Monthly Archives: June 2022

It was curiosity about his own familys fraught history of migration, from India to Trinidad, that persuaded Andil Gosine, a curator, artist and professor, to begin thinking about ways to connect with other artists who shared his history.

Gosines great-great-grandparents went there as indentured laborers, part of a wave of over half a million migrants from South Asia and, to a much lesser extent, China, who came to the Caribbean from 1838 to 1920.

These men and women, desperately impoverished, were brought to replace people of African origin who had been forced to work on plantations until slavery was abolished in the British Empire. The new arrivals entered into what they were told were short-term contracts that, in reality, offered only the slimmest possibility of freedom. Many had no idea where they were being taken. Their working conditions were dire and women in particular were subject to sexual abuse and forced marriage. Few migrants ever managed to make it back to their countries; they stayed on, becoming an integral part of their new homes.

Gosine, a guest curator at the Ford Foundation Gallery, has highlighted the experiences of people like his forbears who, despite the violence and economic bondage of their lives in the Caribbean, created new forms of culture and new ways of thinking that endure today. The exhibition, Everything Slackens in a Wreck, is a lush introduction to an international and multigenerational group of female artists of Asian-Caribbean origin: Margaret Chen, Andrea Chung, Wendy Nanan and Kelly Sinnapah Mary.

The idea began brewing a decade ago when Gosine, who teaches environmental arts and justice at York University in Toronto, visited Caribbean: Crossroads of the World, a show presented simultaneously at the El Museo del Barrio, the Studio Museum, and the Queens Museum.

I was struck that among the hundreds of works on view, the only evidence of an Indo-Caribbean presence in the islands was a photograph titled Anonymous Coolie Woman by a French photographer, Gosine said in an interview. (Coolie is an outdated, pejorative term for an Asian indentured worker, though some among the younger generation are reclaiming it.) But one of the largest immigrant communities outside these museums doors, in New York City, is Indo-Caribbean, he pointed out. New York is home to the largest Indo-Caribbean diaspora in the world.

Gosines goal was not to organize a survey of Asian-Caribbean art, or an exhibition about indentured servitude. He wanted to find work that embodied the beauty that resulted from these complicated histories of immigration and cultural mixing.

In 2009, Andrea Chung, 43, a San Diego-based artist whose Trinidadian and Jamaican family lines include Black, French, Chinese, Arawak, and possibly Indian ancestors, traveled to Mauritius, an island nation in the Indian Ocean that was a stop on the indentured labor circuit for Asian workers. She wanted to learn more about indentureship and about the workings of the global sugar industry, which drove such migrations.

I was doing a tour of the sugar chimneys the brick structures used to burn the scraps of the sugar cane harvesting process, she recalled, and I noticed weaver birds had made nests out of the sugar cane leaves. It struck me as ironic that the product that destroyed so many peoples lives and shifted the world in so many different ways could become this new creation.

Thirteen years later, Chung has revisited that memory with House of the Historians (2022), a sculptural installation fashioned of sugar cane and reeds commissioned for the show. She taught herself how to weave to recreate the distinctive apartment nests of the birds, she said. Its such a great image about how we share this history but we also build this community and culture out of it.

Around 100 egg-like baskets are lashed together at the gallery, dripping with narrow, fibrous sugar cane leaves and hanging above a heap of sugar cane bark. Sourcing the cane products was a four-month process, complicated by Covid; in the end, Gosine had to phone someone living in his grandmothers village in Trinidad to send bags of sugar cane to him. Chung laughed when she revealed that every time she touched the material she would break out in hives: I am literally allergic to the material that my ancestors were brought over here to produce.

Three large, striking paintings by the Guadeloupean artist Kelly Sinnapah Mary, 41, are part of her series Notebook of No Return: Memories (2022), that she began in 2015 while researching her family tree. When she was a child, she said in a Zoom interview, she assumed she was of African origin, if she thought about it at all. My parents, especially my mother, didnt distinguish between Afro-Caribbean or Indo-Caribbean she felt we were all one people, she said. They didnt really talk to us about the culture of our ancestors or speak their languages, and the distinct histories of those groups werent taught in schools. It was only when she was older that she realized that her heritage could be traced back to South India.

