economic one: that it would increase connectivity for business and alle-viate traffic in the region.
Kublalsingh’s hunger strike and the HRM protest at the Prime Minister’s office soon began to reveal how ordinary citizens perceive pol-itics in Trinidad. On day 19 of the strike another activist and supporter of Kublalsingh, Ishmael Samad, stormed the site of the protest to perform a ‘citizen’s arrest’ and remove Kublalsingh, stating that he would not let him commit suicide. Minutes before Kublalsingh had been attended to by his doctor, who was now on stand- by, visiting the site twice a day.
An ambulance was also kept on hand, funded by his family. In the con-frontation, Samad grabbed Kublalsingh by the wrists and attempted to drag him upright from his cot. Cameramen and photographers sprang to capture the incident. As Kublalsingh was pulled at by Samad, his sister and doctor tried to pull him back down, while journalists and members of the HRM attempted to restrain Samad. The incident was one of the key events in the protest, staged to receive attention from Trinidadian mainstream media, and one of which a large proportion of the popula-tion would have been aware.
An activist from El Mirador
In the last week of Kublalsingh’s hunger strike Ayanna, a 23- year- old law student at the University of the West Indies, also visited the pro-test site at the Prime Minister’s office. Ayanna was born in one of the coastal villages, but moved to El Mirador with her family when she was 12. Every day, she wakes up at 4.30 am to catch the bus to an office in Port of Spain where she is completing an internship. She is interested in family law, in particular women’s rights, and on weekends runs a men-torship programme in the village where she was born for young girls without opportunities for higher education. She had also been follow-ing Dr Kublalsfollow-ingh on the news and attended the solidarity walk at the University. ‘This has gone far beyond the issue of the building of a high-way,’ she explained. ‘The man is trying to make a difference in how we think about our own rights in Trinidad. This is about governance and accountability.’
On day 18 of the hunger strike Ayanna went to the Prime Minister’s office and met a couple of older students from the University of the West Indies on the way. She did not know them very well, but sat with them as they discussed the protest. One student commented, ‘This is what happens day in and day out in Trinidad and Tobago; people just don’t
care about environmental issues or about standing up to make a change.
Everybody complains about the state of the country, this and that, but they won’t inform themselves about what is going on. We are just so far behind.’ Another replied, ‘I can’t believe more people just don’t care about this. If the government can just decide to build a highway in one area and kick people off their land in one place, they can do it anywhere.’
Ayanna listened to their conversation quietly. When she arrived, she met with a couple of her own friends and stood with them throughout the day. Later, she said she was glad that she had gone to the office and seen what was going on for herself. As she noted:
I’m lucky though. I can do that, I have more flexible time where I can go, I know other people who support him, but they’re lawyers as well. Think about people in El Mirador, they are trying to make their day to day work, they put their kids in school, they don’t work the kind of jobs where they can just hang out and protest. The girls before, they’re right, but it’s very Maraval5 activism. They hang out at theatres and have artist friends and talk about world issues.
El Mirador people don’t have this luxury. And when people from there talk about people from here, they talk about us like we’re rel bush.6 They don’t really know how we live and what is important to us.
On the way home, Ayanna met her older cousin Roger at the mall for dinner. ‘Eh eh, yuh been limin’ with Kublalsingh and Kamla [i.e.
Bissessar-Persad]?’ he joked. ‘This is what I mean,’ explained Ayanna.
‘These issues are just a big joke. Nobody wants to think about them, they just be laughin’ at him.’ Roger’s relationship with his younger cousin has always been close and is one in which they can share a joke. His style of talking is quite common among Trinidadian men; a performative mode of banter that is also partly a show of masculinity. This sort of talk used to be called picong, where one would make a joke of a person or insult them through using humour so their insult does not provoke serious offence.7 Picong, now more commonly spoken about by young people as ‘shit talk’, is also a way of showing that individuals do not take themselves too seri-ously, that they don’t think they are above or better than anyone else.
Ayanna continued to explain to Roger why he should care about the hunger strike, telling him:
Imagine if that was your daddy’s house or mine? That the gov-ernment just want to build a highway and there was no fair way for them to have a say about it, they just have to move. Or worse,
imagine if it was yuh grandfather’s house. An old man, he spent most of his life doing up the house, that’s where your father was born, you spent yuh childhood there and the government can just take it away. That is what he is protesting for. It is not just about a highway, it is about the government being fair.
Roger in turn replied that the government was never fair, ‘so what is de point, why get yuh self all worked up for? The people don’t care, they talk about it for a week and then they forget about it. Yuh can’t do nothing about that’. The conversation continued and eventually Ayanna and Roger agreed to disagree. An argument such as theirs, which becomes heated then simmers down again, is a common exchange.
Between those who know each other very well, this style of discussion can gain in tempo, becoming animated and passionate, escalating to a peak and then becoming subdued again. Trinidadians from the town are quite open in talking to one another when they are with close friends and family. Yet around issues that are more difficult, or when deep griev-ances exist between people who are close, sensitive topics are rarely spo-ken about (a situation discussed in Chapter 4). Matters of opinion are more acceptable to debate, a dynamic which also translates to Facebook.
An example of this is the people who were already involved with the issues surrounding the hunger strike.
Ayanna was the only person from El Mirador who went to the Prime Minister’s office during the hunger strike. Her actions and engagement online were more typical of those in activist circles and, even though she did not identify with the HRM, she had more of an inclination to go to the Prime Minister’s office following discussions with her own friends.
Her peers also study law and share her interests in governance, rights and the democratic process. They held these concerns before studying together, as did Ayanna – a fact that made her stand apart from other people in El Mirador.
Ayanna’s Facebook profile shows a variety of interests. She rarely posts images of herself day to day, only on occasion, and she updates her status with different themes, such as jokes about the weather, a dream she’s had or something she’s eaten. She always posts using local dialect;
for example, in one case she writes: ‘First doubles raise now dis strong strong breeze jusso jusso. Is this the end of days?’ [‘First, the price of the Trinidadian food ‘doubles’ has raised and now this strong strong breeze, just so, just so.’] She frequently shares news and commentaries that have appeared around national issues, especially if they relate to gender issues. As she explains, ‘I like to post things that cause a reaction.
Not a shock, but just a strong opinion, something important, something to make you think about the country you’re living in.’ Although she has often become involved with heated debates on Facebook with her peers and other people from Port of Spain, she has never had a public debate with anybody living in El Mirador. Ayanna joined a couple of Facebook groups around the HRM and the university’s group in support of Kublalsingh when her friends were already talking about the issue.
She shared some articles and commentaries and began to get involved in conversations with friends on her timeline.
On 5 December 2012 Kublalsingh ended his hunger strike after 21 days. By that stage his legs and feet were swollen from the effects of kidney deterioration, and his body and face appeared severely emaci-ated. Although the Prime Minister had not appeared to speak with him personally, Kublalsingh received official word from her office that she would agree to reassess the decision around the disputed construction.
The day her notice was announced, there was a brief media spectacle of interviews and Kublalsingh flexed his arms in a bodybuilder’s pose for the cameras, showing his now disfigured form. He returned home to the care of his family, the HRM went back South and there was a brief period of respite.8