Last Minute Shiz...

Don’t call it a shop or a store says Designer Robert Young of his latest venture The Cloth Propaganda Space.

Young says while merchandise will be on sale he envisions more for the space at 24 Erthig Road, Belmont.

Helping him achieve his goals is Lupe Leonard the Edna Manley School of Design and Parson’s School of Design graduate who produces under the label Asyiin, not to be pronounced.

The former printery of forty years has been transformed into a vibrant atmosphere that will house collections from both designers over the coming weeks.

Young says it’s a workshop, a laboratory and an experiment where he envisions a coming together of minds and energies that will be as well transformative.

The choice of location is deliberate and takes him away from the Woodbrook district that houses many other top designers.

The Cloth Propaganda space has been stocked with some of his staple designs along with new offerings. Ms Leonard is a craftsperson who produces artisan style accessories.

The store opened on Wednesday, December 21.

A Sharing Time

So much has happened since I last blogged and even before. This is my medium, though, and it does not respond to all of the Current Affairs agenda. Like any good media outlet it is in that way independent. I have been busy with school and now exams while admittedly finding time to recreate in other ways. Two titles have been recently begging for exploration, Why I Hate Christmas, An ya Know What I Mean and this one.

It is the season of sharing though and I have been wanting to post. It actually feels good to blog, I may have said that before.

How can I hate Christmas? I told a friend of my intention to write about it and she said “you don’t hate Christmas!” I’ll say that in part I do. It’s hard to celebrate the birth of Christ when your thoughts on Him are not always faithful.

Hard to ignore all the good soca that has been playing since Crop Over as has been the case in the years since local artistes are producing for the festival. I wasn’t here for the Bajan Invasion but had my own version of it with Krosfyah when in New York. Meh trini cousin Karma's friend, who went on to become my friend too, was dating a member of the band and on Eastern Parkway in the late 90’s we could be found with the band. Can I say that to me the Haitian and Jamaican bands were characterized by a less than Bajan courtesy. Forgive me. Having covered Crop Over for many years consecutively I was also more aware of the selections earlier than most and would search them before the wave of music for Trini Carnival began playing. These days though Crop Over marks the start of the annual Soca Season.

This now competes with Christmas for air time and represents a conflict that is being Trinbagonian. Not until the late 70’s did I start to recognize local musical expression heralding the season. I swear if the internet didn’t in the main replace the posting of correspondence as in through the post, I’d go postal the next time I heard I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas, responded to in I never Had a White Christmas.

Can it not be said that this is a struggle for identity and valorization of the indigenous which I believe is eroded in some of the aspects of identifying with other than Nation, The United States is not exempt from a place with Africa and India in this regard, too England. They all continue to hold a dominant place in our narrative as spoken and heard.

Commenting on Soca last year took me to a new place. I wondered if I could have saidon the airwaves what I wrote in the posting? We’ll see how the breeze blows for me this year. I’d say here that Carnival holds no more comfortable place in my craw at times with all that separates it from Christmas. I can say that the rhythms of the music do make the medicine a little easier to go down.

The Partnership seeks to spread the message of its Live Up campaign. Does this compromise my independence or as was discussed yesterday blur the line of activism. Fact is in the last ten years at least four of my close friends have been diagnosed as Hiv+. The disease continues to spread, something to be mindful of we are oft reminded especially during the Carnival season even if we sexing down the place whole year. You know, like Christmas is Jesus time even if we live less than generously year round. Hmmm.

The NGO, though, seeks to get its material aired as a charity to the cause. On the other side though is the question, if your message is that important why not pay to have it aired year-round? AIDS is one of the most visible charity based causes, Breast Cancer runs second and I see Autism on the horizon. Of Hope, Love and Charity the Bible says Charity is the greatest. I sense some capitalism at play. I may be speaking from a cynical place but it wouldn’t be the first time. I mean even God? Can we say "yes" all the time "there is a God", faith requires that I believe, that is all faith asks. Yeah cause you sometimes have to fight to see the good amid all else that life is. Plato is responsible for the similarity in the two words Good and God.

Last year was a special Christmas as they tend to be. I have so far though resolved not to buy any gifts. I’ll let you know how that goes.

In essence Christmas is here and Carnival is waiting to take to the stage. I have one exam left. They’ve been enjoyable so far, apart from the anxieties which I don’t need a reason fto get. I went to a workshop. It was to sensitize journalists about reporting on HIV related matters, as well, we were given guidelines for terminology and explanations of key terms.

