sticky time

Abstract “sticky time” explores the disorienting ethereal nature of anti-Blackness in Trinidad and Tobago by layering the artist’s personal, and familial anecdotes alongside artifacts, histories, and recorded events in the public consciousness. Through poignant, multimodal accounts and approaches, and drawing on work by seminal scholars in the field, the author attempts to locate a Caribbean account of anti-Blackness amidst varying and disappearing accounts. Turning to astronomical and spiritual metaphors, the essay attempts to elucidate the function of cultural amnesia in disempowering Black people, relegating to us the sole labor of time and memory.

face

My earliest memories of knowing my face was knowing my nose was large, like my father’s. When I was younger, he would squeeze my nose with his rough knuckles and pull.  Why you take your father negro nose boy? He would ask. I would never be sure what the answer should be to that. My brother, with his straight nose like my mother’s and his soft hair, shone like honey as a child. I am told that one of my aunties when they saw me as a baby said, This one go be ugly like he father. Ugly, of course, meaning negroid, African, Black. I did not shine like honey, no eyes stuck to me.

My mother attributes her straight nose to both her parents. Her father, whose skin was darker than mine, also had a straight nose. And her mother, a Dougla, inherited her straight nose from her Indian mother. 

With the recent arrival of my niece, the first child of the generation below mine, my family members joked that they would rather the child not inherit hair or a nose like mine. Our jokes betray a common hope for the luck of the draw. I cannot blame them. In a place like this Indo-European features are not only a measure of beauty but also of opportunity. To hope for soft hair, straight noses, and mildly melanated skin is to hope for the child to be preferred among classmates and to be looked upon more favorably by employers. And who wouldn’t hope for that? 

The luck of the draw. Already, since her arrival, my niece’s life has been filled with softness. Her hair is the talk of the town. She, like my brother, has experienced the goodness the world has reserved for little Black girls with soft hair and straight-ish noses. 

Let us consider memories. My mother recalls a moment, before I was a thought, in which she enters City Gate with her then boyfriend, a “red man” (a light-skin, mixed, racially ambiguous man). She says an Indian woman said to the man why you going out with a nigger like she? I always wonder, but have never heard what the man said in response.

An old friend of mine told me once, when she was looking for a job in about 2010, calling places she’d seen in the classifieds, some places would ask what her name was. Facebook was already out by that time. Sometimes she would give them her first name but each person would insist on hearing her last name. After providing her last name, most companies she’d called would say that there were no openings. She recalls once trying an experiment. She tried calling the same places that had denied her except this time, she used a non-Black last name, of Indian or Syrian origin instead of her own. In this case, some of these places reported having openings. I forget the part of the story where my friend turned up to the job interviews. But I can imagine the scene, the mix of confusion, disappointment, and embarrassment that would creep over the interviewer’s face. 

In 2019, a doctor was dismissed and called to apologize after a phone recording leaked in which he made negative remarks about Black people and indicated clear bias in his preference in hiring other Indian people.  If you look hard enough, you can still find the recording. His remarks are so sincere it’s almost funny.

In 2015, a Board member of the Chaguaramas Development Authority (CDA) was fired for racist remarks. The newspaper article reads that the board member used the n-word and other insensitive remarks in a post and subsequent comments on Facebook. I could not find the post.

Just last year, one of our former Prime Ministers, Kamla Persad-Bissessar, berated the current Prime Minister, Dr. Keith Rowley, at a public meeting of her political party. She said that unlike Dr. Rowley, she had inherited a name from her ancestors, whereas Dr. Rowley had the inherited the name of a slavemaster. The clip still exists. Persad-Bissessar speaks to a cheering crowd in the clip. 

These stories are like nursery rhymes. They have a predictable formula; “In (insert time), (insert person in authority) was (insert action taken) for (insert racist transgression).” You can make your own! 

They remind me of films shot in black and white or in sepia. The photos of the civil rights march in America and Martin Luther King Jr. They seem oddly nostalgic. Not of this time. And yet, here these stories are in my present on my 2023 internet, in full color. 

In every public instance, the story is told for a few days in local newspapers, and on social media. The perpetrator might apologize or might not. Within a few weeks the stories are harder to find. When you google them. results no longer emerge on the first page. They become part of online newspaper “archives.” Eventually they become anecdotes we recall on our verandahs over sweaty glasses of liquor. 

