Car­ol Quash

The sto­ries of Trinidad and To­ba­go have been told in many ways, most of­ten with one goal in mind—to pre­serve the his­to­ry and tra­di­tions that make the twin-is­land na­tion what it is.

Through writ­ten text, vi­su­al and per­form­ing arts, spo­ken word and song, fea­ture films and doc­u­men­taries, and in­ter­ac­tive dig­i­tal for­mats, each medi­um us­es unique tools to share ideas and tra­di­tions, build worlds, teach his­to­ry and cre­ate feel­ings.

For the past 15 years, pho­tog­ra­ph­er and sto­ry­teller Richard Ramirez has been us­ing his artis­tic tools to do his part in pre­serv­ing these sto­ries.

Ramirez has pub­lished two vol­umes of His­tor­i­cal Build­ings and Land­marks of Trinidad and To­ba­go, with a third on the way, each rep­re­sent­ing the na­tion on the in­side and out­side.

“The cov­er of the first one is black, the sec­ond one is red, and the third one is go­ing to be white,” Ramirez told Guardian Me­dia.

He has al­so pub­lished Folk­lore Spir­its of Trinidad and To­ba­go and Van­ish­ing Arts and Tra­di­tions of Trinidad and To­ba­go. Each pho­to­graph in the books is ac­com­pa­nied by the sto­ry be­hind it.

“I start­ed off tak­ing im­ages of places of in­ter­est and shar­ing them with friends and fam­i­ly, and with my small group on Face­book, so that peo­ple could see and talk about them,” Ramirez ex­plained.

He was sur­prised to find that many peo­ple did not know about some of the com­mon lo­ca­tions across T&T.

“For ex­am­ple, most peo­ple are not aware that there’s a ceme­tery in the mid­dle of the Queen’s Park Sa­van­nah, called the Peschi­er Ceme­tery,” he said. The pri­vate bur­ial plot com­pris­es 6,000 square feet.

“The ceme­tery was es­tab­lished in 1786 on lands of the Par­adise Es­tate, owned by the Peschi­er fam­i­ly. There is a com­mon mis­con­cep­tion that the Sa­van­nah lands were giv­en to the peo­ple of Trinidad by the fam­i­ly. But the re­al­i­ty is that the land was sold, but the piece com­pris­ing the ceme­tery was not sold and re­mains in the pos­ses­sion of the heirs of that fam­i­ly to this day.”

Ramirez said that be­cause he grew up in the area, he al­ways knew about the ceme­tery, but did not know the sto­ry be­hind it.

“What we were told as kids was that when we had horse rac­ing in the Sa­van­nah and a jock­ey fell off the horse and died, that’s where they used to bury the jock­ey. And I even heard that they used to bury the hors­es there,” he said with a chuck­le.

He then moved from sim­ply post­ing pho­tographs to ex­plain­ing the sto­ries be­hind them on so­cial me­dia, be­fore de­cid­ing to doc­u­ment every­thing in a book.

“Peo­ple will have it years af­ter I am gone. It’s not a lega­cy for me re­al­ly, but more of me do­ing my part to make sure this in­for­ma­tion is saved and shared so that we don’t lose it, be­cause we are in jeop­ardy of los­ing our his­to­ry and our cul­ture for lack of prop­er sto­ry­telling.”

The first vol­ume is more Port-of-Spain-cen­tric, doc­u­ment­ing 52 lo­ca­tions in and around the area—an ac­tive choice on his part from an eco­nom­ic stand­point.

“A large mar­ket for me would be cruise ship pas­sen­gers com­ing in­to Trinidad. Al­most every pas­sen­ger that gets off a cruise ship is tak­en around the Sa­van­nah. So when they go back to the Cruise Ship Com­plex, and they see this book, and they turn the first few pages, they will say, ‘Yes, we saw this. We should take this book with us.’ That would al­low me to fi­nance my project.”

But he al­so want­ed to en­sure that land­marks through­out Trinidad and To­ba­go were cap­tured.

