Suffrage Literarily

Suffrage Literarily from
 Encyclopedia Literaria 

Ever wondered what Suffrage means in a banana or other fructoid republic? Reinterpretation traditional into contemporary phenomenon see Suffrage Literarily in Encyclopedia Literaria at the GloCaLKnowledgePot read more in link
https://krisrampersad.com/suffrage-literarily-from-encyclopedia-literaria-by-dr-kris/

Nobel Tears of and for a Nobel Bard now Sower in the Skies Derek Walcott RIP

A Literary Life

I saw tears pouring down the cheeks of Derek Walcott. Twice. That is apart from the tears he evidently sheds digging into his personal and historical trauma to articulate our vision and aspirations for our society, our world.

On the first occasion, he is in immense distress and anguish. On the other occasion his are tears of immeasurable pleasure, joy and sense of accomplishment. Both times were in relation to his art. He was not acting: Private, personal emotion pouring out uncontrollably about his passion for his work, his art, the society that inspires, nurtures and receives it with disdain or with pride. Antithetical emotions conveyed in seemingly like expression, portrayed in the face of the same individual.

The two moments may well sum up the range and scope of the man, the artist, the playwright, the poet, the essayist, the dramatist, the human. They also sum up the pain and pleasure of piloting art in a society like ours.

“What does this society want, Kris, tell me”, Derek’s anguish had burst out. Tears brim in his eyes and over flow down his cheek. It is the year of our collaboration on the staging of Steel, the play he wrote and directed to celebrate the creative impulse of the region which manifests in the creation of the signatory percussion instrument birthed in the 20^th century, the steelpan. It is also to celebrate the communities and people and socio-economic-political and cultural realities that spawned its birth and growth and the dreams and ambitions of those who created it. The play reflected the yearning for acceptance and appreciation for its emergence; acknowledgement of the impulses from which it springs, to provide the music it does: to seduce, charm, excite, admonish, cajole and the range of emotions and experiences music can provoke in us. 
A run and rerun of sold-out highly appreciative and applauding audiences had translated into an onslaught of deflating media reviews that Walcott. The emerging media tone was that not even the globally lauded Nobel Laureate Walcott, could capture and convey the Steelpan and steelband; that what he presented was farcical and a shadow of what the steelpan was and meant to the people who spawned it and the society that claimed it.

The weeks and months of careful auditioning the right talents for the right roles; the highly-temperamental rehearsals, flowing over with energy, buoyed by optimism, and the nightly audiences of packed Queen’s Hall and standing ovations evoked the tears that stuck in memory as what one may and should expect of our society despite the enormous passion and self-sacrifice to excel and help other's excel for one’s art. The moment would resonate over the years. 

That could have been my lament. But like Derek, I chose instead to turn the sigh into a song. Because there there is the flip side, to which I had front row seats to witness another tearful moment. This was the tears on the night of the awards ceremony held in his name and in tribute. Derek cried uncontrollably as he recognized a seven year-old who had entered our competition to attract writers.

I was asked by Albert Laveau, the Trinidad Theatre Workshop’s Creative Director, to manage the public and media outreach and engagement and publicity for the Workshop which Derek and Albert among others had founded in the 1950s. As the TTW was then working on the production of Steel, my role morphed into handling the full outreach and engagement portfolio for the play and related activities. The play had initially been launched some quarter century earlier in New York. This was its coming home. Derek, who took full control of the production, insisted on a meeting. Within minutes, the formalities and his acceptance of my role aside, our conversation turned to the literary arts and the common lament on the declining quality and quantity of new works.

 I am an optimist. The inhibiting factors that made quality writers and artist reticent in surfacing their work were many and I believed with encouragement and incentive some of those sitting on creditable work would surface. Perhaps an offer of prizes?

Derek immediately sparked. He pulled out his cheque book, wrote a cheque and said, “There. Let’s begin.” I was surprised at the immediate, enthusiastic and generous response. He set no conditions on how I may use his contribution. The next day I told him that it would go towards a literary prize.

Within days of public release of this, and a few strategic calls, I had a call from the General Manager of the Trinidad Hilton, Mr Ali Khan. He would match the contribution of Walcott with a similar sum, also to be used as I saw fit. In meeting again with Laveau and Walcott we decided it would be called the Trinidad Theatre Workshop's Fund for Literature and Drama. As word got around, First Citizen’s Bank also offered to match Derek's contribution which went towards the prize for Children's Fiction. The momentum built, and Business magnate Derek Chin of MovieTowne offered to pitch in a prize for film and we were able to satisfy Albert who pointed out that void in drama and script writing. By and by, after some cajoling, the University of the West Indies, later came in, which funds went towards a prize for poetry. The Hilton prize went to Children's fiction.

Within the month we had five prizes, that became known as the Trinidad Theatre Workshop Prizes for Literature, Drama and Film.

Recognising that the region had not in any significant way acknowledged Derek Walcott’s win of the Nobel Prize for Literature some thirteen years earlier, I proposed A Year of Derek Walcott. After all we were in the year of the Laureate's 75th birthday which alone merited celebration. The proposal was accepted. Derek, of course, was modestly reticent, but the enthusiasm of Laveau and myself made his doubts insignificant. The Year of Celebrations would begin with the activities around Steel and culminate in the awards ceremony of the TTW Prizes for Literature, Drama and Film. I was now conceptualising, managing and executing the outreach on Steel, the TTW Competition for Literature, Drama and Film (including long fiction, short fiction, poetry, drama and short film script) and its Prizes and Awards Ceremony and A Year of Derek Walcott when he would celebrate his 75^th Birthday - burning the candle on both ends. 

The literary world was abuzz. It created ripples across the region and beyond. Calls were coming in for Derek's Steel to tour other parts of the world; potential movie offers. The short script award became the precursor to MovieTowne's short film competition and festival and our activities inspired literary and other like festivals. Derek's fellow citizens of St Lucia, his birth country, were quick to point out that Trinidad and Tobago, Walcott’s adopted country, was staging A Year of Derek Walcott - a year! What was his birthplace St Lucia doing? It inspired St Lucia’s now annual staging of a Nobel Laureate Week - a week of Derek Walcott during the week of his birthday in January. Incidentally, he was born a month before my mom, of which I often jokingly reminded him, and proffered that she was single/widowed.  

Immersed in directing Steel, Derek would enquire about how we the competition was progressing. I kept him apprised of development and the pace of submissions. He was visibly touched by the interest and responses it had garnered from writers in all spheres and especially when I told him that one of the contenders was a seven year old who was making a bid for the short story prize.

Derek, Albert and I worked together on the programme for the night of the awards ceremony that will be called Evening Epic. I came up with the name, drawing from the title of his Nobel Lecture, "The Antilles  Fragments of Epic Memory."  Following Steel, the Laureate joined in preparing the programme, recommending pieces of his works that would be dramatized and sung.

Walcott held as a principle that actors and artistes should be paid for their work in a society that expects artists to live on air while giving souls to service. To return the favour, many with whom he had worked were willing to give of their time, skills and talent to pay tribute to an artist whose work spans two centuries. They included members of the cast and crew of Steel with pieces from various of his musicals: The enormously popular satirical The Joker of Seville; among them, which music was composed by the US phenomenal. The Joker was produced from Walcott's legendary association with  the US Walt MacDermot who had revolutionised american musicals in the rocking 60s.

At Evening Epic, the night of the awards ceremony of the TTW Prizes for Literature, Drama and Film, touched by the tributes, and the event which is also one his legacies, Derek cried. They were tears of joy. The tears unbridled when we asked that he present a special prize to the seven year old who was brave enough to make his submission to the competition.

Those tears were the counterpoint to many of his own laments about the region and our societies inertia and stagnation, the corruption, the narcissistic institutions crumbling at the seems the power mongering, the fraudsters and proponents of bogus festivals, and the neglect of the arts – "Hell is a place much like Port of Spain" (The Spoiler's Return); a place which he nevertheless unhesitatingly celebrates.

