Lapeyrouse has an air of genteel decay. It is tropical Gothic – largely overgrown, rusty and beautiful. We don’t believe in lush, manicured lawns and tidy graves here. Our cemeteries are things of storybooks and magic, of spirits walking in the night, midnight lovers’ trysts and Lord Kitchener  Calypsos. Even on All Souls’ when families come to clean their graves, when flowers are placed and candles are lit, our cemeteries never lose that mournful air. It’s as though we feel death should not be prettied up and sanitized too much. Death can be violent, majestic, tragic but never pretty.

My grandmother told me that we were all buried there, except for Uncle Carlton whose life was so entertaining his story deserves to be told by itself. Garma, her daughter Lily, her husband Pal and Pal’s son Neville were all buried in the same family plot at Lapeyrouse long before my birth. My grandmother does not remember the plot number and no one was there at the cemetery to assist us so Kibwe and I decided to walk around and look at the graves and see if perchance we could make out a headstone with the names Kellar or Richards on it. We never found them no matter how still we were, how hard we looked or how often we called their names while walking through the streets of the dead.

Lapeyrouse, in it’s own way, reflects the social class distinctions of Trinidad just as well as the neighborhoods we live in, our last names and the cars we drive. Whoever said that we are all equal in death never perused a cemetery. We could not help but notice that the graves at the outskirts, closer to the entrance on Philipps Street were far more ornate and some better maintained. They are together in a discernible cluster but with enough space between to show respect.

We could make out the names of many prominent or old families – Sucre, Nahous, Bermudez, de Vertuiel, de Gannes, Borde to name a few. There was also a prominent Jewish section, presumably the last resting place of those who fled Europe in WWII and settled here (any port in a storm). These families’ ancestors were housed in ornate mausoleums and gated tombs with loving inscriptions on marble tombstones. There were husbands placed next to beloved wives, children placed next to parents, enclosed tombs with chairs and spent candles, once lit by visiting loved ones. There were also stray dogs and homeless men sleeping in tombs whose gates had long rusted, presumably owned by families who may have died out or migrated and left no one to tend the great tombs of their ancestors.

As we walked further in, the headstones became a bit more modest.  I noted a few with inscriptions in Chinese and one that commemorated an ancestor that came from India many years ago.  Names like Williams, Hodge, Evans started to appear. As we walked even further from the entrance, to the side nearest to the ice factory on Ariapita Avenue, per my grandmother’s instructions as this was all she could remember by way of direction, the graves got much less ornate.

Many were overgrown and had no headstones. Most that did had only numbers. The plots were smaller and often overgrown with weeds. One or two were planted with the purple running plant common in Trinidad gardens that my grandmother called “The Wandering Jew” that perhaps once confined to one grave, now spread over several. There was the occasional white rum bottle that hopefully signified some tribute to the dead, an errant flower and some headstones with the words Our Beloved or Our Mother or Husband, Father, Child painted by hand on modest concrete grave markers. In this part of the cemetery, life is jumbled and people rest almost one on top of the other. They are strangers hugging whispering strangers, their bones turning to dust together. They don’t stand on ceremony here.

I closed my eyes and tried to think of Neville, Marjory, Fanny, Yolande, Irwin, Selwyn, and Baby – all Garma’s grandchildren – coming here in their best clothes to visit their mother Lily. They would have gathered again with Ms. Mary, Old Daddy and others when Garma died, and again for Pal and Neville. The last time anyone mourned there was in the 1960’s when Neville passed over. Yet here we were in 2012, Garma’s great, great-granddaughter and the man she has chosen, come to seek them. I wondered whether the other unnamed graves had people who came to visit them despite the fact that their final resting places may not have been the fanciest. I wondered whether they were remembered like how we remembered Garma, with stories and lessons in the absence of fancy tombs, mementos, photographs or paintings. I also could not help but wonder how soon the Kellars, Grandersons, Lloyds, Smarts, Grells would be gathered here again. Fifty odd years is a long time and graves get lonely.

The thought makes me write a little faster.

It was only when I was older, having heard so much about her for many years that it occurred to me that she must have had a name. “What was her name though, her real name?” I asked my mother. “Name? I can’t remember! That was all they ever called her. She was jus Garma”.

Names are a funny thing. We come into the world and are given a name – most often with no attention to personality, divine purpose, lineage or ancestry. A name is chosen for a child and she carries that name for all her life. However, Garma’s given name was largely abandoned in favour of the loving epithet that defined her role as mother and matriarch.

