Friday, September 7, 2012

Carnival Hijacked by a C-String Thong!


(c) Nandi Keyi - sissymoriah.blogspot.com

Has the West Indian American Day Carnival (WIADCA) been high-jacked by naked, possibly half-drunk, black females exhibiting sexual deviance and inciting crude sexual desire.  Sissymoriah thinks so!
Retrieved from Facebook
Viral photographs from West Indian American Day Carnival 2012.
 Retrieved from Facebook
How else can one explain the plethora of photographs featuring women who appear to have no regard for themselves, the sensible masqueraders in their bands and the elders, children and youth lining the parade route? To think that the image of a black woman bent over with her bottom exposed and her legs open is the enduring viral photographic representation of the West Indian American Day Carnival 2012 is a travesty. That this display allegedly happened in Sesame Flyers band is so disappointing!
Sissymoriah is talking about the Sesame Flyers, a longtime Caribbean youth and cultural organization with a history of good works and community uplifting. Except in this case some Sesame Flyers masqueraders were up-lifting their legs to let the world in. People might say, “Dat is we culture.” But it is not Sissymoriah’s culture. Neither is it the culture of most of the bloggers on the hundreds of threads created around these photographs. In supposed defense of Sesame Flyers, comedian Alize Hennessy said that she heard that there were several independently affiliated sections in the band and the masquerader was not wearing a “house” design. But as far as Sissymoriah is concerned, bandleaders should vet what costumes parade under their umbrella. How can I not know what is happening in my own home? Anyway, any naked masquerader would feel at home in Sesame Flyers because the band has been part of the bare-breast-bare-bottom masquerade crew for years. The big difference is that Sesame Flyers “house” costumes utilizes a G-String thong, and the infamous masquerader was wearing a C-string thong (see illustration). I cannot see the masquerader’s bosom area in the photograph but she could very well have more coverage that Sesame Flyers “house” masqueraders  because even one thread upwards from a piece of wire circling the breast and a little flower for the nipple is an improvement.
What an example for the youth!
No wonder when  Sissymoriah ventured out for jouvert to see traditional mas', she encountered various pockets of young girls looking like 13 in slivers of underwear, gyrating on each other and grabbing each other’s body parts. Sissymoriah saw - with these two eyes - little girls lying on the ground with their legs open enticing random boys passing by to stoop and lay between their open legs for a little dry sex to start the jouvert. It was free for all! This post is crude but why hide the facts … they certainly were not hiding theirs.
Sissymoriah shame. Really shame. Shame for the “culture;” shame for the photographers who choose to focus their lens on the intimate parts of women; shame for the little schoolgirls – those who behaving and those with no behavior. Most of all, I feel a profound shame every time this woman’s cock-back, naked bottom appears in my newsfeed on Facebook.  Sometimes in life we all implode in one way or the other. It is unfortunate that this will become an eternal part of this woman's electronic footprint: shared over-and-over to perpetuity for the world to see. I shame about the women but I do not blame them. I blame the soca entertainers who for decades have been exploiting the vulnerable: whipping women into gyrations and contortions with instructions in songs that the sacred women in their lives dare not try in public. 
Sissymoriah decided to have a chat with Ma Virginia Edwards, an engaging elder from Trinidad & Tobago who grew up in Port-of-Spain, the center of cultural development. Ma Virginia would attend dances in the 50s, 60s and 70s so Sissymoriah, who is not an elder yet, asked this long-time party lover if she saw any sign of what was to come in the dances and carnivals of long ago.
          "Ma Virginia back then was wining we culture?" Sissymoriah asked.
          "In my days people didn't use to wine! We used to chip,” she replied.
Then she got up from her chair and displayed the chipping motion, moving forward with three half-steps, and backward with smaller ones, her foot barely leaving the ground – like shuffling. To accompany those steps she displayed a little shake, not wining mind you, but a fun little upper body tremble. Ma Virginia's heyday was in the era of foxtrot and rhumba but it was also the period that Trinidad & Tobago's culture, from which the West Indian American Day Carnival sprung, firmed into the incredible tri-factor: steelband, masquerade, calypso. Through it all, Ma Virginia said: “I never, ever saw nobody put their hands on the ground and wine.” Today, in the kids’ mas’ bands there are adults prodding children to put their hands on the ground and gyrate what has not even developed yet. This is what some people think is our “culture,” when it is actually the beginning of a downward spiral where pubescent females have dry sex on the sidewalk, and adult women bend over in their C-strings – all in the name of culture.
Next year, keep your children away from the West Indian American Day Carnival: it is a failing experiment at culture where immorality triumphs.
Sissymoriah say so. 

Sunday, September 2, 2012

Did the Javelin Drive a Stake Into Our Common Sense?



