Thru Novel Lenses! New Vision New Perspectives New Ideas New Directions For the New World! Futuring Sustainable Development in the Post Pandemic Planet From Pre School to Policy Making
The challenges facing education, the arts, culture and media for survi val into the post pandemic planet inspires this recollection on the encounter and reencounter with education luminary Sir Ken Robinson.
The presentation on the prospects for the creative economy, revisioning accounting and representation still holds as we address the challenges of the post pandemic planet. For more visit https://krisrampersad.com/ah-drinking-babash-in-dis-fo-rum-creative-masks-of-satire/
Requests Semianrs Workshops Webinars Courses all Ages, All Sectors, All Industries at The Academy at the GloCaL Knowledge Pot https://krisrampersad.com
Dear Mayor, and noble and other honourable citizens of the colourless world
I see there is a call for suggestions on how to treat with the colonial legacy and monuments - which must be close to the millionth such call to which I have responded. But now aware that there will be no action along the lines that I have used, tried and tested with other similarly trauma-inflicted communities of our region, I am not even tempted to point out that most times I feel like I have been talking to stone or that we only reaping the whirlwind that will continue to gather strength as we add fury to savagery, I propose the following as a preliminary list for your immediate action to assuage the bloodthirsty masses. I am sure these would meet with nods and applause of approval from noted historians, educators, leaders, opinion leaders and the like from whom you seek counsel. This list is to exorcise the ghosts roaming Port of Spain, while I compile the much larger list for exorcism across the country, and beyond, Dear Mayor. I come, you see, Mr Mayor, to not praise, but bury Columbus, along with the colonial legacy embedded in our psyche, landscapes and institutions and monuments of memory.
More at: https://krisrampersad.com/exorcising-historical-trauma-black-white-of-monuments-memory/
In celebration of Independence, Demokrissy is migrating!
Loyal followers of Demokrissy have been enquiring about the State of the State at Independence.
While the State itself might be slow to evolve, we are continue our revolution, smashing walls and barriers (read more and Subscribe https://krisrampersad.com/)
I discovered Columbus when I was about
four years old and then I lost him again to rediscover him one fine sunset, his
parts cut up and scattered across my world and yours, the way he cut up our
continent and our peoples that became Your Majesty’s Empire.
Early explorations
I still remember
the expression on his face. Pa looks baffled. So far, he is able to answer all
my questions that end-of-July morning - the kind of morning that begins with
sunshine warming the weathered unvarnished wooden gallery, bathing it in soft
light and lending a calm cosy to the holiday feel. But every farmer’s daughter
knows – if she took the time from the more pressing global inquisitionings – a
day like this could brew thunder and torrential rains by mid-afternoon.
I must have
agitated him, this early morn. He asks me to bring him a cigarette – his brand,
named after an avenue in the city - and a box of matches.
I hand him a
Three-Plumes match from its yellow box, a product of Trinidad Match Limited
since 1887, it reads. I could read. Before that it was just a yellow box with
red markings, and the dark red scratch sides. Reading material was scarce in
rural Trinidad so I had taken to reading anything I could find and that usually
was the packaging of any item. I would later learn that 1887 was the year
Parisiens began to lay the foundation for the Eiffel Tower; and that Britain
passed the Act to unite Trinidad with Tobago as it celebrated the golden
Jubilee of Queen Victoria, just like your recent jubilee celebrations, and ours,
Liz.
Pa scratches the
match against the side of the box like my sister would, some years later, do a
scratch lottery. It flares over the edge of the cigarette and flickers out,
leaving a light stream of smoke behind it. He put it to his lips, leans back,
closes his eyes and draws hard on the tobacco that has soothed many a
shamanistic and other agitated spirits for millennia. It has also attracted as
gold many-a-pilferer, marauder and cutthroat pirate to our parts from yours, as
you well know, Dear Liz.