Her given name, I discovered later, was Prudence Richards. At some point during the late 1800′s she left the island of Bequia and migrated to Trinidad in search of a better life. In this she was not unique. The end of apprenticeship signaled a wave of inter-island migration and many people moved around in search of job opportunities, in search of family members and friends and the almost elusive hope of purchasing land.

My family remembers Garma as a very tall, physically strong black woman who worked in the oil fields in South Trinidad and cooked for the men that worked there to make extra money.  She was also a domestic worker in Belmont. Garma valued her economic independence; she worked, she prayed and most importantly she saved. She always said that she didn’t want any man to ‘rule her’ and tell her how to spend her own money. She owned a house on Garnet Lane in Belmont and built smaller properties to the back of the house in the barrack yard style.  It was Garma’s house my grandmother’s family came to live in when their father fell on hard times, and it was Garma that paid the lessons fee when Yolande, my grandmother was chosen to write exhibition.

Garma was primarily a Shouter Baptist. I say ‘primarily because even in this she went her own way. She also had a picture of Selassie I in her house and spoke of Africa and the Orishas; She seemed to practice her own syncretic brand of Shouter Baptist faith. When my  grandmother, Yolande,  was a little girl Garma would take her to preach on street corners with her Bible and bell as she said that Yolande could ‘See’.  In whatever form Baptist people were not well-respected by middle-class society and as Yolande grew older she grew ashamed of the woman who came to pay her school fees with her head wrap and her flowing garments. The child who travelled with her to ‘meetings’ down South on a donkey cart, who gleefully accompanied Garma to preach on street corners began to feel the effects of the class anxiety that permeated the urban Port of Spain middle class. In her 84^th year of life, Yolande still recalls this time with regret.

Garma seemed to have had only two companions: Ms. Mary and Old Daddy. Ms. Mary made the move from Barbados to Trinidad in search of work and better times and seems to have met Garma in their early years here. The bond that they created during those trying times was one that endured throughout Garma’s life and after her death. Ms. Mary remained with the family, living in one of Garma’s houses, up until the time of my mother and would lament, “Look how long Garma gone and left me and I still here”. Mary lived well into her nineties, a strong reminder of that period of Trinidad’s history.

Old Daddy was the other and he was said to have fathered one of Garma’s daughters – Lily or Reska although no one remembers which one. This might have reflected an intensely matrifocal society or just indicated how Garma chose to live her life. Like Garma, Old Daddy’s given name was abandoned and no one called him anything else. My grandmother says he was tall and handsome with light skin and a straight nose. She is clear to mention this as if it is proof of his handsomeness.  He fought for England in the Second Boer War in South Africa. After the war he became indigent and Garma agreed to take him in to live with her. My grandmother vaguely remembers him sitting all day by Conqueror’s shop on Erthig Road in Belmont and sending for one of the passing children to call Garma to come and get him. The child would scamper back gleefully to give Old Daddy her daily answer: “Same way you find yourself there, same way you could reach back” and that was that. They seemed to enjoy this little daily ritual and Old Daddy would find his way back to Garnet Lane on his own. Whether he was resentful or not, he also stayed with the family long after Garma’s death.

Garma passed over when Yolande was 12 years old and was outlived by her friends Mary and by Old Daddy. When I think of her, the woman I never met, I think of her faith, her independence and her will. I think of a Caribbean that was in the throes of change and a Trinidad that I would not recognize if I could walk its streets with her. I wish we had a photograph of her or a drawing but we don’t. I wish I had some possession of hers, some token but I don’t. I just have dreamed of echoes of what I’m told she looked like and how she talked and how she smelled and laughed, although I have heard no stories of her laughter. The pictures of Trinidad in history books have become her likeness for me. She is post-emancipation Trinidad – a melting pot, strong, resourceful, trying to set its own terms. I hope there is some of her in me.

*This story was first published on http://rootswomen.com/ayanna and has been developed and adapted here

I have been thinking about stories and memories as I move into 2012. So many New Year’s resolutions are about looking forward into the future and breaking the patterns and habits of the past. We seem to have an irrational fear of the past. Our history as Caribbean people has told us all that lies in our past is barbarism – African slaves, European slave-owners, Indian indentured labourers, Chinese bondsmen, Syrian traders and near forgotten Amerindians. The past is death; the past is shame.

