By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
May 28, 2018
(Dedicated to Wendy Williams)
Now, please don’t blame me; doh say that I say so because ah simply selling it as ah buy it but the people have it to say—call them de bad-minded people— that Meghan Markle is not the first black or mixed-race woman to join the British royal family by way of marriage.
Continue reading Is Meghan Really the First …
By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
May 21, 2018
I am always struck by Colm Imbert’s casual cruelty; his notion that he possesses superior wisdom; is always in the right; and his access to privileged information makes his utterances irrefutable. Such advantages, he believes, give him the right to demean and insult anyone he chooses.
On May 11 he was at his most incorrigible presumably because God blessed T&T with greater accesses to nature’s riches than say Jamaica. He accused Mariano Brown, Patrick Watson, Roger Hosein, Indera Sagewan-Alli, and Maria Dukharan of being “unfair and biased in their criticisms of Government’s handling of the economy” (Guardian, May 13).
Continue reading Imbert’s Casual Cruelty
By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
May 14, 2018
PART 1 — PART 2
Trinidad has always been seen as an exciting, exotic place. In 1498 after Columbus made his fourth and final voyage to the New World, he averred: “Gold is generated in sterile lands and wherever the sun is strong” (Hughes, Energy without Conscience). Around 1580 Sir Walter Raleigh left England to search for the fabled city of gold. V. S. Naipaul examined Raleigh’s obsession in The Loss of El Dorado.
Continue reading Conrad Friedrich Stollmeyer – Pt 2
By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
May 07, 2018
PART 1 — PART 2
It goes without saying that human beings are complex people; none more so than Conrad Stollmeyer who came to Trinidad in 1844 under strange circumstances. He arrived after apprenticeship ended (1838), at a time when the ex-slaves were desperately trying to find plots of land to house themselves and their families, to cultivate their crops and tend to their animals.
Continue reading Conrad Friedrich Stollmeyer
By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
April 30, 2018
I want to congratulate Marina Salandy-Brown for her marvelous gift to the nation in conceiving and developing the Bocas Lit Fest that has reenergized how we see our world. It connects to a long literary tradition that has its origins in the early days of our society.
Salandy-Brown, the founder of the festival, says she was motivated to “reestablish a place for Caribbean literature, which had all ‘disappeared’ from the purview of metropolitan publishers, being replaced, in Britain, by works by the children of Caribbean people born in Britain, such as Monica Ali and Audrea Levy” (Express, April 25).
Continue reading Carrying on the Tradition
By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
Posted: April 27, 2018
By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
April 23, 2018
“As everyone knows, priceless things have their price.” —Pierre Bourdieu, The Forms of Capital
Dr. Roodal Moonilal is a sophisticated intellectual who spent six years at the Institute of Social Studies at the Hague, in Holland, where he received a doctorate in history. In fact, he announced with justified pride: “I became the first student in the history of the Institute to graduate with a distinction in a PhD for my thesis (sic)” (Newsday, June 27, 2010). One would have thought that he was acquainted with Pierre Bourdieu’s thinking on the importance of cultural capital and its immense value to a society.
Continue reading Growing Our Cultural Capital
By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
April 16, 2018
“The dicta coming out of Puttaswamy emphasized the fact that sexual orientation is an essential attribute of privacy which is inextricably linked to human dignity.” —Justice Devindra Rampersad
A nation is a strange phenomenon. It takes many strands to make it whole. When so many things are going wrong in the nation and there seems to be little room for hope, little things happen that allows hope to blossom and points to what we can achieve if we only put our minds to it.
Continue reading The Soul of the Nation
By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
April 09, 2018
Queen Njinga of Africa ruled Ndongo (located in present-day Angola) from 1624-1663. Despite her outstanding accomplishments, “Europeans at the time portrayed her as a bloodthirsty cannibal who thought nothing of murdering babies and slaughtering her enemies.” This is the conclusion that Linda Heywood, a Trinidadian professor of history at Boston University, arrives at in her new biography, Njinga of Angola: African Warrior Queen (2017).
Continue reading Flawed Heroines
By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
April 3, 2018
On Monday I attended UNC’s Monday Night Forum. Nothing out of the ordinary, I thought. I have always attended political meetings of every stripe to understand the political currents of my society and the world. I never supported Tapia, but Lloyd Best and I remained the best of friends. We attended the same primary school.
In 1972 David Abdullah contested the Tunapuna seat as a candidate for the ULF. I voted for the PNM. We remain friends. I was never a fast friend of Basdeo Panday but nothing stopped me from attending ULF meetings at Mid-Center Mall and other places. In August of last year, Nicole Dyer-Griffith was contesting the leadership of Congress of the People. I attended a meeting at the Tunapuna Community Centre to hear what she had to say.
Continue reading Permission Please, Sir