the best intentions of the authors. As such even those documents we declare the best in the field are projects of cultural hegemony. Furthermore, these conceptions of the past silence other versions of the past. They cement in the public consciousness and reflect in our eyes reified cultural boundaries whose solidity reflects the social categories used by scholars in the moment from whence the project emerges. As mentioned previously my project is not about which truth is more correct or not, but it is an enterprise of reconstruction, an anthropologically aware historical ethnography into the possible conditions for the production and function of difference in present day urban Trinidad.

18 This is the same point made by Grosfogul and other decolonial scholars (Williams 1944, Fanon 1963, Forte 2005:46, Lander 2009, Burman 2009, Mignolo 2009) who suggest that, "race and racism are not super structural or instrumental to an overarching logic of capitalist accumulation; they are constitutive of capitalist accumulation at a world-scale" (Grosfogul 2009:20). Contemporary decolonial epistemologies are growing out of a network of Latin Americanists in Europe and the Americas. After a symposium and a series of workshops in 2008, a network developed with an interest in focusing on how new non-Eurocentric epistemologies can be developed from Latin America, but also elsewhere, and how this may be engaged with by scholars based in Europe. A collection of essays on this theme were brought together in Kutt 6 in Fall 2009. 19

To establish how the cultural resistance of automatic solidarity emerged alongside the cultural assimilation of British capitalist values, Trinidad Carnival is used in chapters

5 and 8 as a cultural lens and evidence of cross-cultural communication and interaction, as well as economic segregation from the 19th century into the present. In chapter four this approach is validated through a literature review and discussion of the late Antonio

Benitez-Rojo's (1997) definition of Trinidad Carnival as an "indigenous intellectual device." His sense of Carnival added to the Bakhtinian sense of Carnival pervading much

Euro-American scholarship of Carnival (Da Matta 1991) and improves upon the popular local narrative produced out of the nationalist climate of the 1950s19 (Smart and Nehusi

2000).

To complete the historical revisionism begun in chapter three, chapter five -

Solidarity, Assimilation and the Foundations of 19th Century "Trinidadian" identity - critiques the essentialism of the canonical historical record through an alternative reading of the local socio-cultural and economic relations found within 19th century Port of Spain.

The endeavour disturbs neat descriptions of Port of Spain residents into already formed and solid representational social groups as the census suggests. In their place it makes visible two distinct elements of everyday life in overcrowded 19th century urban

Trinidad: "automatic solidarity" and cultural assimilation. The chapter suggests these distinct elements generated a dialectic of resistance and assimilation in Trinidad related to the development of local class consciousness (Lukacs 1920) and the motion of capital

19 As Franco notes "the nationalist climate of the 1950s greatly affected the particular patterning of the traditional or authentic in Carnival" (Franco 2007:43). 20

(Marx 1995:5).20 It also suggests the social category of"Trinidadian" emerges from this dialectic and motion.

Chapter six - Woodbrook and the Victorian Twilight - is a story of how the suburb was created through the fortunes and capital of first the sugar economy, then the cocoa economy, coming to lay the groundwork for a soon to emerge nationalist Trinidadian upper-middle class, who became the architects of post-colonial politics in Trinidad before latterly being derided as a corrupt symbols of neo-colonialism, "the metropolitan stage"

1 and "Afro-Saxon culture" (Tapia Magazine, Sunday Aug 13 \ 1972). The chapter imagines the cultural and economic heritage of these architects of post-colonial politics in

Trinidad as Caribbean-specific Gramscian "organic intellectuals" who while defending disenfranchised Trinidadians functioned as conduits and mechanisms of an "historical bloc." This bloc not only failed to redress the violent legacies, both symbolic and real of colonialism, but also inscribed within the foundations of post-colonialism a cultural logic of racism tied to transnational forms of wealth creation and economic inequality.

Chapter seven - W oodbrook on the Path to Independence: Intersections of Class,

1 Ethnicity and Race in 20 h Century Urban Trinidad- covers Woodbrook during the period 1920-1990 through the childhood memories of residents, newspaper records, previous accounts and economic data. This is to illustrate Woodbrook as the centre of a post-colonial "Trinidadian" nationalism, demonstrate how such a Afro-Saxon culture came to represent the interests of the nation, and how those interests determined the

20 The complete line from Marx in the Preface to the First German edition states that "the ultimate aim of this work (is) to lay bare the economic law of motion of modern society" 21

country's subservience to free market capitalism. The chapter concentrates on various historical forces as they crystallised specifically in Woodbrook and provides witness to class formation and class consolidation. It tells us about the expansion of post- colonialism as an economic and cultural movement.

Chapter eight- Woodbrook Today: Ethnic Fluidity, Class Conflict and Violence - concerns what W oodbrook is like today. To provide insight into this question the chapter starts with two vignettes on life in the area. The first is "an afternoon on the Rehab." The second is the economic stratification and commercialisation of Carnival. Both windows illustrate two characteristics of the area. One is racial and ethnic fluidity. The other is economic inequality. Taken together they provide a glimpse of social hierarchy in the district. In particular, how the racist colonial logic of divide and rule has developed within multicultural Woodbrook to lines of class and wealth. That such a change has occurred illustrates how the lines laid first by the racial hierarchy of colonialism, then extended and solidified by the political concessions of post-colonial Afro-Saxons have produced a neo-colonial present of cronyism, corruption21 and economic inequality the significance of which exacerbates social stratification and violence, and is a mechanism of difference making between rich and poor.

21 'Global Integrity' reports: "Corruption in T&T is not grey; in fact, it is extremely colourful, as kaleidoscopic as T&T's renowned carnival. Corruption thrives in this small country with its bountiful energy resources. T&T's environment allows nepotism, 'constitutional dictatorship' and political interference that violate the constitutional separation of powers, not only among the executive, legislative and judiciary branches, but also among the private sector and the media" (Rampersad 2009). CHAPTER TWO:

FIELDWORK EXPERIENCE AND METHODOLOGY

My mother was born in Trinidad and I am a dual citizen of Trinidad and Tobago and the United Kingdom. While I grew up in London, my mother was always keen to immerse my sister and me in Trinidadian culture. I remember as a little kid, no more than three of four, being taught how to "wine" (dance) to calypso, and of our house always being full of visitors from Trinidad, their accents in the air. I was often sent by myself or with my sister to Trinidad for summer holidays. We had cousins there around our age and it was always fun exploring a tropical environment different than London. Many of the

Trinidadian friends I made in the first twelve years of my life are still my friends today.

I first lived and worked full time in Trinidad in 1998 as an editorial assistant for a publishing company before returning to London after a year to pursue a Masters in

Anthropology and Cultural Process. Over that year in Trinidad, I hung out with many of the friends I had made previously and felt accepted within many social circles. By this time, I had developed my own Trinidadian accent22 to differentiate myself from other

"limeys," as I had once been called when I was around fifteen. The accent and accompanying local vocabulary made a big difference to how I was treated by those I didn't know such as taxi drivers and shop assistants who often charge foreigners more

22 "Trinidad's official language is Trinidadian English while the language of education is British English; however, there is a dialect spoken by the country's inhabitants. This dialect is comprised of many words from the many different ethnic groups that once inhabited the island over the historical period. It surfaces throughout all types of discourse amongst Trinidadians" (Carlin 2005 :68) 22 23

than locals. Speaking in local dialect made others comprehend the things I said more easily than had been the case with my British accent.

For the period 2001 to 2005, I returned to live and work in Port of Spain as a staff writer at the same publishing house I had left a few years earlier. During this period, I felt more accepted as a local, not just in my own eyes but also in the eyes of others. For example, whenever I took a trip abroad many friends in Trinidad asked me when I was coming "home" - not referring to London but to Trinidad. I had an apartment in

Woodbrook, a Trinidadian girlfriend, I played football regularly with my friends, I paid taxes and I covered stories for magazines about local culture - meeting many new people along the way. I became immersed in a particular Trinidadian culture and mindset. One, which was urban, middle to upper class, and less concerned with colour lines, as it was composed of many different skin tones.

In my experience of Trinidad, my own ethnicity or skin-colour (it varies from white to red to brown depending on where I live) has never really been brought up in the sense I find it is interrogated in the United States. No one asked me to choose or tell him or her what my mix was, a common question I have been asked in the US. There appeared more room to manoeuvre too. More fluidity in terms of various ethnic positions

I could take at different times and with different people. While I never felt I had privileged access to any groups in Trinidad because I was lighter skinned, I know on some level I no doubt did. For example, in dealings with authority such as police officers or security officials my friends would often nominate me to go and pose whatever the query was. The reasoning I was told was those officers would be less concerned to see a light-skin person emerge from the car than a dark skin one (although I suspect it was also 24

because I was able to use my English accent and pose as a tourist). Nonetheless, having friends of every shade and class, who I had built up over time and through work, made me not question the effect my own colour had on my interactions with others. It was only latterly during fieldwork and when considering events from an anthropological perspective that I realised there were often times I was the only light-skinned face in certain parties and places. However, at the time, this never occurred to me nor was it mentioned as a reason I shouldn't be there.

Here is an example from a Carnival fete called Brass I attended in 1999. Brass is a fete renowned as a party of the "masses" (a working class crowd) I remember walking into a heaving scene. It was a lot of people in a small space, probably around 3000. As I walked through the crowd with my friends, two large women in comparison to me blocked my path. The first woman stood in front of me while her friend moved behind me and said - "let's see if you can wine white boy. If you can go down low to de ground you can stay. If not you gotta go." The phrase was a command to see ifl had the required cultural knowledge - the dance moves - in order to be a legitimate attendee at the fete.

All the years of training my mother had put me through, not to mention the many years experience of hanging out in Trinidad, came to the fore and I passed with flying colours. Confirmed by the high fives between me and my two new friends and the laughs we all shared. At no point do I remember thinking during or after the incident I was a white boy or that being white was a reason not to be somewhere - white boy was just a way to hail me in a crowd. It wasn't necessarily racially offensive or troubling, not to me at least. Rather the ability to dance in the required manner was what made me "Trini." It didn't matter my colour it mattered if I could wine. This was a point further confirmed to 25

me on many other occasions when in Trinidad I have been called "red," "indian,"

"dougla," "whitey," "tarred by the brush," "coolie" and much else - all with no consistency. In fact I would venture it is more the accent, vocabulary and other cultural symbols (like wining) I used in everyday interaction that affected the treatment I received from others rather than the colour of my skin. Nationality in the sense of being Trini seemed to be more important than a particular ethnicity, race or class.

Building off this short aside, my position as an anthropologist amongst those I had known for a long time was never in the foreground. I was accepted within many different social circles because for many I was a Trini or at the least a half-Trini who had put in the time, made enough acquaintances and knew enough of the culture like a local, to be accepted on the inside. In terms of the information I collected from my friends, it was only when I began recording interviews for my dissertation research that I disclosed I might use previous and future conversations for this project. It was then, when I needed signatures on consent forms that my relationship as an anthropologist came to the fore and was problematic. On the one side, I was embarrassed to ask friends to sign the forms and as such their voices, disappointingly, are missing from this project. On the other side, some people were actually pushy about ensuring their opinions were included.

In the summer of 2005, I left Trinidad and moved to Washington, DC to begin graduate study. On two occasions during 2006, I returned to Trinidad to conduct preliminary fieldwork for this project. For the academic year 2007-08, I was a visiting sociology lecturer in the Behavioural Sciences Department at the University of the West

Indies (UWI), St Augustine Campus, Trinidad, living in a rented apartment on Robert

Street in the heart of Woodbrook. 26

In terms of research my fieldwork in the main was a two-pronged endeavour, but also at times a somewhat "kitchen-sink" approach too with the collection of every piece of daily minutiae I could find. The first, most conventional path of my data collection involved nine months of archival research at the University of the West Indies, West

Indiana Collection. This part of the UWI library contains documents, books, dissertations, newspapers (microfiche and hardcopies), journals, specialist texts and many out of date publications. Access to the collection is denied without prior approval or UWI faculty credentials, the latter of which I acquired through my position as instructor.

Much of the material in the collection is filed under author name with little description of content or the era it relates to, none of it has been digitised. Over a nine­ month period and with the help of various librarians of the collection I spent on average four to six hours a day, Monday to Friday, reading through as much material as possible and uncovering much data for this project. I was looking for first hand words and accounts describing race relations and groups; Carnival in the 19th century; documents from the 19th century and into the 20th century about the coming into being and development of Woodbrook. Also, articles that talked about cultural intersections between social groups in Trinidad, instances of cross-cultural solidarity and examples of transculturation - such as Carnival masques, social movements, and language use.

Human geography dissertations with their local settlement patterns; maps and newspaper reports which highlighted the observation of various groups by other groups;' and art history documents related to the influences found in various Carnival masques and masquerades were particularly useful. 27

19th century newspaper information was contained on microfiche. From historical accounts of Trinidad in the 19th century produced by authors such as Brereton ( 197 4,

1979, 1981, 1993 ), Anthony ( 1978), and Trottman (1986) I chose various dates they mentioned as significant and searched the microfiche looking for first hand material of the events they discussed. A pleasing part of this research and immersing oneself in these

19th century papers was the imaginary world it created. Reflexivity and biases to the side for one moment, there was immense pleasure in picturing and reconstructing the world from the words, reports and letters I was reading, no matter the intertextual and overdetermined meanings involved in such recreation. I also spent a lot of time looking through numerous unpublished dissertations. These proved to be some of the most rewarding sources of information about events and the economy of 19th century Trinidad.

Maingot (1962), Goodenough (1976, 1978), Johnson (1981), Phillips (1984), Waite

(1993) provide much background and reference sources for my understanding of the relationship between race and class throughout the 19th century, as well as the ways in which ethnicity functioned and was deployed by various 19th century groups and actors.

When race and ethnicity were spoken of as fixed and essential I often tried to read against the grain looking for examples of types of cross-cultural solidarity to contradict this description. I also recorded evidence of class mobility for various persons and how this intersected with lexical descriptions of race and ethnicity. I approached much of the available data on Trinidad's colonial past with a skeptical eye and set out to investigate what current evidence may erase, hide and misrepresent. Furthermore, how might such

"myths" (Reid 2009) tie into the present-day representation of racial and ethnic groups in

Trinidad? Is there textual evidence of neo-colonial power to be highlighted? Is there a 28

way in which literature about the past masks a counter history of pauperisation and economic dispossession that would help to better understand social violence in the

1 present and the consolidation of capital accumulation during the 20 h century?

The second line of enquiry my fieldwork took involved interviews and participant observation. I conducted interviews with twenty-eight current residents of Woodbrook.

Five in particular became regular contacts. In chats over a six-month period we covered their thoughts about living in Woodbrook, any changes they could remember, general thoughts about the state of Trinidad in 2007 /08 and ideas about race, ethnicity and class, their thoughts on cross cultural communication and their thoughts on crime in

Woodbrook. The format for these discussions was, with my residential neighbours often off the cuff, and across the wall. However, in other more formal instances I recorded on tape or took notes. Toward the end of my fieldwork, I met Marion O'Callaghan. She was a contact I made through a friend of a friend. A retired anthropologist and former United

Nations Departmental Deputy Director on Race she provided me with keen insights on the changing racial composition of Woodbrook and also the general decline of native anthropologists from the Caribbean. I wish I had been able to record a life history with her. Due to the short period we were in contact however, life stories had to suffice.

My main source of information on present-day Trinidad and Woodbrook, in the sense we were in contact almost every day, was a thirty-something year old resident of

Woodbrook called Richard. He was the best friend of my cousin at high school and his younger brother Nando one of my oldest friends in Trinidad. Richard was particularly sociable, with a large social network and constantly chirpy demeanour. This allowed me to observe and interact with persons across many different professions from all the 29

classes, races and ethnicities represented on the island. These professions included lawyers, criminals, sports personalities, entertainers, business owners, media professionals, government officials, car washers, security guards, cleaners and food vendors to list just a small sample.

Richard is phenotypically dark brown, the son of a "dougla" (Afro/Indo mix) and a "reds" (White/Black mix) - in the US he would be called "Black," in Trinidad that is but one ethnic designation he uses. He and his girlfriend have a son and live on the western side of Woodbrook on Fitt Street, five blocks away from my rented apartment.

We became acquainted in my youth but didn't become good friends until around 2003.

By the time I moved into Woodbrook for my fieldwork in July 2007 we had come to know each other well.

Over the course of the year I was in the field, I spent a lot of time at his house, liming23 with him, his girlfriend, their young son and many of their friends. His girlfriend, Lisa, is a successful Carnival costume designer. Through her, I met many people involved in the production of Carnival. Alongside other business ventures

Richard, a middle-class entrepreneur, was also involved as a shareholder in a large

Carnival band with over 4000 patrons. On many occasions, I would ride with him on his daily errands or attend meetings and social events related to both Carnival and his other business activities. I made written records of the statements and attitudes that came up in my interactions with Richard and his acquaintances. I tried to focus on issues related to

23 "Thomas Hylland-Eriksen describes liming as 'entirely contingent on the shared meaning that can be established spontaneously.' It is hanging around, socialising, talking, laughing, and a great deal of reminiscing - and can be extremely productive ... Opinions get aired ... more importantly, however, relevant topics of interest to the lime and the limer's community are made manifest. The liming situation establishes a forum for its participants, and through this the parameters of the group's world are partially established" (Scher 2003:94). 30

race, ethnicity, humour, Carnival, class and gender. Through the access this family provided to the local area and their background in the Carnival industry I connected with many persons not only living and working in Woodbrook, but also persons who were involved in Carnival such as participants, musical artists, band organisers, costume designers and event promoters beyond the circle I had previously established over years of visiting. I begin to see the importance of Carnival in Wood brook as a lens through which this project could discuss solidarity across race, ethnicity and class, and also economic stratification through the high cost of participation in Carnival. As we will see throughout this project, Carnival is an indigenous lens into urban society in Trinidad both today and historically.

The fact I already had a Trini accent, was up to speed on gossip, slang, jokes and political banter, I believe helped me to gain access into discussions and conversations in little time. This allowed me to construct notes about people's concerns with the country, crime, Carnival and social relations. I did this because I felt these themes were constant topics in daily conversation. I wanted to record local narratives about everyday life and I wanted to see the chains of causality people used for the problems of crime and the

"decay of morality" that seemed to be constant themes on the television and the newspaper, something I explore in the final chapter. A lesson I was reminded of from this extension of my knowledge of Trinidad was how difficult it is to speak of a solid entity

24 called 'Trinidad' with any kind of anthropological authority . The conclusions I had about Woodbrook could not simply be extended to cover the whole of Trinidad.

24 "Trinidad is not a single homogenized society. The society that exists in Port-of-Spain isn't nearly the same as that which exists in Caroni or in the deep south. There are some glaring differences, and 31

While I think there were certain advantages to being an insider I also think there were certain drawbacks. For example, in interviews locals would sometimes assume I knew certain details when I did not. Sometimes I would not realise the need to probe deeper until I was reading over my notes or listening to the tape. Often this was could be solved by returning but sometimes the interview occasion was lost. I also found at times I suffered a form of role conflict where my loyalty to my male friends meant I didn't fully support the argument of female friends. This predominantly occurred around relationship issues where male bravado belittled equality between the sexes. I worried if I spoke up about it, as I had done on a couple of occasions only to be argued down, that I would not be seen as being loyal to the male group. On occasion, and not at every instance, this led to my own silence.

At The University of the West Indies (UWI), I taught four courses over two semesters to second year undergraduates. These were Anthropology of the Caribbean (I and II), and Social Theory (Classical and Modem). My affiliation with UWI meant I had the opportunity to observe and participate in the Trinbagonian pedagogical system and test Lloyd Best's notion that the Caribbean has been defined by imported theories and

25 outsiders looking in (1967) • As mentioned before, in terms of historical research, it

you shouldn't fall into the trap of lumping all of Trinidad into one society" personal email received from Professor Daphne Phillips at UWI

25 The failed economic formula for Caribbean development championed by West Indian economist Dr. W. Arthur in the 1950s and 60s was labelled 'Industrialisation by Invitation' "As implemented, this strategy has not produced the anticipated results because the analysis on which it was based did not explicitly distinguish between an offshore sector of Caribbean economy, where foreign enterprise and capital have always had sway, and an onshore sector where the residentiary population operates. Lewis' theory needed to be more precisely located in Caribbean empirical reality. The problem Lewis addressed was the low level of income which the Caribbean economy of 1950 afforded its members. To Lewis, low incomes resulted from low productivity in its principal industry, namely agriculture. In order to raise factor productivity, agriculture needed to be mechanized to raise the land/man ratio since output per acre already 32

granted me complete access to the West Indiana Collection on St Augustine campus, the

University's central historical archive of books, documents, dissertations and other

materials relating to Trinbagonian history. Thanks to such persons as Dr Daphne Phillips,

Dr Nasser Mustapha and Dr Ralph Premdas from the Department of Behavioural

Sciences, I also got to explore some of the ideas I was thinking about to a highly qualified

local audience and took much from our conversations. In establishing my own historical picture this project notes the concerns of such local scholars who spoke to me about

Trinidadian notions of class, ethnicity and race, and how they did not evolve under the

identical historical, spatial and interactive conditions of Euro-American modernity even

if Eurocentric epistemology naturalises a dominant way to articulate such issues.

A final and main site of ethnographic discovery for this project is a football group who met four times a week on a field not far from Woodbrook. The members identified this regular gathering as the "Rehab." I have been playing football on and off there since

I was fourteen years old and feel accepted as a "regular." In fact, I was often referred to by others as a "regular" and if there was ever disagreement about who should be on the field playing - the games were strictly seven-a-side, one goal come off, with regulars

compared favourably internationally but output per man was low. There was however a severe constraint on land space in these small island territories of mountainous terrain. Labour therefore had to be removed from the land to make room for mechanization. In the European experience, with which he was familiar, this was achieved by shifting labour from agriculture to manufacturing, from the land to the factory. The Lewis' strategy thus required that manufacturing industry be established as necessary to raising productivity in agriculture. There were however the problems of capitalizing manufacturing and finding markets for its output. This is the context in which foreign investors were to be invited to establish and capitalize their enterprises and produce for overseas markets initially. The record shows that Caribbean governments gave generous incentives to foreign capital through the various Pioneer Industries Ordinances, and that there was much foreign capital invested throughout the Caribbean. The vast bulk of the investments however went into resource based industries in the offshore sector - petroleum in Trinidad, bauxite in Guyana and Jamaica, tourism in Barbados, Bahamas and the OECS, sugar in Trinidad, Guyana and Belize, citrus in Belize and bananas in the OECS. Few investments were made onshore complementing the surplus labour in that sector"(St Cyr 2009: 1-2) 33

getting starting preferences - my "regular" status was often stressed by others as reason I should be "sweating" and someone else should be sitting down. If I ever had problem asserting my 'seniority' more senior members would argue it forcefully for me until I was playing and the non-regular took a seat.

Membership of the Rehab was not financial, but based, as I came to see it26 on one of four main criteria (any of these by themselves can provide membership however used in conjunction they can enhance each other making one's acceptance and status less fractious): 1) introduction (i.e. which current member "brought you in"; 2) ability to compete effectively at football (individual skills vs. teamwork received different comments); 3) being male with many of its associated local characteristics i.e. ability with the opposite sex, party prowess, humour skills (although on one or two occasions single females - usually on holiday and non-Trinidadian would be allowed to play); and

4) "paying ones dues" i.e. regular attendance over a long period of time.

In all the social and fieldwork situations I encountered through my residence in

Woodbrook, my interaction with Richard, my job at UWI and my attendance on the

Rehab I was presented with the ethnic labels and racial nicknames people used in day­ today interaction. These labels seemed to be the internal jargon and insider knowledge of being a "local," i.e. Trinis never seemed lost as I occasionally did by the specificity of such labels in terms of characteristics - visual, cultural and economic. The labels seemed to be specific Trinidadian products which were not frozen as distinctions. In addition, while some labels had obvious overlaps with visible cues such as dress, phenotype and conversation style, people were also called and responded to labels that had no overlap

26 There is no formal Rehab rule book. 34

with visible/audible cues. People's identity in the sphere of ethnic and racial labels I observed did not appear fixed nor the rules easily understood to cultural outsiders. More accurately, it seemed persons activated various voices and words both for economic and social benefits and to disarm any potential hostilities. Such observations led me to want to explore historically how essentialised these groups actually were. It made me think of the questions I raised on page 1. How did the groups emerge, in what context, through what mechanisms? Perhaps there is some historical significance to be learned from their present fluidity and the solidarity in these naming situations. Perhaps a modem picture of urban Trinidad dominated by division and race politics is mobilised in the interests of economic dominance?

Trinidad and Tobago

For those unfamiliar with the twin-island Republic, Trinidad and Tobago, affectionately referred to as "T&T" by its citizens is roughly the same size as Northern

Ireland, both in terms of land area (5,123 sq. kilometres) and population size (1.3 million people).27

While T &T was a British colony, it is unlike most other former British Caribbean colonies today. For example Roman Catholicism is the dominant religion, with Hinduism

27 The official ethnic categories found in Trinidad do not reflect the labels found in popular culture and day-today conversation of which I illustrated early in nicknames from the Rehab. However, "[a]ccording to the 2000 Census [T&T] is ethnically composed of Indians (40.0 percent), Africans (37.5 percent), Mixed (20.5 percent), White/Caucasian (0.6 percent), Chinese (0.3 percent), Syrian/Lebanese (0.1 percent), and Other Ethnic Group/Not Stated (1.0 percent). The 'African-Indian rivalry" model, accordingly, largely ignores the other groups in the society. Even on the official website of the country's Central Statistical Office, the Whites, Syrain/Lebanese, Chinese, and other groups are not reported. This can be misleading with regard to the social, economic, and even political importance of these groups, in addition to the crucial Mixed group" (Meighoo 2006:4). 35

second and Anglicanism third. Amerindian place names survive alongside Spanish,

French and English ones. British-descended families are not found in the countryside like in other former British colonies such as Jamaica and Barbados because the British were

28 concentrated in Port of Spain. Hindi, French Creole , Tamil and other languages were widely spoken until the mid 20th century (Meighoo 2006:5) something in the Caribbean only applicable to Guyana and Trinidad.

A 2003 World Bank Development Report (World Bank, 2003) classified the twin island republic as a "Less Indebted Middle Income" country. During the period 2000 to

2005 it experienced a 200% rise in its GNI (formerly GNP) from $6.7 billion in 2000 to

$13.4 billion in 2005 as it moved from a moderate oil-based economy to a globally important natural gas based one that accounts for 70% of all US Liquid Natural Gas imports. To illustrate Trinidad's long established connections to global trade and capital, its commercial oil industry has been in existence since 1908 with offshore production beginning in the 1950s, while it was also a major world producer of both sugar and cocoa during the 19th century. By 2004, "despite relatively high rates of economic growth and inflation, there has been a persistently high level of unemployment. This has not fallen below 10% since 1982, and for most of the late 1980s and early 1990s it was over 20%"

(Lewis 2004).

28 Creole: someone of mixed genetic ancestry that contains local mixture, most usually African mixture, and was born in the Caribbean, this could include Afro/European, Euro/Amerindian ancestry and Afro/West Indian 36

Trinidad and Tobago

Map 1. Map of Caribbean. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3. 0 License.

Woodbrook

As the project moves into the 20th century, it focuses on the residents and the intellectual/socio-economic formation of Woodbrook. 37

A Maravaf

PS.A. "VHh H,i-.!10. lut1;1 (11.0 ..nJ, Pl1w,""' , (;it',.,u':ir 'F' l't"'1,!id•tt"•2'L~. \ ,;\bll ~·" ;: H<>rl1o:uli<.11.it "''Jl><;•'....'l~...i.'i.: c.<.-ntr~ S1).rn-..... !',, .. i,h Mdutl . c ...,,vk·-\ . • l're·1Ju1t'~ :.·· · a f11rn,•r v - \'d:.e,z,., If,.,, ..

Qu....,.r,'~ W1(.1ft, ...·r?c H.oll ' ·' . ' ';; ~; S1 J ml!.':> Palh:c ' ll.-ru..:'n

Map 2. Port of Spain and its environs with Woodbrook in the centre. Map courtesy of Discover Trinidad and Tobago

Woodbrook is an urban site of approximately 200ha, 5000 people and 1000 houses (Chadee and Martinez 2000). It is bounded by Lapeyrouse Cemetery to the east and the Maraval River to the west, Wrightson Road to the south and Tragarete Road to the north. Three main arteries, Tragarete Road, Mucurapo Road and Ariapita Avenue, traverse it. At the time of European contact it was the site of a Amerindian village called

Cumucurapo and prior to this there is midden evidence of a Saladoid village dating back to between 500 B.C.E. and C.E. 600 from where communities en route to the rest of the 38

Caribbean may have stopped (Reid 2009:27-28, Boomert 2000). By the 19th century,

Woodbrook became a working sugarcane estate before being incorporated as a suburb of

Port of Spain in 1911. Many icons in the nationalist era of the 1920s - 1960s emerged from, lived in and gravitated to Woodbrook.

According to life-stories I collected from older residents, Woodbrook has traditionally been a middle to upper class residential area. "The elegant old district" as one resident of over 60 years called it. In recent years Woodbrook has been transformed, as it once was by first sugar and then cocoa production, by a new imperialism (Harvey

2005) with an influx of foreign petro-capital workers and their accompanying forms of wealth creation (Venn 2009:210-211) changing the area from one of primarily residential housing to a site dominated by bars, restaurants, mas camps,29 offices, retail shops, casinos and lounges catering to high-income tastes [Photo. 1]. From west to east the area is visibly distinct with gated communities [Photo 2.], well kept streets, and the skyscraper housing development One Wood brook Place towering above the western side [Photo 3].

In the east, where I rented an apartment for 11 months, are smaller houses often interspersed with empty or broken down lots, ill-functioning street lighting and poorly maintained road surfaces [Photo 4].

Between 1950 and 1990, Woodbrook and another district of Port of Spain called

Belmont were home to numerous families and places of residence involved in the production of Carnival bands and costumes [Photo 5]. Today, according to Gerard

Aching (2002), the business of Carnival is less about family run bands and production,

29 A mas camp is the place where a masquerade band (Carnival group) makes costumes, display them to the public, collects monies for said costumes and generally lime. 39

and more about the profit motive. During this change Woodbrook has become the central

Carnival business district of Trinidad and Tobago with by far the greatest number of mas camps and band launch venues. Each year from July to February, these locations burst into life. Some mas camps such as the Mas Factory, run by Albert Bailey, are long established, while others like Tribe and Island People have only appeared in the last four or five years. Ariapita A venue and Tragarete Road themselves are also central parts of the designated Carnival parade route and in Victoria Square, Woodbrook provides one of the three main judging points of the two day annual festival (the others are the Queens

Park Savannah and downtown Port of Spain).

Figure 1. 'Crobar' on Ariapita Avenue. (2008 photo by author) 40

Figure 2. Casino on Ariapita A venue. (2008 photo by author)

Figure 3. Bar and Restaurant 'More Vino' on Ariapita Avenue. (2008 photo by author) Figure 4. Gated House on Fitt Street. (2008 photo by author)

Figure 5. 'One Woodbrook Place' Rises on the Western Side of Woodbrook. (2008 photo by author) 42

Figure 6. Empty and Run Down Lots on Roberts Street. (2008 photo by author)

Figure 7. Stephen Derek's Mas Camp on lBuHer St. (2008 photo by author) CHAPTER THREE:

THE COLONIAL ENCOUNTER AND ITS LEGACY:

RACIAL HIERARCHY

"Division of the races ... separation and fragmentation were the policy of colonialism" - Eric Williams (l 962:xi)

"Race or racism is the precondition that makes killing acceptable ... So you understand the importance ... of racism for the exercise of power: it is the pre-condition for exercising the right to kill" - Michel Foucault (2003:256)

"The Caribbean, as with other parts of the New World, has been shaped by racialised constructs since the beginning of its modem history in the late 15th Century. Caribbean history is closely related to the emergence of modem racism, usually dated at the point of the encounter between Europe, Africa and the New World" -Rhoda Reddock (2007:1)

By July 31, 1498, the date Christopher Columbus and his men on their third voyage into the Antilles30 first glimpsed Trinidad, the island was a site of cultural interaction for over 7000 years31 with many distinct communities inhabiting the island

30 "Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole. The glue that fits the pieces is the sealing of its original shape. It is such a love that reassembles our African and Asiatic fragments, the cracked heirlooms whose restoration shows its white scars. This gathering of broken pieces is the care and pain of the Antilles, and if the pieces are disparate, ill-fitting, they contain more pain than their original sculpture, those icons and sacred vessels taken for granted in their ancestral places" Derek Walcott (1998:69).

31 "There is no doubt, that relative to the other West Indian islands, Trinidad was densely populated at the time of discovery ... Juan Bono in 1516 built a house in Trinidad in which he intended to 43 44

(Kerrigan 2010). Some labels handed down over the last 500 years refer to some of these peoples variously as Taino, Yaio, Nepuyo, Caribes, Suppoya, Chaima, Guaiquiri, Warao,

Kalipuna, Yao, Carinepogoto, Garini, Pariagotos, Quaques, Chaguanes, Mabouyes,

Salives, Tamanacos and Aruaca (Newson 1976:18). Today, there is little idea whether or not the labels handed down fell into a hierarchal order with certain groups deemed inferior and superior to others or not.

We do know from local legend that in this earliest era of European contact, and under the gaze of its inhabitants, that the Spanish renamed the island from Iere to Trinity.

Such textual symbolism of the strength colonial power and representation had over local self-ascription32 is one illustration of how European colonialism made and remade social groups in Trinidad and elsewhere. The colonial politics of domination constructed difference and hierarchy by ignoring local cultural and social diversity for monolithic classifications in a production of hierarchal social structure based on ideas of race, racism and violence. This construction of difference, what can be called the colonial logic of divide and conquer is the central theme of this chapter.

capture the Indians of a village and then transport them to Puerto Rico. The plan succeeded in part, for 180- 200 Indians were taken, but in the process 100-200 were killed and many escaped. This would suggest that the village exceeded 500 in population. It is reasonable, therefore, to assume an average of about 400-500 people per village. Archaeological investigations have revealed the presence of 24 permanently occupied settlement sites in the period prior to conquest" (Newson 1976:32)

32 32 Forte has called this encounter the "original act of engineering " (2005:46). While such a theory has its critics (Hassen 2000, Deleuze & Guattari 1983, Foucault 1978) it is a heuristic able to conceptualise transcendent violence and suggest violence's constitutive role in the foundation of Modem society. Violence it can then be said is embodied in language, subsequently institutionalised in laws (Anderson 1991) and political institutions (Habermas 1983: 180), and ultimately manifest in armies, deep lying structures of power (Bourgois 2001), everyday practices (Bourdieu 1977) and the knowledge system and spectacle that governs and allows society to function. As Kleinman (2001 :238) makes clear "hierarchy and inequality, which are so fundamental to social structures, normalise violence." 45

Lacking any obvious mineral wealth comparative to Spain's other Caribbean possessions, these first conquistadors and the several others who followed over the next three years made no attempt to colonise the island (Newson 1976:71). They would stop often however, to renew their supplies of water, food and wood, leave a few missionaries behind and capture Indians to be sold on as slaves in other islands like Puerto Rico

(Mavrogodato 1996:4).

Las Casas and others in Columbus' crew recorded their first observations of the island's inhabitants and spoke highly of their mode of life, domestic economy and

33 general benevolence (Kingsley 1888) . From such accounts and a reinterpretation of the islands "pre-history" (Guarch-Delmonte 2007:100, Boomert 2000, 2003:145, Curet 2005,

Patel 2007, Reid 2009:27) we can imagine the Spanish met a population based on shifting cultivation, fishing, hunting and the collection of wild vegetable produce with a relatively simple and egalitarian socio-political organisation. With the effective residence unit imagined by Newson being the village, "composed of a number of extended families integrated by kinship ties with groups of villages held together by a loose military organisation" (Newson 1976:228).

Numerous vessels follow in the wake of Columbus but an attempt to colonise the island and subjugate its population to the structural and actual violence of Empire building does not take place until 1532 and 1533 when Trinidad's first European

Governor, the Spaniard Antonio de Sedano, and his men land twice and fight the

33 "They built commodious dwellings, manufactured vessels of clay ... had the art of spinning cotton into cloth, and were by no means destitute of agriculture; they made canoes of surprising capacity, they made cordage and hammocks from the fibres of the coco palm and other trees" (Joseph 1838:119). 46

34 islanders at Cumucurapo . At this point Sedano records a vast population, probably over- stated of 200,00035 (Newson 1976:30). Joseph recounts the first battle:

His [Sedano] first arrival in Trinidad to colonise it, was with a few followers armed with swords, shields, and cross bows. At St. Domingo he obtained two carvela and pirogues, whence he sailed to subjugate this island in 1532. The Indians, in a body (emphasis added), opposed his landing; losing their cacique, they retreated, but returned the next day frightfully painted and fought until sunset. Great slaughter was made amongst the Indians, and the Spaniards lost fifty men- a serious number, considering the smallness of the expedition. It appears the Spaniards had no fire-arms. [Joseph 1838:132].

The second battle described by both Ottley (1962:12) and Mavrogordato (1996:5) also mentions an alliance of several different tribes fighting as one to drive off the

Spanish. Another account claims the Spanish managed a truce and were able to build a camp at Cumucurapo, which they abandoned in 1534 as their attention turned to events in

Peru (Newson 1976:73). Joseph however, recounts a different view of the second battle, which nonetheless results in the same conclusion - Amerindian alliance and the Spanish leaving (1838:133).

For my purposes, the point to note in each account of the two events, no matter their distinctions, is they each describe an alliance between different communities and social units. This can be interpreted as evidence of cultural solidarity, which historians note is common to the era of colonial conquest with indigenous populations shifting and

34 Cumucurapo is a long since vanished Amerindian village located on a muddy mangrove that today is the western edge of modern Woodbrook (Ottley 1962:11112). Evidence ofthis can be read on the edge of Woodbrook today which carries the name 'Mucurapo road' from the Amerindian words 'Cumo Mucurapo,' a place of great silk cotton trees

35 Both Rouse and Newson see this figure as too high and suggest an island wide population between 11,000 and 25,000. 47

forging new alliances36 through contingency in the face of violence and superior weaponry.

By 1569 the Spanish again attempted to settle a colony in Trinidad but failed.

Nonetheless, by now the majority of their trips from the Canaries to South America involved a stop there because the trade winds across the Atlantic made Trinidad a convenient place to drop anchor for food and water. It was also a stopping place for the continued kidnapping of Indians to labour in the encomiendas of Margarita, Puerto Rico and Hispaniola (Joseph 1838:130, Newson 1976). At the same time and under direction from the King of Spain to enslave "aborigines," more missionaries were left on the island or were swapped over with each visit. These agents of colonialism, alongside a commensurate small Spanish military expedition, set up "a precarious and impertinent fort" [Angostura museum] two miles east of Cumucurapo near the foot of the Laventille

Hills, known at the time as a port of Spain, Puerto de Los Hispanioles or Puerto de

36 Any surprise and erasure of such Amerindian alliances perhaps reflects the epistemological habits of Western researchers today. The reproduction of such colonial worldviews into the present can be said to replicate the power dynamics of colonialism maintaining them as forms of symbolic violence and neo-colonialism well into the modern era (Thomas 2006). This is something not only reflected in everyday discourse today but as Forsythe points out for the entire colonial period, "colonial discourse structures the political institutions, legal system and narratives of social order to be found on the island" (Forsythe 1974:404). This situation of symbolic violence is an intrinsic part of the process that connects colonialism to capitalism sustaining the relationship of domination and subordination established centuries ago. It is the myth of "positivistic perspective" (Curet 2005:28). A form of ideological racial-boundary policing that protects the integrity of a fabricated European whiteness and its essentialised superiority (Robinson 1983), and structures the historical racism of the colonial encounter. As Hulme notes of the power inherent in the colonial encounter: "colonial discourse may misrecognise, but it also has the power to call its categories into being" (1986:213). One group's definition runs through time while various others are often lost to time as the colonial view of group boundaries and dynamics manufactured from the past becomes accepted locally. 48

Espana. A few years later the Spanish also secured what would become their first permanent site in Trinidad, at San Jose de Oruna37 (St Joseph).

According to Matthews (2007), in 1594 a small number of enslaved Africans were delivered under contract by the Dutch to construct a lasting settlement at St Joseph described then as a small, far from impressive "clearing in the bush." This addition of enslaved Africans as labourers deemed inferior and forced to work for white masters is a foundational element in the racist logic behind the colonial system of domination and how it obtained labour.

A year later, on the orders of Queen Elizabeth, who was at war with Spain, Sir

38 Walter Raleigh visited (Joseph 1838:13 8) and burned St Joseph to the ground . St Joseph was rebuilt after this and became the island's capital for near on the next two hundred

39 years . Up to this point there was little cultivation by the Spanish and "we seldom read of their possessing above forty soldiers there" (Joseph 1838:135). In the estimates of population collected by the Spanish there is a massive decline in the Indian population over the hundred years, from estimates of between 20,000 and 30,000 to around 15,000

37 "It appears a Spanish Governor, towards the year 1577, called Don Josef de Orufia founded what he called the city of San Josef de Oruna, up the Caroni, in the country of a tribe of subdued Indians called Carinepagotos" (Joseph I 838: 135).

38 This was actually Raleigh's second visit, and from his "adventures" we learn St Joseph consisted of 40 houses and a Spanish garrison of 30 men prior to its ransacking, and that "the soil of this island is excellent, producing sugar, ginger, and other West India merchandise; immense quantities of deer, wild hogs, fish and game ... There were at that time according to Sir Walter, several nations of aborigines besides the Paricos, such as Jaio, the Arawaks, the Salivas the Nepoios; and those near the Spanish towns are the Carinepagotos" (Joseph 1838:138)

39 1 At the end of the l 6 h century Trinidad was being visited regularly by pirates and corsairs including, Andrew Baker (1576), John Chindley (1590), Benjamin Wood (1592), John Lancaster (1593), Jacob Whiddon (I 593-4 ), John Burgh (1593-4 ), Robert Dudley (1594-5), Sir John Popham (1595) and Sir Walter Raleigh (1595). And while Raleigh successfully ransacks the St Joseph its location inland makes it difficult on the whole for attacks from Amerindians or other foreigners, hence its choice as capital of the island (Newson I 976). 49

(Newson 1976:77). Enslaving raids, disease and battles to prevent the Spanish from

40 settling the island all took their toll on the population numbers •

The Spanish approach toward the indigenous population in Trinidad changed at the beginning of the 1?1h century. Two things are central in this change; the first is the desire for more supplies and produce from the land to support Spanish Empire building and exploration of the new world.41 The second is the enlargement of the Catholic missions for the conversion of the island's Amerindians, previously small and limited in their ability to deal with the initial Amerindian population.42 The encomienda system as these missionaries were more accurately known was a brutal form of slavery. In Trinidad it meant the enslaved labour of Amerindians43 grew tobacco and plantain in exchange for supposed Spanish protection and forced conversion to Christianity. Any Amerindian who rejected Christianity was severely punished. By 1634 the Amerindian population

40 As the sexual intermixtures between Europeans and "Indios" - and the offspring of such liaisons - were removed from written records, there is also a form of symbolic violence that wipes out the indigenous numbers too

41 This economic philosophy is known as Mercantilism and involved the recognition that their purpose of the colonies was to satisfy the needs of the mother country.

42 We can imagine here the Comaroffs (1992) "Colonialisation of Consciousness" taking hold. A central tenant in the process of colonialism is to gain control over the humble day-to-day process of living and everyday experience of the would-be subjects. Cultural hegemony is a process of ideological manipulation, of reconstructing the processes by which everyday life is reproduced, of 'colonising consciousness'. The footsoldiers in this process are often missionaries. They steer the colonised away from their own indigenous cultural forms of living and into the European way of "material individualism ... the forceful domination of nature; the privatisation of property; and the accumulation of surplus through an economy of effort" (Comaroff 1992:275). This is achieved through reconstructing the ordinary. "First came the well and the irrigation ditch, next the plough, each being as critical to the construction of the Protestant world view as it was to the material basis of the civilising mission" (Comaroff and Comaroff 1992:248). If the cultural hegemony of the European world was to be naturalised and be reproduced by the colonised "it would have to do so by reforming the minutiae of practical existence" (Comaroff and Comaroff 1992:275). "No habit being too humble, no sign too insignificant to be implicated in the battle" (Comaroff and Comaroff 1992:236).

43 By now Amerindians were simply labelled as one monolithic group with the identifier "Indio," denying any and all cultural diversity, and placing the entire indigenous population at the bottom of the society 50

according to Spanish records dropped to 4,000. It should be noted this particular figure does not take into account the mixed offspring of Amerindians and Europeans who are erased from history completely even though mixed marriages, discouraged by the

Spanish Crown, were legal from 1501, and taking place as the historical evidence notes:

"Spanish colonialists had developed systems for establishing kinship ties with

Amerindian groups as a basis for forming alliances, through marriage and friendships"

(Forte 2005:58). A situation of hierarchy can now clearly be said to exist with Europeans on top, a mixed group in the middle, and a bottom group comprised of Amerindians and a small number of enslaved Africans.44

Under the supposed protection, and "God given" civilising mission of the Holy

Catholic Church, Amerindians had become vassals of the King of Spain. The political control of the indigenous population, not just in Trinidad, but all over the New World was now administered through a stratified form of social organisation45 which claimed one race - the white European - was superior over all others and justified colonialism as a form of development and civilising mission. As much is suggested by the Spanish themselves and provides insight into how status hierarchies are produced and sustained in the colonial period. Division by class is intrinsic to hierarchical order and the fact that it

44 Joseph (1838:140) remarks on this when he notes that in the first decade of the 17th century as trade between the Spanish, Dutch, English and French emerged in Trinidad. It is a trade not merely for the exchange of locally grown tobacco for food, clothing and other essentials, but also for the exchange of enslaved Africans. In 1606 for example, Isaac Duverne in fulfilment of a contract with Trinidad colonists brings a relatively low number of slaves (470] (Newson I 976: 148) who supplement the encomienda system working alongside Amerindians.

45 "Many of the Spaniards who went to the New World claimed to be of noble descent but others just assumed noble status on arrival. Their social status was however, largely a state of mind and it was not enforced by legal privileges. The King as head of the social body was the ultimate source of legislation defining the status of groups and individuals, dispensing privileges and favours, such as encomiendas, land grants, offices and honours, and revoking them as it desired (Newson 1976: 111 ). 51

is found in the historical record tells us more about how the coloniser thought than the colonised:

It is undeniable that the existence of various hierarchies and classes is of the greatest importance to the existence and stability of a monarchical state, since a graduated system of dependence and subordination sustains and insures the obedience and respect of the last vassal to the authority of the sovereign. [McAlister 1963 :364].

By 1610, Spanish Laws of Mercantilism - the decree that its colonies only existed for the benefit of the Spanish Crown - meant Trinidad was told to cease trading with other nations. Fernando Berrio, son of the first Governor of the island and Governor at the time disobeyed the regal command. Unimpressed, King Philip III ordered an attack on all ships in Port of Spain's harbour, including those of the Dutch who in the previous ten years had made two deliveries of enslaved Africans and then latterly in 1640 made an attempt on the island itself which was put down (Bate 1893 :22). The effect was instantaneous and trade between the island and other colonial powers dried up. An unintended outcome of this dispute was Trinidad's removal from full participation in the

1 transatlantic slave trade until the end of the l 8 h century (Matthews 2007). Nonetheless, colonialism and its use of difference, and strata of persons, had entrenched itself in the minds, practices and social hierarchy of the island. Trinidad had also now been brought within the transnational system of trade and accumulating wealth for European powers.

At the end of the century missionaries from Catalufia established San Francisco de los Arenales, the largest mission on the island. On December 1, 1699, a violent

Amerindian uprising in Arenales, today known as Arima, included the murder of the governor of the island, several priests and their slaves. It is said to have been an 52

46 "ambush" that was violently put down by Spanish arms • The violence by the local population can be imagined as a response to the dehumanisation and destruction of local cultures (Fanon 1963) they had experienced over the last two hundred years of colonialism. As such the attack on slaves, alongside Europeans, can be interpreted as the slaves being seen by the Amerindians as a group apart and members of the oppressive hierarchal structure of colonialism. The twenty-two indigenous adult men who survived the Spanish suppression and subsequent torture were hanged in the public square of the capital, St Joseph (Henry 2008, Forte 2005). Their bodies were decapitated, dismembered and strewn on the roadside as further warning to other Amerindians thinking of standing up to the Catholic Church in the colony. The few surviving Amerindian women and children at the mission were given as "body servants" to some Spanish inhabitants of the colony. This sequence of events is remembered in contemporary historical accounts as the "Arena Massacre." The "massacre," as Western history tells it, always refers to the

Spanish as the victims; another illustration of the way difference today was constructed in the colonial era.

In the decades that followed, the island in comparison to economic activities on other Spanish Caribbean colonies was relatively quiet (Newson 1976: 117). In 1688, according to Spanish records the total population of the two towns, St Joseph and Port of

Spain was about 750, which includes Spanish settlers but also mestizos and "mulattos,"

Indians in their employment and a number of slaves (Newson 1976:121). Indios as a group were still not recorded, and whilst the majority of Africans were slaves their social

46 "By tradition, old papers and an old ballad, we learn that, as customary, the governor, the Cabildo and the Clergy went to witness an annual feast of the Indians at Arena, and that in the middle of one of their warlike dances, the Indians, at a given signal, discharged a flight of arrows, which killed the Governor, al the Priests present, and most of the white people: very few escaped" (Joseph 1838:141). 53

status it appears was higher than that oflndians.47 This was primarily because culturally they were closer to Spaniards than Indians and also spoke Spanish.

Describing the scene around a Port of Spain in 1690 a French Naval commander wrote of seeing a small number of fisherman's huts, a small military post, six houses and several others being built [Angostura Museum Exhibit]. We are also told in the writing of

Joseph that at the end of the 1?1h century there were fifteen Indian missionary Pueblas, and that the Indians were suffering greatly from small pox (1838:142), not to mention the imposition of taxes by the Spanish. It shouldn't be overlooked that taxation is another mechanism the logic of colonialism used at this time to bring the colonies under its regime and support Spanish rule.

1 In the first quarter of the l 8 h century a successful cocoa crop produced by the enslaved labour of Amerindians (Forte 2005:62) and newly introduced enslaved Africans from Guinea for Spanish landowners emerged. The rich quality cocoa was in high demand from the Spanish market and between 1716 and 1718 a further, small number of

African slaves were bought from the Dutch to increase cocoa output (Matthews 2007).

For a short time economic prosperity for Spanish landowners reigned. In this example of early economic production and the imposition of taxes we can describe colonialism as a far different enterprise from the civilisation of "uncivilised" people and the evangelisation of pagans it was espoused to be at the time. For anti-colonial scholars

(Cesaire 1972) colonialism was more accurately a process of economic exploitation, of

47 "In Trinidad in 1688 there were two free Negroes who themselves had Indians working in their personal service. The gradual manumission of slaves created a landless group of negroes and people of mixed race" (Newson 1976:126). 54

proletarisation and pauperisation, imposing and laying ideas and practices of inequality,

assimilated by coloniser and colonised and their generations to come.