It is rare
discovery for me as a child - Pa at home at this time of a morning. He is
usually long gone by the time we are up, usually awake from 2 am. We would know
from his deep coughing, caused by a head cold he caught working as a forester
in his younger days which would hasten his end of days. By peek of dawn he
would have already left for the vegetable garden or to the market to sell its
produce that was our main source of income.
Now, facing the
onslaught of curiosity, he is perhaps wishing he had kept this routine and head
out early as I bounce around him in the early morning trying to get answers for
these enormously challenging thoughts of universal import that collide like
meteors in my child’s mind.
“So how did
Columbus discover Trinidad?” The question pops into my head and pops out of my
mouth as questions tend to do from near-four year olds. I am conjuring up a
pale man in fancy pants, frilly shirt and embroidered waistcoat with funny wavy
white hair dripping down to his shoulders as I had seen in my sisters’ history
book. Reading material was often limited to their text books and I would take
sneak peaks, thumbing through them to see the pictures. They open-up the
windows of my imagination.
In my child’s
mind, Columbus is now unfurling - from over our island and pulling onto his
ship - an enormous sheet bellowing out with the wind. I had watched many times
as Ma or one of my sisters made our beds, shaking out a freshly washed bed
sheet. It would bellow out, before settling on the bed. The process of covering
and uncovering and surely discovering too, was a normal household routine.
Though he never
complained nor showed annoyance, it is the kind of question that probably made
Pa, the object of my incessant questioning, wish I was in that place where all
precocious youngsters are sent so someone else would answer their impossible
questions about how the world works - school. I am not yet enrolled in any of
the illustrious British-styled public schools – the legacy of your Governor
Lord Harris and subsequent governments, Lizzie - which were sure to offer the
answers to these impertinent thoughts of an infant. The closest ones are just
about a mile in any direction to one of which I was destined to walk to and
from, sometimes barefooted, over the next seven years – tall punishment for a
few questions – talk about how curiosity kills the cat, as schools kill curiosity!
Ma calls out to
me. She ladles out boiling cocoa from a big iron pot resting on the mud
fireside with a metal kalchul which she bought from Mawah in Princes Town. She
would go to the town just to chat with Mawah’s mother, leaving me to wander
around looking at all the curiosities in this shop that seems to have
everything, including the traditional wooden kulcha, and flat wooden dablas
used to turn roti on the chulha, dhal ghotnis of all sizes – wooden swizzle
stick with zig-zag edges on its round base and the biggest enamel basins and
iron pots one could imagine.
The utensils for
its preparation might have evolved, but not centuries and several languages and
cultural adaptations could alter cocoa, the pre-Ice Age plant, more than 21,000
years old, and its primordial connections as food of the gods across world
cultures. Even European botanists could find no better substitute than to
translate its value - Theobroma (Theo/god; broma/food) and the echo of its
ancient MesoAmerican/Caribbean, pre Olmec, preMayan roots: kakaw with slight
variations in inflections: Theobroma cacao. Today, its most common global
identification as chocolate still echoes its ancient primordial resonance. Once
Columbus helped Europe discover it, there was no turning back. Cocoa now covers
some 17 million acres of global soil, with nearly 4 million tonnes produced
every year. It has become the foundation of Swiss identity, and a catalyst for the
centre of social interaction in kingdoms far and wide. A global strategy for
the conservation and use of cacao genetic resources as the foundation for a
sustainable cocoa economy now guides an International Cocoa Organisation, an
international network of cocoa producers and International Cocoa Genome
Sequencing Consortium who meet annually to upgrade strategy, redefine
directions for the future of chocolate, its by-products and co-industries.
Though no longer a
formal currency as it was used in mesoAmericans - about 100 beans could then get
one a finely handwoven shawl - with increasing scientific evidence that it
reduces high blood pressure and can positively impact cancer and cholesterol
rates, I’m sure, Liz, that you concur with women the world over who testify
that this remains one of god’s essential provisions of heaven on earth.