...Port of Spain, the sum of history, ,,,A downtown babel of shop signs and streets, mongrelized, polyglot, a ferment without a history, like heaven. Because that is what such a city is, in the New World, a writer's heaven.
...I was entitled to the feast of Husein, to the mirrors and crepe-paper temples of the Muslim epic, to the Chinese Dragon Dance, to the rites of that Sephardic Jewish synagogue that was once on Something Street. I am only one-eighth the writer I might have been had I contained all the fragmented languages of Trinidad.... This is Port of Spain to me, a city ideal in its commercial and human proportions, where a citizen is a walker and not a pedestrian, and this is how Athens may have been before it became a cultural echo. (Derek Walcott, Nobel Lecture, 1992)

If one believes in the potential of literature and its related arts to transform us and societies, one would have to conclude that there must be insufficient reading, understanding and internalization that could impact our individual and human condition.
Our lives become immersed in trying to resist the forces that threaten to have us degenerate into a mere 'cultural echo', even in the face of superlatively incisive vision and artistry of the likes of Derek Walcott and the enormous creative capacity we embody.

In his Nobel Lecture as Nobel Laureate for Literature in 1992, Walcott would turn to the most festering chasms of Caribbean society – the divisions that keep us from celebrating and revering ourselves and the peoples who make our society, pinning it on his experience as the outside ‘other’ at the celebrations of Ramleela, brought to Trinidad and Tobago by indentured immigrant labourers from India – an experience, he chastises himself, that was as much his to own, as any other of the identities he claims:

They believed in what they were playing, in the sacredness of the text, the validity of India, while I, out of the writer's habit, searched for some sense of elegy, of loss, even of degenerative mimicry in the happy faces of the boy-warriors or the heraldic profiles of the village princes. I was polluting the afternoon with doubt and with the patronage of admiration. I misread the event through a visual echo of History - the cane fields, indenture, the evocation of vanished armies, temples, and trumpeting elephants - when all around me there was quite the opposite: elation, delight in the boys' screams, in the sweets-stalls, in more and more costumed characters appearing; a delight of conviction, not loss. The name Felicity made sense…

Wind the clock back, to 1962 and the dawning of ours as nations newly independent of colonial rule. His search inwards takes him through the colonial journey from Africa, via Eurasia to the Caribbean., and as relevant then as it is in today's world of irrationalism, violent extremism, racism and terrorism. He writes in A Far Cry from Africa:

Statistics justify and scholars seize
The salients of colonial policy.
What is that to the white child hacked in bed?
To savages, expendable as Jews?
Threshed out by beaters, the long rushes break
In a white dust of ibises whose cries
Have wheeled since civilizations dawn
From the parched river or beast-teeming plain.
The violence of beast on beast is read
As natural law, but upright man
Seeks his divinity by inflicting pain.
….
I who am poisoned with the blood of both,
Where shall I turn, divided to the vein?
I who have cursed
The drunken officer of British rule, how choose
Between this Africa and the English tongue I love?
Betray them both, or give back what they give?
How can I face such slaughter and be cool?

These experiences would inspire and buoy my own drive to grow, nurture, encourage and sustain literary appreciation through  the Leaves of Life initiative and the publication of LiTTscapes – Landscapes of Fiction from Trinidad and Tobago - which deviated in its presentation of prose fiction to also represent some of Walcott’s insights through poetry on our ‘scapes’ - and its associated activities of LiTTours – Journeys Through the Landscapes of Fiction; and LiTTributes – events that celebrate the literary artistic impulse in itsrelation to other arts in song, music, drama, costuming, cuisine, art and design, architecture, landscape, culture, festival and celebration, forging connections among us, and with other societies too - with LiTTribute to the Mainland - staged in Guyana, to LiTTribute to LondonTTown, and elsewhere.  LiTTribute to the Antilles that we staged in Antigua in fact sprang from Walcott's Nobel Lecture, The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory which had also inspired our Evening Epic, the award ceremony for literary prizes. His Nobel lecture I use to encourage comparative discourse to broaden our appreciation of ourselves, outlooks and perspectives on Caribbean society, with the Nobel Lecture of Sir Vidia Naipaul, Two Worlds our Trinidadian son who took the prized Nobel Laureate almost a decade after Walcott in 2001.

Derek would often cheekily ask after "the other guy" - ie the other Caribbean Nobel Laureate for Literature about whom he is known to have had some not too flattering pronouncements, especially as I have encouraged discussions on Literature and Caribbean Society comparing the two laureates in contexts of oral and literary development. This I had began exploring in my first book Finding A Place  the evolution of the multicultural milieu of migration and adaptation in a society and contexts of writers as Naipaul, who not unlike Walcott, has had his fair share of barbs and rejections and traumas from Caribbean society.  The 'alien' Felicity which Walcott describes in his Nobel Lecture is, I believe, not coincidentally, the home and birth landscape of VS Naipaul - elements of co-relationships that we are yet to explore with intellectual maturity and objectivity.         

To have shared in the depths of anguish and the heights of joy of one of the individuals who have labored  to help shape the global conscience of the previous and this centuries to be sensitive to small island realities were pivotal experiences in my awakening, awareness and appreciation of the place of my art, my life, my work, in a society like ours.  

Surrounded by paraphernalia from the productions, with the tears of anguish and of celebration, thank you Derek Walcott (January 23, 1930 to March 17, 2017)

Rest in Peace, Nobel Bard.
There are no more fitting words for an epitaph than what you have written yourself, with my most recent visitation from the sower:

There is a sower in the sky

That sows the seeds of stars

That sowers name is death my love

Who sows that we shall die

And if I die before you love

The harvest that I reap

Will be the memory of our love

Through everlasting sleep

In everlasting sleep, my love, in everlasting sleep

 Derek Walcott, The Joker of Seville

Related Links: 

The Walcott Files
LiTTscapes for Littribute to the Antilles 
A LiTTribute at UNESCO 
Inscription by UNESCO of Poems
Small only in Size UNESCO Executive Board told
World in a Fishbowl
Death of Knowledge & social Conscience
A Musical Heritage walk UNESCO Creative Cities

Breezes-of-tropical-arab-spring

In-war-and-peace-from-hiroshima-to-home.html

A-path-out-of-mayhem-and-murder

Turning-our-dreams-to-shame-rip-asami

Focus-resources on real crime

jus-call-me-cooligan

The world-in-fishbowl

The-other-magnificent-seven

Tribute-to-literary-mentor

Pat-bishops-last-struggle-killings

Them-red-house-bones

A-tale-of-two-skeletons

Arresting-tears-for-us-and-haytian-globe

Lagahoo-tribute-to-independent-spirits

The-human-face-of-constitutional-reform

The-ghost-of journalism past

OverCopulation - The Archbishop The Priest The Politician & The Journalist

Ask About LiTTscapes,

Ask about LiTTours and LiTTributes

Diplomats get stimulating LiTTour 

Making Music with Steel

After several years of delay, the Trinidad Theatre Workshop’s long-awaited musical Steel is finally raring to go.

Written and directed by Nobel laureate Derek Walcott, Steel details the birth of pan.

In an interview, TTW publicist Dr Kris Rampersad said the show is scheduled to premiere on September 13 at Queen’s Hall.

She said repairs at Queen’s Hall and the venue being overbooked over the past few years were reasons for the delay.

Despite the hold-up, Rampersad sees Steel as the definitive musical on the rise of pan.

“A story on steelpan has never been done before on this scale, from the directing to the music to the stage,” she said.

Rampersad said she believed this musical was going to end the debate on pan in Trinidad by documenting everything from its birth and development to the clashes in the 1940s.

Rampersad’s confidence stems from the quality of the cast and the musical stewardship.

Besides Walcott’s directing, composer Galt MacDermot wrote the music for Steel and Gene Lawrence will serve as musical director.

MacDermot won a Tony Award for scoring Two Gentlemen of Verona.

He has written the music for other Walcott plays, such as The Charlatan, O Babylon and The Joker of Seville.

Leon Morenzie, TTW artistic director Albert Laveau, Conrad Parris, TTW veteran Nigel Scott, and singer Mavis John will all play roles in the musical.

Morenzie received a nomination by the US National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP) for his role as Sam in Athol Fugard’s Master Harold and the Boys.

Born in Trinidad, Morenzie now lives in California and has worked on Broadway as the lead actor in The Leaf People.

Aside from appearing on sitcoms such as Martin and the Steve Harvey Show, he also served as a dialect coach for Don Cheadle and Sophie Okonedo in the movie Hotel Rwanda.

Baritone Brian Green is also carded to perform.

Green, who performed in Carnival Messiah, sang in 1999 with the National Opera of Wellington, New Zealand.

Artist Jackie Hinkson is responsible for designing the set.

Set in the Laventille-Belmont area, most of the action in Steel takes place in panyards.

Rampersad said pannists from Witco Desperadoes and Pandemonium would play as members of the fictional band “the Bandidos” during the show.