In 1725 blight destroyed the island's entire crop. The resultant misery and

departure of numerous landowners and cultivators brought a sharp decline in revenues.

The island's registered population, which again failed to account for Amerindians and

also mixed persons, fell to 162 adult inhabitants.48 By 1750 Joseph commented that "the

prosperity of the colony had by this time fallen to its lowest ebb, and indolence and

apathy had seized the inhabitants to a degree that is most incredible" (Matthews 2007:7).

As the island's contact with regular colonial trade diminished in this period we can

speculate some adaptation to the local situation and in particular mixture between the

various groups - Spanish landowners, missionaries, slaves, Amerindians and mixed

persons - did take place. In fact as Campbell and Forte note, over the next thirty or so

years due to the fact white men were few, white women were even rarer, a small group of

African women were available and the continued presence of an Amerindian population

on the island (Campbell 1992:55, Forte 2005:69), social relations produced a free

coloured population far earlier than in other Spanish colonies.49

Encouraged by the imbalance in the sex ratio, racial mixing was most common in the towns of St Joseph and Port of Spain, where Spaniards, negroes and Indians lived in close proximity. Mixed marriages, although legal from 1501, were not encouraged by the Crown. As a result most of the relationships between people of different races were casual and most of the offspring illegitimate. Legitimate

48 Only slaves and landowners are included in this number as Amerindians did not count as adults

49 "The Indian men, since they are obliged to live in society, choose mates of other races, and the women do the same, hence out of every seven children born of an Indian mother during the last 30 years, there are scarcely two of pure blood, as I have been informed; this will of course decrease their population; for those of the mixed race, whether they be Samboes (between Negroes and Indians), or the countless castes that the admixture between the African, European and Indian tribes produce, they are not the real aboriginal race and leave the inactive community of Indians as soon as they reach the years of discretion" (Joseph 1838:103). 55

mestizos were probably absorbed into the community as Spaniards or creoles for they are not specifically mentioned until 1687. Illegitimate mestizo children were probably brought up as Indians. [Newson 1976:123-124].

According to Farfan family papers, one of the oldest families on the island, cocoa cultivation was revived by 1752 and in 1759 the Mission of Arima was formed, consolidated and in 1785 enlarged. This enlargement was designed to push all remaining

Amerindian tribes from around St Joseph into the Arima area and ensure their labour for cocoa cultivation. The Mission promised the remaining Amerindians control of 2,000 acres of land - a promise that would later be withdrawn as Trinidad's now generic

Amerindians were displaced50 from their lands to make way for an influx of French planters (Wood 1968:43-44). Arima is the last Mission Town. It finalised the evangelisation process of many Amerindians51 begun over a hundred years earlier and the erasure of Amerindian ethnicity from the Spanish accounts of Trinidad thereafter (Forte

2005). The obvious inaccuracy with such a representation is it denies the cultural mixing between the Amerindian population, Europeans, Africans and other mixed persons that had already occurred on the island and instead used census categories that have little authenticity yet maintained hierarchal social structure. This following quote recorded in the early 19th century and reproduced by Forte clearly demonstrates the sorts of mixing the essentialised categories of the colonial census erased.

To the villagers, my father and mother were known respectively as Jose Tiburcio Valerio and Eleonore Valerio; both being natives of the island. From them I have inherited a natural legacy ... This legacy consists of a mixture of three strains in

50 Supposedly to "protect" the "aborigines, the crown of Spain used to grant to particular families whole districts, in order that they might govern the poor Indian of those districts" (Joseph 1838: 169)

51 On a lighter note parang, a festive contemporary music associated with neighbourly sociability and Christmas spirit that utilises both Spanish and Amerindian musical instruments, is said to have emerged from this forced assimilation situation 56

my blood: the Caucasian, the Indian [Amerindian] and the Negro. My father, a man of small stature, was born of white and Indian parents, and, in colour and other external characteristics, would have had little difficulty in passing for a white man. My mother, a dark-skinned woman, also of small size, and very kind disposition, is descended from the Negro and the Carib Indians. [Valerio cited in Forte 2005:93].

In the late 1700s the Spanish colonial system was failing around the globe and

Trinidad was in a poor state economically.52 Faced with a reluctance of its inhabitants to remain in St Joseph (Joseph 1838: 155), not least for the lack of costal benefits for trade,

Port of Spain, with its around 400 inhabitants comprising "a mixture of half-breed

Spaniards, and some full bloodied French strangers" (Ottley 1962:14), took over as the central site for commerce and administration on the island (in 1783 the Cabildo would finally agree and made this move official).

To summarise this early era in Port of Spain's history there was a small wooden church close by (Mavrogordato 1996:8), people lived in a mixture of ajoupas (mud-huts) of wattle and thatch on the riverbank, in light houses in town or in make-shift, open-air dwellings, there was regular contact in the marketplace53 (Mavrogordato 1996: 3 7), and

European whites were in the minority both in Port of Spain and St Joseph.

52 One Spanish Governor complained of much lawlessness with everyone, "even young children of ten or thereabouts, guilty of the most flagrant violations of the law" (Hollis cited in Millette 1973:6), as though somehow it was the failure of upholding the law that was to blame and not the extermination of the previous cultures on the island and the hierarchal social system of colonialism itself to blame. Another story relates that the colonialists were barely supporting themselves, "by raising corn, by the almost spontaneous production ofa large species ofplantanes [plantains], keeping a few meagre cattle, killing wild cattle, and catching fish" (Macpherson cited in Millette 1973:7), even though tens of thousands of Amerindians had once survived and supported themselves on the island before the imposition of colonialism.

53 Whether it was fishing in canoes, trading with the Spanish mainland and visiting Amerindian traders mooring their corials at the bottom of the principal road, Nelson street, or in the battle for necessity as hard times ruled, there were forms of interaction, not least in terms of possible food bartering between Amerindian, African and colonial cultures. 57

Port of Spain with a population of about 300 was composed of a mixture of indianised Spaniards and half castes as well as some French and Corsican foreigners. In 1763 whites, who probably included creoles and mestizos, since neither were specifically mentioned, constituted 21.5% and 54.3% of the populations of Port of Spain and St Joseph respectively .. .In Port of Spain negroes, euphemistically know as pardos were dominant as a free class. In both towns free morenos and mulattos formed the next most numerous group. [Newson 1976:124].

The Cedula of 1783

By 1776, Manuel Falquez the Spanish governor of Trinidad at the time was convinced of the need to increase Trinidad's small population and stimulate commerce.

54 He discussed with Roume de St. Laurent , a French planter based in Grenada, the possibility of immigration of French planters and their slaves to Trinidad. The talks were pertinent, after the Seven Years War France had recently ceded many of its Caribbean islands along with their inhabitants to Britain. These inhabitants, French planters and their slaves, were eager to get away from the British and were further enticed by offers of land. In this arrangement the Spanish found a way to increase Trinidad's population. In the census of 1777, when emigration began, there were only 2,763 people recorded as living on the island, including 2,000 Indios, who had latterly been included in the census figures (Millette 1970). By 1779, an extra 523 free settlers and 973 slaves had settled and received land grants, including Maurice de La Peyrouse, whose name was given to La

Peyrouse cemetery that today marks the eastern limit ofWoodbrook in Port of Spain [see map 2].

54 On a reconnoitre to Port of Spain in 1777 St. Laurent observes there were "several canons on a battery, a church, and about 80 houses covered with straw and palisadad with roseau, and plastered with a mixture of mud and cut grass and whitewashed" (Newson 1976: 118) 58

In November 1783, the emigration was put into legislation through the Cedula de

Poblacion, a royal decree granting any foreign Roman Catholic the right of settlement in

Trinidad, and with this right a place at the top of the hierarchal race structure of the island

(something Daniel Crowley's hierarchal list discussed in the introduction still illustrated as the case in the 1950s). Signed by Charles III and circulated throughout the West Indies the legislation created a constant flow of French settlers to the island who, on taking an oath of allegiance to Spain, were granted up to 3,000 acres of free land to plant and cultivate whatever produce they wanted. The Cedula also made the importation of enslaved persons important because it gave their owners claims for land in proportion to the numbers of the enslaved they possessed or had kidnapped.

There was a territorialisation of capital in this era that through the ownership of property established a class relationship vis-a-vis the previous racial structure of the society. This relationship I would suggest is at the bottom of modernity and its expansion into and through individual lives in Trinidad. This territorialisation was the beginnings of the class structure Marx described as "the three great classes of society" - the bourgeoisie, the landowners and the proletariat - which later in the 19th and early 20th century would determine the institutional and ideological framework of capitalist society on the island (Marx 1992:1025-1026). In this sense the moment and era can be viewed as the beginning of a process where colonialism, the production of difference, and global capital accumulation, meet, intersect and collide. This process laid the foundations of the social structure of the island that will have lasting impacts and be maintained still hundreds of years later. 59

That said, this first wave of French immigrants traced to Grenada, St Lucia,

55 French Saint Domingue and Martinique have been described as "several bankrupts , and various other desperate characters" (Ottley 1962:16, Joseph 1838:166) and it is generally agreed they were a mixture of planters, refugees, immigrants, and some free coloureds.

Nonetheless, many, along with their enslaved persons from Africa, started small farms on lands granted by the Cedula and contributed to an upsurge in population numbers.

The Cedula of 1783 meant more immigrants, free or freer trade, free land or less restriction on land, but no political autonomy for the colony as it was still part of the

Spanish Empire. It marks, in comparison to other colonies, the late start of plantation society in Trinidad. This appearance of a plantation economy, with its profits, enslaved labour, racial hierarchy and consumer staples for mercantile interests and European capital, was a significant contribution to the growth and emergence of European industrialisation. The plantation economy has been described as the bridge that links and connects the colonial world to modem society56 (Williams 1944, Solow and Engerman

1996:52, Richardson 1996: 104-105). This type of society and adaptive strategy brought

Trinidad firmly within the economic developmental phase of Western international economy and politics. The accumulation of capital for foreign entities and its reinvestment for more profits now became the driving force of life in the island. 57 The

55 One rule in particular attracted such characters. It permitted anyone leaving another place in debt as free from lawsuits in Trinidad, hence a readiness by many new arrivals to suddenly profess themselves Roman Catholic.

56 "An examination of market connections among the slave trade, plantation agriculture, and British industry during the third quarter of the eighteenth century is particularly revealing, for available evidence now indicates that there occurred at this time a substantial rise in the level of British slave trading activity and colonial sugar production on the one hand, and a marked acceleration in the rate of growth of British industrial production on the other" (Richardson 1996: 105). 60

Cedula also marked a new period of transculturation and interaction, often traumatic for

many on the island. As Ottley put it, the Cedula created "a social and political situation of

great complexity, since it gave birth to the establishment of a French colony in a

possession in which the only Spaniards of note were the governor and one or two Spanish

officials" (1962:16). Evidence of this French and Spanish blending is still in evidence today in the combination of traditions found in language, festivals and culture.

An historical point to note about Trinidad's Cedula situation in distinction to

other islands like Puerto Rico and its experience with its Cedula of 1815, was Trinidad's now varied ethnic, colour and racial composition. As previously alluded to, the last 25

1 years of the l 8 h century in Trinidad was an experience of recolonialisation achieved by

predominantly French whites, free coloureds and free blacks, and their slaves who

displaced, acculturated and in some ways were transculturated too by the former population of Spanish, Amerindians, slaves and mixed persons. This recolonialisation means that post-1783 some free coloureds were part of the first wave of conquering

settlers, and some non-whites overcame the socio-economic exclusion, racism and

disadvantages of not being white that free coloureds faced on other islands. The Cedula

undid the disabling laws of the Spanish Empire. It gave free coloureds in Trinidad political rights including land, commercial privileges, loans, permission to import slaves for ten years (1785-1795) without paying duties (Campbell 1992:91) and certain political

safeguards. Mixed persons therefore owned land, slaves and had rights: rights that were not equal to whites, but certainly comparable, and greater than in any other Caribbean

57 "By 1797 altogether there were approximately 452 plantation concerns on the island. These comprised 59 sugar estates, 130 coffee plantations, 103 cotton plantations and 60 cocoa plantations" (Matthews 2007: 12) 61

58 island at the time • This situation laid the roots of a coloured and transitional middle class to follow in the 19th century illustrating how the accumulation of capital and landownership intersected with the construction of difference on the island. This specificity is often over looked when Trinidad's colonial situation is simplified and drawn into a supposed monolithic experience of colonialism all Caribbean islands experienced.

Since their legal status was always liable to change, the Spanish tried to establish their social status through their wealth and claims to noble descent and 'limpieza de sangre '. With the gradual mixing of races and the birth of American Spaniards or creoles these claims came to be of utmost importance in determining social status, colour was only significant in general terms. Social mobility did exist, however. Those members of the mixed races who showed enterprise or by some means received official favour were accepted as having higher social status despite their colour and lack of claims to noble descent. During the eighteenth century the racial basis of the social hierarchy was undermined by miscegenation, population increase, and an improvement in employment opportunities in the army and trades, and replaced by one based more on the economic role of the individual in society. While race continued largely to determine employment, racial divisions, particularly between the mixed races, became less marked and social advancement more easily attainable. [Newson 1976:111].

A census for Trinidad taken in the middle of 1784 (Brereton 1981) recorded 3 3 5

Spaniards, 384 French, 765 "mixed" Spaniards, and 633 French free coloureds (persons of mixed European and African descent) and free blacks, 260 Spanish slaves and 2027

French slaves. Not included in this census data are an estimated 1500 Amerindians survivors whose numbers continue to decline. By 1786 some Irish families arrived and settled too (Joseph 1838:173) and the Cabildo formally comprised of ten Spaniards

58 For example article 4 of the Cedula of 1783 states (Campbell 1992): "Art. IV. The free negroes and mulattoes who shall come to settle in the said island, in quality of inhabitants and chief of families, shall have half the quantity of land granted to the whites, and if they bring with them slaves, being their own property, the quantity of land granted to them shall be increased in proportion to the number of said slaves, and to the land granted to said negroes and mulattoes, this is, one half of the quantity granted to the slaves of whites; and their titles shall be equally legal and granted in the same manner as to whites." 62

became seven French, One Irish and two Spanish. Port of Spain at this time contained around 600 houses, most of which were made of wood. It was a flourishing trade town of

3000 people, divided into five barrios with an alcalde and magistrate presiding over each. In these days,

the citizens of Port of Spain lived for the most part on Venezuelan plantains and cattle. These together with a host of other commodities were brought to the town in open boats from Guiria and other ports on the adjoining mainland, and sold wholesale and retail along the South Quay. [Ottely 1962:55].

One year later, in 1787, the population for the entire island was more than 10,000 people. Unsurprisingly such a rapid increase created a housing shortage. Not only were more houses needed but also more labour to work the increased crop output. The small numbers of enslaved Africans previously brought by both Irish and British ships under

Spanish contract alongside a slight traffic in stolen slaves from Grenada and those brought by the French were insufficient to meet the increased planters' demands

(Matthews 2007). To put this initial period of slavery into figures then, according to

Brereton, between 1789 and 1791 3,307 enslaved Africans arrived. Mortality rates were so high however, that the actual enslaved population declined over the same period from

6,451 to 5,916 (Brereton 1981).

The Cedula mostly attracted French settlers from French colonies in the

Caribbean, but also from ones outside of it too such as Louisiana and Arcadia (the French colonial empire in north-eastern North America). Another group of French emigres were

French aristocrats59 who departed France during the French revolution - "some came

59 "These families lived in large estate houses, with many servants and ornate furnishings. They dressed formally for dinner, and strict manners were observed. As a result, Trinidad rapidly became known as one of the most cultured societies in the West Indies. It became accepted for the French planters to have 63

directly to the West Indies, but many were allowed to join British units to fight the revolutionaries. They ended up fighting in the Caribbean battles of the 1790's, and settled in Trinidad after hostilities ended" (Besson and Brereton 1991 ). Appended to this group of emigres and benefiting from the Catholic clause in the Cedula, was a considerable

Corsican immigration by refugees of Corsica's 13-year struggle for Independence from

Genoa (Cipriani Family Papers presently in the possession of Louise Cipriani). A further wave of French immigration into Trinidad resulted from the Haitian revolution of 1791.

At this point, as the century came to a close, linguistically the island was predominantly

French but officially Spanish.60

The rapid development of Trinidad's economy and population between 1776 and

1795 attracted British attention. They saw the island's usefulness for strategic purposes, economic gain through sugar production, and in the longer term the political experiment of indentureship (Matthews 2007). Shortly thereafter Spain's entrance on the side of

France into the war raging north of the Caribbean gave Britain the pretext for spilling hostilities over into the Caribbean. In 1797 an expedition led by Sir Ralph Abercromby entered the Gulf of Paria, landed at Invaders Bay (today the edge ofWoodbrook) and brought the era of Spanish decision-making to an end. There was no resistance by the

Spanish Governor Don Jose Maria Chacon and his forces, who were outnumbered and

coloured mistresses. The resulting offspring were sometimes legitimized and educated abroad by their fathers" - http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/-ttowgw/comings/french.htm [visited Jan 22 2010]

60 With their numeric advantage over the Spanish, the many French inhabitants treated the island not as if it belonged to Spain but France. Joseph recounting the period notes that on the slightest oppositions from the Spaniards the French would "hoist the tricolour, unfurl the revolutionary standard, and sing the Marseillaisse and other Republican songs" (Joseph 1838:178). 64

outgunned by the British fleet of 7000 men and marines. On the 18 February 1797

Governor Chacon signed the Articles of Capitulation ceding Trinidad to Britain.

British Colonial Rule

The first new immigrants to join the advent of British rule on the island were

Venezuelan revolutionaries61 and refugees from the wars of With British rule a new period of socio-political formation, ethnic adaptation and economic politics where diverse groups and individuals were defined, essentialised and fixed, waxed and waned

(Forte 2005:70). In particular, the importation and migration of various new social

"groups," the majority of which would be of African and Asian origin, left a culturally visible legacy and logic still in existence today. The administration of these groups, as we will see, through such mechanisms of difference making as the Slave Registration Order, the Census, labour codes and official policies (Warner-Lewis 1996:39) simplified and essentialised the variety of people and the cultural material that existed and arrived.

Culture contact as it was under the Spanish continued with British colonialism to be a process of racial categorisation, misrepresentation and class subjugation.

Those of each quarter will be entered in a separate book showing the classes, nations and countries whence they came, the numbers of individuals composing the same, distinguishing the free from the slaves, any augmentations or diminutions since their arrival in the Island, and the occupations they follow. [Spanish Governor Chacon cited in John 1988:38].

At the 1797 handover of the island, the Cedula of 1783 and its stipulations, lapsed. The first three British military governors of the island Picton, Hislop and Monro

61 Francisco de Miranda, in particular, used Trinidad as a base from which he and his supporters attempted to overthrow Spanish colonialism in Venezuela (Forte 2005:92). 65

however, continued the system of land grants. Theirs, in an early form of political and social cronyism, was a more corrupt system. Who and how much land persons were given, was decided on an ad hoc basis that linked class and colour together. Its consequences extended the materiality and consequences of this early era of capital accumulation into the future. Unsurprisingly the British governors favoured Englishmen, with or without slaves, but they also continued the distribution to some free coloureds62 with few or no slaves, as well as French immigrants. The situation can again be imagined in terms of the construction of difference with British whites at the top of a sliding scale that moved from light to dark, upper class through middle to lower and then under class.

The first new immigrants to join the advent of British rule on the island were

Venezuelan revolutionaries63 and refugees from the wars of liberation against Spain who saw Trinidad as a convenient base and place of escape from battle (Wood 1968: 17). 1802 and the formal surrender of Trinidad to Britain by Spain under the "Treaty of Amiens"

(Millette 1970:3) marked the arrival of new predominantly Protestant Europeans including the English, Scots and Germans. These Protestant immigrants can be divided into three distinct sorts; 1) plantation owners and their slaves who left other no-longer profitable British sugar islands; 2) businessmen, entrepreneurs, merchants, artisans and tradesmen who saw Trinidad as the place to make their fortunes; and 3) a temporary group of migrants who came as colonial officials and sugar company managers. All three

62 "The coloured community contained people of all classes and attainments, from professional men who had been educated in France and received in polite society in Paris, to illiterate squatters in the Northern Range and brothel keepers in Port of Spain. Some were estate proprietors; others less wealthy, kept one or two domestic slaves" (Wood 1968 :41)

63 Francisco de Miranda, in particular, used Trinidad as a base from which he and his supporters attempted to overthrow Spanish colonialism in Venezuela (Forte 2005:92). 66

sorts can be described as being related to the movements of global capital in terms of the their own desires to increase their own accumulation of it, and each with their whiteness entered at the top of the racial hierarchy on the island.

The arrival of these new groups created religious tension with the capitulants (the

Roman Catholic, Spanish and the French Creole64 colonials living in the island when the

British captured it) and contributed to the sliding hierarchal formation of the island's society Crowley captured in 1957. As others like Brereton and Besson (1991) have noted this social division between capitulants and the new white migrants was maintained and can be seen in such realities as the rarity of intermarriage (Brereton 1979:38-41 ). The

English-speakers becoming the favoured class of the new governors further compounded this. The overall situation makes possible the claim that at the beginning of the 19th century the upper class community in Trinidad as defined by their relationship to the means of production - plantation and slave owners - was stratified by national origins, culture, language and religion, encouraging solidarities along ethnic and socio-cultural lines rather than strict class or racial lines. This elite community consisted of people born in Europe and some "Creoles" born in the island (or elsewhere in the Caribbean). It was the most diverse elite community of any 19th century British Caribbean territory (Wood

1968). It was also a community, for all talk of division, who could work together when the situation called for it. In 1805 for example, mistaking the fleet of Admiral Nelson approaching the island for the French and Spanish fleets the British Governor summoned

64 The tenn "French Creole" is used to describe persons who "were mainly whites of French descent" but by the end of the 19th century "the term was generally understood to include people of English, Irish, Spanish, Corsican, and even German descent, born in the island, and almost invariably Roman Catholic. People born in Europe, but resident in Trinidad for many years, and linked by marriage to this group, were also by courtesy considered to be French Creoles" (Brereton 1979:35). 67

the local militia, a force made up of not just members of the upper class but people of colour, free blacks and foreigners (Joseph 1838:229, Bates 1893:25). When the confusion about the approaching fleet was resolved the local press did not dwell upon the mistake but rather highlighted the idea that the island's militia, even with its many different

"groups," could be relied upon when the British elite called.

In an attempt to control the diversity of religion, culture and nationality through governmental pressure, the island's first British governors chose the Spanish system of government with governor as chief judge and chief executive as best suited to succeed.

The Cabildo was not however a means of administering British laws and institutions, that would not happen for another 40 years. Instead the British governed, using a Spanish institution, governed by Spanish laws and traditions - compounding socio-cultural mixture at the political level too. Demographic representation was greatly skewed as well. A small British group and their military might, ruled a population overwhelmingly

French, mixed and African. Over time and to cope with the imbalance the British slowly changed the administrative structure of the island and refined their Crown Colony system, a point explored in chapter five.

The situation then which has been likened to an early version of M. G. Smith's cultural pluralism ( 1962) - separate cultural segments with their own institutions who only meet in the marketplace65 and are integrated through the weight of common political

65 Extending the 'marketplace' to include brothels provides further evidence of miscegenation. "There is, Sir, in this place ... free female blacks and mulattoes, who acquire considerable wealth, merely by allocating prostitutes. The taverns where lodge (with few exceptions) are kept by coloured females, and, would be properly called houses of ill fame in any civilised part of the world ... [A]nother house, with a large sign to decoy the unwary, 'The British Coffee-house,' and kept by a mulattoe [sic] woman of the name Perry, meets with every encouragement she could anticipate, because she has an assortment of 68

leadership, usually in the hands of one of the groups, the colonial power- was far from that. Yes, separate racial segments may have come to exist in census terms, but many persons were already mixed66 (Wood 1968), and division by class was already apparent as the economic relations of domination and subordination from colonialism became entrenched.

Pre-Emancipation "African" Labour

A useful way to disturb the census category of "African" and "Black" and help to illustrate why some "Blacks" gained access to educational opportunities and achieved middle class respectability while others didn't in 19th century Trinidad is to understand the wide mixture of areas and cultures of Africa the "African" population on the island came from. 67 It is also sensible to remark that "Africa" as an essentialised culture, and

"Black" as a racial category, were first encountered in Europe and brought to the

Americas as a mechanism of racial boundary policing and construction of difference that supported the supposed inherent superiority of whiteness. What "Black" and "African" crudely referred to were not history-less, nor were the enslaved brought to Trinidad nymphs for the accommodation of her gentlemen lodgers ... Most (of not all) of the West India planters are, more or less, addicted to this social festive vice" (M'Callum 1805:75-76).

66 While slavery and immigration brought many new people to the island in the background the Amerindian population continue its decline and its mixture into the new local population. Figures estimate that between 1777 and 1797 the Amerindian population nearly halves from 1824 to 1082 (Newson 1976:219), however this figure doesn't take into account those still living in the forests and hills. Again, while much of this decline can be attributed to diseases, notably measles and smallpox, and a high death rate from the onerous work meted out to them, sexual relations, including rape and concubinage, between Amerindians and other groups, plus symbolic violence also play a major role in the disappearance of their bodies from the historical record.

67 It's worth also pointing out that some "Africans" were recent arrivals to the Caribbean while others were been born there, mostly on other islands and not Trinidad itself. 69

relieved of all cultural knowledge as Frasier (1939), the Chicago School sociologist claimed they were. As many authors from Herskovits68 to Braithwaite69 (1976) to Mintz and Price (1992) and many more have argued, "Africans" in Trinidad possessed varied cultural institutions, whose survival and continuity, albeit in new forms, be they syncretisms, reinterpretations, transculturations or creolisations, can still be traced to multiple places of origin today.

In the 1797 census 70 the population of enslaved "Africans" on the island was

10,009. Thirteen years later in 1810 the number is 20,821 (Millette 1970) and on the eve of emancipation in 1838 it was 20,656 (Wood 1968). Acknowledging the work of

Maureen Warner-Lewis (1991, 1996) we can identify and unmask the variety of ethnic/regional origin in Africa erased by the quill from this large number of people. One particular pre-emancipation stream is made up of Yoruba, Hausa/Fulani, Ibo, Ewe-Foh and other West African ethnicities caught in fighting surrounding the simultaneous collapse of the Yoruba Empire of Old Oyo and the rise of the Mushin Caliphate in the modern Nigeria-Benin area. Many of these people, from distinct social and linguistic

68 Frasier argued that African slaves were dispossessed of their cultures in the enslavement process and were best viewed as disadvantaged peoples. While Herskovits believed in syncretism and reinterpretation as a more accurate conceptual framework for the study of acculturation and cultural change in the reconciliation of many cultural elements and beliefs brought together in the enslavement process. Herskovits too is not exempt from criticism and his physical anthropology background is often cited as an excuse for his reproduction of notions of physical race into notions of cultural race.

69 "Although there is no such thing as an African culture transplanted intact in the Americas, African culture, in the words of Braithwaite, not only crossed the Atlantic, it crossed, survived, and creatively adapted itself to its new environment and, as Clarke asserts, was reborn on alien soil" (Rosa 1996:281)

7° Capt Mallet (I 803) in his Descriptive account of the island of Trinidad, listed the population count for various "quarters" or wards. He includes Macurapo 70 [sic] (Mucurapo ward to the west of Port of Spain contained three sugar estates - Woodbrook, St. Clair and Peru) and Tragarete [sic], which cover the approximate lines of what is today Woodbrook. In I 797 the combined population of these quarters was: White - 43, Coloured - 79, and Slaves - 462, for a total population of 585, placing bodies into ideological categories that manifested the concept of racial inequality. 70

groups, fled the fighting and were picked up along the coast by the British Anti-Slave regiment whose cargo already included "freed Africans" from raided slave vessels. All were brought to Freetown in Sierra Leone. Upon liberation they became British dependents and were the responsibility of British authorities and their organisational schema. They were given indentured contracts and 8,854 taken by the British to Trinidad

(Laurence 1958:14) their "social place" determined by the racial ideology of European colonialism.

Further opposition to the symbolic violence of the census by Warner-Lewis breaks down the data in the 1813 Register of Slaves. 41.2 percent came from the Bight of

Biafra, "an outlet of peoples such as the Igbo, Ibibio, Efik, Calabari, Itsekri and Sobo from the Niger Delta, along with Chamba and other north-western Bantu of the

Cameroons. Some of these people were referred to as Moko" (Warner-Lewis 1996:34). A second group of 19 .1 percent came

[f]rom Central Africa, peoples from the Congo Basin and the Central African Atlantic coast as well as the peoples of present-day Angola. Smaller groups included 12.2 percent from the Senegambia - the Malinke or Mandino, Wolof, and Kanga; 8 percent were of the Gold Coast; another 8 percent from the Bight of Benin; 6.6 percent from the Windward coast; and 4.5 percent from Sierra Leone. [Warner-Lewis 1996:35].

Another distinction to note of this early part of the 19th century is the difference between enslaved "Africans" recently arrived and those born or arrived when the Spanish controlled the island. They had different cultures, wore different clothes, often spoke different languages and were seen as a monolithic group in the eyes of others, not themselves. This monolithic gaze continued with the arrival of indentured "Africans" after emancipation as the authorities deemed any distinction between African immigrants 71

and the earlier African and African derived populations spurious (Warner-Lewis

1996:38). This leaves the question what might be the legacies of their differences?

Another "black" stream from the pre-emancipation era woven into the fabric of modern-day Trinidad are African-Americans or the "Merikins" discussed by Weiss

(2001 ). They were liberated slaves who fought for the British in America during the war of 1812 (1812-1816). Numbering over 700 they were members of the Corps of Colonial

Marines raised by the British from among four thousand refugees of the War of 1812, and later on the coast of Georgia in 1815. After spending fourteen months garrisoned on the island of Bermuda they were disbanded in 1816 as "free men" and granted the right to settle as independent farmers in Company Villages located in south Trinidad around modern day Princes Town (Bullard 2007). Those who took the opportunity to leave the

US joined a small number "Merikens" who had disbanded previously after 1783 as recompense for fighting on the colonial side of the American War of Independence

(Warner-Lewis 1996:42). None of these ex-soldiers were Roman Catholic or Protestant and the religious life they brought with them was three-quarters Baptist and one-quarter

Methodist. Today they are cited as the origin of the modern-day Baptist religion in

Trinidad71 (Stephens 1999).

Two decades ahead of Emancipation Weiss notes the "Merikens" represented a first experiment of the imperial event. They were a land-owning free peasantry that went on to be involved in trade, money lending, and agriculture, and through education joined

71 "When they settled in the area called Company Villages in Trinidad, they brought a strong Baptist tradition with them. In 1825 the superintendent of the Company Villages in Trinidad reported that its settlers were three-quarters Baptist and one-quarter Methodist. (They also included twenty Muslims.) Nearly all authorities on the Company Villages agree the "Merikens" were the ones who brought the Baptist church to Trinidad" (Bullard 2007) 72

the civil service. Another smaller disbanded company of "Merikens" discussed by

Samaroo (1987) included Muslim soldiers who settled in Manzanilla. In trying to keep their culture alive they built mosques and according to research (Khan 2004) were spiritual forebears for modem day Muslim groups in Trinidad such as the Jammat al

Muslimeen. A later stream of 1,301 free African-Americans migrated from the US between 1839-1842 (Laurence 1958:12). All three streams can be imagined as filling a social space above that of the enslaved "Africans" working on the plantations and were well positioned amongst those categorised under the census label "African" to become part of the black and coloured middle class that emerged during the 19th century.

After abolition in 1807 a final pre-Emancipation stream of"African" labour was brought from other Caribbean plantation colonies via an illicit slave trade. According to

Claudius Fergus between 1811and1833, 6,000 to 10,000 West Indian slaves were bought from around twenty-four different colonies including the Bahamas, Grenada, St.

Vincent and Barbados to Trinidad in this period (Information by e-mail courtesy of

University of the West Indies Professor, Claudius Fergus). Again, this group complicated the accuracy of the monolithic group label "African" found on the census. We see too from all these movements of persons coming from distinct situations that the notion of

"black" is a simplistic and falsely vacuous umbrella term wholly unsatisfactory in its descriptive qualities (Warner Lewis 1996:xii).

Another point to note in the hierarchy of status being constructed in this early period of British control is not that all enslaved "Africans" worked on the plantations as field labour with many working as "personal slaves" in town (John 1988:47). It is possible to imagine a process of learning about and cultural assimilation to white and free 73

coloured society, across the supposedly monolithic "African" group. This cultural observation occurred for different individuals at different rates - from much interaction in the private sphere of the home to none whatsoever. Holm notes too that coloured or creole slaves - those of mixed ancestry - were more often chosen as personal slaves than

"African" slaves. His critique of the label "African" also notes not all coloured slaves were the product ofracial mixing in the Caribbean but in Africa too (John 1988:59). To add another level of complication to the categorisation process of the colonial powers, over time the conventions used in labelling also changed.

All slaves born in the New World, whether of creole or African parents were called 'creole' ... the African slave population necessarily aged, devoid of additions to the youngest ages. At the same time, the ranks of the youngest creoles grew rapidly, gaining the children both of Africans and creoles: in a large number of cases, creole children were unrelated to any creole adults. [John 1988:55].

"White" Labour

Many other ethnic and racial groups also arrived in Trinidad after the British took control. In 1806 around two hundred indentured Chinese labourers from Macao (Sookdeo

2000, Joseph 1838:231) were brought under contract of indentureship for fieldwork.

Many according to Lok Lai (1988) died out or abandoned the island.72 These were followed by a second wave of Chinese immigration between 1853 and 1884 when eight

72 "These people at first commenced cultivating gardens after the fashion of China: they worked in a singular manner; while one laboured, his companion held a parasol over him ... the local government ... gave these Tartars lands at Cocorite, one of the most pestilent spots in the colony: mortality, of course soon thinned and disgusted these Asiatics, and they turned fishermen and pork butchers ... They soon taught the lower order of people gaming and were rather too frequently detected as receivers of stolen goods; nor could they conceive the justice in punishing them, as they called it, 'for making good bargains,' as they themselves did not steal, which they never did ... At present there are but two or three of these people alive' a few of their descendents by negro and coloured women form a part of the people of Trinidad. They were exemplary parents, and never suffered a child of theirs to be born in slavery - they always bought the mothers, and sent their children to English schools" (Joseph 1838:233). 74

voyages between China and Trinidad brought 2,645 more Chinese labourers. In terms of regionalism over 90% of all Chinese immigrants to Trinidad in the 19th century are drawn from a small region in the southern Guandong province, a 7000 sq mile cluster of rural districts located around the triangle of cities on the Pearl River Delta, Macao, Canton and

Hong Kong (Look Lai 1998). Scholars note while the majority of these Chinese labourers were brought to work on plantations few, if any, actually did, instead moving into commerce as soon as they could. By the late 19th century (Brereton 1979), and certainly into the 1920' s, Chinese immigrants were also part of the local Creole middle class. 73

By the late 1830s - related to the movements of global capital - poor "white" labour from France, Portugal and Germany arrived for offers of higher wages. They were supplemented by seasonal workers from Venezuela largely of Afro-Amerindian extraction, called peons or "panyols"74 (Sookdeo 2000:12), who entered into cocoa

73 C. L. R. James' Beyond the Boundary describes the Chinese immigrants during this time period. "A Chinese would land in the island from China unable to speak a word of English. He would begin as a clerk in a grocery store in some remote country district. He and others like him would pool their monthly salaries and turn by turn set up a small business in some strategic spot, usually in the midst of some village populated by Negro agriculturists. These Negros worked on contract. They were given a piece of land which they cleaned and cultivated. After five years they got so much for every mature cocoa tree, and then handed the land back to the owner. Naturally such a cultivator would be very hard up for cash, and very often by the time his five years were up he had pledged most of it to the Chinese shopkeeper. He, on the other hand, lived at the back of his shop, saved his money and in time sold not only foodstuffs but shoes and clothes and gadgets of all sorts. This often made for bad blood between the Chinese and his creditors. But this man, after about fifteen years, would be seized with a passion for cricket. He did not play himself but he sponsored the local village team. He would buy matting for them and supply them with bats and balls. On the Sunday when the match was to be played he provided a feast. He helped out players who could not afford cricket gear. He godfathered very poor boys who could play. On the day of the match you could see him surrounded by the locals, following every ball with a passionate intensity that he gave only to his business. All night and half the day his shop was filled with people arguing about the match that was to come. When the team had to travel he supplied transport. The usual taciturnity of the local Chinese remained with him, except in cricket, where he would be as excited and as voluble as the rest. You could find people like him scattered all over the island" (1963:69-70).

74 Today, the continued cultural presence of these "panyols" is often remarked on in research concerning the roots of contemporary Parang music and the Calypsos of the early twentieth century Trinidad (Forte 2005). 75

cultivation on behalf of the Francophone plantocracy and whose numbers from the turn

of the century were greater than ever returned in any census (Joseph 1838:206).

In 1838, the official date of Emancipation (however somewhat in effect from

1834), the population of Trinidad stood at approximately 36,655, of whom the census

says, 3,993 were "white," 12,006 were "coloured" and 20,656 "apprentices" (Wood

1968). The island meanwhile, in comparison to long settled colonies, was still sparsely populated75 with a general migration away from work on the estates76 (Woodville

2003:86). This meant a concerted effort by the colonial government to import more indentured and migrant labour to ensure the continued viability of the "plantation economy."77 The effort swelled massively the lowest social tier in the island and laid early patterns of pauperisation with lasting effects.

Hailing from the Atlantic provinces of the Azores, Madeira and the Cape Verde

Islands the wave of immigrants from Portuguese territories who arrived in post-

Emancipation Trinidad to work on the cocoa and sugar estates was not the first

75 "In 1841 Martin Sorsano, the commissary of Population, estimated that 43,265 acres were cultivated. This is about one twenty-seventh of the island, Unlike long settled West Indian colonies, Trinidad was wild and empty, and the greater part of it still covered in its primeval vegetation of evergreen tropical rain-forest" (Wood 1968:19).

76 Elisabeth Thomas-Hope (1986) has written a piece on Caribbean diaspora as an inheritance from slavery. She shows how with the advent of emancipation migration became a central method in which slaves could exercise their freedom from the plantation system that had denied them any expression of dignity and individuality by treating them as chattel. Slavery was about exploiting labour that was tied to a place, slaves had no freedom to come and go as they saw fit. They had no "locational choice" apart from flight, maroonage or other blatant forms of disobedience. Such acts were explicit forms of escape and meant return could never be an option, as death was a likely punishment for such petulance. With emancipation migration became an established means of recovering personal identity, it allowed the subject to reacquire and exercise personal freedom - they could now come and go as they pleased. It also allowed them to forsake any continued economic dependence on the plantations by migrating for work elsewhere

77 The plantation economy was based on sufficient capital, the availability of large expanses of land, a steady supply of cheap labour to maximise profits, sufficient technology, a disciplined workforce and the sanctions of state power (Wolf and Mintz 1957, Roopnarine 2007). It was a factory system with similarities to the changing socio-economic face of 19th century industrial Britain 76

Portuguese immigration to the island. 78 It was however the largest and can be divided into two waves (Besson and Brereton 1991 ). The first wave arrived in the 1830s. The second came to Trinidad after 1846. The first wave were refugees - comprised predominantly of rural folk suffering economic disaster - who took work on the estates, replacing the formerly enslaved "Africans." On arrival, as they disembarked their labour was fought over by different planters and their agents (Burnley 1841 ). The second wave consisted of mainly educated urban dwellers forced to flee violent religious persecution.

The field-labouring Scots already in the island and the refugee Portuguese found common ground in their Protestant religion, however this also created division with the predominantly Roman Catholic Portuguese majority. According to Besson and Brereton

( 1991 ), intermarriage and business relationships between persons of the same nationality yet of different religious persuasion were rare. Many of those from Madeira migrated voluntarily to Trinidad seeking improved living conditions. Family emigration was common too. Madeirans oftenjoined family members who had already settled in

Trinidad before them. The more wealthy and educated brought family servants with them. This mixture of economically differentiated migrants from different Portuguese possessions added further subdivision of class hierarchy and social rank to Trinidad society.

1 By the end of the l 9 h century even though many more had immigrated it was estimated that the "Portuguese community" totalled around 2,000. The reason for the decline lies in the emigration of much of the economically poorer Presbyterians to the

78 Some Portuguese had arrived in the island as early as 1630, and later there were Portuguese and Spanish Jews who came to Trinidad in the eighteenth century and then again in the 19th century as immigrants (Ferreira cited in Besson and Brereton 1991 :263-269). 77

United States and Brazil leaving behind a majority Roman Catholic Portuguese community that slowly absorbed the outnumbered Presbyterians. A final small immigration of Portuguese to Trinidad arrived from the Cape Verde Islands following a critical food shortage in 1856. They earned a small wage as field labourers (Ferreira

1991).

"East Indian" Labour

By 1844 the white field labour and "African" indentured workers, coupled with the reluctance of "African" labourers to work on the plantations had failed to provide the manpower the plantation economy required to sustain its economic viability as a supplier of commodities such as sugar, coffee and cotton to the British market. Some newcomers like the Prussians from Le Havre (Wood 1968:25) and the Chinese had also suffered high mortality rates doing plantation work, while others declined the work altogether, tending to their own crops, becoming tradesmen, artisans, and money-lenders. The colonial government of the time alongside the British government and the Indian parliament turned to the indentureship of East Indians who it was believed would improve labour efficiency - being cheaper to employ than existing labour - and were according to the

British supposedly obedient and more acclimatised to the weather (Burnley 1841,

Roopnarine 2007:41). On May 30, 1845 the first indentured East Indian indentured labourers arrived in Trinidad. By 1917 when the government of India banned the practice, a total of 143,939 indentured East Indian labourers had been sent to Trinidad. 78

The first ten years of the system of indentureship was one of experimentation but by 1854 the main lines of the indentureship contract stipulated: three-year contracts followed by another two years to complete an "industrial residence" of five years and be granted "a certificate of industrial residence" - a form of "free paper," certifying the person's indenture was expired and they were "free." A ten-year residence in the colony was required to qualify for a free return passage, and only one in four indentured East

Indians returned to India (Brereton 1974:33). In anti-colonial terms East Indian indentureship in Trinidad can be described as the new slavery of British colonialism

(Roopnarine 2007). It meant harsh treatment, racial hierarchy, pauperisation and the almost total control over the lives of the indentured by planters. On arrival the worker was assigned to a plantation, prescribed a 54 to 80 hour work week, lived in barrack type buildings and was not allowed to leave the estates without a pass, although desertion was a common form of resistance. Any labourers who infringed these immigration laws however were prosecuted as criminals and sentenced to jail terms. lndentureship was a means ofre-inscribing the social relations of the colonial economic structure and an extension of the domination ethos of colonialism. In terms of both the race and class structure of the island, indentured Indians entered and filled the bottom space. They were dehumanised and seen as inferior by all other groups in the island. As a brown and coloured middle class composed of mixed persons, coloured residents and land-owning blacks emerged, this new group at the bottom of the sliding hierarchal scale of humanity meant the emergent class alongside the formerly enslaved, assimilated an elevated sense of self worth based on the racist colonial logic of divide and conquer. 79

To say indentured immigrants came freely is incorrect and in the worst cases many were coerced and kidnapped by the British agents or their local stooges in India

(Brereton 1974). From records kept by the colonial authorities the majority of East Indian immigrants can be traced to three main regions of India; 1) the largest group came from the United Provinces along the Ganges river where Bhojpuri is spoken; 2) until 1872 a large minority group came from the Madras Presidency or what is known today as Tamil

Nadu and Andhra Pradesh where Tamil and Telugu were spoken; and 3) a much smaller group have been traced to what was once the North-West Frontier Province of undivided

India (now a part of Pakistan), where the dominant language is Pashto.

There was also a great sexual imbalance to East Indian indentureship in Trinidad with more men than women arriving, a situation the colonial office was aware of and in

1855 attempted to deal with by stipulating that for every one hundred person embarked forty were required to be women - a requirement not always enforced. While this might provide circumstantial evidence that many East Indian men took "African" women as wives or mistresses, historians remark that very few did, and this particular form of

79 sexual relationship - whose offspring today are identified ethnically as "Douglas" - did not occur regularly until after the First World War. Although in 19th century urban

Trinidad, Diptee (2003), as we will see in chapter five, provides evidence to contest such a scenario.

From time to time the laws governing indentureship in Trinidad changed. For instance, "between 1869 and 1880 Indians were granted free lots of Crown land in lieu of

79 The term "dougla" is derived from the Hindi term "

their return passages; and in 1895 the right to a completely free return passage after ten years' residence was withdrawn." (Brereton 1974:32). With return passages proving too expensive for plantation owners, various schemes were devised to retain East Indians, including small plots of land for labourers to cultivate their own crops. Brereton (1974) remarks this played well with East Indians because many dreamed of owning their own land, and in spite of the many hardships encountered during their indentureship period, many actually saved up sums of money from selling produce to return to India or began to own land and later emerged into the coloured middle class. We also know there was

East Indian immigration from other Caribbean countries such as Jamaica, Guyana, St.

Vincent (from where in 1862 my own East Indian great, great grandparents on my mother's side can be traced) and Grenada where some indentured labourers originally immigrated to, but later moved from to connect back with family or to start again.

Hinduism was the main religion of the East Indian workers who came, with a minority being Muslim. Wood states most that immigrated were simple country folk from traditional communities of village India (Wood 1968: 15) although that does not do justice to the entire spectrum of castes historically reported by others (Samaroo 1987). A final group of East Indian immigrants arrived early in the second half of the 20th century from

India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka - these were predominantly doctors and

Gujarati businessmen.

F .E.M Hosein, one of the leaders of the Indian community in late 19th and 20th century Trinidad wrote a paper that analysed the following causes of cultural persistence among East Indians: 1) Indians brought from India, "bound by common bond of race and fellowship," often formed an association on the depot and the ship, which later 81

blossomed into a bond of family friendship; 2) They were segregated from rest of population; 3) They had their own "racial prejudice"; and 4) Their language was different from that of the West Indians. We can also add to this the idea that some East Indians planned to return to India. It is possible to imagine that such reasons, amongst others, led to less transculturation on the surface and the policing of ethnic boundaries by East

Indians in Trinidad. Nonetheless, today it is clear that East Indian culture, and narratives, are very much part of the modem Trinidadian present in an ongoing syncretic process of cultural formation that extends back to this time.

Brereton has made the point elsewhere that "by 1870, Trinidad had become nearly as cosmopolitan as it was a century later." Although additional members of the already situated communities and supposedly essentialised groups did continue to arrive - 65,000

80 between 1871 and 1911 with the exception of the Syrio-Lebanese , and Ashkenazi Jews during World War II, no new national or ethnic group moved en masse to Trinidad after that date (Brereton 1979: 1).

80 A final group to consider in this overview of the various peoples who have come to live and settle in Trinidad are an ethnic group identified in 20th century Trinidad as "Syrians." Comprised of immigrants from Greater Syria, what today would be Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, Syrians can be traced to three waves of immigration. The first occurred in the early 1900s when Maronite Christians under intense religious pressure from a primarily Muslim society left the Middle East in great numbers heading to the USA. Trinidad was the first port of call on the journey from Marseille, France. Many Syrians chose to stay and their arrival in Trinidad during the booming cocoa trade allowed them to settle and find work as travelling peddlers, often in the Woodbrook and St Clair vicinities of Port of Spain, but also around the whole country. On arrival this lighter skinned group of people entered below the newly emerged coloured and black middle class. News of their economic success spread home and their families, alongside other Syrians, soon joined them. During the First and Second World Wars, and as a result of the collapse ofthe Ottoman Empire, another wave of Middle Eastern immigration occurred this time from the large Christian population of Lebanon. Interestingly the spellings of many Syrian and Lebanese names found in Trinidad today actually derive from the inability of British immigration officers to translate Arab names (Besson and Brereton 1991). 82

Colonialism, Automatic Solidarity and the Making of Social Groups in Trinidad

This chapter told a story about how Trinidad came to be repopulated in the colonial encounter. As Lloyd Best (2001) suggested, the chapter imagined how things were set up, the actors, the social relations and how things may have worked on the ground. It examined the colonial logic of divide and conquer to suggest social groups

"were set up" based on ideas of racial hierarchy and racism. This produced a hierarchal social structure. However, it was a structure with a greater level of cultural differentiation, social mobility and mixture than the Trinidad census implied.

To recap briefly, a listing of peoples and places herein identified included a vast number of Amerindian cultures originating in areas from the modem-day Guianas in the northeast of the South American mainland to the Columbian highlands in the West, and from the south deep of the Amazonia basin to the southwest as far as parts of modem-day

Peru. Added to this were peoples, groups, cultures, history and ethno-genetic material of the many different individuals and groups within groups that comprised the European

African, Amerindian, Asian, East Indian, Middle Eastern and many mixed

Afro/Amerindian/East Indian/European persons we today call "West Indians" that arrived and made Trinidad their home after 1498.

The ethnic, racial and cultural essentialism of these peoples today, or in the past, is connected to Western epistemology. 81 This epistemology was created through colonial

81 "I am reminded of an apocryphal story about the American newspaperman who went to Haiti and had an interview with the President. They started to talk about Haiti and its population, and most indiscreetly the American newspaperman asked the President what percentage of the people were white. And the President of Haiti said, 'Oh, about 95 per cent.' The American newspaperman looked a little puzzled and said, 'Well, how do you define white?' And the President of Haiti said, 'How do you define coloured?' And the American newspaperman said, 'Well, of course, anybody with Negro blood is 83

apparatuses and mechanisms of power such as the census, slave registration, immigration policies, laws, symbolic violence, actual violence and more. Such thinking was also extended and adopted through neo-colonial devices such as the Western university system, social histories and ultimately the State itself. It is worth pondering here the initial questions from page 1. How do people become essentialised, named, represented as good/bad and who has/had the power to do this? Are social groupings such as White,

Coloured, and Black, reflective of local experience or a reflection of a relationship of power? Moreover, if they reflect a relationship of power to what end is the reflection useful and mobilised in the interests of dominance?

Read through the collision of colonialism and capitalism one way to read these questions is to say the ideology of racism and its hierarchy of social groups in Trinidad served the interests of a white European ruling class laying the path of capital exploitation as the legacies of imperialism and colonialism collided with global capitalist expansion. This is seen most clearly from the beginning of the British era with its increased demands for labour to work the land. Enslaved "Africans," alongside European and African indentured workers, first supplied this labour and became a "proto-

82 peasantry " (Mintz 1985: 134). With emancipation however this type of fieldwork was

puzzled and said, 'Well, how do you define white?' And the President of Haiti said, 'How do you define coloured?' And the American newspaperman said, 'Well, of course, anybody with Negro blood is coloured.' Said the President: 'Well, that's exactly our definition, too: anybody with white blood is white." E Mayr (in Mead, M., T. Dobzhansky et al., eds., Science and the Concept of Race (New York, 1967), p. 104.)

