A re­view by

Austin Fi­do

On a re­cent trip to To­ba­go, a first-time vis­i­tor got lost. Hope­less­ly be­mused by a wind­ing road, cer­tain he was al­ready three or four wrong turns in­to his jour­ney, he stopped to beg di­rec­tion from a man sit­ting on a bench in the af­ter­noon sun.

The gen­tle­man smiled in­dul­gent­ly at the tourist, looked to his right and left, and shrugged: "It have many ways to get there," he said gen­tly.

Screened in pub­lic for the first time at the re­cent­ly con­clud­ed T&T Film Fes­ti­val, Dreams in Tran­sit is a 30-minute in­ter­ro­ga­tion of is­sues of per­son­al iden­ti­ty. Specif­i­cal­ly, Trinida­di­an iden­ti­ty. How does one ar­rive at "Trinida­di­an" as a de­scrip­tion of self? It have many ways to get there.

It is tempt­ing to de­scribe Dreams in Tran­sit as an au­to­bi­o­graph­i­cal film: it is nar­rat­ed from the per­spec­tive of a Lon­don-based, Trinida­di­an woman; writer, di­rec­tor and pro­duc­er, Karen Mar­tinez. But the nar­ra­tor is not Mar­tinez, it is Mar­ti­na Laird: al­so a woman, al­so Trinida­di­an, al­so based in Lon­don.

To fur­ther com­pli­cate the ques­tion of the iden­ti­ty of the film's pro­tag­o­nist, the prin­ci­pal char­ac­ter is a woman in a white dress who nev­er speaks at all. Played by Cather­ine Em­manuel, the "dream woman" leads the nar­ra­tive all over Trinidad and be­yond, word­less­ly re­fo­cus­ing at­ten­tion on the per­son­al in the shape of an en­tire­ly fic­tion­al per­son.

Fic­tion in­vites an au­di­ence to ex­pe­ri­ence some­thing for­eign as its own. In Dreams in Tran­sit, the ef­fect of the nar­ra­tive de­vice is to turn what might oth­er­wise be re­gard­ed as one woman's re­sponse to her own cir­cum­stances in­to a nu­anced ex­am­i­na­tion of Trinida­di­an iden­ti­ty that is ac­ces­si­ble to any­one with a sense of self.

The film is non-fic­tion dri­ven by a fic­tion­al con­struct. It is a se­ries of in­ter­views in which the lead is mute. It is a doc­u­men­tary–po­ten­tial­ly the most pro­sa­ic form of film­mak­ing–with the struc­ture and sen­si­bil­i­ty of a po­em.

De­liv­ered in three stan­zas (ti­tled Land, Sea, and Else­where), there is lyri­cism in the writ­ing and de­liv­ery of the nar­ra­tion ("On a cold and rainy Car­ni­val Mon­day in Lon­don, I looked out over the sea of peo­ple and found my­self dream­ing of my oth­er home: the Caribbean"), and the script fre­quent­ly de­fers to quotes from po­ets, such as Derek Wal­cott and Mar­tin Carter.

In­deed, the film opens with a po­em from Pe­ter Min­shall. To quote it in part would be to frac­ture its mean­ing and to quote it in full would not do jus­tice to the de­liv­ery. Suf­fice it to say, when Min­shall con­cludes "I am a Caribbean," it is clear that iden­ti­ty con­tains mul­ti­tudes.

Form fol­lows func­tion is a max­im of in­dus­tri­al de­sign, but it has cur­ren­cy in sto­ry­telling al­so. The film's genre-bend­ing struc­ture com­ple­ments the di­ver­si­ty of na­tion­al (and, of course, re­gion­al) iden­ti­ty.

It was a con­scious choice by Mar­tinez to "play with the norms" of the doc­u­men­tary for­mat. "Iden­ti­ty and be­long­ing and home are al­ready mul­ti­lay­ered," she said on the phone from Lon­don. "So I felt it gave me the lib­er­ty; I could take a more flu­id form."