To the steaming cup of
fresh cocoa, its oil already forming a film around the edges of the cup, Ma adds
a touch of bliss. She tilts the condensed milk can into a bluey-green enamel
cup, stirs it and hands it to me.
‘Careful, it hot!’ she
warns, nodding in Pa’s direction. Ma is not one for much words.
I walk back to
the gallery tentatively. The oil, temporarily disturbed, returns to curl around
the edges of the cup. The aromatic steam of cinnamon, clove, bayleaf, nutmeg
and cocoa drift out and up. You would agree, Dear Lizzie, in that moment, it is
not difficult to understand why Europe turned half the world upside down, raided
east and west, and went to war for the likes of this.
I hand the cup
to Pa and run back into the kitchen. Ma hands me a smaller version of the same
bluey-green enamel cup, with own serving of ‘cocoa tea’, though that in itself
may violate indigeneous practice that reserved enjoyment of cocoa for ritual
use only by men who fought nations for the privilege - the second of four
Anglo-Dutch wars was fought over cocoa, in England’s favour, in the 1660s and
on which the wealth of the likes of the Dutch East India Company was founded
then trading its primary wealth in cocoa beans. As was most other pleasures of
primitive planet-of-the-apes type cave-men, cocoa, too, was considered toxic
for women and children.
Not so in our
wooden dwelling. Ma had spent most of the night grinding the chulha-parched cocoa,
adding cinnamon and bayleaf and grated nutmeg, Taking handfuls of the ground cocoa,
moist with its own oils, between her palms, she had lovingly moulded them into
oval shaped balls. They are already hardening this morning and by tomorrow,
before boiling, we would have to grate it on the grater Pa made from pounding
holes closely together with a nail onto a piece of galvanise, bending it into a
semicircle, and nailing its edges against a short, flat piece of wood.
The still
lingering aromas of last night’s cocoa production hang on the wooden floors and
walls of the entire house and spill out to envelope the village in the way the
porridge from The Magic Porridge Pot
had crept out of the house in that Enid Blyton book I would later read.
Pa didn’t seem
to think I am violating any gender taboos, either, when I reappear with my own
cup of steaming cocoa, which seems to me, on hindsight, a very patriotically
appropriate way to commemorate one of the last Discovery holiday days Trinidad
and Tobago would know. Indigeneous to Trinidad, the Trinitario is one of the
world’s three main varieties of cocoa – a unique offspring of our geo-botanical
connections with the South American mainland as a more resilient, higher
yielding and natural hybrid of the two others – Forastero and Criolla. For Your
Majesty’s information, our cocoa might be old world Americas, but had produced
another New World hybrid - the cocoa panyols, an ethnic group of intergenetic
mixes between native peoples and other migrant streams who joined them here –
Your Majesty’s people, Europeans, Africans, Indians and others.
On this July 31
morn both Pa and I are unaware that it would be some years yet before Apple
computer technologies would name its application programme interface (API),
cocoa.
The steam from
his cup of hybrid cocoa is beginning to subside. Pa takes a sip, inhaling
deeply its aroma. I have never seen him this relaxed.
“Why he not up yet? Wake him?” I ask Pa,
nodding in the direction of my brother’s room, hoping for chance at an excursion
to visit some other part of Trinidad on this holiday. As my brothers and
sisters grew older, our wooden house was expanded over the years: a room added
here, a corner boarded in there, and this was a new room my brothers and his
friends added at the end of the gallery.
Pa’s answer triggers the
steam of questions from my condensed milk-sweetened, cocoa-lubricated tongue.
As he had every Sunday
afternoon, my brother had routinely polished the silver angel with its
transparent plastic pink-tipped wings perched on the bonnet of his baby blue
Cortina taxi the day earlier, before he also lathered the entire car, and himself,
to be covered in white soap suds. Sometimes he would cover his whole face and
head in suds and try to scare us. He succeeded once when he sneaked up on me. I
screamed so loudly, that I stumbled over a root of the enormous chenette tree
in our yard in trying to run away from him as he looked like a jab jab from a
Carnival band.