She also said Steel would help serve as a marketing tool for T&T’s culture.

With a current thrust towards cultural tourism, Rampersad said the idea was for T&T to serve as the launching pad for the musical, as Steel would be also performed internationally by the local ensemble.

She also reiterated that the show’s quality could never be in question.

“Derek Walcott settles for nothing but the best and he brooks no compromise. Steel can’t be anything less than perfect.”

http://legacy.guardian.co.tt/archives/2005-06-30/features1.html

@krisramp @lolleaves @KrisRampersadTT @JustinTrudeau +POTUS ㅤ @UNESCO +TIME @time @NYBooks @guardian @BBCWorldHaveYourSay +Nobel Prize +Nobel Peace Prize Forum +Barack Obama +Michelleobama  @UN @OprahWinfrey @Life @BBC

LiTTribute 11 – LiTTurgy to the Mainland with readings and performances inspired by Rampersad’s book LiTTscapes – Landscapes of Fiction from Trinidad and Tobago

Moray House

FEBRUARY 16, 2013 · BY STAFF WRITER · 0 COMMENTS   NEXT ARTICLE »

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LiTTscapes: Moray House Trust in conjunction with the Ministry of Culture and the Theatre Guild and in association with Trinidadian Dr Kris Rampersaud yesterday presented “LiTTribute 11 – LiTTurgy to the Mainland” with readings and performances inspired by Rampersad’s book LiTTscapes – Landscapes of Fiction from Trinidad and Tobago. The coffee-table style book contains photos and writings from T&T. In photo: Rampersad (right) hands over a copy of her book to UG’s Al Creighton. It will be available in the University of Guyana library. (Photo by Arian Browne)http://www.stabroeknews.com/2013/media/photos/02/16/moray-house/

See video: http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=littscapes+

Reflections on inTTrinsic connecTTions

By The AuTThor: Kris Rampersad

at LiTTribute II - LiTTurgy to the Mainland:

Readings and Performances inspired by

LiTTscapes – Landscapes of Fiction From Trinidad and Tobago

Moray House Trust, Georgetown, Guyana

February 15, 2013

Mistress of Ceremonies: Paloma Mohammed and longtime friend; Professor Al Creighton: Acting Vice-Chancellor of the University of Guyana and Head of the Guyana Prize for Literature; Distinguished guests all, Friends

Students of the Guyana Theatre Guild – brilliant, brilliant interpretation of the introduction to LiTTscapes.

I salute you, thank you for making the work your own, because that is what it was meant to be – to be claimed and owned and rendered by the generations next and those to come.

If I might begin by drawing attention to the title of this event – a LiTTribute – first of all – a title with which I took obvious authorial licence - as a combination of a literary tribute that has Trinidad and Tobago at its centre and which also celebrates other creative disciplines of music, song, dance, art and architecture, fashion and cuisine.

 A confession – this is really not just the second such – if one were to count the launch of LiTTscapes itself during the jubilee of Independence month in August last year which set the tone for the LiTTribute (To the Republic) – hosted by Trinidad and Tobago’s First Lady in celebration of the 36^th anniversary of Trinidad and Tobago’s Republican status. That in itself was followed by the inaugural LiTTour – literary journeys evoking tribute to the landscapes of fiction from Trinidad and Tobago and took on a life of its own – as on that fateful journey we stumbled upon the defaced tombs of some of the earliest European settlers in South Trinidad – a French family shipwrecked enroute from Martinque to Venezuela in the mid 17^th century.

Yep – that is our Caribbean story. Inescapably, our stories are tied up and entangled and intermingled with each other’s and that goes back into our prehistory.

As now, the unfolding story of LiTTscapes – post-publication - it unfolds with these LiTTributes, the LiTTours, but also the expanding knowledge that will be reflected in the next publication on my table – Letters to Lizzie – an engagement with Queen Elizabeth in the context of her 60^th jubilee celebrations and our 50^th anniversary of Independence (the celebration of which I have found particularly problematic to identify with – given that my whole orientation, the whole vision and world view of LiTTscapes is that we ought not to be defining our age in terms of the time of recent self governance but as the sum total of all our history and experiences; the sum total of all the peoples who came and those whom they met there; and the yet nebulous truth of from whence they came and how our islands and this our continent began).

What the story of these LiTTributes unfolds, is that it is clearer and clearer that as islands, we are not just islands. We are part of that continent at the beginning of the world, as Lawrence Scott in his novel, featured in LiTTscapes articulates.

So it brings me to beginnings. I have never been able to contemplate the history of my islands as the isolated story of Independence or colonialisation or even migration, not the recent migrations that brought most of us here, nor even the prehistoric ones.

I have poured over maps and drew the invisible line that connects South American rivers and topography with our islands; and looked at biological studies of our flora and fauna and geological and anthropological and archeological reports, and even without that, know, there are primordial linkages which we have been taught to forget.

Within the whole context of debates and discussions about globalisation are those other debates and discussions – those on globe-forming – in which we have not really seen ourselves, but in which our writers – our writers of fiction position us.

A couple months ago when an anaconda crawled up the Caroni River, Trinidad’s attention was jerked awake to the realities of such primordial connections to the ecology of South America. It is part of our knowledge we have buried somewhere in the dark recesses of our heads.

Until about four years ago, I had never been to Guyana – the land just a stone’s throw away – and then only for a day so all I saw was the route to the airport and back, and immediately it recreated for me the landscape around the Gangetic plains from which some of our ancestors originated.

Last year I was back and this time for a couple more days and saw a little more, something of what lay behind the mystique of the Demerara River.

This time around, my third tryst here, I braved the potholed roads and on a return boat that is a little more than canoe and ventured further into what Joseph Conrad might call the heart of darkness.

For me, it was the heart of light; the niggling inside my head that is getting more insistent of late as I research and get ready to release Letters to Lizzie (that is if I can get the time and headspace to finish writing it!); the niggling that there is so much more beyond our immediate geographic space; beyond the waters of the Caribbean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean that washes upon us that we often view as waters that divide us but which to me contain our shared experiences and heritage and cultures.

But I have not had only three visits to Guyana – so as our master calypsonian would say, I lied! You see I had already visited Guyana a hundred times through my imagination, through research and through the stories and poems of your authors like Wilson Harris, Roy Heath, Edgar Mittelholtzer, Jan Carew and Martin Carter. (And Al Creighton in his comprehensive and incisive and generous review mentioned Raleigh and Ian MacDonald whom we share along with Lakshmi Seetaram-Persaud who is married to a Guyanese Al – they do not belong to Guyana alone (and there is only one Derek Walcott citation in LiTTscapes that refers to St Lucia, the other citations are all based on his comments on Trinidad).

Even before last week when I went to the native people’s habitats in Berbice, I had already sailed with Wilson Harris’ Donne hundreds of times to the Palace of the Peacock a conqueror and captor; and participated in the density of history and the condensation of time he saw, as a surveyor, mirrored in the Guyana hinterland that he has been able to infuse in his novels;

I had numerous hilarious private moments laughing at Lizzie, through John Agard’s mashing up the Queen’s English – so now she had to take note and made him the UK’s poet laureate – hats off and congrats!

And I had, with Martin Carter and Walter Rodney danced on the walls of prison and shared an insistent that although a prison, it was my wall and hence mines to cry or dance on. And that is why I requested the Dance interpretation of Martin Carter’s poem The Knife of Dawn. And I have never seized to marvel at this one, written in 1927 with the lines “We who are sweepers of an ancient sky; discoverers of new planet, sudden stars… “ Yes, you heard me, written in 1927, before space travel, before mega thrusts to the moon” Our writers have been our visionaries though we have remained blind to the enormous possibilities and potentials of ourselves that they have been presenting us with.

So that’s why I asked and was immediately granted my wish for a dance interpretation of Carter’s poem which will be done by the Guyana National School of Dance – thank you for that, Paloma, for so readily agreeing without even knowing what a tremendous source of inspiration that poem has been in its notes of defiance, of empowerment, of envisioning – and which still is to me in all of what I try to do!

That item will close tonight’s LiTTribute: and indeed the LiTTurgy to the Mainland: though they may think they may be paying tribute to LiT scapes, the work before us today; it is also my tribute to a source of inspiration and which I present to those who follow and hope they to will take what might have seemed to be a ridiculous and petulant decision to make my dance right here; to remain in the Caribbean and continue the exploration of the nuts and bolts that make it this place we love so well and so love to hate as well. And that despite the tremendous force that is constantly in operation to insist that there is a better world out there to make someone of ourselves – forcing and pushing our young people out to discover new planets and sudden stars elsewhere - not the ones hanging over their heads.