You know how you might be sitting around with a group of mostly Black friends and a non-Black person says the n-word and you all feel it but don’t say anything. Because here different nah boy, and he different too, he grow up with we, he does talk like we and smoke the same weed. You know that feeling? 

The experience of anti-Blackness in Trinidad is primarily ephemeral; things seen, heard, believed, and felt. But the experiences are rarely tangible if ever; they remain relegated to the written or spoken word, subject to change and reinvention as they pass from green Whatsapp bubble to green Whatsapp bubble. 

“Here there is much to tell, an archive of life stories rots in the tropics. Some seem mere fiction—likely stories—but most are the truest accounts of unbelievably surreal lives. Here fact is fiction and fiction fact. We live according to what we are willing to believe in any given moment.”¹

I am in my parents’ car heading home from school. I have just told them a story about some mistreatment I experienced at school by a teacher that I cannot remember. Perhaps I was treated unfairly in some way or spoken to inappropriately. What race they was? my father asks. And I do not remember what I answer. There are many memories like this. If I confirm it is a Black person, my parents would use my experience to illustrate how Black people hate our own kind and can’t stand to see another Black person succeed. If the person is light-skinned, they would become an example of prevailing colorist attitudes. If the person is Indian or Syrian or white, the story would become a way to warn me against the prevalence of racism against Black people and my vulnerability to it. Every which way, I learn that I am Black and therefore susceptible to mistreatment by all people. 

As a child, I became dismissive of racism as an explanation of things. I genuinely felt as though times had changed. None of my non-Black friends in school had ever used the n-word (in a serious way). I had never felt unfairly treated in a way that was clear and definite. So, I concluded that the racism my parents and family members spoke of was a projection of a past they’d experienced.

My grandfather, for most of his life, worked in the cane fields. He was called Driver by most of his friends until the day he died because he worked as a driver, picking up the cane and transporting it. It is likely his ancestors worked in the same fields, before we were free. It is likely they shared the same name.

My father’s family’s complexity is something easy to ignore; he and all of his siblings are Black. Somewhere in their lineage there are non-Black people. This we know again from stories and photos. In family lore, my father’s grandmother is known for her grey eyes and her light, almost white skin. She had children with a Black man, and so did her daughter, my grandmother. My father often recalled, with fondness, how my great-grandmother would sometimes, at random, blurt out to herself, What all these niggers doing in my house? The point of humor for my father was the irony of  all these dark-skinned children and grand-children belonging to her. 

My grandmother would bring back sweets at the end of her days on the cane fields for my father and his siblings when he was younger. Sometimes, when I remember this, I wonder if this was my memory at all or a memory of a similar scene in Camara Laye’s memoir L’Enfant noir in which the child remembers similarly, how his mother would return from the cane fields, worn and sometimes with snacks or strips of cane to suck.² How many of us share this memory? Maybe the memory is mine or my father’s or all of ours. Maybe this is what history really is, a memory we’re all stuck to. 

In a picture on my paternal grandmother’s chest of drawers, my great-grandmother sits in a gallery. The yard behind her is all beige dirt. She is in a grayish floral pattern dress. Her legs are open in a way that reminds me of my other aunties. Everything is beige, including her skin. Every time we visit my granny her skin color comes up, the picture comes out, and we worship for a few minutes, then it returns to its almost-altar on the chest of drawers next to discarded receipts, some forgotten makeup.

here

“. . . But the past does not exist independently from the present. Indeed, the past is only past because there is a present, just as I can point to something over there only because I am here. But nothing is inherently over there or here. In that sense, the past has no content. The past—or more accurately, pastness—is a position. Thus, in no way can we identify the past as past.”³ 

Sometimes, instances of anti-Blackness I have experienced in Trinidad come back to me in wisps, like the time my mom and I had to pick my choice of secondary schools that I would go to after the national exam. Despite being at the top of my class, my Indian teacher suggests that the choices my mother had selected were out of reach. Aim a little lower, he suggests, not in those words. To which my mother refuses. I do not know if my memories are so little because they did not happen, or because I do not remember. Perhaps these kinds of memories do not stick to me the way they stuck to my parents. Maybe this is why they throw their memories at me, to make sure they stick to me too; this trove of shared memory and the truths it points to. 

