Our Man in Trinidad: Blank Man 2020 July 2020
“I carry myself in a way that black boys and black girls can be proud of what I am and what I represent. My children are proud of me, I’m proud of the life I’ve lead. I’ve never run away from the colour of my skin.“
Keith Rowley, People’s National Movement “This, again, is desperation on the hands of the other side, to insert more race into everything. I am not a racist. I’m a citizen of this country, whether it is red, black and white. All the colours of the rainbow.“
Kamla Persad-Bissessar, United National Congress
When considering the complex multicultural soup that is Trinidad, I am reminded of my friend Rona’s observation: “Yuh cyar stress about which leaf be eddo or taro in de Callaloo—dee richness is in de brot’.“
The campaign is heating up in steamy TT. Opposition UNC leader Kamla Persad-Bissessar currently stands accused of racism by Prime Minister Keith Rowley after she referred to him the other day as “the black man on the other side.“
Today she denies it. “No. I said blank! I said blank. I said blanking. I said blank.“ She said blank, she says, three times. However, TT Guardian confirms hearing “black“ on the audio, as if it would even make sense to call one’s political opponent a “blank (or blanking) man.“
PM Rowley responds indignantly, through his mask: “No. And she didn’t call me an Oreo either. What she said was “Ohio”, or “Oh Hello”!”
These two party leaders have a history of fomenting balkanization, and it is not limited to the Afro-Indo split. According to Rowley, “There are very many occasions when you in the media would have seen her accusing me of being in the pockets of the one per cent. That was an attack on the Syrian community and then trying to divide us along racial and ethnic lines. Mrs Kamla Persad-Bissessar has been leading a quiet, racial campaign for a very long time.“
In Colonial Trinidad, solidarity was once briefly forged through the industrial labor movement. In the 1930’s, a new class-consciousness swept through the British West Indies, inspired by Marcus Garvey, as well as the Bolshevik vogue, and this served for a time to bring two key groups into alliance: Indo-Trini sugarcane and Afro-Trini oilfield. Such unity paved the way to eventual national independence. Sugar and oil did indeed mix, defying the nature of polarity, and even the prophesy of Dr. Eric Williams, at least for a while.
In the 1970’s, the Black Power movement upset the delicate merger. Americans like Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael fueled a new brand of identity politics, distinguished not by class but color and ethnicity. One angry young man from Port of Spain, named Michael Abdul Malik, moved to London to become radicalized. He returned home and rebranded himself Michael X, achieving international notoriety as a revolutionary separatist. He established a commune in the hills above the city, where he murdered at least one comrade with a machete. “Chop with a cutlass,“ charged the prosecution. Malik was convicted and hung by the neck in 1975, but not before John Lennon sold his own hair to pay for the man’s legal defense. Afro-Trini’s rioted in the streets of Saint James.
Today it is apparently all about Blank Power. The Afro candidate Keith Rowley holds a thin demographic lead over the East Indian. This has been the way of Trinidad and Tobago electoral politics since Independence. PNM, in fact, has only ever lost once, in 2010, when Cambridge Analytica successfully suppressed Afro-Trini voting, and UNC’s Kamla Persad-Bissessar made history.
Class-consciousness still festers, and the dirty secret is that Indo-Trini orthodoxy sees the other side as lacking class altogether, whereby Carnival is a form of debasement and the tradition of liming is nothing but a waste of time. Afro-Trini dogma, meanwhile, views a history in which the East Indian played the white man’s game for too long, tending his plantations, serving his bureaucracies, and ultimately winning small pieces of land, all at the expense of liberty.
The division belies a shared post-colonial legacy, in which 90 percent of the nation’s citizens trace their ancestry to slavery and indentureship. In this respect, a European or American would make for the ideal opponent in the August 10 election, but they are not running. Regardless of the outcome of the 2020 PNM-UNC showdown, Syrian-Trini’s will gladly bankroll the inauguration. As “the top one percent,“ they can afford it, and, without a goat in this race, they are happy just to be on the winning side.