Two Maps, Three People, a GPS, and a Tour Guide

I'm once again back at my desk in my living room in Florida, but for the purposes of the blog we're up to last Monday morning; we needed to be at the airport by 1:00 on Tuesday and I was determined to pack in lots more of Trinidad in our remaining 36 hours or so. The weather looked great from my window at the Pax, so off we went once again down the hill, through Curepe, onto the Churchill Roosevelt Highway, over to the Uriah Butler Highway and south 10K to Chaguanas (I really felt I was starting to get this driving business sorted; boy was I wrong...)

We stopped in at Radika's Pottery one more time to pick up a handful of clay for later mineralogical analysis; after the long buildup to Divali everything was really quiet and as you can see the hallway full of deyas is no more. I never did get a consistent estimate of how many there actually were - somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 and I know that's quite a range but I did hear both figures from folks at Radika's. I wouldn't doubt that at some point before we arrived a week ago that there were 100,000 deyas in that hallway.

Then it was back up the highway for an absolutely wonderful lunchtime treat - a visit with my old friend, great painter, and University of the West Indies art professor Ken Crichlow and he totally surprised me by inviting as well two of his colleagues - Lesley-Ann Noel, the Coordinator of the Visual Arts Program, and fellow teacher Larry Richardson who once upon a long time ago took me on my first epic drive around Trinidad to meet the potters in Chaguanas and Rio Claro. We had an absolutely fascinating conversation about art and clay and education and business and I really hope I can come back some time to check out the new ceramics curriculum they are working on for the program. SO much potential here.

Ken Crichlow, Lesley-Ann Noel, and Larry Richardson

In 2005 I put together an exhibition of Ken and Shastri's work for FGCU titled Trinidad: Two Views and it has been wonderful to visit both their studios to see the current work. Ken is just coming off of a major exhibition last spring, a gorgeous series of paintings he titled Rapture: optimism and transformation and we couldn't actually see any of those because they all sold but thankfully there is a digital catalog. We did get to see his newest work in process - great big swirling canvases saturated with the color, mark and movement that is so distinctive in his work. Such an incredible treat. I'll hope to see Ken again in December; he'll be coming to Miami for the wild ride that is Art Basel Miami Beach (quite possibly the biggest contemporary art show in the world)

We left Ken's around 3:15; reluctantly, but we were on a mission and were headed for one of Trinidad's great attractions - the daily sunset influx of thousands of red ibises to their sleeping site on an island in the heart of the Caroni Swamp. From where we were it was only about five miles or so but rush hour gets a really early start in Trinidad and despite the best efforts of Ken's directions, two maps, the three of us, instructions from the GPS, and multiple phone calls to the tour company we got completely turned around more than once and finally arrived around 4:20 for a 4:00 boat trip. I was a totally frazzled, cursing, sweating mess and convinced I had ruined the day for everyone but the lovely gentlemen with Nanan's Bird Sanctuary Tours just popped us into an empty boat and took us out through the canals to meet the tour in process, pointing out cool stuff in the mangroves along the way like sleeping boa constrictors. Happily, being a bit late does not, in fact, ruin your day here and once we had clambered into the other boat we set off for the open waters deep inside the Caroni Swamp.

The Scarlet Ibis is the national bird of Trinidad and something like 15,000 of them live here in the swamp, going out during the day to feed on the shrimps, crabs, and other crustaceans that provide the carotene that produces the bright red plumage, and returning to very specific sites in the evening for communal nighttime roosting. As you sit in the tour boats they stream overhead in loose V shapes accompanied by low flying herds of white egrets and when they all zoom in to land in their chosen clump of mangroves its like a ticker tape parade, red and white confetti speckling the trees until the egrets find their way inside leaving only red dots against the green foliage. We were really lucky - the tide was high this evening so the flocks came in early and we could see the birds quite clearly.

Moat of my time in the Caribbean I've lived local - completely separated from my life in Florida - and for this trip it was just grand to travel with my buddies Jan and Ellen. They've been a huge help, great fun, and absolutely necessary to the maintenance of my sanity while driving Trinidadian roads. Thank you thank you thank you - and where we going next ?!?!