I have to hit the road and there is more to be said. Xmas is too a time for sharing of time and food and that’s good any time. I look forward to that, particularly preparing my own family’s meal as I do every year on Christmas Eve night, all night…hahaha! Yet to be decided what’s on the menu but let’s pray nothing burns or gets too much salt, they’re a hard two to please.

Did you know that from a Pagan ritual December 25th or thereabouts represents the ascension of the Sun into the Western Hemisphere?

In de Gayelle

If I deny all that is foreign to me I might end up like Gayelle TV.

The media house has dedicated itself to 100% Trinidad and Tobago programming. It has struggled for that choice. Advertisers in this country don’t support Gayelle, at least so the story goes. In essence 100% local has not proven to be a winning business model.

It’s name, Gayelle (pronounced: guy-l), is taken from the name of the arena for stick-fighting, a blood sport that is decades even centuries old. Two men, usually, engage in a fight using a piece of wood taken from a tree, not one processed like ply or so, called a bois.

To extend on its meaning it can be suggested that it, too, means as an entity it is prepared to fight to the end in its defence and as is evident by the response to its agenda, with some offense.

My name, Sterling Henderson, is in the first part English and then Scottish.

As the story goes my first name was chosen by my god-father. I am my mother’s second child and she says the pregnancy felt so different to when she carried my brother that she believed she was having a girl. She decided on no boy names and when I was born it was then that a name was chosen.

The black Hendersons I have heard of hail from the southern states of North America and were freed after serving in the Civil War. Some of them settled in south Trinidad after migrating from the States, my father, Sylvan was from Belmont and before that I’m not sure.

Some might suggest that my name is not an African name and needs to be changed to reflect my heritage. I am Caribbean Roman Catholic. Some suggest that to really accept Christ I must be born again: now that I am older and aware I must consciously choose my savior and not accept the one given to me at baptism as a baby, I unawares. In Judeo-Christian tradition, though, the child follows the religion of the mother and so for now I rest comfortably like a vagrant outside the Vatican.

The story of Gayelle is one of determination in a sense and belief in self, too, of using the media to develop both in a nation, perhaps.

Abbott Joseph Liebling in a 1960 article for the New Yorker magazine wrote “freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one”. The title of the piece was Do You Belong in Journalism?

I write this against the backdrop of a world with a relentless agenda that reinforces through images, popular music and silence that gays do not exist.

All the music I hear speaks to male-female relations, some to inter-racial relations and some to praising gods.

What in my day in the media says to me you have a voice? What says I exist? Not much.

People never seem to agree when I say I hate the world. Maybe I’ll struggle but hopefully they’ll understand if I say it’s really about embracing that which is like me and rejecting that which is foreign to me.

A Side of Politics

I met Slava Mogutin when I lived in New York and he dated a friend.

My friend, is Jamaican. He once told me he "hates" his homeland and would never return due to it possibly being the most homophobic place on earth.

I have in recent times, more so, kept up with some of Slava's work as I try to make sense of my own voice as a poet and draw inspiration from his liberation which in a sense came after he moved to New York as he was able to express himself with impunity.

If you feel so moved to check out his website and photographic work, you may be offended. I find some of it disturbing but such is the nature of expository work. He captures what he describes as gay sub-cultures, to be honest for the most part they are white gay sub cultures, at least in genesis. This is not to say there are no fetishes in black gay culture but to my knowledge…lets just say to borrow a line from Langston Hughes who credits Berry “The ways of white folks, I mean some white folks…” you get my point.

The reality is though that there is no gay Caribbean identity. This may seem like a jump but it is in part what motivated this piece. The matter simply does not arise and when it does it draws heavily on the mores and trends of North Americans who live a different reality. I ask myself how we are at same sex union talks when we haven’t even decriminalized consensual anal sex, not to be confused with homosexuality but used interchangeably in the language of some. There is a lot more to be said about that but this is a blog and not me attempting to justify non-normative sexual practices, normative being for procreation in missionary style only.

In the Caribbean the only institutionalized rejection of institutionalized relationship models is the mistress, the outside woman, yuh matey. We never hear of parents advocating sex of any kind not even between them. We do though hear of that necessary deputy and are allowed to imagine that this is where men, the one kind there is in the Caribbean, get their pleasure.

It speaks to socialization which is really the bee in my bonnet as I write and which will take me back to Slava Mogutin.