I have always known, however, that for me my future lies in my past and that there is much wisdom to be gained in the stories of the women in my line. One of my favourites by Jamaican poet Lorna Goodison is called I am Becoming My Mother:

“Yellow/brown woman

fingers smelling always of onions

My mother raises rare blooms

and waters them with tea

her birth waters sang like rivers

my mother is now me

My mother had a linen dress

the colour of the sky

and stored lace and damask

tablecloths

to pull shame out of her eye.

I am becoming my mother

brown/yellow woman

fingers smelling always of onions”

Adrienne Rich, American feminist poet and essayist writes in Of Woman Born:

“It is hard to write about my own mother.

Whatever I do write, it is my story I am telling,

my version of the past”

Both women, from different cultural and geographical backgrounds echo the same sentiment: our lives are joined with our mothers’ in a cycle of constant becoming and re-becoming.

I know that mother’s story is my own, as my grandmother’s story is hers, as her mother’s was hers. We are an unbreakable, inviolate line of memory. It is more than a line and more like a web, for each story breaks and branches and merges with the threads of the others, until our collective narrative becomes like the rich, brown earthy underside of history.

I have realized that in the end, we all become our mothers, however, I never realized just how important that was. For it is in our symbolic ‘becoming’ of our female ancestors, that we pass on their legacies and become testimonies to their lives and experiences. The stories that are passed down through the generations help to form a chain of history, our history as women. Although we all have had different experiences, the telling and the sharing of these stories makes us all a part of something greater than our individual experiences.

I have been listening to stories about the women and a few men in my family ever since I was a little girl. The telling of stories has always been important to us as a means of entertainment as well as keeping traditions and our history alive. As I grow older, I become their collective voice; a combination of the memories they passed down and the snippets of conversations I picked up over the years. For the last few years however I began systematically collecting these stories and writing them down to document our history.

My next few blog posts will be from a series I am working on called Stories My Mothers Told Me. I will be sharing a few stories of four generations of women in my family- from my great-great grandmother Prudence, her daughter Lily, my grandmother Yolande, and my mother Gale. I hope you will enjoy their stories and mine.

*This series is a reworking and elaboration of an article previously published by on Rootswomen.com

I really enjoyed participating in this discussion hosted by Tanya Marie Williams and reading the views of other creatives from and working in the Caribbean region.

While my essay and Tanya’s discussion focus on the Caribbean I can’t help but think about how this discussion applies to all creatives. How far is your aesthetic or sensibility affected by your country or region? Where do your influences come from? Is there an American aesthetic, European or African Aesthetic or are well all caught in a wider ebb and flow of experiences and create from that estuary of influences? I’d love to hear what you think

I have been reading with interest artist Tanya Williams’ ongoing discourse at on Caribbean aesthetic at her blog designerisland.blogspot.com. She asks the question: Is there such a thing as a Caribbean aesthetic? If so how can we define it? Photographer Alex Smailes, designers Richard Rawlins and Katinka Bukh all weighed in and it seems the consensus so far is: It depends on where you are – where in time, in space and what direction you look at it from.  Tanya’s question is all about identity, really. Who are we, how do we see ourselves and as a result what visual culture do we produce?

All creatives in their own way ask the same question. The Caribbean is a complicated place. Centuries of imperial representation and the mobility of Caribbean bodies have made the spatial, temporal and imaginative limits of the Caribbean difficult to determine.  The Diaspora is large, varied and shifting. It is further complicated by the creation of an idealized Caribbean space through media, the tourist economy and the various incarnations of West Indian literature. From imperial writers seeking to describe this newly ‘conquered’ space, early West Indian born writers, anxious to prove their Englishness and contemporary indigenous West Indian and Diaspora writers, seeking to reclaim and glorify the space and its peoples, all have formed a running commentary on the complex representations of the Caribbean space.

So where is Here? While the Caribbean fed the wealth of Europe and later the U.S, it remained in an ‘Other’ space, instrumental in constructing notions of what was ‘Western’ and thus ‘Civilized’. Defying geography it is seen external to The West, a foreign landscape whose savagery was the point of reference that confirmed European civility. Just as Europe situated itself as civilized in a comparable relationship to Africa and Asia, the Caribbean was ‘Oriented’ not because of its location but because of where it fit in the schemata of power relations with Europe. Columbus’ colossal navigational error, sailing west to reach east, continued to manifest itself in an ambiguous relationship with the Caribbean. We are the West Indies because we are in the West but called after a place in the East. We are in the Western Hemisphere, populated largely by people from the Eastern and Southern Hemispheres. We are English, French, Dutch and Spanish but also Yoruba, Urdu, Patois, Kweyol and Papiamento.