A mural-size triptych depicts Sinnapah Mary dressed as a bride, surrounded by spiky vegetation, her skin covered with images drawn from Hindu mythology, European fairy tales and local folklore. Flanking it are portraits of her mother and father, their skin similarly adorned. The works speak to the Creole nature of Guadeloupean culture: Both the pastiche of stories and the plants sansevieria (snake plant) and alocasia (elephant ear) that came from Africa and South Asia with the enslaved and then with indentured laborers.

Her small sculptures made of paper, metal, mortar and acrylic paint, from Notebook of No Return: Childhood of Sanbras (2021), are hilarious and charming, disturbing and angry by turns: a three-eyed schoolgirl in pigtails rides a tiger (a reference to the Hindu goddess Durga), a naked girl lies prone with a plant growing out of her bare buttocks, and a severed, Mary Jane-shod leg is carried away by a small, furry animal. What I really love about Kellys work is its honesty, Gosine said. It recognizes something fundamental about Caribbean Creole culture, which is the simultaneous presence of pleasure and violence.

Wendy Nanan, 67, who lives in Trinidad, and Margaret Chen, 71, who is based in Jamaica have had long careers in their home countries, but less visibility in the United States or internationally, which Gosine was determined to correct. Much of Nanans work alludes to the mixing of cultures that typifies the Caribbean. Idyllic Marriage, a papier-mch altarpiece from 1990, shows Krishna marrying the Virgin Mary, who seems to tremble in fear.

The Indian indentured, hoping to move their children forward in a colonial society, adopted the masters clothing, holding Hindu pujas at home while attending Presbyterian Sunday school, Nanan said. So the creolized callaloo society was formed. She was referring to the signature dish of stewed greens served throughout the Caribbean.

Chen traces her familys origins to another form of economic migration: Her Hakka Chinese grandfather left southern China in the late 1800s, arriving in Haiti and then Panama before going on to Jamaica, where he set up grocery stores and a furniture-making business that she alludes to in her installation, Cross-Section of Labyrinth (1993).

During a painstaking, two-year-long process, she laminated thin layers of wood, drawn from what she calls the leavings from the furniture workshop floor, into a floral motif that sits on the floor, 20 feet across. She carved the wood and embedded it with shells. The remnants evoke parts of the self that are left behind as we move and change but the artist reclaims those bits and pieces here, turning them into something new, fragile, and beautiful.

Along with the four artists, Gosine has included a sound piece for the Ford Foundations soaring, plant-filled atrium in collaboration with an organization called Jahajee Sisters. It was formed in response to the high rate of gender-based violence in the Indo-Caribbean community, which the groups co-director, Simone Jhingoor, characterized as part of the long shadow that indentureship has cast on the community. The groups name translates as boat sisters, a term used by the migrants to describe the close relationships that formed between people who found themselves side by side on the long journey from South Asia to the West Indies.

Gosine asked the Jahajee Sisters two questions: What brings you joy? and What brings you comfort? In response, 25 members of the group sent in sound clips ranging from the whistle of a teakettle to the sound of a toddler singing. Theres no way we cant anchor to joy, Jhingoor said.

The exhibitions title comes from a line in a poem by Khal Torabully, a Mauritian poet. The first thing that comes to mind for me when I think of the phrase everything slackens in a wreck is the kind of loosening that often accompanies disaster, Gosine said. Yes, when indentured laborers arrived, conditions were terrible. But at the same time, caste fell apart. Gender relations were vastly reorganized. People were forced to renegotiate the terms of their relationships.

For Chung, too, there is beauty in the spaces opened up by such pain. The trans-Atlantic slave trade ripped people away from their homes and their cultures and their traditions, and then indentureship did essentially the same thing, she said. And yet, through all of that messiness and trauma, cultures were formed.

Everything Slackens in a Wreck

Through Aug. 20, Ford Foundation Gallery, 320 East 43rd Street, Manhattan, 212-573-5000, fordfoundation.org.

