Sauces and Condiments - Hot Pepper Sauce - A Trinidadian Staple Fiery hot habanero peppers -- 15 of them! -- make this volcanic hot sauce something to remember. Use rubber gloves to chop and seed the fiendish pods.

L0yal Trini

Geoffrey Holder (Trinidadian, 1930-2014) - A Sleeping Boy (1953)

As early as 1700, Samuel Sewall, the renowned Boston judge and diarist, connected “the two most dominant moral questions of that moment: the rapid rise of the slave trade and the support of global piracy” in many American colonies [...]. In the course of the eighteenth century, [...] [there was a] semantic shift in the [literary] trope of piracy in the Atlantic context, turning its [...] connotations from exploration and adventure to slavery and exploitation. [...] [A] large share of Atlantic seafaring took place in the service of the circum-Atlantic slave trade, serving European empire-building in the Americas. [...] Ships have been cast as important sites of struggle and as symbols of escape in [...] Black Atlantic consciousness, from Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative (1789) and Richard Hildreth’s The Slave: or Memoir of Archy Moore (1836 [...]) to nineteenth century Atlantic abolitionist literature such as Frederick Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom (1855) or Martin Delany’s Blake (1859-1862). [...] Black and white abolitionists across the Atlantic world were imagining a different social order revolving around issues of resistance, liberty, (human) property, and (il)legality [...].

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Using black pirates as figures of resistance [...], Maxwell Philip’s novel Emmanuel Appadocca (1854) emphasizes the nexus of insatiable material desire and its conditions of production: slavery. [...] [T]he consumption of commodities produced by slave labor itself was delegitimized [...]. Philip, a Trinidadian [and "illegitimate" "colored" child] [...], published Emmanuel Appadocca as a protest against slavery in the United States [following the Fugitive Slave laws of 1850.]. [...] [The novel places] at its center [...] a heroic non-white pirate and intellectual [...] [whose] pirate ship [...] [is] significantly named The Black Schooner [...]. One of the central discourses in [the book] is that of legitimacy, of rights and lawfulness, of both slavery and piracy [...]. About midway into the book, Appadocca gives a [...] speech in which he argues that colonialism itself is a piratical system:

If I am guilty of piracy, you, too [are] [...] guilty of the very same crime. ... [T]he whole of the civilized world turns, exists, and grows enormous on the licensed system of robbing and thieving, which you seem to criminate so much ... The people which a convenient position ... first consolidated, developed, and enriched, ... sends forth its numerous and powerful ships to scour the seas, the penetrate into unknown regions, where discovering new and rich countries, they, in the name of civilization, first open an intercourse with the peaceful and contented inhabitants, next contrive to provoke a quarrel, which always terminates in a war that leaves them the conquerors and possessors of the land. ... [T]he straggling [...] portions of a certain race [...] are chosen. The coasts of the country on which nature has placed them, are immediately lined with ships of acquisitive voyagers, who kidnap and tear them away [...].

In this [...], slavery appears as a direct consequence of the colonial venture encompassing the entire “civilized world,” and “powerful ships” - the narrator refers to the slavers here - are this world’s empire builders. [...] Piracy, for Philip, signifies a just rebellion, a private, legitimate [resistance] against colonial exploiters and economic inequality - he repeatedly invokes their solidarity as misfortunate outcasts [...].

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All text above by: Alexandra Ganser. “Cultural Constructions of Piracy During the Crisis Over Slavery.” A chapter from Crisis and Legitimacy in the Atlantic American Narratives of Piracy: 1678-1865. Published 2020. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me.]

Janaya Khan

Gender: Non binary (they/them)

Sexuality: Queer

DOB: 23 November 1987

Ethnicity: Afro Caribbean (Trinidadian, Jamaican)

Nationality: Canadian

Occupation: Activist, writer, prof boxer

Note: Co founder of Black Lives Matter Toronto

Trinidadian singer & actress Mona Baptiste taking a bubble bath, 1956 🖤🖤🖤

📸: Siegfried Pilz

Danielle Boodoo-Fortune -- Let Love Be My Guide

Okay so ok there’s the whole demons speaking every language automatically so you can’t insult them in like Spanish or anything BUT I only see white languages present would they understand like French creole or know the differences between Trinidadian patois and Jamaican patois?👀 or would they be completely stumped bc I really doubt satan would understand what my grandma is saying and even then a heavy accent? Yeah no google translate ain’t saving them😂

a trinidadian woman

tells me a hot-blooded man

dances like slow winds

in haitian halls/

Ntozake Shange

🥲🥲

Geoffrey Holder (Trinidadian, 1930-2014) - Mother and Child (1956)

🔥 Certified Baddies 🫡

Model: Melissa 🇹🇹