In speaking with a former media colleague recently I asked her about what caused gun violence in her area. She answered by saying it’s rarely drug related. She said a lot of times its really minor matters like disrespect, basically men and more so young black men now express anger with the pulling of a trigger and many times the taking of a life. This has been said before. It's also been said that belying all that is a lack of a sense of power, which is natural to desire and so gangs form giving a sense of belonging to a disenfranchised group. Within this structure one is now able to experience a range of things among them power and the ultimate form being to take a life. For leaders of gangs the power to provide as we see with dons in Jamaica and so called so called community leaders in Trinidad.

This week in T and T a man was sentenced to 20 years, in real time, for a brutal and excessive rape. Story goes he showed up at a house, asked for the father of the girl who answered the door, he wasn’t there and he proceeded to rape her along with an accomplice. Strange.

One radio commentator, and contemporary, in addressing the issue on his show which has a black agenda, a man of Muslim faith he is, spoke of the absolute zero tolerance for acts of violence against women by men. Here I can add that feminist activists recently told me, albeit under the pressures of a press conference and one which they were using to denounce the rise on domestic violence and crimes against women since the start of the SOE, that domestic violence affecting women in same sex relationships is a minority issue, they said more women were being affected by the violence of that other gender making the matter more pressing. Ok. Back to the radio commentary though, it was the second Muslim I’ve heard say it’s ok for men to hit each other but reprehensible for them to hit or hurt women. This ironically does not jive with the misogynist label usually associated with the faith by feminists particularly.

I aint so brave to disagree, as they say, “15 million Frenchmen could not be wrong". I have been conditioned along the same lines. I on one level feel different when violence is perpetrated against women. From a purely academic p.o.v this is conflictual as feminists argue that any difference between a man and a woman in terms of strength, ability and the like is a nurtured difference and not a natural one. The paradigm is changing though. Rhinanna's Man Down comes to mind so too the movie Columbiana, which I havent seen but have heard features a lead female killer of sorts.

It does make we wonder though if the ideal of a world of no violence is possible if we look again at that message that we send young men: they will be violent and we accept that what we won’t accept is violence against women.

I don’t write without fear but I am comforted to some degree by some of those crazy white people who do things that black people don’t: Slap Peace

Fear - A work by Christopher Cozier

Christopher Cozier transcends decades as an artist but is always contemporary. One of his pieces which resonates with me is on what he sees as the commodification of Fear.

It is reposted with permission from Richard Rawlins @ Draconian Switch E Magazine.

Characters

If not Shango then Caesar say “he is one of us and we will save him”. Perhaps not until he stops saying he is the Christ’s. His trust in himself has been eroded and he will not come to us. He is as decadent as Ancient Rome’s abandon, can not deny his roots and knows life is a carnival, a testimonial. Does that make him lost, without grounding or identity?

He found comfort in the rhythms of the Pontiff of Sound. The Godfather welcomed him openly, invited him into his House, and shared his smiles with him. Many others of extraordinary talent continue to praise him for his manners, enjoy his manner and he waits for manna.

No time to teach him growth, they have and he does not realize its process. He believes his benevolence as he imagines a father, shaped by a mother, a brother too. Not lover, not hater, not anything. He feels himself a new creation and longs to belong, but where?

The mind of that boy is damaged some say. Others say it is without discipline. Some say nothing but think of him, not knowing what to think. So many icons and his choices are curious. Dark figures he knows not wholly but burns for a connection without knowing why, distracting himself from finding kinship when all seem different.

There are voices that calm him and torturous choruses he can’t escape; his own sound to him sometimes a curse to others a voice of truth, a thing to comment on. He masks. Turn to him and he will to you. Anything else clean as a new page upon which a story is told, made up, believed. Sanctus.

Like a well you spring, kinetic forces propelling a thing that is not to be owned or hindered. “ah just shit de”, it had to be said. Candido Moldanado was an old, classic New York cabbie. He’d often say “Candido Moldanado tiene un coolo cacado.” I'd rode with him many times.

He should be a boxer the man told my mother. Not Ogun? Yemanja? Not the giants who have walked before?

Orion's Arms

Mummy and I landed in New York in late January of 1991. It was winter and extremely cold, not just because I never knew such temperatures but because even by those seasoned in the seasons, it was said to be cold.

I remember crying as I spoke to a family friend living in New Jersey, calling from a phone booth in Bed Stuy. It was the day after we landed. Bed Stuy then was not what it is today. It bore none of the glamour of a neighborhood being developed through its changing upwardly mobile tenants. It was old black families that owned homes not of the same repute as the brownstones of downtown Brooklyn and Harlem but of similar architecture.

The Mc Donalds on the corner of Fulton and Halsey, the Crown Fried Chicken place a couple blocks down and the odd Chinese fast food joint summed up opportunities for dining, or at least eating.

