Douens had stolen the baby and hidden her in the village dirt oven. This was the treasured oven that baked many treats for the villagers, like their daily bread, special cakes, and Christmas ham. It was now part of the scheme of the impish douens to bake the baby.
Read More
The firebrand was going strong a mere month before his death. In September 2021, in a Facebook Live broadcast from the compound that lasted 75-minutes, he threatened the government with “war” over lack of education funds for Afro-Trinidadian children, alleging that “all the money [was] for the Indian children.”
Read More
“Animal sacrifice is for protection. Or like in your case to ketch somebody heart. And when you do it, you does do it once and done. Human sacrifice is when you want money and power. That does summon thing you eh want in your life. But you does have to pay a price. If you do it once, every year you does have to make another sacrifice to please the spirit. It doh ever stop. Not until you dead.”
Read More
Boundaries were blurred so that Christmas was no longer the only festivity — now prasad was parceled out for Divali and ladles of sawine for Eid-ul-Fitr. All Trinidadian cultures were now represented. And though the cane-fields had been replaced by housing settlements, coffee shops, gourmet stores and delicatessens that sold imported cheeses, the name Bush Convent had never left, as if the miasma of rotting bagasse had settled permanently within its walls.
Read More
With the promise of our return ‘home’ to the Caribbean fading into a distant memory, my mother’s morning tonics, herbal remedies, prayers, shrine and amulets appeared out of sync with a hostile 1970s London that demanded our total assimilation into British life.
Read More