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From the Wreckage of Caribbean Migration, a New Kind of Beauty - The New York Times

The events of every"Pirates of the Caribbean" movie are kickstarted due to the main characters' involvement in some ancient sea curse that threatens their lives. In "The Curse of the BlackPearl," a curse related to pirate treasure has Captain Barbossa's men gunning for Will Turner and Elizabeth Swann. And in the second movie, "Dead Man's Chest," Jack Sparrow receives a cursed black mark on his hand, symbolizing his unpaid debt to the villainous Davy Jones.

"At World's End" reveals that Davy Jones himself suffers a cursed life as the captain of the Flying Dutchman, a bit of maritime magic that eventually transfers to Will.In the fourth movie,"On Stranger Tides," it's the villainous Blackbeard who's cursed to lose his life as foretold by a prophecy. It falls to Jack to work with Blackbeard's daughter, Angelica, to save her father by getting him to the fabled Fountain of Youth.

Finally, in the fifth "Pirates" movie,"Dead Men Tell No Tales," an entire ship full of cursed men led by Captain Salazar are looking for Jack to settle an old score. In other words, you can't watch a "Pirates of the Caribbean"movie without stumbling across some sort of spell.

See the article here:

Things That Happen In Every Pirates Of The Caribbean Movie - Looper

A simple family DNA test kit cant provide a lot of answers for Americans whose ancestors did not come from Europe.

Many of these cultures didnt have paper records preferring instead to use oral history and many people of color who came from African and Caribbean countries were enslaved and not included in usual historical records.

Thats why TikTok user Jels (@parttimebooknerd) account is so worth following.

Jel is not a professional genealogist, and actually holds a full-time job working as a nurse, but she was still curious about her family history. After about a year of looking into her Caribbean ancestry, Jel realized how complicated the process was. So she decided to start posting about her findings and her recommendations on TikTok for other Caribbean Americans looking to learn about their roots.

But its not just a labor-intensive process. Jel notes in one of her first videos that theres an emotional element to reading so much about colonization and enslavement that Caribbean Americans should be prepared for before diving in.

Make sure that youre mentally, emotionally and, most importantly, spiritually ready to find or not find whatever information you might come across, Jel advised. Just remember that everything our ancestors went through got us to be who we are today.

For viewers who have never looked into their ancestry, Jel had two tips to start out with.

Tip No. 1 is knowing the history of your country, she said in a video. Tip No. 2 is knowing who colonized your country.

Jels family is from Belize, which is on the eastern coast of Central America and was colonized by the British in 1862, so she read up on both countries before starting her research. One of the most helpful resources she found was church records.

They were really good at keeping birth records, death records, marriage records, she explained.

Family Tree Magazine, a resource Jel references in her video, also noted that missionaries were big in the Caribbean from as early as 1736 and those churches would have kept records of members.

Enslavement and colonization also pose another problem to tracing ancestry a lot of names were changed.

For example, Jel was able to find her third great-grandmother, who was listed as Mary Williams Squires on her Ancestry.com family tree, but couldnt go back further than that because Mary was not her name until she was an indentured servant.

Mary is from India and she was then brought to Africa, Jel explained. I want it to be noted that Mary Williams was not her real name; that was her given indentured servant name by her British master.

Jel did find her third great-grandmothers real last name but still hit a roadblock.

I will never know anything about my Indian ancestry because we dont really know her real name, she said.

Jel also wasnt sure how her third great-grandfather Charles, who was allegedly from Barbados, met Mary in Belize. She said she even grew up hearing different stories from her family members about how they met.

One thing about Mary is that she couldnt read or write, Jel added. Thinking about somebody in your family not being able to read or write and knowing why they cant read or write it kinda hurts the soul.

The emotional and mental toll, as Jel mentioned in her initial advice, can be exhausting. In a follow-up video, she recommended taking time off from doing research.

Finding out about your ancestry is taxing mentally, she said. Theres just a lot of processing that has to happen while youre doing this.

In other videos, Jel suggested ancestry resources for specific Caribbean countries like Jamaica, Barbados, Grenada, Haiti, Trinidad, the Dominican Republic, Cuba and Puerto Rico to name a few.

The videos comments sections are flooded with requests for more information and thanks for Jel taking the time to find the resources.

Thank you so much for this, one viewer wrote. Both of my parents are from [Grenada].

How exciting! someone else said. i got fam in Belize that ive Never met so thank you so much for the info!