It wasn’t until the Super Path Mark came to Atlantic and Flatbush, many years later would there be any semblance of a more than basic shopping experience. Wide aisles, greater selection, fresher produce, a deli section and even a bakery if I remember correctly spoke to what I would learn to be gentrification. Out-priced by the rents in Manhattan, others were now willing to live in Brooklyn, well at least those who were willing to live in Brooklyn.

Until then when you stopped a taxi in Manhattan and said you were going to Brooklyn they would many times drive off without even an explanation. The talk was that many would take the drivers across the bridge into the borough and then run off without paying. They would sometimes say they couldn’t get a trip back so it wasn’t worth their while to travel out of the City. The same was true for Yellow Cabs and Gypsy Cabs.

The Saturday after landing I found myself in search of the Village. In search of that bastion of bohemia I had heard so much about. I first found myself on Broadway at around West Fourth right next to where the Tower Records Store used to be, MP3 buried that long standing landmark and floors of musical joy. My first purchase was at one of the many weekend markets that can be found around the city, a yin and yang pendant.

I would learn to dress for the cold while becoming as much a part on New York’s narrative as any other: lessons in acclimatization, assimilation and acculturation.

For me, personally, migrating was not about financial gains. It was about more and not that, I never thought of making it rich. I wasn’t able to have the career options open to everyone else as a below the radar immigrant. Living in New York though allowed me a space to be comfortable in other ways.

Many of my generation locally had migrated or were planning to. For some it was through football scholarships and others nursing scholarships.

I’m not sure any of us can say that the prospect of being somewhere else is not appealing. There doesn’t have to be a story. There usually is a motivator be it education, opportunity or a chance at a new start but the promise of the unknown and the mystique of the foreign have value, to me.

I’m trying not to get into the reasons I left not that they can be summed up in any priority. There is something about life that keeps me seeking understanding, rather to be understood. That too can have many reasons.

I could get into a justification based on the stifling nature of life in Trinidad and Tobago. Myth has it that it’s the curse of life in a small place, it is told through stories of small villages most times, limited opportunity, limited space so limited freedom of movement, protecting privacy is paramount and bigger is better. We accept these views and they have become our truths.

After my purchase and some browsing I made my way down past Washington Square Park and on to that strip where the fetish shops were. As fate would have it, hanging out at the door of the Pink Pussy Cat, the jewel in the sex shop crown, was a Trini from Belmont. I’m not sure how we started talking but we did and he was able to point me around. It was the beginning of the beginning. We went on to become good friends and part of a circle of young West Indians that would move as a unit for some time.

A lot would happen in the ensuing years I lived in New York. We went from Bed Stuy to Crown Heights, East Flatbush, back to Bed Stuy and eventually Clinton Hill.

I’d work primarily in the hospitality sector. To me it was invaluable experience. The tricky part is that an undeniable part of my experience in New York is a host of things I think many would wish I denounce. In coming home again my baggage includes contraband some may wish it didn’t. If they were to understand, though, that I can’t escape it and would prefer to rationalize it in a way that can bring peace to some and even love for others.

My Alien Registration Card is set to expire and the only way to save it is to just pack up and move back and go through the process of naturalization. My recently started degree represents both sabotage and salvation?

Migration is not without its problems. It can lead to a schism more so than as caused by a heavy diet of foreign media. I have heard the comment “I doh understand Trinis who does leave here and go Brooklyn and live with a set a Trinis. Why yuh go go somewhere else and not try to have a broader experience?” All I’ll say is that through the media we have assumed perhaps American values as a standard of sorts even on these shores.

I was one of those who immersed themselves in the wider society. Working as I did in restaurants and night clubs for years I was exposed to many and all types. My friends in New York are in great part of global origin, including Chinese.

As I forge forward at home, there is a struggle to establish a personal sense of a national identity, as one who has repatriated with hardly resolved views on my years away, in huge part affected negatively by what I believe to be Trinidad and Tobago values as espoused repeatedly. Part of me feels albeit slightly resented and mildly punished for having left. Too I think those around me would have had collective experiences that bond them.

Conversely I have a world of friends in another place with which I shared things that unite us, that keep me warm and are part of my joy. It’s not as win-win as it seems if it does at all. On one level my nationality saves me and the other my personality which is in part due to my nationality. At the end of it I might suggest that there are parts of me that I am valued for in New York that I believe are best left alone in Trinidad while my responsibility as a citizen, as I choose it to be, distances me from a considerable and meaningful time in my life, that spent in New York.