Sissymoriah is flummoxed about how it came to be that the 50th anniversary celebrations of Trinidad and Tobago became wrapped around the feats and heroism of sportsmen. If this wasn't an Olympic year and Keshorn Walcott did not win that gold medal I don't know what nationals would be talking and singing about for the golden jubilee of nationhood. The hoopla around sports accomplishments in newspapers, local music, and the lips of politicians and nationals contrasts sharply with the Trinidad Guardian edition (August 31, 1962) marking the advent of independence where the top sub-head on the front cover read: "Another Schol Awarded." Back then scholarship was the most celebrated accomplishment of our land.
Pelt Sissymoriah with a cyber stone if you must but in a nation that was founded by a scholar on venerable intellectual precepts there never such over-talk about throwing, batting, running and dribbling as in the last decade. In any case, if the powers-that-be insist on instilling sports as the foundation for development they should at least make sure the list of sporting heroes is complete. Now, there is a stadium in Trinidad and Tobago that carries the name Jean Pierre Sporting Complex. Sissymoriah wants to know if Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar knows how the sporting complex got its name since it was missing from the list of sporting greats she heralded in her independence speech. Eugenia Theodosia 'Jean' Pierre, now deceased, was one of the world’s best netball players. Jean Pierre captained the Trinidad and Tobago netball squad that won the Netball World Championship in 1979, tied with Australia and New Zealand. Today Trinidad and Tobago ranks 3rd. overall as one of the world’s “most winning” nations. Sissymoriah wants to know why in this euphoria over sports that Jean Pierre and other women in the winning squads are being ignored. Discrimination against women? Easy answer but the Prime Minister also left out  international boxing champion Claude Noel who won the World Boxing Association’s Lightweight title. Noel later self-destructed and went to jail for robbery. So the Prime Minister left out women and a bandit.

Sissymoriah feels it is time to move on from sports. Place at the center of the society, the great academicians, thinkers, cultural and political revolutionaries and innovators in science who have also occupied the “world stage.” More emphasis on Nobel Prize winner V.S. Naipaul, Earl Lovelace, Elizabeth Nunez and other literary greats. Sissymoriah wants children to be told why the government banned Kwame Ture from his homeland. How about disseminating some knowledge about Henry Sylvester Williams, one of the founders of America’s Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s?  Shouldn’t the Prime Minister's list of notable citizens have included CLR James? How about Dr. Muriel Pettioni, Harlem’s mother of medicine! It is time to move to the fore of the national psyche Camille Alleyne, a modern-day Trinbagonian who is a pioneering NASA scientist. This is a model that African children need to see not Shaq, a basketballer, who with a payment in the millions dropped in T&T for a visit. Shaq went as a mentor for “projects” children but the enduring image is a photo of him lifting our Prime Minister in the air.

Speaking of millions, Sissymoriah has been trying not to comment on the obscene money that the government is pelting at a handful of calypso and soca artists, most of whom can wave and jump, perform aerobics and theatrics but can’t string 30 words together to make a verse. Good God, if money flows like water in T&T do create some academic prizes, install chairs for research and development, computers and smart boards in schools, literary prizes, and a few ARM-LENGTH funding bodies to nurture the scientific, literary and other academic sectors of society. Winning sports prizes are wonderful, particularly for tourism, and the athletes who rise to the top of their sports deserve to be commended as this takes an inordinate amount of discipline, skill and study. Glamorizing sports at the expense of all else, however, is not the foundation of a progressive society. The euphoria is fleeting at best because 33 years after a great sportswoman took center stage, her name has been forgotten even when it is enshrined on a stadium! You may say that Sissymoriah vex because she never won a single race in her lifetime but I’ll tell you one thing – Sissymoriah thinks outside the box.

Sunday, August 26, 2012

Is Trinidad and Tobago Becoming a Police State?


Introducing the Police State of Trinidad and Tobago

By Sissymoriah

When a government’s big, bad pig buys media houses while surreptitiously medicating citizens with slap-stick pills, and carnival serums, it signals the installation of a police state.

In a police state, there is no line between the judicial and executive branches; citizens are unable to talk freely without being “maco-ed.”  Citizens are also casually shot as it easier to move a corpse to a morgue than a cussing live human to a jail. And oh, … in a police state the Minister of National Security is very rich and buys newspapers. The latter is happening Trinidad and Tobago where the big, bad pig wants majority stake in two newspapers. This is straight out of Orwell’s Animal Farm, that pesky fictional story that real life always seen to imitate in one failed state or the other, as those in power create, break and bend rules to fit a naughty agenda.

So this big bad pig says, “I see no conflict,” in owning newspapers. Under his ownership what will these newspapers be but weapons to be used in his party’s suppression of sheep, donkeys and old horses? Irrespective of what party one supports (and his supporters are rabid), this is bad business for the country. Maybe he is taking a page from the life of old Rupert Murdoch, whose media personnel hacked into the private conversations of ordinary people, celebrities and political figures in England. Abuse of power always happens when media and politics not only sleep in the same bed but become an asexual entity. The big, bad pig of Trinidad and Tobago recently placed a photographer to spy on the opposition leader’s constituency office. 

Could he be trusted with the immense power that comes with owning media? His actions make the answer obvious.