Skin.

By Shawnelle Martineaux

Your shipwreck got to shore without crashing.

Your cargo was splayed and frayed by its unbelonging.

They were marked black and glistened

In the heat.

They were not home.

They made do.

There was no home to go back to.

But there was history to make.

And lives. For you to take.

And time. For you to keep.

Just like their bodies kept score.

Sweet sugar and hot tea was had.

Every burden, they bore it.

For you.

One day, your mirror cursed at you.

You are not the fairest of them all!

So, you clenched your teeth.

You swiped your pen.

And of livestock, you made men.

They were free. For your taking.

Their identities, for your making.

No expectation of them waking.

Just go. Be.

But freedom brought the kiss of love.

And eyes opened wide and

touched the horizon, wanting…

more.

With your earworms whirling

in their minds

they got back on your ship that you built

with their blood, sweat, and tears.

Your shores beckoned them home.

And, when they answered,

you pretended they were not yours.

They were marked black and

It was harsh against the coldness of your

grey gloom.

Their skin is just a vessel

at your border.

Mother. Land.

It carries your stories.

It speaks your truth.

The gnarled thing inside it is all you.

Do you fear what you have become?

Is it true that the same sun

that never set on my back

never set on your empire?

Was it not you who made me

an English child

at bedtime, cradled at your breast?

Why can’t I come home?

Why don’t you claim me like you own me now?

You must be too good for your own devices.

But I’ll be sleeping

in the conservatory with the other delicate

things

you conveniently forget to tend to.

Maybe one day in the spring sun,

I’ll grow into your prized courgette.

And you can peel me and see that I

am good inside.

Then, you can have me for lunch.

An inheritance, an identity, and some words of questionable wisdom.

It is 5:40 a.m. on Tamil Thai Pongal 2024. My insomnia is in full swing, and my brain is working overtime. For some reason, a preoccupation with my own identity has overcome me this morning. My primary suspicion is that the talks of removing Colonial statues and of deporting immigrants triggered it, so I am sticking to that theory. My identity is not in crisis because of colonialism, and immigrants are not the devil. I feel grateful. I am happy that biology, war, culture, time, luck, technology, love, and hate if I am being completely honest, conspired to bring me into existence, just so that I could want for sleep in this very moment and tell the world about it as if it is some profound thing. Isn’t that funny?

Generations ago, my Tamil great great grandfather took a trip from Ceylon to the much smaller island of Barbados for some business of which I have not been apprised. There, he met the love of his life. Emily Alleyne was a mulatto chick with an adventurous spirit, who clearly couldn’t get enough of him. After their long honeymoon back in Ceylon, they settled in San Juan, Trinidad, of all places. My great granny, Nora, and her siblings, eventually came along. That was how I would come to be a Trinidadian a century later.

Nora would marry, too. He was of Chinese, Indian, and African heritage with a Muslim dad. He somehow turned out to be an Anglican and a Roman Catholic at the same time. Their marriage would last, though not their relationship, and Nora would eventually tell me of how much his name—Lionel—suited him because truth was his mortal enemy.

Before their permanent separation, they would make their first-born, Victor, and their identical twins, Rodney and Senley, the former of which would turn out to be the little man who funded my university studies, despite barely being able to read.

Rodney would leave home at a young age because of verbal and physical abuse by various stepfathers who came along. He would move to Arima, where at 22, he would meet Miriam Makeba’s long-lost twin of pure gorgeousness, from whom I inherit the majority of my good looks, Paulina. She was training to be a midwife. He would ask her to stop, promising to take care of her. She would, and he would keep his word until her dying day in December 2017.

Paulina’s dad, Clifford Meyers (pronounced Mares), was an English, Spanish, and French patois-speaking man of mixed heritage. She was his twin. He would meet Juliana Torres, a Mestizo woman of Venezuelan heritage. With her, he had two boys and two girls. After all that baby-making, he would marry someone else… Because of course he would. 😅

Paulina and Rodney would make my mother Alison, along with the twins, Ashton and Arlene. These people had no idea that they would all come to be some of my most cherished humans, despite our myriad differences.

