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We’re short on time as Dr Kris Rampersad and I meet at Normandie Hotel to chat. After a quick photo shoot with Elise Romany, we have just 45 minutes before she is due at the National Museum to open an exhibition by
LeRoy Clarke, ‘Eye Hayti …Cries…Everywhere.’ That’s far too short a time to chat with someone whose CV in media, cultural heritage and development work weighs some 50 pages heavy as a writer, researcher, media strategist, lecturer, journalist, founder, publisher, sustainable development, advocate and more.
Despite the time frame, Dr. Rampersad is as cool as they come. She orders a cup of tea, Earl Grey, black with no sugar as I cling to my third cup of coffee for the day and she starts, “Tea, is an ancient ritual in all our cultures, you know? It is my pick me up. I get less than four hours sleep, you see.” Then she moves straight to the subject at hand: “Do you know that I was one of the founding journalists of Newsday?” It’s a fact that I did know once but forgot. She doesn’t mince words: “Many of the new journalists forget or do not know, like much of our society has little interest in heritage. Newsday started in a social climate not unlike what we have today: tremendous negativity in the news. Then, it was driven by public outcry for more balance, with more positives even with rising crime.Today that outcry seems to have died and we just accept and relish and even revel in the blood and gore. We are losing our social conscience because we have done little to try to protect or retain it. Newsday came on the scene as ‘the good news paper’ and I was titled ‘the good news reporter’,” she reminisced, laughing.
“Our first cover story, which I wrote in September 1993, was ‘5000 Lives Saved’ (by the local suicide hotline). Think about it – a headline for such a story would normally read ‘5000 Attempted Suicide.’ My journalism was already taking on that character to impact the social conscience; that news and media should know its social responsibility to proactively shape the national character, not just report or react to it and that was the thinking that drove the founders of Newsday. But it didn’t last long. A few months in, the paper ran a crime story and its readership jumped beyond what its good news was attracting. The executives reversed the paper’s direction to what Newsday now is,” she says.“If we are lamenting the deterioration of our social conscience today, we are only reaping the whirlwind for not having invested in what it would have taken to change public orientation and outlook, not just react to it.” As negative as it all sounds, Dr Rampersad exudes energy, optimism and hope. “Social change doesn’t happen overnight, and it is not unattainable. That belief drives everything I do. But it is a collective responsibility. Positive change requires investments, risk-taking and resources.”That conscience about the long term, that we are only here for a short time as custodians not just as consumers, she notes, is what is missing from our society today.
Though she prefers not to be labelled an academic, much of her time is spent in intensive research, not just behind a desk, but interacting, collecting oral stories of peoples and cultures, visiting museums and piecing together stories couched within artefacts and she has accumulated and documented audiovisual materials and interviews from over two hundred cities in more than fifty countries across the world, and supplementing and comparing this with other materials.
“This means very little to most, but I have the only full length intimate video interview with Senior Counsel Dana Seetahal, but who’s interested, eh? No one ever took the time to try to find what made a woman who was giving so much to our society tick. Whatever interest there was in her horrendous death has just moved on to the next unsolved murder statistic.”
She is also active on the range of social media as well: LinkedIn,Facebook, Twitter and her own blog. “As much as there are negatives, the new technologies place the world at our fingertips. It’s a tool, to be used, negatively or positively, and for a child consumed with curiosity and a thirst for knowledge, who grew up barely able to afford books, for me it makes everyday Christmas,” she laughs. “It allows me to piece together connections about us; about our place here in the region, in the Americas, in the world that no one knows!”
Dr Rampersad was recently appointed chair of the National Museum and Art Gallery, a position that she says, was thrust on her for articulating the need to transform “such core national institutions which now exist only as shells of what they should be, pawns of power play and bureaucratic wrangling.” She explains, “It’s a sad indictment on all of us that our museum should be in the state that it is when a museum is the pulse and soul of a nation’s character and identity. We need to ask ourselves where our focus really is as a nation. I get shocked looks when I say that the same kind of dedicated attention and investments it took for us to develop our oil industry is needed for the cultural heritage sector, there’s no two ways about it; so when the oil dries up – and we are told we have, what, less than two decades – we would have a developed parallel economy in the heritage and its satellite sectors. Look at the developed world, this has been at the social and economic centre of those societies since time immemorial. It is not about what’s left or falls out of national and corporate and education budgets,” she says. “It requires proactive and conscience intervention.”
