"Reading between the lines of that entire presentation it still seems as if Trinidad and Tobago is a country rich in African heritage and African people but the Indian presence is an exotic aberration that we polish up and put on show as the occasion demands."
At the risk of being harangued and ostracised for the rest of my life by Brian Mac Farlane fans and sycophants I must say I was probably one of the few people left still wanting by his over-the-top presentation at the opening of the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM).
Maybe it was just all too literal for me.
A tribute to the Queen’s Park Savannah and you have cricket and football and joggers and bikers, literally running and biking and playing cricket.
The Buccoo Reef was pretty with the enactment of the blue waters but then there were the corals and fish. Where was the creativity, I couldn’t help wondering. But maybe it was just me.
I understand that there were others who were thrilled at the presentation. But I think I got stuck at the opening with those darned ugly poui trees.
As I said to the Newsday staff gathered around the TV in the Sunday Desk office, “that must be the poui trees after global warming”.
But while that aspect of the presentation may have just been my personal prejudices at work I don’t think that my concern about the Indian presence in the production was mine alone.
Ten, 15 minutes into the show, pretty much every one of the eight or so persons gathered in my office to watch the drama unfold were all asking the same question: where was the Indian presence?
With each new vignette the question got louder. It was only after much picong flew and friendly insults were hurled at the TV that Indian dancers finally emerged along with Drupatie and some strange woman lip-syncing to the Indian version of “Hot Hot Hot” who was barely capable of performing since either her dress or her waist lacked wining capacity.
Last time around at the Americas Summit Mac Farlane was loudly criticised for the poor showing given to the Indian presence. This, from a man who produced an entire Carnival band about India. It was startling and disturbing.
Now this time he gave more than a couple minutes to those darned fussy upstart Indians who are always complaining about being left out — which is what many people in this country say, anyway.
But despite those few minutes I still felt like a footnote in Trinidad and Tobago history.
Reading between the lines of that entire presentation it still seems as if Trinidad and Tobago is a country rich in African heritage and African people but the Indian presence is an exotic aberration that we polish up and put on show as the occasion demands.
I don’t think anyone sitting in that audience who was not a Trini would have come away thinking that Indians have brought a rich socio-cultural dynamic to a country which might otherwise have been flat and one-dimensional.
When we boast of being multi-cultural, multi-religious, multi-ethnic it is because we are being forced to acknowledge that Indians make up 40 percent of this population.
That is not a minority figure, it is, in fact, a majority figure so why must it always appear that we are the exotic “other” and African is the norm? I would hazard a guess that of the boasted 935 performers who took part in that sophisticated Best Village skit on Friday morning maybe five per cent were Indo-Trinidadian.
My contention is that it is not enough for us to offer the Indians a small vignette in the larger show, they must be an integral part of the entire production — we all must be, whether Indian, African, Mixed, Chinese, Syrian, Caucasian.
Those people running around the Savannah — they are of all those different groups. The people playing cricket — they come from all those groups. Choirs, dance groups, musicians — they all come from the different representations of people in this country.
Whenever I see the face of Trinidad and Tobago represented to the national public through advertising or the rest of the world through tourism presentations and staged works, I wonder how much of us really understand what a truly multi-cultural nation looks and feels like and how committed we are to truly acknowledging our multifacity to ourselves and representing it to the rest of the world.
When we see presentations like Mac Farlane’s it becomes increasingly apparent that we prefer to maintain a state of blissful obliviousness.
The above column was reproduced unedited, except for formatting changes, from the Sunday Newsday of Nov. 29, 2009. You can reach the writer at: vmaharaj@newsday.co.tt
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