82 "Long before the end of the period of apprenticeship (1838), Jamaican slaves were producing not only most of their own subsistence but also an astoundingly large surplus of foods, the bigger part of which ended up on the tables of free people, including the planters themselves ... this picture was replicated (though with tremendous variation) in societies stretching from the southern United States to Brazil" (Mintz 1985:34). 84

83 often shunned . As the demand for labour was high there was an introduction of a

market price for labour (wages) and a market price for the use of land84 (rent). This

financial incentive - and its increase as planters competed for labour - did little to supply

the numbers required to meet the Plantocracy's demands, with labourers preferring to

take on other working class employment or none at all. The sugar planters, according to

themselves and in pleas to Britain, "were ruined" (Burnley85 1842: 14). An alternative

labour solution was sought and supplied through East Indian indenture.

While the pure wage relations of a capitalist mode of production would not

emerge in Trinidad until the early 20th century in the first half of the 19th century the

seeds of capitalist social relations at the base of a capitalist market economy were being

sown in Trinidad. "Labour and land had become commodities just like the crops

produced by and on them" (Polanyi 1947, (Marx 1978:432-436). In Trinidad over the

more than half a century this was taking place, social classes, and the social relations of

racial hierarchy and white supremacy of colonialism were being embedded into this

embryonic capitalist economy. The social "playing field" then, as the Trinidad market

place was connecting to the global capitalist economy, could never be - and never was -

level for all.

83 The now free male labourers migrating away from the plantation preferred "smallhold cultivation, jobbing, working in the sugar factory, picking coffee and cocoa, work as tradesmen." The females "shifted to huckstering, retailing and domestic activity." And "the children were sent to school or to 'godparents' whom they might assist in provision cultivation and marketing" (Woodville 2003:86).

84 In the early years after Emancipation this was seldom paid. Due to low population density in Trinidad much of the lower class set up small communities on various plots of land they chose, engaging in small cultivation and participating infrequently in wage labour for planters. Mostly the labourers were squatting on Crown lands or a plantation, however due to the demand for labour by the planters eviction was rare as the labourer would be welcomed by a neighbouring plantation (Woodville 2003)

85 William Hardin Burnley (1780-1850) was the largest slaveholder in Trinidad and Tobago and was adverse to the abolition of slavery, claiming it to be the ruin of the island and the economy. CHAPTER FOUR:

LITERATURE REVIEW: TRINIDAD CARNIVAL AS AN

"INDIGENOUS INTELLECTUAL DEVICE"

"The Carnival well reveals the contradictions of race and class segregation in the all-encompassing vortex of bacchanal, encounter and mixing that is Trinidadian space" - Burton Sankeralli (2001)

"[M]as is not Carnival; Carnival is a central rite which includes mas. But mas is when you are always playing the Other. There are many different Others and you are making yourself like all the Others you have to deal with, for the purpose of lubricating society - for making relations easy ... It is not only that mas compels you to play many different roles, so today you are Catholic, tomorrow you are Hindu; today you are white, tomorrow you are mulatto. Depending on where you find yourself, you are all these things. The reason mas is necessary is that you have to do that; but the more intriguing thing is that mas also requires you play yourself in many different incarnations. So you are not only playing the Other you are playing yourself. So the Caribbean personality is very complex. A Trinidadian comes to Brooklyn, the first day he talking Yankee. The first day! You have to understand why he or she does this. There are very good reasons why they do it. And we are doing it all the time. But mas is only one of these subversions that we adopt in order to relate to many different situations" - Lloyd Best (2001)

"Studying carnival in terms of imaginative rationales, symbolism and social representations can tell us more about the relationship between rulers and the ruled than just concentrating on the open manifestation of political opinions" - Denis-Constant Martin ( 1999)

85 86

Traditional Carnival theory (e.g. Bakhtin 1968, Turner 1986, Da Matta 1991,

Scott 1991) defines Carnival as inversion, as subversive, as the temporal displacement of hierarchy, order and everyday semblance, a "momentary degradation of values" (Bakhtin

1984:80-84. Benitez-Rojo 1997:212). Much of the critique ofBakhtin's famous treatment of medieval Carnival centres on his elucidation of homogenous class formations that differ greatly from the transnational, multiethnic and class-straddling "roots" of Trinidad

Carnival (Hill 1971, Nettleford 1988, Aching 2002) that emerged from the experience of colonialism, slavery, Emancipation and nation building. A small body of literature (Hill

1971, Lovelace 1978, Benitez-Rojo 1997, Constant-Martin 1999, Schechner 2004) presents Trinidad Carnival today as a redefinition of traditional Carnival theory, which instead of solely disrupting hierarchies in a Bakhtinian sense, reflects and preserves the values and sense of community Carnival creates across class, race and ethnicity in

Trinidad.

Performance scholar Richard Schechner's paper, Carnival (theory) after Bakhtin is a good synopsis of why Bakhtin's notions of Carnival and the Carnivalesque don't fit countries like Trinidad and Brazil (2004:3). From the obvious point that Bakhtin's

Carnival was a "spectacular" metaphor for understanding and celebrating the novel to the contrast between a totalitarian Soviet regime and 19th century Trinidad, Schechner (2004) critiques "the sometimes strange, enigmatic world of the academy" for its use of Bakhtin in the analysis of new world Carnivals.

Despite its similarities to European Carnivals then, Trinidad Carnival is not solely a European inspired one (Riggio 1998, White 1988, Smart and Nehusi 2000, Henry

2008), but rather a "spectacle" (Debord 1967, 1988, Beeman 1993, MacAloon 1984, 87

Turner 1986) translated by local circumstances and processes (Benitez-Rojo 1997, Hill

1971) with influences that include the introduction of peoples and culture from many different parts of the world including various masquerade cultures of Africa (Henry

2008).

For Guy Debord "spectacle" was the public display and manifestation of a particular economic and socio-cultural formation (Debord 1967: 15). He described spectacle as a form of false consciousness, an ideological smokescreen to hide the

"autocratic reign of the market economy" (1988:2). His "Society of the Spectacle," its artefacts and processes, forms and shapes, production and sales was a mask hiding violent and oppressive social control and a mechanism of the expanding capitalist ideology remaking the world. This is a similar manner to which Benitez-Rojo describes

Carnival in the Caribbean. Reading beyond its obvious visibility he believes renders previously invisible mechanisms of power and control, visible (James 1963, Goldstein

2004:16, Gramsci 1971, Aching 2002, Mac-Aloon 1984:271). In this sense Trinidad

Carnival is a way to shine light on social change within Trinidad society (Constant­

Martin 1999).

C. L. R. James - the profound analyst of mechanisms of solidarity (1947, 1963,

1989) - used the sport of cricket as a similar shining light. He saw cricket as "a reservoir of shared cultural knowledge across class, race and colonialism" (1963) and used the sport in the West Indies to examine the relationship between structure and everyday social change. He described cricket eloquently as a sporting spectacle and analysed the sport as a way into issues of social justice. In cricket, specifically the matches between

England and the West Indies - a central part of colonial and post-colonial social life - 88

James saw a spectacle in the Debordian86 sense (1990) but with specific post-colonial salience. He peeled back the layers of what seemed a mere sporting encounter to reveal, that on the field, the symbolic violence perpetuated by the social system was being tackled without disrupting the social fabric, something I understand Carnival doing throughout Trinidad's colonial history (and football on the rehab in the present too); allowing individuals to confront structural violence without using actual and regular physical violence.

Rex N ettleford ( 198 8), Paul Gilroy ( 1993) and others (Hill 1971, Ahye 1991,

Birth 1994, Ho 2000) covered the historical importance of Trinidad Carnival in local politics, nation building and social unity. Nettleford (1988) in Caribbean Festival Arts noted,

[I]n the Caribbean, the idea of festival remains a vehicle for communicating and affirming values and for strengthening the bonds in the new society, but it has changed somewhat through a protracted transformation from colonial fiefs to independent modem politics. The task of nation-building looms large, and the manipulation of symbols, festivals included, has become part of the action. [183].

Nettleford's work took on the development of Trinidad Carnival since independence in 1962 and its use as a nationalistic device of integration. He suggested

Carnival was used as mechanism of national solidarity. My project explores this mechanism of solidarity as an element in the development of "Trinidadian" as a social category. It suggests Carnival's role in "constructing national identity, national

86 Debord's work captures well the intersection of identity politics and commodity production and asks creative questions about industrial rationality. How does it function (Debord 1988:141)? What does it create? And why does "a false sense of reality" become desired (Debord 1988:6). For Debord it is this 'unreality' that defines the society of the spectacle because the society of the spectacle is an appearance of reality, specifically a public display and manifestation of a particular economic and social formation (Debord 1988: 15) - the materialisation of class-based ideology (Debord 1988: 150). Spectacles obscure their principles of manufacture. They deterritorialise the relationship between history and the social present. They present themselves as we have always been here when it fact we are exceedingly recent arrivals (Latour 1993). 89

development, and national sovereignty" to "produce an illusion of independence, development, and progress" in the motion to, and beyond the post-colonial era, and into the neo-colonial one (Grosfoguel 2009:23).

Birth (1994) is another author who localises Carnival theory within the experiences of Trinidad society. In Bakrnal: Coup, Carnival, And Calypso in Trinidad he examines how a violent and attempted coup d'etat seen as a threat to the nation in 1990 became one of the dominant themes of Carnival. In this capacity Trinidad Carnival is reflective of how humour can triumph over political repression and fear. His subject matter emphasises general, abstract aspects of social structure, and how a sense-of-self as a Trinidadian is influenced and transformed by participation in Carnival.

From two world conferences on Carnival held in the 1990s organised by Milla

Riggio, emerged a special issue of The Drama Review (1998) dedicated solely to the masquerade specifics of Trinidad Carnival. The material covered is vast and includes the dissection of the movement of traditional Carnival characters like the bat, the influences of various central Carnival figures and the post-colonial theatre tradition in Trinidad.

Another collection of articles edited by Hamey (1996) takes discussion of Trinidad

Carnival in a more literary and Cultural Studies direction integrating work by C. L. R.

James, V. S. Naipaul and Samuel Selvon in an historical framework that studies the forces and ideologies behind nationalism through a comparison of ethnic conceptions of

Carnival as portrayed in literary classics. Puri also explores ethnicity and Carnival using a model of cultural hybridity and the production of certain popular forms like "chutney soca" to suggest Trinidad is a country whose future is driven by the integration and politics of various nationalistic projects amongst Trinidad's ethnically varied population. 90

The effects and assimilation of the neoliberal drive towards the commodification of everything (Harvey 2005) on a previous form of social solidarity like Carnival is discussed by Aching (2002) in his class treatise on the "middle-class-sisation" of

Trinidad society and the implications of the economic transformation - from cultural commons to commodity- on the festival. For Aching (2002), and it is an approach my own work subscribes to in chapter 8, in the late 20th century there has been a political­ ideological manipulation of this nationalistic theatre and "spectacle" designed to "mask" and hide the "privatisation of public space" (Aching 2002:98, Harvey 2005) and other forms of economic stratification, a situation that bears a remarkable similarity to theories on neoliberalism and Debordian (1967) ideas on spectacle. Ho (2000) and Nurse (Ho &

Nurse 2005) take this privatisation of public space in another direction and analyse the implications of the neoliberal commodification of various forms of Caribbean popular culture. Their central focus is on globalisation - the new imperialism - and its intersection with various Caribbean forms. These include Carnival, calypso music, steelpan, film and identity.

Scher (2003) too focuses on the interaction of the global economic system and

Carnival. His thesis however concerns Caribbean populations as a "transnation" and the transplantation of Carnivals from the Caribbean to cities such as New York, Washington,

DC and London as an element in diasporic identity construction. Sampath (1997) meanwhile sees Carnival as a battle between local festival and tourist development. With tourism winning at the expense of local subject matter and local participation at all stages of Carnival-production, design, and management. He writes about how much of the traditional downstream industries connected with Trinidad Carnival have been 91

outsourced to China and local participation is overlooked by the government urge for international currency that comes with foreign tourists on travel packages to play in Las

Vegas-themed masquerade bands in Trinidad.

Benitez-Rojo's alternative sense of Carnival as a metaphor in process - a window on Trinidad society that changes over time as the society does - permits avoidance of narratives of holism where distinct gender, race and ethnic groups shape the stories of

Trinidad Carnival into different and simplistic periods where singular groups dominate each era (Kerrigan and Laughlin 2003). It also permits an opportunity to stretch the traditional origin myth of Carnival in Trinidad by postulating through anecdote and archaeological evidence a tradition of masking reaching back beyond the now neat tale of

European arrival and its role in the dissemination of Carnival to the island where after

Emancipation, in an act of social resistance, the male, Afro-Trinidadian population appropriated it (Bellour and Kinser 1998).

This is a good place to enter such an anecdote told to me by John Cupid, the head historian and official anthropologist of the National Carnival Commission (NCC). It is also an argument he has made elsewhere too (Stegassy 1998) and one Bellour and Kinser explore (1998). For Cupid there was "a tradition of celebration" on the island long before the French arrived, and before that, long before the Spanish came too. A "tradition of celebration going back to the Warrahoon." The Warrahoon (also spelt Guarrahoon) were and are a group of Amerindians from the Orinoco delta who the archaeological record states (Highfield 1997, Boomert 2000, Forte 2005) were certainly in the island in the five hundred year period before European arrival, and whose presence I have remarked upon elsewhere (Kerrigan 2010). They were also clearly involved in the Trinidad Carnival of 92

1848 documented by Charles Day (1852) who when discussing the initial period of

Carnival in the island after the beginning of French immigration during the mid 1800s recorded his observations of a Warrahoon masquerade played by half-Indian peons and

Africans on the streets of Port of Spain that appeared well established. Today the word

"Warrahoon" is often heard in Trinidad as a reprimand when persons, usually men, are behaving wild and uncouth. Forte also notes "The 'raiding Warao' is still a figure common in many stories emanating from southern Trinidad in recent times, relating to

Waraos entering yards at night and stealing clothes off of drying lines or even snatching babies" (2005:60).

According to Cupid, "there were always celebrations on the island. Where we are here on these hills and high valleys of Lopinot there were people .. .long before the

Catholics came, there were celebrations on the island of Kairi" (Personal Interview). I asked him if he could describe these festivals to me. If there was any evidence to back up his story, he replied: "They [the Warrahoon] played an animal mas [they imitated animals] and painted their faces with roccoo berries and red ochre." He also told me that the Capuchin Monks who arrived in the late 1600s as missionaries "observed these celebrations." According to Cupid the Warrahoons' animal masquerade involved a headdress made of animal skin, painted face and animal skin worn on the shoulders and ankles

What first grabbed me about Cupid's version of events is that it does not erase the presence of the Amerindian population, its culture and genetics on the island, which we know existed in plain sight into the early 19th century. Nor does it erase their cultural influence and how a tradition of celebration may have existed there long before 93

Europeans began their colonial conquest of the Caribbean. This observation did not strike me as particularly hard to believe either because anthropologists and historians have demonstrated the world over the long established human capacity for celebration87

(Herodutous 2003, Constant-Martin 1999). In terms of archaeological evidence to back up Cupid's assertion it is agreed upon that roocoo berries and vegetable substances like cashew nuts were being used as facial and body decoration at the time of Spanish arrival in the region (Crowley 1956:205, Henry 2008:94). Unfortunately I found no evidence of the costumes Cupid describes nor of the documentation he mentioned penned by

Missionaries. 88 Nonetheless, the notion of festival and celebration on the island before the arrival of Europeans does not strike me as a huge leap and as such I want to suggest, as

Cupid does, this tradition did exist. Furthermore, that Wild Indian masquerades are a recorded sight throughout the 19th and 20th centuries at Carnival time and are still seen on

87 We know as far back as 525BCE that the Greek historian Herodutus wrote of the spring solstice celebrations he had witnessed and also been told about from North Africa. In particular he mentions Egypt where celebrations were held to mark the opening of their crop season and honour the fertility of both the earth and women. Herodotus states, "the Egyptians were the first people in the world to hold general festive assemblies, and religious processions and parades, and the Greeks learnt from the Egyptians." These festivals, the 'Artemis' it is believed provide the model for the festival of Bacchus as this short description of the event indicates. "(T]hey come in barges, men and women together, a great number in each boat; on the way, some of the women keep up a continual clatter with castanets and some of the men play flutes, while the rest, both men and women, sing and clap their hands. Whenever they pass a town on the river­ bank, they bring the barge close in-shore, some of the women continuing to act as I have said, while others shout abuse at the women of the place, or start dancing, or stand up and pull up their skirts. When they reach Bubastis, they celebrate the festival with elaborate sacrifices, and more wine is consumed than during all the rest of the year. The numbers that meet there are, according to native report, as many as seven hundred thousand men and women" (Herodutus 2003:119).

88 In an echo of John Cupid's suggestion that a tradition of celebration has long existed on the island Herre (a companion of Columbus on his first trip to Trinidad) recorded seeing Carnival-like behaviour at the time: "Their diversions consisted of public and private dances; the first was a kind of warlike amusement. Herre says, that 50,000 men and women used through the night to dance together, keeping time with wonderful precision; they accompanied them with historical songs: these entertainments were called Arietoes. Their private dances were licentious ... Their musical instruments consisted of a ride drum and different sized conch shells (Joseph 1838: 119). 94

the outskirts of today's "bikini and beads"89 Trinidad Carnival is evidence an Amerindian

strand, and connection to the 19th century masquerade did exist. This matters because 1)

it problematises the dominant essentialist and simplistic European origins myth, 2) it does

a similar thing to later narratives of Africanisms that surround Trinidad Carnival in the

19th century and 3) helps to support Ortiz's notion of transculturation over the European

notion of acculturation or the even more simplistic European vs. African Carnival origin myths, for an idea of culture reflective of mixture and amalgamation from multiple

sources. It would seem to me Cupid is offering a local tale suited to ideas of communication, transculturation and automatic solidarity between people.

Trinidad Carnival in Benitez-Rojo's sense then is not a fixed event, it is not a

story that has been told forever, it is a device that can function as an "assemblage"

(Deleuze and Guattari 1984 ), or specific cultural conjunction (Gilroy 1993, Hall 1996)

capable ofrevealing, in an allegorical fashion (Benjamin 1985, 1999: 19-20, Constant-

Martin 1999), the multiple intersections and intensifications of class, race, ethnicity,

gender, nationality, religion and more, that are particular to Trinidad at any moment in time, but have varied, blended and continue to vary at different points in its history. And this is how Trinidad Carnival, its masquerades and other festival events are used in this project - as cultural products and intersections through which various lines of meaning, power, resistance, discourse, capitalist expansion and more, combine and are revealed at different moments in local social history.

89 "Bikini and beads" masquerade portrayals also known as "Pretty mas'', is the most recent incarnation of Trinidad carnival. It is based upon neoliberal capitalism - profit, mass production, luxury - and it replaces the high art aesthetic contained in the "theatre of the streets" Trinidad Carnival was once described to be (Kerrigan and Laughlin 2006). 95

Benitez-Rojo's endeavour to capture multiplicity reconstructs the global, hegemonic representation of Carnival from a singular product in the world with

European antecedents, or African ancestry, depending on one's view point into diverse form of communication and public performativity of cultures that are peculiar to the history of each nation or island and the various intricacies and complexities of individual sociocultural systems. In combination with Peter Burke's (2009:271) work where he points out, "What is clear is that Carnival was polysemous, meaning different things to different people," it is possible to intimate like Lloyd Best did that Trinidad's population over time has learned a sense of themselves and their potential for solidarity through participation in, and the allegory of masquerade or "playing mas."

On a macro level this means talk of Carnival must be both plural and singular. 90

Carnival is not a monolithic entity found around the world but rather multiple and particular to each environment it is found in;91 a claim substantiated by clear distinctions and differences in the Carnivals found throughout contemporary Caribbean diaspora which at the same time maintain symbolical, vocal and romanticised connections to a

90 "However, what is clearly evident is that the character of these Caribbean islands is each so very different. Populated and pioneered by different cultures, in different mixes, over different timelines, under different conditions of wealth, health, religion and stewardship, that in consequence, the Carnivals that have evolved in each, are all so different. Though the festive-spirit may be similar; elements of tradition, tone of satire, the style of display, representation of characters, whit of portrayal, size of costumes, number of participants, emphases of events, step of dance, beat of music, instruments played, lyric of songs and decorum of participation; all mix to set different dimensions in displays of creativity that combine to form the festival we call Carnival" (G de Barry 2001)

91 Not unlike how "democracy" might better be understood globally rather than the hegemonic belief that liberal democracy is the only form applicable around the world and must be assert if not through neo-colonial power dynamics then by force and the barrel ofa gun (Grosfoguel 2009:28). 96

Carnival tradition out of Trinidad as is the case with Toronto's Caribana, Brooklyn

Carnival (Kasinitz 1992) and Notting Hill Carnival to mention three92 (Scher 2003).

The plurality of Carnival is particularly salient to Trinidad because since the supposed beginning of Carnival in the island - the colonial introduction of Carnival to

Trinidad by the French planter class in the late-1700s (Ottley 1974, Pearse 1956) -

Carnival here has annually (except for a brief hiatus for WWII) intersected with many of the elements of social structure and system that local scholars work with, such as politics, ethnicity, class, colonialism, race, gender, capital accumulation and globalisation. As

Errol Hill once noted:

[T]he Trinidad Carnival is not simply a retention of a European inspired festival. It may resemble in many characteristic ways the Carnivals of many countries, but its ancestry is different; in Trinidad the Carnival underwent a complete metamorphosis, a rebirth, resulting from peculiar historical and social pressures of the early 19th century. The effect of this metamorphosis was to make the Trinidad Carnival essentially a local product in form, content, and inner significance. [Hill 1971: 100].

Finally, Benitez-Rojo suggested theorising everyday life in the Caribbean through a "Camivalesque approach." He said this is important because "no perspective of human thought-whether premodem, modem or postmodern- can define the Caribbean's complex sociocultural interplay" ( 1997 :203 ). Again, this is not a reworking of Bakhtin' s

"Camivalesque" but rather the introduction of the term as connected specifically to the history, stories and situation of the Antilles. A sense scholars of the decolonial approach to epistemology would vigorously defend (Mignolo 2000, Lander 2009, Grosfoguel

2009).

92 "The particular configuration that any Carnival may take and the role it may play in the lives of those who participate in it and those who do not depends upon the particular conjunctions of class, gender, ethnicity, and generation as well as the broader structures of community and nation found in each locale" (Green and Scher 2007:2) 97

19th Century Trinidad Carnival: What's Behind a Masque?

To illustrate the analytical utility of using Trinidad Carnival as an indigenous intellectual device, below are six examples of Trinidad Carnival masques from the 19th century93 examined as cultural artefacts that can be read to make visible specific intersection of class, race, nationality and ethnicity in the island.

Pierrots and Pierrot Grenades

The pierrot pantomime character was a popular comedic figure in the theatres of

France and Italy from the 16th century onward and while there is much confusion over its origins in Trinidad (Henry 2008:49), many agree he made his first appearance in Trinidad at the Carnival balls held by the upper classes at the end of the 18th century (Kerrigan

2005). His lavish costume included a satin gown decorated with bells and hundreds of little triangles, a velvet breast piece with sequins and mirrors, and a plush beret. He was given to making long, boastful speeches full of allusions to Shakespeare and Milton, showing off his scholarly and articulate command of history. As the costume provided

93 In a style similar to C. L. R. James's "peeling back the layers," Carnival characters in the 19th century were more than masques particular to certain representational groups but rather cultural products and artefacts upon whose skin is written the intersection of many different peoples and places. They are another way to stress and tell a story of transculturation and connection rather than separation which took place during Trinidad's 19th century history. Carnival is a repository of cultural manners, gestures, attitude, text, chants and costumes. It is a major part of the reservoir of cultural knowledge that today all Trinidadians drink from. Carnival then becomes an educational tool, its potential to make historical and social connections visible adding to the pedagogical banner of social justice this project flies under. In particular anthropological realities and sociological theories become more accessible not through Euro­ American thought orientation and interpretation of what is important but through the stories and 'facts' of local struggles on a grassroots levels. This work is able to show how some Trinidadian Carnival practices contradict some of the received wisdoms in the social sciences. The essence of the argument is that Trinidad Carnival celebrations have made the ontological tum providing useful insights in how (as a people) Trinidadians have been constructing and reconstructing their beingness whether or not they participate. 98

attachment to a country of origin these early pierrots were extremely popular masques at the fancy balls at the beginning of the 19th century.

The pierrot grenade - the name means "pierrot from Grenada," which is to say a

"mock" pierrot- was the freed slaves' caricature of their former masters' elaborate masquerade, and first appeared during the jamette Carnival era. Some prefer the name

"pay wo grenade" as it is a more direct corruption of the French name and also connects to the "country king character" in African mas (Henry 2008:52-53), which helps to further the notion of mixture and transculturation between cultures and the products they produced in such interaction. However, some prefer to see the "pay wo grenade" as a wholly African masquerade hiding its restricted and outlawed activities such as types of music, song and dance under a syncretic veil of European connection.

Either way, as the satin and velvet of the Europeanpierrot costume was too expensive for the ordinary man in the street, the pierrot grenade cleverly used whatever material was available, cutting scraps of cloth of many colours into strips and sewing them onto burlap bags. Instead of silver sequins and mirrors, he embellished his costume with tin covers and pieces of foil; sardine cans with stones in them took the place of bells

(Kerrigan 2005).

94 According to Felix Edinborough , the best-known contemporary pierrot grenade, the original pierrot grenade had a mask of fine wire mesh, which allowed some of the more "respectable" members of society to play the masquerade in downtown yards.

"People weren't meant to see your face in those days," he says. "You were meant to be

94 Personal interview done on Feburary 5th 2004 99

someone else, you couldn't have the same face, and you would change your voice. You

never used the same voice."

The pierrot grenade was also far fiercer than his forefather, and moved from being a witty yet harmless European clown to become "a loquacious, combative, and fearless masker whose rhetorical skill was merely a prelude to a violent duel with whips and

sticks" (Hill 1972 :28). This masque provides evidence of a cross pollination of ideas and absorption of the faculties of this particular masquerade to the particular individual who was wearing it. Hence in elite circles it was flamboyancy of tongue which provided the appearance of power and strength, whereas on the street, language, eloquence and knowledge of history was still important but so was one's ability to handle a baton and

stick fight.

In the contemporary era the masquerade is no longer part of the popular

celebrations and only appears at special events. The masque still retains its ability to spell as its main character trait, alongside a similar costume, however the mask and the baton are nowhere to be seen. In his language and punctuation use, as this exemplar of how a

pierrot grenade would spell "independence" the masque is a patois person speaking

English; local terms and accents having replaced the rules of the Queen's English,

symbolising the process of assimilation and transculturation that has occurred in Trinidad over the last two hundred years:

Suppose you have a local pig That like to dance a calypso jig For a bunch ofsucier fig, You will tell everybody from here to France That you have a pig that like to dance. Now such a talented animal will surely cause bacchanal. So to save yourselffrom grief 100

And to protect yourselffrom endless tief You will arrange with a good, good friend And build for your pig a burglar proofpen. Now you are protected from dishonest men

Because you have your pig in the pen And since it's a pig that like to prance Your pig in the pen will continue to dance. And anybody who pass by chance Will be able to see at a moment's glance And broadcast it from here to France That your pig 'in the pen dance. ' [Edinborough cited in Henry 2008:61].

Negue Jadin

Like the pierrot, the negrejardin - French for black gardener (the spelling

1 became negue jadin sometime in 20 h century) - is a character first portrayed by the upper classes at their Carnival balls, and later adopted after Emancipation by the liberated slaves. The negue jadin's ability to cross barriers ofrace and class, back and forth, is rooted in its authenticity. For an upper-class planter, the masquerade, depicting a field slave, allowed him to play a role removed from polite high society. Acting out slave customs, behaviour, and dances was a thrilling and slightly subversive change from the elaborate Carnival masques of the ballroom. Later on, for a liberated slave, playing the negue jadin character after Emancipation was a chance to mock his former enslavement and invert reality through parody (Kerrigan 2005).

During slavery, when dangerous cane fires (or Cannes Brulees) broke out on the estates, the field slaves were driven with whips and blaring horns to extinguish the fires.

The toil could last for days, to the sound of endless drumming. The Cannes Brulees were reinvented as a street performance called the Canboulay. This time it was the negue jadin 101

that carried the whip, cracking it like the estate drivers, while the streets were lit up with torches and the masqueraders were roused with cries and horns. The freed slaves used the substance of their own experience to create a powerful satiric masque, bellowing songs of defiance and wielding sticks. In the case of stickfighting, reckoned to be an art form brought from West Africa, practiced on the plantations as a form of leisure and after

Emancipation transferred to the barracks of the overcrowded city where it became a symbol around which various neighbourhood groups or early Carnival bands would organise, East Indians and Africans collaborated within their neighbourhood group

(Sookdeo 2000).

1 After the 1881 Canboulay Riots, towards the end of the 19 h century, the negue jadin again became popular with the upper classes, and reappeared at the masquerade balls still held behind closed doors. As before the costume consisted of tight-fitting satin or khaki pants reaching to just above the knee and a brightly coloured shirt with a heart­ shaped panel sewn onto the chest, bordered with swansdown. Masks had been banned, and were replaced by soot on the masquerader's face, but the negue jadin still performed old dances like the bamboula, the giouba, and the calinda. (Kerrigan 2005, Henry 2008)

Today the negue jadin is a rarity in Carnival, but the stickfighters of Trinidadian lore with their kalinda songs, are recognised as his descendants, and live on in villages across the country, descendents of mixed heritage 102

The Burrokeet and Soumary

Evidence of mixture and transculturation between East Indians and the other cultural strands in Trinidad in 19th century is found in the Carnival masques called the burrokeet and the soumary. In particular, they provide evidence of combination and recombination in a way that suggests various cultures not only learning about each other but transculturating to produce something new. Burroquito is the Spanish word for a small donkey, from which burrokeet is derived, and this traditional "donkey mas" - still popular with younger masqueraders today - probably dates back to the late 18th century, when Trinidad was a Spanish colony. Donkey characters are documented in Spanish

Carnivals as long ago as the Middle Ages, and the burrokeet still shows many signs of this heritage (Kerrigan 2005).

The burrokeet costume was meant to give the illusion of someone riding a donkey. The masquerader wore a frame made of wire or bamboo covered with cloth or papier mache around his hips, with a donkey's head to the front and a tail to the rear, and an elaborately decorated cloth hanging on all sides, to cover the masquerader's legs. The

"rider" hung on to a bit and bridle made from thick, colourful cord. The rider himself wore a satin shirt and Andalucian straw hat. To the accompaniment of cuatros, guitars, and maracas, the dance of the burrokeet imitated the behaviour of a frolicking donkey and is called the burriquite (Kerrigan 2005).

But, like so many Trinidadian people and phenomena today, the burrokeet's history can be complicated by analysing other cultural influences - specifically, in this case a cousin called the soumary: a horse masquerade with roots in India, where it is associated with the Hindu Durga festival. East Indian indentured immigrants brought the 103

soumary to Trinidad in the mid 19th century, and its appearance has been documented in the Carnivals of the 1870s (Sookdeo 2000:220) and at festivals held at small sugar cane villages in the early 201h century. Historian Burton Sankeralli (200 I : I) explains that the soumary comes from "the lee la of the Hindu goddess Durga ... referred to as the harichand dance," in which the principal characters are the horse and rider, a groom and a princess. Like the burrokeet, the soumary costume was constructed around a bamboo frame worn on the hips by the rider, who danced to the drumming oftassas and Hindi folk songs. The soumary was also frequently seen in Guyana, where Carnival designer

Peter Minshall recalls seeing it as a young boy.

Estate owners and others observing the soumary a century ago tended to describe the masquerade as an East Indian version of the burrokeet, though the two have separate origins, which led eventually to some confusion over which came first, or whether one derived from the other. In recent years soumary performers like Birbal Jassant, in the process of keeping the character alive, have emphasised a unique history separate from the burrokeet. A truth I would like to suggest here is that the burrokeet and the soumary, though distinct, have influenced each other's development over the last century and a half, in ways impossible to pinpoint - which means they provide a good analogy of cultural process in Trinidad (Kerrigan 2005).95

95 The jab jab - patois for "double devil" -- has a similar name to the jab molassie, but a different history. His costume makes him look like a medieval European jester - two-coloured shirt with points at the waist, decorated with bells, mirrors, and rhinestones; a cape; a hood, sometimes with horns; stockings on his legs - but this clownish getup disguises a fierce warrior who carries a thick whip, ready to use in battle against any other jab jabs he may encounter. In the old days, the jab jab would usually wear an iron pot under his hood to protect him in battle from his opponent's whip. He showed off his battle­ readiness with chants about his ferocity and his resistance to civil society. The jab jab character was often unofficially called "coolie mas'', because East Indians took it on as their own. "The jab jabs, with their fancy clothes, whips, and bells, had a particular Indian involvement," says Burton Sankeralli. "The Indians understood the bells as gunghroos (sunghroos), bells Indian dancers attach to their ankles, and jab jabs were 104

The Dame Lorraine

Similarly, the Dame Lorraine, another masque, which first appeared in the 19th century, provides evidence of cross-cultural influence and that enslaved Africans had their masters under observation, digesting their culture in a form of appropriation rather than strict acculturation. In its most simple description the Dame Lorraine is the masquerade of a large planter woman with an oversized bosom and backside who carries a parasol. Beneath the surface however, much more was going on.

As mentioned previously the masquerade balls of the upper classes were elaborate affairs. They fed into the excessive lifestyles already practiced by the elites where over- indulgence in drinking and eating was a daily practice and exercise lacking. This manner of living led to the development of many diseases and lifestyle-related illnesses such as diabetes, gout, high blood pressure, heart problems and rheumatism. To many of the slaves then, the elites were not only sexual predators but grotesque to look at, and in the stories they told on return to the plantations and their barracks these representations were digested by the other slaves to create an imagery of depraved, misshapen and fat

'masters.'

The Dame Lorraine emerged as a masque after Emancipation. It is derived from the observations and imagery produced out of the encounter between enslaved Africans, their masters, and two Carnivals: the balls of the elites and the mockery contained in jamette Carnival. As a masque it did not reach the streets until the 20th century,

indeed referred to as 'coolie devils'. Indians were attracted to the devils because they evoked images from Indian mythology." "Until the 1950s," adds John Cupid, "Jab jab mas used to be plentiful in Aranguez, Quay d'Orsay, St Joseph, Tunapuna, Dinsley Village, Tacarigua ... and in all places along the Eastern Main Road where sugar cane villages used to be" (Kerrigan 2005). 105

nonetheless it did emerge in the private shows freed slaves put on for members of their communities.

The presentation of parody and mimicry suggests that despite the elite's power, and the fine clothes they wore each day, the Africans knew what lay underneath as they were intimately acquainted with their foibles. The exaggerated physical forms reflected the elite's deformities as perceived by their bondsmen and women. The show was staged in that rustic environment because this is where the Africans believed the elite belonged, where the pigs lived, the cows slept and the chickens roosted. [Henry 2008].

The theatrical Dame Lorraine presentations dismissed and mocked "high white" society. They presented colonial aspirations of nobility and pretensions of a superior civilised society as a sick joke. They can be understood in resistance terms as ridiculing the notion of white European racial superiority contained in the ideological foundations of colonialism. They can also be seen as a form of transculturation.

Early 20th Century Dragons and Changes in Carnival

The writer Max Harris points out that during the Carnivals after Emancipation devil bands were common on the streets at night with hooting hordes of semi-dressed

"beasts" acting out hellish scenes representing the days of slavery. In the taxonomy of traditional Carnival characters, the devil was a whole family, with dozens of different characters - some accounts mention as many as 42 versions of devil masques. Today at least eight main characters survive: the imp, the beast, the demon, the bookman, the dragon, the jab jab, the jab molassie, and the devil proper (Kerrigan 2005).

At the beginning of the 20th century and with commercialisation of the masquerade offering prizes for the best bands, the formally 'dangerous' creatures of the 106

devil band gave birth to full-scale devil and dragon bands - far less improper and with far

more pageantry than their post-Emancipation predecessors; a similar situation to wider

societal values too.

The dragon itself was a special kind of beast, with its own history and tradition.

One of the first recorded devil bands of the tum of the century was the Demonites,

created in 1910 by "Chinee" Patrick Jones, who was inspired by Dante's Inferno to create

an elaborate depiction of the denizens of Hell. Such cultural mixture is worth spelling

out, for it is further evidence of transculturation in play: African experiences and cultural production, mixed with Chinese influences, and European religious themes to produce a masquerade uniquely related to the cultural intersection that is Trinidad.

A dragon band included many characters, all acting roles, who together as a band told a story through a form of street theatre. This type of mas was a signal of changes to come both in Carnival and Trinidad more generally.

Summary

In sum, the various discourses and accounts surrounding Trinidad Carnival over time not only provide a narrative thread to tell a story about socio-economic and cultural transformations on the island over the last two centuries and the patterns they have produced, but also what such discourses and narratives hide, support and reconstruct in any articulation of Trinidadian modernity. Furthermore, in recognition of Gilroy's modernist "Black Atlantic" thesis (1993) and its resistance that writes the history of slavery, plantation economy and racial genocide back into the picture of Euro-American 107

modernity and progress, the history of Trinidad Carnival and what it is today can help us view and understand the shifting racial-ethnic and class hierarchy of T &T, highlighting how at various times the local population has been made, fragmented and subject to the various accommodations and exploitations of global capitalist expansion. In this sense my use of Trinidad Carnival in the next chapter and elsewhere in this dissertation

1 illustrates how the local, nationalist and post-colonial politics of the 20 h century Trinidad were negotiated and how this construction failed to redress the violent legacies, both symbolic and real of colonialism, inscribing within the foundations of post-colonialism a cultural logic of racism - the divide and conquer ethos laid by colonialism - tied to transnational forms of wealth creation and economic inequality. CHAPTER FIVE:

SOLIDARITY, ASSIMILATION AND THE FOUNDATIONS

OF "TRINIDADIAN" IDENTITY

"If you know your history, then you would know where you're coming from" - Lyric from Buffalo Soldier by Bob Marley and the Wailers (1983)

"[S]earch out the causes of the present in the past. Only in this way [can] we come to comprehend the forces that impel societies and cultures here and now" - Eric Wolf (1982:xv)

"While Trinidad was a colonial caste society where whites were at the top and non-whites always at the bottom, there were no monolithic groups of the dominant and oppressed. Cleavages of race, nationality, religious affiliation and outlooks cut across each racial or ethnic category; some members of the labouring classes also experienced upward mobility" - Neil Sookdeo (2000:249)

Trinidad and Crown Colony Rule

In the early period of British control, political rule was achieved with a system called "Crown Colony Rule." A "Crown Colony" was effectively Government by the

Crown. Rule was directed from London and was represented on the island by a Governor

108 109

who kept on the non-democratically chosen Cabildo.96 The Governor had full control

over all the affairs of Port of Spain and the island, and as such contributed greatly to the

erection of a strict socio-political boundary between an elite and the rest not least through

ignoring the rights and wants of the masses entirely.

The Governor did not consider the "masses" as equal to "the people." "The

people" were not the workers, the peasants, and the unemployed and indentured

labourers. For the Governor, the "people" were a small number of merchants, the sugar

planters (predominantly British and Protestant) and the cocoa planters (predominantly

French-Creole and Roman Catholic), a mostly white and coloured group. As such, Crown

Colony Government was a deliberate impediment to the development of any kind of alternative nation and democracy to the Western colonial form97 (Phillips 1984:433). It was a means of establishing and maintaining white supremacy and economic superiority

over a supposedly inferior mass. The demarcation between "the people" and "the masses" however, did not last throughout the century. As we will see there were occasions of

uprising where "the masses" came together with "the people" against the British elite and

by 1864 such thoughts and sentiments clearly bubbled under the surface of letters written

by locally born Creoles who had been educated in Europe and returned to Trinidad as

professionals. This union highlights a dialectic of local cultural solidarity and cultural

96 "[I]n those days, everything and everybody in Port of Spain were under the jurisdiction of the Illustrious Cabildo. It was at that time of its history an omnipotent body. There was no appeal against its decisions. It made its own laws and punished those who broke them" (Ottley 1962:29).

97 "By the 1820s, the free coloured, let by doctors and lawyers educated in Europe, conducted a strong public campaign on the island and in England for full civil and political equality with the whites. Many of those in this group were students of the Enlightenment, and, consequently, they found the quasi­ authoritarian nature of the Crown Colony system unacceptable" (MacDonald 1986:33) 110

assimilation to white British values at the centre of this chapter and possibly at the

foundation of the yet to fully emerge social category of "Trinidadian."

Are they always to be led on strings? Are they never to have rights of Britons (free institutions)? Are their minds never to have the full sway of the intelligence with which Providence has endowed them? Is the course of their destiny to be perpetually disturbed and marred by the whims and fancies of interests foreign to their prosperity? Are they to be always the shuttlecocks of dishonest merchants? [The Star ofthe West, Port of Spain, Sat, Jul 9, 1864].

For the first thirty years of the 19th century then the British elite was a political

class apart from "the people," and "the masses" were not a political class in formal

political terms. In terms of economic class politics however, during this initial period the

situation was slightly different and can be described as the plantocracy98 (which in

distinction to the political elite included the British, the French, the Spanish and the

landowning free coloureds) vs. the labouring slave class who would latterly be joined by

the East Indian indentured class, while a growing coloured middle class was also forming

in between the elite and labouring classes. Colour and class then clearly intersected in

early 19th century Trinidad as it did throughout the colonial world with whites and

initially some Creoles, set apart from the African, Amerindian and later the East Indian masses. This oppression based on colour and class exploitation, was also fundamentally

structural - Aime Cesaire's (1972) process of proletarisation and pauperisation -

"imposing ideas and practices of inequality, assimilated by coloniser and colonised, and their generations to come" and growing cumulatively each year.

98 The plantocracy was divided not only by nationality, but also by religion, class and profession across its various national groups. As we will see inn connection to Carnival, by the latter part of the century some of these lines of fragmentation had implications in terms of the sides taken to ensure the preservation of the festival versus its prohibition. 111

Specifically, the Crown Colony Government system was designed to avoid the rambunctiousness of the British-American system (with its electorates and limited self- government that had recently given a sense of righteousness to the American Revolution) or the radical objectives of the French revolution whose sentiments appealed powerfully to slaves and the free coloured population as was clearly seen in Haiti (Millette 1970:22-

34). It was designed to deny the possibility of Afro-Creoles99 or any other localised group getting a say in the island's system of government or distribution of economic resources.

In effect Crown Colony Government was a mechanism to maintain British control and capital and ultimately ensure the maintenance of power through laws and committee that represented the capital interests of the elites and offered nothing to the interests of labour.

This triumph of capital over labour can be considered as evidence of the growing capitalist political economy in the island.

The Crown Colony system was, in many aspects, an autocratic form of government headed by a governor who, ruling in the monarch's name, had almost unlimited power. In theory he was the impartial, yet special protector of the unrepresented masses. In reality he usually shared the planter's general political and social views, which was mirrored in policy. A governor who sought to implement policies that went against the planters found his tenure of office difficult, but not impossible. While the upper classes had access to the island's chief executive, the majority of the population remained without political representation. This undemocratic system of government was to remain largely unchanged from 1831 to 1924, when considerable political tension began to surface. [MacDonald 1986:26].

While this macro dimension of group power dynamics is useful and proper because it demonstrates the impediments the masses faced in relation to the state and the mode of production it tells us little about what happened when individuals of different

99 Afro-creoles were person of African heritage born in Trinidad. In the period before 1797 Trinidad had the largest free Afro-Creole population in the Caribbean many of whom were free and possessed lands. It was a larger group than the merchant class, the members of the civil service and the plantocracy and as such these groups had little interest in extending or improving the rights of Afro-Creoles 112

representational groups and economic classes came into contact, observed and learned about one another no matter the prevailing stereotypes, prejudices and socio-economic realities. What was going on below the level of group dynamics?

When the British arrived in July 1797 the census read that the population of

Trinidad was 17,718 (Millette 1970), divided 2151Whites,4476 Coloured, 10,009

Slaves, and 1082 Indians. This divisional representation is an example of Wolfs critique of "billiard balls" spinning and bouncing off each other ( 1981 ). Another description of the events of this initial British encounter and the one this project follows would include the overcrowding at the time in the capital Port of Spain where following the "Great Fire of 1808"100 10,000 people were living within the confines of one square mile

(Goodenough 1976)- a more micro-focussed description ofreality.

Suzanne Goodenough's (1976) work alongside that of Carton Ottley both discuss the realities encountered in 19th century Port of Spain when "a large proportion of the town's population was foreign born and even a large element of the Trinidadian-born residents were not form Port of Spain itself but came from the rural areas" (Ottley

1962:50). Ottley and Goodenough agree that Port of Spain at the time was not a place of neat division and separation.

The stores and shops in Port of Spain were family businesses in which the owner and his family worked in the shop downstairs during the day, and went upstairs to sleep at night. Their slaves slept in the garrets and they rented the backyards to all and sundry. [Ottley: 1962:55].

100 During the night of March 24th 1808 a fire swept through the Port of Spain that burnt to the ground 3000 out of the 5000 houses. 12 blocks of the Town were completely destroyed including all the public buildings. Martial law was proclaimed and tents pitched to house the homeless. The destruction meant a new town rose in its place (Ottley 1962:23-25). 113

Following their lead we begin to imagine the cosmopolitan composition of the

population of Port of Spain during this early period of British rule and can surmise that

intermixture on some levels between the various groups was a regular occurrence in Port

of Spain specifically because of its unique demographic mosaic.

[I]n race, nationality, and political ideology, those men and women of Port of Spain, at the beginning of the 19th century, presented a mosaic of many pieces of varying hues. They were a motley collection of French, Spanish, Italian, African and American peoples. They were black, white and coloured. Some belonged to the French republican school of thought, while others supported the monarchy. [Ottley 1962:21].

Examples of intermixture can be imagined in the daily activity of market interaction. 101 For example, Ottley notes that before 1816 when the market house was

built on George Street, markets sprouted up in many locales around the town, such as the

grass markets ofWoodbrook and at the Corner of St Vincent and Duke Streets, the wood

and fish market on South Quay, plus the daily market in Charlott.e Street (1962:56). In

such circumstances, persons learnt about each other. This produced a mixed space where interaction, albeit economic, could take place, and produced a common hand me down knowledge of various others.

Outside those who lived and remained in the island it has also been mentioned that at the time many boats continued to bring goods from Venezuela selling their cargo so they could spend the proceeds on English linen, cotton goods and machinery to take back to the mainland with them (Ottley 1962:55, Henry 2008:96, Bellour and Kinser

101 As Furnivall (1948) would later remark in regard to his theory of cultural pluralism at work on tropical colonial societies in the Far East, which while problematic is nonetheless a useful anecdote for this period - persons of different hues and colours came together and mixed in, at the very least, the marketplace. 114

1998:148). The amount of traffic of this sort between Trinidad and Venezuela102 is said to have been as heavy and close as at any time "since the dawn of life in the two countries"

(Ottley 1962:56). It also lets us further imagine that in the early part of the 19th century

Port of Spain had early capitalist characteristics where goods were produced beyond the means of subsistence, consumers came to market to buy them and the capital produced was reinvested to create more wealth. 103 As with the late 18th century the goods for sale at market included fish, sugar, and cane rum, but now the market was much larger with butchers stalls, fish stalls, bakers, an array of foodstuffs, as well as everyday goods such as coconut oil (for lamps as well as medicinal and culinary purposes). The sellers included tray women, merchants and family run businesses, and all had to pay tax to the

Cabildo for a yearly licence (Ottley 1962:55-56).

At the time of the British arrival we also know the demographic size of the free coloured population (Creoles born in the island plus free blacks and coloured immigrants) was substantial. Some with wealth and land and many as well educated as the white colonialists. Hence we can surmise there was a level of interaction between whites and the free coloured population unmatched throughout the British West Indies (Campbell

1992:52-83). Under the Spanish these free coloureds were referred to as "citizens" and enjoyed relative economic power and social privilege in comparison to populations on

102 By the 1870s the well to do class of Europeans would also take trips up the Orinoco. "One of the most delightful excursions from Trinidad is a trip of the Orinoco as far as Bolivar ... The steamer 'Bolivar' that runs up the river is an American-built side-wheel steamer ... The time occupied by the journey is two day and night each way and three days at Bolivar ... The steamer makes two trips per month" (Stark 1897:122)

103 By the 1830s goods were brought direct from the captains of ships who carried on a two-way trade, bringing in cottons, machinery, foodstuffs and other commodities, and taking away the country's cocoa and sugar on their outward journeys. At times, too, the merchant would deliver a shipment of cocoa to the captain of the ship with a long list of articles which should be purchased with the proceeds of the sale" (Ottley 1962:55) 115

other islands and were eager to maintain such privilege under the British (Campbell 1992,

MacDonald 1986:33). What is less remarked upon, but mentioned by Borde (1876), is

that there was differentiation within this group, at the very least "between the 'affranchis'

or those who came to Trinidad free and with property, and the 'libere' or those who have

purchased their freedom in the island" (Maingot 1962: 136). The newly arrived British

ignored these distinctions and labelled all free-coloureds including Amerindians (Forte

2005) and later in the century Chinese, Indians and Portuguese as "people of colour" and

a "vile"104 group. 105 It is many of these free-coloureds who were involved in trade, money

lending, agriculture, shopkeeping, and the civil service who formed the emergent middle

class on the island. That this mixed group economically, educationally, ethnically,

religiously, nationally and racially was large and varied, some with economic wealth and

legal and political knowhow106 seemed to do little to change the hierarchical and

racialised thinking of the British.

The arrival of Ralph Woodford in 1813, the first civilian governor of the island,

brought social reform - the British wanted a settled society of socially defined and

graduated racial "ranks" (Campbell 1992:66) - with the rolling back of many of the

104 As Mr. Marryat wrote in an 1810 letter to Lord Liverpool: "if we consider this subject a question of law ... that law declares the free people of colour to be vile and infamous race. And indeed the general state of their education and manners is such that the description does them no great injustice" (Maingot 1962: 136).

105 This colonial logic of white supremacy and racism should be recorded here because it is a similar logic that appears in interviews I discuss in chapter 8 and as such provides connection to my suggestion that the original colonial logic of divide and rule and its intersection with contemporary class politics is echoed in neo-colonialism

106 In 1823 the numbered of free coloured on the island was 13,347, almost a third of the colony's total population and In 1826 a delegation of free-coloured travelled to England and were successful in repealing some discriminatory laws (MacDonald 1986:34). 116

freedoms of the vile coloured class, 107 the imposition of institutional power of the white

British elite, and the proletarisation (Cesaire 1950) of the masses. Nonetheless there were still many examples of arenas and spaces where different persons (as defined by class, race and nationality) had the opportunity to hear, 108 see and be seen by others. 109

The many different races, classes and stations mixed at Queen's Park Savannah horse races of the 1820s (Ottely 1962:52). 110 Different groups had different roles at the meetings that suggest their different situations within the colony's social structure. The

"negros" attended the cattle on the perimeter of the fields, the "whites" enjoyed sitting out in their carriages and cabriolets and the "free-coloureds" sat with their families under the shade of trees. All persons existed in the same social space (Kirke 1898:63) no matter lines of separation existed. The races were an element of common popular culture experienced from varied race and class positions. Even after the formation of the Trinidad

107 The nascent non-white middle class group lost many privileges such as attending the plutocracy's fetes and Carnival parties that existed under Spanish and French control.

