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To Trinidad, to learn

When people ask me what I do for a living, the answer “I’m a freelance literature festival programme director” generally gets a look of polite bafflement. My job title never appears on drop down menus, for very sensible reasons. There aren’t very many of us. Slight understatement.

When you work in a niche area, you have to make your own professional development opportunities. So that is how I came to be waiting for 2 hours in an immigration queue at Port of Spain airport, Trinidad last month. Eventually it’s my turn at the booth, and the polite-though-weary official begins to grill me on my plans while in Trinidad. “I’m visiting the Bocas Literature Festival”. The what? What is that? Where? Oh. Hmmmmm. OK, and who invited you? Hmm? OK. She diligently copies the relevant names and numbers down from my iphone screen, scribbling vertically around the edges of the immigration form, filling in all available margins. And then, with a flourish of her stamp, I’m in the Caribbean. On a literature gig. Am I the luckiest person on the planet, right at this very moment? Quite possibly.

Bocas has been going for seven impressive years. I had worked from the UK with the livewire founder and director Marina Salandy Brown and her team a couple of times during the early days of the festival, and so I knew that they had created not just a festival, but a community of aspiring writers, established writers and readers, and nothing less than a West Indian cultural focal point in Bocas. T&T’s capital city of Port of Spain has seen its fortunes rise thanks largely to major deposits of oil and gas, but Trinidadian society has struggled with the fallout from rapid social change as well as its strategic location on the drug trade routes. The island has an incredibly rich literary and cultural heritage – Naipaul, Lovelace, Walcott, not to mention calypso and cricket – and while to Anglo-Euro-American minds it may not have seemed the most obvious place to incubate the next generation of writers and thinkers, the founders have proved the doubters emphatically wrong.

So I had come to listen, and learn. And, so it turned out, to laugh, linger and lime. Being at Bocas is to be part of an atmosphere more akin to a symposium or conference, such is the number of writers and partners who descend on the city from afar for the duration of the festival. The festival is a celebration of the glorious abundance of Caribbean literature both contemporary and canonical; but it also creates a space to interrogate issues affecting current Trini society while also keeping more than a weather eye on the international literature scene. In short, it’s everything your typical literature festival programmer could want in terms of brain food and soul food.

I listened to quiet readings and watched vibrant literary performances. I fell back in love, properly, with poetry. I learnt what an extempo calypso debate is. I heard the Prime Minister read from his memoir and answer questions in a room open to the street and with a commendably open and relaxed attitude. I listened to poetry in nightclubs and amphitheatres, songs in colonnades, dark stories dramatically told in a night-time open air theatre, and spent many hours listening to discussion and illumination in an old fire station. I danced by a pool and watched parrots fly overhead. I was moved to tears watching an event broadcast live from the Port of Spain prison, and again during an award ceremony for the best writing from the Caribbean for 2017. I made notes, plans, affirmations, contacts, and friends.

It was, in short, probably the most useful experience of my professional life. And one of the most fun. I am very grateful to the AIDF programme, jointly funded by Arts Council England and the British Council, for seeing merit in my application. I still haven’t fully unpacked my case. Because that would mean it really is over.

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Playing the boys at their own game

We all watched this week as a woman was beaten to the White House by a self-confessed proud abuser of women and women’s rights. Trump’s ascendancy to the most powerful office in the world is, in a word, nauseating.

I watched something else this week. I watched my six year old daughter on a rampage. Darting and veering round the sports hall, red hair streaming out behind her as she pounced on balls, cheering her own successes, enthusiastically thwacking plastic cones and occasionally breaking into cartwheels, she was one of two girls taking part in the fortnightly winter training sessions held by our local cricket club. Earlier this year I’d walked from the clubhouse discreetly shaking my head in disbelief. I had left her with her plaits, sequined ALOHA T-shirt and stripy leggings, perfectly content, throwing herself into warm-up games for a week-long cricket summer club. Her cohort were, to a boy, aged between 8 and 14, dressed in whites or club tracksuits, full of hotheaded energy, jostling for supremacy. They barely batted an eyelid at her being there - solipsism has its virtues - and neither did she.

There are two forces at work here: expectations and confidence. Expectation on the part of the club coaches as well as her family that a (young) girl is every bit as welcome and able to take part in learning a sport that is, notwithstanding the ever-growing international achievements of our women’s sides, traditionally a male preserve. (The women – the mothers, wives and girlfriends – usually make the teas. Mega flapjacks, etc.) Our local coaches are superb in the even-handed encouragement, support and feedback they give the kids who take part in their programmes.

When something is a given, children accept it. This works as a positive as well as a negative force. Just as with racism, or any other -ism, children are not born sexist – they learn it. The boys at the club follow their leaders in terms of how they act towards each other, behaviour which in all its pre-pubescent energy has its ups and downs – that a girl is part of the game is just how it is, neither here nor there.

The second force is altogether more slippery. Some children possess a seemingly innate self-confidence, but it develops, eddies and doubles back on itself at a bewildering pace. There are thousands of books written on the subject of how to bring up confident, happy children. I list confidence secondarily to expectations in this context for good reason: if a certain expectation is a given, then confidence in fulfilling that expectation is a natural follow-on. I do my best to instil a sense of confidence in my kids by acting confidently myself in whatever environment we find ourselves in; confessing to them when it feels hard, sharing my worries when it’s a struggle, but carrying on nevertheless. Hopefully that helps. The indicators so far are that they have bags more self-confidence than I did at the same age, for which I am so grateful, while being painfully aware that they are young, and it is fragile. I hope that their self-esteem can develop down the same road, although that too is a tricky quality to keep buoyant.

And so back to the tragic global reality, the farce of Trumpton. People are only ever vile about the things they fear. I don’t know if Clinton ever played the boys at their own game when she was at infant school. I don’t know if Trump ever saw girls giving it their all on whatever passed for a childhood playing field for billionaires’ offspring. But I do know that having girls and boys run free on the same pitch, failing and achieving and winning and trying, hard, without stopping to think about whether their gender plays any part – that seems like a place where we can start thinking about the future.