I learned of racism, the civil rights movement, the Black Power movement, and even now Black Lives Matter protests as far pasts in other places. Even slavery was taught primarily with books littered with hand-drawn colonial-era illustrations. Whether I am listening to a racist rant on Trini TikTok, or being aggressively treated by a police officer in the US, the feeling always resembles a sensation of not being where and when I thought I was. I lose ground. 

I am in Massachusetts for school, walking home. A white man walks past me with a girl. Presumably to impress the girl, he starts running away from me, saying something about calling the police. He is laughing. And I remember the n-word jokes non-Black people would make in the secondary school I went to back home, the ones I overheard or saw, in which a Black person might pretend to be a gangster and a non-Black person might pretend to be the victim. The premise was the same.

I am in America again. My friend is driving, and the police pulls us over. I sit in the back. Through the rolled-up window, the white police officer tells me to put my seatbelt on. I do not hear him the first time. He raises his voice and puts his hand on his gun. My friend in the front seat, a Black woman, quickly rolls the window down so I can hear him. As I put my seatbelt on, I notice the officer tightens his grip on the gun and adjusts his stance. I am a Black man. 

In 2020, soon after the unjust killing of George Floyd, police officers in Trinidad murdered three men in the disenfranchised community of Morvant/Laventille. The majority of community members there are Black and descendants of enslaved people. In that same year, local newspapers published statistics that indicated an 86 percent rise in police killings. The majority of people who had been killed by police officers were (and probably still are) of African descent. A 2022 report on human rights by the US State Department highlighted police impunity as a prevalent issue in Trinidad and Tobago, citing the same incident along with others including the murder of Jamie Walker by an off-duty police officer and the murder of two men while in police custody. 

I attended the Black Lives Matter protest held in Port of Spain outside the American embassy in solidarity with protests in America. Standing six feet apart, we chanted Black Lives Matter in the Queen’s Park Savannah, a large expanse of flat green land that used to be a sugar plantation. We yelled, say their names! and spoke the names of victims of police brutality. We called those names with vigor. One member of the protests spoke and encouraged us to say the names of local victims too. Was it reticence I detected in our voices? The names we called I remember sounded foreign, because they were Trinidadian names, not the names we heard and read on social media. 

The local police service’s website indicates that the police force was founded by colonial settlers in the late 1500s. The entry then skips to the developments of the police force after the abolition of slavery in 1838. Later on, the website playfully mentions that in the 1800s, “The only weapon the policeman carried was his truncheon which was four feet long. Then violence would be met with violence, and here a local tradition of the police ‘beating first and arresting after’ was given birth.” A truncheon is described by the Cambridge online dictionary as a “thick heavy stick.” 

The website fails to mention anything about the police force’s function between 1592 and 1838. We are left to wonder what might they have been doing those 200+ years? Before reliable historical records and before independent organizations to keep police forces in check. I’m sure we can imagine who they held in those early jail cells.  

Once in Europe, a white man tells me he’s only been to Africa once. The country he had been to was Algeria. He goes on to criticize Algerian people for the way they seem stuck in the past, still angry, he explained, at the French for all they did; colonization, exploitation, the usual. Their palpable anger made his visit uncomfortable. He said he would not visit again. 

Another time in an airport in Europe another white man bumps into me in one of those airport stores. He actually puts his hands together and bows. He says, you’re beautiful. He starts shaking his head. He wears a peach shirt similar to the color of his skin under the warm store lights of the kiosk. You all are so much better than us, he says. I smile. Your hearts are more open. I bet there’s so many more of you in heaven than us. He laughs. I laugh too. Of course, I try to soothe his guilt. 

People in Trinidad, Black and otherwise have expressed the same sentiment. We not in slavery days is a common adage among the lesser educated. Among the educated, the sentiment takes a more sinister approach; it’s more complicated than that.  More complicated than enslaved and enslaver, than Black and White. But they share the same sentiment; the temporal belief that where we are now and here is not where we were then and there and therefore requires different language and approach. 

How could I explain that maybe that’s not how time works for us? In fact, how could I explain that their concept of the past was flawed, that time travel does exist and not in the ways we imagine, with neat portals that transport one from here to there. But that for us, time travel is an involuntary condition of our existence because all times cling to our bodies. For us, time is too sticky to shake off. 