Tuesday morning we got packed up and checked out and headed down to Longdenville, just outside of Chaguanas, for a mindboggling factory tour of the Abel Clay products facility, maker of structural earthenware blocks in Trinidad since 1936. I had been hearing about this place for years, and figured that if I wanted to understand ceramic production here I'd best go and was delighted to be able to make an appointment with Jason Mohammed, the very engaging and accommodating manager/director of the facility.

I don't know about you, but I totally love to find out how things are made and in this case we are talking about the production of 240,000 structural clay blocks per DAY. Mr. Mohammed gave us the grand tour starting with the original kilns and then moving along the entire production process from the gargantuan clay mining area to the many stages of clay preparation in the factory buildings and on into extrusion and drying of the blocks and firing in continuous twenty-four hour cycles in enormous computer-controlled gas-fired tunnel kilns. Utterly fascinating.

One of the original 1936 round downdraft kilns

One little corner of the giant clay mine adjacent to the factory complex

Dry storage for the cured clay

Moving clay through the many stages of processing in the factory

Blocks emerging from the giant extruders

Blocks drying on the right, the 24 hour tunnel kiln on the left

Finished blocks

Loaded truck leaving the factory

With just a couple of hours left we managed to fit in a visit to one of Trinidad's great Hindu spiritual centers in and around Waterloo and Carapichaima - the Temple In The Sea, and the 85ft tall Hanuman murti.

The temple was being prepared for one of the many community prayer sessions that take place in this quiet space first built out into the sea in the late 1940's by Indian-born indentured laborer Siewdass Sadhu after he was fined by his employer (the Tate and Lyle sugar company) for building a temple on company land. They tore that one down, so he created a space for his temple by painstakingly constructing a narrow 500 foot peninsula into the shallow Gulf of Paria.

And here we found the final resting place of the deyas we have come to know so well. After their brief time lighting the way, they are consigned to the natural world and at this site become an ongoing part of the foundations of the temple.

Last stop was the fabulous 85 foot tall Hanuman murti on the grounds of a huge pink stone temple and yoga center complex; it was pouring down rain at this point but that did not diminish the impact of this giant Hindu figure, said to be the tallest outside of India. Hanuman is the deity symbolizing physical strength, perseverance, and devotion, and of the unlimited power within  each of us.

Despite a few entertaining moments at the airport in Trinidad I'm home again now after several months of on-again-off-again travel, with a mountain of new information to work from and beautiful pots and images to inspire me. I've been looking at this new pitcher from Radika's - I particularly like pouring forms and have rather a lot of them from all over the world; unlike mugs or cups or plates these pots are about offering and sharing and I really like the references to family, community, and ritual embedded in pouring vessels. This pitcher is definitely not an art object altho its likely it will serve a decorative purpose now rather than a functional one; it was wheelthrown incredibly rapidly as one of several hundred pots made that day by that thrower and the rocks and sand in the clay push their way through the firemarked surface. It's not fancy, its not 'pretty' (which is a word we heard a lot in Trinidad in regards to preference in material culture) but for me the fascination comes from an essential integrity, a clear and simple human gesture that resonates through the complex history of people in the Caribbean.

Now its time to settle into a routine of writing, gardening, and making pots, and figuring out how to create a structure within this sabbatical year that is just as productive as my accustomed teaching schedule. The cat will help, I'm sure.

Bright Lights, Bearded Bellbirds, and Baked Sharks

What shall I say about Divali ? Despite the booming fireworks and exploding bamboo, the smoke from the kerosene flambeaux and the bright bling of gold jewelry and Christmas lights, Divali really seems to be about creating a quiet, intimate space of gratitude, connection, and spiritual relevance. On Saturday afternoon Jan, Ellen and I made our way through shockingly empty Trinidad streets to the home of Shastri and Shirley Maharaj in Chaguanas where we ate and talked and looked at Shastri's lovely new paintings and talked some more and then went across the road to the neighbor's house and ate more and talked more and left with extra gifts of Indian sweets. The food was gorgeous; all vegetarian and most of it locally grown, complex spices and flavors weaving together in your mouth like a symphony - pumpkin with garlic, stewed and curried pomme cythere, chickpeas and potatoes, an amazing totally new-to-me vegetable called chataigne from Shastri's garden, and 'melangene' - eggplant - all eaten using layers torn from the bread formally known as silk paratha but descriptively named 'buss up shut' (translate to 'busted/ripped up shirt' and you can begin to see the allusion).