108 In terms of language the first European language spoken on the island was Spanish and then later with the arrival of the French from Grenada, Dominica, Martinique and St. Vincent, French became increasingly dominant, yet in 1803 when the island was ceded to the British by agreement in the Treaty of Amiens English became the official language. We can imagine different groups would have picked up different words and various vocabularies, not least to ensure the acquisition of goods and foods. This market place linguistic combination of early 19th century Trinidad can be seen still today in place names around Port of Spain and a local creole dialect, and gives merit to notions of bilingualism, trilingualism or at the least linguistic mixture. In 1814 the Cabildo now under the control of the British declares the English language the sole language of government, and discontinued the translation of their orders and minutes into both French and Spanish. Again however, such delineation was an idea rather than a strict reality. For example soon after this decision the Cabildo faced with problems of refuse left on the road side by the town's inhabitants who ignored a law stating it had to be removed every Wednesday and Saturday issued the order again via leaflets printed in English, Spanish and French. So while English was the official language of government trilingualism was still required to communicate with the masses presenting a picture of both linguistic mixture and monolinigualism interacting at the same time (Ottley 1962:50).

109 Newspaper reports of the petty lawlessness taking place in town with many brawls, fights, feuds, duels and intrigues which led to the erection of a public wooden gallows also demonstrate a distinct public observation of various persons rather than constant segregation as the census implies.

110 This is well illustrated in the picture of Creoles, Indians and Chinese mixing on the savannah reproduced on page 52 of Oxaal (1968) 117

Turf Club in 1828, which made the horse races more organised and regulated, the event

111 was still widely attended by all classes and colours as this quote of the era notes :

On Monday misanthropy had elbow room enough to walk forth its spleen, and might have indulged in solitary grumblings along the deserted streets of Port of Spain. Cranes reposed in quiet dignity along the wharves, and empty carts in the shade of mercantile retreats. The ledgers and scales lay neglected, and the dust swept pavement received only the visits of flies. The metropolis of sea-grit Port of Spain had poured forth its entire material of rational bipeds, and of migrating quadrupeds into the verdant plain before St Ann's before mid-day. The day was one of those when the sun quietly courts all he shines upon with the rays of his splendour struggling as through a veil. [Source quoted in Ottley 1962:53].

In the sphere of Carnival it is also obvious various persons under various representational labels came to mock, imitate and play with the identities of not just

111 A 1871 letter written by Charles Kinglsey uses more straightforward language: "I have been to the races: not to bet, nor to see the horses run: not even to see the fair ladies on the Grand Stand, in all the newest fashions of Paris via New York: but to wander en mufti among the crowd outside, and behold the humours of men ... I do not suppose that the brown fellows who hung about the horses, whether Barbadians or Trinidad men, were of very angelic morals: but they looked like heroes compared with the bloated hangdog roughs and quasi-grooms of English races. As for the sporting gentlemen, not having the honour to know them, I can only say that they looked like gentlemen, and that I wish, in all courtesy, that they had been more wisely employed. But the Negro, or the coloured man of the lower class, 'was in his glory. He was smart, clean, shiny, happy, according to his light. He got up into trees, and clustered there, grinning from ear to ear. He bawled about island horses and Barbadian horses ... he sang songs, possibly some of them extempore ... The Coolies seemed as merry as the Negros; even about the face of the Chinese there flickered, at times, a feeble ray of interest. The coloured women wandered about, in showy prints, great crinolines, and gorgeous turbans. The Coolie women sat in groups on the grass ah Isle of the Blest, where people can sit on the grass in January like live flower-beds of the most splendid and yet harmonious hues. As for jewels, of gold as well as silver, there were many there, on arms, ankles, necks and noses, which made white ladies fresh from England break the tenth commandment. I wandered about.. .At last I came to a crowd ; and in the midst of it, one of those great French merry-go-rounds, turned by machinery, with pictures of languishing ladies round the central column ... The hobby-horses swarmed with Negresses and Hindoos of the lower order. The Negresses, I am sorry to say, forgot themselves, kicked up their legs, shouted to the bystanders, and were altogether incondite. The Hindoo women, though showing much more of their limbs than the Negresses, kept them gracefully together, drew their veils round their heads, and sat coyly, half frightened, half amused, to the delight of their 'papas,' or husbands, who had in some cases to urge them to get up and ride, while they stood by, as on guard, with the long hardwood quarter-staff in hand. As I looked on, considered what a strange creature man is, and wondered what possible pleasure these women could derive from being whirled round till they were giddy and stupid, I saw an old gentleman seemingly absorbed in the very same reflection. He was dressed in dark blue, with a straw hat. He stood with his hands behind his back, his knees a little bent, and a sort of wise, half-sad, half-humorous smile upon his aquiline high-cheek-boned features. I took him for an old Scot; a canny, austere man a man, too, who had known sorrow, and profited thereby; and I drew near to him. But as he turned his head deliberately round to me, I beheld to my astonishment the unmistakeable features of a Chinese. He and I looked each other full in the face, without a word; and I fancied that we understood each other about the merry-go-round, and many things besides. And then we both walked off different ways, as having seen enough, and more than enough. Alas he, after all, an honest man and true?" (Kingsley 1871 :258-262). 118

themselves but the others in society they saw and observed (Kinser 1990). This

interaction and observation produced various cultural products within which is written a

culturally diverse knowledge of the island (not least the costumes and masquerades

reviewed previously). For example, as the British arrived the early European Carnival

festivities found on the island still echoed the earliest recorded private costume balls or fetes from before the Cedula which were mainly attended by the Spaniards and those of

mixed European and African descent (Besson and Brereton 1991) with slaves excluded.

At these events the various costumes demonstrated signs of cultural mixture, particularly

French, Spanish and North African. While slaves were not guests at these balls or those

after the arrival of the British, this did not mean slaves were completely removed from

events - many still had duties to perform at the fetes including service and musical

entertainment. This presented them with opportunities to observe their owners' behaviour

and share this information back on the plantation or barracks (Henry 2008). While the

higher classes were engaged in their festivities the excluded slaves left on the plantations

shared stories of what they saw. As we know also, many of the slaves, as well as the free

Africans and coloureds who arrived in Trinidad in the 1gth and 19th century, brought with

them West African traditions which included a African masquerade culture as distinct to

a European Carnival culture (Henry 2008). Soon the slaves were holding their own

limited events at the same time. These usually involved rudimentary masques, based on

animal masquerades or of imitating the styles and mannerisms of the planters or styles

some could still remember from home. It is a small step to interpret these various strands

across and between many different persons and their cultures as further evidence of mixing and opportunities for observation of the various Carnivals celebrated by the 119

plantocracy, and imitated on the plantations that people could be exposed to, no matter if

much of this observation turned into lampooning rites of what they saw. For example, the

French performed a male masquerade called a negue Jadin based on the field slaves and a

female one called a mulatresse which allowed them to act out their perceived behaviours

of the other (Ho 2000:5, De Freitas 1994:62-64, van Koningbruggen 1997:12-14).

After the Cedula as the island's population grew through immigration the private

costumed balls of the Europeans grew in size too but still demonstrated a combination of

both white and coloured elites (those with land and/or slaves). On arrival, the British

seemed initially reluctant to permit or engage in these balls, however as many newspaper

articles from the era show this initial reluctance soon evaporated and the balls became an

annual fixture on the calendars of the British plantocracy - another space where

extending the notion of mutual observation and interaction, or in other terms automatic

solidarity may be valid. An English officer in 1826 wrote to his friend this description of

events:

I wish, Bayley, you had been here in the time of the Carnival; you have no idea of the gaiety of the place in that season. Ovid's Metamorphoses were nothing compared to the changes that took place in the persons of the Catholics of Trinidad. High and low, rich and poor, learned and unlearned, all found masking suits for the Carnival. A party of ladies, having converted themselves into a party of brigands, assailed me in my quarters and nearly frightened me out of my wits. I was just going to cut and run when Ensign ... who was with me, not knowing the joke, and thinking they were so many devils come to take him before his time drew his sword. [Pearse 1956: 180].

So on British arrival private costumed balls, dinners, out door picnics andfites were already popular activities that took place between Epiphany and Lent coming to a peak on Mardi Gras (in some years the events lasted for almost a three month period).

The British, initially adverse, soon came around and as the newspapers record were seen 120

at the balls of those groups from whom historians say they were estranged, predominantly

the French and to a lesser degree the Spanish. The general scene then, on British arrival,

was a world that still can be divided into representational categories as the census

suggests but can also be read as a history of socio-cultural connection and

communication - partly in the observation of each other's celebration traditions, the

situation of overcrowding in the city and mixture at such venues as the markets and races

- rather than a situation of strict segregation, no matter that segregation and racism did

exist.

Emancipation and Residential Mixture in Port of Spain

Emancipation - the abolition of the slave trade and slavery itself- was declared official in 1834. However, following requests by the plantocracy for an apprenticeship period of four years to ease the planters' implementation of a new labour supply a more correct date for liberation from manumission is 1838.

By such time the overcrowding situation of the city - at the end of slavery about

12,000 people lived in under one square mile - while not solved112 had been altered somewhat. By 183 7, with extension work, the upper classes were able to move away from the centre of Port of Spain toward the north-west of the town and remove themselves from the increasingly dense neighbourhoods about to receive a large number

112 The overcrowding in Port of Spain brought obvious health hazards that affected all groups - for example the Cholera epidemic of 1854 affected one in five of the total Port of Spain population of 20,000, at the time - but took its greatest toll on the labouring masses of East Indians and Africans who witnessed whole families being wiped out (Goodenough 1976:50). "The entire colony was in mourning and mostly sombre habiliments were to be seen in the streets," a chronicler of the times wrote (Ottley 1962:83) giving the impression of a form of mournful solidarity shared at the same time in many lives. 121

of "apprentices" come to the city looking for work. This principal of rural-urban migration of the poor is the major feature in the growth of 19th century Port of Spain.

The city of Port of Spain numbered eleven streets in total after the extension in 1837. Everyone lived in close proximity. The city expansion [of 1838] took place just in time to open up other possibilities that allowed the white elite to move out of downtown Port of Spain. Ladies and gentlemen of the period, according to the protocol of good manners of the day, could not frolic in the streets. The higher echelons of society went by carriage to the Government House, Champs Elysees, Coblentz and other newly constructed larger mansions. Going downtown to play mas on the streets was not part of the social order. That is why the freedom of the streets was so disturbing to the upper class. It was a departure from the tame gestures that passed for their frolicking. [Henry 2008: 1O].

The emergent middle class was described by Powrie (1956) as comprising three distinct elements: Anglophile and/or Protestant coloured; Francophile and Catholic coloureds; and free black immigrants. The coloured position was an uneasy one both legally and socially. They had freedom yet they could not vote or politically push their interests. Some were as wealthy and well-educated as whites, with wives who had an

"insatiable passion for showy dresses and jewels" (Carmichael 1833 quoted in Miller

1994:73), but the vast majority were denied access into elite society (Goodenough

1976: 18). By 1834 they out numbered the elite four to one and were generally antagonistic toward them (Goodenough 1976: 18). In solidarity with the local population the abolition of slavery was one of this group's political objectives and according to

MacDonald with this success the group's political force was spent and they quickly

"assimilated into English culture," some rising in society through education and the civil service, filling the space left with the departure of some white merchants and artisans

(1986:34). The dialectic of local solidarity and cultural assimilation to foreign values can be identified here as at the bottom of this emergent middle class-consciousness. 122

The less wealthy and educated metiibers of this middle class were not, according

to Mason (1998:23) and van Konningsbruggen (1997:19), all able to move out of town

immediately and remained in houses nearby or directly adjoining many of the barrack

yards. 113 This created a situation of constant interaction between individuals and groups

of different economic class, religion and nationality (Brereton 1979: 166). As one

commentator points out of this encounter, "privacy or minding one's own business was impossible" (Brereton 1979: 126).

Evidence of one form of solidarity across class and colour such interaction

engendered, it can be argued, is contained in a Port of Spain Gazette report from 1833 discussed by Sookdeo. When "the Assistant Chief of Police sought to 'check the shameful violation of the Sabbath,' 114 and arrested two coloureds, 'his house was assaulted by a large concourse of rabble,' who broke the windows and attacked Mr.

Peake himself' ([Italics mine] 2000:215). This quote suggests accord albeit specific and slight between the lower class (rabble) and the coloured class (middle).

A situation of residential segregation based along lines of colour and class is a fair description of reality in post-Emancipation Port of Spain and is born out in the race status

113 "The 'yards' were spaces built in the courtyards behind storefronts and houses on the streets of Port of Spain, and housed in their prime, up to 30 people at any given time, although they were built for nine or ten. The living quarters consisted of several rooms arranged in a barrack like system, around the perimeter of the yard. Several people, even whole families, shared one room. The cooking fires, rocks used for bleaching clothes and restroom facilities were in the centre of the yard and shared by all residents. As a meeting space, these shared facilities allowed for some shared responsibility, as well as tension and outright conflict. Women often laundered clothes in the yard for money. At any given time the yards were filled with clotheslines and the smell of bleach. Cooking food items to sell on the street was also another form of income, although minimal, and we can imagine the competition this created between residents who shared. It was a crowded and highly unsanitary system (the bathroom was often just a pit, that drained into the same groundwater drank from)" (Brownson 2002)

114 The British in Trinidad frequently used the "violation of the Sabbath" as an excuse to show their disapproval of Carnival 123

and ecology maps of Goodenough, who using census data across three periods -

1842, 115 1930 and 1960 - explores spatial patterns of social groups in Port of Spain.

However, as with most representational work on the era the data speaks in generalities

not specifics. So while the maps speak to a certain level of residential segregation they

also support readings of substantial mixture. For example, it is clear on Goodenough's maps that the north-east comer of Port of Spain had a high concentration of "African" residents (groups she defines in accordance with the labels used in the census data) abutting and in the same space as "British Colonials" (coloured middle class), as well as abutting a high concentration of "White Foreign European" (White French and Spanish planter class). Also in the bottom centre of the same maps in what would be called downtown Port of Spain today, persons who were phenotypically white, coloured and black all lived in the same area or at the very least in spaces adjacent.

It is fair to say that many of the white elite moved outside and to the edge of the town limits. In town however the density of population, particularly amongst the lower class, meant many different persons from different parts of Africa and the Caribbean, including some of the middle classes had daily contact with each other creating a situation of socio-cultural mixed and adaptation. The physical separation between the upper classes, in particular the British elite, and the urban masses, was a specific residential pattern. After Emancipation it was into this separation that a form of Carnival known as Jamette Carnival grew.

115 "This census was undertaken by the newly installed Town Council of 1840 and enumerated 15,002 inhabitants; 6 per cent were white and foreign born, 29 per cent West Indian born and mostly black, and 56.7 per cent were Trinidadian born. There were 8.3 per cent in the African and 'other races' categories" (Goodenough 1978:44) 124

Jamette Carnival and Barrack Life

I was residing in Trinidad during the Carnival, which commenced on Sunday, the 7th March at mid-night. I had seen the Carnival at Florence, at Syria in Greece, and in Rome; and was now about to witness a Negro masquerade, which from its squalid splendour, was not unamusing, cheapness being the grand requisite ... The maskers paraded the streets in gangs of from ten to twenty, occasionally joining forces in procession. The primitives were Negroes, as nearly naked as might be bedaubed with a black varnish. One of this gang had a long chain and padlock attached to his leg, which chain the others pulled. What this typified, I was unable to learn; but, as the chained one was occasionally thrown down on the ground, and treated with a mock bastina- doing it probably represented slavery ... Each mask was armed with a good stout quarter-staff, so that they could overcome one half more police than themselves, should occasion present itself. Parties of Negro ladies danced through the streets, each clique distinguished by bodices of the same colour. Every Negro, male and female, wore a white flesh coloured mask, their wooly hair carefully concealed by handkerchiefs; this contrasted with the black bosom and arms was droll in the extreme ... Those ladies who aimed at the superior civilization of shoes and stockings, invariably clothe their pedal extremeties [sic] in pink silk stockings and blue, white, or yellow kid shoes, sandalled their sturdy legs. For the men, the predominating character was pulinchinello; every second Negro at least, aiming at playing the continental jack­ pudding. Pirates were very common, dressed in Guernsey frocks, full scarlet trousers. and red woollen cap with wooden pistols for arms. From the utter want of spirit, and sneaking deportment of these corsairs, I presumed them to have come from the Pacific. Turks also there were and one highlander, a most ludicrous figure, a caricature of the Gael, being arrayed in scarlet coat, huge grenadier cap, kilt of light blue chintz, striped with white, a most indescribable philibeg, black legs of course, and white socks bound with dirty pink ribbon. [Ottley 142-143)]. 116

Jamette Carnival was, amongst other things, an opportunity for the controlling white elite to claim the character of Carnival celebrations had changed and now represented something more sinister- as society more generally did now that slavery had been abolished. New narratives of dehumanisation were required to maintain the hierarchal status quo. The jamette label represented a class of underworld people, derived from the French class term for diametre or diamet, applied to those beneath the

116 1 There is dispute about the year this account refers to. The date of the Carnival March 8 h implies the year to be 1886, however the book is subtitled 'A social history of the island from 1797 - 183 8.' 125

"diameter" of reputable society - to the British this is what the masses represented they were not a part of "the people." Jamette Carnival was a time of explicit and strict separation where the recently "freed" first celebrated their Emancipation and then steadily year-on-year sought to terrorise and remove the elites from the streets at Carnival time in an act of symbolic revenge and takeover - albeit for a short period of time - the public spaces of the street.

The barracks were a tough place to live. They absorbed the emancipated classes and the many West Indian immigrants from other islands too. Many women and men who lived in the barracks had no jobs and in the worst cases some residents had become diseased and unemployable. By the 1850s many "jamettes" of the towns barracks were organised into various bands 117 for the purpose of stickfighting, gambling and dancing at

Carnival time. Women were active members of these bands and able stickfighters too, and there are many accounts of them being charged with affray on Cannes Brulees mornings (Brereton 1979: 167).

Barrack and neighbourhood affiliation brought camaraderie to the bands and disputes over territory outside of Carnival could become street fights at Carnival time.

The reasons for membership in these bands may have occurred within a certain class group, however, affiliation was not always about class, religion or ethnicity. The rivalry between the jamette bands at Carnival time was not about race either; it was between barracks and working groups, between neighbourhoods and communities, producing a micro situation of solidarity between barrack members below strict race, colour and class dynamics. By the 1860s these jamette bands were being called "deviant," "semi-

117 Today popular culture might throw around the label "gangs." 126

criminal" and "violent," and their fights examples of prearranged criminal activity. By the 1870s the jamette class, which was not the majority of the labouring classes but rather a particular section who were pumped up for Carnival time, had become an "anti-hero" of the masses (Brereton 1979). They portrayed themselves in terms oflawlessness, violence and disrespect, directing aggression at the elites and the new coloured middle classes. For

Brereton the jamette Carnival was more sensational than it was vicious (1979).

Nonetheless, the labouring classes took a certain pride in the exploits of the jamettes. On a basic level it was a social movement speaking back to power, an anti-establishment sensibility that resisted the violence inscribed upon predominantly black bodies by the racist territorialisation of global capital; in the collision between colonialism and global capitalist expansion being black ensured you were inferior socially, economically and culturally (Fanon 1963:40).

On the macro level then the popular definition of division at Carnival time can be substantiated and there is much written about post-Emancipation Carnival in Trinidad becoming by 1841 multiple and separate with "parallel celebrations, practiced by different social segments" (Ho 2000:5, Cowley 1996:14, Hill 1972:40, Nunley

1988: 112). Further accounts suggest the elite withdrawal was thought to be - by the elites

- a clever means of engendering a decline and ultimate death in Carnival as a street festival and form of social resistance (Sookdeo 2000:221 ).

These macro representations are not what I am most concerned with here, for my purposes there are micro realities worth adding to those accounts. Toward the end of the passage opening this section for example, one is left to wonder at the inspiration for certain costumes like the "Gael" [sic], "the Scot" and "the Turk," not to mention the 127

"pulinchinello." On a simple level such artefacts imply observation and digestion of

difference by those formerly enslaved. Furthermore, in the case of the coloured middle

class there are accounts both of their removal fromjamette Carnival at this time but also their involvement. Perhaps this is because the coloured middle class was less cohesive as a group and class than we imagine.

The degree of participation by the coloured middle class is difficult to ascertain. The evidence seems to point to the following situations: (1) Carnival remained for them an important season of festivity and sociality consisting of house to house visiting with small combinations of musical instruments, playing in the tradition of the Spanish Main and also a variety of 19th Century dances from Europe. (2) Whilst avoiding association in the streets with the masses this class was deeply resentful of any interference with Carnival by the Government and was ready to use it if necessary as a means of indirect attack on the Governor and the upper (white) class whenever tension rose. [Pearse 1956: 184-185].

Something to add to this ambiguity of participation amongst the coloureds is the likelihood that some individuals frustrated in their attempts at upward economic mobility and acceptance used the supposedly lower classfete of the jamette Carnival as a valve to release their grievances at authority (Powrie 1956). As Sookdeo points out, "[f]or them

[the phenotypically ambiguous], Carnival was one chance in the whole year when socially embarrassing facts of inheritance could be used to advantage, freely and openly"

(2000:216). As such we can imagine this participation as another form of social solidarity against the elite.

Participation in secret and under masque by upper class persons in the festival also occurred throughout the jamette era through the rites and costumes of the lower classes (Henry 2008:8). While the numbers are small, and the threat of violence should one be found out a real concern, there is evidence to support upper class participation in jamette Carnival. We have the written accounts of both Chares Day and De Lima who 128

admit to such activity and seeing - "white men also masked as blacks" (Day 1852:315) - while one editor in his 14/2/1834 editorial describes how he traversed the town looking for maskers while himself "in character" and described in detail and with some admiration a "lower class" Artillery Band.

It is also clear from newspaper reports and in Milton Prior's118 illustration of 1888 that for all talk of scaring white folk off the streets we have visible evidence of persons phenotypically white on the streets viewing and observing the events, which demonstrated that not all white folks, nor the coloured middle class were so scared that they stayed off the streets at Carnival time forever. In Prior's depiction, all the spectators on the verandahs overlooking the events on the street are white. In fact there are accounts of both the upper and middle classes visiting during daylight hours with their older children to offer "an opportunity to comprehend their society and observe the differences between their masquerade balls and the heinous gyrations and savage behaviour displayed in the streets" (Henry 2008:13-14).

Another example of socio-cultural mixture in this era can be identified in the costumes the jamette Carnival included. While some were certainly inspired and related

119 to the former slaves' experiences on the plantation - for example the Jab Molassie , the

120 Moko Jumbie and the stickfighter - many costumes demonstrated a genesis of multiple cultural, religious and economic strands. In the private fancy dress balls held by the elites

118 Milton Prior was an artist of the time whose work appeared in the Illustrated London News 119 Wearing nothing but a loin cloth and smearing his whole body in soot, molasses and more recently black paint, the Jab Molassie is to many the reincarnation of slaves who met their death in the vats of hot molasses on the plantations.

120 The stickfighter was the front line warrior of the oppressed Africans. A fearless warrior upon emancipation he faced the brunt and stood up to the violence of the police and the armed forces 129

the list of names of those present and their costumes "as announced" and reprinted in the newspapers of the day contains evidence that not only were the elites dressing as figures from European imagery and lifestyle such as "Napolitan fisherman," "Spanish Lady" and

"Pyrrenean [sic] Guide" but some costumes may have been enthused by the lives and imagery of the masses, such as "black witch," "house maid" and "harvest girl."

Finally, while the jamette Carnival came to be regarded as vile and despised by the whites and some upper class coloureds there was much hypocrisy in such a stance for many of the elite while legally married kept mistresses or concubines from the same lower,jamette classes (Goodenough 1976:137, Maingot 1962:134). 121

East Indian Arrival and Further Examples of Transculturation

As mentioned previously the failure on the part of the planters to find a solution to the labour shortage they encountered with Emancipation was addressed through indentureship, an experience well discussed by others (Brereton 1979, Mangru 1987,

Moore 1995, Roopnarine 2007). Narratives about the division between the "Indo and

Afro" descended populations in Trinidad today stem from this era. Newly freed slaves refused to work on the sugar plantations, sites of some of the most inhumane treatment

121 Writing in the first decade of the 19th century M'Callum notes disapprovingly this is a situation long established. "On the arrival of the European, his first object is, to look out for a mistress, either of the black, yellow or livid kind. As there are plenty in the market, he has no difficulty to encounter. After pleasing his taste, he bargains for her, in the same manner you would for a colt in Smithfield, either with the mother or the proprietor, for a certain sum of money. He supports wretched companion of his solicitude in all her extravagance; she denies him nothing, and he is equally generous in return" (1805:73). 130

ever meted out to humans by their fellow humans and East Indians under a new form of slavery called indentureship, took their places.

The populations remained mostly apart during this initial period, often for reasons of location, religion (Magru 1987:216-217) and race and caste prejudices (Moore

1995: 169, Brereton 1979: 188). Furthermore, the plantocracy and their racist system of economic exploitation in the island inculcated an early prejudice between freed people and indentured labourers, by creating inter-group racism that initially divided the labouring class.

We know on arrival in Trinidad the East Indian contract workers, labelled derogatorily as "coolies"122 were assigned to a plantation where they were indentured for three years, and lodged in "loogies" and barrack quarters, which were the living quarters of the original black slaves and as such those formerly enslaved saw those brought in to replace them, in line with the othering logic of colonial exploitation, in a lower position on the hierarchal social scale. The environment of the plantation society was not a place where the rigidity and authenticity of the caste system could be maintained (Moore

1977:98). Local colonial authorities did not recognise and accommodate this foreign belief system either. Nor could it be observed to the same degree as in India (Bronkhurst

1888:27) especially for East Indians born in Trinidad for whom the system had even less legitimacy. It follows then, that "the labouring and living conditions of indentured

122In general, Coolie is a word used for indentured labourers or cheap labour. In places like Cuba, California and China, the word coolie was used for contract labourers, such as the Chinese coolies who had worked under the indentured system in these countries. And generally speaking, all indentured labourers to the Caribbean, which includes the Germans, Irish, English, Portuguese, Chinese and East Indians are "coolies," however, the world "coolie" got stuck with the East Indians who were by far the largest of the indentured laborers. The Indians arriving in the New World called themselves Jahan or "People of the Ship," referring to the ships that brought them across the oceans to the Americas. 131

labourers forced interaction across caste lines" (Diptee 2003:5) and Des Voeux confirms this in his 1871 report to the British Parliament: East Indians on occasion shared quarters with "others differing in caste but sometimes also in race" (BPP 1871 :8).

The harsh treatment handed out to East Indians was similar to slavery. Samaroo in his article: "Two Abolitions: African Slavery and East Indian Indentureship" (1987) comments that the resistance and rebellions of the Indians was "often expressed in fashion similar to the African resistance to slavery," too, taking the form of riots, strikes, desertion and murder of offending managers, overseers and at the "pass-system" in general. Such resistance was invariably, as in the days of slavery, put down with exemplary harshness. So while on a macro level one can establish that the freed African population saw themselves as apart and above the newly arrived East Indian labour force it is possible to remark on a micro level that the experience of East Indians on the plantation may have been one that for African and East Indians produced a similar contempt toward the white elite. Furthermore, a small minority of authors like Sookdeo agree that on Trinidadian plantations solidarity was sometimes based on estate-work­ group in spite of racial difference: "In 1859, when competition and assault became blurred during Hosay observances, Creoles and Chinese went to the help of their workmates; loyalties to the estate transcending those of race in the fighting" (Sookdeo

2000:225).

While scholars stress the heavy presence of East Indians in rural areas

(Munasinghe 2001, Khan 2004) we should also note not all were sent to rural areas as the popular story implies: some were sent to the plantations in and around Port of Spain

(Ottley 1962:69) including Woodbrook, swelling the already overcrowded barracks and 132

living in harsh conditions on estates to the north-west of the capital. 123 In terms of the city

limits of Port of Spain Tikasingh states that by 1891 there were over a thousand East-

Indians living in Port of Spain (Tikasingh 1973 :22), the vast majority female (Diptee

2003:9). Many found work on the Woodbrook estate, or living around it, or on the nearby

Ariapita and Peru estates, 124 keeping cows and donkey carts, supplying the town with milk and grass (Comins 1893:18/45). In contradistinction to a racist historical narrative of

East Indian simplicity, some few, according to Tikasingh, found work "in positions requiring intelligence" (Tikasingh 1973 :22) and were wealthy. 125 That there was a difference in experience between those East Indians who worked on the plantations and those who entered the service industry and achieved relative wealth is an example of how different relationships to capital accumulation produce differences in social opportunities and class mobility.

In the main the plantation economy produced proletarisation and economic dependency for the black and East Indian labouring class, which was compounded by a lack of educational opportunities that constrained their opportunities for social mobility.

In capitalist terms this situation of social impediment had a particular function in the

123 Lafcadio Ream's 1890 book 'Two years in the French West Indies' provides a description of his visit to Peru Village in 1880. A small extract is available in The Book of Trinidad (Besson and Brereton 1991: 227-231)

124 The Peru Estate would later become the borough of St James, today the area of land bordering W oodbrook. This is where my East Indian feat great grand mother and my East Indian great grand father both bought land respectively in the late 191 and early 20th century and where my great great grandparents moved to on arrival to Port of Spain from St Vincent in the 1860s. The Peru estate was known in this era as "Coolie Town." My own family history was researched through immigration records in Trinidad, the life story of my Grandfather, the word of mouth of his friends and research collected by myself and my uncle.

125 "Many coolies in Demerara and Trinidad, who landed with nothing but the cloth about their loins, are now wealthy men, with hundreds of dollars in the savings banks, herds of cattle, provision and rum shops, the stock of which are worth from $500 to $2000. On festal [sic] days the wives and daughters of these whilom labourers drive through Georgetown and Port of Spain in cabs, they keep livery stables, and even racehorses" (Kirke 1898:332) 133

island and on other colonies too. By maintaining low production costs for commodities

such as sugar and cocoa destined for consumers in Britain and Europe through low wages

and structural impediment for social mobility in Trinidad the historical racism and

structural violence of colonialism supported unfolding global capitalist expansion.

Extra evidence of socio-cultural interaction, rather than strict separation between

East Indian labour and African labour, is provided in the accounts not only of the barrack

yards with their stories of integrated stickfighting (Henry 2008:33) but oflife on and

around the Port of Spain estates. The Peru estate survived the labour shortage after

Emancipation through the work of East Indians (Hart 1865 :28) and its early existence

bore "a very near resemblance to a cluster of huts anywhere in Bengal, being built chiefly

of wattle, daub and thatch" (Goodenough 1976: 123). By the closing half of the century

Peru estate was developed into a housing estate as was the Ariapita and later Woodbrook estates. While the Peru estate retained a lot of its original East Indian families due to its close proximity to Port of Spain (Bronkhurst 1883 :248) it also attracted a number of new

African and Creole middle class tenants to its edges who moved out of the now densely populated centre of town (Besson and Brereton 1991: 143). By this time they had established themselves more fully as a new middle class - with their acquisition of

English and a Christian education - making them eligible to hold civil service and other professional positions 126 between the white ruling class and East Indians and labouring blacks at the bottom of the social ladder. This new middle class filled with white-collar

126 To become a teacher, a policeman, a civil servant, or other such positions, one had to be a Christian. 134

occupations of teaching, civil service, law, journalism, clerical work, pharmacy, and

medicine (MacDonald 1986:35).

The political leadership of the Afro-Trinidadian middle sectors was largely composed of lawyers, many of whom had been educated in Europe and had become highly assimilated. Coloured and black lawyers such as Michael Maxwell Philip, solicitor general (1869-88), and L. P. Pierre, the Afro-Creole stipendiary magistrate, were articulate advocates for equality and more representative government. Under the leadership of such individuals, one of the earliest middle­ class political organisations was the Legislative Reform Committee. This coalition of Afro-Creole professionals, French Creole cocoa interests and English merchants was formed in the 1850s and lasted, in one form or another, to 1914. The principal issues that unified the members were their resistance to state­ sponsored East Indian immigration and their feeling that British colonial officials exercised many of the powers that Creoles were entitled to. [MacDonald 1986:36].

In this process of assimilation through Western education a further gap between

the black and coloured middle sector and the poorer blacks and East Indians grew. This

gap with its accompanying lack of educational opportunity, social mobility and political

access, as well as its characteristic dialectic of solidarity with the local poor, alongside a

snobbery and arrogance learnt through the assimilation of British cultural attitudes, laid

the groundwork for the attitudes and inequality of contemporary capitalism found in

urban Trinidad today; a connection to return to in subsequent chapters.

Another area to look for evidence of mixture is in lndo-Afro sexual relationships.

At the time of writing, Audra Diptee, seems to be the only author to have thus far

reassessed our understandings of the interracial sexual relationships between Indian men

and women of African descent (2003). Rather, scholars seem to overlook such ethno- genetic mixture and look "to the hierarchical Hindu caste system to explain the lack of

social and sexual intercourse between the Indian and Afro-creole communities" (2003:2).

While there is no doubt legitimacy in this viewpoint, it runs into problems when we 135

accept the point made earlier - that the caste system was simply impossible to maintain in

this new world. So while interracial sexual relationships may not have been the norm

they probably occurred more often in 19th century Trinidad than we are currently led to

believe. Furthermore, as Diptee makes clear, scholars in their quest for representational

solidity overlook "the perspective of Afro-Creole women and have presented them as

sexual objects to be had at the whims of Indian men when, in fact, these women had a

decisive role in negotiating sexual relationships" (2003:2). What Diptee's critical lens

suggests is two central points. 1) That a monocausal explanation of prejudice based on

cultural purity is a far too simplistic way to engage the situation of inter-racial relationships; and 2) Contemporary scholars are guilty of sexist assumptions that fail to recognise the agency of women to negotiate sexual relationships factoring in the earning power of potential spouses, cultural differences and existing stereotypes. We should add that women's own earning power too in addition to things like belief in the preserving the purity (or not) of whichever "bloodline" was also at stake.

Returning once more to the 19th century documents, Bronkhurst states "In some rare instances, Hindus of good caste have even married black and coloured females and are living happily," (1888:27) while Kirke provides evidence of interracial sexual relations when discussing the children of a "madras coolie and a Accavoio Indian"

( 1898: 171 ). Further evidence can be derived from the census of 1911 in which there are

1515 people of mixed East Indian origin, although interestingly 97 5 had Indian fathers and 539 had Indian mothers. When considered in this light the sexual aversion portrayed in much scholarship of the period between East Indian and Afro populations becomes

"somewhat exaggerated in the existing scholarship" (Diptee 2003:7). 136

The 1880s -1900s and the Emerging "Trinidadian" Identity

When you have ceased looking - even staring - at the black women and their ways, you become aware of the strange variety ofraces which people the city. Here passes an old Coolie Hindoo, with nothing on but his lungee round his loins, and a scarf over his head; a white-bearded, delicate-featured old gentleman, with probably some caste-mark of red paint on his forehead; his thin limbs, and small hands and feet, contrasting strangely with the brawny Negros round. There comes a bright-eyed young lady, probably his daughter-in-law, hung all over with bangles, in a white muslim petti [sic ]coat, crimson cotton-velvet jacket, and green gauze veil, with her naked brown baby astride on her hip; a clever, smiling, delicate little woman, who is quite aware of the brightness of her own eyes. And who are these three boys in dark blue coatees [sic] and trousers, one of whom carries, hanging at one end of a long bamboo, a couple of sweet potatoes; at the other, possibly, a pebble to balance them? As they approach, their doleful visage betrays them. Chinese they are, without a doubt: but whether old or young, men or women, you cannot tell, till the initiated point out that the women have chignons and no hats, the men hats with their pig-tails coiled up under them. Beyond this distinction, I know none visible ... There again is a group of coloured men of all ranks, talking eagerly, business, or even politics; some of them as well dressed as if they were fresh from Europe; some of them, too, six feet high, and broad in proportion; as fine a race, physically, as one would wish to look upon; and with no want of shrewdness either, or determination, in their faces: a race who ought, if they will be wise and virtuous, to have before them a great future. Here come home from the convent school two coloured young ladies, probably pretty, possibly lovely, certainly gentle, modest, and well-dressed according to the fashions of Paris or New York ; and here comes the unmistakeable Englishman, tall, fair, close shaven, arm-in-arm with another man, whose more delicate features, more sallow complexion, and little moustache, mark him as some Frenchman or Spaniard of old family. Both are dressed as if they were going to walk up Pall Mall or the Rue de Rivoli; for "go-to-meeting clothes" are somewhat too much de rigueur here; a shooting-jacket and wide-awake betrays the newly­ landed Englishman. Both take off their hats with a grand air to a lady in a carriage; for they are very fine gentlemen indeed, and intend to remain such: and well that is for the civilization of the island; for it is from such men as these, and from their families, that the good manners for which West Indians are, or ought to be, famous, have permeated down, slowly but surely, through all classes of society save the very lowest. [Kingsley 1880: 89-91].

As Kingsley's letters demonstrate by the 1880s the various groups written into the census had come, within Port of Spain, to live within eye and earshot of each other - or at least individuals from the various groups had. As such, and it can be read in the Kingsley 137

quote, certain cultural values and elements of British decorum were being assimilated by various sections of the population as the visible signs of elite behaviour and comportment became the ideals the local Creole population either aspired to or deferred to depending on ones' place in the social hierarchy. This assimilation emerged alongside the examples of transculturation and solidarity explored previously - in local cultural products, forms of behaviour and political thinking produced from the interaction of various nationalities, classes, religions, races and ethnicities that combined amongst the masses and from which some local Creoles emerged to form a middle class. As such it becomes possible to imagine a situation wherein the first signs of "Trinidadian" as an identity and intellectual formation - an identity formed between assimilation and holding onto partial cultural elements - began to emerge.

To consider from here forward is the characteristics the identity "Trinidadian" takes. Does it become reflective of the cultural milieu in Trinidad or does it begin to imitate and mimic European values? Either way, it is important to examine how

"Trinidadian" comes to function during a time period when global capitalism begins to entrench locally and the colonial era supposedly comes to an end.

To illustrate this process, the project now looks at the attempts to destroy the street festivals of Hosay127 and Carnival by the British elite as well as the Water Riots of

1903. In the latter decades of the 19th century these three events can be described as social movements and each illuminates signs of solidarity across distinct cultures, across

127 Hosay is today the Muhurrum's local Trinidadian label, and the festival is agreed to be distinct from what it originally represented in India, having according to some been "creolised," and taken on elements more often associated with Carnival, like street dancing, frenetic drumming and parading. So despite evidence of cultural retention such a festival is also further evidence of interaction, transculturation and mixture between the lndo and Afro-Trinidadian communities (Diptee 2003 :6). 138

the labouring classes 128 and also somewhat between economic classes against the British

colonial elite. This was a situation with the potential to threaten the interests of British

capital accumulation on the island.

In the 1880s - a time of much economic hardship for the labouring classes - the

coloured middle classes asked for democratic representation and were turned down

(MacDonald 1986:36). At the same time the capitalist class (mostly the white British

sugar barons and French cocoa planters) became greatly concerned about Carnival and

Hosay as potential spaces for "local" agitation against the colonial elite. In 1880, 1881,

and 1883 the island's police force subdued Carnival events by surprise of force, while

Hosay was consistently demonised .in the press (Sookdeo 2000). In 1880 the

Superintendent of Police, Captain Arthur Baker successfully suppressed the Cannes

Brulees procession that marked the beginning of Carnival by invoking an 1868 ordinance.

Without any prior publicity and taken by surprise the Carnival masqueraders surrendered their drums, torches and sticks with little resistance. However in 1881, with

Captain Barker's previously successful intervention regarded by the masses as an attempt at the total suppression of Carnival in Trinidad, the bands anticipated trouble. With an agreement between bands not to fight each other but only to fight the police, a form of automatic solidarity across bands against a common foe developed. When Baker

128 By the late 1870s the black and coloured labouring population as Brereton labels the working class (1979:110-129), were far from homogenous. This picture can be well imagined from the various groups with distinct ethnic and geographic origins laid out and discussed previously in chapter two. Supplementing these already existent groups, their descendents and the further ethnic mixture occurring, the period 1870s to late 1880s was the peak period of immigration into Trinidad by West Indian immigrants, predominately Afro-descendent, working class, Bajan migrants drawn by the higher wages and jobs available in Trinidad. 139

attempted to seize the torches and sticks once more he was met with "united resistance from several hundred men armed with sticks, stones and bottles. A fight ensued in which

38 out of 150 policemen present were injured" (Brereton 1979: 171). These events came to be known as the Carnival Riots of 1881.

What are remarkable about these riots are the newspaper responses to the confrontation. Many editors, in numerous editorials and papers from that year, condemned Baker's attempts at Carnival control. They accused him of heavy handedness and provocation. Such unanimity may have occurred because Carnival was a symbolic resource in a battle between the "people" - now conceived as those locally born and raised - and an expatriate government who were out of order not least because they were considered illegitimate arbiters oflocal rule (Williams 1963). The local middle-class of

Afro-Creoles and coloureds felt the police attack and the elite intention to destroy

Carnival were too harsh. This can be read as giving some a renewed sense of pride in their own racial and cultural history, and forged a unity between "the masses" and "the people" against the white foreign elite (MacDonald 1986:39). In solidarity with the poor and against what many saw as blatant class legislation some newspapers like the

Chronicle and some unofficial representatives to the Colonial council like G. L. Gracia - both local voices of the more well-to-do - publicly attacked the anti-Carnival legislation for implying all poor people were criminals when most were simply enjoying themselves in a time honoured way(Brereton 1979:161).

While Carnival the next year after months of newspaper anxiety passed off peacefully, the 1883 Carnival, according to reports in the press, reverted to its earlier riotous, jamette ways. Perhaps the Government ordinance prohibiting celebrants from 140

playing drums, chac-chacs and tambours, while European instruments like cellos, violin and pianos were exempt, was a catalyst for the wildness of 1883, whatever the real reason under the combined pressure of the masses and the Creole classes the Carnival ordinance was revoked and a nascent form of national solidarity across race, class and ethnicity in saving the festival faced down the British colonial elite.

That said by the 1884 Carnival, the government's anti-Carnival faction had provoked some concessions as the dialectic of assimilation and solidarity persuaded many that some sort of legislation curtailing the more riotous elements of the Carnival - particularly the Cannes Brulees with its fire torches and intense drum beating - was legitimate. Two ordinances were issued and from 1884 Cannes Brulees (Williams

1962: 186-187) was permanently abolished. 129 Through force, persuasion and more the foreign elite had provoked some sort of change and over the next ten years the more

"distressing" and "obscene" masquerades were purged through a combination of commercialisation and regulation, and forced to fall more in line, but not completely, with British cultural values and sense of order.

This Carnival example is a window on the accommodations the dialectic of solidarity and assimilation produced in the island. It is a small illustration of the ways in which colonialism may give way to the post-colonialism to follow by ensuring the maintenance of social hierarchy, control and order over the masses in a form that was acceptable to the class ideology of global capitalist expansion. Elements of the local

Creole elite, the mass labour force and indoctrinated middle class, are hoodwinked into

129 Anticipating intervention by the police two bands of around five hundred met in Princes Town to make another stand and resist. In the battle that ensued the police fired their guns and two band members were killed while others were seriously injured. 141

believing they had real political power when in fact the "fundamental social group" - the

British elite and French Creole planters - are coordinating their own interests and

producing a degree of consent to their world view (Hall 1985: 19-21 ).

Carnival was not the only street festival at this time demonised and threatened

with elimination. In the Port of Spain Gazette of November 23rd, 1882, Hosay is

demonised as a "recently imported barbarous pagan ceremony" of "menacing attitude"

and "individual violence." By 1884 such sentiment amongst the ruling class had turned -

as was the case for Carnival- to Government regulation and the prohibition of the Hosay

parade anywhere but on the estates. In disregard of the new regulations and police orders

to remain on the estates East Indians took to the streets of San Fernando in the south of

the island. As they approached a line of Her Majesty's Forces they were fired upon. Even

as the East Indians had begun to retreat they were shot at; some reports mentioned three

successive volleys. Twelve were murdered and more than a hundred wounded (Sookdeo

2000, Brereton 1979).

One can interpret the state violence at both festivals separately and as some

suggest as reflecting a British desire to control socio-cultural events they did not probably understand, only saw through surface vulgarity and felt threatened by. For example, the

Cannes Brutees procession with its many horns and ruckus - a re-enactment of the plantation fires started by angry slaves in retaliation at their treatment by overseers - and an overture to Carnival, was an occasion with many torches, stick fights, alcohol, intimidating masks, screams and howls - a spectacle of much disorder that shocked and cowered the standards of the elites. Elite commentators in the Press said this disorder needed to be brought under control. 142

Another perspective to consider however, is that the state violence was an attempt to disrupt and avert the possibility of alliance between Afro-and Indo-Trinidadian working class segments, something already underway in certain individual cases but far more destabilising to the Colonial government if it were to happen on a mass scale (Dirks

2001 ), not least to the successful capital accumulation of their own plantations, those of the French Creole elite and also certain middle class traders too.

Hosay, a revival of the popular ten-day Muhurram festival from northern India, brought to Trinidad in 1845 attracted from the 1860s onward the "active participation of blacks ... which included fasting to build castle-like structures and playing tassa drums"

(Sookdeo 2000:212), and "the distribution of Indians and Africans on the different estates created multiracial competitive units and a division of labour extending to tadjah­ building" (2000:214). I want to suggest that within the arena of street festivals with their free and autonomous interaction the elites were concerned at what solidarity of the cross ethnic labouring class could mean vis-a-vis mobile vulgus (Hobbes's leviathan or government by mob) and the intimidation of authority through sheer weight of numbers and a "state of nature." The elites' small size - even backed by the influence of colonialism and the plantation system - meant they were vulnerable to violent mobilisation by the masses and many in the colonial Government may have been increasingly nervous about this. Hence, each year the depiction of the street events became more and more sensational, as this newspaper prior to the 1884 Hosay parade expressed. Also note in the last line the supposed solidarity between the "Barbadian element" (a label denoting West Indian immigrants of African descent) and the

"Coolies." 143

One informant suspects that the date named by the Coolies at that of their intended Festival is deliberately meant to mislead the Government whom they want to take by surprise. Bloodshed and the murder of white men is hinted at as having been deliberately planned and the Montserrat [the name of an estate] Coolies are supposed to have promised to come , if required, to the help of those ofNaparima. The burning down of San Fernando is named and its pillage by the assistance of the low class Barbadian element. [Port of Spain Gazette 1884].

Describing the events of the 1880s Sookdeo also suggests that "when planters saw

'coolie-creole' cooperation and celebrations," alongside the growing propensity they were demonstrating in complaint of their conditions, their workday and remuneration, the elites were becoming increasingly "unsure about the fullness of their control in Trinidad"

(Sookdeo 2000:225). Something echoed in the 1885 report by the commission of enquiry into the 1884 shootings cited in Phillips (1984:456), and many newspaper accounts like this one:

To prohibit masquerading by the people in the streets and to allow it in the houses of persons of superior condition would, especially in these days of more or less political uneasiness, might possibly bring serious trouble ... An attempt to forcibly abolish the Carnival would certainly lead to immediate disturbance.

The elite now spoke of the street festivals with fear. They were occasions of

"terror," "exhibiting hellish scenes" (Henry 2008:5). By the 1880s, the elite seemed determined to destroy Carnival and Hosay through state violence. The British led elite however, ultimately relented in their overall desire to suppress the street festivals outright. One consideration of this situation is the failure of the divide-and-conquer ethnic politics of the plantation society and in its place a more nuanced negotiation of dominance. Yes, the social relations between Indian and African groups were affected by the hierarchal positioning of the groups vis-a-vis each other- this after all was the colonial situation - but as I have tried to show in this story, tales of racial and ethnic 144

antagonism alone are far too simple a version of events in 19th century Trinidad and interaction within different ethnic strata of the labouring classes was certainly more pronounced than a narrative of separate cultural segments suspicious of one another. As such to maintain the interests of capital over labour and keep a lid on mounting tensions between the small elite and the masses modifications to the system of domination has to be constantly achieved.

Perhaps we should view the survival of both Carnival and Hosay into the present as a positive outcome of local 19th century racial, ethnic and class co-operation. The

"mob" in this Hobbesian sense should not be read as solely comprised of the lower-class masses either. Yes, in defence of Carnival and Hosay there was solidarity between those at the bottom of society but there was also solidarity in protecting Carnival from prohibition between the French and Spanish upper classes, the coloured middle classes and the lower-class masses also. Colonialism, and its strict racial ideology of white supremacy, restrictions on social mobility and a manufactured segregation, was on the micro level of individual interactions becoming less certain. As a national solidarity grew so it produced forms of transculturation and a local island identity of the masses and the people vs. the elites distinct from basic class solidarity. In fact, in terms of forms of solidarity during this era of Crown Colony Government with its racism and the denial of universal suffrage these festivals could even be represented as a surrogate for political parties, trade unions 130 and welfare related systems - "organic" forms of social movements indigenous to Trinidad experience.

130 In an 1895 newspaper commentary the new found accommodation of the festival is played off as a concession between various classes "The Carnival is undoubtedly a somewhat senseless amusement, 145

That said, while brute force, state violence and military direction did fail to suppress either festival in the short or long term, the elite nonetheless succeeded in the longer term through ideological manipulation and bureaucracy, to tame Carnival with regulation and a sharp increase in commercial sponsorship, henceforth removing much of the revolutionary spirit of the festival through a compartmentalisation by date, economics and top down state pressure, something Gramsci would describe as the materiality of hegemony (1971, Hall 1985:20-21). This repression can be read in the traditional Marxist sense too as a means of protecting and reproducing the social structure outside of the automatic processes of the economy (Phillips 1984:421). It is a moment where we can see colonial control waning and the social relations of capitalism coming to the fore in its place. This moment in Trinidad and the mechanism that carried the local population along with it was the result of the dialectic of solidarity and assimilation I have sought to identify throughout this chapter and upon which the social category of "Trinidadian" grew.

With regard to the changes in Carnival after the 1880s, the Port of Spain Gazette of February 11th, 1895 describes Carnival as having passed off with "commendable quietness" and that "we noticed that maskers were fewer in number and in many instances better and certainly more decently dressed than in former years, nor did we see any of the gross vulgarity and obscenity of gesture which was once so prominent a feature on these two days of licence." Carnival then in the last twenty years of the century had become a symbol of negotiation and accommodation between the "people" - now a

but in the opinion of many people the same remark applies to many things indulged in by the rich and fashionable." 146

group composed of both the local masses or labouring class and the locally born middle class - and the British elite. This was a negotiation wherein the "people" - yet to be fully cognisant of their new and early form of national grouping - saved the right and freedom to express themselves in the street while at the same time accepting and assimilating the terms of decorum a viable Western-orientated society and capitalism supposedly necessitated.

The "Masses" and the "People"

Further evidence of this nascent national solidarity across class, race and ethnicity, against the foreign elite can be seen in the story of the Water Riot of March

23rd, 1903. The riot ended with the burning to the ground of the Old Red House as well as the destruction of much other Government material such as records and papers. While in the popular culture of present day Trinidad I did not see it mentioned nor hear people speak about it, at the time it provoked "outrage" at the Colonial Office in London, and later featured significantly in Eric Williams' book and gift to the nation on Independence in 1962, History of the People of Trinidad and Tobago, denoting a certain symbolic importance of the events in the national narrative.

