Exploring Trinidad Part 2: Culture and Influence with Sunity Maharaj

Exploring Trinidad's Rich History and Cultural Blends

In this episode of The Moreish Podcast, host Hema and guest Sunity Maharaj delve into the historical influences on Trinidad's food and culture. We chat the profound influence of diverse cultures on Trinidadian music, spirituality, and daily life, emphasizing the creativity and unique cultural fusion evident in the society. The conversation touches on economic challenges stemming from a plantation economy left from colonization, the influence of historical events on modern Trinidad, and insights into the Lloyd Best Institute's efforts to promote independent thought and decolonize the education system, drawing inspiration from the Trinidadian steel pan. This episode showcases the depth beyond Trinidad's - and the Caribbean’s -  renowned elements of sun, sea, and sand, revealing a vibrant and complex society.

Part 1: History of Trinidad: Tales of Heritage and Resistance with Sunity Maharaj

Resources and Links:

Lloyd Best Institute of the Caribbean
Lloyd Best Institure of the Caribbean Archive
Pelau: The unofficial, National Dish of Trinidad & Tobago
Life in Trinidad & Tobago
Recipes from Teri's Food Therapy

Transcript

Sunity: You see it in the creativity everywhere in the society. You see it in the language. You see the influences of all these cultures in the music because Calypso was the, the music of the people. It's in the, in the spiritual life and religious life of people. 

Hema: Hi, this is Hema host of The Moreish Podcast. This is part two of our look at the history and culture of Trinidad. If you haven't listened to part one, I encourage you to go back and have a listen. It is packed with information, not only about the history of Trinidad, but sprinkled throughout you'll hear bits of history and information about other Caribbean countries. Then come back in two weeks where we'll be diving into the history of Tobago with Devonne Adana.

With, with all of these different people that made their way, lived, were brought, were kidnapped, were enslaved on the island, how does the influence show up in what the culture is today and the food is today? 

Sunity: One of the things, the, to me the biggest expression of it is the creativity of the people. Trinidadians are not, um, they're not factory produced. They love to be allowed to do their own thing. And this is why, to a great extent, we have to design an economy for creatives, not for public servants. Because a lot of people, even if they have a, a job in the public service, they're doing something else after hours. Something that is their, their passion, their love. They're making a mas, they're acting, they're singing something else, but the economy is not shaped for them. The economy comes from the plantation economy. And so we do have serious economic problems because of that, the kind of economy that was created by the Europeans here. And we moved from sugar, which was a, uh, a monoculture. Then we went to cocoa when sugar failed. So we had our short period of cocoa barrons, and the, the most prominent expression of that are the magnificent seven.

The, the houses around the Queen’s Park Savannah, where people, you're going to see these things like castles. One of them is a, what used to be called the Stollmeyer Castle. It's now been not been acquired by the State, and it has been changed back to its original name of Killarney, I think, because it was copied from Scotland, I think. And so some people made a lot of money from cocoa, and then we got, a blight that went through um, Witches Broom, which is destroyed at the cocoa and pauperized a lot of people. And then after that oil. 

So we've only had always one product to earn foreign exchange and wealth. And today as we engage energy transition, or as you know, the American government opens the floodgates on oil to make the price come down. We are going to feel the effects of that. And not only that, we have, we have brought up as much oil as we can. The oil production of oil is in decline, but we have not, the impact of that history is that we have a very limited economic options because the plantation economy has survived, which is, you put all your eggs in one basket and you live off of the fat of that one thing. And when that collapses, you have nothing else and you have to scramble and you just hope that, you know, people just say, you know, the fact that they survive, somehow, they survive. Some people don't. 

They say, you know, well, Trinidad is, um, God is a Trini to, has to explain the fact that they still, they recover. So God is a Trini. We live with that motto.

The point I was making? You see it in the creativity everywhere in the society. You see it in, the language. You see the influences of all these cultures in the music because Calypso was the, the music of the people. Then we got to Soca. Soca is the birth and the, the person who created is attributed, to having created it Lord Shorty. He has described, very publicly, how he fused the, the rhythm of the Indian music.