It is this kind of reawakening that I am hoping of LiTTscapes and its ambitions and intentions – what I called at its launch last year a revolution – a revolution in reading! A revolution to re-envisioning ourselves; at how we look at our world in the first and foremost instance, and how we look at the rest of the world and our place in it – as centres, not on the periphery – as sweepers of an ancient sky; not as offsprings in a new world; and as DISCOVERERS – of new planets and sudden star; not stargazers.

 That is our challenge: to lift ourselves above and beyond the self derision and self negation we have been hinged.

What brought me to Guyana this time was my own exploratory urge.

LiTTscapes, I hope is a stimulant to curiosity – to be curious about ourselves in the first instance, our immediate locale and to discover and explore and rediscover ourselves and those around us an those who have been exploring and discovering those around us – our writers – who have probed and can stimulate us to probe deeper, beneath ourselves – to move beyond the self-derision and self deprecation and the discover our ugliness too, and too, our beauty.

That’s what I found in the Guyana hinterland this week – what I began to find as I traced the imaginary line that connects us – island and continent.

This is a LiTTurgy – a praise song: to all those who came before, and on whose enormous shoulders we stand and are dwarfed.

I thank you for this opportunity.

For more on LiTTscapes go to the GloCal Knowledge Pot  

ACP conference aims to boost media coverage of rural agri

Over 150 officials and journalists from African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) countries have gathered in Brussels, Belgium for a conference that aims to bridge the gap between agriculture development in rural areas and coverage of this sector by media.

The conference, which is being held under the theme ’The Role of the media in Agricultural and Rural Development of ACP countries’, commenced on Monday with a briefing session for participants at the European Commission building at the Borschette Centre in Brussels.

The gathering is part of the Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation (CTA) 25th anniversary celebrations and aims to bridge the gap between agriculture development in rural areas by reaching target audiences in ACP countries via the mainstream media. Participants hail from more than 40 ACP countries.

In his remarks at the opening briefing, Ian Barber of the European Union emphasized the importance of the media in the various democracies. He said that the media acts as a watchdog and gatekeeper, ensuring that presentations by democratic governments are important to all areas of governance

Former CNN news anchor Tumi Makgabo (left) chats with Trinidadian media consultant Dr Krishendaye Rampersad.

CTA director, Hansjorg Neun said that the media strengthens and collaborates within the confines of good governance. He stated that this year’s conference intends to provide answers to the question; “why do we only read about agricultural issues when there are natural disasters such as tsunamis, food crises, flooding”. Neun emphasized the need for the media to provide coverage to agricultural issues; its potential and success stories, noting that agriculture needs to be urgently boosted to feed some nine billion people worldwide by 2015.

According to the CTA head, while most governments and private entities are investing in agriculture, there is also a simultaneous need for such entities to invest in media and communication. He said that most media houses /journalists are not specialists where coverage of agricultural matters is concerned. In this light, he pointed out that the CTA has undertaken several strategies to ensure that key messages are conveyed on agricultural issues; making agriculture a better, more appealing theme where journalism is concerned.

Among the reasons highlighted for agriculture issues receiving little recognition within the mainstream media were poor infrastructure within media houses, lack of equipment, lack of education on agriculture activities on the part of journalists and poor output resulting out of the latter. Recommendations brought to the fore within the first session on Monday were the need for improved skills where journalists are concerned; improved relationships between government agencies and the media; as well as the recognition of the important roles technology plays within the field, the latter being highlighted as advanced in the Caribbean as compared to Africa and parts of the Pacific.

Trinidad and Tobago’s Dr Krishendaye Rampersad – one of several Caricom representatives attending the conference, stated that there is an urgent need for investment in training to develop the sector. She said that on the part of the agriculture sector, officials there should also think of how the agency can strengthen itself where media relations are concerned.

Ignatius Jean, the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA) representative based in Guyana told participants that there have been moves to improve relations between the mainstream media and the agriculture sector within Caricom. According to the former St Lucia government minister, “we love and hate the media but we can’t live without them”.  He noted that it is important for partnerships to be a part of the media/agriculture development relationship. The agriculture official said the media has a symbiotic relationship with democracy, noting that it plays a powerful role as an agent for change in some societies.

Among the points raised at Monday’s session, which was moderated in part by former CNN news anchor Tumi Makgabo and Trinidad’s Dr Eugenia Springer, were the communication strategies used by various players within the mainstream media; the need for skills development of journalists; and access to more readily available information. Gender issues regarding cultural or personal issues preventing women in some societies from playing a part was also discussed.

Most participants at the conference are from the African continent while the Caribbean is represented by media houses from Jamaica, Barbados, Belize, Suriname and Haiti. The Caricom Secretariat is also participating while Guyana is represented by Stabroek News and Prime News.
The conference ends today.

 ACP conference aims to boost media coverage of rural agri - Stabroek News - Guyana

For more visit the website click this link

My world in a fishbowl - Address to St Stephen’s College

My World in a fishbowl
Kris Rampersad
Feature Address at the graduation ceremony
St Stephen’s College, Princes Town
October 5, 2011

Chairpersons, Bishop, Archdeacon, Principal, Board of Management, My former teachers, Teachers and Staff and my teachers - I see some of my teachers here, some whom I recognise and forgive me if memory fails and I do not recognise others –
Special guests, and people of the moment, you the Graduates
Friends: and two special ones – Vimlah and Judy - who came through the years to this day believe it or not, we only reconnected a few months ago since we left school.

We will decide later if I should thank you for this opportunity to speak to you today later… but I begin an apology – my apologies for turning down several other requests over the years – and to several other schools as well. Apart from never genuinely having the time – as you see, life leaves little space for so much, I also did not feel I was ready to address such an audience.
I have shied away from speaking to this school or any other graduation classes in the past, because I sincerely believe that to be asked to give the feature address at a graduation ceremony means that one has something of significant value, some unique wisdom to impart to graduates and teachers and parents and attendees. In making such a request, it is as if the school is passing over its enormous responsibility to the speaker, saying we have done our bit, we are letting them out of our doors now, and we are asking you, the speaker, to give them one last lesson.
It seems fitting that this, my first address to schools, should be to my alma mater. Yet, over the last few weeks I was in a quandary in trying to decide what to say.
Happy World Teachers Day!

I could have spoken on the theme for today, World Teachers’ Day 2011, Education for Gender Equality, because there is so much to say and do on how we need to rethink education, and how we define success and failure. But it didn’t seem an adequate subject to bring to you, the 2011 graduating class of St Stephen’s College and my alma mater.
When I told one of my nieces of this dilemma, of not knowing what to say, her immediate advice was, “Go to the internet. Look for something someone has said at a graduation.” (I am sure that would have been the suggestion of many of you as well?)
To the now generation, that could actually have resolved my problem of finding something to say today. The internet seems the source of all things for most of you – the answer to all ambitions and dreams and aspirations to becoming rich and famous and fabulous.

But, if I were to turn to the internet it will be not as just the source of the information but as the subject of my talk. For after acknowledging that the internet is indeed a great source of knowledge and a remarkable networking tool, I would have to gently - or harshly - rebuke those who see it as the source of all things; the remedy for all ills; the solution to every dilemma; the sum all knowledge. I could easily take you through an exercise I have had to take many of my students through and point out the high price of lifting material off the internet – the millions in lawsuits that it has cost some.
And then, fitting nicely into the theme I have been given here today - Conceive. Believe. Achieve - I would have explained how all the information on the internet – every single bit of it – was conceived by someone; they believed that it might be of value to someone else and so they put it on the world wide web; and some did this so successfully that they became instant millionaires.
And then I would ask you to think of why do we tend to think of the internet mainly as a source of things we can use, as consumers, rather than as a place where we can present ourselves as creators, and inventors and generators of new ideas and new products and new knowledge?
Why isn’t our first, instinctive, initial response not what we can take, but the things we can conceive of and create and place on the internet to form someone else’s source of information… so instead of thinking in terms of taking something created by someone else and presenting that to the 2011 graduates of St Stephen’s College, why don’t we first think of how we can present something that is an original creation, that you or I or someone else may think is worthy to be placed on the internet because it is new information, or can be an inspiration for someone else - an original piece of work, conceived and designed and articulated just for this occasion?
The internet may be many things to many people, but at the end of the day, it is only a receptacle of the ideas of all of us. If we were to all go there to source ideas we will really be creating nothing new, just recycling and regurgitating the ideas of others and in effect, we would have contributed nothing to the march of progress or the development of our world, not so?