The events as depicted in the Report of the Commission of Enquiry state: "the immediate cause of the Water Riot was the introduction into the Legislative Council of a new Waterworks Ordinance which became the focus of a violent agitation" (Laurence

1969:2). The agitation it goes on to say could only be explained through a long history of the "people's" displeasure with the city's water supply and how certain "wealthier 147

sections" used it (they were, according to the same document, notoriously wasteful and had a habit of leaving their taps running). This issue of dissatisfaction with the city's water supply was another "symbolic resource" between the government as understood as the British elite and the locally born population understood according to the Commission of Enquiry as "an ignorant and incensed people" (Laurence 1969:8). It wasn't strictly a battle between the rich and poor, or black and white, it was an encounter between those without political representation in the land of their birth and a colonial power that supposedly represented all.

The official enquiry document speaks of and identifies a "mob" that threw stones, dragged the governor's carriage to the waterfront and tossed it into the sea, and attacked the council chamber- "all control over the mob was lost" (Laurence 1969:8). There is mention of a local Ratepayers Association too, under whose auspices the week before the riot, a public protest of around two thousand people was held. A few days later the

Ratepayers Association interrupted a Council Meeting where the Waterworks Bill was to be discussed creating a hullabaloo that led to its adjournment. What was the relationship and interaction between these two actors in the events that transpired?

It was the Ratepayers Association's attempt to enter the Council Chamber, from which they were now banned in the wake of the previous week's disturbances under a hastily implemented ticket system, which both the Government and locals cited as the spark leading to the riots of March 23rd. By the time the situation was brought under control through the use of "authorised firing" by Government forces sixteen people were dead, forty three wounded and the Red House destroyed, save for some walls. 148

In representation of those killed or injured in the riot H. A. Alcazar, K. C., later to be a prominent figure on the island had this to say:

It was a recognised fact that the interests of the Government were not [those] of the people. The actions of the Government were such that the public had come to regard the interests of the Government as entirely separate from their view. The Government are regarded as bent upon getting as much taxation out of the people as possible to keep up a bloated civil list. And I am sorry to say it, sir, for many years past that the impression has been gathered from the acts and conduct of the administration itself... there is an absolute lack of sympathy with the people displayed by the Government. [Laurence 1969:9].

What in this historical event do the labels "people," the "mob" and the

"Ratepayers Association" connote? Were they demarcated by category, such as phenotype or class, or is there a way to get at the micro level interaction and infer a possible cross-cultural solidarity behind the events? For starters in Alcazar's words above there is a hidden transcript connecting the alleviation of hardship from the poorer classes, and the treatment of persons like him who made representations to the government. The connection lies in both groups' maltreatment and lack of representation by the Colonial

Government and was grounds for a form of local, albeit temporal and contingent, solidarity.

The Commission itself in its report into the disturbances supports this point with its description of the Association's make up, its perception of the association's function, and ultimately the connection between the association and the crowd outside the

Chamber that it claims provoked the riot:

The Ratepayers Association was a body of middle class citizens, including a number of coloured lawyers and substantial tradesmen as well as some resident Englishmen and some less reputable persons. It had been formed, according to Governor Moloney, for the express purpose of supervising the expenditure of public monies, because there was no representation, and it had a reputation for rigorous criticism of the Government. Its leaders were motivated partly by the 149

desire that elective members should be introduced into the Legislative Council, partly by a grievance over the abolition of the Borough Council, of which many of them had been members, in 1898, and partly by a simple desire to play a part in public affairs. Although only 185 of the 6793 ratepayers in Port of Spain were members of the Association, it clearly had a very wide influence, and was able to capitalise on the Colonial Government's tendency to ignore, and so to alienate, the public. The Association was determined to do all it could to block this latest Waterworks Bill and it led to the agitation which preceded the riot. The Commission of Enquiry took the view that the Association's effort to create so much noise outside the Council Chamber as to force the abandonment of the Meeting of 23 March had excited the crowd beyond control, and resulted in riot. [Report of the Commission of Enquiry into the Recent Disturbances at Port of Spain, Trinidad. 1903. Cd. 1662, pp. 25-6].

In the eye-witness testimony of the event by Dr Stephen Moister Laurence written years later there is further evidence to support the connection across class and colour lines. Born in Port of Spain in January 1866, Dr Laurence was of"brown complexion" and achieved a successful academic career that earned him a scholarship to study medicine at the University of Edinburgh. On return to Trinidad in 1891 he set up his practice on St Vincent Street, three blocks from where the riot of 1903 would take place.

His recollections begin with the "uncommon vividness" with which he remembers the riot and in stating the "whole sorry business seemed to centre around the Governor, Sir

Alfred Moloney." At first glance this seems to engage with Alcazar's sentiment and narrative of local vs. colonial. Although to be fair, Laurence does state what appears on the surface to be more of a personality clash than a political problem. In describing the

Governor's first speech to the legislative council Laurence said: "His address was unsound, lacking in self-respect and modesty, but bursting with self-commendation (at the expense too of his wife - an awful meanness) and self conceit. I was present and heard his address. I have never forgotten it: never ceased to resent it" ( 1969: 11 ). 150

Laurence may articulate such a feeling for a person who was the symbolic head of the British colonial enterprise on the island in personality terms; however, I suggest it is not such a great shift to understand such sentiment through the prism of colonial politics and the development of local nationalism. For example, further into the narrative

Laurence picks out the monolithic categorisation of the population used by the colonial elite and notes "Downing Street" has little understanding of the "situation" in the colonies. By situation he was referring to how little the colonial Office "know of the people." He noted the colonial government was replicating the class division it began long ago in the East "that is, India" and saw locals in the Trinidad in the same way, as one monolithic group called "native," with little understanding of the processes of transculturation, and assimilation taking place within different segments of the population.

In the West Indies the native-born is becoming more and more westerner. If the question is put, why is this? That answer is ready to hand - the West Indian native grows up in too close touch with western civilisation to fail, natural mimic as he is, to adopt as his own. The standard is one - that of Western European Civilisation; and for better of for worse, speaking generally, the West Indian, whether of pure or mixed African descent, is adopting and adapting himself to the same civilisation as the Englishman in his English home, whose religion and democratic ethics have passed on to him. [Laurence 1969: 15].

While one can take issue with the racism and the simplicity of the acculturation process as described by Laurence much of the machinations at issue are still valid. For example, different levels of access to education to different elements of the society meant the colonial office's picture of one neat group of natives to administer was incorrect.

Nonetheless, and as the Ratepayers Association understood in terms of political mobilisation, there were ways of enacting solidarity across difference, and such solidarity 151

was most easily achieved with the colonial government and its ties to the capitalist elite

as the target. Problematically however, full political legitimacy would have meant trying

to step outside of the already assimilated Western socio-economic and political systems -

something the new middle class and the labouring masses were unable to do. So while the

Water Riots that took place lend credence to the suggestion of a local middle class movement that attracted the support and solidarity of the working class, the movement was not outside the socio-cultural and economic relations found and laid by first colonialism and then by the emerging capitalist structure of late 19th century Trinidad society. Hence the movement would never have pushed beyond the status quo of racial hierarchy and class relations of such a situation. Such a description of the population of the island at the end of the 19th century tells us how the dialectic at the foundation of the identity "Trinidadian" as the 20th century began was both limiting and liberating.

Postscript: Solidarity and Assimilation

I have wanted to show with the various cultural products from Carnival, the social narratives from the riots, the overcrowding, the social hierarchy found in Port of Spain and the legacy of Crown Colony Rule that in the second half of the 19th century the culture of the island was far more than the census' plurality of segments. Against a

British elite culture, and specifically its political economy of racial hierarchy and structural violence, there were socio-cultural occasions for conversation, observation and solidarity across multiple levels of society. There was opportunity not just for different groups to forge, produce and negotiate their identity in relation to some sort of divide and 152

conquer "other" be they East Indian, African, Creole, Foreign; but also for different persons, specifically individuals, in interaction - albeit subtle or blatant - to observe, assimilate and learn about other cultures, values and also to come together for common causes. In terms of transculturation these situations can be identified as resistance to colonial control and early ingredients in a Trinidadian identity that forms in the twentieth century.

For the British elite, as I've tried to show, they in the main only saw the "people"

- those with wealth and British values - ignoring "the masses" in a common colonial story of them vs. us. As such, punitive measures such as laws to ban drums, mask, music and even ultimately the Carnival itself, alongside the use of armed force and murder to get this point across was an occasion to bring the different phenotypes together against them. Within such British forms of control- and what can be imagined as a form of racial boundary policing - Crown Colony Rule was an agent of change imposing a production of not only Creole national solidarity across class, ethnicity and race, but also the reproduction of relations of domination and subordination between the masses and the ruling class that sustains capitalism. The local aspiring middle class assimilated such economic and social relations and this I suggest, and as we will see, justified and laid the groundwork for the inequality of 20th century capitalism to come. What was first a combination of resistance against racial and class oppression, and assimilation to white

Western values, in the next chapter becomes a mechanism of motion in the development

131 of 20th century Independence struggles of "mimic men" - those "khaki wearing" Afro-

131 V.S. Naipaul's (1967) premise is that creativity in a colonial context is not possible and that members of these societies are relegated to perpetual "mimicry." 153

Saxons as Lloyd Best loved to call them - that extend and maintain the unequal distribution of economic resources found under colonialism deep into the post-colonial era.

That the resistance of street demonstrations and celebrations shown in this chapter took place and it would seem were not purely work-based forms of solidarity and resistance, may give the impression that the demonstrations occurred outside of capitalist relations. This I suggest would be an incorrect way to read the situation. Another perspective borrowed from Stuart Hall via Gramsci tells us we should understand the historical specificity of Trinidad and Port of Spain. That we should give weight to the

"culturally specific quality of class formations in any historically specific society." In terms of a 19th century racially and ethnically complex society like Trinidad what this means is we must see the specific way in which capital preserves and adapts its fundamental trajectory while harnessing and exploiting the "particularistic qualities of labour power" locally and negotiates these specific contradictions "into its regimes" (Hall

1985:39). In other words the ongoing contradiction between the interests of labour and capital is at the heart of the social movements discussed in this chapter, however it is more complicated than simple economic reductionism. CHAPTER SIX:

WOODBROOK AND THE VICTORIAN TWILIGHT

In the year 1888 Woodbrook land was a cane estate In the year 1888 Woodbrook land was a cane estate

It was only good just for planting rice, but look at it now it is a paradise.

Oh what a decent locality now is the Woodbrook vicinity.

Mr Watson was the manager and secondly the technical advisor. Then it was given to Mr Boyer who knew the cultivations and the harder tasks, Boy you could of seen the cow pass on the road taking the kings up to orange grove

Oh what a decent locality now is the Woodbrook vicinity.

In those days I was not in existence, but it was told to me by my grandparents. The transformation is so very nice, Turning a cane estate into a paradise.

There were no electric lights in Woodbrook land, Because when it was dark we couldn't see our hand.

Oh what a decent locality now is the Woodbrook vicinity

Let us give our compliments, for the improvement is magnificent.

We got vehicles and radios, in the pretty little cottages and bungalows.

Two beautiful squares for us to cool out in and you could hear the outside amusement they are broadcasting

So what a decent locality now is the Woodbrook vicinity

No better construction could have been found,

154 And secondly we got the children's playground, And a big oval to play cricket With Port of Spain hospital if you are sick

We even got a market and dancing hall We even got a billiards hall and all

So what a decent locality now is the Woodbrook vicinity - Calypso by The Mighty Growler (1933)

The End of a Sugar Economy

In 1787 Louis De Lapeyrouse established the first sugar estate in Trinidad at

132 Tragarete (Marshall 2003:103), on what is today the northern edge ofWoodbrook . By the early 19th century Woodbrook Estate was a productive 367.5 acres sugar cane plantation "within one mile of the town of Port of Spain" (Mavrogordato 1977:64,

Williams 1963:43), extending from Lapeyrouse Cemetery in the east to Ethel Street in the west. It was originally, in line with the Cedula of 1783, granted to Phillipe Rose Roume de St Laurent, (the French Creole- born and raised in Grenada- behind the Cedula) before being acquired by Henry Murray, the deputy clerk of the Cabildo, and later the first Registrar of Slaves 133 for the island (Pocock 1993 :250). Records are lacking for the exact date the Murray family bought the estate from the wife of Roume de St Laurent.

However, we do know when it was put back on the market by the Murray's. In the

"Appointment of a Registrar of Slaves," a direct order sent by the British Secretary of

132 Within a decade over 150 other sugar estates entered production on the island (Newson 1976:205)

133 The post of Registrar of Slaves was created to support the Registration of Slaves Royal 1 Ordinance of 26 h March, 1812, an ordinance designed to make the treatment of slaves more humane. See Pocock (1993:310) for more details of Henry Murray's life 155 156

State, Earl Bathurst on July 4th, 1812, was the requirement the appointed must not be

"directly or indirectly, the owner, part owner, or mortgagee of any Slave or Slaves" (John

1988:26). In order to accept the position pushed onto him by the acting governor of

Trinidad, Lt. General William Munro, Murray sold his slaves and his plantation. This hastily arranged sale went through at a substantial loss to Murray of £5000. 134

Following these events in 1812, it is unclear who came into possession of the estate. Nonetheless, it is listed as a productive sugar plantation in various documents

(Comins 1893, Mavrogordato 1977, Guppy 1980). On 27th February 1838, an advertisement appears in the then bilingual Port of Spain Gazette offering the Estate for sale. The reason stated is the present proprietor's anxiety to "retire from the colony." In

1843, shortly after the death of his father, we find another for-sale notice in the newspapers put up by one of Henry Murray's sons, suggesting that the family re-acquired the land at some point. In the advertisements, only part of the estate - "Woodbrook

House and three acres" - was listed as being available for purchase (Pocock 1993:315).

At an unknown date the rest of the estate was also put up for sale as the remaining members of the Murray family return to England. Recognising the estate's potential value, a firm called W. F. Burnley & Company of Glasgow, Scotland bought the expanse of land.

In the period between 1843 and the mid 1890s, mostly using the labour of East

Indian indentured workers the majority of the estate was a functioning sugar plantation.

134 While Murray took up his position, back in London a new order was being drafted that annulled this first one. The news of the new order reached Trinidad in September and Murray was out of a position. Murray complained to Munro about his sacrifices. "In short, I may in common language truly say we have turned ourselves out of house and home ... while my six children may now be said to be disinherited" (John 1998:27). After much confusion and a personal representation in London by Murray himself, he was reinstated to the position and remunerated for his inconveniences. 157

From the census of 1871 we know there was also some residential housing135

(Goodenough 1976: 115). There was also a training institute for "masters" who were to be

employed in the soon to be introduced Ward schools (Mavrogordato 1977:64). Yseult

Bridges in her Victorian Memoirs reproduced by her grandson in 1980 recalled

Woodbrook of this time as:

The very last of the sugar estates within the boundaries of Port of Spain to withstand the city's expansion. Its extensive canefields, which ran down to the meet the waters of the Gulf of Paria on a wide beach, were long ago obliterated by the suburb which is known by its name. But in my childhood the place still survived and was carried on in the traditional fashion. Unlike most of the sugar estates today it was privately owned and it possessed its own usine, or factory. All grades of sugar except the most refined were produced there. [Guppy: 1980: 135].

From the 1860s onward adverts in the newspapers begin to appear offering

"Building Lots For Sale On 'Woodbrook Estate," suggesting the slow development of

136 parts of the estate for residential purposes . In adverts I collected from 1862, applicants

interested in the conditions of "Sale and Lease" are asked to contact Thomas Murray (the

son of Henry Murray) implying the estate was yet to be bought by W. F. Burnley &

Company.

In 1891 Dennis Wood Deane Comins, the Surgeon Major at the time charged with

inspecting the living conditions of recent East Indian immigrants to Trinidad, visited

135 "The town [Port of Spain] is not happily situated for extension hemmed in by Queen's Park (Savannah) and the Bay, all of which space is occupied though much less closely built on than it might be, abutting onto the malarious swamps to the east its only direction is westward beyond Richmond Street, along St James and Tragarete Roads and north-east up the Laventille spurs and towards Belmont. New Town is filling in well and a row of cottages now shows across the Tragarete Road (on the Woodbrook Estate)" ( 1871 Census cited in Goodenough 1976: 115)

136 "When King Sugar began to be dethroned, on account of Bounties, the owners of Woodbrook, found it more profitable to rent out the estate for building lots than to cultivate it, and the smaller folks (principally immigrants from Bimshire [Barbados]) began to build their humble cottages up there. Later on, the Government made another push with St Clair and after reserving part for the Experimental station, sold the rest for first class residences and everybody who was any body migrated to those quarters and left down town to the middle classes" (Innis 1932:80) 158

Woodbrook estate and recorded the information he found (1893:2). Again, contrary to a

popular myth that East Indians were only found outside of Port of Spain, Comins

recorded the presence of fifty-six "Indentured coolies" and twenty-six "Free resident

coolies," on the estate. He goes onto describe the "Cooly [sic] barracks ... a few hundred yards from the manager's house, in ranges of three and four huts." He states, "no

particular number of men is specified to occupy a room; friends live together, and

outsiders come and stay for a day or two." He shows that "both Hindus and Mussulmans

[sic]" lived together and spends two pages documenting their Hospital, their "Pay-list and

general routine," presenting a picture of life on the Wood brook estate during the final

1 decade of the l 9 h century. While life as an indentured worker was undoubtedly severe and difficult, Comins' account in comparison to accounts from the first forty years of

Indenture seems to present some changes.

However, Bridges, writing about the same period shows that the servitude and othering experienced, was nonetheless still harsh and an elemental part of the relationship between differently positioned individuals.

When 'crop' was on- as the sugar-cane harvest was called- I would frequently ride my donkey over to Woodbrook to spend the day. After I had played with Ozzie one of the young overseers would mount me on a mule and I would ride with him into the canefields. Under the dazzling sun lines of coolies would be working, cutting and topping each 6 foot tall stem of cane with two quick, successive strokes of the machete, then casting it onto a heap to be loaded later on to huge two-wheeled carts .. .I grew to know most of the coolies at Woodbrook, and would visit the barracks to talk to the women: still in their native dress they would be busy about their cooking, or with lime juice and wood-ash polishing the brass bowls and platters which they had brought with them from India, until they shone like gold. [Guppy 1980:137-138].

In terms ofresidents, East Indians weren't the only persons living on or around the Woodbrook estate. Afro-Creoles, both of working class means such as scavengers and 159

labourers, and also of a higher economic status who worked for the colonial government could be found on the edges of the estate that now extended into the Town of Port of

Spain. By 1895 the Port of Spain Gazette (Jan 12) was able to speak of"Woodbrook

Village," a "curious conglomeration of dwellings some of which are well built and comfortable enough, whilst others are mere huts."

Much of the comments about the village that appeared in newspapers of this decade concern its poor upkeep and unsanitary conditions. Due to poor drainage and the fact that other sewage from Maraval and St Anns, north of Woodbrook, ran down and settled in the bottom half of the estate the village was "a hot bed of disease" and presented a serious health situation for the early inhabitants of Woodbrook.

The Siegert Connection

1 Another l 9 h century thread in the emergence of Woodbrook as a residential suburb of Port of Spain runs through Germany and then Venezuela. It speaks to a familiar story to later emerge of persistent foreign migrations to and from Woodbrook. It is the story of Dr. Johann Gootlieb Benjamin Siegert and his family who in 1899 bought

Woodbrook Estate and later in 1911 sold it on to the Port of Spain Town Board; the body managing the affairs of the City at the time, for the sum of £85,000. The deed of purchase is dated 1st November, 1911. 160

Dr J.G.B. Siegert was born in Prussia, and is known as the inventor of Angostura

137 Bitters still in worldwide use today • His story, according to historian Gerard Besson "is one of war" (Personal interview).

At 19 Johann Siegert took part in a battle that determined the fate of Europe, and five years later he flung himself into a tide of history that carried him away to the New World, where he joined the struggle for the mastery of Latin America. First an army doctor to the Prussian troops of Marshal von Blticher, Siegert became Surgeon General to the army of the Liberator, Simon Bolivar. [Raymond 2000:15].

Based two hundred and forty miles up the Orinoco at the port of Angostura (now known as Ciudad Bolivar) where he was put in charge of the Military hospital, Siegert mixed and experimented with local herbs and other plants he found in the rainforest for possible medicinal uses. One concoction would later become Angostura Bitters.

Well after Venezuela had won its independence from Spain in 1821 and Simon

Bolivar had moved on, Dr Siegert remained in Angostura, pursuing his interests in botany and chemistry. In 1824 he first produced his bitters tonic. After his death in 1870, his sons, all of whom were born in Venezuela but educated in Germany, took over the business and with increased vigour began exporting his bitters formula around the world.

Carlos, Dr. Siegert's eldest son, and at the time in sole possession of the bitters formula, recognised the merits of a politically stable base from where he could continue to produce and export away from the renewed civil unrest heating up in Venezuela (Raymond 2000).

137 Today, 2009, bars around the world are struggling to replenish supplies of angostura bitters as local produce and the enterprise of foreign capital dovetail again. A Nov 5th report in the London Guardian newspaper entitled 'Bitters pill to take! Acute angostura shortage shakes cocktail trade,' states, "following a shutdown at the sole manufacturer, a recession-hit firm in Trinidad and Tobago ... Trinidad's House of Angostura has blamed a shortage on ingredients and a financial restructuring. The firm is owned by CL Financial, a Caribbean conglomerate hit by a liquidity crisis, prompting an emergency bailout earlier this year by the government of Trinidad and Tobago ... Once owned by the rum firm Bacardi, the House of Angostura was sold in 1997 to CL Financial...According to Trinidad's Newsday newspaper, CL leveraged Angostura's profits against a series of acquisitions including a deal to buy control of a Jamaican industrial company, Lascelles de Mercado. It was reportedly left with a TT$600m (£57m) hole in its balance sheet." 161

In 1875 he moved to Trinidad. By then, and for over forty years previously the bitters were exported to England, and Carlos, who was busy marketing the product aggressively around the world, and reinvesting profits to increase the business, needed support. To aid the project his brother Alfredo joined him, and soon after they brought in younger brother

Luis.

In 1899, looking for local sensible investment possibilities the Siegert brothers explored becoming landlords. In this capitalist pursuit they purchased Woodbrook estate from the recently liquidated assets of W.F. Burnley & Company, who had already given up the cultivation of sugar and transformed seventy acres into a tenantry of 588 lots

(Farell 1948, Goodenough 1976:278). The Siegerts offered £50,000 for the land, which was accepted.

In many ways a long Victorian shadow extended over Woodbrook during these years. For example, on the eastern side of Woodbrook the roads laid shortly before the

Siegert's purchased the estate reflect the British Imperial period. 138 The new streets were given names celebrating Generals of the day from the Boer War and India- Kitchener,

Buller, and Powell Street to name a few (Anthony 1978:74).

When Carlos died in 1903 the family tradition of passing on the firm and the formula continued. The Woodbrook Improvement Scheme a partnership with the

Government, the Town Board and the Landlords, "for the improvement of the existing streets and laying out new streets in Woodbrook" (Farrell 1948:38) was agreed upon in

138 This form of Imperial propaganda, naming streets after British heroes whose names filled the newspapers of the time was a common feature of colonial projects across the world It demonstrates the power of colonialism to articulate representations of the world. If the cultural hegemony of the European world were to be naturalised and reproduced in the colonies "it would have to do so by reforming the minutiae of practical existence" (Comaroff and Comaroff 1992: 275). "No habit being too humble, no sign too insignificant to be implicated in the battle" (Comaroff and Comaroff 1992:236). 162

1905. In these new streets memories of the Siegert family are well preserved today.

Streets like Alfredo, Ana, Alberto, Cornelio, Carlos, Gallus, Luis, Petra and Rosalino

reflect the names of members of the Siegert family, while the square opposite St

Crispin's Church is known as Siegert Square.

By 1909, the Siegerts' business ventures, as a result of successive failed

investments around the world by Alfredo Cornelio, declined and in January 1911 the

family was forced to put Woodbrook Estate up for sale. It was first offered to the

Government who said no and suggested rather the Port of Spain Town Board might consider the purchase because part of the estate lay within the boundaries of the then

Town. Over some months terms were agreed and a deal done. By 1919, when Alfredo

Siegert died, he owned nothing. All his family's wealth had been lost.

At the time of purchase the boundaries of the estate as stated in the deed of

purchase were Colville Street in the East, Ethel Street in the West, Tragarete Road in the

North and by the Sea in the South [see MAP 2]. The land of Woodbrook Estate at the

direction of the Siegert family was already being developed into a housing suburb, with

sugar production a thing of the past. Correspondence I obtained from the municipality of

Port of Spain between the Siegert family and the Government reveals that when first offered the Estate in January 1911, the Siegerts refer to the area as a "large working class

suburb." This lends weight to its early residential purpose, which according to the retired

Town Clerk H. W. Farrell who worked for the Board's replacement entity (the Port of

Spain Corporation) for 39 years indicates, "It was never intended either by the Siegerts or the Port of Spain Corporation to be a residential area for the wealthy," which in a short time it would become. 163

Further evidence of Woodbrook's initial working class character can be read in three features. The first is "The notice of sale for arrears" published in the Port of Spain

1 Gazette on Sunday, August 26 \ 1906, and dated th July, 1906. A comparison of the rates due for houses and parcels of land in Woodbrook against those in "town" shows those in town commanding far higher rates. What is also interesting in the notice is it provides full names for the owners of residential premises. With names such as Martha de Verteuil, Antonio Gomes de Freitas, Emencio Vertino, and Mary Adams alongside single titles like Dookanee and Jagan, one can imply that Woodbrook in 1906 was made up of persons with names from the various different national and coloured groups on the island. Another point to note contained in further comments made by H. W. Farell, is that barrack yards "were quite a few in 1911" (Farell 1948:39). The local historian Michael

Anthony addressed this:

Throughout these years [1900-1911] the Town Fathers were demolishing many of Port of Spain's barrack dwellings, and they watched approvingly as the homeless flocked to Woodbrook for accommodation. Woodbrook in its earliest residential formation then became a haven for a great number of Port of Spain's working class, but by 1911 this character had already begun to change. [Anthony 1978: 105].

Another claim to support Woodbrook's working class roots is that made by Reyes who notes that many of the first families to settle in Woodbrook were Barbadians who arrived either to work in various capacities on the estate, or in bridge-building projects

(Reyes quoted in Ahye 1983:3). Still further evidence of ethnic mixture and the working class beginnings of Woodbrook come from one of my interviews with a long time resident who when speaking about the 191 Os and early 1920s mentioned the fact that

"Lewis Street had five or six Indian families living on it .. .It was nicknamed Cow Pen 164

Street because they would graze their cows in Adam Smith Square, which caused a fair amount of shock and horror" (interview Mary Cain).

The Cocoa Economy

It is fair to say then as a residential suburb of Port of Spain, Wood brook began as a place oflow-income persons of various ethnic persuasions at the end of the Victorian era, who paid low rents relative to other residential areas abutting Woodbrook. As the economic situation of the island changed rapidly over the next twenty years the economic class composition of Woodbrook changed fairly rapidly too as the local Creole elite and merchant class moved in.

One factor in this rapid economic transformation of the area was a move by the

Town Board to relocate lower income dwellers and replace them with higher wage earners who would pay higher land taxes. 139 This was achieved by putting a "minimum value requirement" on the erection of houses in Woodbrook. The minimum value figure was far larger than most working class tenants could pay (Anthony 1978:105). As has been pointed out elsewhere the imposition of tariffs and taxes is an active mechanism in the process of class formation 140 (Donaldson 2008).

Another spur in the economic transformation of Woodbrook during the first

1 twenty years of the 20 h century was connected to the island's position in global chains of

139 The policy of the Port of Spain Board, and after it the City Council, was to maintain Woodbrook as a residential area and for that reason residential lots were and still are leased for 25 years with the option of renewal.

140 "Class is above all relational. 'Man is aristocratic in so far as man is a serf. There is never one class ... Class is a relation and classes shape each other. The state - and through it political parties - is active in class formation, too, often through the imposition of duties, tariffs and taxes" (Donaldson 2008: 17) 165

supply and demand, and specifically profits received by certain well-positioned social groups, mainly the French Creoles, from the cocoa industry. As the industrial production of chocolate in Britain emerged through the mobilisation of technology, investment and

"taste patterns," Trinidad with its high quality and abundant crops of cocoa was incorporated into this investment through what Harvey has called elsewhere "the capitalistic logic of searching for 'spatio temporal fixes"' (2005:43). According to

Frances Bekele (2004) at the Cocoa Research Unit at the University of the West Indies, the cocoa industry in Trinidad experienced a "tremendous boom" in this period, and the era 1866-1920 can be called the "golden years of cocoa in Trinidad."141 The "boom" experienced in the cocoa industry was the increased capital now moving into the hands of the French Creole142 class that pushed their structural and ideological incorporation into the political class of the bourgeois British Plantocracy on the island. For the workers and

141 "The cocoa industry enjoyed a period of fifty years' abounded prosperity ... During this time cultivation and production rose, the young fields gave high yields, labour was cheap and plentiful, capital was ready to hand and large profits were made ... During this period fortunes were made in cocoa ... In 1921 the price of cocoa slumped and the crack in the structure ofthe industry split wide open ... the workers, who had benefited little by the boom, lost by the slump. Wages were cut, tasks were increased and labour was reduced. The estates fell into decay through neglect of cultivation and interest payments on mortgages fell hopelessly" (Author unknown)

142 It is important to remark at this point that "The term 'French Creole' is by no means restricted to persons of purely French parentage born in the West Indies. It also included the free people of colour, the children of the French planters of the early times with their African slaves, and later, their mulatto, quadroon and octaroon mistresses. Some of these children were recognised by their fathers and legitimized and freed, receiving educations at French universities and inheriting land and property. Several families settled in the south of Trinidad, many in Port of Spain, their children becoming in turn the doctors, lawyers and school masters in the latter part of the 19th century. They were, however, a minority, almost a curiosity in the social structure of the colonial society. Nothing remains of the Frenchness of Trinidad's French Creoles, except some family names. As a recognisable group with distinct traditions, language, customs or outward appearance they have vanished completely. But they gave, in their decline, to the country personages like Poleska de Boissiere, Jose Dessources, Captain A. A. Cipriani and Dr. Eric Williams, Trinidad and Tobago's first Prime Minister" (http://www.nalis.gov.tt/communities/communities-thefrenchandothercatholics.htm) 166

labourers in the field the "boom" much like during sugar production was a period of pauperisation that forced many into chronic indebtedness 143 (Craig 1988: 15).

By 1884, cocoa production had replaced sugar as "the leading agricultural commodity and became the economic barometer of the country" (Bekele 2004). The profits transformed the local society, and especially the French Creole class who had been forced out of the sugar economy by the British and experienced relatively hard economic times as a result. Nonetheless, following almost a century of British

Colonialism where they had been part of the socio-cultural elite the local French Creole community and its new economic wealth was well placed to partake as capitalists in the politics and culture of Western bourgeois capitalism.

In 1895, out of the 375 cocoa estates considered important enough to list in the

Annual Register, "270 were owned by French Creoles, about seventy by resident

Englishmen, and twelve by British concerns" (Brereton 1979:49). The remaining 18 could not be classified as French Creole or as English with any certainty (Brereton

1979:218). Cocoa had turned around French Creole economic fortunes and the profits also enlarged a Creole middle class of phenotypically distinct persons from black to coloured to white to mixed, with numeric ascendance amongst the lighter skinned groups.

The colour gradient and racism of colonialism, with its distinctions in land ownership and educational opportunities, produced economic differentiation across the non-British elite that further entrenched economic stratification as capitalism advanced. Over a short space

143 "Cheating of illiterate people, indebtedness at high rates of interest, lower prices for the smallholder whose was mortgaged to the local shop, reduced access to further credit, all led, for countless people, to the loss of their holdings, either to the estates or to the shops, which were often one and the same. Every report on the cocoa industry in Trinidad documents this merciless usury with painful frankness" (Craig 1988: 17) 167

of time many of the newly wealthy middle class alongside the families of the local Creole elite group increasingly grew into the suburb of Woodbrook, displacing many of the lower economic inhabitants and transforming the character and feel of the suburb. The building of houses during this era coincided with the invention of the power saw too and reflected the French colonial ginger bread architectural style with wrought-iron railings and wooden fretwork that is still visible today.

By 1920, Woodbrook occupied a symbolic socio-economic place in Trinidad's development as a capitalist society where the preconditions "for a reorientation of territorial politics towards the requirements of the capitalistic logic" (Harvey 2005:44) could be identified. There were remnants of the lower-class who had middle class aspirations, 144 but Woodbrook now also boasted a majority of residents who held skilled middle class jobs working in government, banking, customs, the growing education system, construction etc. all of which can be phrased in a colonial society, as Besson put it to me, as "working for colonial authorities."145 This was a transitive class distinct from the lower classes and with definite aspirations of upward class mobility. Woodbrook also boasted members of a the elite French Creole class who over the next few decades moved out and on to the affluent districts of St Clair and Maraval. All these different Woodbrook residents it seemed had assimilated Western bourgeois values and the aspirations of class mobility. Woodbrook was now mixed racially, ethnically and denoted an emergent new

144 One notable family to mention is that of Eric Williams who described his Woodbrook home of the time as a "chicken coop," where they were constantly threatened with the "ordeal of removal" for late rental payments, "the horror of the cesspit," the thriving of bedbugs and overcrowding which meant many bodies in one bed (Williams cited in Ryan 2009: 16).

145 "The Civil Services are over ninety per cent coloured; newspaper reporting, elementary education and some secondary, all routine and a large part of the executive work of the majority of the business houses (except a few from which they are jealousy excluded) all are done by coloured men" (James 1932: 13). 168

middle class value structure. In a sense it represented the new people - "Trinidadians"- or at least what they would come to aspire to.

Woodbrook Estate, the area south of St Clair, was developed by the town council. Homes in the central and western section were built in the 1920s and 1930s by aspiring individuals who could afford the ground rents. There was therefore much more racial mixing in Woodbrook than in other suburbs, and its population was socially mobile from its inception. Beginning as a solid upper working class suburb, it soon attracted professional people like lawyers and doctors, some teachers and a few policemen. In addition to members of the well-educated minority groups, there were a few white families. Miscegenation is also evidenced by the presence of Douglas, Indian-Negro mixtures, especially those with Indian mothers. [Goodenough 1978:32].

A certain level of income now structured who could live in Woodbrook. The district represented the elaborate protocols of middle class respectability and the protocols of an aspirant elite, more than the lives of the masses. These protocols were conservative and consciously "British"146 (Reyes cited in Ahye 1983:2). Woodbrook was economically comfortable and it was settled. In the lives of urban Trinidadians

Woodbrook was also becoming somewhat of an institution. What previously people could only attain through church attendance, marriage and education, i.e. "British" respectability could also now be achieved in moving to Woodbrook (Goodenough

1978:35). This respectability and aspiration was an emerging class-consciousness up-and- coming in the lives of Woodbrook residents that can be called "Trinidadian." Fifty years later commentators would look back on this time and describe the residents with the label

"Afro-Saxon" (Tapia 1981, Best 2003, Ryan 2009:21).

146 "This background shaped their [residents of Woodbrook] outlook and set them apart from other parts of the island. For example, they were not at the time enthusiastic about the Carnival. .. To the Woodbrook settlers, such activities as the Christmas serenading of the Hispanic Parang groups or the Cantiques de Noel of the Creole inhabitants were ... anathema to their lifestyle" (Ahye 1983:2). 169

The Afro-Saxon147 Elite

In order for a capitalist economic system to function, it requires an elite. In the

context of Trinidad this elite was never indigenous, but shaped and tied to the

assimilation of metropolitan class interests and British values through the education

system, Anglicanisation, and local forms of government (James 1963:71, Campbell

1996: 167, Sudama 1980). This Afro-Saxon elite evolved out of and maintained close ties

with a plantocracy (French and Spanish) which controlled sugar cultivation in the first

half of the 19th century, was supplanted by the foreign capitalists (the British), and later

switched its investments to the cocoa economy in the 1880s (Johnson 1981 :61 ).

Gradually an increasingly local elite (Creole - French, coloured and Afro) diversified its

interests and entrenched itself in money lending, commerce and light industry as well as

the professions (Raphael 1981:47). By 1920 the economic characteristics of this "national

bourgeoisie" was tightly linked to the circulation of foreign capital through trade, British

values, and had long "since healed the differences between themselves and the foreign

capitalists" (Raphael 1981:47) - for which can be read the British elite.

According to Singh ( 1994) in the early decades of the 20th century the island's

colonial and Creole elite was comprised of three interlocking groups. It is from the

bourgeois interests of these groups that the Afro-Saxon elite developed:

[T]he administrative elite (the governor, the colonial secretary, the attorney­ general, the Commandant General of local military forces and the Chief of the Constabulary, the chief justice, and their immediate subordinates in their respective areas of jurisdiction, all subject to the ultimate authority of the governor within the colony, and the final authority of the Colonial Office in

147 My work builds on Best's notion of"Afro-Saxon" - "Africans practicing European institutions in the Americas" (200l:13) - which I add a level of transculturation to in that while accepting this assimilation to Western capitalist values also his on a cultural level became something else too. N.B. Lloyd Best, a Trinidadian economist and cultural theorist passed away in 2007 170

Britain); the commercial elite (essentially the import/export merchants, financiers and shipping agents); and the plantocratic elite (owners or managers oflarge family estates or company estates) [French Creoles]. These three interlocking elites, joined after 1920 by a mineral-exporting elite (directors and managers of oil companies), dominated both the political and economic systems and enjoyed the highest social status by virtue of their economic and political power, as well as by virtue of their race. [Singh 1994 :xx].

The collusion and interests of this early elite - a class for itself - is nowhere better seen than in their opposition to the organised and volatile working class movements of the period 1921-193 7, their mechanisms of control such as pauperisation, and their failure to redress the violent legacies, both symbolic and real of colonialism (Raphael 1981:47).

To govern a colony where the elite group was a small minority required such mechanisms. Another mechanism to consider is the principle of "divide and conquer" politics itself (Williams 1963:87, James 1963:58). Such politics normalise class divisions

(Hill 2007:73), further subdivision, and can endure through the activities of various

"organic intellectuals"148 such as Arthur Cipriani and Eric Williams himself (both former residents of Wood brook) by organising the consciousness of the local population

(Comaroffand Comaroff 1992). The "Afro-Saxons" of Lloyd Best (2001) can then be read as aspirant locals on the road to becoming the newest members of this early twentieth century elite in Trinidad and members of a Gramscian Historical Bloc extending throughout the twentieth century. These "Afro-Saxons" I suggest developed in the socio-economic and cultural sphere of colonialism and emerged from the dialectic of

"automatic solidarity" and cultural assimilation as global flows of capital accumulation

148 "Every social group coming into existence on the original terrain of an essential function in the world of economic production, creates together with itself, one or more strata of intellectuals which give it homogeneity and an awareness of its function, not only in the economic but also in the political and social fields. The capitalist entrepreneur creates alongside himself the industrial technician, the specialist in political economy, the organisers of the new culture, of a legal system" (Gramsci, 1971 :5). 171

remade the island's social structure. The social category "Trinidadian" in the opposition between capital and labour served bourgeois class interests. As the category

"Trinidadian" self-consciously refashioned the spontaneous philosophy 149 of contemporary Trinidad society it reproduced a new and particular capitalist worldview in the lives oflocals. Its formation and acceptance is perhaps a glimpse into the motion of capital itself.

A Historical Bloc

In Gramscian terms we can describe the emergent strata of local middle class- consciousness identifiable in 1920' s Wood brook as demonstrating nascent signs of becoming the post-colonial elite and in this context elements in a Gramscian Historical

Bloc150 and an "alliance of forces" that extends into the present. These Afro-Saxons represented the new people - "Trinidadians" - who would organise Trinidadian politics, first on a path to self-government, then independence, and finally neo-colonialism wherein the binary class relations of global capitalism - domination and subordination, bourgeoisie and proletariat - were entrenched in the life of the island and its population.

The key component of this chapter is to further elaborate how the interests of these "new

149 "It must be shown that all men are 'philosophers,' by defining the limits and characteristics of the 'spontaneous philosophy' which is proper to everybody. This philosophy is contained in: 1. language itself, which is a totality of determined notions and concepts and not just words grammatically devoid of content; 2. 'common sense' and 'good sense'; 3. popular religion and, therefore, also in the entire system of beliefs, superstitions, opinions, ways of seeing things and of acting" (Gramsci 1971 :323)

150 In the sense I use it here an historical bloc is a group of various cultural factions that has developed in response to movements in the socio-economic sphere and self-consciously refashions the spontaneous philosophy of contemporary Trini society to reproduce its own particular worldview and make criticism of its authority problematic. In Gramsci's own words: "Structures and superstructures form a 'historical bloc'. That is to say the complex, contradictory and discordant ensemble of the superstructures is the reflection of the ensemble of the social relations of production." (Gramsci 1971 :366) 172

people," these Afro-Saxons, over the course of the next forty years came to be seen as the national interests of the island. 151

According to Gramsci ( 1971: 180-185) there are distinct phases and moments in the evolution of "relation of forces" 152 and a historical bloc. To avoid economic reductionism the social conditions, concessions and coordination which persuade different social groups, classes and interests to organise together and produce the unity required for the moment of "hegemony" (Hall 1985) is important to comprehend. It is through such constant negotiation that the consent of the masses to domination by capital is secured.

As we will see in Trinidad over this chapter and the next these social conditions can be broken down (Cuneo N. D.) and include 1) the passage from economic to political class-consciousness, which can be illustrated in the solidarity and fight for local workers

151 Harvey notes how the emergence of nation-states and the institutional arrangements embedded in them have an "influential role to play in setting the stage for capital accumulation" (Harvey 2005:26-30).

152 "The first and most elementary of these is the economic-corporate level... in other words, the members of the professional group are conscious of its unity and homogeneity, and ofthe need to organise it, but in the case of the wider social group this is not yet so. A second moment is that in which consciousness is reached of the solidarity of interests among all the members of the social group - but still in the purely economic field ... A third moment is that in which one becomes aware that one's own corporate interests, in their present and future development, transcend the corporate limits of the purely economic class, and can and must become the interests of other subordinate groups too. This is the most purely political phase, and marks the decisive passage from the structure to the sphere of the complex superstructures; it is the phase in which previously germinated ideologies become 'party', come into confrontation and conflict, until only one of them, or at least a single combination of them, tends to prevail, to gain the upper hand, to propagate itself over the whole social area -- bringing about not only a unison of economic and political aims, but also intellectual and moral unity, posing all the questions around which the struggle rages not .on a corporate but on a 'universal' plane, and thus creating the hegemony of a fundamental social group over a series of subordinate groups. It is true that the state is seen as the organ of one particular group, destined to create favourable conditions for the latter's maximum expansion. But the development and expansion of the particular group are conceived of, and presented, as being the motor force of a universal expansion, of a development of all the 'national' energies. In other words, the dominant group is coordinated concretely with the general interests of the subordinate groups, and the life of the state is conceived of as a continuous process of formation and superseding of unstable equilibria (on the juridical plane) between the interests of the fundamental group and those of the subordinate groups -- equilibria in which the interests of the dominant group prevail, but only up to a certain point, i.e. stopping short of narrowly corporate economic interest" (Gramsci 1971: 181-182) 173

rights of many French Creoles like Arthur Cipriani' s; 2) the moment of superstructure built up out of the base or structure, which can be identified in the local emergence of trade unions and their later manipulation as mechanisms of bourgeois control; 3) the economic-corporate interests of the dominant group being adopted by subordinate groups, which happens through the Trinidad education system and the wider societal adoption of metropolitan class aspirations; 4) a single combination of ideas becoming dominant and pervasive throughout society, these are most clearly identified in the political movement to Independence, the Trinidad nation-state, and the acceptance of

Eurocentric values and hierarchy; 5) the moment of historical bloc with its synthesis of economic, political, intellectual, and moral ideas, which is most clearly seen in the political organisation and education of the masses in the adoption of the international system of global capitalist relations and neo-colonial economic inequality; 6) the universalisation of interests of the dominant group which are presented as not its own narrow corporate-economic interests, but national interests shared by subordinate groups, this can be understood through Harvey's treatise on global class consolidation (2005); and finally 7) a State mediated and fashioned hegemony being the unstable equilibria of compromises between the dominant and subordinate groups such that the interests of the dominant group prevail, what might be called the current status quo not only in Trinidad but globally.

In this chapter and the next using the lens of culture and class in Woodbrook, and specifically the lives of two "organic intellectuals" who emerged from the "masses" seemingly with the interests of the local "subaltern" population against colonial power in tow, but go on, under the specifics of the Trinidad colonial situation to the serve the 174

bourgeois interests of global capitalism, the first five of these processes will be fleshed out.

Intellectuals

Gramsci's concept of the "intellectual"153 is divided into two forms, the

"traditional" intellectual and the "organic" intellectual (1971 :3-33, 15, 2000:303-311 ). He conceived the intellectual in terms of class power, political economy and the "war of position" (1971: 238-239, 2000:230). It is a concept conceived in a European context to explore the interconnected nature of culture, politics and history there, and the extent to which the cultural and economic spheres reinforce each other to provide "a state of mental preparedness" for a "unified consciousness" (2000:58). The "traditional intellectual" was connected to classes left over from the pre capitalist society and expressed the interests of the church, monarchs and colonial masters - in Trinidad we can connect the traditional intellectual with first the Spanish colonial elite and then the British colonial elite. This pre capitalist traditional intellectual was extended, displaced and co- opted in capitalism by the intellectual apparatus of the bourgeoisie, - the professional philosophers, inventive thinkers, scientists, teachers, journalists, politicians or "organic intellectuals" who work in civil society and its private and public institutions (the church,

153 David Forgacs summarises Gramsci's take on the word thus: "As he redefines the word it [intellectual] comes to designate anyone whose function in society is primarily that of organizing, administering, directing, educating or leading others. Gramsci is concerned both with the analysis of those intellectuals who function directly or indirectly on behalf of a dominant social group to organize coercion and consent and with the problem of how to form intellectuals of the subaltern social groups who will be capable of opposing and transforming the existing social order" (Gramsci 2000:300). 175

schools, political parties, media, army, courts, bureaucracy etc.) (Bondanella, Bondanella and Shiffman 1996:277).

"Organic" intellectuals then are rooted in capitalism - they are related to that mode of production through education and by the social necessities of production and the political necessities of their group. 154 Their ideas are connected to the social production and relations of its superstructure of which the intellectuals serve as functionaries

(Gramsci 155 2000:303-306). Organic intellectuals are predominantly connected to the dominant class and its coercive institutions. These organic intellectuals are neither a static category nor mere individuals, but rather form a "strata" within capitalist society that organise and coerce consent156 from the masses. Gramsci also indicates there are times

154 "Every social group, coming into existence on the original terrain of an essential function in the world of economic production, creates together with itself, organically, one or more strata of intellectuals which give it homogeneity and an awareness of its own function not only in the economic but also in the social and political fields" (Gramsci 1971: 134/135, 2000:301 ).

155 Marx made a similar, more basic argument in The German Ideology. "The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas: i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas." (1978: 172-173). Walter Benjamin too, in his style of cultural critique mixed with economic theory also makes a similar point in his Theses on the Philosophy of History (1999:245-255). While C. L. R. also connects into this thinking with his 194 7 essay Dialectical Materialism and the Fate of Humanity.

156 Consent in relation to hegemony refers to acts of non-violence. Consent is achieved through acts of domination that do not require direct physical coercion; it is achieved through a process of ideological manipulation. Manipulation that entails the dominant ideology being naturalised and contriving "a tangible world in its image" which "does not appear ideological at all" (Comaroff and Comaroff 1992:29). This process of preserving "spontaneous consent" is achieved through institutions, traditions, ideas and ideologies; it is also maintained in the everyday practices and expectations of everyday life. It is something that is gained through the act of living, through the process of reproducing culture. By consent I mean the acceptance and participation in social hegemony. Gramsci "set out to differentiate opposing modes of political control, contrasting the functions of 'domination' (direct physical coercion) with those of 'hegemony' or 'direction' (ideological manipulation, consent)" (Boggs 1984: 159). Or as Gramsci put it: "the spontaneous consent given by the great masses of the population to the general direction imposed on social life by the dominant fundamental group ... is historically caused by the prestige which the dominant group enjoys because of its position and function in the world ofproduction"(Gramsci 1971:12). 176

when organic intellectuals emerge from the "specific social relations" 157 of the proletariat. These organic intellectuals are much rarer and do no form their "own layer" or strata. They emerge ambiguously and slowly either from the factory and workers groups to educate and organise a counter-hegemonic discourse "born on the terrain of the contradictions" engendered by the material forces of production or "after the conquest of

State power" (Gramsci 2000:204, 1994:336). This is most clearly written of in his Pre

Prison Writings against the background of the preparations for the metal workers strike of April 1920 and later in the last essay before his arrest 'Some Aspects of the Southern

Question' 158 (Gramsci 1994: 155-162, 334-336).

In Trinidad, as I stress throughout this project, the local historical and social specificities were not identical as in parts of Europe. As such, Gramsci's concept of the intellectual must be tweaked to fit these different circumstances. The situation of

Gramsci' s intellectual in Trinidad is complicated. In this colonial situation a new society is being forged out of a majority-introduced-non-indigenous-population with distinct loyalties to nations, religions, ethnic groups and cultures that do not yet possess the developed class structure of capitalism due to a highly limited industrial base lacking

157 Hoare and Smith make this point in their introduction to Gramsci's text 'On Intellectuals.' "The working class, like the bourgeoisie before it, is capable of developing from within its ranks its own organic intellectuals, and the function of the political party, whether mass or vanguard, is that of channelling the activity of these organic intellectuals and providing a link between the class and certain sections of the traditional intelligentsia. The organic intellectuals of the working class are defined on the one hand by their role in production and in the organisation of work and on the other by their "directive" political role, focused on the Party. It is through this assumption of conscious responsibility, aided by absorption of ideas and personnel from the more advanced bourgeois intellectual strata, that the proletariat can escape from defensive corporatism and economism and advance towards hegemony" (Gramsci 1971:3)

158 "Certainly, it is important and useful for the proletariat that one of more intellectuals, as individuals, should adhere to its programme and its doctrine; should merge with the proletariat, becoming one with it and feeling themselves to be an integral part of it...This formation of intellectuals is needed if was are to see an alliance between the proletariat and the peasant masses" (Gramsci 1994:336) 177

"developed complicated superstructures" (Gramsci 1971 :22). This development however does emerge through oppositions such as resistance and assimilation, and capital and labour, which generate the loyalty and aspirations of a new indigenous transitive middle class. These are the emerging Afro-Saxons - with aspirant Western capitalist values and cultural assimilation of British capitalist ideas, yet still, as we saw in the last chapter, with a modicum of loyalty to the Creole masses. In the development of a capitalist class structure, as the mode of production transforms from colonial to capitalist and as organic intellectuals emerge to diffuse bourgeois values, I suggest the intellectuals of late colonial

Trinidad, the Afro-Saxon agents linked to the dominant class interests, are pulled in multiple directions but ultimately side with the interests of capital over labour and lay the preconditions for the neo-colonial inequality to follow.

