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 !