Well, that’s the direction a talk on the internet would have taken if it was to be the subject of my talk today: why don’t we think of ourselves as originators, as creators, as inventors, as conceivers, rather than just users and consumers, takers and extractors?
And that little discussion on the internet, some of you may realize, has provided the introduction to the topic I was asked to speak on today – Conceive. Believe. Achieve – to which I would add to more small words, connect and confidence.
While the internet has become, it seems, so essential to our lives, and a lecture on understanding how we may use it to serve us as a tool, not as a replacement to our minds, may perhaps be timely and beneficial counsel for you - our next generation of leaders and thinkers and activists and educators and economists and businessmen – on a day like today, it still did not seem the subject I’d choose for this my first formal address to my old school.
For after my initial admonition to not adopt ideas wholesale from the internet but use it as supporting props in generating your own; after my coaxing you to instead focus on adding your original thoughts and creations to this global storehouse of knowledge; after my urging you to believe you can create your own virtual portal as a keyhole to the globe and develop your own apps; and after I provide tips and examples by which you may become overnight billionaires, what else would there be to say?
The dilemma remains. What final lesson can I impart to these students who went to the same school as I did, who grew up in the same locale like I did, who in essence may not be much different than I am, save the few, few, few years that separate us?
It was clear to me that the answer must be in that – in the difference – in the few years that separate us, for who wants to hear about the very similar experiences in the school and in the uniform that most of you are this minute just now counting the seconds to shedding at long last!
So what can I draw from the few years that separate us? What bit of wisdom can I relay that you can take away and take out and reflect on that can comfort, or reassure, or inspire in the years ahead?
Shall I invoke an inspirational line from Shakespeare, or Walcott or Naipaul or Selvon or one of my other favourite writers to whom I go time and time again when I am searching to the exact word that will capture some profound meaning? That comforts? That inspires? And that encapsules the enormous promise and potential of life?
Shall I recall a favourite scene from a movie or play that provided inspiration at a particular time and from which you too might receive such inspiration?
Shall I play a strain of music, like from the Walcott musical, Steel which I promoted and worked on with the team of the Trinidad Theatre Workshop in 2005, that you can replay over and over again in your mind in the years to follow that may fill an empty moment and which may sum up the reason and meaning of our being that gives us the fillip to go on when all else fails?
I dismissed each of those in turn. Much like the suggestion of taking something from the internet, they seemed too much like drawing from second hand knowledge and talent and skill, and that would be cheating, stealing, plagiarism, not so - if I were to attempt to share something that was not my own?

Anyone can do that. Surely that would be an insult to the efforts of those who had been trying to get me here over the years.
So what could I bring here today, to share with you that was my own, of my own making, which I can hold up as an outcome of being a former student of St Stephen’s College, of this district, of this region?
What can I bring from me to you? My dilemma persisted. I’m sure this is beginning to sound to you like the never-ending story. I must confess, temptation stepped in, and ‘taking something from the internet’ seemed a nice easy way out.
And then my eyes fell on this fishbowl that sits in my living room -- except, it is not used as a fishbowl. It contains no fish, no water, no substrate, no seaweed nor ornaments, no pump pushing up bubbles in relaxing gurgling murmurs.
In it are just some rocks, pebbles rather, none much more than a few cubic centimetres. And, they are not pretty rocks. They are nothing like the decorative kind you can buy in a store to put in an aquarium. They hold no particular mineral value. They are not oil bearing, nor are they evolving diamonds, nor rubies, nor even that tantalizing purple-blue tanzanite that are fetched from the volcanic depths of Mount Kilimanjaro. Furthermore, these rocks do not reflect my interest in geology, nor science, nor earth history, nor business, or any of the world’s mysteries.
Their shapes suggest no essential eye-pleasing forms or structures of nature that might stimulate architects into constructing lofty edifices of human civilization like that grand architect, Gaudi, and his monumental tributes to the art of nature that dwarfed any conception of achievement one might have as one stands in their presence in Barcelona.
Non-descript greys and browns and whites, the rocks in my fishbowl without fish do not even have aesthetic value. They do not resonate with colour or sparkle like those that built the Taj Mahal that may attract the painter’s eye, or the poet’s imagination. They do not carry hieroglyphics as the markings in caves in Africa, India, or Central America. And they certainly have no commercial value. They were not bought, nor would they be sold in a shop. Any visitor may easily overlook them, and at most, curiously ask, where are the fish, and why doesn’t the bowl contain the usually colourful substrate one finds in fish bowls? An unsupervised person might easily toss them away, as my neice has threatened to do on many a cleaning occasion.
In fact, my fishbowl of rocks is of little value to anyone, other than me. And that value is, it struck me, that they are actual representations of the time between when I sat where you are sitting, and now, as I stand here, speaking to you. They are a collation of experiences in the some 45 countries and almost 100 cities of the world on whose soils I walked. (It reminds me of something someone had scribbled in my school’s yearbook – ‘good girls go to heaven; bad girls go everywhere’. I have been everywhere, it seems, though from a calculation, 45 countries is only a fraction of the some 198 listed countries of the world, so there is still a lot of world to discover).
While your eyes may widen at the thought and your mind question whether it’s possible – 45 countries, about 100 cities, and in such a short time frame – most within the last decade, I still gasp in disbelief with another thought: such a big world to be reduced to such small numbers.
In the process of trying to formulate this address, my eyes fixed on the rock-filled fishbowl, without fish, and then on one of the rocks in particular. Nothing really marks this one out from among the other rocks: no label, or identification, but it was one I recognised into which I have injected my memory Athens, Greece.
It took me back to the moment at the ruins of the amphitheatre at the foot of the Temple of Delphi at the Acropolis in Athens. I had desperately shuffled my agenda to take in a concert of a Japanese band, singing Grecian folksongs - in English.
(That’s multiculturalism for you. We do not have the monopoly on that as much as we would like to think although we do have some unique elements of it.)

As much as the thrill of that experience of visiting Athens was in fulfilling the original intention – of delving into the heart of western civilisation, thought and literature - it resonated another thrill: of being in a Grecian amphitheatre and with that came an upsurge of memories of a place, not too far away from here, and morning assemblies in its outdoor amphitheatre. The school, our school was built like a Grecian amphitheatre - we found that out (Vimlah, Judy, didn’t we?) when we were researching its history for the first, a special silver jubilee publication of the school’s yearbook. Though its design was borrowed from the ancient Greeks, the towering columns at the front; the graded steps where assembly was/is held, it captured the same aesthetics the ancient Grecians of the second century BC had in their architecture. Adapted to sit against the slope of hills in Craignish, Princes Town, with its fine architectural contours, I am sure you will agree, it remains the best-looking school in the country.
We take our world into the world. It was the memory of events at the St Stephen’s College Auditorium that I was enjoying during that concert at the Acropolis. It was almost like the architects – those of the second century, and the one who built the school in the 1960s had connected over the thousands of years. (Really, it was only I who was making the connection in my mind.)
(I might add here, that then, the architect, was only a name in a page of the school’s history – Colin Laird. He came to life for me in recent years when we worked closely in lobbying to restore another national treasure, the nondescript Biswas house in St James, the ugly sister to the more ornate Lion’s House in Chaguanas of the novel by our home-grown literary laureate VS Naipaul - A House for Mr Biswas.)
With that memory, evoked by a memory of an Athenian-like pebble from near our school amphitheatre (that is no different than any other pebble) I was transported across the two milliennia of Grecian civilization and architecture that the amphitheatre represented, to the 1960s when Laird built the school, and to my much more recent days at the school to which you are now saying goodbye.
A few years, but there have been a billion experiences since I have spoken to our assembly, at that place down the road which I carry around with me as one of the most astounding pieces of architecture in this country. (And one which we should endeavour to protect and preserve even as you seek to have a new school or expanded school, Principal Sargeant?)
Thought of one local pebble was now triggering a ripple of memories. I began to test my recollection of the near one hundred cities in some forty five countries, from other pebbles in the fishbowl, each of which, though of no particular size, shape, dimension, sparkle, value or worth, held a memory of an experience that came from one or the other of those cities.