To illuminate this last point, I suggest two residents of Woodbrook, Capt Andrew,

Arthur Cipriani and Eric Williams were organic intellectuals linked to the dominant class but as the capitalist mode of production was not fully formed in Trinidad in the early part of the 20th century I suggest they were intellectuals combining characteristics of both

Gramsci's "rural type"159 and his "urban type."160 This combination provides explanation

159 To paraphrase Gramsci's discussions of this "rural type" of intellectual for my own purposes (Gramsci 1971:148-149), these intellectuals link the "social mass" of people and the urban petite bourgeoisie. They bring the peasantry into contact "with local and state administrators" (lawyers, politicians, notaries etc.). These intellectuals have a higher and "different living standard" from the masses that represents an aspirational social model the masses hope to achieve. In this vein the intellectual also connotes a socio-cultural level of distinction (Bourdieu 1984) the masses believe they can achieve through the contacts and alliances they will make. Finally, the masses both respect the social position of the intellectual while at the same time possessing "instinctive elements of envy and impassioned anger."

160 "Intellectuals of the urban type have grown up along with industry and are linked to its fortunes. Their function can be compared to that of subaltern officers in the army. They have no autonomous initiative in elaborating plans for construction. Their job is to articulate the relationship between the entrepreneur and the instrumental mass and to carry out the immediate execution of the production plan decided by the industrial general staff, controlling the elementary stages of work. On the 178

for why and how they were pulled in multiple directions. The social mode of production they experienced means, concurrently, they were resistant to the colonial enterprise, yet they enjoyed the benefits of economic differentiation and their middle class status, and through education they possessed bourgeois class interests and aspirations.

Why is such a Gramscian lens worthwhile? My central purpose is to link the politics of 1920s Trinidad through Independence into the present. The historical narrative stressed by many local political leaders, academics and historians, but not all, speaks triumphantly of the overthrow of Crown Colony rule, the growth of a nationalist movement and self-government, independence and finally self-determination; when in fact many of my interview in the Trinidad of today described a country defined by economic inequality, entrenched class interests and a political class removed - a situation remarkably similar to the imperialist one of a hundred years ago, and colonialism itself.

In what follows I take evidence of the socio-cultural transculturation and solidarity presented previously, alongside the cultural assimilation of British values, to tell a story of the formation and subsequent transformation of a local economic class grouping in Woodbrook during the 20th century that extended the legacies of colonial inequality. I will suggest the ideas of this new nascent elite class and economic grouping went on to become dominant and pervasive throughout Trinidad society - essentially the

"moment" of an "historical bloc" with its synthesis of economic, political, intellectual, and moral ideas (Gramsci 1971). In the final chapter this historical bloc is related to the economic inequality and its consequences experienced in urban Trinidad today.

whole the average urban intellectuals are very standardised, while the top urban intellectuals are more and more identified with the industrial general staff itself' (Gramsci 1971: 148-149). 179

Capt. Cipriani: "Britain's Best Policeman in the Colonies?"

Capt. Arthur Andrew Cipriani is remembered mostly as the eight time Mayor of

Port of Spain. He occupied many other roles in his life too, from rearing racing horses and becoming president of the Trinidad Workingmen' s Association (TWA) to serving as a Captain in the First World War and setting up the Trinidad Labour Party (TLP). Many hold him in great esteem, not least the official historical record. Testament to which is the statue of him standing in Port of Spain's Independence Square.

Born in Trinidad on January 31, 1878 to white Corsican parents who arrived in

Trinidad in the middle of the 19th century and invested in cocoa and commerce, Cipriani was one of three brothers and attended St Mary's College, a Catholic school in Port of

Spain. According to some he was aware of the changing society around him (Williams

1963, James 1931) and made the choice from a young age to serve his country on various fronts exploring politics, agriculture, commerce and the working and living conditions amongst the poor. This created a nationalist narrative around his memory.

At the outbreak of World War I Cipriani suggested to the local and overseas authorities in charge of the British colonies that a regiment of West Indian soldiers join the campaign (Henry and Buhle 1992:267). His request was first rejected, but he continued to argue that the men of the region would be no less loyal in laying down their lives for the British Empire than British home grown troops. In 1915 the decision was taken to send West Indian troops to the battlefront. Cipriani placed his name at the top of 180

this list and convened the first recruiting meeting. 161 Such pride in British society either contradicts the nationalist narrative of Williams and James, or implies a relationship between the nationalist narrative and post-colonial ideology.

The accounts of his military career, his concerns for the welfare of the soldiers under his command, his campaign for them to be paid for their services and his defence of them against racism are glowing (James 1931, Williams 1963, Brereton 1981, Singh

1994). Some go as far as to state he was idolised by his men (Singh 1994). On his return home in 1919 Cipriani was elected president of the Soldiers and Sailors Union. He was also prevailed upon to accept the presidency of the Trinidad Workingmen's Association

(TWA), the most important working class organisation of the time, which he eventually accepted. In 1921 he was elected to a seat on the City Council of Port-of-Spain and became mayor of Port of Spain in 1929. He served in that capacity until 1940, an eight term unbroken sequence.

From this short overview it is obvious, for some, Cipriani is warmly remembered and looked on as a benevolent force on the path to self-government (Oxaal 1968:54,

Williams 1963). It is not my purpose to delve into the rights and wrongs of such interpretations, however in trying to understand the historical formation of global capitalism and how it entrenches in former colonies it is useful to look for certain events,

161 "If the West Indies claims a place in the sun, we must do our duty as a unit of the British Empire. It is true that we here form the weakest link in the chain. But it is said that weakest link is the strength of the chain. [Cheers]. I am one of the people. I was born and bred in this colony, was reared in it from childhood to youth, and from youth to manhood. I have shared your sorrows and your joys, and I appeal to you to-day in the name of the King to enlist, and I do so irrespective of class, colour, creed ... The game has not been played in many quarters, it is not being played now" (Cipriani recruitment speech cited in Henry and Buhle 1992:268). 181

conduits and persons who can help to illustrate how the political economy of modem

capitalism in Trinidad achieved its development and the consent of the masses.

Examining Cipriani and many of his achievements in light of the "colonisation of

consciousness" thesis from the Comaroffs' work in Africa is suggestive of complicity on

his part (1992:235-264). However, at no point is my intention to suggest Cipriani's

political actions were pre-meditated or conspiratorial in nature. I do not believe it was his

intention to promote a path to neo-colonialism. Far from it, to a point he did agitate for

enfranchisement, self-rule and local representation. He "represented in practice what many other French Creoles merely preached" (Oxaal 1968:54). It is clear however he was

pulled in multiple directions.

The demobilisation in 1919 of black soldiers who had served in the British West

Indies Regiment can be used as a significant marker in Trinidad social history (Brereton

1981: 157). It marked the end of a decade of change, in which a "Trinidadian" capitalist

class society began to emerge out of old certainties alongside the foreign capitalist class,

and the outlines of a legitimate reform and working class movement can be glimpsed.

Some of these changing certainties include the end of indentureship in 1917, the

discovery of large quantities of oil for commercial export in 1910 (with the economic and

strategic importance this brought), the unemployment suffered as the price of cocoa

slumped, and the growth in popularity of a working class consciousness.

Significantly, the War had for a small time distracted attention from the

popularity of working class consciousness emerging out of the increasing urban tension developing between a growing black and coloured urban labouring class movement and the white colonial ruling class. Tensions rose in main due to the harsh and deteriorating 182

living conditions the urban poor faced in overcrowded barracks rooms and on the streets of Port of Spain (Williams 1963 :230). The War had also brought further distress for the poor with rises in consumer prices, low wages and unemployment. The Colonial Office calculated that in 1914-1919 prices in Trinidad had risen by 145 per cent (Brereton

1981: 157). As the demobilised soldiers were refused the same level of material compensation as their white counterparts, economic inequality and white racial superiority added another layer of militancy to relations between the metropolitan ruling class and the masses.

The soldiers brought back bitter memories of racial discrimination and slights they had suffered under White commanding officers. They had not been permitted to engage in much direct combat themselves, being mostly consigned to fatigue, garrison or menial duties in the European theatres of war. But they were in a position to claim, especially as they had suffered casualties in the course of their duties, that they had followed the call of patriotism and had participated in the defence of the British Empire. Moreover, their individual and family lives had suffered social and economic disruption, and they now demanded that they be given recognition both socially and materially for their services. Social recognition they received, but material recognition they found more difficult to extract from the organisation responsible for recommending measures of assistance to returning soldiers, the Discharged Soldiers Central Authority, headed by the White commercial magnate, G. F. Huggins. [Singh 1994:16].

Tough economic times, where many of the soldiers were left unemployed, made the social situation even more volatile. Singh (1994) suggests the black and coloured

Creole civilians of higher economic standing identified nationalistically with the unfair treatment meted out to the soldiers and suggested political ways for such inequality to be tackled. Within weeks, the black soldiers along with Seamen had organised into the

Returned Soldiers and Sailors Council. 183

The new Council garnered great working class support162 and sympathy across ethnic groups, with rural Indian workers (Shah 2000), alongside dockworkers supporting their cause and forging links which would themselves lead to a more general working class unrest spanning the end of 1919 into 1920 (Singh 1994 ). Clearly, the terms of the parties involved in the growing tension could be identified by phenotype - the authorities were white, those experiencing economic discrimination black and brown. Race tension across this white/colour binary was acute. The local Argos newspaper and the Garveyism of the era further stoked the ideology of race politics in the island and increased the threat felt by the local white community. Within two months of the soldiers return events exploded in Trinidad163 (Singh 1994).

At the end of July 1919, black civilians and soldiers attacked white sailors on shore leave from the HMS Dartmouth (Brereton 1981: 161 ). The events continued over night and into the next day with running battles in the streets of Port of Spain. The following evening the Police (comprised mostly of Afro-Barbadians with English senior officers) who represented foreign interests, not home rule, came out in force to stem the violence (Craig 1988 :24 ). They were met with flying bottles and stones. The unrest simmered and continued into the next week and the white elite soon became increasingly nervous of the racial tone and frustration of the mob going as far as to fire off a petition

162 By "working class support" I include those in waged labour, and also the poor and dispossessed too, this would include slum dwellers, dockworkers, former cocoa and sugar workers, oil workers - essentially the proletariat working force who were disconnected from the means of production and who were forced to sell their labour to survive and ensure the viability of the system of capital accumulation

163 The events mirrored similar racial clashes taking place in British ports like London and Liverpool where white soldiers returned to find their jobs at the ports (and sometimes British white women) had gone to black men (Singh 1994) 184

to the Colonial office demanding a white garrison on the island and the right to arm the colony's white men (Singh 1994).

The Council of Returned Soldiers and Sailors held its first public meeting at the height of this tension and drew a large, emotionally charged audience. Under the threat of violence the president of the Council, Algernon Burkett a prominent Afro-Trinidadian

(Singh 1994) made reasonable demands on behalf of the soldiers and sailors - that they should be given small allotments and a small monetary grant. In this largely divisive atmosphere, of locals against colonials, Capt. Cipriani, a white member of the French

Creole elite, became a central figure.

Cipriani returned to Trinidad from the front a month after the social unrest began.

He was informed of the local tensions and in a move many say began his path toward political leadership took on the plight of the soldiers and sailors (James 1931 ). It was not unfamiliar ground for him. During the War while stationed in Italy Cipriani had lobbied the white commanding officer in charge of the West Indian Regiment about the ill treatment many black soldiers experienced (James 1931, Singh 1994). Now in Trinidad he used this as evidence to support his "organic" sincerity of purpose in fighting the cause of equal treatment for all soldiers who fought in the War.

Over the following months Cipriani with great oratory skill criticised the militant and aggressive turn events had earlier taken. He spoke up about the valour and sacrifice undertaken by the soldiers and sailors. He put do\\n the white civilian head of the

Discharged Soldiers Central Authority for not being a solider and thereby not qualified to deal with the business of soldiers. All-in-all Cipriani succeeded in creating solidarity within the soldier fraternity, especially between himself and the discharged black 185

soldiers. He convinced them to follow his direction, to refrain from any social unrest. In

"organising" (Gramsci 1971, 2000) such solidarity he claimed he could exact from the

colonial government in full the demands the soldiers were making. A believer in British

cultural superiority Cipriani now served as a conduit linking a mass of working class

colonial subjects to his belief in British life, society and forms of political resolution.

Around three months later the Governor General came to a decision on the matter.

No Trinidadian soldiers would be entitled to what the imperial government gave British

soldiers. However, they would be given a small financial reward and training in a

profession to establish themselves. The nuance to note through this story of Cipriani is

how he and other members of his local bourgeois strata failed to gain the concessions

they promised the black Soldiers and Sailors - equal treatment for all soldiers who fought

in the War - but also how Cipriani and his emergent capitalist class did gain some

concessions from London while also achieving other things that served the preconditions

for capital accumulation. The first was to get the local Government to offer a concession,

the second was the diffusion of the initial agitation, the third was the general support and

unity of working-class blacks and Indians across the island, and the fourth was the culture

of proletarisation engendered amongst the poor.

At the time Cipriani also joined the TWA to fight for the labour demands of the

Creole masses. The deteriorating economic conditions, in particular inflation and lack of jobs, and the working class consciousness and unrest they fed, further paved the way for the TWA to become "a vibrant body offering leadership to the whole of the working class" (Brereton 1981: 160). From 1919 until the middle of the following year labour 186

politics and organisation on the island developed rapidly as modem capitalist social relations began to replace colonialism.

As dockworkers, black slum dwellers, Indian wholesalers and "lower ranking civil servants and shop assistants, mostly black or of mixed ancestry" (Singh 1994:27) forged cross-cultural solidarity in the name of their class interests, working class consciousness grew. This soon turned into a trans-ethnic working class movement as porters, carpenters, grasses cutters, scavengers and then East Indian plantation workers joined together (Singh 1994, Gilroy 1993). This movement was best symbolised in the waterfront strikes for increased wages, overtime pay and an eight hour day of 1921, which escalated into colony wide labour unrest. The unrest was only halted, and the white elite eventually reassured, with the arrival of HMS Calcutta and its British troops who put down the labour unrest with mass arrests of the leaders of the strikes and repression.

Nonetheless, working class networks and organisation had been established.

In 1923, cementing an embryonic national alliance between white and coloured

Creole liberals and the black and coloured labouring class, Cipriani was voted leader of the TWA, now the single representative organisation of the Trinidad workers and soon to be the main vehicle for leftwing ideology in the Caribbean. 164 Under Cipriani's leadership the TWA developed close links with the British Labour Party and formed links with like-minded organisations in the Caribbean bringing the class politics of capitalism firmly into the life on the island.

164 The 1930s were a time of rebellions and upheaval against colonial authority and exploitation throughout the Caribbean. Some claim the TWA connected across all British Caribbean colonies and play a leading in the industrial agitation. 187

Constitutional reform was also on the table at the beginnings of the 1920s and the

TWA, representing the urban workers, in conjunction with members of the coloured and black middle classes, led the reform campaign's struggle for adult franchise. The campaign led to the Wood Commission, a Colonial commission sent from London in

1922 to make recommendations on constitutional reform. The head of the Royal

Commission of Enquiry and Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies,

Major E.F.L. Wood, full of ethnocentric assumptions and racism, recommended partial franchise, something that wouldn't change until 1946 another example of a Cipriani promise unfulfilled and a linkage between the French Creole class with the metropolitan centre.

Mr. Wood related the demand for representative government to the historical circumstances of the African population of the West Indies. Their whole history, he wrote, 'inevitably drives them towards representative institutions fashioned after the British model.' Having lost their indigenous social systems, their language and traditions of slavery, 'they look for political growth to the only source and pattern that they know, and aspire to share in what has been the peculiarly British gift ofrepresentative institutions. [Quoted in Craig 1988:29].

In the best organisational traditions of Gramsci's "organic intellectual" Cipriani was skilled and provides an illustration of the process by which the strata of the colonial organic intellectual functioned. Cipriani was elected to the new legislative council of the

1920s, and his articulation of reforms both for workers and the constitution, connected the Creole working class with the emerging Creole middle class or "transitional class." In his realisation that the fate of the workers depended on compromise with the government he set both local groups against the colonial elite. His election brought the masses into direct contact with Western administrators and the Colonial political elite. It also united locals in a multi-ethnic form that would later define the nationalist movements and 188

political interests of "Trinidadians" and have implications for the extension of the historical bloc into the future (Oxaal 1968:54).

Overall however, under Cipriani's leadership the TWA failed to provide

substantive lasting benefits to the working class (Phillips 1984: 128) other than position it

in the institutional and ideological framework of a capitalist society. Yes, the workers

after the limited franchise of 1925 had three representatives on the island's legislative council, but the workers had no real share in the government of the colony. Furthermore,

Cipriani focussed on legislative changes that either culminated in dead ends or took so long to come to fruition there was little tangible transformation for the working class. As

such, Cipriani illuminates Gramsci's additional observation that the masses believe in rural intellectuals but feel they do not go far enough. As Anthony notes

[Cipriani], more than anyone else, had made the worker aware of his rights and had sharpened his expectations. But now, at the beginning of the 1930s, this leader was finding it difficult to listen to the vociferous demands of the people, and he often appealed reason and balanced judgement. He felt that despite the wild calls for action, whatever had to be achieved had to be achieved constitutionally and with deep loyalty to the British Empire. [Anthony 1978:143].

In other ways his failures were equally co-optive. For example, early in his political career Cipriani threw his lot in with the British Labour Party (BLP) and saw himself as a socialist in that tradition, fond of saying what was good for the British

Labour Party was good enough for him (Oxaal 1968:54). He styled the organisation and policies of the TWA on the BLP. By such attachment we can claim he was a local conduit between the Creole masses and the larger imperial superstructure. Comaroff and

Comaroff would see this as an example of being "inducted into forms of European discourse" (Comaroff and Comaroff 1992:245). It is a central tenet of cultural hegemony 189

and the role of the organic intellectual in the "war of position" to create a dialogue

between the dominated and the dominators. In creating such dialogue with the

metropolitan centre the colonials were internalising the terms of their relationship with the ruling class and thereby sustaining their position as subordinated.

While his intentions may have been purely positive his failure to understand the

relationship between race and class under international capitalism were ultimately fatal to

his role as a white representative of the black masses. His faith in the BLP, a white

colonial entity which came to power in Britain in 1929 was misplaced. The BLP in

policing the racial boundaries of a decaying colonialism and a growing modem

capitalism failed to change colonial policy along the lines of its pledges and programmes and the Labour Colonial Secretary explicitly rejected constitutional change for Trinidad on the grounds that the colony was not ready for further self-government. The racism of

international capitalism is clear to see. Working class rights and self-government were only applicable in white majority nations (Alahar 2005: 123 ).

To Cipriani's credit and further demonstrating the many directions an organic

intellectual in a colony like Trinidad at the time was pulled, he realised his faith in imperial institutions was to a certain degree misplaced, as this statement to the council reveals: "Those who have the best interests of the working class at heart are bitterly disappointed at the attitude of the Labour Government towards the working class in these colonies ... whether it be Conservative, Liberal or Labour, the situation is exactly the same." Nonetheless, Cipriani never retracted his support for the BLP, illustrating how in the colonies no matter one's allegiance to the colony and its masses, local cross-class and 190

race solidarity could be trumped by loyalty to the political and economic capitalist formation, or put another way - white bourgeois class interests.

It is little surprise then that by 1935 in the face of a world-wide economic depression and the inequalities of colonial policy, the workers as "a class for itself" across rural agricultural workers, urban unemployed, discontented oil workers165 and still others, were disenchanted and impatient with Cipriani's leadership (Phillips 1984:129) and his inaction on the rising cost of living which was not reflected in wages. The working class movement now fractured along race and other lines. The workers, women, blacks and nationalists seized the initiative to question the economic context and its institutions through trade unions and general strike action (Santiago-Valles 1997:327,

Craig 1988).

Cipriani' s role in the defence of certain class interests over others is a symbol and mechanism of control by capital over the oppressed masses. A similar point was made by

Elma Francois, 166 the leader of one of the newly emergent working class organisations, the Negro Welfare, Cultural and Social Association (NWA), who labelled Cipriani at the time, "Britain's best policeman in the colonies" (Francois cited in Brereton 1981:173).

165 In Trinidad during the 1920s oil production had taken over from sugar and cocoa as the islands export. While profits were high wages were extremely low. Tariffs on almost all products were applied to the masses while the colonial government and its oil refineries were mostly exempt. Lawyers were also employed to approach peasants and buy the mineral rights of their land at a figure that seemed attractive but was almost worthless when compared to the royalties if oil was discovered. All in all the oil workers came to resent that the interests of the exploiting capitalist came before the interests of the working population.

166 Elma Francois and her partner Jim Barette were two of the founding members of the Negro Welfare Cultural and Social Association [NWCSA]. "The Marxist oriented NWCSA, though it was committed to the empowerment of people of African descent, also had Indian and Chinese members. Also, from its inception it set out to attract women, hence the inclusion of the words 'cultural and 'social' as these were the areas of work in which, it was felt, women could initially be most easily incorporated. The organisation took the position that women and men should cooperate in the development of their collective political consciousness. There was no separation of women into 'women's arms/auxiliaries' and within the organisation executive positions changed regularly so that these responsibilities were shared equally." 191

An Organic Intellectual

So while Cipriani was first drawn to the local "people" and the local "masses" -

167 the Creole population of which he was part - his final and ultimate loyalty fell to the culture and capital interests of the British Empire. While Cipriani suggested some inventive ideas to assist the masses and brought some benefits to the working class his constant compromises maintained bourgeois ascendancy. He constructed,

common consciousness in which other heterogeneous wills [we ]re welded together on the basis of a common conception of the world. Hence, the role of the organic intellectual - whose role is one pre-eminently of connectivity, both vertically across the hierarchy of forms and horizontally, linking up the fragmented situational, personal and momentary forms of common and practical sense into the coherent whole of collective will. [Smith 2004: 105].

Some examples of this include Cipriani' s fight for legislation to protect trade unions. In 1932 he was successful in getting a 'Trade Union Ordinance' enacted by the

British government. Previously trade unions in Trinidad were permitted but lacked fundamental rights like the right to peaceful picketing and immunity from actions in law.

As Susan Craig has outlined elsewhere, supported by "confidential notes of meetings between British Colonial officials" (Craig 1988 :418), on closer inspection this British acquiescence to Cipriani's demands for such Trade Unions, and this Ordinance in particular, can be interpreted as the strategy of the British Government in response to the upheavals and a change in the mode of control of the imperialist system. These new trade unions were permitted so long as:

they would be guided by the British into constitutional channels. In the opinion of the Secretary of State for the Colonies after the island-wide strikes in Trinidad and Tobago of 1937, trade unions were to be the future

167 As C. L. R. James wrote in his 1932 biography of Cipriani "as a rule the White Creole of any distinction has had his blood reinforced by the blood of the despised negro people." 192

instrument for disciplining and controlling the militancy of colonial workers. To this end, a whole machinery for regulating labour disputes was established. [Craig 1988:386].

Filling in the gaps of Gramsci' s definition for the specific Trinidad colonial situation then, the organic intellectual grows up and is enculturated amongst the dominant local social group, the French Creole class, and absorbs their thinking and bourgeois class aspirations while also being exposed to the demands, needs and relations of the subordinate group through social interaction. As such, it is possible to see Cipriani as an organic intellectual who was both a positive and negative instrument in change. On the one hand he provided a space of change which carried a subjected class forward, but ultimately he was still related to the dominant class and provided a mechanism by which the long-term interests of the bourgeoisie maintained the reproduction of their groups interests and the economic subjugation of the masses. In Trinidad we can say such Creole organic intellectuals overlap with Best's notion of Afro-Saxons. They were Trinidadians produced by the local educational system, class protocols and culture of colonialism

(James 1963, Ryan 2009: 19), who ultimately performed a function for the dominant social group in society. In Trinidad this function can be translated as extending and adopting the social relations and class interests of the metropolitan bourgeoisie both at the time and also long after they had physically removed themselves from the island. Or as Gramsci might phrase it, ensuring the ruling class maintains its hegemony over the rest of society.

Organic intellectuals work across terrains, they are the "deputies" of a ruling historic bloc ( Gramsci 1971: 13 5) and while much of their work takes place in the upper reaches of both political and civil society it disperses from this sphere to produce a world 193

vision that is accepted by the dozing intellectual receptors of the masses as a form of common and practical sense (Smith 2004: 105).

The period between 1919 and 193 7 in Trinidad was a new stage in the economic development of the island. This can be seen in the conflict between the organised workers' union, and the local middle classes allied to the capital interest of the colonial administration (Santiago-Valles 1997:333). The actions of Cipriani as an organic intellectual, tied in the final instance to the latter group, managed to channel both race and class tensions into a capitalist accommodation that promised much but continued to represent the racist hierarchy of groups sown by colonialism. 168 Understanding the role of organic intellectuals and ideology over this time is important. For Gramsci they were imperative to the creation of an historical bloc. 169 They manufactured the terrain on which people moved, where they would acquire and locate their positions, identities and struggles. 170 And if the economically powerful don't get their way through ideas, as the

Euro-American policies of the Cold War proved, they do it through force and violence. 171

In this chapter we have seen the first two stages in the development of a

Gramscian historical bloc: 1) the passage from economic to political class-consciousness

168 As Lears noted "the idea of historical bloc departs significantly from notions of class embedded in the Marxist tradition: it promotes analysis of social formations that cut across categories of ownership and nonownership and that are bound by religious or other ideological ties as well as those of economic interest" (Lears 1985:571).

169 Furthermore, as Gramsci has observed, a class or class fraction may not exercise its dominance in isolation but through a coalition or 'bloc' of classes or class fractions in which it exercises hegemony.

170 "Indeed, individuals in communities by intense practices of speech mimesis may undergo in the space of a few years profound changes of collective speech that transform who they are, their social boundaries, and their worldly relations" (Harding 2000: 12).

171 Rosa Luxemburg "concludes that trade with non capitalist social formations provides the only systematic way to stabilize the [capitalist] system. If those social formations or territories are reluctant to trade then they must be compelled to do so by force of arms. This is, in her view, the heart of what imperialism is about" (Harvey 2005:138). 194

(Cipriani fighting for workers rights); and 2) the moment of superstructure built up out of the base or structure (trade unions as mechanisms of bourgeois control). In the next chapter, stages 3) the economic-corporate interests of the dominant group being adopted by subordinate groups; 4) a single combination of ideas becoming dominant and pervasive throughout society; and 5) the moment of historical bloc with its synthesis of economic, political, intellectual, and moral ideas will be fleshed out. CHAPTER SEVEN:

WOODBROOK ON THE PATH TO INDEPENDENCE:

INTERSECTIONS OF CLASS, ETHNICITY AND

RACE IN 20rn CENTURY URBAN TRINIDAD

"The place is Ariapita A venue, Wood brook, precisely at the point where the road borders the northern length of Adam Smith Square. The setting and the occasion, it seems, consolidate everything about the marriage of paradoxes that makes a place like Trinidad and Tobago, which assembles so much of the world and brings so much difference into contact and dialogue. It is a street in a district whose names echo a history of conquest and domination, of race, colour and class divisions. Now, it is a portion of the stage for a people's festival, which originated as organised rebellion against the injustices of Empire" - Jennifer Rahim (2006)

"The colour of the rulers might darken; the ethnicities might change, blur or merge, but the culture of the power structure remains" - Jeff Henry (2008)

"You were right. I should try to get people to see that my struggle was a replica of the struggle of others" - Eric Williams (Williams cited in Ryan 2009)

In this chapter Woodbrook during the period 1920 to 1990 is fleshed out through the childhood memories of residents, newspaper records, previous accounts and economic data. This is to suggest Woodbrook as the centre of an emergent "Trinidadian" nationalism produced out of the collision between the two economic systems of

195 196

capitalism and colonialism. It is also to show that the capital interests and class concerns of this Afro-Saxon culture came to represent the interests of the nation in the expansion of post-colonialism and how the socio-cultural legacy of this economic and cultural movement is a nee-colonial one.

The first section is the product of visits to Mary Cain's verandah in Woodbrook.

Under the shadows and shards of sunlight produced by her well-tended Caribbean garden we sat down and spoke about her memories of growing up in Woodbrook. Much of what she said built a story of socio-economic and cultural transformation taking place in

Woodbrook between 1920 and 1960 when groups, figures, ideologies and sites of cultural production like the Little Carib Theatre, the Invaders pan yard, Carnival, and an intense process of connection between the past, present and future, rearranged and solidified cultural power relations in the colony set on the path toward self-government and independence.

While it is possible to reconstruct from the written record a view on the events taking place in Woodbrook for this early period, to get a local sense of what was going on in people's heads during the period I have taken the written notes from my various interviews with Mary and reordered the material into a single narrative. This single narrative was then returned to Mary who signed it off. It is then analysed through reference to historical records, written records and commentaries of the era.

In Her Own Words: Mary's Childhood (1930 - 1950)

"Growing up, Woodbrook was almost a village. The Police knew everyone, and they would send messages to parents if needed. When my mother wanted to scare my 197

brother she would get the police to come over and threaten to arrest him. Although, the idea there was no crime then is a myth. I remember moonlight nights when the streetlights went off. The square was particularly important as a meeting place. Woodbrook was populated at this time by school teachers, small business men, civil servants, and home ownership was very important. There was much immigration from other Caribbean islands to Woodbrook too. Many Bajans moved to our street and different families set up residence in numbers 7, 8, 9 and 13, such as the Armstrongs and the Edgehills. Many of them, alongside Trinidadian Afros from the sugar areas were brought in to police Port of Spain, it's a way to avoid conflict in the cities but was the root of conflict between Afro and Indo Trinidadians. Much of modem day Woodbrook to the West wasn't built until the 1950s, and we've been encroaching down little by little. There was a pumping station for sending sewage further out to sea, may well still be one, where Movietowne is. When we claimed back the mangrove we destroyed the Carib site there 172 [she means Cumucurapo]. I grew up on Carlos Street. They said there was a slave graveyard here. This led to many haunted stories when people died. On one side of us was an Inspector of Trams and on the other side a Store Walker [store clerk]. Back then they were considered respectable class jobs. I went to a private school on Lewis Street from three years old, then to Tranquillity then to St Joseph's by which time I got a bike. I walked up until then. Children went to specific schools depending on the Church they went to. There was interplay between religion and class here. Certain points held Woodbrook together, and churches were bonding devices in that. People met at churches. There's St Theresa's Church, St Patrick's Church, an expensive church, both were Catholic. There's St Patrick's bordering Newtown/St Clair with Carlos Street as the ending of the catchment area. There is St Crispin's, an Anglican church on Rosalino St., Methodists had to go to Tranquillity or Hanover. Those going to All Saints Church went Bishops [highschool]. St Theresa's has a school attached and it became a Syrian church in 1930s. The Holy Faith Sisters, an Irish Congregation came out in 1948 just as the Syrian community began to move out and they took over St Theresa's. The convent began to train their children. As they moved up economically the heavy Syrian presence in Woodbrook from 1920s to 1960s decreased. Housing prices in more expensive areas slumped in the 1970s allowing them to buy out upmarket St Clair. What Woodbrook was in the 1940s and 1950s, was really the juncture where the lower middle class entered the professional class. Woodbrook always had a fairly heavy movement out of country too. Even though it was extremely expensive to go to university - before UWI you had to go to Europe - as US degrees weren't accepted here. Many residents of Woodbrook went away on a scholarship, particularly those who served in the armed forces during World War II. They got the first scholarships. Many would study abroad then stay abroad. There was a very ambitious afro-:lower middle class who finally moved to Woodbrook at the end of 19th century from Belmont. Many of these residents got scholarships.

172 "It is interesting to note that the remains of Indian [Amerinidian] settlements in the shape of pottery have been found in three separate places in the area to the West of the Maraval Dry river and south of the Western main Road now known as Mucurapo [the area Mary mentions]. One of those sites yielded pottery of high grade equal in quality to that of Erin and Palo Seco." 198

When I was young, kite flying do\\

173 "Port of Spain's very commodious harbour in the Gulf of Paria, protected by the arms of the Peninsulas in the North and South, provides safe anchorage. The modern docks and harbour facilities wore constructed upon reclaimed land in 1932 thus providing deepwater anchorage alongside. The docks extend for 5,500 feet, and the basin dredged to a depth of 32 feet has a mean width of 900 feet and length of 5,500 feet. The dredged channel or approach is 350 feet wide and automatically lighted beacons mark both. The channel is approached on two leading lights ashore bearing 61 ° 15' from seaward. There are eight berths and in addition there are several smaller wharves and jetties and two slipways" (Cameron 1958). In order to receive construction materials for the two bases they were building on the island, in 1941 the US military moved in an took over the deep sea anchorage. At this time the area became known as 'Docksite' by locals (Anthony 1978:51).

174 Mary's dad was an original Carnival 'mas man' who in the first decade of the twentieth century was the first person to bring out a Dragon Mas band. 199

around Woodbrook. Those covers predate steelpan and were what they played on before the pan was invented. He played for my birthday once. I was so embarrassed at first because it was lower class and associated with violence 175 and I was used to pianos. Arthur Cipriani lived near the cemetery. He died in early 1940s. Eric Williams lived on Cornelio Street for a while. The Naipaul's lived on Lewis Street and Vidia wrote Miguel Street while living there. The Naipaul's hated Woodbrook. Ranjit Kumar lived here too, he was the first person to use race in an election - he was an Indian engineer, who fought for workers rights he also built the dual carriage way Wrightson Road, on land they said you couldn't built a road on. That was Trinidad's first dual carriageway. Cars started appearing from the 1950s, also changes in metropolitan culture, things like health and policy affected Trinidad and Woodbrook. After WWII Woodbrook was poised to do what happened and it became a clearly middle-class area. All the bishops came from Woodbrook, same thing with the diplomatic core. For a long time up until then Trinis were blocked from the top positions in civil service (police etc.) It was first the English who came out, then local whites, then Protestants. Now its Trinis [italics mine]."

Analysis

The personal picture Mary tells of the period 1930-1950 speaks to changes in the class character of Woodbrook and the consolidation of a local Creole middle class of varying skin colours. This picture is shared by sociologist Trevor Sudama (1981: 17) more generally when he discusses over the same period how in Trinidad a "petty bourgeoisie" (read middle class) mobilised by the metropolitan bourgeoisie in the first half of the century was replaced by a new, more nationalistic middle class (Phillips

1984: 139) who in the period to follow emerged as the most politically significant class in

Trinidad and Tobago.

175 "The modern multi-octave, finely tuned "pans" ... were not developed until the post-war period, using as raw material the 50-gallon oil barrel. Every district, almost every neighbourhood, would acquire its own steelband ... District Carnival bands would now be organised behind such famous early steelbands as the Woodbrook invaders, whose leader, Ellie Manette, is generally credited with some of the major breakthroughs in the development of the instrument. The majority of the early steelbands were from lower class districts, and the old neighbourhood rivalries of the jamettes and stickfighters were resurrected in the steelband wars which began to rage, particularly at Carnival. This gave steelbands a bad name among the middle classes and in official society, and several years passed before their true artistic worth was recognised" (Oxaal 1968:82). 200

Before pushing for self-government this new middle class performed "essential services of the bourgeoisie state" such as staffing the courts, administering law and order, and inculcating "appropriate values through schools, churches and the mass media,"

(James 1963, Post 1978:81). Mary's personal narrative suggests pertinent ways to conceive this process of class transformation as it occurred in Woodbrook. For ease of analysis I have divided Mary's text thematically:

Schools,_ Churches and Cliques

Mary mentions the importance of churches, and their overlap with different ethnic groups. This suggests in the Woodbrook of Mary's childhood we can conceive of class

176 being qualified by "cliques" . Cliques can be conceived of as ethnic factions within a class group. For example, a clique could be identified by church membership, which in tum denoted the school one went to and the ethnic group one associated with. As Mary states "those going Bishops [Girl's School] go to All Saints Church." As such, we can imagine interplay between religion and class (Campbell 1992), whereby ethnic factions -

Syrian, Portuguese, Chinese, Coloured etc. existed within a broader middle class defined by its education and its possession of some wealth, hence Mary's allusion to the importance of owning one's home.

Mary also mentioned to me that in some streets of Woodbrook there were different cliques who knew each other but didn't necessarily mix. This lends itself to the idea that an ideology of race and a hierarchy of colour ranked cliques. Such ranking was

176 "Indeed in Trinidad there are no classes in the rigidly defined sense rather there are status groups defined by ethnicity and money but with varying degrees of fluidity" (Sankeralli 200 I :2). 201

no doubt complex because as Neptune elucidates notes of the period (2007:163-166) race could be concealed in Trinidad.

The fact many Woodbrook children of this period went to the island's most prestigious schools like QRC and CIC, which still reflected the social divisions of the colony, and were staffed for their first two generations by teachers who had been to

Oxford and Cambridge (James 1963:34), further supports Mary's observation of cliques in Woodbrook- CIC (boys) and St Joseph's Convent (girls) were French Creole schools;

QRC (boys) and Bishops (girls) were where the sons and daughters of English officials and middle class blacks and coloureds attended (Campbell 1996: 171). James' description of his QRC school cricket team from around 1915 provides a glimpse of the early ethnic, racial and class mixture of the children who were being educated in British ways.

"We were a motley crew. The children of some white officials and white business men, middle class blacks and mulattos, Chinese boys, some of whose parents still spoke broken English, Indian boys, some of whose parents could speak no English at all, and some poor black boys who had won exhibitions or whose parents had starved and toiled on plots of agricultural land and were spending their hard-earned money on giving the eldest boy an education" (James 1963:34)

A decade or two after James' description, the colonial government and the churches still controlled the schools in Trinidad (Campbell 1996). The consequence of this control and the elite system of colonial education many children from Woodbrook encountered was a process of differential acculturation (Crowley 1957:823) or cultural assimilation where the children of middle class blacks and coloureds came to share common values and standards with the Creole Whites of the ruling classes, while also affecting the Creole whites in such things as language, culture and ideology. 202

In terms of education, another point to think about is Mary's comment about scholarships. "Island Scholarships" to institutions in the UK and US were an original form of "public diplomacy," diplomatic propaganda and "soft power." They were designed by imperial powers to shape the future leaders of the colonies and produce persons who followed the ways, views and positions of the West and their capital interests (Oxaal 1971: 17). The winners of Island Scholarship on their return to Trinidad got involved in the local electoral and parliamentary politics and were the Afro-Saxon architects of post-colonialism in the island.

The blacks and the coloureds who won university scholarships, and who were able to establish themselves as respectable professionals, were an inspiration to the rest of the non-white people (Campbell 1996:277).

A final point worth considering is the observation Lloyd Braithwaite (1953) in his study of social stratification in Trinidad gave attention to. Braithwaite looked at the early twentieth century situation. For him, colonial education during this era was a central means of social mobility for the black and coloured masses, however this was specifically within a class and not across class. He believed class had a caste-like quality. Hence, we may say, rather than strict class mobility taking place in Woodbrook in the period from

1930 to 1950, what was taking place was a transformation and swelling of the Creole middle class as a lower middle class subdivision experienced mobility. A point mentioned by Mary in her notion of a residential class transformation in Woodbrook. 203

Sexuality, gender and race

Harvey Neptune's recent work (2007) supports Mary's observation of the impact

the US occupation177 had on prostitution in Woodbrook and expresses the apparent

distain and offense local sensibilities suffered as the morality of colonial life was

changing.

No one would have honestly disagreed with the US official who concluded that it was during the occupation that prostitution broke out in Trinidad on a large and lucrative basis. The arrival of thousands of American men injected new vigour and profit into the local trade ... There were, nevertheless, visible changes associated with the conduct of commercial sex during the occupation. The centre of gravity of soliciting, for one, shifted toward Wrightson Road USO recreational facility. It was a re-orientation that outraged many Woodbrook residents, who publicly charged pimps, prostitutes and, 'procuring' with ruining their prized middle-class neighbourhood, with degrading it into a disreputable rendezvous point. Street-walkers, complained one dweller, had become so commonplace in the area police could be seen 'chatting' with them. By late 1943, disgusted, fed-up denizens began demanding that police mop up what one paper agreed was a 'blot' on their community. [Neptune 2007:181].

Mary mentions a "rush by women to get white American soldiers because the

number of white men had declined." Such an observation suggests the respectability and

wealth associated with white men - a reflection of foreign ruling class values and the racial ideology of capitalism. It also suggests female residents of Woodbrook thought this themselves while also suggesting a more general decline in the white residential

177 The US occupation of Trinidad refers to the World War II (1940) "destroyers for bases" deal between the British and US governments. While the two main bases were far away from Woodbrook, at the bottom of Woodbrook, Wrightson Road to be exact, the USO as well as the deep sea harbour were manned by US service personal who frequented Woodbrook often. Harvey Neptune's excellent, recent, book Caliban and the Yankees: Trinidad and the United States Occupation does a good job of fleshing out this often over-looked chapter in mid twentieth century Trinidad social history. Anthony (1978) also touches on the realities of the situation, remarking that life for the US soldiers there was "bright and colourful." While many lived in tents (nicknamed 'camp causal') they nonetheless had a cinema, a men's club, a wide open space for out-door games and attended calypso tents, mixed with local 'womenfolk' and eventually moved into better more permanent wooden housing. 204

population of Woodbrook, who were being replaced by a new, more phenotypically mixed "Trinidadian" middle class.

Ralph De Boissiere's famous novel Rum and Coca Cola (1956) deals with this

era and in particular the relations between daughters of wealthy local white families and the newly arrived "Yankee men." The novel ends with the death of a traditional Trinidad

and the emergence of a country unsuited for an American future, symbolised in the death of a broken hearted father who sees his daughter transformed by her exposure to

American ways. 178 This is local literary evidence of transformation between an old

Creole class and the emergence of a new "Trinidadian" one.

Mary's mention of prostitution and the responses I found in 1940s newspapers 179 to the practice present other vistas to the white-on-white sexual relations of the French

Creole class and the American soldiers. One is the intolerance by some local residents of

Woodbrook to interracial mixing, and the other tells us that many "Yankees" disregarded the colour line in pursuit of female company, caring little about race when it came to

intimacies (Neptune 2007:169).

Another issue to consider is the economic one. In an economically distressed time, the money on offer from American soldiers was a serious consideration for heterosexual and homosexual participants in the sex trade who usually came from the lower classes (Neptune 2007). The distain toward this profession by some Woodbrook residents suggests the morality of Woodbrook was unsurprisingly for the times, non-

178 "The island's upper classes (St. Clair and Maraval), he observed in 1944, began visiting calypso tents mainly because Americans were doing so ... U.S. citizens also helped legitimise and globalise the calypso through their participation in its production" (Neptune 2007:141)

179 "Police Plan Special Action for Woodbrook Nuisance," Trinidad Guardian, Oct 31, 1944 "Wrightson Road Demand Police Action," Trindiad Guardian Oct 26, 1944 205

reflective of the economic realities poor people faced. One can also suggest Woodbrook

residents were unhappy with the influence Americans and their dollars were having on

the lower classes and society more generally. As Neptune notes, Woodbrook residents

during the 1940s exhibited a distaste for "salacious American consumers who had

become 'corrupters of manners and morals"' (Neptune 2007:150), and were leading young ladies away from the lessons of Church and social convention. 180 Such symbols can be imagined as fault lines for societal cultural change to come.

Nationalist Culture

A syncretic nationalist "Trinidadian" culture also appears in Mary's recollection.

The first example is her mention of steel band, 181 which she notes had one of its inventors,

Ellie Manette, living, making music and growing up in Woodbrook. Recollecting her

embarrassment at being serenaded at a birthday party by steelpan and not piano, could

indicate the instrument, like Carnival, was not seen then as becoming of the "better"

classes - no doubt because of its "African" heritage. 182 Albert Gomes, a post war parliamentarian of the late 1940s writing in a local newspaper of the time, noted members of the middle and upper classes were against the "field of the Steel band." Gomes also

180 Writing in 1956 Powrie states, "Pious, naive, virginity is the approved ideal for young unmarried girls. Deviation from this ideal places such girls in danger of social ostracism. But it is difficult, and becoming increasingly impossible, to live the ideal life. Deviation is extremely common and the sense of fear and guilt harboured in the mind of the average girl gives hollow meaning to the outward show of piety based on regularity of Church going" (1956:226)

181 A better metaphor of the creation of new culture is harder to find, as Lloyd Best has written: "Pan turned literally to the dustbin and emerged as the essential metaphor for transforming nothing into something, the magic of creation. It translates into making music wherever you go, with whatever you find. The ultimate capacity to invent" (Cited in Laughlin 2006) 182 1 Steelpan is related to the 19 h century percussion instruments the Tamboo Bamboo used in Jamette Carnival (2008 Lecture by Kim Johnson) 206

knew steelpan and the bands forming around it from each district on the island were

perhaps at the time, the most important thing happening in the lives of young men who

"come from the most depressed areas of the colony" and "grew up when the Colony was

in the throes of a great convulsion."

As winds of national self-definitionwbegin to emerge, such sentiment changed, and

as Mary implies, it changed in Woodbrook too, again suggesting a transformation in the

old colonial class values of Woodbrook toward a new more nationalist and

transculturated type of values. Ellie Manette and a few friends from Woodbrook formed a

band, the Oval Boys, which later became the famous Woodbrook Invaders. Steelband

emerged as a bridge across class divisions, like those between Woodbrook and

Laventille183 in the creation of a Trinidadian culture and moves from being seen as a

symbol of the vulgarity of the lower classes to be seized in the 1950s by nationalist

politicians as a symbol of Trinidadian culture.

Another part of the emergent nationalist and populist culture of Woodbrook to

mention is literary authorship and V.S. Naipaul's novel Miguel Street (1974). As a boy

Naipaul made friends at both Tranquillity and QRC with people like Lloyd Best and C. L.

R. James. Made up of connected narratives, Miguel Street is about Luis Street in

Wood brook. Its narratives especially those of Hat and his love of cricket can be seen as documenting the struggle between a united white elite and its coloured imitators versus the black masses.

183 Laventille was and is a poorer, working class, majority Afro descended community on the hills east of Port of Spain. It is often cited in opposition to the more wealthy, lighter skinned Woodbrook class. It too boasted many important faces and persons on the road to Trinidad independence and many saw the population as manipulated by Eric Williams and later the PNM government of Patrick Manning for electoral votes with promises of development and better infrastructure that have still gone unfulfilled. 207

Miguel Street, as Naipaul named his first novel, was Luis Street. It was re-named Cowpen Street when Indians moved in to staid Woodbrook. They kept cows. We kept ducks, chickens or turkeys. Were we really as different, Trini-Indian or Trini-African as we are told that we are? As I read Naipaul's authorised biography I was reminded that we were not. Woodbrook was not a ghetto as French [Naipaul's biographer] supposes. It was one of the rare places where we all met. We talked over fences, over gates, but rarely visited. We guarded our secrets. The country was racist. It still is. Woodbrook added to that. It was classiest and snobbish. None of us was taught about sex. In this Victorian lower middle class society storks, shoeboxes, and angels brought babies. The so-called nuclear family of the Black middle class consisted not only of brothers and sisters. Our parent's friends were aunties and uncles with rights of interference. [Mary]

The life of Beryl McBurnie, another Woodbrook resident of the era Mary describes, embodies the idea of changing values in Woodbrook. In her 1983 book Cradle of Caribbean Dance Molly Ahye tells a fascinating story of how McBurnie, a coloured girl born in Woodbrook in the early part of the century, brought up surrounded by conservative and consciously British values constantly put on plays and dance shows during her youth in her mother's backyard. At first these shows reflected British ideas on dance. They reflected the type of dance taught by colonials of European descent, forms like classical ballet and the type of balls the French Creoles, white upper class and coloured middle class who lived in Woodbrook, attended in their privately owned clubs

(1983:8) like the Country Club184 and the St Clair Club.

Over time and through the influence of such persons as the anthropologist

Andrew Carr and trips she made around the country, McBurnie became fascinated with local folklore and customs. She learned and taught folk forms many of her peers, teachers

184 The Trinidad Country Club came into existence in 1931. The estate, formerly known as Champs Elysees, comprised 670 acres and was obtained by Monsieur Philippe Roume de St Laurent from the Spanish Government on behalf of his mother who went on to purchase five other parcels of land to enlarge the property. The Club was purchased by JB Fernandes in 1955 and Fernandes readily admits that membership then consisted of "old, stuffy people ... We weren't different to any other club. Everyone had their own club in those days." 208

and neighbours thought inappropriate. Nonetheless, she persisted. To pursue her dream of

building a permanent theatre and dance school in her mother's backyard she left Trinidad

in the 1938 to study dance under Martha Graham at Columbia University.

Her many performances, talent, skills and belief in local folk forms, meant she was widely known in Trinidad. On completion of her studies, some say at the request of

Eric Williams and C. L. R. James, two of the most ardent supporters at the time for

national self-determination (Sankeralli 2001 :3), she returned to Trinidad. On November

1 25 \ 1948, in the backyard of her mother's home on Roberts Street, Wood brook,

McBumie opened the Little Carib Dance Company and Theatre. The theatre became a

cultural centre for Woodbrook and the island as a whole. It promoted and supported the

arts from a local perspective. 185 Present on opening night were many important local

figures including politicians in the government of the day, the commissioner of police, the future Premier of Trinidad and Tobago, social workers such as Audrey Jeffers, 186 the

island's top lawyers, many artists, religious figures, folklorists and journalists (Ahye

1983:31).

While local cultural products of transculturation were being looked down upon by colonial elites and classed as primitive McBumie and her company toured the island and

185 "We must not be afraid of being black. The European ballet forms are lineal, mechanical. .. machinery, industry. In the Caribbean we are more sensual, agricultural. We understand the agricultural form, we come from it. We do not understand the 'modern form.' Do you realise what we seem to be doing now is exercises? ... So what do we have? A lot of little monkeys on stage" (Sankeralli 2001 :5).

186 Born in January 1896 on Baden-Powell Street in Woodbrook, Jeffers was a prominent figure in the women's liberation movement and spent her entire life up to her death in 1968 improving the state of social services in the country. Anstey House is a hostel located on Baden-Powell Street in Woodbrook. The Coterie of Social Workers founded it in 193 5. Audrey Jeffers started the Coterie in 1921. Anstey House served as a domicile for young girls coming from the countryside to town to work. Named after the then Bishop of Trinidad, Rt. Rev. Dr. A. N. Anstey, this building also functioned as an education centre and it was the growth of this activity that provided the impetus for the founding of Bishop Anstey High School. 209

created works based on local art forms and folk dances giving previously derided cultural forms a sense of integrity. These forms included such things as steel pan, bongo, calenda, drumming, shango songs, work songs, calypso, the belaire as well as East Indian and other culturally specific forms. When McBumie opened her junior theatre section she attracted patronage from the likes of Wilson Minshall (father of Peter Minshall), Sir

Hugh Wooding, Dr Patrick Solomon, Bruce Procope (Lawyer/Cultural Historian), Jack

Kelshall (a white Trinidadian socialist and former advisor to Cheddi Jagan), Andrew

Carr, Audrey Jeffers, John 'Buddy' Williams (musician) and Albert Gomes; whose children were among the first to register. These figures are all central to Trinidad and its history books, and these persons all gravitated to Woodbrook either as residents or patrons of the theatre. Viewed in this light it is little surprise McBumie came to the attention of Eric Williams and other nationalists, who embraced her ability to produce folk forms that overcame the prejudices of the day and spoke to local cultural creativity.