Meanwhile, in the sleepy, seaside village of Blanchisseuse on Trinidad’s North Coast, some other magic (or madness) was happening.

Maureille Elie, who spoke not a word of English or Spanish, met a mixed Venezuelan woman who spoke English and Spanish by chance. I only know her as Mamita, and I have only seen one photo of her. With her, he would have a relationship (don’t ask me how, but I reckon it was short given the limited communication capabilities) and make his only biological child, my granny Louisa Edith De Leon. The Vene would move to Belmont after they broke up. I presume she learnt English. She would make several more daughters of non-Elie paternity.

Maureille would keep his daughter and would marry an absolute witch by all accounts. The very smart and promising Louisa, who became fluent in English at primary school and spoke French-patois at home, would be withdrawn from school altogether on her stepmother’s orders. Her teachers begged. Her headmaster pleaded. It did not work. As such, she did not even have a primary school certificate, despite being a really smart cookie. The joys of being a girl back in the day!

Louisa would, nevertheless, become skilled in various domestic arts, as well as crochet, which would take her to Tobago and her mother’s Venezuela for competitions. She would make two sons for two men—the older, Herbert, whose father was a lawyer, would win an island scholarship. The other, Courtney, was for some other professional man from Couva, Trinidad. He would become a soldier, then a drug addict after his batch made a drug raid. He would also become my most loved paternal uncle despite this flaw.

Louisa would remain in her father’s house until the unlucky (for her, not me) day that a Vincentian man of French and African roots, Ralph Martineaux, would stumble into her life and marry her. They would make a few children in Blanchisseuse, then move to Arima where they would make the rest of their 9 gremlins together. The unfortunate man I would come to call my father, John Martineaux, was their second-to-last child and favourite boy child.

John and Alison would grow separately in the same little village in Arima. They would go to primary school and secondary school separately, and they would have somewhat separate friends. One day in 1990, his best friend, Derek, and her best friend, Carol, whom I would grow up calling Uncle Derek and Aunty Carol, would get married. John and Alison would meet at that wedding and would later learn that their families had intermarried before while planning their own wedding four years later.

Four years later, they would also be building a house together while I was brewing in Alison’s tummy after what, in hindsight, I consider to be a really bad decision to date below her league. They would marry the December after I was born, in a huge wedding ceremony, planned for almost a year. My dearest brother would come about three years later, looking like Emily Alleyne, who had travelled to Ceylon with her love. More importantly, he would share Emily’s adventurous spirit.

None of the things which I’ve outlined above would have happened if empires were shy about imperialism and if borders were impenetrable fortresses meant to protect against so-called cultural degradation and ethnic replacement. Quite frankly, us racial and cultural mutts have as much of a right to exist freely as anyone else, and we would prefer it if you didn’t try to get in our way. We are not some disease that needs to be contained, lest we contaminate the prized flock. Continents and histories had to join forces just to bring us about, and we intend to not disappoint them for their efforts.

Had colonialism and immigration not happened, some random man from a South Asian island owned by a monarch of two European islands, who also happened to own, among other things, a bunch of smaller islands on a new continent, wouldn’t be able to take a ship, sail to the other side of the globe, meet a woman with slave and planter blood, marry her, move to another island where neither had roots, and make Trini babies. The ship would not exist, and neither would the empire.

Some man by a Trini beach wouldn’t be speaking a derivative of French, and the woman he fell for wouldn’t have been speaking English or Spanish. There would be no school from which little Louisa could be pulled, and she would have no Arima to move to with Ralph. There would be no such thing as a Trini, as the island would still be called Iere. It would be inhabited by a handful of my ancestors who had a proclivity for feathers and cassava-use. And god bless pone and farine!