I am in Johannesburg once visiting a café in 2023. Where I sit, I can see the entire dismal restaurant with its leather seats and empty set tables. Every member of the wait staff wears a uniform of black pants with black short sleeve shirts and black aprons. All of them are Black. At one point, a white man, the only other person there with an open laptop, tries to help me find the outlet. His presence there is comforting. I feel less odd pulling out my laptop and doing work. Not too long into my stay another white man approaches the table of my fellow laptop-user. They speak a language I do not recognize. One wait staff member rushes to the table to take orders, but not in the way I saw them do with other customers. There is a difference in their gestures I cannot name. When the electricity goes out, the white man gets up promptly and goes to the back, I assume to make sure the generator would be turned back on. He is the owner. Or maybe the manager. There are two white men in this café in South Africa being waited on by only Black people. I feel I am not playing the correct role in this scene. I almost get up and start looking for my uniform. 

“They (anybody not Black) can’t stand to see a nigger happy or free.” (My parents and Black people everywhere, since time.)

According to NASA, “A black hole is a place in space where gravity pulls so much that even light cannot get out. The gravity is so strong because matter has been squeezed into a tiny space.” Scientists have long theorized that Black holes bend time and space such that they might make time travel or even superfast space travel possible.

In P-Valley, a white businesswoman tells one of the show’s protagonists that “water got good memory . . . It always flows to where it once ran. That also goes for power.”⁴

I would like to say that my heres, Trinidad, the plantation, were also theres, an obscure residence in Europe. My presents, 2023, also resembled pasts, 18-whatever-the-fuck. Everybody remembers things, but it seems to me that my Blackness makes remembering involuntary. Our bodies collect the weight of things, we suck them in. Time cannot help but stretch and slow and cling.

falling

Blackness has long been more than skin color or phenotypical features and understood as an intersectional reality of embodiment, socioeconomic, geographic and political placement. In Trinidad and beyond, writers and artists contend that to be Black is, for example, to occupy a political place of criminality or to live in the constant face of death.⁵ Other theorists consider Blackness an economic political place that depends on one’s vulnerability to the state.⁶ 

In the series Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown, the late Anthony Bourdain presents a look at Trinidad’s culture through its cuisine. Bourdain’s episode attempts to encapsulate our racial multiplicity, by interviewing members of each major racial group, Indians, Black people and Syrian-Lebanese folks. 

In the episode, a well-known entrepreneur and other members of his family host Bourdain. The table at the entrepreneur’s house was set with an array of Middle Eastern dishes. A veritable feast. At one point one of the women said she just had to drizzle some olive oil over one of the dishes. You simply can’t have it without oil. Anthony Bourdain comments that the Syrian-Lebanese are the smallest racial group of the country, and one of the members of the family makes a point to emphasize, a finger in the air, but the most powerful. After which he goes on to complain that there used to be a large middle class which served as a buffer between the haves and the have nots, but that with the diminution of the middle class, the lower class were getting less manageable. 

Hearing this brings me back to my first lesson on the Haitian Revolution back in high school, when I learned that both whites and free people of color were invested in keeping the African-born enslaved pacified and that prior to the revolution rebellion had increased.

The blatant boastfulness of the entrepreneur’s statement struck me. He knows, was my first thought. They know. Which might seem obvious because everybody knows. People here say Syrians run everything all the time. We also know that Black people are the most disempowered. Or maybe it is something we assume and reify. But even the disempowerment of Black people is hazy. For all my attempts, I cannot find information on how power (business ownership, the funding of political parties for instance) is disseminated throughout the country in racial terms. Yet, we know. They know. So how do we know? 

“The ultimate mark of power may be its invisibility; the ultimate challenge, the exposition of its roots.”⁷

In 2019, a mentor of mine shows me a recent news interview in which a young Black dark-skinned comedian is “roasted” by an Indian newscaster. On looking at the video I find it hard to pinpoint exactly what is racist about the incident. The boy, dressed in a red shirt opened onto a white t-shirt and black jeans, looks the part of the comedian. Whereas the newscaster, dressed in a suit and tie looks his part as well. The newscaster roasted the boy for the way he was dressed, his unattractiveness, and his failure to make good jokes.