He was from South, and therefore, when you're from South and you have a lot of, you know, the, the, the South is a lot of in East Indians. Their music is right next door all the time. He was influenced by that and he deliberately fused the music and he called it Soca, right? Soul of Calypso, he called it Soca.

Now we have the Indians brought their music of the people was Chutney, which is a different kind of Chutney to what you hear now. But very much, the music for when you have a baby, the rituals associated with, you know, a baby is born, with a wedding is gonna happen. Now that has you, that has evolved to Soca Chutney and everybody is into Soca Chutney. 

It's in the, in the spiritual life and religious life of people. You can go to a Catholic church, you see a lot of Indians. You go to Waterloo to the Mandir there, you see Africans and so on. People, so it's the cultural fusion in and the food, you know, like the whole of Trinidad will get up again as they did recently with the Jamaican, um, singer Beenie Man.

I think it's Beenie Man who made some disparaging, what they considered a disparaging comment about doubles. The whole of Trinidad, all over the world came up, I mean, attacked the poor man. They had to put a big apology on and say, you know, he loves Trinidad, he loves everything Trinidad, the poor man. I feel sorry for him.

But the national food and the nationalist food doubles, pelau which is a mixture of what the Africans might cook at home, maybe with some European influence. Then you roti, you know, they say, well, roti is Trinidadian and not really Indian. I mean, India has roti, but not the kind that we, and the way we want it. It's a totally different experience. 

So the food is, roast breadfruit and ma and smoked herring and salt fish and all these things. Um, coucou, which is African. And the food of the, what we had called the underclass, the, the enslaved people who did not get the meat.

They, they, they, they had to look after the animals. But when all of that meat went to the master and they got the tail, the feet and so on and so, cowheel soup, because that's what you had, you flavour your soup with that. Pigtail, oxtail and all these things come out of the poverty. But today they are gastronomic delights that we can offer the world. 

So yeah, in the food for sure, the music, the dance. We dance like they say, if you go to a fete and you see somebody entering with a finger up in the air, that's a Trini. That's how we land in a fete. You know, that's a Trini. You know, people do other kind, we put up a finger and they point it to the sky.  

But at the same time, you will hear people talking about race issues. The contestation, because the politics is organized, the two main parties have ethnic bases. But, you know, we have a a, a Calypsonian named David Rudder, he has a line in one of his songs, is, how we vote Is not how we party.

Politicians have mastered the art of organizing people by ethnic tribe. For the, just as an arithmetical formula for votes, and people fall into that because I mean, they, in some cases they would say you, there already is nothing that differentiates one party from the other, and people have, driven wedges over the years.

You know, in our history there was a time when, um, before independence, when Indians from that historical fear that was put instituted by the British policy of divide and rule, they were afraid that independence is going to mean that, the Blacks are gonna take over and we have to be in fear. 

And they wanted to partition Trinidad. One party proposed a partitioning of Trinidad. This is the island, because they were following what was going on in India and Pakistan when India was partitioned to create Pakistan because of Hindu Muslim, an animosity. They tried to transplant that here, fortunately, wasn't taken on. Not even Indians, majority of Indians did not support that either. 

But these are to a great extent, manufactured animosities, because you look at Trinidadians, they just, they don't, they understand, they know each other. They celebrate each other. You know, on Diwali day when Hindus are having their, you should check the roti shops.

Everybody participates in Diwali by making sure they eat roti on that day. You know? And similarly, this is, the Hindus here, I mean, they're fully into the, some people may not eat beef, but many do and they're Hindus. And for Christmas they have their ham and they have their whatever because this is what you do at Christmas.

So there is a mainstream culture. There is a special culture, there's a unique culture of one's own, and to the extent that people can celebrate what is unique to them and celebrate it with everybody else is what makes us, makes Trinidad so special.

Hema: As I've been doing this work and researching and learning more about the different countries in the Caribbean, Trinidad is so unique in all of the things that you're just talking about and we haven't we didn't dive into the food and food is such a big part of, there's so much history that comes with the food, but it's a big part of the culture. Like, listen, when I used to go there to Trinidad every year as a kid, you had to eat at every person's house that you went to. 

