Hello dear audience! This is Jacqui, writer and researcher of “Under the Sycamore Tree.” Here are our show notes for our Episode 0: “Sankofa Tings.” Possible triggers in this episode include climate change, racism, European colonization, neoliberal capitalism, patriarchy, homophobia, transphobia. 

• Find out more about the Women’s Voice and Leadership - Caribbean partner organizations on our funders’ websites: Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice and Equality Fund. Learn more about the Women’s Voice and Leadership - Caribbean partnership more between Astraea and Equality Fund more generally here.  

• Next, you might be interested in the excerpts we read! Here is the booklist from this episode, in the order read in the episode: 

• Olive Senior’s poem “Discovery,” from her over the roofs of the world (Insomniac Press, pg. 44 [2000]; RWL Book Club Pick, August 2020); 

• Curdella Forbes’ A Tall History of Sugar (Akashic Books, 2019; RWL Book Club Pick, April 2020 - see our  podcast episode on the book!); and 

• Aime Cesaire’s Discourse on Colonialism (trans. from the French by Joan Pinkham, Monthly Review Press, 2000 [1972 (1955)]. 

• You might also be interested in all of the historical content we used! Here are links to check out more: 

• Dominica Prime Minister Roosevelt Skerrit addresses the UN General Assembly (via Resilient Caribbean)’; I became aware of this speech from Bahamian-American artist Tamika Galanis, and her video piece, “A Thousand Points of Light” (2018)

• Prime Minister Mia Mottley of Barbados addresses Opening Ceremony, COP26, 1 Nov 2021

• Interview with David Commissiong: “Farewell to British Colonial Rule”: Barbados Breaks From the Queen as Calls Grow For Reparations,” Democracy Now (NOTE: DemocracyNow! is a very important resource for this podcast! Check out their weekday news and podcast)

• MAURICE BISHOP Live at Medgar Evans College, Brooklyn (29 May 1944 – 19 October 1983),  CARIBBEAN INSIGHT TELEVISION (CITV) 

• Day and another (Appellants) v The Governor of the Cayman Islands and another (Respondents), UKSupreme Court

• Privy Council Rules Against Same-Sex Marriages in Cayman Islands, Radio 90 FM (Jamaica)

• Finally, we sealed this episode with audio from one of Colin Robinson’s final interview in this plane: Sex & Gender Justice in Trinidad and Tobago with Colin Robinson, Interview with Abby Charles, CaribNationTV

I hope you connect with these texts and enjoy the episode even further! Sincerely, 

Jacks.

Transcript

EPISODE OPENER

00;00;01;16 - 00;00;19;17, [ARCHIVAL AUDIO] Colin Robinson: I mean, that kind of imagination of the Caribbean we have to destroy because that's what keeps young people oppressed. Young people from the Caribbean going on and going on to the Internet to get that sense that nothing would ever get better in their nations.

[INTRODUCTION] The Series

00;00;19;19 - 00;05;25;17, [SCRIPT] Host Carla Moore: This episode, Sankofa Things is our Episode zero, our foundation because we needed to get Crystal clear before listening to our organizations why in the world their work is needed in the first place, which, how is one to feel about this. Really. Welcome to the Under the Sycamore Tree Podcast produced by Rebel Women Lit and Queerly Stated and I am your host, Carla Moore of Moore Talk JA.

Carla continues: We are delighted to bring you the stories of two dozen feminist and Queeribbean organizers from Eight Nations of the English speaking Caribbean who are supported by Astraea lesbian Foundation for Justice and the Equality Fund to undertake feminist and queer social justice work in our region. We are a team of Jamaican and Jamaican American women, ranging from our mid-twenties to one of the newest members of the forties club, we’re young professionals, scholars, entrepreneurs and of course, activists.

Carla continues: We're also a literary community. Storytelling is what brought us together. And what brings us to you. We will tell this network of stories in a somewhat circular but holistic way. Our podcast is also a call to action. We are using their stories to name the need for local diasporic and international support that centers, facilitates and sustainably funds this movement of which the WVL grantees Rebel Women Lit, Queerly Stated, and I are a part. 