There would be no Paulina and no Rodney. There would be no Alison or John. There would be no me to write you this long piece of prose about myself, defending the merits of ancient empires in this beautiful English language. There would be no phone on which I could type it from my American-made bed under the cooling breeze of a Chinese-made fan. There would be no you to write it to, and no internet to which I could publish this manner of madness.

As the insomnia that probably kept Emily awake and dreaming of adventure keeps me awake now, and as my yearning to travel across oceans to see what life has to offer continues to arrest me, I am amused that anyone would want to remove statues that commemorate a period in Trini history that had to happen for me to happen.

As the citizens of countries of immigrants pontificate about why their borders should be closed to protect “their culture”, and as they try to justify why us third-world scum should be seen as inferior, I wonder whether they would hold their own ancestors to these newfound standards. Are people willing to be closed to their own existence?

An open world that is honest about and at peace with its past will likely honour it and make a great future. A world where people can move, meet, mix, and mingle is the best world. Sometimes, those opportunities turn into pensive lawyers with asocial sleeping patterns who really understand what it means to be a Westerner. Happy Tamil Thai Pongal! May we reap the fruits of our labour and stare at the sun. Maybe one day, soon again, there will be another empire on whom she never sets!

Populists, Anchor Babies, Diplomats, and Vivek Ramaswamy.

When Vivek Ramaswamy withdrew from the US presidential race, I was overjoyed. He has since endorsed ex-president and fellow businessman Donald Trump… It’s not ideal… but he’s no longer running, which is great. My issues with Vivek can be summed up in two main points: 1. I think that he is an opportunistic and unprincipled populist, and 2. I think that he is a hypocrite. These points overlap in many ways, but I’ll discuss them seriatim below.

Opportunistic Vivek

It is, of course, at the forefront of my mind that Vivek was a politician marketing himself as a businessman first. He is a brand, first and foremost. It is the fact that he is a successful businessman who chose to enter the political ring that makes him a politician. All politiciams should be scrutinised because they are inherently opportunistic until they prove otherwise. Substantively, I think that much of the guy’s campaign focussed on undocumented immigrants and “securing the border,” not because he was particularly passionate about the subject matter, but because he knew that it worked for Trump in 2016.

He chose to adopt the populism that Trump exploited because he knew that it was a formula for incensing the working class masses of Middle America. I am not a fan of populists or anti-immigrant sentiments, but the borderline fascistic ideology is only a small part of what grinds my gears. It is the insult that upsets me more.

The intentional exploitation of xenophobic tendencies for political gain gave me pause, especially because I knew that it was intentional. Everything he did was intentional. It may be the libertarianism values I espouse, or the bored theatre kid in me, but when I close my eyes and think of Vivek, the image that energes is a seething Patrick Bateman mid-bludgeon, enjoying his orgasmic, psychopathic thrills. Only, instead of bludgeoning someone to death, he is insulting people’s intelligence.

Deep down, I genuinely believe that Vivek thinks that “those people” are too silly to be reasoned with, and as a result, he has to emotionally manipulate them into supporting him by fuelling their sense of lack. It is run-of-the-mill marketing, but it is still insulting. I would more quickly trust a shark that told me it just wanted to speak about its lord and saviour Jesus Christ while I had an open wound and was bleeding out on the Pacific Ocean floor than trust a word that comes out of opportunistic Vivek’s mouth!

To facilitate his condescending opportunism, he opined that the children of undocumented immigrants should be denied birthright citizenship in the same way that the children of diplomats are denied the same. The argument was dumb. Vivek proffered that it was because diplomats were not subject to the law that they could not receive that citizenship benefit. His dubious analogy was that undocumented immigrants were criminals and, therefore, were not subject to US law. As such, their children born on US soil should not receive the Constitutional birthright citizenship.