None of the pebbles carry a date or a stamp of place as a reminder - local place of origin connecting global space of memory) - because that knowledge I carry around inside me, just like much of what you have learnt at this institution would not bear a label, or a subject title, but would surface time and again, when you are in need of this knowledge.
There, in my fishbowl, I found what I would speak of to you at this gathering. Unfortunately, my time is now up, I believe?
(It was here I was going to show a slide show that connects us to each of those places – but technological complications have stymied that for another time perhaps.)
My fishbowl became the bridge between reality - the local pebbles in the bowl - and the imagination - the global experience that I had injected into each; between the time I spent here, and elsewhere, and what I took from here to other places… and that didn’t require wealth, nor power, nor status, nor position to accomplish. (You may ask what did it really took, but that is a subject for another address, perhaps. For the moment, my short answer will be a pen and paper):
A wave to the Pope at the Vatican;
A bow to the Dalai Lama;
Daily talks in Uganda with Terry Waite – the Archbishop who was taken hostage in Beirut while trying to negotiate the freedom of others;
Touching the temple bell that Tulsidas, the author of the sacred Ramayan touched daily as boats carrying the dead drifted down the Ganges at dusk;
Through Japan, India, Malaysia and Singapore; parts of north, central and South America - Brazil, Costa Rica, Mexico, Colombia, Chile, Argentina, fro civil society engagements;
Backpacking through Europe as a student with no money but full of a spirit of adventure;
Island-hopping across the Caribbean, 'cause we is island people;
To and from North, South and East Africa - Uganda, Tunisia, then South Africa again; and India again; and Chile, and London, and Brussels and Paris again; Making new friends, from places with strange names like Bhutan and Kazakhstan and Lithuania and Palau;
A birthday spent sliding down an overgrown goat path having foolishly attempt to climb the Old Man of Stowe in Scotland without food, water or sensible shoes.
The memories gushed over each other as if they were in a gurgling stream in the fishbowl.
Working with our Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott to produce his latest musical Steel; railing at bureaucratic pigheadedness at a culture meeting with Pat Bishop and felt her last breath; forming a human chain in Scotland to demand release of political prisoners in Ethiopia, Africa, or spending all night one Christmas eve trying to mobilize international media support for their release so they might be able to spend Christmas with their families, neglecting the calls of my own family to come home to Christmas with them;
Boarding a Greenpeace vessel to protest fish trawling, or clamouring for the right, of all of us, to information.
Surely, my folks would want to hear of my clash with the Head of Security of the British Royal Family at the Commonwealth Peoples Forum during the Commonwealth Heads of Government Forum in Uganda in 2007 where I was coordinating the international media for the Commonwealth Foundation, and from which I now have a treatise on how to quell the ire of the power beneath the power of the British throne when he threatened to cancel the Prince’s visit, charging that I was the reason, perhpas his own private joke, for yet, by the next day, had simmered down sufficiently to facilitate front row videoing and photographing of moments of the Prince’s tour….
Or certainly, they would want to hear of lunches in the drawing room once occupied by Prince Edward and Mrs Simpson or dinner with the Duchess of the real Hogsworth Castle who keeps a real garden collection of poisonous herbs. Did I dare to eat, then, knowing this?
And I could recall the cheekiness of joining a group of women testing attitudes to condom use in Africa – this at a pharmacy in Tunisia in North Africa and the varying shades of disapproval we received from the male pharmacist there on our pretended interest in buying condoms (oops - sorry Honourable Bishop!)
And the conference rooms (of the UN, Commonwealth, OAS, CIVICUS, various world summits on arts, culture, gender and media);
The meeting rooms and activist rooms that merge in a blur as there was little to distinguish them from each other, not unlike our pebbles in the fishbowl;
The inexplicable breathlessness that takes over on entering the haven to art and nature Gaudi created in his tribute to the Sacred Family in Barcelona;
The perfumed gardens and piping birds giving the perfect blend for provocation of the senses in that tribute to love, another creation of artistic perfection, the Taj Mahal;
Looking out the balcony of the Sunway Hotel in Malaysia, and wondering why the name seemed so familiar – yeah, the same Sunway name bandied about in references to the now infamous Calder Hart!
Standing on the Equator line in Jinja, Uganda; in the Shukkheien Gardens of Hiroshima;
Seeing an acorn for the first time – remember A-for-acorn, it was one of our earliest learning experiences but so alien because how many of us have ever seen an acorn. I did only a few months ago.
Being in the ancient city of the Mayas in Tenochtitlan, Mexico, or climbing its old world pyramids: Those once were only drawings in our history book, like Colin Laird was just the name of a builder in a page in our school’s history.




Discovering how the country Portugal got its name from the fruit (only recently I learnt that) while standing on the shores from which Columbus set sail and opened up passages for Europe to discover our part of the world; a working picnic trying to inject the Caribbean in plans for UNESCO’s directions on global culture for under the Eiffel Tower; passing up on a vineyard visit in Bordeaux France and stumbling upon Corajoud’s remarkable water mirror mirage at the Bordeaux waterfront;
An opera, an art gallery, a theatrical performance, a book launch.
Crossing the many rivers of the world and thinking how water has shaped the history of humankind – Having knelt at the Nile’s pulsating source at Lake Victoria in Uganda; sat at the Seine in Paris, tasted the Thames of London; gazed on the goings-on at the Ganges, shed a tear at the Tiber for Rome’s lost glory.
Traversing the Atlantic, the Pacific, the Indian ocean, the Caribbean sea.
It is a lot of world to contain in a fishbowl!
To the theme for today, Conceive, Believe, Achieve, let’s now add those two small words, connect and confidence.
Looking at this little rounded glass fishbowl, it struck me that here is the bridge between the years, and that particular day, when I sat in this very pew, receiving the final blessings and fare-thee-well wisdom within these hallowed walls. In it is the time between those years, and in it are the experiences and knowledge that separate us. In it are the changes that have visited this church, our school, our locale, our country, our world and our planet.
There is one thought that comes with all of it that I want to share with you. Never once did it occur to me that any of them were a better place than the place we are from; born where we are – on a small island, in the Caribbean, in a place that is a true microcosm of the world. It is because we are from here we can make any other place in the world feel like home.
This place allows you, us, like no other, to draw from the histories and cultures and experiences of all the peoples of the world because their histories are your/our ancestries.
And you’d have to agree too, that there is no better age to live in, than this one, where knowledge is not the luxury of a privileged few but a right of all.
At this time when information is available so readily, it is so easy to allow our minds to wither and imagination to die, but it is also an opportunity to leverage all the knowledge in the world from this little corner, here, because the place where you have been born gives you an insight into the operations of the world from the perspectives of all the cultures that form us (the indigeneous peoples, Europe, Africa, India, China…) – a perspective owned by very few, if not no other peoples. Whereas most operate from their monochromatic homogeneous corner of the world, we have front row seats to all of theirs (not unlike at the concert at the Acropolis in Athens or the St Stephen’s College auditorium), and the hybrids we are creating too, like the music of the steelpans which we just heard.
When I sat in a graduation ceremony similar to this, some, few, well really many, many moons ago; When we (Vimlah, Judy and others) exited the school walls and the gates of this church never to return, till now, I never envisioned the life that lay before me – no, never! So I cannot presume to tell you what lies ahead.
Curious thing, we are told that change is the only thing we can be sure of, but nothing prepares us for that – in fact, all our learning is geared to encourage us to resist change.
Perhaps the most challenging circumstances you’d ever have to face is the kind of browbeating that you will be subjected to by people and institutions caught in a time lag, and demanding that you conform to it as well.
In school we were told science is about facts, and the humanities are about imagination and never the twain shall meet. But we know, from the collation of now accessible knowledge on the internet and everyday unfolding events around us that the most unstable knowledge today is scientific knowledge; its truths are true only until the next find, the next discovery, the cracking of the next code, the expansion of the next formula.
The pace at which change is occurring is demanding greater and greater flexibility and most cannot keep up, not being taught how to keep up, not learning how to keep up.
There are many events, circumstances, opportunities even setbacks that will shape your life, but there is no blueprint, no roadmap, nor GPS waiting for you outside the church door that will point or talk you through the journey you are about to take.
Life opens up to you when you open up to it …. Be flexible, approach all with an open mind and an open heart. We close ourselves out to so much of what life has to offer if we do not.
And the benefits are multiplied when you do so with confidence.
That's the word I was looking for when I began this talk. Confidence.