Her life also illustrates well the transformations taking place in Woodbrook, where a new local middle class was replacing an older, whiter, colonial class.

Evidence of the role McBumie and other residents of Woodbrook played in an emerging nationalism is well articulated by Sankeralli:

Beryl McBumie, together with artists such as Boscoe Holder and Olive Walke, spearheaded a cultural renaissance in Trinidad wherein the songs and dances of village and hamlet were rediscovered and brought into society's mainstream. Beryl did for culture what Eric Williams did in politics and scholarship. Learie Constantine in cricket, C. L. R. James in a variety of fields, Audrey Jeffers in social work and women's issues, Ellie Manette and others in the steelband movement, Lord Kitchener in calypso, Albert Gomes in literary criticism and many others both sung and unsung, were doing in every sphere of life in the 1930s and 1940s. They were building a Trinidadian nationalism of tremendous power and self-confidence, one that would eventually lead us to independence. [Sankeralli 2001 :2]. 210

Carnival

Mary's observations about Carnival in Woodbrook also provide evidence about the changing socio-cultural character of the area. As she remarked, Carnival in pre-l 940s

Trinidad was still seen as a festival of the lower classes. "Woodbrook people not in that;" giving a glimpse into the class mentality of the time, and the distance Woodbrook

"people" wanted from a festival of the local masses. Mary also remarked that Carnival changed after World War II. This is a significant observation (Kerrigan & Laughlin

2004), suffice to say that Carnival in the 1950s, like the local folk forms practiced by

McBurnie, was soon appropriated by the newly emerged and self assured local intelligentsia as a festival of national culture, no matter it involved the disenfranchisement of its working class authors (Green and Scher 2007).

Nevertheless, in the era 1920 to the Second World War, Carnival remained a divided phenomenon. While thousands of masqueraders took over the streets of Port of

Spain, the upper classes continued to enjoy elaborate costume balls at private homes and at the Trinidad Country Club. When they ventured out on Carnival Monday and Tuesday it was in decorated lorries, from which Trinidad's French Creole and Colonial elite, dressed as Arthurian or Elizabethan courtiers, waved down at the crowds - like the

SUV's of modern-day Woodbrook look down on the less economically wealthy in the daily traffic jams through Woodbrook. When Carnival returned after the war, events had changed and one begins to see the emergence of a general trend toward the commodification of the festival. The numbers of spectators and revellers increased; and costumes inspired by tales from history and literature were more ambitious than ever. But the most significant change in these years was the integration of the lighter-skinned mas 211

of the Country Club - that of the Wood brook class - with the darker-skinned mas of the streets, as the island's always-fluid colour lines shifted and faded (Kerrigan and Laughlin

2004).

In Trinidad, as in the rest of the world, the war had wrought major social changes.

These being the years leading to self-government and independence a spirit of nationalism was in the air and as the boundaries of class and race grew subtler and more complex Carnival took on the same changes and a air of self-confidence. When Mary states with Fanonesque imagery, "it was young people, without masks," she could easily have been describing the changing times. Whereas previously Trinidadians wore a colonial cultural mask, after World War II they became more comfortable in themselves, in a new Trinidadian identity and reveled in it with confidence.

In a 1946 newspaper commentary on that year's festival a reporter notes the change to come and its capitalist implications.

For many years, a great number of the country's inhabitants have deplored the license and vulgarity so often evident during the celebration of the their national festival, this year they hope that the new Carnival Committee, by offering valuable prizes and other encouragements to proper bands will make the two-day fete something to be proud and capable of being unashamedly offered to the America [sic] and other tourists to whom we look for a handsome income in the near future. [Diaz in Trinidad Guardian 3/3/1946].

Summary

Mary's story and the literature on the timeframe tells us about the mobilisation of a nationalist sentiment, guided by a new middle class who were replacing the older colonial elite as political leaders on the island. It was a local middle class that unsettled the broad set of handed down British conventions. "Culture" became something the 212

"natives" and not just the colonial elites now possessed. While paradoxically, as we saw in the last chapter, this local middle class were also participants in the economic traditions and values of the foreign capitalist class (Phillips 1984:141). As C. L. R. James once said: "the leaders of a revolution are usually those who have been able to profit

[economically] by the cultural advantages of the system they are attacking" (1989).

In the analysis of Mary's account, stage three of Gramsci' s historical bloc was fleshed out. We see an older colonial class-consciousness in Woodbrook defined by its aspiration to metropolitan values and how through school and churches - "education" in the Gramscian sense ( 1971 : 162-190) - an emergent Creole class faction too came to measure their success by proximity to these metropolitan values. In this colonial situation the synergy can be interpreted in line with stage 3 of Gramsci' s definition to mean "the economic-corporate interests of the dominant group were adopted by a subordinate group" (1971 :405-406).

In this section we began to glimpse through the production of local cultural forms and transformation in Carnival, culture and the arts, stage four of the historical bloc - "a single combination of ideas becoming dominant and pervasive throughout society."

( 1971 :406) As the old Colonial socio-cultural values were modified by socio-cultural changes new locally produced cultural products gave confidence to ideas of self-rule, nationalist ideology and intellectual decolonialisation. By 1962 this combination of ideas led toward self-government and independence. In claiming these cultural forms as authentically Trinidadian, the newly emergent middle class symbolised by Woodbrook and its residents was able to claim authority as the spokesperson to represent the masses on the path to self-determination. The central problem with this claim is the economic 213

and social value system this new middle class adopted on its post-1950s path was one firmly based on Eurocentric values and hierarchy, as Oxaal reminds us.

The know-how and cohesion required for electoral and parliamentary politics ironically (or intentionally?) created structural inducements for that section of the coloured middle class with the requisite background and 'values' enabling them to presume to represent the black masses to take over the legislative and official seats occupied largely by white backsides in years gone by. [Oxaal 1971 :26].

By the 1956 general election, the Woodbrook Afro-Saxon class had come of age.

Gone was the necessity of the moral and political leadership of the imperial power. In its place emerged a self-confident national movement. One able to distil the battles of many key actors such as Capt Cipriani, Albert Gomes, and Beryl McBumie who through the vehicle of trade unions, alongside a cultural renaissance, helped to represent the masses in a single political organ - a multiracial party representing "the people of Trinidad and

Tobago, whatever their race and class, colour or religion" (Williams 1955:36). In the election, described by one author as "the Old World versus the New"187 (Ryan 2009:116), the People's National Movement (PNM), "a national party with a national programme," led by this new middle class188 emerged triumphant winning thirteen of twenty-four seats and established a mandate that would lead to Independence at the next election.

Woodbrook was not simply a homogenous space of class and culture either - as if it ever could be - but mixed ethnically and economically. As some authors point out of the

187As the campaign drew to a close, it was clearly Williams and the PNM against the rest. The press, the Catholic hierarchy, big business, the old government and members of the legislature, all came out in opposition to the PNM, while the Americans stood on the sidelines" (Ryan 2009:142)

188 "The breakdown of PNM candidates in terms of ethnic affiliation reveals that the centre of gravity in the PNM was in the black professional class, though only seven of the twenty-four candidates were graduates of universities or Inns of Court. Only one candidate could seriously be considered a worker in the sense in which that term is commonly understood" (Ryan 2009:140) 214

success of the PNM in the Port of Spain North constituency - within which Woodbrook is contained - not all people of upper and the upper middle class voted for the PNM.

In the five polling stations that were in the high-status residential areas of Port of Spain North, the total vote for Gomes was 850, and for the PNM, 402. The fact the PNM was able to win a little less than 50 percent of the total votes in the five stations indicates, however, that the party did manage to win the confidence of some members of the European creole community. [Ryan 2009:145].

Building off this quote, I would suggest that Woodbrook and its increasingly mixed income residents can be separated from the upper-class-areas of St Clair, which in this era, as Mary mentioned, saw a movement out of Wood brook and into St Clair by the richer elements of society. If true it lends further evidence to the changing class composition of Woodbrook in the era 1920-1950s from colonial upper class to Creole middle class and also supports the notion this new local middle class was a central element in the articulation of the nationalist movement.

In the 1950s, Woodbrook with its prized amenities - paved streets, street lighting, piped water, sewerage and underground storm drainage -was fast attracting new residents as the upper and upper middle classes moved out. 189 One of these new residents

(although he had lived there previously as a child) was Eric Williams, recently removed from a position of power at the Anglo-American Caribbean Commission and soon, in

1962, to become the first Prime Minister of an independent Trinidad and Tobago.

According to one source, Williams told colleagues that a move to Woodbrook would make him "a part of the people and less apart from them," (Williams cited in Ryan

2009:74). He soon began to hold many of his early cottage meetings at the Little Carib

189 This highlights further the importance and symbolism of Woodbrook as an institution in the emergence of the new Trinidadians and backing Mary's observation that in the 40s and 50s Woodbrook was really the juncture were the lower middle class entered the professional class 215

Theatre (Sankeralli 2001 :2). At these meetings Williams and his colleagues, who

included young dynamic East Indians, articulated their cross-ethnic solidarity and desire

to "create and lead a nationalist movement in Trinidad and Tobago based on disciplined, nationalist, party politics" (Meighoo 2006: 13).

By now the Woodbrook class of person represented the culmination of a process begun after Emancipation. Mostly as beneficiaries of limited educational opportunities for locals, a lower middle class had developed into a concrete middle class stratum in local society and politics (Craig 1970:414) with professions such as doctors, teachers, lawyers, pharmacists and journalists. This is not to say there were not confrontations and agitations with other class groups in Trinidad. There were; most specifically with the working class masses both prior to and after the election. However by the mid 1960s it was the new Trinidadians, a class of people symbolised in the middle class of

W oodbrook and their Afro-Saxons values, who would control the destiny of the island.

In Her Own Words: Cherry's Childhood (1950 - 1970)

In this second part of the chapter, through the thematic analysis of conversations I had with Cherry Robinson190 (a Woodbrook neighbour of mine during the period July

2007 and May 2008) the era 1950-1970, recognised as one of "great nationalist fervour" 191 that ultimately leads to Independence, is discussed. Cherry and I both lived on

19° Cherry was born in 1946 and has lived her whole life in Woodbrook

191 In terms of nationalist culture, during the period 1950-1970, there is an Afro-Trinidadian middle class takeover of Carnival and its central elements pan, calypso and mas, which for political 191 purposes are portrayed as centrepieces of national culture • In many places this era is referred to as the 216

Roberts Street. Cherry always seemed concerned for my safety and no matter the hour I

returned home looked out of her window and sent a wave of relief in my direction.

Perhaps it was because this is an area of Woodbrook whose buildings and streets are

today in a state of disrepair compared with other parts of the suburbs. Needless to say we

spoke often.

In this section, her words, their analysis and then a discussion of Eric Williams

and his street University of Woodford Square illustrate stages 4 and 5 of Gramsci' s

theory of historical bloc.

"I was born in Woodbrook, in our family house. My mother came from eleven siblings and I have two sisters and two brothers. I grew up in a family where things were affordable. My grandfather was a policeman and my grandma's side had family in the States and the UK who sent money. My grandparents had a phone, pitch oil stove, fridge, grammar phone, car, we had all that; not many others around did. I remember my grandmother would fill up ice in trays and then wrap it up in paper and put it in the deep freeze and on a Sunday all the neighbours would come to ask for ice and she'd have this ice there. My grandmother used to have a little oven so ifthe neighbours wanted to make a special cake they would ask her and she would put the cake in the oven. So it was really a sharing, a living together. I went to a small school. Originally right around the block. There is a red house 192 there now. It's not registered but it's a 'crazy house '. There was a woman who ran a private school down there. I went there first and then I went to the primary school where Bishop's Centenary is now. There was a private school there called Woodbrook PC from there I went to the secondary school where Tranquillity is now. Back then it was wooden houses, a lot of fruit trees. A lot of the houses changed from wood in the 60s. People were living and sharing bathrooms, it was a communal sort of living then. As kids we used to run in the street, climbing trees, going into anybody's yard who had mango trees or whatever they had. It was a community way. Things that brought people together outside of being neighbours were the Roman Catholic Church, the Anglican Church, the Methodist Church.

191 In terms of nationalist culture, during the period 1950-1970, there is an Afro-Trinidadian middle class takeover of Carnival and its central elements pan, calypso and mas, which for political 191 purposes are portrayed as centrepieces of national culture . In many places this era is referred to as the The 'Golden Age of Carnival.' At this time, Woodbrook and Belmont, two suburbs of Port of Spain, solidify their claims to be the heart and centre of Carnival arts/production.

192 A "crazy house" here refers to a mental hospital/institution for the mentally ill 217

Going to Church was a must. There was even ajoke -though I was a Roman Catholic, if we played with you, and your mother had belonged to the Ebenezer Church, and my Grandmother feel you went to Church in the morning at eight o'clock and you just playing, playing, playing, and we going to Church two o'clock in the day, we all dress and we come to church with you all. So yes we shared in that way too. There was not a problem everybody went into everybody's yard. We played football, we played cricket, we rode bike on the streets. The young fellas would come in from work at half past four. In most homes it was a normal thing to have chores to do, whether your parents minding chickens or whether you had to get the bread or whatever it is, but then you would all of a sudden notice at the lamp post there at the end of the road, you would hear the whistling and then all of a sudden people would be liming at the lamppost and you would hear them laughing, talking, whatever it is. The older community would even put out benches there and sit down and then around half past eight, nine, you'd see everyone going into their house. And that just doesn't happen anymore. Different generations would hang out together to a point too. Although when the big people assemble, come in and say good evening, good afternoon, whatever they say, the children knew to don't ever sit between big company and listen to their conversations. I never grew up inside. I grew up out there. There was always a mixture of people. On the corner there was Spaniards, in the big house was a lady called Molly Gaskin, a big lady, she was Indian. We were Negros, and next to us there were Jews and Russians living, then there was a whole mixture of people, and we all played together and nobody felt you were white or green or whatever. I think this was something typical of Trinidad. People talk about race, and well my husband comes from Cedros, and Cedros was a mixture of Indians and Black people, and they mixed, they intermarried or whatever it was and no one looked at it. When I was growing up I would not say there wasn't a race issue. But in the sense when you went for jobs at the bank it wasn't only your colour but where you come from. If you come from Laventille or Morvant [black lower class areas] they don't want you. It was more about area. If you were from Woodbrook you were more likely to get the job. If they heard you came from a certain area or even school it was 'uh uh'. Even if you grew up in Woodbrook, and maybe they thought you went to some ordinary secondary school and you were up against girls who went to Convent and St Josephs, higher schools, they would figure those children are more trained and disciplined. Then we had a black power uprising. The thing started in Canada at a university up there and you had Trinidadians and West Indians in Canada, up there, and they picked it up here. Royal Bank was one of their targets because you never saw at that time black people working at the banks and they targeted them on their march and they really had to change. In those days the traffic was nothing like it is now. Woodbrook when I was growing up, before the businesses escalated, W oodbrook was considered a residential area and you had people of a certain class living in Woodbrook, upper class, so you would find teachers, doctors, skilled professionals but as time moved on everybody just moved out, you know. They moved out, they were looking for a more. I don't know how you put it, they wanted to be in a posh area. Well they went to Fairways, to Maraval. 218

From children we took part in Carnival. We may not have played mas but we would visit the steelpan yards, Silver Stars, lower down you had Star Lift, it had Invaders and we were allowed to go with our parents, we were allowed to go into the pan yards and they would play Monday Mas, Shindig or whatever. When you reached a certain age they let you play mas but there was always kiddie Carnival and most parents involve their children in it. They had families making mas like George Bailey on Powell Street and you will find a lot of these fellas [points behind her toward the next street], like Stephen Derek, he may have been with George Bailey as a young boy. You understand me. George Bailey died young and I could remember the local community, everybody took this thing hard, but then his brothers took on, carried it on, Alvin. The sense of community between now and then in Woodbrook has changed. We used to send our seven year old around the corner to buy stuff. I can't do that again. I have two granddaughters and I cannot think to do that. I would never see her come back. From that point of view I think people just remain in their homes. They would visit but it's not that community feeling anymore. Then different blocks would lime with different blocks. You see we all went to school together and then the playground by the fire station we would all go down on a Saturday. And then where Hilo is on the opposite side there is a big church now there used to be a cinema and we all used to go there it used to be Astor. It has all changed it's not the same people who lived here when I was growing up. In this street there aren't many 'old livers' left [People who grew up here as children]. People have died, and the usual thing, their children have grown and married and moved out and have shown no interest in coming back so they have sold the properties. These people haven't all moved abroad they just moved out of Woodbrook."

Analysis

Community and Interaction

The picture Cherry tells of the period 1950-1970 is dominated by the idea of community across class, race and ethnicity lines - strikingly similar to the rhetoric

professed by Williams in the formation of the PNM. For my purposes, I suggest it speaks to the disappearance of an older more racist and colonial influenced middle class, and the emergence of a newer more cosmopolitan composition of residents in Woodbrook. This picture was shared by another resident Tony Martin (1981: 17) when speaking to Burton

Sankeralli about the era 1940 to 1960. 219

The racial diversity of my comer of Woodbrook was matched by its amazing class diversity. One block away over Tragarete Road was St Clair, the country's most prestigious address. Within yards of my house, east and west along Roberts Street, there were barrack yards. I moved effortlessly back and forth along this entire spectrum. [cited in Sankeralli 2001 :2].

In Cherry's recollection of her childhood in Woodbrook she stresses sharing and living together. In the story of her grandmother's stove and refrigerator, we can read, in support of the quote above, the newer middle-class in Woodbrook was comprised of social elements on either side of the economic spectrum, those with money and those newly making their way into money.

Cherry's repetition of activities that took place in the street -- play as children, adults "liming," and conversations between households - indicates neighbourliness during the 1950s and 60s amongst the residents in her part of Woodbrook. She describes the osmosis of private and public spheres. This lends itself to the sense private attitudes were permeated by streams of communal life. Woodbrook appears in Cherry's narrative as a place where the street seems to migrate into the living room (Benjamin 1985) providing a metaphor of the emerging "Trinidadian" - as a people interpenetrated by a plethora of new and old ideas, unforeseen constellations and mixtures Euro-American academics still find puzzling because of their comparative distinction. This contradiction is a theme similarly portrayed in the poetry of Derek Walcott (1990), who moved to

Woodbrook in this era and put on many works at the Little Carib Theatre. Walcott suggested an ability in these new post-colonials to straddle more than one tradition, to take the public world of the colony and mix it with private cultural memories. Both

Walcott and Cherry support a suggestion of continued transculturation in the day-to-day 220

life experience of multicultural Woodbrook. Anthropologist Burton Sankeralli notes in

his description of the place where Beryl McBurnie grew up:

1 The Woodbrook of the first half of the 20 h century was perhaps as stratified and conservative as Trinidad ever got. Ahye describes it as 'the most conservative and consciously British community in colonised Trinidad and Tobago. Yet it was an integral part of a culturally rich West Port of Spain. Here in large measure may be traced the origins of the steelpan. Ellie Mannette and the Invaders steel band itself based in Woodbrook and were supported by Beryl. Here the cultural traditions of Europe, Africa and India creatively collided .. .It should be noted that in the Trinidadian space as a whole class distinctions are quite fluid. West Port of Spain was no exception, elite and poor communities - the barrack yards - were to be found close to each other. [Sankeralli 2001:1-2].

Cherry's sense of community, we can imagine, ties into a larger sense of cultural

solidarity taking place in the 1950s generated by nationalist sentiment and an invigorated

sense of cultural selfhood; a cultural solidarity perhaps in line again with Best's idea of

"automatic solidarity" and making something out of necessity.

Carnival and George Bailey

From a child, Cherry took part in Carnival. This is an important observation. It·

speaks to the changing gender and class composition 193 of a festival previously

dominated by men and an easing of the Victorian morality we saw in Mary's recollections. 194 Writing in the mid 1950s, it was a change Powrie recognised too (1956).

193 "Middle-class attitudes had changed greatly after the war. Before the war, 'few parents would consent to their daughters being interfered with by male revellers, especially those from lower class bands.' By the mid 1950s, 'street bands contain a fair proportion of women and there is now no rooted objection to women taking part in such a band."' (Green and Scher 2007: 17).

194 Interestingly and building off Mary's observation about "cliques" in the previous section, these "cliques" once defined by Church allegiance are now transferred to the street via Carnival, as Powrie writing in 1956 notes. "The number of middle class bands taking part each year is far greater than before the war. This is partly die to the break-down of middle-class reluctance to be seen openly joining street 221

Powrie attributed the reasons for an increasing presence of women in the "Carnival of the

streets" to their "economic Emancipation through wartime employment, which allowed

them greater social freedom" (Green and Scher 2007: 17).

Women have benefited from this Emancipation in two main ways. First, they are less inclined to fear the accusation of sexual promiscuity when they have been seen in male company or enjoying the social diversions for so long the preserve of men. Second, a greater variety of occupations are open to them, respectable and not too badly paid. This has given them a certain degree of economic independence and parading the streets in costumes with a band is a significant response, for costumes have to be paid for. [Powrie 1956:230].

George Bailey, 195 considered Trinidad Carnival's greatest bandleader was born in

1935 on a street two blocks away from where Cherry grew up. He attended Tranquillity

Government School and produced his first Carnival band at 21, a young age for a

bandleader both then and now. His bands are remembered for how they changed popular

opinion of Africa, history, and the Carnival arts (Kerrigan and Laughlin 2004), an

observation in line with the growing self-confidence characteristic of the time.

Bailey learned much from his father, Aldwyn "Sonny" Bailey, himself a

bandleader, who produced his owrI presentations in Woodbrook from 1932 to 1940, and

George was also exposed to the craft of early Woodbrook masmen like Leonard Carty,

Ormand Hackshaw, and his father's friend Ken Morris. From these Carnival elders he

parades, and partly to the clique situation. The middle class bands tend to represent social cliques in their midst, and it does something to express group solidarity" (1956:230).

195 "With his 1960 band Ye Saga of Merrie England, a pageant of English history, the "theatre of the streets" came of age. As Peter Minshall once remarked, "Who before had ever brought a royal carriage, complete with four white horses, knights, and a black Queen Elizabeth, on stage?" The Grand Stand audience responded with a prolonged standing ovation. His historical presentations won him the band of the year title four years in a row, from 1959 to 1962 (a record that would not be equalled for 30 years), but in 1963 Bailey became restless. With The Realm of Fancy Bats and Clowns he launched a new genre, "fantasy mas", taking the traditional bat and clown characters in a splendidly fresh direction, dabbling with what many designers today call the "kinetic principle." In 1969, as cries of "black power" began echoing from North America to the tiny states of the Caribbean, Bailey produced Bright Africa, another triumphant assertion of both his heritage and his imagination" (Kerrigan and Laughlin 2003) 222

learned the realist tradition of "historical mas" and applied it to regal presentations of

1 Africa. Previously in the Carnivals of the 19th and early 20 h century Africa was only ever represented in tribal and savage Carnival imagery.

Cherry's recollection of Bailey's death and the impact it had on the Woodbrook community further suggests the closeness of the neighbourhood and Carnival as a mechanism of connection able to cross lines and cliques in the growing self-definition of this community (Oxaal 1968:148). It is also important to recognise Bailey's significance, along with others like Harold Saldenah, Cito Velasquez and Beryl McBumie to mention a few people, in the transformation of Carnival from perceived festival of the street to a

"theatre of the streets" - a festival of artistic merit. Each Carnival artist, and there were many in this loose social movement, possessed the skill and imagination to elevate what was once seen as a lower class diversion into a nationalist movement easily co-opted by the political class.

In only his second year as a bandleader and designer, [Bailey] presented Back to Africa, perhaps the most celebrated band in the history of modem Carnival, winning the 1957 band of the year award. With this single presentation, Bailey changed popular perceptions of Africa, history, and Carnival itself. Traditional African masquerade, dating back to the era before Emancipation, used rags, paint, and spears to portray an image of a miserable, uncivilised past. Bailey flaunted this stereotype by drawing on the elaborate pomp usually associated with bands depicting the history of Europe. His magnificent, meticulously researched African costumes asked masqueraders to think instead of a regal heritage. Before Bailey, the crowds did not believe any African mas could match the grandeur of Roman or Greek themes. He proved them wrong. It was a watershed moment, both for Carnival and for Trinidad society (Kerrigan and Laughlin 2004:44).

The talent of this generation of Carnival designers at a time when a nationalist movement was growing and looking for new traditions and symbols was not missed by

Eric Williams and the newly emerged Trinidadian people he wanted to symbolise. He 223

appropriated the reinvention and the festival itself became a symbol of a newly emergent nation. In doing so the nationalists took a "vulgar" celebration of the lower class masses and recast it as a "demonstration of the genius of the people" (Green and Scher 2007:19).

Green and Scher go on to note such a move was a central pillar in establishing the PNM's legitimacy to first agitate and then rule as the representative of "the people" (2007:3-4).

This illuminates one way in which the Western cultural values and interests of Afro­

Saxons politicians came to be the interests of an entire nation.

In consolidating their political power and exerting their vision of national culture the new middle-class and their political leaders were asserting their defiance against colonial rule (Oxaal 1968) while at the same time sustaining its logic of divide and conquer. In this circumstance the carnival arts can be seen as a manifestation of stage four of Gramsci' s historical bloc; "a single combination of ideas becoming dominant and pervasive throughout society" (Gramsci 1971 :406). The increased sophistication of the

Carnival arts and other forms of popular culture became symbols of the dominance and legitimacy for ideas of self-rule and government.

Race, Class and Cliques

In Trinidad of the 1950s and 60s, some scholars note that "race ... had begun to play a lesser role, and education and employment status emerged as the major determinants of social class by the post war period" (Briggs and Conway 1975,

Goodenough 1978). Reasons for this are supported in the comments Cherry makes about getting jobs at the bank. Race, while still a factor in social relations, appeared to fall 224

lower down on the list of qualities required for such a job. Education, where one went to school and, location, where one lived and was from according to Cherry, became central considerations injob qualification. We can suggest one's school was an indicator of the type of ideas a person had assimilated (preferably Afro-Saxon middle class or upper class

British ones) in this case ideas tied to the teachers and bourgeois values stressed by the

"best schools" (Campbell 1996). In terms of location, Cherry suggests Woodbrook was deemed an area producing and containing residents who were acceptable to first the colonial and then the postcolonial elite controlling local banks at the time. Writing in the early 1970s Camejo supports this analysis when he says; "While race is probably no longer the overt factor in social and economic stratification a form of discrimination still exists, this is based on social class and is termed 'market discrimination"' (1971).

An added way to look at this issue as it pertains to Woodbrook is to borrow from both Sudama ( 1980) and Mary who speak of class fractions and cliques respectively.

From Sudama is the claim he makes concerning "the identification of differentiated groups of places within class boundaries" and his question about social groups addressing this issue: "if the ideological and political practices of agents differ but they cannot be differentiated by the places they occupy in the economic structure, is this a sufficient criterion for the demarcation of class fractions?" (Sudama 1980:21 ). In answer, I suggest an extension of Mary's notion of cliques. Cliques represented different groupings within the same class group, as seems to be the case in multicultural Woodbrook. As a class, the various cliques have the same "political and ideological effects."196 However, as cliques

196 This phrase is borrowed from the neo-Marxist Poulantzas who stated: "If certain groupings which at first sight seem to occupy different places in economic relations can be considered as belonging to 225

differences between cliques maybe less pronounced than others. Whatever the case, the existence of such cliques within one neighbourhood, lends itself to an idea stressed earlier in this project - the ability for individuals to learn much about various different cultural traditions in day-to-day interaction with neighbours. It also speaks to the way in which

Trinidadian multiculturalism was co-opted by the class interests of Afro-Saxon ideology to replace the racism of colonialism in the contemporary day to day life with class hierarchy, consolidation and conflict.

In this analysis of Cherry's narrative we saw how "a single combination of ideas,"

(Gramsci 1971:406) which I call the ideology of self-government, emerged. In the next section we see how Eric Williams took these ideas and made them "dominant and pervasive throughout society" (Gramsci 1971:406), leading to stage five of Gramsci's historical bloc, "the moment of historical bloc with its synthesis of economic, political, intellectual, and moral ideas." Something I suggest can be symbolised in Independence.

Eric Williams, the University of Woodford Square and Protecting the Interests of Capital

During the year 2007-2008, I spent much time in downtown Port of Spain heading to the public library to search archival materials. On my trips to the National Library of

Trinidad and Tobago (NALIS) on Hart and Abercromby Streets I crossed Woodford

Square. Each time, I felt like the shadows of thousands of people, shadows I couldn't see, stood all over the square. The square had energy impossible to put a finger on. Little surprise perhaps because in this square there is much history. A history alive still, both in 226

memory and in the people who continue to orate and attend what is best described today

197 as a speaker's comer .

Just over fifty years ago, the square was Trinidad's first university- "The

University of Woodford Square." It emerged in 1955, as Eric Williams and his colleagues

sought a way to produce an informed citizenry, politically conscious and conversant with

a local account of history (Palmer 2006:9). As Williams told the gathered crowd at the time:

Somebody once said that all that was needed for a university was a book, and the branch of a tree; someone else went further and said that a university should be a university in overalls. With a bandstand, a microphone, a large audience and slacks and hot shirts, a topical subject for discussion, the open air, and a beautiful tropical night, we have all the essentials for a university. Now that I have resigned my position at Howard University in the U.S.A. the only university in which I shall lecture in the future is the University of Woodford Square and its several branches throughout the length and breadth of Trinidad and Tobago. [Williams cited in Lamming 1991:92].

What started out at the Trinidad Public Library as a number of well-received speeches on "The Social and Political History of the West Indies" grew after June 21st

1955 with William's dismissal from the Anglo-American Caribbean Commission.198 The same day Williams went to the square and delivered a fifty-one-page lecture documenting his relationship with the Commission and the reasons for his removal. Ryan, citing

197 Today the square still functions as a forum for people to speak up. There is a blackboard on the eastern side that lists the topics to be discussed each day/ Most of the days take place at 7am and are open to anyone. I attended on occasion and my one remark would be its not a stage for the softly-spoken or the faint at heart!

198 "By 1955 his relations with the organisation he worked for, the Anglo-American Caribbean Commission, had reached a low point. He was dismissed in June 1955, and he told the public in a famous speech: 'I was born here, and here I stay, with the people of Trinidad and Tobago, who educated me free of charge for nine years at Queen's Royal College and for five years at Oxford University, who have made me whatever I am. I am going to let down my bucket where I am, now right here with you.' This speech marked his launch into politics. In July 1955 he opened 'the University of Woodford Square" (Brereton 1981:233-4). 227

Williams himself, claims there were some 10,000 people in Woodford Square to hear this

lecture (2009:75). Its message was one of solidarity, of a fight against the "Imperialist

enemy," in "the cause of the West Indian people." At its end the square roared its

approval, the "people's parliament" was born. Here, over the next few years Williams

gained a loyal public constituency and imparted his sense of national pride. His lectures

were varied and topical with such themes as: "The Educational Problems of the

Caribbean in Historical Perspective," "John Locke," "Lands, Peoples, Problems," "Massa

Day Done," "The British West Indian Federation," and "The Democratic Tradition in

Western Civilisation and its Relevance for the West Indies."

The working class masses were proud to have an international scholar amongst

them. As Williams stressed national pride and confidence, a bond was forged. On the

road to independence this was a bond central to the success of his PNM party. It allowed politics to move on to a terrain distinct from the class conflict, trade unions and the existing political organisations, it was a terrain of "national unity" with its combination of economic, political, intellectual, and moral ideas (Gramsci 1971: 182).

This small park in downtown Port of Spain, named after the British governor199 who commissioned it in the early 19th century, and dominated by the city's Anglican

Cathedral on its southern side and the immense Edwardian fa9ade of the Red House on its western side, the nation's Parliament building, became a centre of education for the masses of Trinidad and Tobago. An "Alexandria of the Caribbean" - as a gentleman in the park told me. Like Cipriani, Williams was "organising" the "masses" and leading

199 We should not ignore the irony that Governor Woodford, architect of the most famous square in Trinidad where Williams built national identity, was also a firm believer in racial ranking and white superiority. 228

them. He believed his intellect and lower class origins meant he could lead them and the

country to Independence and freedom from colonial control. He was an Afro-Saxon,

educated, learned and shaped by the W oodbrook class. He was a graduate of the British

forms of government and debate. He had been assimilated more than most by Western

capitalist values. Williams was a bourgeois "organic intellectual" and though he believed

and installed himself as the sole "professor" who could lead and free his "people" he was

organising them for an international system of global capitalist relations and neo-colonial

economic inequality (Franco 2007:34).

William's lectures: turned history, the history of the Caribbean into gossip so that the story of a people's predicament seemed no longer the infinite barren tract of documents, dates and texts. Everything became news: slavery, colonialisation, the forgivable deception of metropolitan rule, the sad and inevitable unawareness of native production. His lectures retained always the character of whisper which everyone was allowed to hear, a rumour which experience had established as truth. [Lamming quoted in Ryan 2009:54].

It is agreed by most commentators that it was at Woodford Square that Williams won the support of the working class and the urban poor (Phillips 1984:146, Ryan 2009,

Brereton 1981, Palmer 2006). It was here that the most "politically informed and sophisticated citizenry in the Anglophone Caribbean" of the 1950s was forged (Palmer

2006:285). Williams' rhetoric was both radical and empowering. He gave the island a sense of self-confidence in determining its own destiny. He cried down the imperial powers of first Britain and then the United States. He argued for a clean slate, a local foundation for the new Trinidad and Tobago he envisioned. And he rallied the masses in the same vein, achieving a consensus that swept his party to election victory again in

1961. His mandate was now large enough and he pushed for Independence immediately, first as a member state in a new Federation of the West Indies, and when that failed, the 229

Independence of Trinidad and Tobago alone. On August 31st 1962, Trinidad and Tobago

was declared an Independent country.

Of course in this era Williams caught the eye of the United States who were

already concerned about Castroism and the tum to the left many Caribbean countries

seemed to be anticipating. Yet while Williams' party offered the road to political

independence, ultimately, like Cipriani before him, Williams did not break the colonial

stranglehold or the power of the local agro/industrial commercial bourgeoisie represented

by such entities as Tate and Lyle and Texaco in fact he encouraged it. His would never be a tum to the left; he supported the interests of capital long before, and after, he needed the political support of labour to ensure his political aims. As Ryan observes: "Williams' constitutional proposals were a model of moderation. What was striking about them were the enormous concessions which were made to the vested interests ... which on the surface, Williams appeared to be attacking" (2009). As such, Williams can be viewed as an agent of mystification obscuring his compromised intent and the institutional framework of capitalism his government supported.

Williams made an important contribution to the education of the masses, which over the years as others have pointed out had a cumulative effect on the educational levels of the general population in Trinidad and led to further middle class expansion

(Phillips 1984: 149). However, Williams was not as radical or counter-hegemonic as his words made him seem. Shortly after Independence he made his peace with imperialism

200 and it was not in favour of the masses but rather a neo-colonial future . Some say this

200 "But Williams had eventually made his peace with imperialism - a restless, irritable peace to be sure, but a peace. Williams the tragic statesman: the soul of the angry petit bourgeois intellectual in the black hide of the opportunistic colonial politician" (Oxaal 1971 :60) 230

was inevitable, as prior to Independence a development policy of "Industrialisation by

Invitation2oi,, forged a complete reliance on foreign capital, technology, expertise,

manufacturing industries and personnel. Others say Williams was always intent on

turning his back on the forms of militant agitation and anti-colonial politics he formerly

paid lip service to (Phillips 1984:144-145). To convince the colonial government of his

ability to lead, he had put his and the country's future in the hands of Euro-American

capitalist hegemony.

Shortly after independence in 1962, the Negro petty bourgeoisie had to come to terms in a more direct way with the reality of the economic power of the international bourgeoisie. In any event, the Negro petty bourgeoisie, despite its nationalistic rhetoric, was favourably disposed to a dominant role for this class. And, in the absence of an indigenous bourgeoisie, the strategy of capitalist development espoused by the Negro petty bourgeoisie automatically confirmed its dependence on the international bourgeoisie. It was therefore in these early post­ independence years that the alliance between the Negro petty bourgeoisie and the international bourgeoisie was effectively consolidated as the dominant relationship in the state. By 1964, Texaco Trinidad Inc. had become one of the chief underwriters of the development programme of the Government by taking up a disproportionate share of the Independence Bonds issued. Other locally based multinationals followed the example and became 'good' corporate citizens. [Sudama 1980:41].

201 "The rationale behind Industrialisation by Invitation' as a model for development was that strategy wuld provide the capital that was badly needed for economic growth, would lead to the emergence of a class of skilled workmen and also create one of supervisors/managers, in addition to providing employment to ease the chronic unemployment situation which then existed. But the imperialists were not interested in creating employment or contributing to the growth of the economy; they were not interested in trade outlets, raw materials, cheap labour and political stability, all of which were offered by the policies of the state. Trinidad thus became a net capital exporter, exporting capital in the form of profits, royalties, fees and revenue forgone" (Philips 1984:156) 231

Fallen Heroes

Silvio Torres-Salliant's work (2006) discusses debunking Caribbean father

figures, "heroes" he calls them, as an effective postcolonial strategy. By

"unromanticising" them we see the real texture of everyday life and decision-making

individuals contend with. Understanding the flaws of our idols make us more realistic

about our past. While these sentiments are no doubt important that is not what I am

stressing here. Rather I want to suggest here is that Williams and his Woodbrook

sensibilities, the middle class world of the central political class in Trinidad, the Afro-

Saxons, in gaining control of the state was always, since the 19th century, and still is today, aligned with the capital interests of Euro-American capitalism and elites elsewhere who are intent on weakening working class politics such as the trade union movement202

(Phillips 1984:149). Woodbrook represents an historical bloc and how it ultimately, neither self-consciously nor through force, manufactured consent and negotiated assimilation of the interests of global capitalism, from the first instance to the present.

C. L. R. James, Williams' mentor and ultimately most disappointed critic (as a result of Williams increasing megalomania), described Williams as an Afro-Saxon of the highest grade. Yes, through independence he enabled stage five of Gramsci' s historical bloc, the moment of historical bloc with its synthesis of economic, political, intellectual, and moral ideas - nonetheless, he was purely and simply a bourgeoisie politician. As such "it was only a question of time before the victories of [his] nationalist generation, with their primary mission of formal political independence, would be viewed as hollow

202 "By promises, positions, appointments, of labour senators, the state functionaries led by Wil.liams were able to control, divide, separate, and create infighting within the movement. The culmination of these conflicts resulted in weakening of the potency of the trade union as the only existing organisation of the working class" (Phillips 1984: 151) 232

and stale by the rapidly growing numbers of young, black and unemployed" (Oxaal

1971 :26) Something that becomes immediately apparent a mere eight years after

Independence with the 1970s Black Power203 Riots wherein the nationalist movement toward self-affirmation and governance was found to be not as revolutionary as it seemed. Rather it became clear Eric Williams was no socialist ( Oxaal 1971, Phillips

1984: 141) and his state was an "active collaborator" with foreign and local capital interests.204 As Sankeralli snipes, "Nationalism degenerated into a new bourgeois

Eurocentrism" and "an even more vicious colonial bureaucratic power structure was imposed" (Sankeralli 2001 :5). The relations of domination and subordination of

203 A word about the label 'Black Power.' To European and US readers such a label is easily associated with the Civil Rights movements in the US. However, while certain ideas were transferred from Canada203 and the US to Trinidad and the wider Caribbean at this time (Oxaal 1971), and there were certainly protagonists who sought to stress the 'Blackness' of the participants, such a limited perspective is incorrect. "'Blackness' was essentially viewed in the movement's rhetoric and ideology as a socio­ economic condition ... very far indeed from advocating ... ethnic exclusiveness, at the expense of class solidarity" (Oxaal 1971:41). Between February 26th and April 21'1 1970 the movement gained momentum in rallies at Woodford Square (from which Williams had long since withdrawn), before taking to the streets of Trinidad and Tobago airing frustrations and demands in a very masculine language that shook every fundamental institution in the country including church, state, business, political parties, army and judiciary (Craig 1970:392). The government fell under intense pressure, wobbled greatly - to the extent US naval ships were on stand-by off coast - headed off an attempted coup by the military at TetreTron and only regained control by declaring a state of emergency lasting for two months. The black power riots of 1970s then, were a cross-ethnic, cross-gender, cross-class based movement whose participants were against racial discrimination and foreign domination. As Raffique Shah, forcefully lays out in his recollections of the movement: "I have listened to, and read, with more patience ... the distortions peddled by a number of self­ proclaimed Indian academics and extremists over the involvement, or absence thereof (their view), of Indians in the Black Power movement of 1970. Thirty years after one of the biggest social movements of the 20th century rocked the then seemingly stable ship of the PNM Government, it is downright dishonest of people who weren't there, and who know little or nothing about the events of 1970, to attempt to re-write history in the most distorted form in a bid to exclude an entire ethnic group from gaining the credit it earned during that turbulent period" (Shah 2000).

204 Williams was far more interested in industrialisation and the form of industrialisation he chose replicated the structure of Euro-American society. It was an Afro-Saxon stance many feel betrayed the cultural substance of the people whom his "charismatic authority" carried to independence (Oxaal 1968, Sankeralli 2001:4). This is most obviously seen in the dominant Western capitalist values that came to permeate the middle class and the entrenchment of foreign capital in manufacturing, the media and business (Phillips 1984:158). 233

colonialism became the relations of domination and subordination of capitalism in a blur

and mystification of Independence.

Postscript: 1980s-1990s W oodbrook and the Territorialisation of Petro-Capital

The dominant economic activity in Trinidad for the majority of the 20th century was the production and export of oil. The oil sector was - and still is on some levels - an economic enclave, operated mainly by foreign corporations with capital-intensive operations, employing relatively few workers at high wages (Hilaire 2000:7). Since

Williams and Independence the main bridge between the oil sector and the rest of the economy has been taxes on oil company exports. In 1973/74, due to the quadrupling of international oil prices Trinidad experienced a decade of prosperity when government revenues exploded recalled locally as the "Oil boom."205 Initially, expenditures were restrained and a substantial proportion of the oil windfall was saved. After a year or so, as international reserves soared, government expenditure picked up - the "boom" was underway - and a classic "Dutch disease"206 experience shortly followed (Hilaire

2000:8).

205 "The quadrupling of oil prices in 1973 revived the economy and created a 9.6-percent real annual growth rate from 1974 to 1979. Trinidadians and Tobagonians, nicknamed the "Arabs of the Caribbean," were known throughout the region in the 1970s for the Carnival of consumption that they participated in with their instant oil wealth. The downturn in oil prices in 1982, however, plummeted the economy into a deep depression in 1983 from which the country had not emerged by 1987. Negative growth peaked in 1984, when the economy contracted by nearly 11 percent" (Meditz and Hamatty 1987).

206 "Dutch disease" is an economic concept that tries to explain the apparent relationship between the exploitation of natural resources and a decline in the manufacturing sector combined with moral fallout. The theory is that an increase in revenues from natural resources will deindustrialise a nation's economy by raising the exchange rate, which makes the manufacturing sector less competitive and public services entangled with business interests. 234

In 1982, global oil prices dropped dramatically and the local economy went into

decline for the next decade. The large middle class however had grown accustomed to a

certain Western lifestyle and for political expediency the necessary adjustment measures

were delayed. Consequently, the country's social ecology experienced the consequences

of massive external debt, rising unemployment, high inflation, falling real estate prices,

crashing personal income, sharp income disparity2°7 and burgeoning fiscal and current

account deficits. In short time Trinidad and Tobago ran through its large stock of foreign exchange reserves accumulated during the oil boom. Serious adjustment only began around the mid-l 980s with the tightening of import and exchange controls and devaluation in 1985. In search of a solution to their economic problems and in common with many other post-colonial societies the government was pushed into a formal program of structural adjustment in collaboration with the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Under the terms of the agreement, the government was required to implement a number of policies that were designed to shift resources from consumption to investment and to alter the balance in favour of private sector and export sector growth

(Bynoe 2000: 1) in a process Harvey might call a transnational consolidation of class power (2004) and I call neo-colonialism - for this was a process of subservience begun with the colonial relationship.

207 This is something that has continued well into the present and as the United Nations Office on Drugs and Violence notes: "International research has consistently reported a positive relationship between economic inequality and crime. This relationship does not hold for all types of crime, but is especially true for violent crimes including homicide. A high level of inequality is usually an indicator of other imbalances and social difficulties in a society. It is usually associated with the presence of large excluded sub­ populations, or dislocations associated with the early stages of transition from traditional agricultural economic structures to more modern industrial or service economies, and perhaps with a syndrome of other social problems that give rise to high levels of social violence (Harriot 2002: 10) 235

In terms of "popular culture," following the oil boom years of the early 1970s

Trinidad's consumption of media, consumer goods and professional styles became

decidedly North American (Miller 1997). From music and dress to sports and TV the

language, sty le and frame of reference of a majority of the urban population exhibited

North American cultural influence (Miller 1994).

As a result of IMF and World Bank directed structural adjustment requirements, and then a distinct upsurge in the development of the local energy scene, by the late 90s, the economic situation in Trinidad generally can be described as one of neoliberal consolidation.208 Cronyism of the state and private sector cliques established by Afro-

Saxon politicians and capitalists in the mid twentieth century absorbed much of the new

investment and offered little economic benefit to the wider society (Ferguson 2005:378).

Nonetheless, the petroleum sector was revived and became the liquid natural gas

sector, as Trinidad and Tobago emerged from economic woes as a small but significant player on the global energy scene. In fact, over this period the twin-island republic moved from a moderate oil-based economy to a globally important natural gas based one that accounted for a large percentage of all US Liquid Natural Gas imports as economic enclaves reaped the capital benefits of this situation the wider society began to experience

208 Neoliberalism is the dominant global economic system of our time (e.g. Klein 2004, Ong 2006,) and a multifaceted form of predatory capitalism. For David Harvey (2005 & 2006) neoliberal flows of capital, especially those connected with petro-production (a fundamental mechanism in the unequal movement of global capital) not only create new social landscapes between the already wealthy and the poor (Lansley 2006, Watts 200 I, Coronil 1997), but 'construct consent' and discursive legitimacy for their accumulation motives by appropriating and also devaluing local cultural forms as masks to distort and distract focus from the slick alliances, vested interests and exclusionary practices embedded in neoliberalism (Ferguson 2005, Henke & Marshall 2003). 236

an intensification of already present forms of structural violence and aggressive class politics brought on by the expansion of neoliberal capitalism.209

Over the period 1990 to 2005 crime and violence in T &T also increased rapidly.

It has been shown that rises in petro-wealth are always accompanied by rises in crime and violence (Peluso & Watts 2001, Coronil 1997) and many local figures such as Judge

Mark Mohammed have linked petro-capital to increased levels of corruption and crime

(Mohammed cited in Joseph 2008). Rather than assume a direct correlation between increasing murder rates and an increased influx of petro-dollars, in the next and final chapter, it is suggested a contributing factor to the rise in crime and violence in

Woodbrook is the foundation and framework of a class based capitalist society that developed out of the social groups made, and the relations laid, during colonialism.

209 In first quarter of 2004 T &T accounted for 80% of all US LNG imports (Kelshall 2004: I) CHAPTER EIGHT:

WOODBROOK TODAY: ETHNIC FLUIDITY,

CLASS CONFLICT AND VIOLENCE

By the mid 1990s there was the depression in the oil price and for a while things got very bad in Woodbrook, mainly because it was so close to downtown. They had previously taken away the police station and in the 90s they had to move one back. The middle class left for Diego Martin, Petit Valley, Westmoorings. They deserted portions of the city. Many Chinese families moved to Canada too. Woodbrook then started to become a playground, first for bands, then casinos; the bohemian capital of Port of Spain. Carnival today in Woodbrook is very much post-WWII, post-Independence - most ofthe development comes from commercialisation. Carnival's positioning in Woodbrook today is important part of understanding what Woodbrook has become (Mary Cain, emphasis mine)

"Patrons liming outside Crobar in Woodbrook, Port-of­ Spain, had to run for cover, early yesterday morning, when gunmen opened fire on a group of people, fatally wounding a 22-year-old man. The gunmen also robbed a senior police officer and another man liming outside the nightclub of their motorcars, before making their escape in three vehicles" - Trinidad Guardian report, June 29, 2009

237 238

Racial and Ethnic Fluidity: An Afternoon 210 on the "Rehab "

Its five minutes to five on a Monday afternoon. I keep looking out of the window for Richard to pull up. "Sweat"211 is always scheduled to start at 5pm, yet never does; regardless I like to be there on time. As we live close to each other and it doesn't make sense for the both of us to drive Richard always passes for me. Besides, the traffic is always bad in Woodbrook, especially now so close to Carnival. Normally - outside

Carnival season- one is guaranteed a journey of at least 15 to 20 minutes instead of the less than five it should take. Today with all the streets in and out ofWoodbrook swollen with sounds and traffic (many people are picking up Carnival costumes and accessories as the city prepares for the annual festival) the place is at a standstill so the company for the drive is good. Sometimes Richard brings his motorbike and I ride pillion. Today he's got his three-year-old son Paul with him so he's using the car.

Richard pulls up, closer to five-thirty than five. He honks outside and I grab my football stuff before locking up first my apartment and then the front gate as I'm constantly reminded to do by my landlady and her numerous wall posters reminding her tenants to be vigilant. I jog between the open drain and the traffic and get in the car.

Inside Paul is bouncing around in the back. He and Richard sing R&B together as I throw my gear in the boot.

210 The exact location of the "Rehab" has been disguised to lend it and its patrons some level of concealment

211 "Goin or comin sweat? [sic]" is a phrase to discern whether one is going to the 'Rehab' or not. It does not necessarily mean is one actually going to play football, but rather is asked to see if one is coming to 'lime' 239

Our short journey to the Rehab, taken four times a week, is always full of

anecdotal material. From the street scenes we witness out of the window and local

driving styles with accompanying horn language specific to Trinidad (Kerrigan 2003), to

the conversations Richard and I have about local incidents, friends, Carnival, crime,

politics, and much else.

The journey is part of our routine. A "routine" is something Richard has stressed

to me as key to staying happy in a small society. Such insights from Richard, someone I

see almost everyday and who's social status and business ventures connect him to all variety of persons in and around Port of Spain, provide a starting point for much of my thinking on Trinidad. As he once told me, the social picture one's gets of Trinidad is

greatly shaped by the Trinidadian who introduces you to others because this is how social hierarchy functions in what he called a "peacock society." To meet and be accepted by the socially popular Richard told me, you must be introduced by the socially popular.

Today we're talking generally about Woodbrook and my research.

He tells me, "If trees had eyes they'd see a lot."

To which I reply, "History?"

Richard responds, "No, crime. They'd be able to tell us what happened and who did it."

