After rainy season, Ziya, her Amerindian godmother and I are going to roam the country taking selfies. Also taking the practice of being "independent ladies" seriously, we are stopping at sites where colonial names replaced Amerindian ones and bad ass posing next to those signs with the little remembered Amerindian ones held high. Why?
I had wanted to give Zi a map of the country with as many of the original names as possible, replacing the Spanish, French, British and other names that were imposed through conquest. I wanted her to see her belonging beyond its colonial representation. To understand that this place where the contemporary meaning of dougla was invented and could be positively claimed, only existed through the historical meeting of Indians and Africans on once indigenous people's lands.
That those names have disappeared from our knowledge remains a colonising act, one claimed as our right at the birth of our independent nation, one for which we remain responsible today.
Because that map doesn't exist, Zi, her godmother and I were going to make it ourselves, not as a flat, sepia etching as if Amerindians only existed in the past, but as if they continue to live and breathe in the making of Zi's own memories. For how does teaching an Indian-African mixed girl to connect her navel string to the Mother T&T of her indigenous godmother enable her to love here differently?
If she became Prime Minister, might she value Parliament's grounds more for its Amerindian rather than Westminster heritage? If she became a judge, how would she adjudicate future Warao land claims? As a citizen thinking about highway development, how would she understand the significance of the skeleton found in Banwari Trace being known as the "Mother of the Caribbean"?
Planning this decolonising adventure, I've been reflecting on Eric William's words that there is no "Mother Africa nor India, England, China, Syria or Lebanon, only Mother T&T," an Amerindian Mother still not called by her original woman's name.
And, in questioning Mother T&T's genesis as conceived by the men who doctored her birth, I've also been reflecting on who Mother Trinidad and Tobago has been allowed to be by those who since ruled.
Independent Mother T&T hasn't been allowed to be lesbian, for example, which is why women's desire for other women is criminalised, not since colonial times, but from as late as 1986 when the jackets in Parliament decided that the sole purpose of this Mother's sexuality was to service a mister or face a jail.
And, except for between 2010 and the present, Mother T&T has been dominated by men, mostly elite, mostly African and Indian, mostly against their Mother championing too much feminism. So, from 1956 to today, Mother T&T continues to end up in public hospitals from unsafe abortions along with thousands of other women. Even with a grandmother holding prime ministerial power, Mother T&T can't yet get a gender policy approved or sexual orientation explicitly protected in the Equal Opportunities Act or reproductive rights.
In a little girl's reconceiving of Mother T&T on more feminist, more indigenous terms, for she may have only one mother, but she has a godmother too, in telling her that being an independent lady isn't about your relationship to men and money, but to emancipation, and in making selfies that frame all this in Ziya's inherited mix, you'll be surprised at the political potential for the young to imaginatively play with the power of self-definition, even in relation to citizenship.