Carla continues: Be still… Or at least slow down… Breathe mindfully and take note of your somatic alchemy as you join us on this veranda for this podcast. Yes, our podcast will take the form of a virtual audio veranda chat. In Jamaica we love to invite our people into our yards to chat bad, drink nice and just relax with one another.

Carla continues: We hear this is a region wide practice, so we invite you into your yard. Also, as a safe space, so many of our organizations either run safe spaces, previously did, or wish to do so. Safe space is at a premium for the grantee organizations and those whom they serve. We hope that holding space with this podcast will activate your understanding of its preciousness.

Carla’s Welcome!

Carla: So come inna di yaad wid we. Get a snack, make you drink, and let's begin.

[ACT 1] A Foundation

Carla: In African diasporic literature, there is this trope typically presented as a mythological character of the truth teller. The truth teller is overlooked, often a leper or a stillborn or aborted child or a child of unknown origin. In Trinidad, they are called douen, the douen have access to submerged truths key to the mental, physical and spiritual well-being of the entire society.

Carla continues: But are overlooked by humans and used as chattel by those in power. They are not portrayed as children because they are childlike necessarily. Rather, it is because their bodies reflect the form that our societies forget can contain profound truths. The douen do not wait to be acknowledged, and they know that the fact that they are not acknowledged does not make the truth any less true.

Carla continues: Let's say literature is a technology one created to hold the most layered truth of our histories. And let's just say that our work Caribbean feminist and queer justice work contains such truths, and we carry them to you now. You must know how the Caribbean has been present at the beginning of things, very important things, including and so much more than climate change.

[ACT 2] A Tale of Colonial Promiscuity

Carla: Our region could as well be present at what could possibly be the end of these very same things. We will put narrative to work to guide us through these beginnings and possible endings. Stories that help us understand that beginnings and endings are multiple and potential, not foreclosures. And within each, our lessons and portals if you care to seek them out. Let's start with the land itself.

Carla continues: There's 1492, a landing on Guanahani, the indigenous name for what is now called Cat Island, or what Columbus audaciously called “San Salvador” in The Bahamas. His first landing begins what we now call “colonization.” 

00;05;25;19 - 00;06;02;22, [POEM] Ms. Monica Foderingham: 

“But it was gold

on your mind

gold the light

in your eyes

gold the Crown

of the Queen of Spain

…

gold the prize

of your life

the crowning glory

the gateway to heaven

the golden altar

Though I couldn’t help noticing

(this filled me with dread):

 

silver was your armour

silver the cross of your Lord

silver the steel in your countenance

Silver. The glint of your sword. Silver, the bullet I bite …”

00;06;02;23 - 00;06;35;12, Carla: Barbados, way out in the Eastern Caribbean, was the world’s first sugar colony, and the second official “crown colony” of the United Kingdom. The establishment of the colony of Barbados, can be understood as one of the beginnings of imperialism. Or hear how Curdella Forbes, Jamaican writer and Howard University Professor, retells it:

00;06;35;14 - 00;08;11;23, [LITERARY EXCERPT] Ms. Monica: “Sugar in the boiling houses made the slaves drunk… the shining crystals scooped into vast kegs for shipping to England, the mother country. The grains clung to their skins and got into their eyes and ears and even their secret parts…and that was the reason some could not have children.

Ms. Monica continues: After the long cruel hours in the canepiece, being bitten by cane rat, sugar snake, overseer whip, hot sun, and cane leaf, when they went back to their slave cabins at night there was sometimes nothing to eat but sugar, but they could not eat it without becoming sick, or rather more sick…You will see this in the annals of the sugar plantations, how it was that the bright brown crystals came out…tips of fingers, sometimes whole knuckles, and even whole arms bitten off by the great machines.

Ms. Monica continues: The crystals at first wine-dark in blood, then soakaway to brown when the crushers smoothed them out…and still, long lines of sick and ailing…many young and old suffering from the surfeit or indigestion of sugar. The extent and variety of ailments from saccharine indigestion…were both miraculous and unsurprising…” 

00;08;11;25 - 00;08;41;00, Carla: Thus began a tale of “colonial promiscuity,” of which, one of its possible endings is climate change. Our region, like most of the worlds’ island nations and coastal places, are among the hardest hit by forces unleashed by the piracy of capitalist-based consumption. This means that our leaders have been some of the earliest sounding the alarm, eloquently and ferociously, on the world stage. 