Native to our part of
the world, the chenette tree, like cocoa, also predates Columbus by thousands
of years, and its fruit is known in various pronunciations as genip across South
Central America and the Caribbean. The more
melodramatic injections into its nomenclature occurred when European botanists
wrapped their tongue around its sticky pulp. Discovered for Europe in Jamaica and named by
Patrick Brown as he had 103 other genera in
the mid-1700s, Brown, an Irish botanist who worked as a doctor across the West
Indies also produced A Civil and Natural
History of Jamaica until our oh-so-inhospitable-to-Europeans clime sent him
a-packing as it has a few others, like the man who invented television whom we
will discover later. Brown gave chenette its botanical name, Melioccus bijugatus which was
subsequently described and placed in its soapy genus group by Dutch-born
Austrian, Nikolaus Joseph von Jacquin who has an
orchid named after him; had Mozart teach music to his children and named a
couple of his pieces after them, and in honour of whose work in the Caribbean,
Austria in 2011 issued a special commemorative silver coin issue.
The Spanish dubbed it limoncillo/mamoncillo in some of their territories.
Contented to translate rather than rename, the English called it Spanish lime
another characteristic misnomer as it is, Liz, most unlike a lime or lemon, as
an apple is from an orange. I believe this is the origin of the application of
the Trini word ‘lime/liming’ as a pasttime of ‘doing nothing’ or hanging out
with friends. The towering chenette tree in our yard was a village icon.
A piece of wood nailed to its trunk formed a bench and under its soothing cool
became the district’s social hub – for liming, all fours card games and even
serious meetings; informal craft groups; Hindi, Bhajan singing and other
classes, and village events planning – all right in our front yard. That might
be also the original meaning of the word community leadership, until it was
endowed with other connotations decades later.
I did not
know any of that technical stuff, then, nor that chenette was a fairly
substantive source of calcium, carotene and phosphorous, when as children we
sucked the pulp or roasted the seeds, and so indelibly stained our clothes much
to Ma’s displeasure. We noticed too, that its stickiness restricted our
tongues, but that it also had a constipation effect, also to Ma’s displeasure.
She would have to spend sleepless nights as we complained of stomach pains from
having gorged too much, though she made sure she had adequate supplies of seina
leaves to administer when necessary to relieve constipation. I hear on the
grapevine, Liz, that roasted chenette seeds are now gaining currency as a
treatment for diarrhoea.
Loved and hated, the
tree contributed substantially to our chores as we had to daily sweep up masses
of its constantly shedding leaves. Our water copper, used to boil sugar at one
time in the once thriving sugar industries, but now serving as our fresh water
reservoir, had to be protected from its droppings as it sat directly under the
tree. My younger brother and I would splash around in its massive bowl on
weekends before emptying it, scrubbing off any moss that had accumulated around
its edges and then refilled it with fresh water and covered it with galvanise.
“Why he not up yet,” I
ask again, growing impatient as the beautiful day seem to be slipping away.
I am curious as to why my brother is not
stirring in the room in the gallery. He is usually up and out while it was
still dark, in the predawn, to take villagers in his Cortina to their workplaces
in ‘town’, Princes Town - named, Lizzie, as you know, for your grandpa George V
and grand uncle Edward after they visited as princely lads. It was known as
Kairi to the native peoples who find Columbuscrawling up our coast, as indeed
was the entire island, when Columbus was doing his discovering, until Spanish
Catholic missionaries gathered them around a church and school and renamed it
Mission. At the time of your grandsire’s visit, Lizzie, it was then little more
than a few scattered shacks with the church and school set up by Spanish
Catholics. A later school and church, set up by missionaries from your then
North American colony – Canada - will conjure up the old name, Iere, but
shortly after their visit, it was proclaimed Princes Town, a name it still
holds.
