Ganges, Nile and Kamala

I can’t recall why the devil I attended the Miss Universe show held in Trinidad in 1999 except that Donald Trump, then co-owner of the Miss Universe organisation, presided over the event held at the Heliport in Chaguaramas.

I only recall sitting in that heliport transformed into a kitsch stage that I was uncomfortable throughout and got up and left before the beauty queen was announced.

I didn’t have the vocabulary— the words that slide off us now encapsulating a swathe of wrongs, like “privilege”, “micro-aggressions”, “racial profiling” etc. I had no words to chafe against a distasteful man like Trump, who embodied privilege, racism, contempt, who leered at women and had shoddy business practices.

I couldn’t describe the multiple colonisations I felt nor could I explain the lack of irony with which we let Trump into this country, preside over us in an area his country once colonised at an event being used to objectify women and charge us for it.

I must have registered the heavy shadow of our history in that vast hanger, reminded of how insignificant, invisible, and contemptible we were to our colonisers.

I must have sensed then the ghosts of the American and British wartime ‘Destroyers for Bases’ agreement with the British Government granting the US army and navy base rights in Chaguaramas and in return the Americans giving the British 50 destroyers.

Together the allies constructed the naval and airbase, built Waller Army Airfield and militarised Chaguaramas.

Trinidad’s governor Sir Hubert Winthrop Young, who attempted to safeguard the interests of the colony and his own authority in the presence of a considerable American air, land, and naval force, was summarily sent back to England.

We were lucky to be a footnote in the US’s military presence in our region. Think US policy of intervention set in stone 1904 by Theodore Roosevelt. Think Cuba, Panama, Haiti, Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, Mexico. Think Operation Urgent Fury and the military occupation of Grenada.

If we sat at the edge of our couches to that cliff-hanging election result in the US with Joe Biden and Kamala Harris as President and Vice President-elect, it’s because we know that “when America sneezes the world catches a cold”.

To add tinder to this historical fire, the globe is so sharply divided in our politics (think Brexit to the Biden/Harris razor-thin win) that the UK’s most senior military commander General Sir Nick Carter expressed a serious concern that ‘the increase in regional conflicts across the world could ramp up to “a full-blown war.” In other words, World War 3—“mirroring the run-up to the two worlds in the 20th century.”

T&T shows the world how to navigate differences. We, the inhabitants of these islands are used to navigating land mines when dealing with one another– the quick calculations, of where this person lands in their politics or what card to play with which person of which race.

We all get it. We get it more than most because we have been split down the middle for a long time. Two tribes. The Ganges and the Nile, and numerous tributaries of other old worlds.

Enter Kamala Harris straddling continents, from Madras to Jamaica, claimed equally by tribes in T&T, reminding us we don’t belong in India or Africa, that we too are a new-world people.

Harris has said her mixed heritage showed her how similar all humans are. It’s true. From Chennai to Texas to Jamaica to Trinidad we want the same things: family, security, love, opportunity, tolerance, discovery, awe, shared experiences.

In Trinidad, racist and boastful rants were exposed on social media recently by two women with rich daddies, and racism from a doctor with the illiterate language of violence show there is work to be done in T&T in people who are yet to recover both from the inheritance of colonial damage and the caste-based oppression many faced in India before deciding on indentureship.

Whereas once we were mute, fled or turned violent when we felt wronged, the resistance to the old order has given us words which we must use as individuals, and as a region, as we would a Diwali diya, or Christmas lights to illuminate ourselves and one another. We have a world war to prevent.