She had orig­i­nal­ly planned a longer film, with at­ten­tion paid to po­lit­i­cal ma­nip­u­la­tion of na­tion­al iden­ti­ty and its im­pact on con­cepts of what it means to be Trinida­di­an. But the start­ing point for the project had been less po­lit­i­cal, more per­son­al: "It's some­thing I had been think­ing about for a long time–where does sense of self and iden­ti­ty come from? What is it that makes you say, 'I am Trinida­di­an?'"

Once she start­ed re­search­ing and in­ter­view­ing for the film, Mar­tinez re­alised her con­cept of a broad­er, longer ex­plo­ration of iden­ti­ty pol­i­tics would ob­scure the per­son­al sto­ries she was gath­er­ing. The de­sire to do jus­tice to those sto­ries–by show­ing "an open-end­ed­ness" and avoid­ing di­dac­ti­cism in the nar­ra­tive–grad­u­al­ly be­came the pri­or­i­ty.

"I re­al­ly on­ly un­der­stood in the ed­it," she said of the de­ci­sion to cut the pro­ject­ed length of the film and shift its fo­cus, "I want­ed it to be a film in which Trinida­di­ans could see them­selves."

In seek­ing to iden­ti­fy what it is to be of this na­tion, Mar­tinez's cam­era in­tro­duces us to Trinida­di­ans who are de­vot­ed to their coun­try's land, sea, or break­fast (dou­bles). For every im­plic­it point about na­tion­al iden­ti­ty there is a coun­ter­point: some take com­fort in the land, oth­ers are nur­tured by the sea; one sub­ject iden­ti­fies a taste for dou­bles as in­her­ent­ly Trinida­di­an, an­oth­er has ac­cept­ed the need not present her­self to the world as a com­pos­ite of the pre­sumed tastes and pref­er­ences of her na­tion.

And the point is made that those, like Mar­tinez, who are not res­i­dent in Trinidad at all are clos­er to the coun­try than ever be­fore. Dig­i­tal con­nec­tions help mi­grant and di­as­po­ra com­mu­ni­ties to be as up-to-the-minute on news from their coun­tries of ori­gin as they care to be. Per­haps too much.

"There is no need–you are in Lon­don," says writer and ac­tivist At­ti­lah Springer, seem­ing­ly ad­dress­ing a ques­tion posed at the start of the film: "For con­tem­po­rary mi­grants, is home al­ways some­where else?"

In her seg­ment, Springer im­me­di­ate­ly con­cedes that, al­though it may not be her per­son­al modus viven­di when liv­ing in the UK, the al­ways-con­nect­ed-to-home ap­proach has its mer­its for those who sub­scribe to it: "It gives them a sense of them­selves, a sense of who they are, in a big city."

It al­so gives the so­ci­ety from which they are dis­tanced a sense of who they are: as me­dia pro­duc­er Geor­gia Pop­plewell notes, dig­i­tal­ly con­nect­ed mi­grant and di­as­po­ra com­mu­ni­ties are "now ex­ert­ing po­lit­i­cal in­flu­ence back home." They can be re­gard­ed as a rel­a­tive­ly wealthy, en­gaged con­stituen­cy with­out ob­vi­ous rep­re­sen­ta­tion but just a flight, or Face­book call to ac­tion, away: an ir­re­sistible com­bi­na­tion for po­lit­i­cal par­ties seek­ing to boost fi­nances and sup­port.

Ul­ti­mate­ly, Dreams in Tran­sit ar­rives at no fixed des­ti­na­tion on its jour­ney to­ward a de­f­i­n­i­tion of what it is to be Trinida­di­an. It con­cludes by cit­ing cul­tur­al the­o­rist Stu­art Hall: "Iden­ti­ty is not an al­ready ac­com­plished fact, but rather a pro­duc­tion–one that is nev­er com­plete, al­ways in process." It is a sen­ti­ment ex­pressed ear­li­er in the film, by Ru­pert An­tho­ny Cox, who lives off the land with his fam­i­ly in a self-made for­est dwelling: "My home is my hap­pi­ness; where I feel hap­py, I see that as my home."