This ambiguous orientation has allowed for an interesting relationship between “The West” and the West Indies that it consumes. Even more interesting because we are consuming “The West” right back, consuming culture, influences, aesthetics, products, brands etc. The use of the word ‘consume’ in this context is entirely appropriate. George Lamming once drew attention to a particular connotation of the word ‘consume’; not simply ‘to partake of’, or ‘to eat’, but ‘to destroy’, or ‘to waste’. To Lamming it is this kind of consumption that is characteristic of the swelling tide of capitalist driven globalization. The mantra of the capitalist world is “ I don’t exist if I don’t consume” It is this type of consumption that feeds the tourist/expat/MNC gaze built on the historical framework of land and labour.

So where are we? In a liminal space between East and West? Between history and becoming? Between consumer and consumed?

I’ve been re-reading Olive Senior, whom I have not read since my undergrad days, not for answers but because she too seems to be perplexed, about the conquerors, the visitors, the land and the bodies. Her “Gardening in the Tropics” explores the complicated binaries of the Caribbean landscape/ body – cultivated gardens vs. tropical wilderness, bloody, labor-intensive history vs. paradisiacal indolence, exotic black bodies vs. virgin unconquered territory. Three poems, Meditation on Yellow, The Knot Garden and Tropic Love explore three areas of Caribbean life that dramatize the inherent conflict in these binaries.

Senior’s poem Meditation on Yellow traces the trajectory of exploitation and violence from the landing of Columbus and the decimation of the indigenous Indians to the power relations inherent in the tourist industry.  The use of a single voice that travels in time and space to be simultaneously an indigenous Indian, an African slave and a contemporary tourist sector service worker, creates the sense of a collective oppression regardless of ethnicity or time period. The voice laments,

“In exchange for the string of islands

and two continents

you gave us a string of beads

and some hawk’s bells”

and confesses in retrospect,

“ had I known I would have

brewed you up some fever grass

and arsenic”

Senior conjures up the sense of the unequal exchange between alien cultures and the arrogance of the European conqueror. The image of gold through the consistent use of yellow imagery in the poem sets up the relationship between violence, exploitation and material possession:

“ but it was gold

on your mind

gold the light

in your eyes”

In a contemporary setting, gold also conjures up the marketed image of golden sunshine, golden-sandy beaches, the promise of golden suntans etc. The Caribbean landscape, once the site of material hopes for gold mines, is now consumed for another type of gold, the golden dream space of sun, sea, sex and sand.

The nature of trade and exchange remains complicated by our history as is so clearly manifested in the operation of the tourist industry. While tourism operates all over the world, Caribbean or tropical tourism depends on the projection of an iconic paradisical landscape for consumption by a vacationing public. The dream space must be cultivated, projected, packaged, marketed and sold wholesale and the maintenance of this illusion, regardless of the social realities that exist, depends on a carefully regulated and cultivated system. How does this impact on our visual culture and the way we brand and package ourselves for global consumers when the images of the Caribbean are often guided by tourism brochures? How do we own these images and yet not be defined by them?

Just as the European gaze had to construct the Caribbean as barbarous to fit into its schemata of civilized and uncivilized, western and non-western, the reality of the Caribbean space must be eviscerated from the tourist gaze. The wilderness had to be ordered, the natives had to be tamed and the freedom had to be regulated. Senior’s poem, “The Knot Garden” deals with this paradox with characteristic wit, creating rebellion out of the fertility and freedom of the landscape. ‘Gardening’ becomes a double-edged motif for the simultaneous ordering of the landscape by the colonial gaze and the ‘disordering’ of it by the forces of history and the agency of human endeavour:

“Gardening in the Tropics

you’ll find things that don’t

belong together often intertwined”

This is indeed the constant challenge of the imperial representation, to separate the reality from the fantasy, the violence of the history from the desire for indolent relaxation, the desire for rustic paradise with the metropolitan and global sensibilities of the people. Despite all attempts at separation, the agency of the landscape rebels,

“ … Instead of neat trench

and barricade separating species,

hagglers and drug barons moving

into the more salubrious climes

while daughters of gentry are

crossing lines to sleep with

ghetto boys with gold teeth…”

It is these binaries that we keep bouncing back and forth between. We are metropolitan and developed; we are rustic and untouched. We are a serious place of business and conferences; we are a party people with an inordinate number of holidays. We are both and we are all. We defy neat construction and definition.