00;08;41;02 - 00;13;19;07, [ARCHIVAL AUDIO] Former Dominican Prime Minister Roosevelt Skerrit addressing the United Nations: “Secretary-General to the United Nations. President of the General Assembly. Distinguished Heads of Delegations. Excellencies, Ladies and gentlemen. Mr. President, I come to you straight from the frontline of the war on climate change with physical and emotional difficulty. I have left my bleeding nation to be with you here today. Mr. President, warmer air and sea temperatures have permanently altered the climate between the tropics of cancer and Capricorn.

PM Skerrit continues: Heat is the fuel that takes ordinary storms. Storms we could normally muster or master in our sleep and supercharges them into a devastating force. In the past, we would prepare for one heavy storm a year, now thousands of storms form on a breeze in the mid-Atlantic and line up to pound us with maximum force and fury. Before this century, no other generation had seen more than one Category five hurricane in their lifetime.

PM Skerrit continues: In this century, this has happened twice. And notably, it has happened in the space of just two weeks. And may I add, Mr. President, that we are only midway into this year's hurricane season. Mr. President, to deny climate change, it is to mock thousands of my compatriots who in a few hours without a roof over their heads, will watch the night descend on Dominica in fear of sudden mudslides and what the next hurricane may bring.

PM Skerrit continues: We, as a country and as a region did not start this war against nature. We did not provoke it. The war has come to us. Mr. President, my fellow leaders. There is no more time for conversation. There is little time left for action. When the Caribbean do not produce greenhouse gases or sulfate aerosols. We do not pollute or overfish our oceans.

PM Skerrit continues: We have made no contribution to global warming that can move the needle. But yet we are among the main victims on the front line. Our livelihoods are part of our ecosystem. This is how my people and my country earn and survive. But what is our reality at this moment? Mr. President, we dug graves today in Dominica. We buried loved ones yesterday.

PM Skerrit continues: Dominicans, Mr. President, have been responsible members of the global community. We have co-joined all of the major international battles from the abolition of forced labor to the protection of patents. Yet today, 72,000 Dominicans lie on the front line in a war they did not choose. With extensive casualties from a war that they did not start substantially more funds must therefore be made available to vulnerable countries for loss and damage not to do so.

PM Skerrit continues: Mr. President would be to abandon those who have paid a steep price for what others elsewhere have created. It would be to let 72,000 Dominicans shoulder the world's conscience on climate change on their own. Today, we asked you not to express your sympathies this week, but then hope eyes do not meet next week. Let us spark a thousand points of light.” 

00;13;19;09 - 00;13;53;24, Carla: What does climate change have to do with feminist and queer organizing in our region? Well, first, climate change is a feminist issue. It's a queer issue. Second, in order to hear our full stories, you must know the context in which Caribbean feminist and Queeribbean organizers work. 

[Act 3] A Structural Reading

Carla continues: Let's move next to the people. Another beginning and possibly ending. The Caribbean is also crucial to the invention of blackness.

00;13;53;27 - 00;15;01;23, [ARCHIVAL AUDIO] Barbados Ambassador David Commissiong on DemocracyNow: “In… in… Barbados, the the seminal slavery laws of the British Empire were the 1661 Barbados Slave Code, which was subsequently taken to Jamaica, and then from Jamaica to the Carolinas and across the the 13 colonies. So Barbados was a center of British power, economic power, political power, military power, cultural power. The historians tell you that around the turn of the 18th century, Barbados, little Barbados was more important in trade to Britain than New England, Carolina, New York and Pennsylvania combined.

Ambassador David Commissiong continues: I mean, it sounds crazy in the 21st century, but back then, sugar was like like a narcotic drug. And so Barbados developed this system of this production of super abundant profits on the basis of the super exploitation … ”

00;15;01;25 - 00;16;49;23, Carla: France’s Code noir was created to regulate black life in Haiti, Martinique, Guadeloupe, Saint Lucia and Grenada, among other places. This tale, which can also be called how Blackness was invented, has a few possible endings. One of them is Revolution. Note our Hemisphere’s History, two of the most famous revolutions the world over happened here. One of the earliest underworld's only successful slave rebellion, the Haitian Revolution.