It must please
Your Majesty to know that the two poui trees the Princes planted in the yard of
the Church of England in the town also still stand, 134 years later. So far
they are winning the battle to resist the giant tropical termites whose Queen,
leading her colony of nymphs and soldiers, are constantly waging war,
threatening to make a meal of the princely pouis.
Princes Town
itself has grown into its name, and out of it too – maybe ready for city status
even, if the powers that be would take note - as it is now aggressively edging
off what used to be the lush tropical rain forests described by your
writer-traveller, Charles Kingsley who, At Last, made it here for A Christmas
in the West Indies in the latter half of the 1800s. It must have been his
writings that brought your grandsires here; and certainly too, geological
reports of the 1850s eruption of the mud volcano at what the Spanish had
labelled Devil’s Woodyard that had also attracted Kingsley. The indigeneous
people’s had long worshipped at it for its connections with the mysterious
underworld that provided the trees, fruits and roots that nourished them. The
boggy soil and forested district did not deter Kingsley continuing the journey
to Devil’s Woodyard, but your grandsires were waylaid by the pomp of planting
of the pouis, as you may know since it is part of the Royal lore.
Princes Town now
continues to encroach on the once-canefields that provided the raw materials
for the sugar, molasses and rum factories that augmented British waistlines and
coffers. You may want to know, Lizzie, that this town, named for your
grandsires, has done the empire proud, with reputedly the highest numbers of
drinkers in the country – one of your Empire’s enduring legacies in these parts
from the practice of paying estate workers near rumshops - but that’s for
another letter, to come.
But it was not
rum in my Pa’s cup this July morn. I’ve never known him to be excessive with
the bottle, but he didn’t abstain either. He is drawing patience from the
aromatic, freshly brewed cocoa in the enamel cups Ma bought from the lady in
the store crammed with enamel and other household paraphernalia in Princes
Town. Ma and the lady would stand for hours chatting away in Bhojpuri while I
wander around the overstocked shop.
Though they
never spoke the Trinidad-adapted Indian language, nor Hindi, to us, both Pa and
Ma could read and write Hindi. They could both read and write only a smattering
of English and by that were defined as illiterate. So this conversation on this
morning about our Discovery with my Pa is in your mother tongue, Liz; which Pa
and Ma had adopted for us, though it was not their mother tongue, in which, if
I may humbly point out, Your Majesty, versed as you are in one of some of the
European languages, might yourself be considered illiterate.
The oil from the
cocoa hangs on to the top of Pa’s lips, forming an artificial moustache on his
hairless face and head. It made him look funny and a laugh is trying to force
its way through the many serious questions on my lips. I held it back - the
laugh; it is the questions I can’t stem from pouring out.
I have never
known Pa to have hair on his face, nor head either. The baldness makes him look
stern at times. Villagers call him The Sheriff and sometimes I knew why. His
grey eyes would blaze right through you when his lips tremble and his voice
raise in anger. In those times I know not to ask the questions about how the
world works that popped into my head and onto my tongue as somethings more perplexing
must be troubling him. Like how he would feed his family because someone had
crept into the garden that night and stole all the crops he had nurtured over
the last months which he hoped to sell so we could have what household things
we need. I’d bite my lip to keep the thoughts in, then.
Not now. This
mild morning, sipping his home-made cocoa, he is as mellow as the Eastern
spices in it.
“He not going to
work because it is a holiday today,” he is answering my question about my
brother’s late-sleeping, while I try to suppress my giggle over the milk-moustache
over his upper lip. An unusual quiet hang over the village, serene, without the
routine morning bustle of people getting ready of school, for work. Few others
are stirring, taking advantage of this ‘holiday’. My mind is on high drive.
“What holiday?”
I ask, perked.
“Discovery Day.”
He even seems a bit happy, then, to be home to sagely field the curiosity of
his youngest daughter; you will understand anew, Liz, as you have a couple lil great
grand royal ones around that age now added to your household.