Sunity: You have to. You have to. Yeah. Because if you don't, people would feel insulted, especially if they've prepared for you. But all of us have some idea of what do we consider our comfort food? And it's a food of childhood always, you know? And you know, I would just think, hmm, if I could sit down with a plate of rice, dhal and bhaji, I could eat with my hand with a little kuchela on the side. That would just be, you know, just. Yeah, that's home. It's a taste of home, right? And you might have your own, but mine will be that, you know?

Hema: I've said this several times, but pelau is the thing that I could eat every single day.

Sunity: Exactly. And somebody's gonna tell you, no, don't eat pelau every day because rice has so many calories and so on. But it's your food. It's what opens up spaces in you and make you feel so warm inside. This is, you feel satiated after you eat that you feel satisfied, you feel you might feel over fed, but you ask for seconds.

Hema: It is, it is a taste of home. 

There's so much that we've just really hit the surface of the history and there's, I'm gonna leave some links below for people to dive more into the history of specifics if they're interested. But before we wrap up, I do wanna go back to the Lloyd Best Institute because you guys are doing some interesting work. 

Sunity: The, the line that best captures it comes from a seminal piece of work that Lloyd did, which is independent thought and Caribbean freedom. And it captures, a perspective on the Caribbean that we to, to use words from Bob Marley, emancipate yourself from mental slavery. That's what independent thought is. Because the colonization process has been so thorough, so scientific, because it comes through a, a, a value system that has been put in that this is what you aspire to, and it is embedded in the education system that, that the more educated you are is the more colonized you can actually become.

That's why Pan was created by people largely out of school, teenagers really, who lived in Laventille, Morvant, Cedros, and so on and, we may be, may, may, may have been freed from enslavement, indentureship has ended, we became politically independent, but the imagination, it's colonized and you see it in our ability, inability to solve problems that require common sense in the region.

So in, in it is the Institute promotes independent thought. So it is totally nonpartisan. Anybody can come there, I can speak to if people wanna speak to me, doesn't matter what political party you belong to, what gender you are, what income group you have, where you live, none of that matters. It's a space that is, we fiercely protect as independent, and it starts here and that the path to freedom from the legacy of colonialism is through that. When we can see the place as it is not as not with a whole set of assumptions that are really baked into colonialism, that we've, you know, imbibed, but as it is and see each other as they are and understand the, the place and the people enough to figure out how do we develop this place in a direction that works for everybody. So equity, justice, all these values are embedded at the Institute and this is, happening in an environment where power systems are always trying to divide and to give primacy of one thing over the other. 

It can be a hostile environment, hostile in the sense that the mainstream may be moving against the, you may, we may be swimming against the tide sometimes in on independence and not, um, going with whatever, sometimes the majority is going a direction, you say, no, we, we are not going there. You see in the States what's happening, it is a majority that brought that government to office, right? That's what democracy is. You just have to go with that, if that is the one. 

But we understand how you can even manipulate people. You know, people are manipulated. People allow themselves to be manipulated. All of those things are at play. But the Lloyd Best Institute, so what we do, we are a space for independent thought. We have gatherings. We are about to host from the 16th of March to the 22nd something that we call our annual convois.

Convois is a gathering of people, um, goes back to the, when the Africans would have to go underground and strategize. They used to hold a convois, using a French word. Our focus this year is on transformation of the education system. And we take, as our point of departure, a proposal that Lloyd, the Founder and my husband, Lloyd Best, had, put out for public discussion many years ago called School in Pan, not Pan in School, School in Pan. 

What he did is he observed the genius with which young people, who were out of school, were dropouts, many, in many cases, performed badly in school. First of all, the genius that they brought to inventing Pan and moving it from a dustbin cover to the kind of music you can put on any world stage today, A music of joy or a beauty, a thing of real joy and beauty, and how up to today young people who are failing in the education system, the academic education system, they go to a panyard, they're highly disciplined in the panyard, and they're going through a lot of school because they are not disciplined for indiscipline.

Their discipline in the panyard, their capacity to learn is enormous to create, and it's a space where they come alive, and he is kind of tapped into that to say, how can we take that, understand that and put it into the education system so that our young people are filled with the joy of learning that they have in the panyard.

The discipline that comes from taming all your impulses with the, the need to, and the willingness to respect authority. Because in the panyard, you respect authority. This is the Captain and he's drilling you and you are learning that the ability to connect with elders as these are repositories of knowledge and I will respect that.