Thank you so much! a commenter said. Me and my mom were talking about looking into our family tree yesterday, but had no idea where to search.

It was fate you came across my video then! Jel responded. hope you start getting into it.

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TikToker offers resources for Caribbean Americans looking to trace their ancestry - In The Know

The school girls who attended the Girls in Aviation Day event on St. Maarten on Friday received more than they expected when the event was interrupted by the arrival of a pair of U.S. Marine Corps MV-22 Ospreys loading troops on a training mission.Coming after the conclusion of the Caribavia conference this week, the Women in Aviation International (WAI)-sponsored event at Grand Case Airport hosted 30 eleven-year-old students split equally between the Dutch and French sides of the island.

Corporate pilot and WAI member Kristina Tervo explained how to read a sectional chart to an attentive audience of school girls at St Maarten's/Saint Martin's first annual Girls in Aviation Day. (Photo: Curt Epstein/AIN)

Held at the HeliRiviera hangar, it featured 11 stations, including "talk like a pilot" (introducing the phonetic alphabet), marshaling aircraft, learning about air traffic control, and aerodynamics. Veteran corporate aviation pilot Kristina Tervo also demonstrated how to read a sectional chart.

Its very important to get more ladies into aviation in different careers, not only pilots but maintenance and all the other fantastic careers that we have, she told AIN. When I started flying, I really didnt have role models at all so what we want to do here is show that there are so many different possibilities in aviation.

A highlight of the event was the display of a St. Barth Executive PilatusPC-12. For many of the attendees, it was their first time aboard an aircraft.

The event had been under discussion since last years Caribavia, when several conference attendees, including WAI director of communications Kelly Murphy, met with Ludmila de Weeverwho was at the time St. Maarten'sminister of tourism, economic affairs, transportation, and telecommunications, and is now a member of parliamentand lit the spark.

We hope to let girls know that any job is available to them, and they can see through this event that we have females that are in aviation-related jobs on the island already, said de Weever, adding she hopes to make the Girls in Aviation an annual event. By having a WAIchapter locally, its aviation scholarship program is available to help fulfill their dreams.

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Girls In Aviation Day Opens Eyes on Caribbean Island - Aviation International News

Providenciales,16 June 2022Economic ties between Africa and the Caribbean took a strong upward turn this week as the regions premier financial institutionsthe African Development Bank and the Caribbean Development Bankcame together to advance their collaboration with one another.

On Tuesday, African Development Bank Group President Dr. Akinwumi Adesina delivered the prestigious22ndWilliam G. Demas Memorial Lectureat the Caribbean Development Banks 52ndAnnual Meeting in Providenciales, Turks and Caicos.

The long-planned visit by the African Development Bank president to deliver this lecture physically had been on hold for the last two years, with both institutions having had to work virtually on account of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Adesina and his Caribbean Development Bank counterpart, Dr. Hyginus Gene Leon, announced it was an opportune time for the two regions to deepen development and economic ties through a new strategic partnership.

The William G. Demas Memorial Lecture, delivered to a packed audience, was an ideal platform for sharing mutual experiences and tracing pathways for a much closer partnership between Africa and the Caribbean.

Adesinas lecturetitledDevelopment in a Context of Global Challenges: experiences and lessons from the African Development Bankhighlighted shared lessons from the African Banks experience dealing with seven global challenges: the Covid-19 pandemic, climate change, renewable energy and energy transition, food security and Russias invasion of Ukraine, infrastructure, debt and resource mobilization, and inclusive growth for women.

Increased cooperation will entail the two regionswhich share deep historical and cultural tiesworking closely through their multilateral development banks, particularly in agriculture, to create linkages for the African Development Bank to help train and provide capacity for the younger generation in agricultural development.

We must encourage our young people to realize that agriculture is not simply about subsistence farming, the African Development Bank chief stressed.

It is a business, and we should be turning out more and more of what I like to call agripreneurs, he said.

To facilitate a strategic cross-fertilization of transatlantic investments, the African Development Bank head proposed building on the existing Africa Investment Foruma platform set up by the Bank in 2018to establish an Africa and Caribbean Investment Forum.

Adesina met with Turks and Caicos Premier Honorable Charles Washington Misick and key members of his government. They discussed areas of mutual collaboration.