“What is
Discovery Day?” The questions keep
popping out of my head, spilling onto my tongue and out of my mouth, even
before I know they are there.
“It is the day
Christopher Columbus discovered Trinidad.” Pa had never gone to one of the
British-type schools but he always knows all the answers, it seems. And though
he could not read any of the storybooks, which are my presents on birthday and
Christmas, he could talk about any topic under the sun, I thought, and he could
recite the whole Ramayan in its strange Sanskrit or Hindi text and explain the
strange parables in the lines as villagers often called on him to do. And he
could study any Whe Whe chart with their strange Chinamen faces and letters and
tell what number would play at the man they called ‘the banker’ who functions
from a secret place because Whe Whe is illegal and police is always searching
for the law-breakers like him.
Pa was no longer
with us in the mid-90s when the post-Independent Trinidad and Government
introduced a legal machine-driven version of the game which licence operator
through a selective process. The traditional version, still illegal, has
remained popular; the official version has the audacity to often complained
that it takes about fifty million $TT (five million Great Britain Pounds) away
from the State every year! Maybe if he was still around with the million-dollar
jackpots we could win a million or two; or I could have won him a million or
two. Here’s how.
Pa liked to bet
on my dreams. He said I had ‘straight dreams’ and would even send me to sleep
in mid-afternoon so I could tell him what I dream for the evening betting
session, as the Whe Whe banker ‘opened the bank’ morning and evening. As he didn’t
scoff at whatever my overactive imagination churned up in my dreams, he made me
confident of dreaming. I guess he neverthought I would make a career of this
dreaming thing. He would ask me for a number to bet on and would always place a
bet on my choice saying I gave him straight wins. That made me warm inside,
like freshly boiled cocoa tea sweetened with condensed milk. When I helped him
win a bet he would give me a five-cent coin; or if it was a big win, a
shilling, which I popped into the wooden piggy bank that did not look much like
a pig. He had made it for me with the small slit at the top to throw in the
coin and a wedge at the bottom that twisted out to let the coins drop out. With
those savings, I could buy myself whatever I wanted for Christmas or anytime,
no questions asked. As I began to read, ‘anything’ was almost invariably story
books, of course, like The Magic Porridge
Pot. Even before starting school, I was already an avid listener to my
sisters reading to me, and to unending epic romances Pa would roll out night
after night, mostly from some secret store in his imagination that none of us
can remember, though it was a childhood experience that none of us can forget.
I guess he
thinks that his last answer, ‘Discovery Day’, would quell my questionings. He
lights another Broadway. I know it as his favourite brand because he would send
my brother or sisters, and me when he thought I was old enough to walk the road
alone, to Ganesh, the village shopkeeper, to buy. On days when market sales were
good he would buy a whole carton. We would know to ask for DuMaurier, instead,
only when Braodway was out of stock because the sales van only came into the
village once a week.
Though smoking
tobacco seems now to be more identified with the Frenchman, Jean Nicot de
Villemain, (hence nicotine) who took it to the French court in the mid 1500’s
after Columbus introduced it to Europe following his discovering it on his
first voyage in the region the natives called Haiti, but which Columbus called
Hispaniola, my father was participating in a 7000-year old kingly shamanistic
tradition of the Caribbean and the Americas -
a tradition now practiced by nearly two billion people across the globe,
despite an intensive and powerful anti-smoking lobby. One can sniff new
tensions in the air as recent research and development suggests smoking as a
potential cure for high blood pressure, asthma and tuberculosis. A new
odourless, tasteless white protein extract from its leaves promises to be
every masterchef’s dream ingredient as a salt-free, fat- and cholesterol-free low-calorie
substitute for mayonnaise and whipped cream and can take on the flavour and
texture of several foods and beverages.
