Confusing cultural personality with nationality

THE EDITOR: Thank you for space to reply to and welcome my globe-trotting brother Sonny Blacks, former national itinerant leisure cyclist who discovered every nook and cranny of Trinbago on bicycle wheels. He also wrote a column of his exploits for the Trinidad Sentinel. Sonny is in the vanguard of popularising TT’s socalypso and steelband culture with large and appreciative audiences in UK, Europe and Scandinavia especially. Accordingly, I do hope that he is not of the view that Trinbagonians live exclusively in TT.

They also live in Denmark where Sonny now basks in the pleasures of his self-imposed exile from sweet TT. We forgive him. As an international cultural activist of some repute, Sonny as so many others, confuses nationality with our ancestral origins and civilisation (Newsday Nov 16, p 13). He is suggesting that we disown the latter. Africa is not a political but a geographical entity. People living in India are Indians by nationality. Indo-Trinbagonians are, barring some, not Indian nationals in spite of recent Indian offers. They are Trinbagonians by nationality. They have Indian ancestral and socio-cultural origins.

They have a cultural personality in which are embedded the conditioning elements of both ancestral Indian civilisation and TT’s more recent fledgling cultural influences. The same can be said of our Afro-brothers and sisters. My advice to cultural impresario and patriot, Sonny Blacks is while here on your annual pilgrimage to the Caribbean jewel — a place for sun, sea, sand and sadha roti — do seek some advice on unravelling the distinctive elements and complexities of our unique and well-documented cultural personality. Please avoid or disabuse your mind from believing that being an Indo-Trinbagonian yourself you must be living in India or harbouring loyalty to a foreign country.

STEPHEN KANGAL
Caroni