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.

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.

I’ve been wallowing in the challenging bits of the literary community I’ve been eager to enter. Most notably of them is the fact that, like any other community, there is just as much likelihood that the people in it are harmful to those who trust and Love them. Perhaps they, like the ocean’s waves, are inevitable, and are more than powerful to pull down those who dare to tread among them.

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?

I struggled with the concept of my piece for the First Citizens National Poetry Slam finals this year. Not because I didn’t know what I wanted to say, but because I had no idea of how I wanted to say it. Even as I went on stage, I wasn’t entirely certain I had all the words.

I have a few more now.