Our conversations often function in this way. Where I want to understand the long history of particular social moments Richard disconnects them from history and places the blame and explanation with individuals and their actions. He deals with the problem at hand while I ask questions in order to understand how it may have got there. 240

As we continue the drive Richard is constantly recognised and hailed by numerous other drivers who use the local-three-tap of the car horn to indicate a friendly salutation. Others he knows wave at us as we pass first a Casino and then Veni Mange, a popular restaurant whose owners are his friends.

With Carnival two weeks away many of the voices coming out of the various car windows we edge through in the gridlock ask Richard about tickets for Carnival fetes - whether he has any left, when they can pass by his house to collect them or more generally a "how you goin?" I often think one reason Richard and I are such good friends is not just that we've known each other a long time or I was his younger brother's good friend but that I'm from "foreign" as they say here. Hence I don't carry the same social baggage as others. I don't need extra fete tickets for my friends, I'm not ingrained in the social cliques developed in the local school system. I'm somewhat of an unknown to others but an unknown who Richard says knows how to operate socially with the variety of people and their various backgrounds his work, and sociability, introduces me to. This he has spoken of positively as though I am some form of social and cultural capital in the circles he moves. These circles include the socio-economic conjunction of Woodbrook­ multicultural middle-class and heavily influenced by North American consumer culture; the fellas who hang on the run-down blocs of the less well to do areas of "town" and work for him at various fetes he puts on; and persons across many different professions from all the classes, races and ethnicities represented on the island. These professions include lawyers, gangsters, sports personalities, entertainers, business owners, media persons, government officials, car washers, security guards, cleaners and food vendors.

Richard has remarked he has no problem introducing me to his many friends and contacts 241

because he feels he can leave me by myself with any of them and not worry about me being bored, getting into trouble or offending anyone. While I agree with his commentary it is hard to tell if my success with the people I meet through Richard is purely about my personality or the fact he has introduced me as his friend, and even· sometimes his cousin, and the weight his own status lends me.

After about half an hour we get out of the traffic and head down back streets.

Eventually we slow down and mount the curb to drive onto the "field." Physically, the

Rehab is a large expanse of land reclaimed from the sea, basically landfill covered with grass. As one might imagine this makes for a pretty uneven playing surface with protruding objects like rocks and refuse. One learns quickly that going to ground in a football tackle usually results in "white men" - Trini parlance for grazes that peel off a slither of skin to reveal white flesh under black or tanned skin. On one side of the field is a large open drain backing onto the garden walls of middle-class housing. On the other side a large fence separates the field from a four-lane highway. The screaming of players' nicknames out of the windows of passing cars is a regular occurrence during any game and I'd venture adds to the authenticity and solidarity of "regulars."

From what people told me the Rehab began around 1987. No one seemed to know a precise date and some said it wasn't until 1989, however all agreed it began when a group of male, middle class young adults got together to do two things: play football and smoke marijuana. Over time those two facets attracted others - of various professions, classes, ethnicities, races and abilities - until a routine and a form became established.

The routine was getting together four times a week - Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays and

Saturdays at 5pm and playing football until the light got so bad people couldn't see the 242

ball anymore. The form is an occasion for talking, sharing and bonding between variously economically positioned male individuals that extends in time and space beyond the confines of the field. On the sidelines as some sweat, a "lime" always takes place under the large tamarind trees with those who didn't come to play football, sitting, heckling, and watching the footballers, while ritualistically sharing, passing and praising their joints of marijuana. The topics covered by these limers are diverse and far from senseless, ranging from popular culture, local politics and gossip to the media, science and business.

These Trinidadian afternoons are often a pretty sight. The rains seem to mostly fall in the middle of the day, so by late afternoon the sky is baby blue with a few wispy clouds. Soft winds brush the tall palms spotted around the edges of the Rehab and the temperature while still tropical is cooler in the afternoon than the midday sun. As we pull up, my eagerness to arrive early and Richard's more laidback approach are pitted against each other. Richard always wins. Today only one other car is parked up. No one else has arrived yet.

Mani, a reptile zoo worker, middle class and of Portuguese and Spanish descent exits the parked car.

Richard turns to me and says "boy, Chinee is always be here first, like he don't ever want to stay home." Chinee, is middle-class, a company manager and his parents are of Chinese descent.

Mani approaches our car and says "Mamoo what mischief you causing this afternoon?" before turning to me and shouting "English! You should stop hanging out with this fella he no good." Such social ribbing in Trinidad is quite normal and termed 243

"picong."212 On the Rehab, and this holds in most daily situations in Trinidad too, the ability to give and take picong, to invoke particular selections of style, ethnic humour and language in a form of social ribbing, can be described as a symbolic construction of community (Cohen 1985).213 Its function and ones' participation in it put you on some sort of social inside, at times fleetingly at other times fully, with those around.

Furthermore, all these labels, Mamoo (Indian Uncle), English (which could be viewed as nation, ethnicity, race and class all in one), and Chinee in Trinidad are ethnic markers. In my experience it never appeared they were delivered in a derogatory sense and on the Rehab I've never in fifteen or so years seen people take offence to such labels.

I'm more inclined to view them as playful. Often they are used to introduce oneself to new people. I've known Mani and Chinee for over ten years and only learnt their real names recently. This is not to say tempers don't occasionally fray on the Rehab- of course they do - but they are often about bad tackles, slander, issues to do with money or just the plain frustration of everyday life coming to the surface in a intensely male space of sport and braggadocio.

212 The common Trinbagonian term and local cultural practice of 'picong' (Ho 2000) refers to light comical banter, usually at someone else's expense. It is the way Trinbagonians heckle and mock each other in a friendly manner. The line between humour and insult may be fine and constantly shifting, however, the convivial spirit of picong rarely degenerates into more heated debate and physical altercations. This is because the ability to engage in picong without crossing over into insult is highly valued in Trinidadian culture, and verbal wit is prized over physical strength (Rohlehr 1998). As such 'picong,' can be classed as an element in community building

213 As Cohen notes, community is the experience of sharing forms and particular symbols. Community is "a commonality of form (ways of behaving) whose content (meanings) may vary considerably among its members. The triumph of community is to so contain this variety that its inherent discordance does not subvert the apparent coherence which is expressed by its boundaries ... Thus, although [members of a community] recognise important difference among themselves, they suppose themselves to be more like each other than like the members of other communities. This is precisely because, although the meaning they attach to the symbols may differ, they share the symbols" (Cohen 1985:20-21, original emphasis). 244

As one regular told me, "the rehab is part of our routine. Mondays, Tuesdays,

Thursdays, Saturdays and holidays - it's a given." This consistent attendance, provides

access to lexical terms, rhetoric labels, and styles - everyone who has "paid their dues" -

"gets it;" hence contributing to community. As another of member put it:

It's an institution more than a team. The regularity and the liming create community and the camaraderie extends off the rehab too. Like when Barry [one of the Rehab's best strikers] went to play in the semi-pro league and when he scored Sega [a Rehab regular] would scream 'Rehab' and everyone in the crowd who was from the Rehab would join in. And when Head [another regular] was in the car crash we raised funds through the Rehab and organised to go to the church every night. So while our name comes out of arseness and making fun of crack addicts, sweat made everyone close.

There is, in my opinion, a social hierarchy on the Rehab too and the

anthropologist can see "social status" being made, supported and broken from events that take place there. Certain men are deferred to and their opinion on matters - from

incidents in a game and matters of right and wrong in arguments to recognition of

performance on the party scene and confirming a person's achievement in their

profession - supported. Partly this can be attributed to trying to please those who pick the

football teams to play against other teams and the fact being good at football or at the least playing on a winning team is one form of achieving social status in Trinidad.

Football on the island today, in the form of inter-school and inter-club rivalries is a major draw in terms of attendance and in a familiar sense to C.L.R. James' (1963) observations about the role of cricket in the first half of the twentieth century in Trinidad, football and talk of football plays a central part in everyday conversations, social allegiances, and local culture. The deference to the opinions and views of certain members of the Rehab can also be understood as a means of garnering the patronage and social benefits of 245

associating oneself with the people who are most popular socially not just on the Rehab but in the wider middle to upper class social milieu of Port of Spain, a place some of the people I spoke to call in a similar vein to Richard's "peacock society," a "see me society." Such patronage brings social rewards like access to individuals, parties, carnival bands and business opportunities. This idea of patronage through social connection is a microcosm of the larger political cronyism in this oil rich, ex-colony both today and historically.

After saying hi to Mani and Chinee we all hang out by the cars, Paul entertaining us with his singing and dancing as we wait for others to tum up. Within a few minutes the two cars have turned into about twenty. As they drive onto the grass and move slowly past us each driver is hailed by nicknames - another "Chinee," a few "redman," a

"rastaman," a couple of "brotherman," one "Syrian," a few what's up "nigga" and "a chindian" or two are all salutations drifting across the air spoken by all persons regardless of phenotype. Other names linked to surnames, professions, physical features, notoriety and country of origin like "big man," "Tully," "Stones" and "Model," also fill the air to the point where it becomes possible to say no one on the Rehab is without a nickname.

I would stress again that on the Rehab certain ethnic labels and nicknames deemed racist in the US and Europe, and perhaps within particular social spaces locally were not in this liming space seen as problematic at all. They were normal and without offense even amongst regulars who may have holdover tension from a previous sweat and a bad tackle. 246

One afternoon I asked Del (a reference to Italian heritage via the Italian footballer

Del Piero ), a founding member of the Rehab, why everyone uses nicknames rather than first names to address each other. He told me:

Familiarity brings it. It's not what colour you are or if you have money or not, we have all kinds of faces. We like you or we don't like you - if you're a real 'shitong. ' 214 If anyone ain't like the name they given they just have to speak up early or it go stick. A lot of the people here all went to different schools together so there's that and then the recreational activities - if you get me - brought everyone together. Some people go foreign but if you 're a regular when you come back you're still a regular and we go call you the same nickname as always. Its all fun really. The "Rehab" is making fun on addicts. The names we call each other from small and here I guess are making fun on each other too (emphasis mine)

Carnival in Woodbrook as an "Indigenous Intellectual Device"

To add an economic perspective to the socio-cultural fluidity provided by the story of social relations on the Rehab, the indigenous lens of Carnival is again useful here. Carnival illustrates the socio-economic stratification and difference making happening in the individual lives of people in and around Woodbrook during the "new imperialism" of 1990s and 2000s (I call it neo-colonialism) (Harvey 2005: 1).

Seeking to expand the economic potential of the festival and mobilise it as a global brand and industry tied into global movements of capital accumulation, state involvement in Carnival increased in the 1980s. We can phrase this as the development and marketing of "cultural tourism" with its accompanying "authenticity vs. commodification" narrative that emerged and masked an increasing exclusion from the festival of working class locals (Aching 2002).

214 "Shitong" = someone not good at something, in this case football. 247

The business model of the festival changed from populist art form to a salacious

and highly eroticised "pretty mas" form (bikini and beads masquerade portrayals). Pretty

1 mas, the late 20 h century incarnation of the local expressive festival of carnival is based

upon capitalism - profit, mass production, luxury - and it replaces the high art aesthetic

contained in the theatre of the streets Trinidad Carnival was once described to be.

A profit motive begins to dominate Carnival.215 Band fees and the cost of

individual participation rise. As the commodification of the festival rapidly increases,

exclusivity (participation based on the ability to pay) replaces inclusivity (participation

rooted in Carnival as a national commons accessible to all). The timing of the shift

corresponds directly to the upsurge in natural gas production and T &T's insertion within

global flows of capital and the politics of neoliberalism (Gill 2005, Klein 2004, Harvey

2005:1-25). The shift is also an example of what Harvey (2005:137-182) calls

"accumulation by dispossession" - turning things communal into things private and for

profit.

This displacement and the disappearance of what Rex Nettleford (1988) termed

"the people from below," who, until the 1980s were always considered the legitimate

authors of Carnival drama as a populist art form, permits us to describe Carnival of the

1990s and noughties as a new type of"gated community" (Kochiyama N.D.). From here we can see the changes in Carnival were and are analogous to a more general process of

215 J'ouvert as an experience separates itself from 'pretty mas' but nonetheless still demonstrates signs of the profit motive as segregation through cost on a lesser scale begins to appear in J'ouvert too. Carnival and its various bands are now international brands, found online and with branches in the wider diaspora funnelling cash and circulating idea into a year round Carnival industry. A lack of traditional mas, nakedness, sensationalised headlines of bacchanal as though the repetition of these headlines/stories is part of the symbols that maintain the normative sensation of the season. It links somewhat with Miller's thesis about Trini consumption and their self-representation of first world consumer culture. The complaints on the blog Trini Carnival Diary about problems with costumes highlights/is evidence of that. 248

inequality and difference-making taking place in Trinidad society (Aching 2002) and the exclusion of low-income groups from other communal spaces like politics, employment, nationhood, urban areas, security etc. The post-independence promises of Williams and his rhetoric vanished as the heralded festival of nationhood became stratified by cost creating a logic of "boundary policing" reminiscent of colonial times.

In Woodbrook over this time period, global neoliberal reorganisations transformed Carnival production. As we saw in Cherry's narrative Woodbrook once had many family units engaged in costume production for nine-months of the year. Now costumes are increasingly mass manufactured in China, the designs come from Las

Vegas and the business model is straight out of the high volume, all-inclusive resort handbook. Many residents also no longer participate in Carnival due to their inability to afford a compulsory pretty mas costume. This excludes them from the various cultural down-stream rituals and citizenship that today's more wealthy Carnival participants take part in; a situation analogous to Cherry's feelings about "community" becoming fragmented.

The salacious carnival body, often female, but by no means exclusively a female body, is the commercial expression of this modern Carnival. It is the image government and masquerade producers broadcast to the world and fill their tourist literature with. It is the commodified body, an idealised sexuality that fits easily into the Western libidinal economy alongside the MTV booty video aesthetic and heterosexual lad magazine fetishism familiar around the Euro-American world. Similar to the "khaki pants" Afro­

Saxons it is a borrowed Euro-American socio-cultural and economic mechanism of 249

"wholesale dispossession" exploiting "grassroots culture and creativity" for capital accumulation (Harvey 2005: 148).

Whether staring back from billboard advertisements for special interest Carnival bank loans, local TV programs demanding viewers get in shape for carnival, websites dedicated to displaying the latest carnival costume design or newspaper columns arguing for and against such nakedness, the pretty mas body is no-longer exceptional, but normal.

What effect does this imposing hyper-sexualised body image have on conceptions of what "Trinidadian" means today? Do all citizens see themselves in it? Or can such a body demonstrate that citizens are included unequally in the nation?

To answer these questions its important to understand what this pretty mas body image symbolises in Trinidad. It is the face of the "all-inclusive" masquerade band- every one located in Woodbrook- and so labelled because it means all drinks, security costs, costumes, music fees and other Carnival necessities are covered in one price.

However the "all-inclusive" band, as we know, is the "all-exclusive" band because the price of participation - today anywhere between TT$3000 - $6000, far more than the average monthly wage, effectively excludes, from their own tradition of empowerment

(and there are beefy bouncers to enforce this segregation) the working class who want to play mas and who were once the architects of the masquerade before being dispossessed.

The "all-inclusive" band then provokes class hierarchies by making the ability to participate in Carnival a public affirmation of one's social status and wealth. 216 One is not excluded because one is the wrong phenotype, colour, or shade. One is excluded by

216 "To the peacocks in the society, appearing on stage in a band provides an arena for overt display and adulation. Large fantasy costumes appeal to this type, for in the portrayal in this 'time outside of time,' they are able to be completely removed from briefcase toting, brick laying, pen pushing, or clock watching." [Society in urban Trinidad this suggests is about being seen] (Ahye 1991 :404). 250

price. Meanwhile, a prior populist and nationalistic narrative concerning the festival's

"inclusivity" and non-capitalist roots as a "theatre of the streets" where "all owe is one"

still dominates modern discussions of Trinidad Carnival - see Prime Minister Patrick

217 Manning's first paragraph (2007) on culture from his August 2007 Trinidad Budget -

and masks the exclusion and displacement of the low-income local population from the

festival, its associated industries and the revenues they produce. The sexy Carnival body,

the brown-skinned beauty that is all-pervasive and ubiquitous in performing Trinidadian

national identity to the world, this mixed face of culture, ethnicities and races, is itself

then the face and symbol of another type of gated-community (Caldeira 2000,

Kochiyama N. D.); a capitalist festival only open to those of a certain economic wealth

and profitable to only the connected few. The binary logic of racism, a binary of

inclusion/exclusion lives on in today's pretty mas Carnival.

Woodbrook Today

These stories of the Rehab and Carnival provide a glimpse into social hierarchy in

the district today. Deciphering them illustrates how colonial mechanisms of divide and

conquer developed within modern Woodbrook into a multiculturalism stratified by lines

of class and wealth. The official apparatus of colonialism may have been removed but the

political, economic, and cultural situation sown by colonial domination still remains -

with some alterations.

217 "My Government views culture as more than a marketable commodity; it has value in its own right; it is the base on which we build our national character, national unity and a greater sense of national 1 pride." Patrick Manning, Prime Minster of Trinidad and Tobago, Monday 20 h August 2007 251

Not any one can get a Carnival costume in the best and most popular masquerade

bands today but if you know the right people, and have money - if you have the social,

cultural and economic capital - your race or ethnicity is no longer what stops you from

partying with the middle and upper classes. There is in this image of fetes with the

middle and upper classes a distinct echo of the 19th century colonial Carnival celebrations

of the elite's in their great plantation balls of early Trinidad history.

The segregation of carnival through cost has developed alongside a rapid

commercialisation of Woodbrook. Where capitalism might see "development" many

residents in Woodbrook describe the increased economic domination of one group over

another. Today, Woodbrook is a mix-use zone. On its western edge large, high-cost,

high-rent apartment blocks rise. On the eastern side where I lived residencies are

interspersed with run down and empty lots. Between these two edges runs Ariapita

Avenue, described locally as a Las Vegas "strip." Here many clubs, bars, restaurants,

casinos, mas camps, and offices are located between the French colonial fretwork of

homes built in the 1920s and 30s. During the day and right up until around midnight car traffic is always present. The economic milieu of residents is mixed, with different class

pockets across the area. As Mary discussed with me on her verandah: "In Woodbrook

218 today class goes in pockets . Fitt [St], Carlos [St], Cornelio [St], Newtown [a] middle

218 One line of inquiry I was unable to pursue was the relationship of these residential patterns to inheritance patterns in WB. Where were the old families and where were the more recent additions to Woodbrook? Were the old families mostly gone, their property divided between many children who then must sell? Perhaps. This would be one pillar of explanation for the recent class transformations in the area and a general migration out of the area. Another explanation is the process of surbanisation that characterises the evolution of Port of Spain over the last 40 years. The population resident in the capital has fallen from 120,000 persons in 1960 to less then 40,000 today. What is even more problematic from an urban planning vista is 90% of the Trinidad population now live outside the capital while over 90% of employment opportunities are in it (Fifi cited in Gooding 2008). The implication of this situation, as I 252

class area almost totally. From French Street west as far as Gallus/Rosalino [Sts]. and at

the lower end is more middle class than upper ends and another pocket in Ana and

deVertuil [Sts]."

At a town meeting ofWoodbrook residents with their MP, the mayor and the

director of town planning, the negative impact of the rapid commercialisation of the

suburb was in every voice that spoke. The complaints seemed deep and heartfelt. People

described their neighbourhood as "under assault." How they were unable to get into their

driveways; faced constant parking problems; and watched as house prices skyrocketed to

the point where only commercial users were able or willing to buy.219

Its been suggested to me that investors who have their eyes on the few remaining residential properties in Woodbrook (where Dr Eric Williams once resided), are supporting increases in property tax so that owners of such properties (middle class folk) will be forced to sell so that their residences may be turned into business places, some of which may be alcohol-drinking holes. [Spence 2009].

The Colonial Logic of Divide and Conquer

Another feature of this sense of siege comes from the other end of the economic spectrum away from the commercial developers and is visible when residents of

experienced everyday, is traffic jams and frustration as every one drives in and out of the city at the same time every day.

219 These are some of the post-colonial legacies of Afro-Saxon Politics in capitalist government policies. At independence, the Trinidadian state under Williams' PNM party, formed as a champion of the people took significant ownership in companies and statutory authorities. They espoused a progressive tax regime in the sense that the higher a person's income the higher the tax rate that one fell into. Such ideas, while obviously not socialism can be said to fall on the left of the political spectrum. Over subsequent years such leftist thinking evaporated within the PNM and with time it has come to espouse right-wing (conservative) policies. These policies protect those already with capital and maintain through the unequal distribution and access to economic resources colonialist procedures where a binary system of inclusion and exclusion is re-inscribed everyday. 253

Woodbrook describe lower income people from outside of Woodbrook as dangerous and untrustworthy.

Me: Why do you think crime and violence has surged over the last 15 years in Trinidad and Tobago?

Anne Marie: I was working with this woman down the road [in Woodbrook] one time, I worked for her for like three years. When the crime started to get more terrible in Trinidad, well you know my area Morvant has a bad name, right. So one day she watch me like this she say, 'you know if you had come by me now for a job I wouldn't of given it to you' I say 'excuse me' and she said no I wouldn't have given it to you just knowing the area your from. So that kinda throw me back. And then when I working with the youths and them some of them will tell me the same. Um, look for instance Monday. I send a guy to work by a friend, actually another women that I work with in Woodbrook, she wanted a gardener and I send him and when he went up for the interview Monday morning she tell him like um 'I will try you for today but I not sure if I will keep you cus you from Morvant'. So it hard. What you expect this youth to do. Tell meh, what do you expect them to do? (emphasis mine)

This narrative of poor vs. rich - the "poor" being a monolithic evil and the

"rich"220 under attack from all sides by them, I suggest is a window on residential patterns laid down historically. Incidents of violence in Woodbrook flatten Euro-

American racial hierarchies and overlook local forms of ethnic solidarity like on the

Rehab to become class-specific experiences, reflecting the legacy of population patterns since 1797. The binary is no longer strictly between black and white or Indian and

African or foreigner and local - if it ever were that simple - but instead those with wealth and those without. Again the binary logic ofracism lives on (Gilroy 2004:37) - the logic

22° From my interviews both non-residents and residents of W oodbrook, spoke about it, no matter its mixed income levels, out migration and commercialisation today, through its past incarnation in Trinidad lexicon as a "nice" area, a place where the middle and upper classes live. Today with its Las Vegas strip it is certainly stereotyped in the media and amongst non-W oodbrook residents as the place where the "boujis" people of Trinidad go out and where many supposedly live; the latter being less true as many of the previous high-income residents have moved to suburbs further a field. 254

of inclusion and exclusion, of domination and subordination - in the binary of wealth. 221

In Anne-Marie's remark the essentialist logic is cold and hard. In line with

Deborah Thomas' work on violence in Jamaica (2006), I want to suggest this classic cultural logic of divide and conquer is a neocolonial tool embedded in the politics bequeathed by Trinidad's post-colonial architects. When mobilised as essentialism, social hierarchy, just as it was in colonial times, is a mechanism that produces boundary policing to create and sustain cultures of fear, social stratification and mistrust between economic classes in urban Trinidad. An "other" or "outside" group is given form through certain cultural traits, language and supposed drives. A consequence of such belief is the implied superiority of one group over another. This is something Anne-Marie discovered when a Woodbrook resident stereotyped her negatively because of the area she was from and it erases the wider circumstances of history, political economy and social relations.

This observation links wealth and the accumulation of capital to the shifting construction of difference as a mechanism of neocolonial control. 222 By eliminating forms of solidarity

1 across class - as the colonial elite once did through the commercialization of l 9 h

Carnival and latterly Afro-Saxons did by failing to attend to the violent legacies of colonialism experienced by the masses - neo-colonialism achieves a structured and

221 This requires in addition to cultural analysis an interrogation of the politics of class, and as Thomas shows the role of the state. Furthermore where once interpersonal violence was identified as ethnically fuelled (Puri 1999) the recent upsurge in murders, crime and police violence in Trinidad appears, on the surface at least, to be class-based. This is not to say that crime and violence is solely class or gender based, and racial ideology isn't present, it certainly is, nonetheless the fear of crime seems attached to socio-economic markers rather than colour ones. 222 Why, for example, and as Thomas (2008) notes does class drop out of scholarship of the Caribbean and culture become dominant? One answer she offers is in focusing on culture - retentions, syncretisms and difference - culturalist analysis focuses in on the connections of transplanted populations to their 'roots' and ignores questions of the state, alternative ways to constitute political economy and is less likely to question the political economy of international capitalism itself. 255

stratified system of social relations easy to control by blaming and pathologising individuals and particularly the poor for their own economic woes. 223

History, and the way capital integrated with local circumstances to produce middle-class areas like W oodbrook as well as lower class areas like Morvant or

Laventille, 224 two well known and economically deprived areas of Port of Spain is also ignored. The difference with the divide and conquer motives of neo-colonialism is they convince those economically rewarded, through their assimilation and internalization of

Western capitalist values, of political and social gains such as increased liberation, individual identity and political solidarity, when actually such divisionary language creates difference and a artificial sense of superiority to be commodified. Be it the

223 The situation is similar to the one Gramsci describes between Northern and Southern Italians: "Another element in evaluating the real significance of the obsessedly unitary policies of Crispi is the complex of feelings created in the North with regard to the Mezzogiomo. The poverty of the Mezzogiorno was historically 'inexplicable' for the popular masses in the North; they did not understand that unity had not taken place on a basis of equality, but as hegemony of the North over the Mezzogiomo in a territorial version of the town-country relationship - in other words, that the North concretely was an 'octopus' which enriched itself at the expense of the South, and that its economic-industrial increment was in direct proportion to the impoverishment of the economy and the agriculture of the South. The ordinary man from Northern Italy thought rather that, if the Mezzogiorno made no progress after having been liberated from the fetters which the Bourbon regime place din the way of a modem development, this meant that the suases of the poverty were not external, to be sought in objective economic and political conditions, but internal, innate in the populations of the South- and this all the more since there was a deeply-rooted belief in the great natural wealth of the terrain. There only remained one explanation- the organic incapacity of the inhabitants, their barbarity, their biological inferiority. These already widespread opinions (Neapolitan 'vagabondry' is a legend which goes back a long way) were consolidated and actually theorised by the sociologists of positivism (Niceforo, Sergi, Fern, Orano, etc.), acquiring the strength of 'scientific truth' in a period of superstition about science" (Gramsci 1971:233/234).

224 Laventille's development was unplanned and hap-harzard. After emancipation many slaves left the plantations and came to Port of Spain. The Laventille Hills were a close location to downtown Port of Spain with its employment opportunities and many settled here. Many slaves however developed an antagonistic relationship to colonial authority and a somewhat anti-colonial lifestyle was fostered in the community with many residents establishing themselves as skilled artisans and craftsmen. Over time development of the area by the authorities was neglected with a minority of residents developing a bad reputation. Today it is described as a low-income area with high unemployment. Such a description and socio-economic pattern can be linked to its historical development. No forward planning over the last 170 1 years has brought urban decay, poor services, steep streets and stress. In particular the racism of the 19 h and 20th century maybe sited as a reason for the lack of development. Just as the colonialist and then the new 'Trinidadian' developed Woodbrook they neglected other areas. Today the problem is no longer strictly a black vs. white situation but one of economic inequality. 256

obvious styles and symbols money can buy or the production of new fears which require capital in the form of privatised security to protect one's self and family.

This class-based behaviour infused with the logic of racism in urban Trinidad is explored in the upcoming work of a fellow anthropologist who I met while in the field

(Kochiyama N. D.). Her work showed those who can afford added security pay for it and subsequently wall themselves off from others who can't afford it. A good example of this

I saw in the security precautions Richard and his family took. They live behind a large, more than seven-foot high, electronic gate, manned by a rotating security crew. Every person who comes in and out of the gate is logged into a book and video cameras are focused on both the entrance and down the street. This on the actual street the

Woodbrook police station is on in a building no more than six houses away. Kochiyama found that over the last 15 years responses to insecurity in Trinidad include a dramatic increase in "gated-community life" and the rapid expansion of private security firms. The point here is crime and violence encourage social stratification because "protective measures" such as private security are only affordable to some and not all. In Woodbrook this plays out in a East-West population split,225 with the higher earning population living behind electric gates [see photo 2] and the lower earners left to watch each others' backs as Cherry explained it.

225 One window on capital is to look at the way it territorializes in the pockets of individuals to produce communities stereotyped as "rich" and "well-off," the prejudices they build of others, and vice versa. "Globalisation produces uncertainties - especially in relation to control over the resources of citizenship - and these uncertainties are rectified only through the production of minor differences among populations, differences that can be mobilised, often in genocidal ways, to establish uncertainty (Appadurai 2006)" [Deborah Thomas pg 10 unpublished chapter]. One example ofneo-colonialism at work in Trinidad is the example of the Trinidad and Tobago Police Plan imported from Northern Ireland that stereotyped the ethnic issue between African/Indian as the model for the local Trinidadian situation with little understanding of how impossible it was to frame the situation in this way. Needless to say the plan failed to stem the increase in crime, but instead intensify a model of cultural essentialism 257

The whole country changed with crime and stuff, we used to send, I had a smaller daughter, when I say small I mean she was about seven years old and I used to let her go around the comer and buy stuff I can't do that again, I have two granddaughters and I cannot think to do that. I would never see her come back. From that point of view I think people just remain in their homes. They would visit but it's not that community feeling. [Cherry].

Fear and the Production of Difference

Fear produces difference that now splits Woodbrook. During the period 2000 to

2005 the murder rate in Trinidad - population, 1.3 million people - increased 322%. The murder rate in Trinidad today exceeds one person every day and robberies are increasingly a day-to-day reality. On the nightly TV news, on newspaper front covers,226 in daily conversation and as the subject of musical hits that fill the air, to name four spaces, violence and crime described with words such as "mutilated," "headless" or

"beaten to death," are reproduced and represented in text (Morgan and Youssef 2006).

In W oodbrook, such reports once seemed to happen elsewhere but today the same headlines are reproduced here. "The decomposed body of a female found behind a Clico office building, at the comer of Alfredo and Roberts Street, Woodbrook" is a recent by- line from a national daily.227 Mary's observation in our conversations on the return of the local police station to combat such increases testifies to some sort of response and acknowledgement of the violent situation by the state. Crime in "the elegant old district" then has increased noticeably in the last ten years. Many residents told me first hand

226 In the context ofWoodbrook where I lived for the duration of my fieldwork newspapers carried such front-page headlines as "Dad shot dead near Woodbrook bar" (Newsday 21st June, 2009), "Bedlam in Woodbrook as business man beats bandits to the draw" (Trinidad Guardian 21st May, 2005), and "Oil company worker killed outside Woodbrook bar" (Trinidad Guardian 20th October, 2008).

227 Newsday, Thursday June 18, 2008. 258

stories of personal encounters with guns and violence and the impact in and on the everyday lives of residents was clearly apparent.

A good example of this from my fieldwork is a trip I took with Richard to buy a microwave for his mother for Christmas. We talked and joked as we headed to the store.

As we pulled up to park in front he asked me if I would go into the store and pick up the microwave. It was already paid for, and all I needed to do was hand over the bill to the clerk and I could collect it. The reason he wanted me to do this was not because he had problems parking the car in front of the store but rather he was concerned someone might try to steal the microwave as I left the shop and was putting it in the car. As such he had brought one of his guns with him. Now this didn't overly shock me. In Trinidad I've seen guns, heard them fired, been offered the chance (which I've always turned down) to fire one, and jumped behind a car when they've been fired around me. Such events are part of growing up in Trinidad, at least as far as I could tell through those I know. The point to take away from this story, is that in a simple and short journey to the edge ofWoodbrook where it meets "town" (a lower income area, spoken of as notoriously rough) - a drive of less than five minutes - my main contact was concerned enough about being robbed that he brought his gun, something he rarely did. Nothing happened on the trip, as I exited the store he opened the boot of his car into which I put the microwave and we drove off to wrap his mother's Christmas present. This does not mean my senses were not at a higher level than normal. I remember, and I noted it that evening, how as I entered and left the store I scanned the faces of everyone I could, marking each person as a potential threat, an experience and an approach to life fairly unfamiliar to my usual approach to strangers.

One that speaks to how the othering process can work - with a consumer good in my 259

possession I was creating a sense that many individuals were prepared to steal it from me, and they being "threats," I was wary of them.

These concerns about robbery are not just to be found in the lives ofWoodbrook residents but shopkeepers too who spoke about the increasing dangers of operating in

Woodbrook. In 2008, the owner of a popular fine-dining French restaurant was held up, along with all his customers. He soon closed the establishment and returned to France. A bar popular with the mid twenties crowdwas held up three times during the year I was in

1 the field. And a murder took place at the Comer Bar a block from my lodgings on l 9 h

Oct 2008. Another as the opening quote to this chapter illustrated at the Cro-bar shortly there after.

A female Woodbrook shopkeeper described what happened at her store one-day on busy Ariapita A venue:

A six-foot tall brown-skinned young woman in a fluorescent yellow patterned miniskirt shoved a 9mm pistol in my face in the salon where my grandmother and aunt were cowering in a comer. The male bandit, after assuring my aunt and grandmother that he will not hesitate to kill me, made me lie face down on the ground and tied me up. He frisked me asking for my phone. I told him I forgot where I put it when it rang. He struck me again and jammed the gun into my head and temple. He told me how easy it is to kill me and that police will never catch him. [Woodbrook shop keeper].

Crime on the street was another common story people expressed including those on the Rehab who had stories of incidents they had been through or seen in Woodbrook.

They labeled it "opportunistic crime," with one person telling me how liming outside a bar a man walked up "cool, cool and put a gun to my girl's head." He was then told by the assailant to give over his silver chains, which he did and the girl was let go. Another 260

told me, "I drivin on Ariapita Avenue by Crobar dey an ah hear PAX! PAX! PAX! next ting yuh know ah man lyin down covered in blood in de square right dey."

As Caldeira (2000) wrote in her study of crime and violence in Sao Paulo the mental effect of such personal experiences and constant media representations leads to increased levels of social apprehension that in tum generate a general "climate of fear."

In Woodbrook this "climate of fear" I suggest feeds difference-making in residents who see themselves and are seen by "others" as living in a predominantly middle-class residential population, and a lower-class "other" from outside the area or the poorer parts of the district who are held responsible for the crime. A "climate of fear" is an extension of the colonial trope of "fear of difference" identified in the colonial encounter.

To illustrate this situation and the production of divisionary narratives a resident who was held up told me the assailant said to her, "You rich people don't understand. We can't get jobs." Of which she commented to me:

That is rubbish. The bandits want a microwave existence. They want to wave a wand and get a life that most people have achieved with hard work, blood, sweat and tears. They feel it's their right to demand your earnings. If you don't have what they want you have to pay a price. It could be your life. The Government is to blame, giving people a false sense of entitlement by keeping these self­ programmes going for generations.

228 While understandable such thinking maps difference in cultural terms , determining the acts, behaviour and potential of an entire group as reified and static. It

228 "Part of what I want to discuss here is the special emphasis on a universalised discourse of culture and cultural models that both ... the Trinidadian government and the W estem trained academics mobilise within the ethnic politics of Trinidad. Such models of culture emerge from a generalised idea of culture, which requires that an ethnic or national group have clearly identifiable, bounded, and marked cultural features ... Ethnic structuring ... focuses attention on ethnicity and encourages groups to organise around and thus reproduce their ethnicity. My contention here, partly in keeping with the work ofBrackette Williams ( 1991 ), is that ethnicity is not itself a preexisting social fact or positivity into which groups retreat or to which they latch on for political reasons, given the right circumstances. Such a position implies ethnicity is already 'out there.' I feel it is more accurate to say that the nature or the shape of ethnicity is, at 261

diverts attention away from any historical and structural inequalities between economic groups locally. It removes any inherent class privilege colonialism embedded in the lives of some communities and not others. It ignores how social groups and their relations were made. By disconnecting circumstance from the collision of colonialism and economy of international capitalism (Thomas 2006:3) there is no recognition of the role bourgeois liberal democracy and post-colonialism played in maintaining the inequality of the playing field both locally and globally (Robinson 2000, Edwards 2003, Stephens

2005). A situation Harvey (2005:141) and Marx (1995:337-362) show is a deliberate accumulation strategy of capitalism in its creation of an "industrial reserve army." As

Harvey (2005:141) notes, "Capitalism necessarily always creates its own 'other'."

Individualism and Difference Making

You can't walk out in the morning or at sunset. The poor want to rob the rich. The rich think the poor want to take away from them. The poor are trapped by ignorance and a legacy of CEPEP229 and entitlement. You drive down the road and see 20 people cutting one piece of grass. I will gladly take a job as a CEPEP worker. They get up late, go home early and relax by the side of the road while decent hard-working citizens are hustling, stressed. [Woodbrook resident].

In terms of phenotype those who work for CEPEP or who live in "the hills" are in the majority "black" and less phenotypically mixed than residents of W oodbrook. They also generally live in urban areas with fewer amenities than Woodbrook. This is a least in part, determined by frameworks imposed upon a group through a dominant discourse of what ethnicity is." (Scher 2003 115)

229 The Community Environmental Protection and Enhancement Programme (CEPEP) is a government-subsidised programme where contracts are awarded to people who run businesses, and they in turn hire people who cannot otherwise find work who then beautify the country. In day-to-day conversation the upper and middle classes use it as a symbol of "wotlessness" and waste. As the comments go, these workers sit on their 'bums' and do nothing but take home a salary. They are then mobilised by the incumbent political party at election time as a voting bloc. 262

statement of the realities of history. By erasing the global political economic analysis that frames violence in Woodbrook within a more historical, relational context and the realities of the neo-colonial situation the "culture of violence" argument can be seen to turn on a conceptual essentialism - "bandits" - or rather all people who work for CEPEP a legal entity helping230 the unemployed, are "criminals." Such essentialism privileges culture over a focus on socioeconomic inequality231 and what that produces. It naturalizes capitalist competition over alternative forms of society and positions the cultural practices of upper and middle-class Euro-American society as normative (Ferguson 2004) directing attention away from the overall political economy and project of global capitalism to use, abuse, and divide the non-elite masses.

From a discourse analysis point of view, the shopkeeper and the resident's statements provide insight into a discourse model (Gee 2005:71) called individualism; a theory of individual choice and the protestant ethic that assumes the socio-economic playing field is equal for all. The model provides a "chain of causality" that makes blaming the individual for any failure to get ahead in life seem plausible and for many, commonsensical. 232 It diminishes the implication that post-colonialism is an economic

230 This is the official version of the enterprise there are persons I spoke to who claim CEPEP is actually a "handout for votes culture invented by Dr. Eric Williams and perpetuated under every other uncaring, unfeeling Government we have ever had who have used these poor people shamelessly"

231 Both Scher (2003) and Thomas (2008) note the prevalence of cultural models for understanding the issues of increased crime and violence in the Caribbean suggesting Euro-American discourse tries to posit cultural factors - differences in race and ethnicity - as the issues behind the culture of violence. If correct, such an observation raises important concerns not least why erase the true class origins of the issues.

232 To extend the discourse analysis and following the work of Norman Fairclough (2004) this can be phrased as a texturing of the relationship between personal responsibility and socio-economic standing in society. By 'texturing' he means the 'work' done textually i.e. the textual construction or 'working up' of that relationship. 263

and culture movement tied into the interests of capital and not labour. The construction

disguises notions of class privilege and structural inequalities, making difference making

passive, unobtrusive and logical. It conceals class disadvantage/advantage under a cloak

of neo-liberal individuality and omits the fact that inequalities are cumulative. As the

earlier quote by Anne Marie acknowledges, such constant hardship is productive in the terms Harvey implies about capitalism and othering. "So it hard. What you expect this youth to do. Tell meh, what do you expect them to do?" (emphasis mine).

Neo-colonialism in Trinidad

The legacy of history has been that domestic resources have been harnessed for use by overseas enterprise and capital for the production of staples for export markets, the driving force being the maximization of returns to foreign capital realizable in foreign exchange. At some time the very population/labour force comprised chattel capital to be optimally utilized towards the objective of the enterprise. In other words, resource use was not aimed at maximizing the welfare of the human resource in these hinterlands of exploitation. The consequence of this historical legacy is that the society is still, not only externally propelled, but highly externally oriented, dependent as it still is on overseas supplies for provisioning, with the implication that the earning of foreign exchange remains critical to survival and welfare. [St Cyr 2009:3].

It becomes clear then that first colonialism, then post-colonialism and now neo- colonialism have transformed the standards of living in Trinidad for some and not others, shifting the construction of difference as the accumulation of capital extended distance between economic classes and creating new social relations defined by class-power- a situation occurring across the globe (Harvey 2005, Lansley 2006). Class power according to Harvey (2006) and James (1989) ensures that the surplus value society generates are appropriated by and centralised for those groups who already have access to political, 264

economic and social power - a thesis at play as we have seen in both cocoa production,

Carnival and the twentieth century growth ofWoodbrook and its Afro-Saxons. What's more this "punishment of capital" (Linebaugh 1992) is also readily observable on the ground in Port of Spain in modem forms of socio-economic stratification, a closed-class system and the dispossession/exploitation of certain sectors of the local population through high taxes, violence and social inequalities.

The 1940s and early 50s anti-colonial politics of pre-Independence nations, concerning potential alternatives to Western state formation have dissolved to be replaced by political emphasis on Western bourgeois normativity233 and conduct as seen in the desire for many of the tools, symbols and signs of an Afro-Saxon worldview. To put this in the context of anti-colonial discourse and the development of neo-colonialism Cesaire pointed out "there was a boomerang effect" of colonialism that affected not only the colonised but also the coloniser (1950: 173-177).

Colonisation dehumanizes even the most civilised man; that colonial activity, colonial enterprise, colonial conquest, which is based on contempt for the native and justified by that contempt, inevitably tends to change him who undertakes it; that the coloniser, who in order to ease his conscience gets into the habit of seeing the other man as an animal, accustoms himself to treating him like an animal, and tends objectively to transform himself into an animal. [ 1972: 177].

If we replace the coloniser in Trinidad with the "Afro-Saxon" class, and see these

"mimic men" of Trinidadian independence as continuing and organising the antagonistic economics of the capitalists' regime maintained through the unequal distribution of economic resources, we can suggest colonialist procedures remain in place on the island.

233 "I'd say we have a bigger class problem than we do a race problem. We tend to respect the man with the money, regardless of his colour. Take a look around, we have VIP section in everything because people will pay through the teeth to prove dey special or to get away from the 'riff raff. The more expensive it is, the more people want it, even if they have to take loan to get it" - Interview with W oodbrook resident. 265

Why this situation has not been transformed is not solely because of structural violence.

It is also perhaps because post-colonial leaders became organizers' and agents of proletarianisation and mystification - deputies of an historical bloc extending from colonialism, and assimilated through Western education, commerce and society.

Conclusion

In Woodbrook today the transformation from colonial antagonisms to more recent class and wealth-based divisions means the mirror of multicultural diversity hides a fundamental power structure that raced, ethnic and gendered identities cannot get away from. Those with wealth - predominantly economic wealth, but social and cultural too

(of living in the "right" area for example)- are already included and "cosmopolitan."

Their race and essentialised social group is not black, white or other, it is wealth.

Wealth is not a communal nationalistic activity however. There are no ethics of redistribution under the system of postcolonial neoliberalism (read neo-colonialism).

Maybe a redistribution of wealth from the poor and needy to the already economically secure classes but certainly not one in the other direction. The Empire of Capitalism desires no such thing. Wealth in this sense is not just about individuals and transnational class power but also about states and institutions. About the developed world and debt.

About the arms trade and war. About fixed groups and the capital interests they protect.

Wealth is a mechanism for maintaining the present status quo and power structure of modem Western capitalist society - an economic system based on, and sustained by, the social and economic inequality sown historically in the colonial encounter. CHAPTER NINE:

FINAL THOUGHTS

"Was my freedom not given to me then in order to build the world of the You?" - Frantz Fanon (1961 :232)

"The mythology of the decolonization of the world obscures the continuities between the colonial past and current global colonial/racial hierarchies and contributes to the invisibility of coloniality today" - Ramon Grosfoguel (2009:23)

"No protest of mine, I realize, will save me from being taken for an 'idealist'. For he who decries the importance of 'material' motives must, it seems, be relying on the strength of' ideal' ones. Yet no worse misunderstanding is possible" - Karl Polanyi (194 7)

The project began as a way to understand the construction of social groups in

Trinidad. While there seemed great cultural fluidity, there also seemed to be much class solidity. This situation led me to think about how social groupings are made. Exploring this question and how it related to Woodbrook, where I lived and have many friends and contacts became the focus of the dissertation.

What I have learned, and there is still much to investigate, is that in Woodbrook, a long-term process of ideological production and manipulation across two centuries is related to the motion of global capitalism. This motion shifts the construction of

266 267

difference over time. Social groups are made, and made again to serve the interests of capital at the expense of the labouring masses. Organic intellectuals, Afro-Saxons, a historical bloc, contradiction and dialectic, social hierarchy, colonialism, post-colonialism and neo-colonialism are all windows on the process. As this motion of capital accumulation encounters obstacles the construction of difference extends, shifts and adapts to local historical circumstances in a constant process of negotiation with the various cultures, social groups and individuals on the island. Such a "relation of forces" as Gramsci called it has innumerable facets too, making the wholesale identification of the system of domination that sustains the interests of capital over the interests of labour difficult. 234

Today the inherent inequalities of this capitalist mode of production and social system are hidden by myths235 of individual failure, personal exceptionalism and free market utopianism. Those who wish for social justice, as anti-colonial scholars and others do, are excluded from the mainstream and placed in a "liberal" niche - another extension of difference making. Gramsci's bourgeois organic intellectuals and the historical bloc is now a transnational elite defined by international class consolidation. In such circumstances, both locally and internationally, democracy, law and the military all serve the interests of capital.

My hope is this dissertation through its dialogue of socio-cultural history and economic theory provides evidence to connect the racist binary logic of colonialism to

234 "Such 'authority' makes possible the 'propagation', for a time, of an intellectual, moral, political and economic collective will throughout society ... What 'leads' in a period of hegemony is no longer described as a 'ruling class' in the traditional language, but a historical bloc" (Hall 1986:422).

235 The highest degree of illusion comes to be the highest degree of sacredness" (Fenerbach cited in Debord 1994: 11 ). 268

the exclusionary binary logic of capitalism. In this way a link is highlighted between the

· servitude of the masses in colonialism and the servitude of the masses today and the idea

of "progress" can become problematised. The dissertation is also a window on the

process of political change. It shows how consent to economic inequality is produced

over a long period of time and across many different layers of culture, ideas and the

economy. It also tells us that the success of future political battles is not strictly between

two classes the bourgeoisie and the proletariat but a long-term educative and negotiated

process on multiple fronts (Hall 1985).

A Contribution to Caribbean Scholarship

Trinidad history is laced with oppositions and binaries - change and continuity,

resistance and assimilation, oppressor and oppressed, bourgeoisie and proletariat, black

and white. The clash of two discourses (Benitez-Rojo 1997) is the tradition of a

Caribbean sociology that has displaced Caribbean anthropology to the point of its

extinction as a discipline there. Anthropology is no longer a major, nor minor at the

University of the West Indies. While scholarship on the Caribbean can never get away

from such sociological epistemology and its legacy, nor should it necessarily, this

dissertation contributes to a reinvigoration of Caribbean focused and generated

anthropology.

The project can be read as an explicit critique of a post-colonial discourse that has

learned how to perceive itself from the outside in and not from the inside out. As Lloyd

Best, said in a speech he gave to a Canadian audience on Caribbean interpretations, 269

"everything is determined in terms of what the rest of the world does to us, rather than how we see our own situation from inside" (2001 :5). While I like the tenor of his

statement I suggest what is most useful is not these "either or sentiments" but new

conceptions of how the two - the outside and the inside - combine. Connections between the Caribbean and Euro-America are now well established. To fight for the power of one version of events without the other is no longer of central importance in struggles for

social change. As such the local must be understood through a conversation with the

global, and the history between the two. To do otherwise is intellectually shortsighted

because it was under the weight of the exclusionary force of racism and the exclusionary

force of capital - both international forces territorialised in local conjunctions - that the present moment emerged, social groups were made and people divided.

My sources and inspirations were globally eclectic yet Caribbean heavy. The

archival research based on historical documents located in Trinidad and the interviews

done on the ground in and around Woodbrook. In response to the critique of cultural work on the Caribbean that omits the economic perspective (Thomas 2006, Scher 2003) my focus was on combining the intense and great sociocultural mixture of Trinidad's

historical realities with the economic theory of Marx, Harvey, Gramsci, and James. My

fieldwork choice and analytical tool of Carnival as a recurrent metaphor was useful and highly specific to the illustration of the socio-economic situation in Trinidad and the importance of culture in the negotiation of hegemony. Furthermore, as it was impossible to provide more than a "sense" of the past, the metaphor of Carnival was also able to replace binding general statements with "metaphorical ones" (Benjamin 1999: 19). These 270

brought to life the 19th and 20th century economic, and socio-cultural transformations taking place in Woodbrook.

Politically, the project situated itself under the rubrics of anti-colonial theory

(Cesaire 1972, Fanon 1967, Williams 1944), tricontinentalism236 (Satre 2001, Young

1990) and subaltern studies to name but three critiques of neo-colonial power. An anti- colonial text is not accommodating. It stresses difference, inequality and the destruction of colonial ideology and influence. Its essence is against colonialism. It is anti-

Eurocentric political knowledge and experience, at times violently so (Fanon 1963). Anti- colonial theory therefore is anti-capitalism, which it understands as related to colonialism. A central pillar of my project was to illustrate neo-colonial power, how it was constituted, how it shapes the post-colonial present and why it needs to be confronted in its present neoliberal and globalised form. To borrow a theme from

Guyanese author Wilson Harris, my conscious reorganisation of the time and space of the past created opportunities to "re-present" Trinidad critically to popular imagination.

(Harris 1970:61-7).

Finally, the story of the formation of Woodbrook and the shifting construction of difference in Trinidad over time is a look into the development and expansion of Western liberal capitalism. After the colonial elite and its phenotypical privilege had physically left or been blended both socially and ethno-genetically into the local population of

Trinidad, "mimic men" (or Afro-Saxons) took control. There would be no decolonialisation, no redress of the violent legacies, both symbolic and real of

236 "The Tricontinental marked the initiation of a global alliance of those from the three continents of Africa, Asia and Latin America against imperialism signalling a common commitment to social and political transformation." Sartre (ix 2001) 271

colonialism. Instead in the foundations of post-colonialism a cultural logic of racism tied to transnational forms of wealth creation and economic inequality was inscribed. The accumulation of capital shifted its construction of difference once more and the "masses" today, as they were in the past, are still excluded from the "people." Understood in this sense "independence," "progress" and "development" are a socio-economic and cultural pattern readily observable around the world where the legacies of colonial history play out in neo-colonial stratification; and the positives of multiculturalism obscure the failure of global capitalism to address the racism and class conflict inscribed historically and extended into the present. The relationship between the accumulation of capital and the production of social groups then is a constant process of negotiation across time and space wherein the hierarchal socio-cultural position of the economically powerful is maintained as the logic of capital defends its own interests regardless of the consequences the further consolidation of global class power has for social justice, the extension of socio-economic inequality locally and the real-life impacts of stratification. REFERENCES

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