As a student nurse in the UK, I kept count of the number of bodies I helped prepare for collection by the mortuary attendants. One winter's night I racked up a total of eight patients spread over three separate floors. Just over one year, when this total was 50, I stopped counting. I simply got used to people dying.
My point being that there is no race but the human race. And we are less divided in T&T than we believe. There is only outward appearance and political interference dividing the Afro Trini from the Indo Trini.
Out there in foreign the essentials to know is where you can find roti skin, saltfish, Carib beer and the name of a good Caribbean restaurant selling food with plenty pepper. If there was a Trini show visiting everybody went to look for Ricki Jai and Baron, the sweet soca man. I returned to a T&T where everybody was playing mas, beating pan and where chutney music is now playing along with calypso and soca in the all-inclusive fetes.
Our holidays, Eid, Divali, Indian Arrival Day, Emancipation, Independence, Republic, Shouter Baptist and Christian holidays are equal excuses, for all citizens, to overdo the drinking, eating and bad behaviour.
The outward trappings of East Indian and African indigenous clothing remain cosmetic to who we are under the skin. We have a "racial" language peculiar to T&T people only. We all eat doubles, macaroni pie, sweet bread, KFC, pelau and knock back the Carib, the Stag, the rum with the same enthusiasm.
I look at the Bollywood shows and can see not one Indian looking and behaving like a real Trini Indian. What do those people know about a curry duck river lime? The same holds for the Afro shows. It is just the clothing and political interference making us different.
The People's National Movement (PNM) and the United National Congress (UNC) can only move forward if there are enough of each race voting for a party in a general election. The secret of political success is racial unity.
The nakedly racial politics that we are seeing today in America with mostly white faces for the Republicans and a mixture of races for the Democrats, is most instructive. America is now multi-coloured and multi-religious but here in T&T, we got there first.
Lynette Joseph