Guest Columns

On the date corresponding to today in last year’s Carnival calendar, I was tied up in Tobago with pan business, enjoying the morning after our attendance at the medium band 2020 Panorama finals which was held in Tobago. Now all of Tobago is tied up. There is the deadlock in …

‘When a country is in the grip of a collective passion, it becomes unanimous…the partisan spirit makes people blind, makes them deaf to justice. It dims perception of goodness, merely enables it to mistake this or that means for an absolute good. ‘One must, therefore, endeavour strenuously to protect one’s …

I had begun writing about something entirely different when I suddenly felt I didn’t want to anymore, not this week anyway. It was too utterly oppressive and my mood had been altered by two sightings. One was photographs of the murals that Jackie Hinkson put up yesterday on Fisher Avenue …

I may be late to the party, but MX Prime has nailed it with his recent release Torture. He has demonstrated how our music has told our stories and records key moments in our history. When the history is written, this will be the defining story of early 21st century …

As time goes by, I find myself increasingly preoccupied with revisiting childhood experiences. It comes from my belief that all that we are, all that we have become, is rooted in those gnarly years. It makes me think of mangroves and their intricate intertwining of robust and reedy roots, rising …

A friend recently lamented the advantages people who live in the north of our island have over people who live in the south. My impatient response showed my disgust with these silly discussions about north v south, Indo v Afro, prestige v secondary schools, Westmoorings v Beetham and the full …

A friend of mine based in the USA mailed his first novel to me on 15 September 2020—more than four months ago. There has been no sign of it; no indication from TTPost that there is a package for me to collect. Nothing. Many citizens receive statements and bills from …

It’s January 2021, and I can only reminisce and fill the silence of pan-less evenings with musings about what can be done to make magic in 2022 or possibly 2023. January is usually my month for late evenings filled with the repetition of steelpan notes and chords, deciphering the phrases …

Over the last three decades, persons who either tell census enumerators that they have ‘no religion’ or refuse to identify with religion now represent the fastest-growing group based on faith.  As large as the Pentecostals, this group (13% of the population) draws from every other faith group. Why is this …

So Gregory Aboud jumped out of his corner and suggested that we have a carnival celebration and everybody wants to kill him because, primarily, they say it is too little too late.  Is it possible that he is too far away from our perceptions of who can speak about carnival …

“The truth does not care about our governments, ideologies, religions. It will lie in wait… I once would fear the cost of truth. Now I only ask, what is the cost of lies? “[…] Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later, that debt is …

Any recovering alcoholic will tell you that the first step is admission of the problem, so attempts can be made to address it. Crucially, they are encouraged to acknowledge that the problem never goes away—they will always remain an alcoholic—but that admission creates the necessary control over said problem.  What …