Professor Bridget Brereton and Professor Barbara Lalla, who both retired in 2010, were honoured by the Faculty of Humanities and Education at UWI, St. Augustine, for their contributions to the university and to the pool of Caribbean knowledge. The honour took the form of a three-day conference called Reassembling the Fragments, in which the works and academic contributions of the honourees were recognized and examined. Professor Ian Robertson, of the Department of Liberal Arts, was also recognized.
Professor Bridget Brereton
It's obvious upon speaking with Professor Brereton that she's not from around here, but even she can't easily pin down her origins. "I was born in India. My father was British, and my mother was German-Jewish. My childhood was spent in Scotland, I was educated in England, and I've lived in the Caribbean since I was 17. So YOU tell me where I'm from!" The historian has to her writing and editorial credit a number of books and papers, primarily on the history of Trinidad. Many have become sought-after classics, and have found their way onto the booklists of secondary and tertiary institutions. Among them are Race Relations in Colonial Trinidad, 1870-1900, and A History of Modern Trinidad 1783-1962. Her Social Life in the Caribbean, 1838-1938 is a mainstay CXC textbook.
She's interested in examining the way in which historical narratives in Trinidad and Tobago are constructed, through media, other print, and oral means. Another area of significance has been her work in women's history and gender history in the Caribbean. "I've been one of a group of people who pioneered writing women into the history of the Caribbean," she explains. For the past several years she served as vice-principal of the St. Augustine Campus, and in 2007 filled the gap between permanent Principals for some months. She has also served as Head of the Department of History. She does, though, admit to missing the academic side of things during her spell in administration, and was happy to return to teaching. "I have always seen myself as primarily a teacher and a writer."
Professor Barbra Lalla
Like Professor Brereton, Professor Lalla has divided her time between teaching, writing and administration. Many of her academic publications deal with English language and Caribbean language history and with literary discourse, which is an analysis of how Caribbean language is presented in our fiction, poetry and creative writing. One of her seminal works is Postcolonialisms: Caribbean Rereading of Medieval English Discourse. She co-edited Voices in Exile and co-wrote Language in Exile with UWI Mona lecturer, Jean D'Costa. Her doctorate was on the unusual subject of medieval literature and, interestingly, over the years has discovered many connections between medieval English and our own Caribbean potpourri. "I never lost my love for the medieval, because I saw much in common with what is going on there and what is happening in the Caribbean." She's always delighted when her students see the same connections, when they read Chaucer and say, "Oh Lord, that's like Carnival!"
Analysing the evolution of Caribbean languages, which are traditionally oral rather than written, was a voyage in itself. "People said you couldn't do it, because who would write down what a slave said? I started to look at the works of travelers, who thought all this was exotic, and missionaries, who believed that perhaps, these people had souls." She has also published two much-acclaimed novels, Arch of Fire, a historical family saga set in Jamaica, which covered several centuries. Cascade, which she describes as a novel of aging, was the first work of fiction published by the University Press, which had only published academic works before. She received the Inaugural Fiction award from the UWI press for it. While she has never been involved in feminist criticism of literature per se, she has become interested in the way power is distributed in Caribbean literature between men and women, and how it's conveyed through the language. She cites her novel, Cascade, as an example of how a strong, proud woman, having lost her husband, is brought down by age, and clings fiercely to her independence in the face of her debilitation.
Having examined the concepts of transition in the Caribbean context over most of her career, Professor Lalla herself is a living example of it. A Jamaican by birth, she has spent more years in Trinidad than in her native country. She has done stints as Head of the Department of Language and Linguistics, later known as Liberal Arts, but like most academics, loved the teaching, writing and research too much to give it up entirely. One of the highlights of her career has been getting involved in introducing cultural studies to the UWI St. Augustine campus. "When people think of the Caribbean, the first thing they think of is culture. We may not split the atom, but culture is what we have."