Carla continues: And one of the latest, the Cuban. Another possible ending is liberation. See Barbados becoming our region’s latest republic birthed through black women with a black woman Prime minister in Mia Mottley, a black woman president, Her Excellency Sandra Mason and their newest national hero The right. Excellent Robyn Rihanna Fenty. Now let's turn to governments, a.k.a. Babylon. The story of our region includes one of the beginnings of fascism, which Martinique, poet, politician and co-founder of Négritude, Aime Cesaire famously called our attention to in his 1955 a discourse on colonialism.

Carla continues: Cesaire reorients our understanding of fascism in the 21st century. He reminds us that European colonizers, all of them, needed a testing ground for their fascist politics and their colonies, were their labs. Cesaire’s thoughts brings us to another beginning. This time, one of the origins of post-colonial studies.

00;16;49;25 - 00;17;35;22, [ESSAY EXCERPT] Ms. Monica: “What fundamentally is colonization? To agree on what it is not. Neither evangelization nor philanthropic enterprise, nor a desire to push back the frontiers of ignorance, disease and tyranny. Nor a project undertaken for the greater glory of God, nor an attempt to extend the rule of law to admit once and for all appetite and force, at which at a certain point in its history, finds itself obliged for internal reasons to extend to a world scale the competition of its antagonistic economies.”

00;17;35;24 - 00;18;14;03, Carla: So we find ourselves back at this beginning. Colonialism and imperialism and the economic models spawned from them. Back at this beginning, there's a portal that leads not to an ending, but tumbling headlong into the potentially false notion of independent nation states. Maurice Bishop, speaking to us from the past. Also really powerful, illustrates this Though many of us will likely be incredibly familiar with this speech, it's worth injecting an extended version of his specific word.

00;18;14;06 - 00;20;57;29, [ARCHIVAL AUDIO] Maurice Bishop Medgar Evers College address: “Our people, therefore, sisters and brothers, have a greater and deeper understanding of what the revolution and means and what it has brought to them. They certainly understand very, very clearly that when some people attack us on the ground of human rights, when some people attack us on the ground of constituting a threat to the national security of other countries, our people understand that is foolishness, they know the real reason has to do with the fact of the revolution and the benefits that a revolution are bringing to the people of our country.

Maurice Bishop continues: The real reason for all of this hostility is because some perceive that what is happening in Grenada can lead to a new socio economic and political path of development.

Maurice Bishop continues: They give all kinds of reasons and excuses, some of them credible, some utter rubbish. There's an interesting one that we saw very recently in a secret report of the State Department. I want to tell you about that one so you can reflect on that one. That secret report made this point that Grenada is different to Cuba and Nicaragua, and the Grenada revolution is in one sense even worse, I’m using their language, than the Cuban and Nicaraguan revolutions, because the people of Grenada, and the leadership of Grenada, speaks English and therefore can communicate directly to the people of the United States.

Maurice Bishop continues: I can see from your applause, sisters and brothers, that you agree with the report. But I want to tell you what that same report also said and said. That also made us very dangerous, and that is that the people of Grenada and the leadership of Grenada are predominantly black. They're said that 95% of our population is black, and they had a correct statistic. And if we have 95% of predominantly African origin in our country, then we can have a dangerous appeal to 30 million Black people in the United States.

00;20;58;01 - 00;22;14;05, Carla: The independent black postcolonial Republic. What makes a nation independent? Control of their laws, economic and geopolitical agency. Do you feel our nations have these? Let's take our laws, for example. The legislative foundation for our independent nations is savings clauses transferring colonial laws intact to form our legal, legislative and institutional independence. What they left largely unreformed were the police and even many aspects of the judiciary.

Carla continues: This, in addition to the large parts of our economies, left intact from slave times. How do feminist and queer organizing happen when even your governments do not have independence and full agency? But if you hop back into this portal, it can empty you all. It's at one of two places. First, you'll stop at the justice that is available to us.

Carla continues: Let's return to David Commissiong Bajan Ambassador to CARICOM.

00;22;14;07 - 00;23;15;07, [ARCHIVAL AUDIO] Ambassador David Commissiong: “I would say I'm 65 years overdue. It really should have happened on the 30th of November 1966, when Barbados became an independent country. But back then, for whatever reasons and you know, there are many reasons we can speculate about, we made two compromises on our constitutional sovereignty and independence. We corrected one compromise in 2005 when we broke our legal system away from the British Privy Council and installed our Caribbean Court of Justice as our highest national court.