He also spoke with members of the Turks and Caicos private sector. He urged them to put a high premium on agriculture as a business with a profitable bottom line and as a vehicle of immense benefit to the economy and quality of life of the people of Turks and Caicos.

The two multilateral development institutions further strengthened their collaboration with the signing on Tuesday of a memorandum of understanding (MoU) in Providenciales.

Adesina and Leon signed the MoU on behalf of their institutions. Both banks will work closely across various areas.

They will collaborate on economic diversification initiatives in their respective regions, with an emphasis on deploying technological and digital transformation solutions in commerce, trade, public services, and financial intermediation and inclusion.

The MoU formalizes the platform for the two institutions to join forces to promote trade between Africa and the Caribbean.

It also enables both regions to work together on the sustainable development of micro, small and medium-sized enterprises.

The heads of the two development finance institutions agreed that the MoU will play a catalytic role in making their regional economies more resilient, especially for the most vulnerable.

Collaboration by the institutions is expected to promote the development of and access to innovative financing instruments that encourage the flow of funds into the two regions.

At the signing, Adesina said: Our challenges and the solutions that we must pursue to address them are similar.

Together, we are catalyzing the development of our respective regions, making a difference in the lives of our people, ensuring that impact is strong and lasting, and shaping the global narrative about our respective regions and institutions.

Leon said: Deepening partnerships and knowledge sharing are critical for us to realize the transformative development of our respective regions as we envision.

This agreement will not only strengthen our relationship with the African continent but also fuel the innovative path we are pursuing in areas of mutual interest beneficial to all.

The theme of the Caribbean Development Banks 52ndAnnual MeetingMeasure Better to Target Betterresonates with the two regional development banks, as both institutions place a high premium on measuring efficacy to better target the needs of their regional member countries.

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The Caribbeans first and longest-running conference laser-focussed on regional aviation,the sixth annual Caribavia Summit & Retreat was held at the Simpson Bay Resort on the Dutch side of the dual-nation island this week.

The conference welcomed delegates from the U.S., Canada, Portugal, UK, France, and United Arab Emirates and Caribbean participants from Sint Maarten, The Bahamas, Barbados, Curacao, Dominica, St. Eustatius, Saba and Turks and Caicos Islands.

Delivering opening remarks, Hon. Silveria E Jacobs, Prime Minister, Sint Maarten referenced the challenges of the pandemic noting the region still faces hurdles relating to aviation access, Sint Maarten whose economy is almost 100 percent based on tourism has shown great resilience, if we as a government are to adopt economic and regulatory policies that encourage the development of air transport, demand could increase in our region.

Curacao-based, Ivo Oduber, Quality Manager at EZ Air, announced new flights taking off by the end of this year.

Were looking to add scheduled service from Aruba to Colombia and from Curacao to Sint Maarten in time for the holiday season, Oduber said.

From the Turks and Caicos Islands, Lyndon Gardiner, founder, interCaribbean Airways advocates the region should be one economic area when it comes to air service.I encourage more airlines and more competition which keeps us on our feet and provides the customer with lower fares and better service, but we must get to the place where costs are down to encourage traffic to the region.

Vincent Vanderpool-Wallace, former minister tourism and aviation of The Bahamas and principal partner ofthe Nassau-based travel industry consultancy Bedford Baker Group, explained that as the Caribbean is the most tourism-dependant region in the world, it is also the most aviation-dependant region.

As a result of the pandemic, he said, Ive seen a substantial increase in private aircraft coming to The Bahamas and to many other islands, we must take full advantage of this surge.

I am pleased to see the International Air Transport Association (IATA) will host CaribbeanAviation Day on Sept.14 in theCaymanIslands, he said.

In Las Vegas from Oct. 16 -18, Routes World is a win-win for destination decision-makers pitching new routes to airport and airline movers and shakers.The Caribbean is well represented with advance registration looking good, said David Appleby, director, Routes, Latin America & Caribbean, tradeshow interest is high with confirmations already from U.S. Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, Turks and Caicos Islands, Punta Cana and Guadeloupe with additional destinations expected in the coming months.

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Talking Aviation and Tourism in St Maarten - Caribbean Journal