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Monday, July 7, 2025

St Lucia Calypso Monarch urges T&T youths to do better

by

514 days ago
20240209
Reigning St Lucia Calypso Monarch Ti Blacks (Deshawn Augustin)

Reigning St Lucia Calypso Monarch Ti Blacks (Deshawn Augustin)

Lead Ed­i­tor News­gath­er­ing

chester.sam­bra­no@cnc3.co.tt

Ti Blacks (De­shawn Au­gustin), 23, made his­to­ry by win­ning the St Lu­cia Ca­lyp­so Monarch ti­tle on his first ap­pear­ance in the fi­nals of the com­pe­ti­tion last year and now he is on a mis­sion to spread his mes­sage across the Caribbean, with T&T as one of his main tar­gets.

Au­gustin said he came here to ex­pe­ri­ence what ca­lyp­so is in T&T. He went to Ca­lyp­so Fi­es­ta and even per­formed at the Ju­nior Ca­lyp­so Monarch com­pe­ti­tion at the Queen’s Park Sa­van­nah as a guest.

“Which was an amaz­ing ex­pe­ri­ence, be­ing on the big stage for the very first time was some­thing I have dreamt of my en­tire life,” he said.

But while Ti Blacks is not from here, he felt his song, Ghet­to Cries, has a deep­er con­nec­tion with our youths than meets the eye. He ex­plained that he comes from an area in the south of St Lu­cia called Vieux Fort which is stig­ma­tised as be­ing a bad area or ghet­to.

He ex­plained: “Grow­ing up and com­ing from a place like Vieux Fort, I know what it is to be there. I know the peo­ple and the love that we can give in Vieux Fort, so I want­ed to sing about the ghet­to say­ing that you know I am from the ghet­to and grow­ing up there was nev­er the shoot­ings.”

Au­gustin said what the place has be­come sad­dens him and he sees sim­i­lar­i­ties with what some of the young peo­ple in de­pressed ar­eas in T&T are go­ing through.

“I am reach­ing out to the youths to do bet­ter and in do­ing bet­ter we can have a safer so­ci­ety. Com­ing here it is very sad to see, you know, every­body I meet at the re­sort telling me when you go in­to town (Port-of-Spain) please be safe, don’t walk with jew­ellery, and that’s not what I want to hear when I come to an is­land. So I am reach­ing out to you all to just change your mind­set, it’s a mind thing, we could do bet­ter so let’s do bet­ter.”

Au­gustin has fall­en in love with T&T, the peo­ple, the cul­ture and par­tic­u­lar­ly the food.

He said his ex­pe­ri­ence dur­ing his vis­it al­lowed him to net­work with some fa­mil­iar names in the in­dus­try, in­clud­ing Kurt Allen, Ker­nel Roberts and Ter­ri Lyons.

“Grow­ing up watch­ing these peo­ple on TV and watch­ing videos of them and meet­ing them in per­son was just amaz­ing and the warmth and the love they gave me as Ca­lyp­so Monarch … the pos­i­tive en­er­gy they gave to me was amaz­ing,” he said

As a big lover of the arts and cul­ture, Ti Blacks doesn’t lim­it him­self to ca­lyp­so.

“So whether it be danc­ing, whether it be singing, once it has to do with cre­ative arts that’s me.”

He aims to make his mark in the so­ca are­na. He said he loved singing from a ten­der age even though it is not as big in St Lu­cia as in T&T, so win­ning the Monarch ti­tle was a dream come through.

How­ev­er, it was a bit­ter­sweet mo­ment as he lost his broth­er sud­den­ly to heart com­pli­ca­tions on the eve of the fi­nals.

“He was one of my biggest sup­port­ers, it would have been some­thing very dif­fi­cult to deal with but oth­er than that we cel­e­brat­ed the win for him,” he said.

His ad­vice to young artistes is to fol­low their dreams

“Do not al­low any­one to tell you that you can­not.”


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