Ambassador Commissiong: And so we we dealt with the second compromise on Monday when we moved away not just from the Queen, but also from the concept, from any concept of hereditary rule…installed our own native president, but also a precedent always put in place by a democratic process.”

00;23;15;10 - 00;23;56;09, Carla: Where the CCJ and other local courts have made strides on justice and equality. The Crown Court has just as often insisted that Caribbean citizens do not deserve the same rights as British citizens or citizens of any democracy, for that matter. Consider the 2018 case of Day versus the government of the Cayman Islands. We'll hear how Cayman's highest court decided this case, and then you'll hear the final judgment on the case, as decided from Britain by the UK private court, which just so happens to be the highest judicial authority for most of the English speaking Caribbean.

00;23;56;11 - 00;26;05;07, [ARCHIVAL AUDIO] from Nationwide News: “A recent ruling by the Privy Council in relation to same sex marriages in the Cayman Islands has dealt a blow to lobby groups across the region that want to have the buggery law struck down. [Lord Sales gives the judgement of the board] ‘This is an appeal from the Cayman Islands. The point in issue is whether the constitution of the Cayman Islands confers a constitutional right to legal recognition of same sex marriages, which cannot be abrogated by the legislature.’” 

[Nationwide News reporter William Mitchell] “A judge in Cayman initially ruled in the couple's favor in March 2019, but it was later struck down on appeal by Cayman's government. The matter was then brought to the Privy Council, where the coincided with the government. [Lord Sales reading the judgement of the board] ‘This depends upon the interpretation of the provisions of the Bill of Rights set out in the Constitution. The appellants are two women who are in a committed relationship and wish to enter into a same sex marriage, recognized then law. In 2018, they were refused a license to marry on the grounds that the marriage law in the Cayman Islands defines marriage as the union between a man and a woman as husband and wife.’”

[Nationwide News reporter William Mitchell] “In expanding its decision, the Privy Council said Cayman's Bill of Rights states that a marriage is illegal when it's between two people of opposite sex is, the Privy Council says, to interpret that section of the Bill of Rights in any other way would undermine the coherence of the entire bill. [Lord Sales reading the judgement of the board] ‘Rather than the right of marriage. The European Court has held that the right to respect for family and private life creates a right for same sex couples to seek other forms of legal recognition for their relationships. The Cayman Islands government accepts that the equivalent provision in the Bill of Rights has the same effect. Accordingly, a form of civil partnership recognized in law is available for same sex couples in the Cayman Islands, and there is constitutional protection for this.’” 

[Nationwide News reporter William Mitchell] “The Privy Council points out that its ruling doesn't prevent Cayman's lawmakers from bringing legislation to recognize same sex marriages.”

00;26;05;10 - 00;28;07;05, Carla: This Crown Court ruling comes five years after a CCJ ruling overturning Victorian era vagrancy and cross-dressing laws that were used to criminalize trans and queer persons. This precedent was set by members of Guyana Trans United who were the lead plaintiffs on the case. You'll learn more about this case in the episode: Setting Precedent, positive rights. And here's another portal funding.

Carla continues: What we want to know truly is does funding facilitate or arrest our work truly, hell, like not just our work. What about us? Or visions? Those conversations, the actually generative, you know kind of lush. You know those conversations. How precisely does it differ from a colonial state of affairs? If the only way it differs is that it allows us to feel like we have more control over our future, a feeling not manifested in our collective realities?

Carla continues: What are we to do? What of entrepreneurship and collectivities? Where do these belong in our work? The vast majority of funding for social justice work, queer liberation and feminist organizing comes from abroad, namely the United States, Canada, and the European Union, collectively and individually. Then there are the International multilateral organizations housed in and directed by these same countries and to a lesser extent, China and Japan.

Carla continues: Note the irony that the countries responsible for the frameworks of our oppression, if not its ongoing daily implementation, are the ones who set our justice agendas.

