My new favourite thing for Carnival isn’t new at all. It’s a traditional martial art, or fighting style, that was born in Trinidad to African and Indian parents and seems to be having a revival. It’s called Kalinda or Stickfighting. I first went to Stickfighting last year, and had a blast. My favourite thing are…
We sang this hymn at my uncle’s funeral yesterday. He was born and raised in Maraval, but his wife was from Paramin, and they welcomed him with open arms. This song was a lovely tribute to the late “Mayor of Maraval”.
It’s a Carnival miracle. The blog title is a lie. The feud is over. Machel Montano and Bunji Garlin are together on one track and it’s fire! Heh HA! Fanism unlocked. I lurve eet! My friend Keegan Taylor, soca producer, stick fighter is one of the writers. I heard the song and immediately called him…
As a journalist, every day I struggle with my use of the language to properly express my thoughts and experiences. I am always worried that I am saying the wrong thing, especially in my news scripts. But outside of matters of grammar and expression, and beyond issues surrounding the creative use of language, one of…
[Many thanks to Peter Jordens for bringing this item to our attention.] Eternity Martis (The Fader, 1 September 2016) writes about the trajectory of patois on the global stage concluding that “more than just slang—it’s a language of freedom.” [. . .] Patois, as well as its hybridized diasporic slang, is a language used by […]…
An article by Doreen St. Félix for MTV.Com. While listening to a radio transmission in Kingston, Stuart Hall suddenly felt lost. It was the early 1970s, and Hall had temporarily returned to his home country of Jamaica after two decades abroad. Back in 1951, Hall had won a Rhodes Scholarship to the University of Oxford,…