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AS PIRES PK
My name is Mary-Anne Roberts and, with my “carnival mentality,” I created a yard where the dead could play and find peace.
My Yard, the installation Spirited, was created by Adeola Dewis, Miguela Gonzalez, Cindy Ward and myself.
She will remain part of the National Museum of Wales Reframing Picton commission until the end of September 2023.
Even if I have now lived longer in Cardiff than in Trinidad, my warp and woof is Trinidadian. My earliest memories are of Belmont, but we’ve moved around a lot. St. Augustine St. James. Diego Martin, Santa Cruz, Newtown.
It’s probably more accurate to say I come from Cardiff in Wales now, just because there isn’t a Mary-Anne shaped hole in Trinidad anymore.
I come from a big family and I have a small family of my own. Husband and two children (adults).
We have lived on the same street for over 30 years. Because I moved so much when I was younger, I don’t want to move now.
The primary school was Mucurapo for girls and then St Joseph’s Monastery.
After A-levels at St James’s Government Sector, I delivered the curriculum at La Jeunesse Tutorials through art and theatre. Under the tutelage of Janet Baptiste-John. It was a school specifically for children with learning disabilities who didn’t have it
looks like had learning disabilities. Janet has been dealing with ADHD since the 70’s.
Another part of my upbringing was the Tent Theater with Ellen O’Malley Camps when she was Helen Camps.
The last part was at the Caribbean School of Dancing.
I don’t really know how to box smart.
I was raised RC but grew up in Trinidad.
So when my father was doing evening classes at St James, we were in the mandir. Feeding on dhal and rice!
My best friend was a Muslim girl! Anisha Asgarali, Salome Ali Bocas, we all went to Mucurapo together.
I believe in people! And what we do now counts!
The afterlife will take care of itself. But I will try to pray too. Give it a shot. Belt and braces, you know?
When the children were young, I tried to come to Trinidad every year.
When they became teenagers and we had to pay adult prices for everyone, visits to Trinidad dropped off massively.
My daughter spent a year in Trinidad when she was eight. My parents loved her and it was great for her to be grounded in who she is.
Tony Hall asked her what she learned at Belmont Girls Primary.
“I learned to curse,” she said. “I learned wine. And I learned long division.”
What do you want most in life?
In the 80s, everyone wore black and had their hair pulled back with red lips.
And there I was with my big, puffy hair, no makeup, and pink T-shirt. I used to look at myself in that double image you make of yourself in the opposite window of the tube and think, “God, you’re so ugly!”
One day, in Peter Jones, buying something, I looked across and saw someone and said to myself, “That looks like a Trini!” You know you can spot a Trinity
everywhere!
And when I looked again, I was myself, in a mirror facing another mirror. And it came back a thousand times! And I looked at myself and said, “Yes! It’s a Trinity!” And that was a big moment for me.
You have to make yourself part of the place where you are.
In a way, I’m very steeped in Welsh culture. I sing medieval Welsh poetry in a duet called Bragod with Robert Evans, an independent musician and academic who has brought back a medieval six-stringed Welsh instrument called the crwth (rhymes with truth) that had actually been dead for 300 years .
For us in the Caribbean, even though we know about the first peoples, the story begins in 1492, 1498 in Trinidad.
And it’s great for me now. When you can sing poetry from the sixth or eighth century, it makes you realize how far people have come…making mistakes…and making beauty.
I hate reading and I hate writing. I do them because I have to.
And I’m not bad at it. But I’d rather dance, little ones.
When I was doing my yard, I kept coming back to Women Who Run with the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola, a book I started reading when I first became a mom.
It’s a storybook about women and how we can pass on beauty and strength to our children, even in times of terrible horror.
Before Spirited, I didn’t know much about Picton, the first English governor of Trinidad. The Welsh Museum sent a commission to respond to Picton’s portrait. My friend Adeola Dewis, who is Rawle Gibbons’ daughter, who lives far away from me, had started Laku Neg, Kreyol for Black Yard, and she said, “Let’s answer, nuh! And we got the commission.
The character that spoke to me the most was Luisa Calderon, a mulatto girl, a British citizen, who was tortured in the pose of a ballerina. She reminded me of the dolls I used to make from my daughter. And with Miguela Gonzales, another Trini, we talked about bringing Luiza from torture to dance.
How do we transform it from that horrible place? How do we show torture and trauma without traumatizing our audience? That’s what it was all about.
The three of us Trinidadians, Adeola, Miguela and I – and our linchpin, Cindy Ward, a metalworking major – ran our Picton project like a mass camp. The whole community was involved.
People from Liverpool were twisting the paper and mailing it to me. The whole thing – we call it our “textile of memory and understanding” – is made of twisted paper. We were trying to understand ourselves. Picton on one side, we asked, what can
we do for
themselves?
Every family in Wales had sugar cutters because every family in Wales got sugar from the Caribbean!
So we had a cabinet of curiosities. I called Five Cent to see Miss Mary.
The museum has kept things fairly low profile. But the response so far has been so positive.
I want to make an analogy of the cuscus root holding the soil together from washing. We are just digging all our cuscus. Because we think it’s not good enough or pretty enough.
We must remember to do things for ourselves. Not for others to say if it’s good or not.
My mother passed away in 2019 and my brother and I were in Trinidad together for the first time in a long time at Carnival.
We did the typical J’Ouvert thing: see what was in an old box; my grandmother’s fan; someone’s bra; someone old pants. We leave Belmont Valley Road, join a steel belt.
When we get to town, people ask us who we are playing with.
But we didn’t register with anyone, we just play mas! People expect someone to give them permission to do exactly the things they need.
Don’t think what is st and what is not st and un-s–t Carnival! What more do you want for J’Ouvert than an old pair of pants and some mud?
We had the time of our lives and then went home and finished mom’s sauce.
A Trinity is everything to us. And, in all of us, we must find equality and justice.
Because for too long, “all of us” has been a few people jumping on top and 16-year-old boys getting shot by the police.
Trinidad and Tobago, this is home, boy!
When I sing with my band Domestic Violins, we do old Trinidadian calypso with strings. This is me, at home!
But Cardiff is also at home. Wales are also at home.
An Irish folk song says, “Back across the ocean to my home away from home!”
Read the full version of this feature Friday evening at www.BCPires.com