To the drunk or the illiterate, the comparison was sensible. To the sensible, it was drunk and illiterate. The pesky little fact that being a criminal requires a person to be subject to the criminal jurisdiction (which diplomats are not) and be convicted as such (which diplomats cannot be), gets in the way of that tirade. A smart, Harvard-trained lawyer would know that this was foolish circular reasoning…but convenience trumped reasoning because those people are too stupid to know that. I rest my case on this point.

Hypocritical Vivek

A perfect example of that unfortunate man’s opportunism was his hypocrisy when it came to market principles. Our dearest Vivek took to Twitter to praise Javier Milei’s deregulation of the Argentine housing market and the consequent doubling of supply with 20% down and decreasing rents. Vote for him, he said, and it would be a vote for deregulated markets! He conveniently knew of the benefits of deregulated markets but refused (or failed—which is worse) to acknowledge that those same principles applied to labour… and therefore immigration by extension!

This was a most disturbing foursome among himself, Hayek, Friedman, and Keynes, and was very disappointing. Protectionism has never known a prettier, more deceitful face!

To add insult to injury, all this lamenting and fomenting about anchor babies while using market economics like a Miss America world peace campaign came from the chief anchor baby!

Vivek, a first-generation American immigrant, was, through his magical birthright citizenship, the means by which his own mother could become an American. His father, who was on a non-immigrant visa, and who is still not a US citizen, was his family’s route to the US and the only reason dearest Vivek was able to have the opportunities that he could in Ohio. He chose to become the chief campaigner against himself, making a narrow distinction based on the fact of his father’s visa, knowing fully well that his intelligent Indian compatriots whom US citizens want to hire are unable to get work visas because of systemic failures brought about by the kinds of policies he was endorsing. Much less for the remainder of non-Indians whom US citizens also want to hire, who cannot legally enter the US workforce because of counterproductive, bureaucratic nonsense.

I don’t know about you, but a person who not only warns but tries to prevent me from doing the very thing he did, which worked for him, is not trustworthy. That is the epitome of hypocrisy. With that thought, I leave you to think, knowing that in about four years, this man will show up again to try and charm the boxers off many a Midwestern, beer-drinking uncle.

Is life inherently valuable?

I do my best to be mindful of when I hold beliefs and not opinions. Beliefs are conclusions I make without evidence, based on my feelings. Opinions are the conclusions I come to based on thinking through the evidence available to me. When I do notice myself believing rather than thinking, I make it my business to explore evidence and scrutinise my beliefs so that I could test their internal validity. After that, I either maintain or reject them.

The latest of my forays into the domain of my skull has involved my belief in the inherent value of human life. I am not sure when I started having this presumptious belief, but its unsteadiness became clear to me while I was listening to a podcast on abortion. The guest, Dr. Calum Miller, was a pro-life medical doctor. The hosts were both pro-choice comedians. While these descriptors are quite propagandistic, one thing stuck out. Dr. Miller boldly asserted, “Well, the starting premise is a belief in the inherent value of life. We can agree on that.” I am not sure whether I was particularly sleep-deprived or just keen on playing the devil’s advocate, which happens because that is how my personality works, but the first thought I had was “Is it? Must we?”

As I lay in the dark, pillow bent into the most comfortable shape possible, it dawned on me that I did not have any reason to maintain this belief. I was begging the question, and that is a no-go for fundamentals as a rationalist! There is no objective reason to conclude that human life is inherently valuable. We happen to prefer ourselves because that’s what genes have evolved to do. But, to look at the vastness of the universe and think that we, as specks of dust on an inconspicuous planet, are valuable, seems juvenile. This is also often a tool used to justify otherwise immoral things. Any good intentions that underpin this idea should not really count if the idea itself is faulty.

Do I have any idea of what should count? Nope. But just as I had no objective reasons to believe in gods when I became an atheist, and just as the absence of objective reasons did not render life meaningless, I think that if we put our heads together, we could come up with sensible principles. It really all depends on where we start our moral reasoning, and that depends on temperament, as Johnathan Haidt has shown. Circular reasoning, for sure, but in the end, I think the great Tim Minchin said it best. We’re just f***ing monkeys in shoes!