00;28;07;08 - 00;28;41;09, [ARCHIVAL AUDIO] Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley addressing COP26 November 2021: “Our world, my friends, stands at a fork in the road. One no less significant than when the United Nations was formed in 1945. But then the majority of our countries here did not exist. We exist? No. The difference is we want to exist 100 years from now. The leaders of today, not 2030, not 2050, must make this choice. It is in our hands and our people and our planet need it more than ever.” 

00;28;41;11 - 00;29;24;02, Carla: And that was Mia Mottley addressing the COP26 opening ceremony in November 2021. Y'all, Mia cannot save the world. 

[Act 4] The Map of our Podcast

Carla: Finally, I will not be your only guide. Let's say I'll be your Earth side guide. We will turn to Colin Robinson, a giant of Queeribbean organizing who is now in the ancestral realm because it's time to take note of who is often missing our indigenous communities and our disabled communities. Colin’s words from one of his last interviews before his transition will have to hold us and keep us. For now.

00;29;24;04 - 00;30;19;12, [ARCHIVAL AUDIO] Colin Robinson, from Sex & Gender Justice in Trinidad and Tobago with Colin Robinson: We had a program that about seven gay deaf people came to because one of our peer leaders signed. Because otherwise they wouldn't have been able to understand what was going on. And we asked them, what's the thing that you could do that would have the biggest impact on homophobia in deaf communities? And you know what they said, right? No clue. When straight - when hearing people sorry learned to sign, right? Because, you know, you can't be talking to your doctor about how you get the STI or asking them difficult questions, him or her difficult questions if it’s the church interpreter you're relying on. You can't go to an LGBTI social event if nobody could talk to you.

00;30;19;14 - 00;31;37;28, Carla: We will be visiting with indigenous women's groups. There will be further portals we will need to traverse to experience Caribbean Indigeniety, but not so many as you might think. As one of our participants reminded us, the indigenous Caribbean is not an alternate universe. Indigenous folks have been living in the same Caribbean as you and I, but as you travel the portals that link us with the indigenous peoples and inheritance of our region, you will come to rethink our relationship to land and entitlement by.

Carla continues: But just but, what if we could fly from this free fall? You know what, say we are flying? We've flown so high that it might be nice to look down. No following Kei’s instructions “First, you must imagine the sky, blue and cloudless if that helps, or else the luminously black spread of night. Next - and this is the important bit - you must imagine yourself inside it. Inside the sky, floating beside me….Now focus…”

00;31;38;01 - 00;37;49;28, Carla: Supported like this, just so, we can make out our Sea - the Caribbean Sea. If we look clearly, and in just the right light, we can make out the map of Queeribbean and feminist organizing in the English-speaking Caribbean.

Carla outlines our map: Look to the northwest corner of the lands ringing the Sea. Find Belize, planted on the Yucatan peninsula’s eastern end like the cool cool side of a brick wall at midday. Belize, which marks the northernmost boundary of our podcast, is where the women of POWA dedicate themselves to women’s and family empowerment and reproductive health. So too do PETAL and Our Circle, who advocate for Lesbian, Bisexual, and Queer (which we’ll refer to as “LBQ” ) womxn across the nation. You’ll also find Toledo Maya Women’s Council, an indigenous group, working toward girl’s and women’s empowerment in the Toledo District in southern Belize. 

Carla continues with our map: Now, glide due east from Belize and pass over the Cayman Islands to Jamaica. Jamaica is homebase to one of the region’s oldest queer advocacy groups, Cari-FLAGS, as well as one of our region’s newest and boldest LBQ groups, WE-Change. Jamaica is also home to EVE for Life, an organization dedicated to lifting up and guiding teen mothers, as well as pushing forward youth sexual and reproductive health education.

Carla continues with our map: Next, soar over to the northeast edge of our Sea; cruise east past Haiti and the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, all of the Virgins Islands, and then slightly southeast past St. Kitts and Nevis to Antigua and Barbuda. Here, the Caribbean Institute of Women in Leadership, or CIWiL, monitors, strengthens and increases women’s political participation and leadership across our region. Integrated Health Outreach works at the intersection of sustainability and gender empowerment to build a holistic approach to boosting women and girls’ mental health. Intersect, which rounds out our Antigua and Barbuda contingent, uses digital/cyber-feminist activism as a means of subverting unequal power relations, engaging Antiguans and Barbudans and people across the Caribbean region on a range of gender-related topics, including through their digital literary journal. 

