In Trinidad and Tobago, as with so many other parts of the world, the status of children’s education, other people’s safety, and the rights and dignity of communities are being informed by people who couldn’t be arsed to develop a thoughtful, Compassionate and informed opinion. Instead, the power to shape what kind of world we all grow up and live in rests almost entirely in the hands of groups of people moved by their own frightful imaginations, drawing real weapons at hallucinations, and more than willing to shoot into the real people that lie behind their falsehoods. Or perhaps worse - some people’s ability to live a safe, dignified life in the world we share depends on the decisions of people who are just straight-up lying. Lying about their hatred, lying about their love, lying about their care and their faithfulness and even their anger. For them, this deceit is not a sin but rather the key to salvation, the virtue they willingly wield against those who would speak and live their harmless truth in the open.

I don’t care about bigots and their feelings until bigots have that one feeling that irks me - audacity. Every other time, I’m too busy caring about the people they say they care about. The folks who care so much about the sanctity of girls’ spaces aren’t the ones who actually volunteer at girls’ schools. The folks who care so much about women and girls’ safety never attended (or crafted) gender based violence trainings to protect them, or engaged legislators in letter and in person to prevent their harm. The folks who say they ‘actually do want trans people to be safe and treated equally’ aren’t advocating when they’re legislated against, assaulted in private and in public, experience bigotry and discrimination that pushes them to suicide.

Because they don’t care. And it’s impossible to have meaningful, careful, caring conversations with people who just don’t care.

In 2019, Liu Yifei, the actress who plays Mulan in the recently released remake, make a social media statement standing with Hong Kong police. The same police who are brutalizing and rounding up protesters outside of protocol, and who have received numerous complaints about arresting citizens without warrants or providing identification, and unnecessarily harming and endangering civilian lives.

When we think about justice, for better or for worse, we often think of a handful of people and spaces whose responsibility it is to provide that for us. We think of the police, the courts, the government, the infrastructure that builds up the thing we call the ‘justice system’. It’s in the name, we think, and therefore we’re expected to get that thing there. It doesn’t matter whether we don’t trust those people or spaces, or whether we have a complicated relationship with them, or even if we don’t have the same access as others. That’s where justice is, and we have to find our way there or, as the Trinis would say ‘crapeau smoke yuh pipe’.

The issue is, though, that for many people, that’s not at all where justice lives. And, even more importantly, it’s not the same place as where the people who need it live. And that’s a problem.

This might be a harsh thing to say, but perhaps black folks making black films isn’t enough? The black stories that we deserve are thoughtful, deliberate (and maybe, perhaps, hopeful) ones that call us to action, bring our gaze to injustice, and carve a path out of it for us. If we can’t give ourselves justice in our own fiction, then where will we find it? (SPOILERS!! BEWARE!!)

There’s been an ongoing conversation about ‘political correctness’ and ‘cancel culture’ ‘killing comedy’. The fact that all of those phrases kind of had to exist in quotes is telling, to me, but I want to examine it just a bit further. The comment by comedians and those who enjoy comedy worldwide is that they should have the unaffected right to do what they are called to do - make people laugh. And that argument is compelling in its simplicity. But it’s also simple enough that it includes things in its definition that perhaps it should not…

As a theatre director, poet and writer , I’ve come to learn a thing or two about suspending disbelief. After all, my job kinda depends on it. What folks might not know, though, is that my experience in that particular aspect of theatre actually predates me ever setting foot near a stage. It was, in fact, the first time I decided to stop stepping foot in church. And today, after reading an…interesting article by local Christian writer Akilah Holder, I’m reminded of all of those feelings.

I want to open this blog with a question that I hope makes us all think a little about how we engage in debates about other people's lives;

Do you think having an opinion is enough to determine how someone else lives?