Possibly one of the most controversial and talked about areas of the tourist industry has been the eroticized, racialized representation of Caribbean sexuality. It was not only commodities, material objects and fantasies of the Caribbean that were consumed, but also Caribbean bodies. Frantz Fanon, in his seminal work, The Wretched of the Earth describes the tourist industry as the brothel of Europe, orchestrated and managed by the Caribbean bourgeoisie to serve the desires of their colonial masters.  As a result of relations of power, domination and material advancement on the plantation, sexual attitudes and patterns of power were built on racialized stereotypes of the promiscuous, accessible black female, the indefatigable, potent, virile black male and the highly desirable and sensuous ‘mulatto/ mulatta’.

Contemporary scenarios often involve white women just as often as white men in interracial relationship with ‘natives’. Deborah Pruitt asserts that many of these transactional sexual relationships, far from being simplistic cases of ‘white on black’ exploitation, are often voluntary strategies to achieve material advantages:

“ It is a strategy that allows Caribbean women and men a form of freedom from oppression and exploitative national and global economic relationships that keep them in poorly paid work or poverty, and position them to gain access to a life that takes them out of miserable social conditions and to obtain the power and freedom symbolized by the ‘developed’ world”

The image of the young black male and the wealthy ‘passing through’ white female, or even the female that decides to remain in her island paradise as an escape from her metropolitan reality, is now as familiar a Caribbean motif as a hammock tied to a palm tree.

Senior explores this materialism that can arise out of disadvantaged circumstances by creating an uncharacteristically pragmatic ‘love poem’. In “Tropic Love”, the female laments,

“ You don’t bring me flowers anymore

-or anything for the children.

My heart has turned to stone

But I cannot put that in the pot”

The reality of daily life is in stark contradiction to the sexualized, romantic idealism of the Caribbean dreamscape.  While tourists are encouraged to come to the Caribbean for their weddings, their honeymoons and their romantic trysts, it would seem that romantic love, like room service and private beaches, could only be accessed by the privileged. The Caribbean woman in the poem must tell her lover,

“ I’m a woman with heavy responsibilities…

with your sweet words, lover, tempt me

not, if you’ve come empty handed”

The issues of domination, force, pleasure/treasure seeking and ordering of the landscape are continuities of the Caribbean experience. From European contact to plantation slavery to the contemporary tourist economy, consumption of the Caribbean body/space continues to have implications for locating, viewing and projecting the Caribbean. Positioned at the nexus of a globalized world economy, it is upon the representation and construction of the image of the ‘Indies’ that western concepts of modernity rest. Despite this history, however, the landscape and the history of the Caribbean refuse to accept the binaries of its construction and like the unruly plants in its ‘Gardens’, rebel.

Works Read

Fanon, Frantz, The Wretched of the Earth, Harmondsworth : Penguin, 1961

Kempadoo, Kamala (ed), Sun, Sex and Gold: Tourism and Sex Work in the Caribbean, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Inc., Maryland, U.S, 1999

Lamming, George, “Lamming on Best”, Presented at the 25th Anniversary Conference on West Indian Literature, 2006

Morgan, Paula, “Meet Me in the Islands: Sun, Sand and Transactional Sex in Selected Caribbean Writing’, Presented at the 25th Anniversary Conference on West Indian Literature, 2006

Senior, Olive, Gardening in the Tropics, Toronto : McClelland & Stewart, 1994

Sheller, Mimi, Consuming the Caribbean: From Arawaks to Zombies, Routledge, London, 2003

Photography by Kibwe Brathwaite

I won’t be melodramatic and say its like giving up your children. It’s not. But you do want to give them to people who would appreciate them and keep those that have a special meaning to you. You also can’t help but think of books you would want your children to read someday, the stories you would want to share with them.

Thankfully e-readers make it easier to own as many books as you want without having to turn your house into a book labyrinth. I love the idea of their portability, that they take up virtually no space and now that they are more multipurpose (IPad, Kindle Fire, Nook Colour) I can combine a tablet and a library in one. The publishing industry already seems to be feeling the impact with e-books outselling printed books on Amazon.com. Publishers are acutely aware that they need to figure out how to not just sell and market books but how to make reading material interactive, how to deal with paid and unpaid content online, how to deal with the trend toward collaborative creation and self publishing – in short to figure out how people are actually interacting with and creating information in the digital era.

