View Point

“For the large masses of working people in Trinidad, Carnival, particularly Jouvert, was always about subversion, defiance, sarcasm dressed up in deceptive hilarity. It was one of the very few avenues by which they were able to openly express how they felt about the unfairness of their lives, the hypocrisy …

John Lennon had already said it back in the last century. And when earlier this year Jimmy Fallon converted Bob Dylan’s old 1964 lyrics into a 2018 message “Your silence speaks louder than those who condone,” Trinidad and Tobago, you needed to be listening; Messrs Lennon and Fallon/Dylan were speaking to …

“Most of us Indians didn’t like Eric Williams and his PNM and would be glad to see them go. But we had no interest in seeing the Eric Williams black gang replaced by another black gang led by Granger/Daaga and company. “[…] Once Williams had got the news that a …

Someday in the future, when Trinbago nationalism becomes a common experience across our multifaceted demographic, February 1970 will surely be memorialised collectively as the month that precipitated the most significant events in the history of the two-island state since Emancipation. I am motivated to write this piece not only because …

Pop culture anthropologist Jessica Joseph attempts to show that the modern Bible is misinterpreted in relation to the LGBTQI movement in Part Two of her response to a Letter to the Editor from Akilah Holder: Let us then move on to 1 Corinthians 6:9 which reads: “Know ye not that …

Akilah Holder’s impassioned column—in which she took umbrage at a gay man sharing his feelings of self-acceptance and his spiritual certainty about being loved and accepted by God—generated a lot of buzz, most of it negative and condemnatory. While I agree with those who pointed out the poor reasoning skills—the …

“[Joan] Rampersad’s ‘December’ section highlighted the relocation of Desperadoes Steel Orchestra, a film featuring the Mighty Sparrow, the trial of soca artistes Machel Montano and Kernal Roberts, and the QED, Lydians and Marionettes Christmas concerts. Not a single Indian cultural event was mentioned.” The following Letter to the Editor, which charges …

The return of the Kings and Queens to Sunday’s Dimanche Gras made for a good show. Calypso won as, although there were too many props, there was no excess of lame melodies, thank God, and no overdose of prosaic lyrics. It was refreshing to hear music back in our calypso; …

“Men who hold high office in our society are never asked these questions by our journalists, regardless of the number of rumours that fly about on social media. That is because they are entitled to have their most private lives kept private, save and except where it seriously affects their …

“The question is whether any government has the political willpower to effect the necessary changes to make the Police Service efficient. I am not optimistic about an answer in the affirmative because the scale of systemic neglect extends to the health services and social care as well as environmental management and …

On 8 October, 2013, Newsday published a letter to the editor, headlined “Say no to gay marriages” and signed by Valentine Young, with which I fully agreed. Young’s position was that the legalisation of same-sex marriages had brought God’s wrath upon the United States of America (certain states anyway) because …

An Open Letter to Culture Minister Nyan Gadsby-Dolly Dear Madam, It’s over, madam. Dimanche Gras is dead. Like the numerous, onerous pretty costumes the Pegasus Fancy Sailor and Tan Tan and Saga Boy relegated into irrelevance, the show is arguably now exposed as a creaking, antediluvian anachronism, not merely moribund …