Asa Hodge
Final year student at UWI, St Augustine
When you have to fill in a form asking you your race, what do you put?
If there are options, I would usually select African, or if I have to input it myself, I would put Afro-Trinidadian.
How do you see your ethnic roots and heritage? Is it important to how you define yourself, or is it irrelevant, an accident of birth?
I recognise and acknowledge my ethnic heritage. I'm aware of the fact that part of my roots and heritage are a part product of history, but it's not a way that I define myself. I see myself as a Trinidadian.
Do you celebrate your ethnic heritage, ignore it as irrelevant, or have mixed feelings about it?
I do not go out of the way to celebrate my ethnic heritage.
Being of primarily African heritage, Emancipation Day would be the standout event on the calendar. I have mixed feelings about it because I believe that there was a lot of intermixing during the slavery and indentureship period, so that no one is really purely one race. So I don't see why we need to only celebrate events related to what the majority of our origin appears to be.
Do you think race is important in T&T? Do you think different ethnicities have different values?
I think that race is pretty important in Trinidad, and yes, different races/ethnicities tend to have different values, not just in Trinidad but across the world.
In Trinidad, due to our colonial past, being white or lighter skinned tended to be something that people wanted to aspire to. Although I don't think it's as bad now, I think that sort of racial divide still exists. I know people still refer to things as "white people things" and I've heard the expressions "Only white people do that" or "You sound white".
Value systems may be very different across races. From my observation, Indo-Trinidadian families tend to be more family-oriented versus Afro-Trinidadian families. I mean, just from daily events and general conversations, you hear people associating different things with different races, which to me is a simple example of the differing value systems.
How long have you/your family had roots here (best estimate)?
I was born in Trinidad and I think my family has had roots here for well over a century. My grandparents, if they were still alive, would have been in their 90s, and I knew they grew up with their grandparents, hence my estimate.
What do you like and dislike about T&T culture?
What I love most about Trini culture is how inclusive I see that we can be, and how united we can be, despite our differences and sometimes tense race relations. It's nice to see the unity that can exist around Carnival time and around major sporting events.
Carnival is something that I really love about Trinidad culture. It shows how lively and energetic and creative our people can be with the costumes and ideas and the music.
One thing that I particularly dislike about Trinidadian culture is how divided we can become at times; it's often so disheartening. Also, we can generally be a very laid back society and it annoys me that things tend to move on what could be deemed "island time" still.
Another dislike for me is how we sometimes lack national pride and patriotism. I think the society could definitely benefit from stronger nationalism.
Do you know about the beliefs and lifestyles of T&T people of different ethnic heritages from your own?
I do know about the beliefs and heritages of ethnicities other than my own. Having friends from a variety of ethnicities and backgrounds really helps with that. Through these friendships, we exchange stories about beliefs and values and family traditions, and it is always lovely getting to know about how other people's lives are.
Rawle Gibbons
Playwright and director of Caribbean Yard Campus
When you have to fill in a form asking you your race, what do you put?
African.
How do you see your ethnic roots and heritage? Is it important to how you define yourself, or is it irrelevant, an accident of birth?
Ethnic roots/heritage: Belmont, Port-of-Spain, where navel string bury in its genesis-ending, myth-making earth.
Do you celebrate your ethnic heritage, ignore it as irrelevant, or have mixed feelings about it?
Ethnic heritage celebrated in Carnival as ancestral festival–spiritually, culturally and family lineage, in which four or five maternal generations participated. Also at Emancipation Festival as a family/communal occasion.
Do you think race is important in T&T? Do you think different ethnicities have different values?
Ethnicity, in my view, is a more meaningful descriptor than "race" in the realities of T&T, though the two often merge. There is a sense here in which people of different races share common capacities/inclinations that identify them as "Trinidadian": our public behaviour (how we drive, cross the road, etc) to our psychology of humour, as well as our capacity to mamaguy ourselves, even as we mamaguy others.
At another level, there are behaviours and values that are ascribed, partly stereotypically, to different ethnicities. Tobagonians, for instance, are seen as more unified, socially homogenous, but more clannish; Trinidadian- Africans as pleasure-loving, Indians as hard-working, and so on.
What matters, I think, is that Trinidad, specifically, is a space that continuously contests "definition" and in doing so, subverts the exclusivism of "ethnicity". We're always ready "to storm" and this innate lawlessness may well be our own insistence on our capacity to create ourselves anew.
What do you like and dislike about T&T culture?
I like the continuous sense of possibility with which we view the world, in particular, the possibility of shaping a new, integrated society. I dislike most our willingness to always settle for less than we can be.
Do you know about the beliefs and lifestyles of T&T people of different ethnic heritages from your own?
I consider the "other" ethnicities in T&T part of my own complex whole. Learning these elements of myself becomes a never-ending adventure.
Rawle Gibbons