The TV station dismissed the newscaster for “unprofessionalism” and eventually apologized. Even after my mentor tried explaining, I still don’t quite get it. I believe anti-black racism occurred, but I cannot point the viewer to where or when it occurred in the frame. I know it has something to do with classism, with an abuse of taken-for-granted racialized power structures between a TV host and a comedian.  

In a focus group I conduct in 2019, my colleague and I interview randomly selected people about their perceptions and beliefs about masculinity. In one such focus group, several participants, of different races, staunchly agree that India, is in fact, in Africa. 

Once, my non-Black teacher tells us a story about an experience she’d had as a young woman traveling for the first time. The details escape me but they do not matter. She brings this up as we discussed some racial tension that had emerged at the time. She had walked away from her experience with the conclusion that we were all Black outside of Trinidad and Tobago. A conclusion she now shares with us, her class of Black people. She is trying to say, we are all Black somewhere. Why we fighting up amongst each other? It does not matter. 

The digital allows us to consume ourselves. It also allows non-Black people to consume us. The voices and gesticulations of Black creators are frequently reproduced on social media platforms, most recently on TikTok and Instagram which allow Black voices to be overlaid onto non-Black bodies; a form of racial erasure.

As recent as 2020, an Equal Opportunity Commission aimed at legislating against racist comments was established. A local columnist advocated for protections against Anti-Indian racism by suggesting that, Black people’s historical political power since Independence disqualifies Black people here from being considered racially disadvantaged. This is a common occurrence – it seems as though the national consciousness cannot accept that many kinds of people can be disadvantaged at the same time. We seem to always hearken back to the question—who has it worse? Which I’ve actively tried to avoid in this essay. A more helpful question might be what experiences do you have? How are your people also disenfranchised by these systems we’ve inherited from Europe? How are our experiences different, where do they connect, and how might we support each other?

I cannot count the amount of times I have been asked if I have a BBC on Grindr by non-Black men in Trinidad. Abroad too. Some of you might wonder, what does having a large cock have to do with anti-Blackness, that seems like pro-Blackness to me? To this reader I would say, in the sexual domain, as a Black queer man, I have to remind the non-Black people I interact with that I am not, in fact, Mandingo or Rhyheim Shabazz or the unnamed precolonial African men with third legs in that one black and white picture that circulates every now and again with the caption “Now you see why they hate us.”  

Dr. Marisa Parham talks about unexpectedly “falling into the archive of my own memory . . . Which is to say, this is what I heard. This is what I saw. This is what I felt.”⁸

As I research for this paper, I have had to read again the names of so many murdered Black people here and abroad. These names remind me that there are millions more. Though imperceptible, the memories hold palpable weight. 

Anti-Blackness can be like this, falling into memory. This falling is inward. The archive is in us, in the wide dense expanse of meanings our bodies carry in this world. The archive grows and contracts, but never leaves.

dog yampee

It feels like, in an exploration such as this one, to collate such memories and public memories, I attempt to undo a kind of national level forgetfulness. To suggest that our susceptibility to amnesia, or even to narratives that erase the difference of anti-Blackness from other forms of racialized oppression, is in fact a way to ensure the perpetuity of anti-Blackness. 

In my conversations with non-Black or privileged Black people here, I’ve witnessed some exasperation with any insistence on conversations about race, the feeling that Black people here are now responsible for their own oppression, or the feeling that the conversation is more complex than simply anti-Black racism thereby precluding the necessity of talking about anti-Black racism or the feeling that racism is an American conversation, specific to Black folk that live in proximity to white people. It seems everywhere in this country, non-Black people and some Black people (let’s be real) find it hard to admit that anti-Black racism exists, and can exist in a place like this, on its own, without the need to include every other oppressed person.  

Dr. Parham writes about the glitch as something that occurs when code does not compile correctly. A particular algorithm for example works to produce a particular effect, the scroll, the little heart that turns red when you tap. A glitch occurs when the heart does not turn red, or when the scroll becomes repetitive for example. Dr. Parham writes about how Black people live in the glitch. I would argue that the algorithm of education, culture, and public discourse, particularly in Trinidad and Tobago, is an algorithm designed to make anti-Black racism appear as though it does not exist. As such, anti-Blackness here is self-destructive and reproductive at the same time. It propagates itself by rendering itself imperceptible. The weight of its perception is left entirely to those who experience the brunt of its force.