Divali dinner at Shastri's and Shirley with the final round of rice pudding at the neightbor's

After not one but TWO fabulous home-cooked Indian dinners, we all set out for the nearby village of Felicity whose residents deck their houses and yards and businesses with thousands of deyas and miles of electric lights along the two main roads in the town. Felicity is a village made famous in the 1992 address by St. Lucian writer Derek Walcott when accepting the Nobel prize for literature; Felicity is a village in Trinidad on the edge of the Caroni plain he began and went on to create a mesmerizing portrait of a Caribbean that is both desperately beautifully and terrifyingly fragile, But what is joy without fear ? he says towards the end; The fear of selfishness that, here on this podium with the world paying attention not to them but to me, I should like to keep these simple joys inviolate not because they are innocent but because they are true.
But I digress.
We got in our cars at exactly the right time, Shastri in the Suzuki and all the ladies piled into our little rented Nissan and when we got to Felicity it was full dark with lights on and deyas burning. We cruised along the streets trying to take pictures out of and through the car windows while slowly but surely the traffic built up behind us until it was fully bumper to bumper on the way in as we were on the way out. Some houses were purist in their approach and just had deyas and others had lots of electric lights with every conceivable combination and variation in between and everyone was out on the streets giving each other sweets and little bottles of 'Chubby' soft drinks and talking and laughing and continuing to light more and more deyas.

The practice of building complex bamboo structures to hold the lighted deyas seems to be somewhat out of fashion this year, but we did see a few and after watching me juggling my camera and the steering wheel Shirley suggested I just pull over so I did and ended up at the house of a very nice man who was swinging in a hammock with his baby grandson sound asleep on his shoulder while his nephew and a friend from Guyana lit deyas in the driveway and on the street in front of the house. 

I took lots of pictures there and they gave us little bags of sweet rice and when I asked the owner why he did all this he just said "I am Hindu". It reminded me of Sookdeo, the potter in Rio Claro, who in talking of his temple and the prayers his family offers up twice a day said simply "this is how we do life". 

Divali was great.

Sunday we were back in the car looking for adventure, and enjoying the wacky signage that always comes with driving through countries different from your own. Carrots and french fries. Go figure. We wound our way from the Churchill-Roosevelt Highway through the town of Arima and up into the northern range of mountains as the road got narrower and narrower and the rainforest closed in and eventually we reached the Asa Wright Nature Center, a mecca for serious birdwatchers and a must-see for anyone coming to Trinidad. This was my third visit and even tho we couldn't stay for the formal 90 minute afternoon tour we did manage to arrange a 30 minute trek with Noel, one of the incredibly knowledgeable volunteer guides who gave us a really great highlights tour that included a very close encounter with the fabled bearded bellbird - you have got to go on YouTube to hear the amazing percussive racket this bird will make to attract the ladies. Lots and lots of great things to see - tropical plants and trees and flowers and ants and agoutis and birds and birds and birds.

That's our guide but I stole the bellbird off the net; we did see it clearly but not this close

lobster claws and powder puffs

torch lilies - so beautiful in flower, so ugly by the time the seeds are dropped

leaf cutter ants busily moving their future fodder into a GIANT mound

aw come on - what's a post without pots ? saw this lovely pair of old lead glazed monkey jars in the  beautiful main house of the nature center 

From there we kept on the narrow twisting road across the mountains in search of the northern beaches; this is the only south to north route in the middle of the top of Trinidad, and we found out later that the great-grandfather of my old friend Ken Crichlow migrated here from Barbados in the late 1800s because there was work available specifically to build this road (more on Ken later). When the Americans were here during World War 2 they apparently widened and improved it, but a hundred hairpin turns later I'd say they weren't able to do much. Gorgeous drive tho and thankfully very few cars to share the one and a half lanes with and we did eventually emerge quite suddenly onto the beautiful beaches and vistas of the north coast. By then we were all rabidly hungry and determined to find the famous 'bake and shark' stands at Maracas Bay. 