To the question: Why is our initial instinctive response about using/taking from the internet, not creating for it, for the use of others? There is a simple answer. It is because we do not conceive and envision ourselves as creators; we do not believe in ourselves, in our talents, in our abilities. We lack confidence. We see ourselves as small island people, from a small district, in limited circumstances and with insufficient resources, battling tremendous odds in a not-too-friendly world. We constantly compare ourselves to others, to the technologies and the institutions available elsewhere and feel inadequate. It is the source of failure. If we lack confidence, how can we believe that what we can achieve, become contributors to the world, rather than borrowers and takers?
Own your world!
We are everyday creating and recreating our world. That is the change that is constant. The world is of our making, and we already have all the ingredients to remake it into the kind of world we want – in our minds, in our hearts and in the raw materials and the pebbles that are in our communities. The making of it is in the quality of minds that would leave this hall.
I have said all this to say that you already have all the tools you need. You do not have to step one foot out of your district or village or town to achieve once you have confidence that with the power of you. There are raw materials all around you to achieve, just as Einstein and Galileo and Gandhi and so many others discovered, through working with materials in their immediate locale. Go out and find them - pebbles, straws, leaves!
You have the added advantage of access, from your home corner, to the enormous intellectual wealth of the world through the internet. Research and knowledge is no longer the privilege of the view but a right of the many - use it!
You have it in you, in your heritage, the substance of the heritage from every other corner of the world – in our human ancestry, as well as in our geological and natural history – think about it! I can’t think of any other society any where in the world, and indeed, have not encountered any other that is so endowed – not with the range and the diversity and proximity – in our everyday practices, our everyday reality. Draw on it as an unending source of knowledge.
We have been given all that we need to be the best person that we can be.
And growing up doesn’t mean giving up your dreams. How often we have been told that – grow up, get real! It is about continuing to believe in dreams and finding a new one every day to follow and to fulfill, and looking for a few more to fulfill the next day.
I challenge you, as you leave here, have one dream - at least one - and work immediately to realizing it. It might not augment your income or your knowledge or your network of friends, but it fulfills you. And then, find some more dreams and make them come true.
This day, as you now see, is not about me; it is about you so let me now add my, congratulations.
You might ask why am I congratulating you? Don’t you believe it? Certainly there is so much for you to celebrate today – congratulations. Being here is an achievement in itself, maybe you do not realize the enormity of this achievement:
Think about it – why should we celebrate you today? What have you done to deserve this – still in bobby socks and ribbons – some of you.
We are celebrating you, because well, just because you have been born. And we know that it is not “just because” – you have actually already achieved much more than the hundreds of thousands of infants who never survive birth. So look around and congratulate the person sitting on either side of you, and in front of and behind you and applaud that: for having been born, it is enough to celebrate you!
If you think that in itself isn’t enough, there is more: Congratulations. You have made it pass the hundreds of thousands who never have the opportunity to attend primary school. You got past primary school. Please shake each other’s hands for that, and maybe some applause?
Yes, we must now be feeling some sense of accomplishment?
Not only did you make it through primary school, you also made it into this school. And that means you have rocketed past a few more hundreds of thousands who never reach secondary school.
You are not among the school drop outs. You are not among the many youths who are on the street fending for themselves, holding guns in gangs and who have fallen to lives of crime.
As you congratulate yourself for making it this far, know that these things already make you all potential candidates for the title of young men and women of the decade.
As you congratulate yourself and each other, pause a minute, and acknowledge, too, that for those who have not been able to go to primary school or not having the opportunity of a secondary school or not having finished secondary school are in themselves not a signal of failure; and that your achievement does not make you superior. It is just that you have been a little more fortunate. While we bask in the glory, treat it as not an opportunity to gloat; but one to be grateful and give thanks and praise, as David Rudder will say, for such good fortune. You have been given, most of all, the capacity to dream and the tools to make them true.
And having done that, think now as you step out from this hall, to beyond the school walls, from the gaze of your teachers, how can you return some of what you have been given? You have indeed already been given so much. The world owes you nothing; it is you who are in debt for all that you have received and are about to receive, because always there will be someone with less, much, much less than you.
Think of the knowledge and experience of your elders and how you can draw from that – and remember to give credit where credit is due (remember, my earlier admonition about plagiarism?) Think of how you can share what you have learnt with the less fortunate and how together you can benefit from your knowledge and their experiences – benefit not just materially, but mentally and spiritually too. How can the knowledge and experience of those of us who are in here, and those who are not, support, compliment and build each other? That is how we build community. In the world of which we are a part, it is now called networking – and I am careful not to say that in the world you are entering, because you are not about to become Columbus to discover a world that is already there – it is already there and you are a part, and a vital part of it …
We have been given all that we need to be the best person that we can be. Though it seems such a large place, the world is really a small place, a very small place. It can be contained in a fishbowl.
In each experience we are merely connecting the pebbles to form a bridge between our world, and the rest of the world. And if we fill up the spaces in between with confidence it bellows out into a very large place that is your own, and in which you have a significant part to play.
Conceive. Believe. Achieve, and connect them with confidence.
What will be in your fishbowl? You may be sharing it with an audience like this a few years hence. I thank you for listening, and for this immensely pleasurable and honored opportunity to speak to you.
Kris Rampersad
October 5, 2011.
PROGRAMME
Procession of Graduands.………………………………….……………..……………...…..Musical Interlude
National Anthem…………………………..……………..………….…………………………………..….....Pan Duet
Opening Prayer…………….……..………..……….……The Venerable Archdeacon Edwin Primus
Welcome and Introductions…………………….…..………………….……………….…Ms. Aneshia Beach, Ms Shara Khan
Greetings:…….………….….………..………………………..………..…Mrs. Joan Brown (Chairman PTA)
The Venerable Archdeacon Edwin Primus Chairman of the Board of Management, The Right Reverend Bishop Calvin Bess, Ms. Clare Telemaque, School Supervisor III
Principal’s Report……………………..……………………………….…………….……...Ms. Allison Sarjeant
Musical Interlude “In Living Years”……….………...…………..………….………….………Pan Ensemble
Introduction of Guest Speaker…………………………………………..………….…… .. Ms Shara Khan
Feature Address…………………………………………………………….………………..Dr. Kris Rampersad
Vote of Thanks………………………….……………………….……………….…………Mrs. Margaret Dailey, Ag. Vice Principal
Distribution of Tokens to Graduates; Presentation of Awards & Prizes: C.S.E.C. and C.A.P.E. Levels
Song: “You never walk alone”………………………………….………………..……….…..….Emilie Alpheus
Valedictory Speech………………………………………..………………………………..…..………Nalini Dookie
Special Presentations
Chairman’s Closing Remarks……..…………………………………………………….…....Ms. Aneshia Beach
College Hymn & Prayer……………………………………..….……………………………………….Congregation
Blessing…………………………………….….……….....……….. The Right Reverend Bishop Calvin Bess
Recessional