“Caste is insidious and therefore powerful because it is not hatred, it is not necessarily personal. It is the worn grooves of comforting routines and unthinking expectations, patterns of a social order that have been in place for so long that it looks like the natural order of things.”⁹

It is 2014. I am going out with my friends. They are all Black and gay and effeminate. My father says, be careful eh, before I leave the house. Which could mean any number of things, maybe use a condom or perhaps, if anybody calls you a f*gg*t, call me but mostly it means don’t get killed. 

It is 2023. My mother calls me to tell me about a murder that happened. A popular TikToker was gunned down. You did know him? She asks. She thinks I know him because he is Black, effeminate, and gay. I say no. Yeah that make me think of you. She thinks of me because I am also Black, effeminate, and gay. When you here, [in Trinidad] I does worry so much more than when you away [abroad]. The man is dead, in no small part, because he is Black, effeminate, and gay.

It is night in New York. I am far from home but not too far, having met a fellow Trini for a birthday dinner. This Trini friend has other Trini friends who she introduces me to. We talk about all the things you ask a fellow immigrant, how long have you been here, what did you come for. I say wow, when they mentioned they got married. I am paying more attention to the woman who is the more talkative of the two, recanting a tiresome episode of straight-couple-in-the-big-city. Later in the night, we’re a few drinks in, she asks me where I am from and I mention being from Morvant, Morvant being a predominantly Black community known mostly for crime. She scoffs a bit. I am taken aback, usually people of her race and socioeconomic background know to reel it in a bit with people like me. She then begins saying things about people from there that I had heard before but never so clearly. For a moment, I am taken back to a Jamaican music video I saw of a woman who changed her clothes and face and makeup for an interview, doesn’t get the job and then returns to her place, a ghetto I had never seen before but recognized, because it looks the same as the one I grew up in—the galvanized fences, the broken roads. For the first time, I notice this person is, in this place, simply white, the commonality of national identity fails. Her New York and mine are not the same, her Trinidad and mine are also not the same. In this street in which we stand I am more likely to die innocent of any crime by the force of police. In the country we remember, I am also more likely to die innocent of any crime by the force of police. 

Anti-Blackness, more than the decimation of Black bodies or Blackness, is reflexive; it also insists on the death of its own memory. This might explain why conversations about anti-Black racism are so often rendered invisible or inaudible, why the conversation never moves beyond it exists, it exists! In academic language, both Blackness and anti-Blackness are relegated to the realm beyond the physically tangible, between the here and the there, the past and present and future, a place of unknowns and therefore a place beyond the reach of legislation, policy, and justice (purr). In other words, anti-Black racism is like spirit; unless you’re Black, you need dog yampee to see it.

NASA: “Because no light can get out, people can’t see black holes. They are invisible.”  

“Despite the deathliness that particularly urban poor Black people continue to experience in the anglophone Caribbean and beyond, Black continues to denote a determination to live—an aliveness even when presumably dead—and within that living rests the potentiality of a radically different liberated world coming to fruition.”¹⁰

Time is an algorithm coded to obscure the past and protect the powerful from confronting their sins and their accountability for the future. They coded geography to obscure other people and places, render them less human, less here, and more coloniable. These algorithms glitch in the Black experience. In our experiences of anti-Blackness, heres and theres collide, nows and thens. Time and space take different, non-linear shapes within our bodies. These glitches make memory involuntary, the weight of history coagulates wherever memory occurs. If light cannot escape the archive of our memory, how can we? 

So what’s the point? The experience of anti-Blackness here is like a Black hole. Like Black holes, the experience of our memory traps gravity and light and history. Like Black holes, the expanse of our memory, our capacity to rearrange time and geography remains theoretical and mythical to those who do not experience it themselves. This vast, unfathomable operation demands our sight, rides our very skins. 

I would like to end on a positive note. Alexis Pauline-Gumbs, in her appearance on the podcast How to Survive the End of the World, speaks about how, in order to imagine freedom, Harriet Tubman had to imagine us, a future she could not see.¹¹ Maybe Tubman also had to imagine a past in which chattel capture never swallowed generations of African bodies whole. I would say that this makes us powerful, that we, more than others, can flip through time like a box of old records, somehow use this to our advantage. But I do not know if we can. And I am not here to inspire you. 

I just don’t know what else to do with all this memory.

Notes