It was the Sunday after a national holiday and we were warned that all of Trinidad would be at the beach but the traffic was okay and after my many years of experience of mass market tourism in the Caribbean it was lovely to see Trinidadian people enjoying their own beaches. The tourism industry here is slowly growing and you do see the usual signs saying things like"Tourism - it's about all of us !" but I don't think it is a major economic sector as it is elsewhere in the region (Trinidad drilled its first successful oil well in 1866) so the beaches are still largely for the locals.

And there was absolutely no problem finding bake and shark - Uncle Sam's is just one of about six elaborate food stands across the road from the beach at Maracas Bay. You place your order at one window, wait at another for your food, and then personalize your sandwich with a dizzying array of condiments that stretch down a long table - I went for tamarind sauce, chopped cabbage, lettuce, a little coconut chutney, a little chadon beni sauce, and it was just gorgeous. Last night Ellen pulled up a video clip of Andrew Zimmerman from the 'Bizarre Foods' show on TV eating shark and bake here at Maracas and he said it was one of the ten best things he had ever eaten. Ever.

I'll post one more time for this trip tomorrow after I get home; yesterday we had a fascinating day having lunch with faculty from the Visual Arts Program at the University of the West Indies, and then just barely made it onto a boat for the Caroni Swamp tour to see literally 5000 red ibises (the national bird) and today we're off to an exciting tour of the brick factory with the manager himself so there are more stories to tell. And thankfully there's just a couple more hours of driving on these MAD Trinidadian roads - wish us luck....

Road Warriors

Okay so I know I sound like a broken record but four days ? Really ? We've had lots of adventures this week meeting with potters and wrapping our heads around the (East) Indian experience in Trinidad - which is never so evident as it is at Divali time, a national holiday that recognizes and celebrates this essential event in the annual Hindu calendar. It's kind of like Thanksgiving and Christmas merged together, with a similar blend of deeply spiritual, clearly commercial, and family/friends/community events all rolled into one. And, of course, it is peak season for potters, because the word 'Divali' is actually a contraction of the longer Sanskrit word deepavali which means 'row of lamps' - small, clay lamps filled with oil and lit with a cotton wick. LOTS more on that shortly.

The Garmin display for the very long and winding road leading up Mount St. Benedict to the Pax

When we arrived at the airport Jan had the astonishingly great idea to rent a Garmin GPS and it has been our salvation this week. Trinidad is a very, very busy place; unlike most Caribbean countries they have had a fully diversified economy for quite some time  and particularly in the western corridor between Port of Spain and San Fernando there are many, many roads and huge highways most of which are spectacularly congested. And, of course, the drivers are mad (ie crazy) and in addition to the usual potholes, goats, vendors, blah blah there's giant underpasses and overpasses and roundabouts and an infinite number of ways to take a wrong turn to nowhere. So driving has been uh...challenging...and we have done a whole lot of it, leaving the breezy peace of the Pax in the morning and usually not returning until after dark to snake our way back up Mount St. Benedict. This holiday weekend we are cooling out a bit, but all through the week we have been Trinidadian road warriors in search of pots and potters.

This is a deya, a small clay dish that is thrown 'off the hump' (i.e. they are made one after another from a single large lump of clay spinning rapidly on a potter's wheel) at lightening fast speeds in unimaginable quantities - 5000 a day is the usual level of production - no kidding - and a really good potter, with the assistance of a helper to move them onto a very long board, can throw a deya in TWO SECONDS, really, we've watched it, several times now. This is ceramic production at a rate that simply has to be seen to be believed and even then you don't believe it.