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Murder She Wrote: Death Written in Stone in Dana Seetahal Assassination
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Demokrissy: Wave a flag for a party rag...Choosing the Emperor's ...
Oct 20, 2013 Choosing the Emperor's New Troops. The dilemma of choice. Voting is supposed to be an exercise in thoughtful, studied choice. Local government is the foundation for good governance so even if one wants to reform the ... http://kris-rampersad.blogspot.com/
Old Casked Rum: The Emperor's New Tools#1 - Demokrissy - Blogger
Apr 07, 2013 Old Casked Rum: The Emperor's New Tools#1 - Towards Constitutional Reform in T&T. So we've had the rounds of consultations on Constitutional Reform? Are we any wiser? Do we have a sense of direction that will drive ...http://kris-rampersad.blogspot.com/
Demokrissy: Valuing Carnival The Emperor's New Tools#2
Apr 30, 2013 Valuing Carnival The Emperor's New Tools#2....http://kris-rampersad.blogspot.com/
See Also:
Demokrissy: Winds of Political Change - Dawn of T&T's Arab Spring
Jul 30, 2013 Wherever these breezes have passed, they have left in their wake wide ranging social and political changes: one the one hand toppling long time leaders with rising decibels from previously suppressed peoples demanding a ...http://kris-rampersad.blogspot.com/
Demokrissy: Reform, Conform, Perform or None of the Above cross ...
Oct 25, 2013 Some 50 percent did not vote. The local government elections results lends further proof of the discussion began in Clash of Political Cultures: Cultural Diversity and Minority Politics in Trinidad and Tobago in Through The ...http://kris-rampersad.blogspot.com/
Demokrissy: Sounds of a party - a political party
Oct 14, 2013 They are announcing some political meeting or the other; and begging for my vote, and meh road still aint fix though I hear all parts getting box drains and thing, so I vex. So peeps, you know I am a sceptic so help me decide. http://kris-rampersad.blogspot.com/
Demokrissy: T&T Constitution the culprit | The Trinidad Guardian
Jun 15, 2010 T&T Constitution the culprit | The Trinidad Guardian · T&T Constitution the culprit | The Trinidad Guardian. Posted by Kris Rampersad at 8:20 AM · Email ThisBlogThis!Share to TwitterShare to Facebook ...http://kris-rampersad.blogspot.com/
Related:
Demokrissy: To vote, just how we party … Towards culturally ...
Apr 30, 2010 'How we vote is not how we party.' At 'all inclusive' fetes and other forums, we nod in inebriated wisdom to calypsonian David Rudder's elucidation of the paradoxical political vs. social realities of Trinidad and Tobago. http://kris-rampersad.blogspot.com/
Demokrissy: DEADLOCK: Sign of things to come
Oct 29, 2013 An indication that unless we devise innovative ways to address representation of our diversity, we will find ourselves in various forms of deadlock at the polls that throw us into a spiral of political tug of war albeit with not just ...http://kris-rampersad.blogspot.com/
Demokrissy: The human face of constitutional reform
Oct 16, 2013 Sheilah was clearly and sharply articulating the deficiencies in governmesaw her: a tinymite elderly woman, gracefully wrinkled, deeply over with concerns about political and institutional stagnation but brimming over with ... http://kris-rampersad.blogspot.com/
Demokrissy: Trini politics is d best
Oct 21, 2013 Ain't Trini politics d BEST! Nobody fighting because they lose. All parties claiming victory, all voting citizens won! That's what make we Carnival d best street party in the world. Everyone are winners because we all like ...http://kris-rampersad.blogspot.com/
New Media, New Civil Society, and Politics in a New Age - Demokrissy
Jan 09, 2012 New Media, New Civil Society, and Politics in a New Age | The Communication Initiative Network. New Media, New Civil Society, and Politics in a New Age | The Communication Initiative Network. Posted by Kris Rampersad ...http://kris-rampersad.blogspot.com/
Demokrissy: T&T politics: A new direction? - Caribbean360 Oct 01, 2010 http://kris-rampersad.blogspot.com/
Oct 20, 2013 Choosing the Emperor's New Troops. The dilemma of choice. Voting is supposed to be an exercise in thoughtful, studied choice. Local government is the foundation for good governance so even if one wants to reform the ... http://kris-rampersad.blogspot.com/
Old Casked Rum: The Emperor's New Tools#1 - Demokrissy - Blogger
Apr 07, 2013 Old Casked Rum: The Emperor's New Tools#1 - Towards Constitutional Reform in T&T. So we've had the rounds of consultations on Constitutional Reform? Are we any wiser? Do we have a sense of direction that will drive ...http://kris-rampersad.blogspot.com/
Demokrissy: Valuing Carnival The Emperor's New Tools#2
Apr 30, 2013 Valuing Carnival The Emperor's New Tools#2....http://kris-rampersad.blogspot.com/
See Also:
Demokrissy: Winds of Political Change - Dawn of T&T's Arab Spring
Jul 30, 2013 Wherever these breezes have passed, they have left in their wake wide ranging social and political changes: one the one hand toppling long time leaders with rising decibels from previously suppressed peoples demanding a ...http://kris-rampersad.blogspot.com/
Demokrissy: Reform, Conform, Perform or None of the Above cross ...
Oct 25, 2013 Some 50 percent did not vote. The local government elections results lends further proof of the discussion began in Clash of Political Cultures: Cultural Diversity and Minority Politics in Trinidad and Tobago in Through The ...http://kris-rampersad.blogspot.com/
Demokrissy: Sounds of a party - a political party
Oct 14, 2013 They are announcing some political meeting or the other; and begging for my vote, and meh road still aint fix though I hear all parts getting box drains and thing, so I vex. So peeps, you know I am a sceptic so help me decide. http://kris-rampersad.blogspot.com/
Demokrissy: T&T Constitution the culprit | The Trinidad Guardian
Jun 15, 2010 T&T Constitution the culprit | The Trinidad Guardian · T&T Constitution the culprit | The Trinidad Guardian. Posted by Kris Rampersad at 8:20 AM · Email ThisBlogThis!Share to TwitterShare to Facebook ...http://kris-rampersad.blogspot.com/
Related:
Demokrissy: To vote, just how we party … Towards culturally ...
Apr 30, 2010 'How we vote is not how we party.' At 'all inclusive' fetes and other forums, we nod in inebriated wisdom to calypsonian David Rudder's elucidation of the paradoxical political vs. social realities of Trinidad and Tobago. http://kris-rampersad.blogspot.com/
Demokrissy: DEADLOCK: Sign of things to come
Oct 29, 2013 An indication that unless we devise innovative ways to address representation of our diversity, we will find ourselves in various forms of deadlock at the polls that throw us into a spiral of political tug of war albeit with not just ...http://kris-rampersad.blogspot.com/
Demokrissy: The human face of constitutional reform
Oct 16, 2013 Sheilah was clearly and sharply articulating the deficiencies in governmesaw her: a tinymite elderly woman, gracefully wrinkled, deeply over with concerns about political and institutional stagnation but brimming over with ... http://kris-rampersad.blogspot.com/
Demokrissy: Trini politics is d best
Oct 21, 2013 Ain't Trini politics d BEST! Nobody fighting because they lose. All parties claiming victory, all voting citizens won! That's what make we Carnival d best street party in the world. Everyone are winners because we all like ...http://kris-rampersad.blogspot.com/
New Media, New Civil Society, and Politics in a New Age - Demokrissy
Jan 09, 2012 New Media, New Civil Society, and Politics in a New Age | The Communication Initiative Network. New Media, New Civil Society, and Politics in a New Age | The Communication Initiative Network. Posted by Kris Rampersad ...http://kris-rampersad.blogspot.com/
Demokrissy: T&T politics: A new direction? - Caribbean360 Oct 01, 2010 http://kris-rampersad.blogspot.com/
Others: Demokrissy: Old Casked Rum: The Emperor's New Tools#1 ...
Apr 07, 2013
Old Casked Rum: The Emperor's New Tools#1 - Towards Constitutional Reform in T&T. So we've had the rounds of consultations on Constitutional Reform? Are we any wiser? Do we have a sense of direction that will drive ...
http://kris-rampersad.blogspot.com/
Demokrissy: Valuing Carnival The Emperor's New Tools#2
Apr 30, 2013
Valuing Carnival The Emperor's New Tools#2. 
http://kris-rampersad.blogspot.com/
Wave a flag for a party rag...Choosing the Emperor's New ...
Oct 20, 2013
Choosing the Emperor's New Troops. The dilemma of choice. Voting is supposed to be an ... Old Casked Rum: The Emperor's New Tools#1 - Towards Constitutional Reform in T&T. Posted by Kris Rampersad at 10:36 AM ...
http://kris-rampersad.blogspot.com/
Demokrissy: Carnivalising the Constitution People Power ...
Feb 26, 2014
This Demokrissy series, The Emperor's New Tools, continues and builds on the analysis of evolution in our governance, begun in the introduction to my book, Through the Political Glass Ceiling (2010): The Clash of Political ...
http://kris-rampersad.blogspot.com/
Envisioning outside-the-island-box ... - Demokrissy - Blogger
Feb 10, 2014
This Demokrissy series, The Emperor's New Tools, continues and builds on the analysis of evolution in our governance, begun in the introduction to my book, Through the Political Glass Ceiling (2010): The Clash of Political ...
http://kris-rampersad.blogspot.com/
Demokrissy: Futuring the Post-2015 UNESCO Agenda
Apr 22, 2014
It is placing increasing pressure for erasure of barriers of geography, age, ethnicity, gender, cultures and other sectoral interests, and in utilising the tools placed at our disposal to access our accumulate knowledge and technologies towards eroding these superficial barriers. In this context, we believe that the work of UNESCO remains significant and relevant and that UNESCO is indeed the institution best positioned to consolidate the ..... The Emperor's New Tools ...
http://kris-rampersad.blogspot.com/
Demokrissy: Cutting edge journalism
Jun 15, 2010
The Emperor's New Tools. Loading... AddThis. Bookmark and Share. Loading... Follow by Email. About Me. My Photo · Kris Rampersad. Media, Cultural and Literary Consultant, Facilitator, Educator and Practitioner. View my ...
http://kris-rampersad.blogspot.com/

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