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
By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
March 28, 2019
Tony Barber, Oxford scholar and European editor of the Financial Times, recalls an interesting occurrence when the European Union sought to write a European history book. “One historian from each EU member state was commissioned to write a chapter. The project was abandoned after the British complained that a Spanish historian had dismissed Sir Francis Drake, the Elizabethan maritime hero and victor over the Spanish Armada in 1588, as a mere ‘pirate'” (Financial Times, March 16).
Continue reading Our Living Past
By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
March 18, 2019
“Brexit has killed and saved her [Theresa May] at the same time….She knows as soon as Brexit’s done, she’s done.”
—Ayesha Hazarika, Former Labor Party Adviser
It was one of those all-consuming weeks. I did a book-signing at Wellesley College, Massachusetts, on Wednesday March 6 before flying to Dallas, Texas, the following Friday to attend my eldest grandson’s Beautillion, one of those black coming-of-age functions that has its origin in the southern part of the United States. Another grandson called it “a cotillion for dudes,” it being comparable to the cotillion ceremony that is held annually for young black women.
It was one of those proud moments in a black man’s life when he participates in a function that emphasizes his responsibility to his people, his roots, and his family as he crosses the threshold from adolescence to manhood. They call it “a rite of passage.” It is an important stage in a young man’s life.
Continue reading From Beautillion Ball to Brexit Cauldrom
By Dr. Selwyn R. Cudjoe
Posted: March 16, 2019
A lecture delivered at the Public Library of Trinidad and Tobago, Adult Education Program, January 11, 1983. This lecture can be located at the Trinidad Public Library, Port of Spain, under the call number Ref. W.I. 308, Cudjoe (Trinidad Collection, January 1983). Slight editorial changes have been made to the original document for this publication.
Introduction
Because slavery and colonialism meant the economic, political, and cultural enslavement of our people, the transition from colonial to genuine independence must, of necessity, concern itself with the economic, political, and cultural transformation of our peoples. In fact, it seems to me, that we cannot speak of any meaningful transition, any authentic expression of the national soul/spirit unless we give some serious consideration to these aspects of our national development: none of which, I’m afraid, has been given any serious consideration by our present government in Trinidad and Tobago. This evening, I will concern myself with what I have termed cultural policy and the manner in which it conduces to national development in Trinidad and Tobago.
Continue reading Cultural Policy and National Development