This reality has made many people – including me – signal the end of the book era. But now I’m not so sure and it seems others are starting to be reluctant to sing the book’s swan song also. Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs, released on October 24^th, sold over 379,000 physical copies its first week in the United States alone. That’s a lot of books. It is even more surprising that fans of the inventor of the iPad would buy his biography in print, in hardcover no less, rather than in e-format. It seems to go against the developing trend

This development made me think: Are there reasons why someone would buy a book in printed form or specifically in hardcover even though they may have an e-reader? Is it just about markets and the fact that e-books are still not as ubiquitous as printed ones and still getting the bugs out, or does it say something more about taste and how customers decide value?

Many of the books I kept, for instance, were not paperback fiction or beach novels. I kept books with beautiful cover artwork that I liked, books by Caribbean authors, academic texts and books that I felt changed my life in some way. I kept blank writing books that I had picked up over the years, bought simply because I liked them.

While I have stopped buying magazines in general, my Vogue Italia Black Issue is still in plastic and I would not part with dog-eared copies of anything by Isabel Allende. We treasure our three issues of ARC magazine, a beautiful art journal out of the Caribbean, run by artists Holly Bynoe and Nadia Huggins, that is just so well produced with such a high standard of design and writing that you know they would be collectors items. There is just something about print that conjures up sentiment, nostalgia and indicates value. It is the same reason music lovers will buy albums by their favourite artists, or that have beautiful artwork or extras inside instead of downloading the iTunes versions. You want to have special things in print, things that can be held, shown off and become topics of conversation over drinks in your home. You want to keep them simply because you find them beautiful. Could this be the place that print will occupy in the rapidly changing publishing market?

Hamburg-based design studio Paperlux got it too. They created a beautiful magazine cover that encompassed all the intricacy, design and care that would make someone want to buy it and keep it as a piece of art. The cover is die-cut in an intricate pattern in myriad colours and bends and moves to catch the light. There is no reason to create a magazine like this according to the rules of mass market consumption, but as a collector’s item, as a piece of art, as just a really cool bit of design, work like this will always have place. Check out the video of the process here.

This may be something that artists, designers, photographers etc can keep in mind when creating portfolios and designing marketing strategies. Although the trend is certainly toward creating online portfolios and websites, there is something beautiful about the tactile experience that says to a client that you pay attention to detail and you understand quality. Trinidadian artist Alicia Milne produced and gifted people in the creative community with a sketchbook of her work called Neither Here nor There, Vol 1. It was a brilliant idea. The excitement of seeing a package just for you on your desk, the idea of passing it on to something else to look at was tangible. With art, you just cannot replace that experience with a digital portfolio alone. Another local artist Rodell Warner also did something similar with his Mordern Range publication. Kudos to them for understanding this and doing something out of the ordinary.

I don’t think print is necessarily dead. It’s just a matter of figuring out what customers’ value and tapping into it. There is always room for something special regardless of how the market changes.

Influence - Photographed by Kibwe Brathwaite

I have been thinking about influencers. It’s a term that we’ve heard a lot recently in marketing, PR and Branding. There was a movie released earlier this year called The Influencers featuring creative trendsetters in the US. Branding mogul Steve Stoute has also published a book called The Tanning of America that looks at how Hip Hop culture and its most recognizable icons are influencing brands, tastes and culture in America.

But what really is an Influencer? I thought this was a good definition:

“Influencers are the few that lead the many. Alternatively known as early adopters, thought purveyors or trendsetters, they are the creators of the styles and movements that others adopt. Their actions have been harnessed to create affinity between key audiences and brands and products and services. Their culture exists outside the purview of most traditional marketing channels, therefore accessing them in any substantive way has proven almost impossible. They create and shape a unique worldview within their chosen disciplines and in turn speak to their individual networks at a much deeper and richer level. They move forward linearly forging new archetypes within technology, music, art, fashion, film, philanthropy and communication. (via Influencer 10)”

In light of the buzz I could not help but wonder: Who are our influencers in the Caribbean? Does it even work the same way?  Have we really examined our culture and values to see what and who resonates with the changing consumer?

Marketers in Trinidad seem to have an awareness that some people hold a level of influence over the consumer but this awareness seems to be limited to hiring spokespersons and attractive/popular local celebrities to appear in print and television advertising with the hope of leveraging their following to bring attention to the brand. It is a hit or miss situation and we don’t always get it right when choosing spokespersons. Often there is no real fit with the brand. For years Digicel and Bmobile played “catch the celebrity” as their principal marketing strategy, pushing near identical products with little real resonance between the celebrity chosen and their product. With Bunji and Machel on one side and Destra and Kes on the other what’s the difference really? How does that differentiate one brand from the other? Digicel has now moved ahead of Bmobile by creating characters and narratives that inject a freshness and sense of fun to their brand but this is relatively recent. Every Carnival we still hear countless jingles set to the tune of popular Soca songs with a few words changed and the product name clumsily dumped in the middle. No thought, no resonance and no sophistication.