Carla continues with our map: Now come back slightly east, following the trail of the lesser Antilles south to Saint Lucia. Here, Helen’s Daughters empowers women farmers, Girls of a Feather supports girls leaving the juvenile correction system, and Raise Your Voice Saint Lucia centers women and children in their support of those who experience gender-based violence.

Carla continues with our map: Hop and skip further down the island chain to Grenada, where we’ll stop to hear from Sweetwater Foundation. From this, their base in the southwestern corner of our regional ring, they are undertaking a region-wide survey of childhood sexual assault.

Carla continues with our map: Trace your sight south past Trinidad and Tobago and then east, to the center of South America’s northernmost coast. We’ll hear from trailblazers all-round - starting with two more of our region’s earliest queer advocacy groups - Guyana Rainbow Foundation, also known as GuyBow, and Guyana Trans United, the organization who pursued the court case leading to a regional repeal of buggery laws through the Caribbean Court of Justice. [Stick a pin here. You may be wondering how far-reaching this regional precedent is. Well, back to the independence available to our nations - there are nations for whom their highest judicial authority remains the Crown Court. For these nations, buggery laws are still on the books.] Then we’ll leave Guyana’s coast and move into the Amazon river basin to hear from indigenous-led groups, the Makushi Research Unit and Wapichan Women’s Movement. 

Carla continues with our map: And finally, here we are at the southeastern edge of the Caribbean, floating above Suriname. This is where SUCOS or Suriname Coalition of Sex Workers, and the LBQ women’s and family advocacy group, Women’s Way, put in work. 

Carla closes our map: If you take a deep, deep breath now, hold it, and then exhale it out, we expect you’ll land steady, on sturdy footing, back in center. Wherever in the Caribbean, or elsewhere, that is for you.

[Act 5] Wrapping Up

Carla continues: Let me take us back to Colin, speaking near the end of his most recent life to seal this episode.

00;37;50;01 - 00;38;58;00, [ARCHIVAL AUDIO] Colin Robinson, from Sex & Gender Justice in Trinidad and Tobago with Colin Robinson: “Then there's this persistent narrative that we tend to paint and we love to embrace that we're backward. You know, that we homophobic ‘is the culture, is the culture’, and we need to break that sense of ourselves. We need to break that sense of our governments. We need to break that sense because it’s a stereotype it’s a racist type. I've seen it operate as a racist stereotype internationally. How the Caribbean is this deep, dark place of homophobia where I mean, that kind of imagination of the Caribbean. We have to destroy it because that's what keeps young people oppressed. Because when young people are struggling, you know, in their families, in their homes with this sense of, you know, being trans or these sexual attractions, you know, happening these things happening in their bodies, but not along with their words, and they would turn to the Internet and on the Internet, they would find these crushing representations of the places that they live.”

00;38;58;03 - 00;40;53;14, Carla: We have ten more episodes for you, each dedicated to themes related to the work of Caribbean feminist and queer organizing, eldership, justice and judicial precedents, Indigenous youth, families, communities, feminist leadership making money and self-possessed selfhood. Each of our organizers gifted something for the veranda. A thought, an item or a wish, which we'll plant under the sycamore tree to guide or continue our work, and the generations to come.

Carla continues: Also to honor our elders and forebearers who deserve to retire and rest well. We would like to thank Jacqui’s, Monica Foderingham for reading copiously to Jacqui and their sisters when they were little and for reading to us now, big up nice, clean Ms. Monica. Yeah, nice clean you. You heard in order, passages from Olive Senior’s poem “Discovery”, Curdella Forbes’ A Tall History of Sugar, Kei Miller’s, AugustTown,  and Aimé Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism.

[CREDITS] Carla: This episode was produced by Rebel Women Lit and Queerly Stated with support from Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice, Equality Fund, and Global Affairs Canada. Research and Writing by Jacqui Brown, Script Editing and Project Management by Dave-Ann Moses, editing and sound by Jherane Patmore and Safiyah Chinere, and Outreach by Ashley Dalley. Remember to head on over to the show notes to find the details of the organizers featured in our episode and Rebelwomenlit.com for additional references.

Thank you so much for joining me. Your host, Carla Moore, Under The Sycamore Tree …