DDX Channel
January 24, 2021
Continue reading Dr Selwyn Cudjoe – History, Writing and the Slave Master of Trinidad
Black & Brown People Beware
By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
February 01, 2021
In 2001 when UNC was in power, I objected to its endorsement of Dr Bhoe Tewarie as principal of The University of the West Indies (UWI). I argued that Tewarie was not sufficiently prepared for such a position, his having only attained the status of “lecturer” in his academic career. Readers can determine the truth or falsity of my position.
In May 2017, when PNM recommended that Robert Bermudez serve as Chancellor of the university, I depicted his appointment in a satirical manner since I couldn’t take his appointment seriously. I believed he wasn’t the man for the job.
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Leaders or Liars
By Raffique Shah
February 01, 2021
I prefix what I write here today with an article of faith that I have learnt to value, especially as I grow older: speak up, speak out, whenever I feel strongly about something, when I see lies being promoted as the truth, when I see evil portrayed as good, mine must be a voice of reason in a world that appears to be consumed by misinformation at a time when ‘fake news’ is ingested by herds of humans and regurgitated as gospel truths.
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A Skinny Black Girl
By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
January 26, 2021
“We the successors of a country and a time/Where a skinny Black girl/descended from slaves and raised by a single mother/ can dream of becoming president [of the United States].”
—Amanda Gorman, “The Hill We Climb”
On May 31, 1849, Owen Finnegan, Joe Biden’s great-great grandfather from Ireland, arrived in New York aboard the ship Brothers. He was part of an oppressed people who were fleeing their country because of “caste oppression and a system of landlordism that made the condition of the Irish peasant comparable to those of an American slave” (Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White). “America,” Ignatiev explained, “scooped up the displaced Irish and made them its unskilled labor force.”
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Let them eat ‘old batteries’
By Raffique Shah
January 25, 2021
In my column last week, I questioned why the Government thought was necessary to exclude from scrutiny of the relevant authority details of Government to Government contracts. The point I was trying to make is that citizens almost instinctively do not trust politicians, especially when they are in office. Because countries like Trinidad and Tobago have been mired in allegations of corruption on a huge scale that spans different parties in power, suspicions of corruption will cloud every expenditure a government incurs, which leaves little room for getting things done.
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A Black Race Position
By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
January 19, 2021
Last Thursday, in his response to a letter written by 23 Afro-Trinbagonians about the placement of Black students in our secondary schools, Kamal Persad, coordinator of the Indian Review Committee, responded: “It is clear the under-performance of Afro-children in the education system is still at the top of the black agenda. Accordingly, these 23 persons of African descent adopted an unmistakable black race position” (Express, January 14).
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Mr. Politician, Sah
By Raffique Shah
January 18, 2021
The urgency with which this nation must address the issues that threaten to throw us back into the Stone Age cannot be over-emphasised. We were already in deep trouble when Covid-19 struck with pandemic force in early 2020, sending us reeling from blows to the body, the mind, even the spirit. The energy and petrochemicals sectors faced grim circumstances, the availability of natural gas, the key feedstock of the latter’s operations, being of grave concern, and the markets for their products saturated and dampened.
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Looking Beneath the Surface
By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
January 12, 2021
Viewers around the world were struck by the Trump-inspired mob that stormed the US Capitol on Wednesday. The Boston Globe editorialized: “‘When did you form a monster so hideous that even you turned from me in disgust?’ That’s what the reviled monster asks Dr. Victor Frankenstein in Mary Shelley’s classic novel, but it’s also what the angry mob of thousands who stormed the US Capitol in an insurrection on Wednesday could well ask soon-to-be-former Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell and other congressional Republicans who fled the House chamber” (January 7).
The US has never dealt fully with the monsters of race and racism that is buried deep within its entrails. The white insurrectionists who invaded the Capitol feared that their positional superiority would be undermined and they would no longer control a republic they had dominated since the republic began.
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America’s shame
By Raffique Shah
January 11, 2020
As decent Americans try to come to terms with the shameful conduct of their president and his robotic army of white supremacists, dumb nationalists and sundry dissidents of multiple obscure persuasions, billions of people around the world who have suffered at the uneven, prejudiced hands of the world’s greatest power will be inclined to gloat, to celebrate its implosion.
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A More Reflective Society
By Dr Selwyn Cudjoe
January 05, 2021
“So Trinidad was and remains a materialist immigrant society, continually growing and changing, never settling into any pattern, always retaining the atmosphere of the camp… [This explains] its special character, its ebullience and irresponsibility… an indifference to virtue as well as to vice.”
—VS Naipaul, The Middle Passage
In 1960 Eric Williams, premier of Trinidad and Tobago (T&T), suggested to VS Naipaul, one of our premier writers, that he write a non-fiction book about the West Indies that the T&T government would support financially. Williams assured Naipaul he “could write about any aspect of the region and visit whatever territories [he] wished” to accomplish his objectives.
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