“Then I went east, cen­tral, south, and To­ba­go.”

He said that be­cause dif­fer­ent gen­er­a­tions con­sume in­for­ma­tion in dif­fer­ent ways, he had to find a way to grab the at­ten­tion of a gen­er­a­tion with a short­er at­ten­tion span.

“You know, when we were grow­ing up, we got in­for­ma­tion from en­cy­clopae­dias. This gen­er­a­tion and the gen­er­a­tions to come use very dif­fer­ent me­dia. So we have to find them where they are and give them the in­for­ma­tion in a for­mat that’s palat­able to them”—beau­ti­ful, sharp im­agery cou­pled with short de­scrip­tions.

His folk­lore book, he said, con­tains im­ages of 30 char­ac­ters, all of which were AI-gen­er­at­ed—some­thing he be­lieves is ap­pre­ci­at­ed by the younger gen­er­a­tion.

“And they have to be, be­cause I can’t go in­to the for­est and say, ‘Pa­pa Bois, come out, let me take a pic­ture of you!’ But I have an im­age of Pa­pa Bois in my head, so I can use AI to gen­er­ate that im­age. I ab­solute­ly sup­port AI, be­cause for me, it does not re­place any­thing. It al­lows me to ex­press my­self in ways that I could not with a reg­u­lar cam­era. AI for me is just an­oth­er tool.”

He has even gone a step fur­ther with the cre­ation of a fea­ture-length movie that ex­plains the char­ac­ters in a sto­ry­telling for­mat. It is named af­ter the book be­cause all the char­ac­ters come out of the book.

“But now, apart from get­ting the name, you get a bet­ter un­der­stand­ing of what they do and what they’re known for, nar­rat­ed in a sto­ry­telling style and voice.”

Van­ish­ing Arts and Tra­di­tions of Trinidad and To­ba­go, he said, start­ed off as a “dy­ing arts and tra­di­tions” con­cept, which he re­vised be­cause of the neg­a­tive im­pli­ca­tion.

“It’s not that our arts and tra­di­tions are dy­ing; they are van­ish­ing be­cause we are evolv­ing.”

He ex­plained that things such as sit­ting on the back step on a Sun­day evening and churn­ing ice cream have evolved in­to walk­ing in­to a gro­cery and buy­ing ice cream.

“And it was more than just the ice cream. It was the ca­ma­raderie. The churn­ing of ice cream was a fam­i­ly af­fair.”

He said in­stead of be­ing a lamen­ta­tion of what was lost, the book is a cel­e­bra­tion of where we have come from and the ex­pe­ri­ences we once had.

Ramirez rev­els in the fact that as tech­nol­o­gy im­proves, it can be used to help pre­serve his­to­ry.

“The on­ly way to pre­serve our his­to­ry and tra­di­tion is to get our young peo­ple in­ter­est­ed in it. So we have to put it where they are and in a man­ner that they can di­gest.”

He re­called an ex­hi­bi­tion he held in May at the Na­tion­al Acad­e­my for the Per­form­ing Arts, at which he used two AI-gen­er­at­ed videos to tell pa­trons about van­ish­ing arts and folk­lore.

“One was a 15-minute video, one was a 10-minute video. And I thought peo­ple would pass by and maybe spend a lit­tle minute or two. And every sin­gle per­son spent a min­i­mum 25 min­utes look­ing at both of the videos,” he said, an ex­pe­ri­ence that gen­er­at­ed his idea for the folk­lore fea­ture film.

Ramirez fore­sees a tele­vi­sion se­ries of folk­lore sto­ries, as well as a se­ries of nov­els, in his fu­ture.

“We are peo­ple with a strong oral tra­di­tion. The prob­lem is that we’ve stopped talk­ing to each oth­er. The fam­i­ly con­ver­sa­tions we used to have are now large­ly be­com­ing lost due to our dis­trac­tions. We’re not telling the sto­ries, and if we don’t tell our own sto­ries, some­body else is go­ing to come and tell it for us. And we very well may not like what we hear.”