Speaking of heritage, she delivers a radical thought-provoking notion as we chat. “Look at our ancestry – we are not children of slaves. We are not children of indentured labourers. We are children of societies with magnificent cultures and traditions that have traveled across the seas to build this new and magnificent society,” she leans forward, emphatically, “which I firmly believe is second to none in the world: and I have seen plenty, eh!” She adds, “You want a good sound bite? We should also remove the word ‘Tolerance’ from our national watchwords; just as we need to redesign our National Coat of Arms. It contains elements that have nothing to do with us. We as a people are not about tolerance – the way we function as a society, the way we celebrate together; how we party, according to David Rudder. It should be dropped. And then we can try to start dealing with politics,” she laughs harder.
No doubt much of this global thinking comes from actually being a global thought-leader. Her work has transformed the globe in no small way. A working proposal from her computer and her networking skills to celebrate “Women as Agents of Change” has been used not only by our Government, but moved through the Commonwealth and OAS and onto large swathes of the world as well.
The model of engaging people to activate plans for change she developed in her hands-on work with communities across the Caribbean through inter-American institutions, UNESCO, the Commonwealth and others, is being used across the spectrum to get bureaucracies and decision-makers to understand that their plans and actions should be about people. That brings no monetary rewards, but, “it is about legacy,” she says.
To read the continuing story about Dr Rampersad and hear her viewpoints on what she has to say about the challenges facing our first female Prime Minister as well as the upcoming general election and our nation’s way forward, log on to our website www.newsday.co.tt or check us out at Newsday Womans Weekly on Facebook.
Follow Dr. Rampersad online on Facebook where you can also check out ‘LiTTscapes’ or via Twitter (@krisramp) and through her blog Demokrissy (kris-rampersad.blogspot.com)
Related Links: https://krisrampersad.com/
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IRA Mathur Review of Finding A Place by Dr Kris Rampersad
At first glance, its cover with photographs of Sam Selvon, Lakshmi Persaud, VS Naipaul, Seepersad Naipaul, Shiva Naipaul, Stella Abidh, Shani Mootoo and FEM Hosein suggests Dr Kris Rampersad’s newly-launched book 'Finding a Place – IndoTrinidadian Literature' is a literary critique of these writers and their work.
In fact, the fading newspapers beneath the photographs suggest a more subtle and compelling connection. Dr Rampersad’s ground breaking work is built around little known and rare publications produced by IndoTrinidadians over a hundred years (1850-1950) – The East Indian Advocate, Herald, Patriot, Weekly, Observer, Presbyterian, Koh-i-noor Gazette among others. It unearths lost chunks of our history, presses us to rethink the Indian experience in the New World, and lights up through her research the lost and faded pioneers of IndoTrinidadian writing.
“It was in the (East Indian) Weekly,” she writes in chapter five, “that the first writers found an outlet for their wish to write. Through its reports and focus, they found the subjects and themes that would dominate later creative fiction.
“The issues of adaptation to a new society, cross-culturation, the struggle for promotion and acceptance, acquiring wealth, biracial marriages… later became subjects and themes for the creative fiction of IndoTrinidadians.”
In her introduction, the author asserts that her book, which quotes articles, letters to the editor and editorials from rare, lost or forgotten publications, “maps a process of literary development.”
She writes: “It becomes obvious from this study that a writer like VS Naipaul did not arise as an aberration, but from realities within the society in which he grew up. The desire to write came out of a century-long tradition of yearning and aspiring towards that goal, within which was encapsulated the need to be understood and accepted by the society which was now being claimed as home.”
I had seen Dr Rampersad, looking incongruently girlish the evening of the launch, among heavyweight university academics asserting that we all have only a partial view of the world based on our individual experiences and influences, which is why we each need to write our stories so we can understand one another.
Although Finding a Place is rooted in academia, it reads like investigative journalism at its cutting edge. The writing is lively with evocative images, plump with analysis and context, (so that in some ways it is a one-stop shop for the history of the IndoTrinidadian’s experience in the New World) and the material as fascinating as unexpectedly discovering fading letters of a grandparent and seeing them in their youth.