Anya’s recent Fan Favourite win in the Project Runway competition revealed something very interesting happening in the Caribbean digital landscape that may be going unnoticed by local and regional brands. For those who were not following the competition, Project Runway’s Fan Favourite winner was determined by the number of times the contestant was voted for or spoken about on Twitter. In order for a vote to be counted, the tweet had to contain each competitors’ unique hashtag. In the last few days before the winner was announced, Anya’s competitor surged ahead and his win seemed certain.

With only two days remaining, a few Trinidadians with a significant online presence began lobbying their networks to vote for Anya. They even got non-users to join to Twitter and those who were not compulsive tweeters to use Hootsuite in order to vote regularly. While Trinidadians had been in support of our contestant from the beginning, the voting momentum just was not there outside of the hardcore tweeters and fans of the show. With alarming speed, people started to heed the call from traditional avenues such as Machel, Bunji, Fay Ann and KestheBand. These Soca stars have been long considered by brands to be clear local influencers but people in large numbers also responded to Carnival bandleaders, website owners, party promoters, bloggers, young creatives, entrepreneurs and ordinary folks with extraordinary personalities and large Twitter followings. In two days, a combination of the curfew, the Divali public holiday and the lobbying of these people made the difference and placed Anya in winners row. While factors such as popularity of the show and of Anya herself had a lot to do with encouraging people to vote, the ability of a few people to galvanize such support in a short space of time says something. Who were these people? What is the size of their network? How did they get people to respond? Did people respond because of their influence or did their reach simply give them the ability to spread the word? Do brands need to start looking further afield than the traditional methods of influencing customer and gaining recognition? Are these our new influencers?

Advertisers need to pay attention to this. Trinidad may be a bit further behind but in the US the golden 16-34 demographic is watching less and less TV and interacting with brands online. Soon we’ll be buying fewer local print newspapers. The consumer is already learning to be more discerning and to trust traditional modes of advertising less. Trotting out Soca stars and using the same strategies is soon enough not going to work. People want to communicate and share, not to be marketed to and we have to recognize and tap into a changing cultural landscape and consumer sensibility in order to create relevance and resonance.

I’d love your comments. Who do you think are the new influencers? Were you influenced by someone else to vote for Anya in the Fan Favourite competition? To whom do you look for changing trends, creative ideas and interesting perspectives on issues? Do you think advertisers are not being sophisticated enough in tapping into our changing cultural landscape?

Skyping to the Trinidad Project Runway Finale Viewing Party from the NYC Project Runway Finale Viewing Party

The Caribbean Twitter nation sat glued to television sets on Thursday 27th October 2011, as local fashion designer Anya Ayoung Chee became the winner of American fashion design show – Project Runway.

We watched for weeks as she struggled, rallied, was derided by some competitors, viewed with suspicion by bloggers on the Internet and praised by others. We watched as she just dazzled those judges and the fashion world at New York Fashion Week.

She even dazzled us! Who knew we could look so good? Who knew that our style, our freedom, the sexiness of just being so island could look so good on a world stage? Who knew that one of our own could just look so chic and sophisticated and confident? We always say that we are excellent and can compete on the world stage but I wonder sometimes whether we really believe it, whether we really believed she would win. We are accustomed to honourable mention, to second place, to the bronze medal and we celebrate that because we know when you are from a small place you are just glad to be there, to represent, to wave your flag and say, “Look we! We here too!” But this time, we won!

What does this mean for every artist, writer, designer, inventor, academic and scientist from these islands that so big and so small at the same time? What does it mean that this ‘Chinee girl’ from Maraval, daughter of a doctor, educated in the U.S with all the advantages could go out on a world stage and speak in our accent? With everything she did she declared: This is who I am. I am island. I am Trini and I am going to make you love what I can do.

Oscar Wilde said “Be yourself, everyone else is taken” and that so applies here. In the last legs of the competition, we saw Anya go through a little identity struggle. She was told her designs were ‘one note’, that she needed to get back that urban edge that she had started to develop and fuse it with her island style. I even believed it. Then she centered herself and went with heart. She forgot competition, forget everything but self and what she presented was pure gold, pure Caribbean.