Oblivious to all
of that, engrossed in inhaling, Pa is unaware that smoking tobacco was considered
- by the people who first inhabited our soil before Columbus and his bunch
decimated them - a divine gift. They believed its exhaled smoke carried one's
thoughts and prayers to heaven. Pa looks the part, shamanistic, dreaming and
relaxed as if communing with some higher authority as he ease back on the
wooden bench he had made with his saw, chisel and smoothing plane. I had gathered
up the chippings that fell of the plane and put them in the fowl coub, as we called it, behind the
house. My fowl pet had just had chicks – eight little yellow delights that I
would feed on scraps of left over roti and rice while talking to them about the
unfolding mysteries of the universe. I had a pet goat too, that I untied and
took to graze on roadside grasses on evenings. There was much to do, but first
I had to finish with this inquisition.
I absorb his
answer: ‘Today, Discovery Day, was the day Christopher Columbus discovered
Trinidad.’ Something did not fit there. My chick’s mind isn’t sure what it is.
I know Christopher Columbus from the picture with the three triangle ships in
my sister’s school book. Once, when I am visiting some relatives, one of their
children had a Ladybird book about Columbus. He is in fancy pants and long
shoulder long white ‘hair’ which I would later learn was a wig that fancy
Europeans and massa-like Trini people in courts and the Parliament like to wear.
In the picture book, Columbus’ shirt is bellowing in the wind. He looks soft
and effeminate as European men in their garb of that era. His three ships of
varying sizes are on the sea behind him. Black haired, wide-eyed, brown people
are peering at him from the bushes. Maybe it is they who discovered him; not he
discovered them. That’s how thought pop into my head and out of my mouth.
“So how
Christopher Columbus discover Trinidad?”
My question brings
Pa back from where he had gone with the warm cocoa inside him and the cigarette
already nearly half done.
He looks at me.
“You would know all about that when you start school.” It did not cross my mind
that he did not have an answer and that the question was baffling many others
more than my own child’s mind.
Pa calls out to
Ma. “You ready?” That is his cue for her to accompany him to the garden –
having for the morning, already finished washing the clothes of all of us,
prepared breakfast and made lunch too, cleaned the house and washed the dishes.
My rare morning
discovering our Discovery with my Pa at home is over. I scramble up to
accompany them to the garden, not waiting to be asked; secretly hoping that
might get some more answers.
The giant
bedsheet bellowing out from over the island and collapsing on Columbus’ ship
settle in my mind’s eye, before which also swirls experiences of cocoa, chenette,
and tobacco, all of which predated Columbus’ discoverings, and the eastern
spices and we who came thereafter.
When the sun
rose that July 31, it was only the dawn to a near lifelong quest for my holy
grail – knowledge of it all, and uncovering the puzzles of the discovery of
Trinidad that was before Columbus discovered then. It has taken me to many
parts and through many sunsets.
Even though
Discovery Day has been wiped off the calendar, he still haunts the landscape,
and is stamped on national emblems inspiring the false knowledge that marked
his own Discoverie, and mine.
One fine sunset,
then another, then another, I gathered and pieced together the skeletal knowledge
in the bones he had scattered all over the Caribbean from Puerto Rico through Cuba,
Santo Domingo, across Jamaica and your colonial archipelago to Trinidad, from
Mexico to Argentina, and the Americas and across in Europe through Barcelona
and Seville and Italy, Portugal, and Spain, as discovered, too, Columbus’ own bones.
Scattered in pieces and fragments in which he cut up our land and our history
and our Discovery in the blood soaked soil still violently echoing in the bones
of ghosts in their sleep-walking dreaming state they tell one story. But for me
gathering the pieces, like our collective story, they spoke to me of the yet undiscovered
El Dorado, at treasure trove of buried knowledge echoing down the ages even
now, through little known corridors and crannies, the knowledge bridge from Columbus
to us that can soothe and calm like cocoa balm when cocoa is no longer god, nor
king, but you still a Queen, Your Majesty, Dear Lizzie.
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
val into the post pandemic planet inspires this recollection on the encounter and reencounter with education luminary Sir Ken Robinson.