“The book began with a vague notion, a philosophical position, that of understanding how the many strands of our society have evolved. After that, I looked at the Koh-i-noor Gazette which was one of the few of the 12 publications available in the National Archives,” Dr Rampersad said later in an interview.
“A whole lot has disappeared. When I was looking for material, people would say ‘we just moved and threw away old papers.’ I didn’t locate The Herald and The Patriot until the end of the study, then I had to redo other chapters to accommodate the new material.
“Practically all the issues raging in the 1860’s and 70’s are relevant today – the questions of voice and voicelessness, of national identity; of how much allegiance do we owe to Africa, to India.
“There are instances in the book that manifest how politics and self-interest divide groups such as the split that caused the demise of The Herald, a paper that saw itself as a unifier among races. The political faction produced a rival paper The Patriot. The Herald’s noble literary ambitions suffered, its editor got disillusioned, and the paper died.
The study, adds Rampersad, “explodes the myth that IndoTrinidadians were insular since it demonstrates so much interaction within the society without animosity. For instance, the East Indian Weekly had an Afro-Trinidadian publisher. The paper shows Hindus, Muslims, Christians working together, for example, on the issue of destitute indentured labourers and championing national issues from flooding in Laventille to the need to develop Carnival.
“Today you won’t hear anyone calling themselves a ‘Christian Hindu,’ but that was common then. The term ‘An IndoTrinidadian’ has its first recorded usage as a pen name, as early as 1888.
“Perhaps the society was much more tolerant than we are today, recognising that all peoples need to assert their identity. Nobody at that time had a problem with people having a press for themselves. The Creole population had The San Fernando Gazette, the upper classes The Port-of-Spain Gazette, so when The Koh-i-noor Gazette came out, most felt it was about time.”
Finding a Place debunks old myths of the IndoTrinidadian as insular or un-intellectual by producing overwhelming evidence that this group, like the Afro- and Euro-Trinidadian, was grappling with an identity that remembered the Old, and actively interacted with the New World.
“Trinidadians don’t realise the great struggle it was for IndoTrinidadians to get the vote in the country. When the Franchise committee on granting universal suffrage wanted to introduce a clause that only people who could read and write English should be able to vote – at that time that was about 70 per cent of the Indo population. Agitation in the press got that clause removed.”
Even as IndoTrinidadians gave up their language and adapted English for mobility, says Rampersad, they found other ways to streamline Indian culture and language, other ways of evolving while retaining a sense of their roots. This was manifested in the oral tradition, in chutney and Pichakaree, and the oral traditions fed into the writings.
Dr Rampersad’s premise is that everybody is searching for roots and identity at a time when technology and travel makes it impossible for people to be insular, and many see themselves as multicultural entities. She hopes her book will become a module for others to look at their own groups.
The Triumph of Gollum in the Land of Shut Up Suicide of the
Fellowship of Partnerships Book 11. A Sequel Futuring the Agenda Forward https://goo.gl/HU3rp3
Celebrating Jamettry The Sacred and the Sacriligious
LeRoy Clarke, ‘Eye Hayti …Cries…Everywhere.’ That’s far too short a time to chat with someone whose CV in media, cultural heritage and development work weighs some 50 pages heavy as a writer, researcher, media strategist, lecturer, journalist, founder, publisher, sustainable development, advocate and more.
“Our first cover story, which I wrote in September 1993, was ‘5000 Lives Saved’ (by the local suicide hotline). Think about it – a headline for such a story would normally read ‘5000 Attempted Suicide.’ My journalism was already taking on that character to impact the social conscience; that news and media should know its social responsibility to proactively shape the national character, not just report or react to it and that was the thinking that drove the founders of Newsday. But it didn’t last long. A few months in, the paper ran a crime story and its readership jumped beyond what its good news was attracting. The executives reversed the paper’s direction to what Newsday now is,” she says.“If we are lamenting the deterioration of our social conscience today, we are only reaping the whirlwind for not having invested in what it would have taken to change public orientation and outlook, not just react to it.” As negative as it all sounds, Dr Rampersad exudes energy, optimism and hope. “Social change doesn’t happen overnight, and it is not unattainable. That belief drives everything I do. But it is a collective responsibility. Positive change requires investments, risk-taking and resources.”That conscience about the long term, that we are only here for a short time as custodians not just as consumers, she notes, is what is missing from our society today.
