By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
June 06, 2019
The Tacarigua Welfare and Improvement Council, also known as the Tacarigua Village Council, was established on 23 May 1945. Its first meeting was held at the “Cocoa House” that was built by enslaved Africans in 1837. Vernon Scott, the headmaster of St. Mary’s Anglican School and the person under whom I began my teaching career, was the first president of the Council.
Continue reading Land Grabbing with Government’s Assistance
By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
May 28, 2019
“Whenever you ignore whispers, you do so at your own peril. Sometimes they may be the truth.”
—Eric Williams, PNM’s Founding father
Ok! Minister Colm Imbert, PNM party chairman, did not bouff Education Minister Anthony Garcia. Garcia was asked “a barrage of questions” and Imbert intervened politely, according to Laurel Lezama-Lee Sing, PNM’s public relations officer, “to remind him [Garcia] that the press conference was about party issues” (Express, May 20).
Continue reading Whispers of Corrupting Practices
By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
May 20, 2019
“I bear a grudge that we in Trinidad do not pay enough attention to our heroes. They are the people that will give Trinidad life.”
—Beryl McBurnie quoted in Judy Raymond, Beryl McBurnie
There has been much coverage about the horrible murder of the prime minister’s boyhood friend John Miles and his wife Eulyn at the hands of a monstrously deranged person. This dastardly act led the PM to bemoan: “What have we become? What are we producing as ‘the next generation’? John and I grew up together in poverty, with pride, but violence and criminality were never part of our life” (Express, May 4).
Continue reading Cultural & Environmental Violence
By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
May 13, 2019
In 1981, after teaching in the United States for about ten years, I decided to return home for good. To do so I had to erect a personal library so I could do my work. Without my library I would be lost, so I asked my first cousin—one of those cousins who possesses the skills to do everything—to build a library at the back of my mother’s house.
Continue reading Jamming the Poor, Still
By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
May 08, 2019
“Can there be a national life without a national literature?”
—Jose Marti
Marina Warner, a distinguished English writer of Trinidadian provenance and professor of English and Creative Writing at Birkbeck College, University of London, read from her work, Fly Away Home, at the Bocas Lit Fest on Thursday. She argued, with tremendous encouragement from the audience, that imaginative literature possesses the capacity to capture dimensions of a society’s unconscious in ways that realist fiction seldom does.
Continue reading Obeahing the Word
By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
May 02, 2019
On Tuesday, March 26, Elton Herbert Nelson, a good friend and fellow teacher at Curepe E. C., now named Holy Saviour (Curepe) Anglican School, passed away. I could not allow his passing to go unnoticed and unrecorded; such was his stature and the indelible contribution he made to the life of Trinidadians and Tobagonians.
Continue reading Elton Herbert Nelson: A Phenomenal Man
By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
April 22, 2019
Over the past year, Ralph Maraj, a fellow columnist, has been a tick in PNM’s behind. He isn’t always wrong in his commentaries—even a broken clock is correct at least twice a day—but his obsessive fascination with PNM’s failures leads one to question his objectivity and the distorting lens of his overwrought rhetoric.
Last Sunday he listed everything PNM has done wrong during its tenure and why he is heartened by UNC’s plans as it prepares to govern from 2020.
Continue reading The Dog and the Bone
By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
April 17, 2019
A week ago Reginald Vidale, chairman of the Eric Williams Memorial Committee, begged the government “to celebrate the life and legacy of Williams as the founding father of the country and Caricom” and “to declare a day of remembrance, not necessarily a public holiday, to reflect on his contribution” (Newsday, April 4)
Ayanna Webster-Roy, Minister of Culture, countered by suggesting that, like Williams, the country must champion nation-building by following the nation’s watchwords: discipline, tolerance and production.
Continue reading Learning by Example
By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
April 08, 2019
“Know you not that love, when firmly established, is priceless?”
—Nana Asma’u, “Lamentation for ‘Aysha.'”
I met Margaret Busby in the 1980s just after her press (Allison & Busby) published three volumes of C. L. R. James’s collected work (The Future in the Present [1977], Spheres of Existence [1980], and At the Rendezvous of Victory 1984]). It was an exciting time for James scholars. The assembled pieces were important parts of James’s intellectual corpus.
Continue reading New Daughters of Africa
By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
April 06, 2019
“If you compared Britain to a sphinx, the sphinx would be an open book by comparison. Let’s see how that book speaks over the next week or so.”
—Jean-Claude Juncker, President, European Commission
Last Friday Britain was supposed to leave the European Union (EU) after which the land, as Boris Johnson and his Tory friends assured us, was supposed to be flowing in milk and honey. March 29 has come and gone. On that very day the British Parliament rejected Prime Minister Theresa May’s plan to leave the EU for a third time. This left British citizens asking: “How did we go so perilously wrong?”
Continue reading The Brexit Quagmire