What do you think?

Newspapers are Unserious.

I’m a libertarian, and as a libertarian, very few things provoke an emotional response in me. My sacred cow is that I do not believe in the veneration of sacred cows, and generally speaking, I prefer pragmatism and efficiency over much else. Be that as it may, encroachments on freedom of thought and expression cause me a particular kind of gripe which I must address. I am at least somewhat moralistic about these topics, but there are practical reasons, such as the need for efficient social intercourse, and the value of having the most information available to the public, which I use to justify my moral fervour in this regard. It disappoints me that the journalistic standards applied in Trinidad and Tobago, much like the politics, are from and for the gutter. Everyone seems to be in a race towards the bottom of a very deep, very murky drain.

In 2016, a gang of blood-thirsty dogs, armed with social clout, credentials and, frothing at the mouth, successfully conspired to expel my friend, satirist Kevin Baldeosingh, from the Trinidad and Tobago Guardian. The stab to the back came mere days after the paper’s management had confirmed the renewal of his contract as a columnist. The excuse given was finances, but it was obvious that the contents of his weekly column making the case that a Muslim woman was making a rational choice by choosing to wear her hijab at the expense of a job, was twisted to make him seem discriminatory and used to justify the sudden 180. The newspaper even apologised, and only one other columnist said anything to defend Kevin’s right to think and say what he wanted…he eventually was convicted of attempted murder and conspiring to execute his ex-girlfriend in Florida, but that’s a story for another day. Kevin was and still is a devoted family man. He had two toddlers and a young wife who was studying at the time. He had bills. It must have been a shock. I can only imagine how disorienting that experience would have been.

Now, I must clarify that the newspapers also have a right of freedom to associate. By no means are they obligated to hire someone unless they want to do so. If it was a matter of merely ending a contract, I would have very little to say. The media massacre that ensued, followed by the obvious blacklisting and silencing of a writer who had the longest-running and one of the highest-grossing columns in Trinidad and Tobago history distinguishes this situation and makes it more than an expression of the newspapers’ freedom to associate. This is especially so, because some months later, a columnist and gender feminist, Dr. Gabrielle J. Hosein, would casually thank her co-conspirators for assisting her with Kevin’s ousting using her column. The crime was, in reality, him daring to disagree with her ideas over the years, but she framed it as him targeting and bullying her. All he did was provide evidence which was contrary to her narrative and obvious agenda in a satirical way? Hosein’s lack of compunction and her clear use of her victim card to gather her troops—typical of female bullies—no doubt disturbed me. But it was the fact that she used the media to champion her anti-free speech, tribalistic position which made me want to vomit. That felt like mockery of liberal democracy itself!

Perhaps the problem lies there? Maybe the expectation that the Trinidad and Tobago media would seek to preserve its own reliability and integrity was too high. Maybe it is filled with members who are morally bereft. I know that what disgusts me clearly does not disgust others and I suppose that that sufficiently explains what transpired. This would also explain the complete failure of the journalistic institutions during the Covid-19 Pandemic of the last three years. I do not think that freedom of thought and expression should be partisan issues. These encroachments should disgust anyone remotely interested in living in a free, prosperous and healthy society. I am not sure how to make that ideological front the true and only tribal war.

That being said. imagine my complete surprise, though, when I read the March 1, 2023, Editorial by Mr. Curtis Williams, Trinidad and Tobago Express’ new Managing Editor, and learnt that contrary to my understanding, the media powers that be in Trinidad and Tobago care about protecting freedom of thought and expression. Utter shock! Understand that I try my best not to be a hypocrite. That others can freely engage in grand acts of hypocrisy such as this without feeling anything is the eighth wonder of the world to me. Mr. Williams and his editorial team are worthy of a place in The Guinness Book of World Records for this feat. I know that Kevin has been trying to write locally again. I know that I (and others) have been petitioning to have him write locally again since 2016. And, although Mr. Williams is fairly new to his role as managing editor, I know that he knows of this miscarriage of justice, because I wrote a letter to the editor in response to his flowery editorial some time ago. Has he actually attempted to adhere to his alleged principles? Nope! Will I let it rest? On principle, absolutely not! I refuse to allow media institutions to rot without talking about the smell. I am not ethically impotent.