Elders are always there in the panyard. So Lloyd developed this conceptual paper about how to change, how to decolonize the education system by drawing on insights from pan, and so we were going to be promoting it shortly and we will invite anybody who wants to attend, and see some of what we will probably put online.

So we tackle those kinds of issues and operate on, I, I think it's radical thought, it's about the kind of revolution that a society needs. It's not armed revolution. It's a revolution of the mind, of the intellect and, how to change and build a development process that is fair, equitable, where everybody has a space around the table and does not enrich a few at the expense of the many.

And gives us all, more than anything else, it gives us all that sense of belonging here, which is what you need to build a nation to, to know what it really means to be Caribbean. I am Caribbean.

Hema: And Lloyd Best, your late husband is no longer with us, but his legacy lives on, his work lives on. 

Sunity: Yes, it. Yeah. He used to say because he was a, he was someone who swam against the tide all the time in his life. He would, he would be very unpopular because what he would he always had the courage to stand by his conviction. He never swam in the tide where every where of pop. He was always suspicious of popular movements because of that really, 'cause he often would say, you have to understand and don't, don't, don't support me and don't say you want to be in this, if you don't understand it, you have to know I want you to understand what it is. And you have to, you have to know it. You can't just like me, 'cause a lot of people wanna follow Lloyd, they love Lloyd, and, but he didn't want followers, he wanted partners, he wanted, and his thing would be, I speak my mind.

All you have to do is speak your mind and not be intimidated and shut down and become subversive. Let's talk and see if we could agree on a few things and we move on from there. And so he swam against a tide, almost like a lone voice, until much later in his life where, I mean, he, people came to really revere him and his, he's constantly referred to here in Trinidad, people always, you know, letters us to the editor, people quoting him, all kinds of things. 

And he used to say that he was just doing his work, and if his work was of any value, it'll continue. And if it was of no value, it'd be forgotten. Well, I think it's, history has proven him right, you know, his work is of value and it's very important work that, what we, we continue not just us, other people are doing, doing, you know, drawing on it just in the, in the name of, in development of, of the region and its people.

Hema: I am gonna leave a link to the Institute in the show notes for people to dig more into some of the work that's happening, coming up and learn a little bit more if they're so inclined. 

Sunity: Yes, Carmel is, um, deep in the archiving of all our publications and so on. So the archives give you a really good, um, a lot of Lloyd's writings are there in the Trinidad & Tobago review. They can search them. He's written on everything. On carnival, on agriculture and the economy, on the people, on Tunapuna all kinds of things.

And other people, other thinkers. For many, many years we published a, a monthly, magazine, as it were newspaper really, which was a place to a thoughtful reflection and review of the Caribbean.

Hema: Auntie Sunity, it has been a pleasure to have you join me today and share, this is just a little bit of the knowledge and a little bit of the history. There's so much more to Trinidad, to Tobago, to the region of the Caribbean. 

Sunity: So much more. We are not just a place of sun, sea and sand,, that's a myth, you know? We have real people here, real thinking people live here. 

Hema: We we say on the podcast, it's not, the Caribbean is not just jerk chicken, Carnival and beaches. Yeah, there's so much more. 

Sunity: Yeah. Yeah. Those are the entry points. But if you get be, if you go, if you dig below, well, that's why people come here and never wanna leave, you know?

Hema: It has been a pleasure to have you on. I appreciate it. I will leave links down in the show notes if anybody's interested in diving a little bit deeper. 

Sunity: Yeah, and this has been my pleasure, Hema, and I wish you all the best with Moreish. I hope people understand what ‘moreish’ means. 

Hema: Why don't you tell people what ‘moreish’ means?

Sunity: It's just when something is so good, you just one more, you know, It's, we just invent that word as, yeah, this we were more of this, whatever this is, we want more. 

Hema: Thanks so much for joining me for this episode of The Moreish Podcast. I'm curious, did you already know what ‘moreish’  means, or is this your first time hearing it?

I've got lots more coming up. Next week we have folktales, and then in two weeks, Devonne Adana will be here to talk about the history of Tobago. See you then.