Wheelthrown, unglazed, woodfired deyas

As above with paint and glitter glue

While deyas are the embodiment of the festival of Divali and so are in great demand at festival time, they are also used throughout the year for daily and seasonal Hindu prayers as part of a three piece set - the kalsa is the vessel on the bottom to hold water, the parye is the small dish on top of that to hold rice and then the deya is for the flame. Essentially these are offerings to the gods and goddesses during prayer, at least as far as I have been told and can understand of the very complex and personal nature of Hindu spiritual practice. To begin our education in the pottery of Trinidad we headed to the busy villages of the central plains which are largely populated by Trinidadians of East Indian heritage, whose ancestors came to the country as indentured laborers to work on British-owned sugar plantations. The first boat carrying Indian workers was the Fatel Razak which landed in Trinidad on May 30, 1845, now celebrated as Indian Arrival Day in Trinidad. By 1917 when indentureship ended 147,592 Indians had come to work in Trinidad, and as the family legends go at some point likely in the late 1890's two potters - brothers named Seecharan and Goolcharan - came to Trinidad and settled in the clay-rich central region and started the entire pottery industry. All of the potters today are said to have descended from these two men.

Andy Benny in Radika's showroom, and Michael Maharaj throwing deyas with Richard Garib assisting

Our first visit on Tuesday, and then again on Thursday, was to the very well known workshop and retail space of Radika's Pottery, on the narrow busy street of Edinburgh Village just south of the city of Chaguanas. Radika Benny was a wonderfully charismatic woman who expanded the family business from deyas and flower pots to a huge production line of decorative and functional pots, and I had the great good fortune to meet her and talk with her several times before her passing in 2007. Her son Andy Benny took over the running of the business with great passion and commitment; many relatives are also involved in clay production, and there are at least six separate workshops making pots in and around Edinburgh village (and likely several more in the adjoining areas that I don't know about).

When I have visited here in the past, pots were only sold from the pottery showrooms, but now at Divali time there are vendors all along the streets selling deyas with bottles of coconut oil and bags of cotton string for wicks. Business was booming - for Divali night you don't just need one or two deyas you need hundreds so customers buy their deyas at $8TT a dozen (about 10 US cents a piece) while wholesalers would buy as many as 10 or 20,000 to sell in venues across Trinidad.

Inside the workshop at Radika's, along the hallway from the street leading back to the throwing and firing area there was an absolutely enormous pile of deyas, and bucketfuls of the little pots were constantly being hauled out to the tables on the street. This is how the pile looked on Tuesday morning.

And this is how the pile looked on Thursday afternoon. I imagine that by the end of the day yesterday (Divali is today) they were all gone. And remember - in addition to deyas the potters make huge numbers of other ritual forms as well as 'plant pots', pitchers, mobiles, teapots (called goblets or monkeys as in other Caribbean countries), and a dizzying array of stamped and carved vessels for decorative purposes. And, of course, they make coal pots.

This is Tommy, a member of the next generation of potters at Radika's, stacking mid-sized coalpots to dry before firing in the big round wood kilns. He was just delightful, helping out both in front with customers and in the back with production. I had a fascinating long talk with Andy Benny about the nature of running a business selling traditional product in a contemporary economy, and he has lots of ideas for expansion and design development that will certainly keep this thriving business moving forward.

'Deo' and his daughter throwing two second deyas - he said he was going slowly for our benefit.

The next trip on Wednesday took us out of the congested highways and across the green fields and dense woods of the interior of the country to S&S Potters just outside the southeastern town of Rio Claro. I was last here in March 2010 to research Trinidadian kiln construction, and adapted the design to build a new style of kiln for one of the potters in St. Lucia during the 2010 FGCU summer study abroad program (it's still working great). Meeting up again with Sookdeo Deonarine, his wife Zanaisha and daughter Asha was just wonderful - they were incredibly warm and welcoming, I brought all kinds of pictures for them from previous trips, and we had a nice long talk about clay and wheel construction and deyas and Hindu spirituality and how to live a good life.

Learning about the evolution of the potter's wheel in Trinidad, from the original Indian hand-turned stone disc to a succession of contraptions made from car parts was utterly fascinating - look carefully above to see a transmission, gear shift, differential and axle; this arrangement was first hand-turned, then run on gasoline, and is now powered by an electric motor. 

Here too were thousands and thousands of deyas in all stages of production, and a jam-packed showroom with a zillion different kinds and shapes and functions of clay objects. Deo's grandfather, Baychoo Goolcharan, moved out to Rio Claro after he married and away from the other potters in and around Edinburgh Village, and as a result there are another six or so workshops in the Rio Claro area. As you may have guessed already, there's lots of clay in Trinidad, and it's easily accessible. Right behind the S&S pottery workshop is a huge wall of clay scraped out of the hillside, evidence of many decades of mining clay for pottery production, and no sigh that it will run out any time soon.