Principles aside, as a fellow human, I know what it feels like to be targeted by a mob in my professional and academic life. I know what it is like for people to intentionally misinterpret and then misrepresent what I say, then use that misrepresentation and their social ties to exclude me from opportunities and groups. I went to girls’ schools all my life up until university. It did not get better at university or law school, mostly because I am not the kind of person who can see wrong things happening and just leave it be. These are not experiences I would wish upon my worst enemy, not because it is insurmountable, but because it is an immense waste of time and resources. I feel driven to say or do something when I notice wrong, and my big mouth gets me into trouble with bureaucrats in love with corruption and the status quo. I could live with that.

The kind of professional thuggery that is overtaking our institutions is unseemly and counterproductive. This misuse of the media and the infusion of female-typical aggression into the professional sphere where merit ought to be supreme is unbecoming. The media is an institution which ought to be preserved for the benefit of all, and its undoing in a manner this juvenile, anti-intellectual and anti-human is disgraceful. This is why no good writers remain on staff locally, why the editing skills are atrocious, and why our local intellectual life will continue to be sub-par. The same anti-intellectual forces that have tried to silence Salman Rushdie, that have killed Theo Van Gogh, that have made Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s security detail necessary, that have tried to get Bruce Gilley to stop asking questions and sharing heterodox ideas, and that have made V.S. Naipaul a local pariah are the ones which are conspiring to undo Kevin. This needs to stop before it is too late.

You may support Kevin by clicking this link and purchasing his books on Amazon. He writes really well, and he thinks!

The Death of Civilisation?

Two ideas popped into my head at about 2 a.m. today and I thought that it would be best to write them down. They are somewhat connected, albeit loosely. I am still processing them, so they are more postulations than conclusions, but in the words of JBP, you write to find out what you think!

The first idea is that as a civilisation moves beyond its physicality, it begins losing its identity and the people within it also become more prone to losing their identities.

Western civilisation has moved more and more away from the physicality of industry and more and more towards a digital age of ideas. Things which have been traditionally physical, such as newspapers, money etc. have gone digital for the most part and have gone through process of stripping them down to their bare bones. The idea of a newspaper or of money is what remains.

Similarly, the idea of identity seems to be less tethered to the body and what it does. There is a popular description of things as social constructs and seemingly constant experimentation in that regard on the one hand, yet people seem to be in more identity crises than previously.

My suspicion is that this social trend towards disembodied identity is a response to the world itself becoming less embodied. Humans are, after all, a part of their world. It would explain why these ideas take root much easier among intellectuals than working class people.

The second idea is much easier to conceptualize, though I am not entirely sure if it is original. I think that western civilisation has an autoimmune disorder.

As information becomes more available, it seems that autoimmune disorders are linked to leaky gut. The tight junctions between intestinal cells are weaker because of some chemical process and so things which typically would have remained on the outside of the body (the digestive tract is actually a long tube through rather than inside of the body) are leeching into it. This seems to be tied, at least in part, to ingesting certain proteins like gluten in quantities which are too large and for periods which are too long. The weakening of these tight junctions and the leeching in of these toxins cause the body to malfunction and mount an immune response against itself.

Similarly, western civilisation seems to have ingested the ideas of postmodernism that there is no inherent value in its precepts and that everything is relative. These ideas are leeching into its institutions and these very institutions are malfunctioning and self-destructing by adhering to select values. e.g. openmindedness, intellectualism, markets.

Anyway, those are some crude explanations which are far from thorough I’m going back to bed.