In 2004, I moved to Trinidad and Tobago for a semester of student-teaching at the International School in Port-of-Spain. It was my first time living abroad for an extended period of time and an eye-opening experience in terms of cultural and natural beauty. Unfortunately, I was also introduced to a shocking new idea - that a person of color could hold extreme prejudices about other races. Knowing what I know NOW about the ethnic wars of the 1990s, my naivety then is hard to believe, but Port-of-Spain was the first experience of the kind I witnessed.
I learned the history of Trinidad and Tobago from colleagues, friends, and acquaintances through storytelling, over drinks or lunches of roti, and drinking tea in the teacher's lounge. Located in the Lower Antilles, Trinidad and Tobago or T 'n' T as it was called in the songs, is a nation of two main islands that, like much of the Caribbean, had been a destination for the slave trade. Before becoming a hot spot for natural oil and gas, Trinidad was home to sugar plantations worked by slaves brought over from Africa, as well as indentured servants brought over from India.
The story I was told was that once slavery became illegal, Indians were offered passage to Trinidad in exchange for a certain amount of time working. Upon arriving to Trinidad, however, the indentured servants felt tricked into the work and trapped. Eventually both black slaves and Indians became free and by my arrival in 2004, at least on the surface, it seemed that everyone was treated equally and got along well. The population was a mix of black, Indians with ancestral roots in India, and Carib or Amerindians, as well as whites with ancestry primarily from the British Islands.
While I was there, I lived with Marie, a teacher of Indian descent, who lived in a pretty two-story home in a gated community with bars rather than screens on the windows. Once a week, she had a black helper come clean her home whom she treated as her friend. The housekeeper and her son were very close with Marie and the son would go out with us when we went to concerts or pre-Carnivale parties. Danielle, another one of the teachers at the school who was of British descent, invited us out one weekend via boat to her second home on a smaller island off the coast where we spent the day hiking, lunching and relaxing. Although, I didn't realize it until later, it was my first peek into understanding who the haves and have nots were on the island.
A couple of Marie's friends of Carib or Amerindian descent became our tour guides one weekend when we went camping in what Marie referred to as "the bush." The trip involved taking a boat to a part of the island covered in rain forest, where a camp was set up near the beach with individual sleeping huts. We spent the weekend observing leatherback turtles come onto the beach at night to lay eggs. During our stay, the men caught and roasted an armadillo, which they called "Tatu" and which it was apparently illegal to kill. They smoked weed and to me embodied the romanticized image of Amerindians living off the land.
In this vein, I was introduced to a myriad of people from varying backgrounds with diverse accents and skin tones, professions, and economic levels. Whether the subtle economic and social stratifications of the people I met - well-off white families, middle class Indian families, working class black families and musicians, and separated Amerindians - were indicative of each race's status in society as a whole did not even occur to me.
That is until I went to dinner with a colleague and was introduced to a friendly Indian gentleman who went on to explain to me how all of the black people in Trinidad were "lazy, good-for-nothings who wanted handouts," while all the Indians like him worked hard and pulled themselves up by their bootstraps. "We Indians were tricked into coming to Trinidad, lured by false promises, but we managed to make a living and gain wealth," explained the man.
Having lived with a blatant racist stepparent for two years in high school, I recognized the derogatory stereotypes being flung at me, but I couldn't believe the source of it. I'd been taught that racism was a white people invention and a white people problem, mostly a Southern white hang up in particular. It had never occurred to me that one person from a marginalized group might hold another marginalized group in such contempt. This realization forced me to step back and observe the other relationships I'd witnessed, forcing me to question the societal dynamics and wonder if this man was an anomaly or indicative of that particular culture as a whole? Whichever the case in Port-of-Spain, where I was already one foot out the door, I would soon learn that prejudice and othering are diseases that have infected humans throughout the world regardless of background or skin color.
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