Commentary
Marina Salandy-Brown
Recently, a number of imaginative books have been published on the social and cultural heritage of TT.
St Joseph: Through the Eyes of Godmother, Mother, Son, by Glenroy Taitt and Growing Up Woodbrook: A Tapestry of Once and Now, by Dylan Kerrigan and jointly published by the National Trust, are just two that deserve our attention.
In the introduction to the first, the historian Prof. Emerita Bridget Brereton suggests that books like these are microhistories and take two forms: focusing on a finite span of time in a nation’s history; or on the past of a small community, defined by its size and location, known as local history. The author uses the latter in connection with the fascinating 20th century cultural and social history of our first capital, San José de Oruña, founded in 1592 by the Spanish. The beautifully laid out coffee table book is presented in three parts, each using a different way to record the past.
Taitt, a native of St Joseph and head librarian at the Alma Jordan Library at UWI, St Augustine, is also a photographer who since the 1980s has captured the slowly disintegrating and diverse architectural relics of St Joseph. Forty-six pages of stunning black and white photographs of some unique Trinidadian buildings appear in Part III. In the first part, his godmother, Beryl Marcellin-Welsh, recorded her memories of the old town, using oral tradition, and the author transcribed them for publication. In Part II, he had his mother write a more detailed and engaging memoir of her early life in St. Joseph and edited them for inclusion. The result is a remarkably light and accessible book – just 32 pages of text – which tells the personal stories of the lives of people living in an important place in our history.
St. Joseph also has a special meaning for me since I lived there as a teenager, and my maternal grandmother on my father’s side belonged to the Giuseppi family, who owned the large cocoa estate, then sugar plantation, Valsayn on the outskirts of St. Joseph (1790-1890). It turns out that the author’s mother is also a descendant of that mixed Corsican-Spanish family. My older sister lived there and my nieces both attended the convent there in the 1970s, one of them was married there in the 1980s in the same 1800s Roman Catholic church where I once attended Sunday mass. They became blood relatives with the famous local Flores family, which produced many cherry brandies and generations before them. They may be related, at least in a pumpkin-vine way, to the Marcellins who have produced legendary musicians of their own and are relatives of the book’s author. That is, St. Joseph is an old and closely related community with a long and unique cultural history.
Just two weeks ago I drove through St Joseph, passing by the old public cemetery that is famous on the hillside on my way to Maracas St Joseph, where we lived when I was still young. I was struck by the countless number of vehicles just managing to squeeze into each other on Abercromby Street, the main steep road built centuries ago and suitable for a much smaller number of residents and almost no vehicular traffic and so is short on sidewalks to protect old buildings and people. Soon, the authorities will have to do what was necessary in Woodbrook and introduce one-way systems to channel the traffic going to the Maracas Valley, which has been opened to the new arrivals, their homes and profits large real estate. I was displeased that quiet, antiquated St. Joseph has been catapulted into yet another overcrowded place with an overdose of toxic car emissions, which local residents will have to start stirring up to stop the decay.
They may soon have to follow the lead of the Woodbrook Residents’ Committee, whose members have fought against the deterioration of their quality of life as the famous one square mile has become heavily commercialized in the past 20 years. It has been largely unregulated, the unique architecture is being bastardized and the landscape is changing for the worse. Residents have gathered powerful advocates and allies and have taken the fight to all levels. Their current weapon seems to be culture, the strategy is to fight culture with culture. Woodbrook, once a cocoa estate, then a suburb of Port of Spain and now an urban center in its own right, has attracted a large number of small businesses and entertainment entrepreneurs to its wide main street of Ariapita Avenue. There are more regular pans and olmas there than anywhere else in the capital area, but they have brought with them noise and environmental pollution that has been affecting the peace and health of this other community for many years.
Growing Woodbrook, the must-have publication – detailing Woodbrook’s huge contribution to the full range of Trinidadian culture and including the personal contributions of residents – is accompanied by a series of 10-minute podcasts that trace the history dating back from local Iere people to settlements in Mucurapo.
Both books are available in the paper-based bookstore at the Normandie Hotel in St Ann.