We have to learn who we are and love that, show that, present that to the world. We have to push! This small place has so much to show the world and so much to give. In these bleak times we have to show up and show out. Now we have one more hero to add to our list of heroes.

Anya we salute you!

View her beautiful collection here

Haruki Murakami is now on my list of authors whose work I need to read.

While I fall in love with well-turned phrases, beautiful metaphors and engaging stories, I also fall in love with authors. I can’t separate the creator from the creation. I always want to know their own personal stories: How did they start writing? Where does their inspiration come from? What books do they like to read?

I came across an old NYTimes essay by Murakami that made me not only interested in him but also inspired. He talks about not thinking he could be a writer until he was 29 years old and then suddenly feeling the urge to write a novel. When you love to read and love writing, people always assume that you have the confidence and the ability to really take it somewhere. I have not put pen to paper in a serious way for many years and the more unhappy I became the more I knew I had to begin again. Not because I knew I was going to be the greatest writer in the world but because it is a part of who I am that I had been neglecting. I am happier today.

Murakami also cites Jazz and his experiences learning music and playing in a  band as having the most profound effect on his writing. One of my favourite quotes from the article referenced Thelonious Monk:

“One of my all-time favorite jazz pianists is Thelonious Monk. Once, when someone asked him how he managed to get a certain special sound out of the piano, Monk pointed to the keyboard and said: “It can’t be any new note. When you look at the keyboard, all the notes are there already. But if you mean a note enough, it will sound different. You got to pick the notes you really mean!”

I loved this so much! We have to ask ourselves: What do we really mean? What is the thing we most want to communicate to the world? What is at the core, the essence of ourselves? When we create from that space the words take on new meaning not because the words are new but because they are true.

Check out the rest of the article here

I saw a picture years ago that always remained in my head. It featured a bleak, urban landscape complete with grey, brick walls, trash-littered streets and zombie-like pedestrians. Streaked through the landscape however was a brightly coloured rainbow arched from the sky, making a beeline for the head of one of the pedestrians – a middle aged man in a suit carrying a briefcase. The force of the rainbow that hit him in the head made him stumble forward, his face startled, his briefcase forgotten.

Inspiration, I always thought, looked like this.  You live your ordinary life, doing what you do every day then somehow a rainbow bursts from the sky, hits you in your head and you become inspired to create! You create wonderful things! The colour from the rainbow somehow seeps through your skin and into your bloodstream, colouring your insides and then oozes through the pen onto paper like magic.

It does not work like that. Inspiration is work. It requires practice and refinement of your craft. It requires being curious and inventive enough to see other possibilities. It requires seeing differently, living differently, thinking differently. It could be as simple as taking a different route home or going to a part of the country that you would not normally see thus changing your view of home.

That’s why we started South Sundays.  Every creative person needs inspiration so every Sunday my boyfriend and I, along with whoever else can fit in the car, take a mini road trip to south Trinidad to drive around and poke around at events or sites that we had never seen before.

This last weekend Kibwe, Tanya, Rachael and I ended up at the Waterloo Hindu Temple on the sea. A man called Siew Dass who came to Trinidad under the Indian Indentureship scheme built this temple. In 1947 he attempted to build it on lands owned by Caroni (1975) Ltd. In 1952 he was ordered to demolish it but refused and was jailed for 14 days. After his release he decided to rebuild the temple in the sea, on ‘land’ that belonged to no one but itself. It took him 5 years going back and forth by bicycle to dump earth and material into the sea to build a road and eventually land upon which to build the temple. The temple has been refurbished since but still stands as testament to the man that built it.

Maybe that is why it is so peaceful there and has such power. It feels like a complicated place – the result of inspired work, religious prejudice, and strong faith. The path to the temple is lined with flowers and though the temple was shut, the murti could be seen, stoic as one could imagine them standing for decades. Along the shoreline we could see broken and abandoned murtis, discarded either through ritual or testament to the passage of time.

As the sun set on the day it became clear to me that we were in the presence of inspired work in the true sense. Siew Dass may have got a rainbow in the head that inspired him to initially build the original temple at Waterloo but it was sheer grit, determination and work that make him ride back and forth every day carrying buckets of earth to build it again, to know that he could create something and make it stand, make it endure and make it beautiful.

As creatives, we need a little bit of both, the rainbow and the grit. Many of us live day to day and sometimes don’t have the time to stop and to open our eyes and see what’s around us. I’m thinking that inspiration won’t ever come that way. We have to be open to the inspiration, to have the lens to see the way to solve the problems and the determination to create the enduring magic.