A large Ganesh on the left, and on the right Vishnu and Saraswati atop a large vessel painted with a black cobra, symbol of Lord Shiva.

The Deonarine family are devout Hindus, and in addition to the ritual vessels they also make both fired and unfired murtis, sculptural images of the many deities in the Hindu pantheon with elaborate painted surfaces. Before building their house they built the family temple near the road, and follow their morning and evening prayer cycles daily with the exception of times like Christmas when permission is asked to take a break for a week. As Zanaisha explained to me, the gods need a rest too.

Sookdeo, Zanaisha, and Asha Deonarine

In addition to visiting the traditional potters here in Trinidad, we went by the home and studio of acclaimed ceramic artist Bunty O'Connor, who took me down to Rio Claro to meet Deo when I was here in 2010. Bunty is currently in England visiting family, but via email we arranged for me to stop by to see her new work and take pictures for the book.

Amazing gardens surround the bright pink house, and she's built a new airy studio since I was here last. For many years she ran a big business with lots of employees making earthenware pots with bright low fire glazes; now she focuses on her own studio production - mosaics, garden pots, figurative sculpture, and functional tableware. There is a beautifully seamless quality about the work, the house, and the landscape; each flows into the next in an ongoing reflection on the beauty of natural form.

Large hand built garden pot

Round mosaic panel with hummingbird and anthurium

Thanks to my zoom lens I was actually able to catch this hummingbird right outside the  house

Delightful clay chickens in the brightly painted showroom

A magnificent rooster posing for me as it wandered about the grounds

We did play tourist one afternoon, with a long trek down the island past San Fernando to see the largest  pitch lake in the world - bet you didn't know that Port of Spain, Trinidad's capital, was the first city in the world with asphalt streets.

It's a pretty strange place alright, worth seeing for sure but just as it says in the guidebook you do need to watch out for the very assertive 'unofficial guides' one of whom totally scammed us and will not henceforth be named or discussed but what the heck we did get a tour of the lake site. I do think tho that the warning signs should be expanded a bit to include the human hazards....

You do definitely need a guide tho because some areas of the 'lake' are solid and some are not - see gooey pitch above and take note of the flipflops stuck into the ground as relics of unfortunate encounters with a landscape on the move. Really weird place.

And finally, we made our way once during the day and once at night to the Divali Nagar tented compound on the east side of the big highway below Chaguanas and you have never seen traffic jams like these - endless lines of cars trying to get from the highway to the way-too-small parking lot. The Nagar opens during the day for all the vendors of spectacular Indian clothes and lights and mehendi painting and shoes and hardware and home furnishings and tshirts and every other living thing and food  of course - lots of food stalls all across the back with pepper roti and corn soup and samosas and paneer and sweets in all colors and shapes and lots of drinks but no alcohol at all - Divali is all about finding the light within and cleansing yourself and your life to please the gods and face the challenges of the year ahead. So no drinking, and no meat - all the food is vegetarian. At night all the lights are lit - both deyas and electric - and there are performances of Indian music, drumming, song and dance on two separate stages so we really wanted to go but on our first try we sat at a standstill in traffic for a full hour before bailing out but the next night we parked down the road at a mall, had dinner (shark and bake - a Trinie specialty, very nice) and walked down to the Nagar. it was great - we saw the shows and the lights and it was no problem to get the car out of the mall, onto the highway, and back up to the Pax.

Lord Rama's triumphant return from exile

They asked me to help light the deyas !

Classic example of the bamboo structures made to hold the deyas during Divali

Ganesh, the Hindu lord of wisdom and destroyer of evils and obstacles

A dance group dressed in their best

A musical performance on the main stage

Booths at the Divali Nagar for mehendi, the drawing of vedic patterns on the hands and feet to awaken the inner light

Yesterday afternoon we hooked up with my old friend Shastri Maharaj - a wonderful painter who lives in Chaguanas and has invited us to come to his house for Divali dinner today so  I must get changed now and now and jump in the car !