Society Must Be Amended: Working Anxieties in Trinidad’s Body Politic
Aaron Andrew Greer
Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology/Sociology
Pacific University
Abstract: Contemporary narratives of work in Trinidad often lament the island’s poor work habits, indifference to professionalism, and extreme lack of productivity. These narratives, rehearsed and retold in countless ways, constitute a genre of their own that, depending on one’s position, are either lamentations or songs of praise. For many Trinidadians, the island’s worklessness is a badge of honor to be worn with pride. The indifference to work, I am told, is what makes the island unique and special, different from others in the West Indies. For others, Trinidadians’ hostility to productivity is both a symptom of a self-indulgent society and the cause of the island’s rapidly deteriorating moral economy. All the evidence one needs that this is so, they will argue, can be found in the dangerously high ratesof domestic abuse, alcoholism, drug trafficking and addiction, and violent crime. The aim of this essay is to explore the concept of work and its contested meaning as it traverses Trinidad’s public imaginary. What work is and what it should like are unsettled questions in Trinidad, fought over in subtle and overt ways in the island’s body politic.Engaging an anthropology of the contemporary, this essay explores the concept of work, and its concomitant anxieties, as it circulates in Trinidad’s public imaginary.
Keywords: productivity; work; refusal; discipline
Introduction: Capital Antinomies in the Caribbean
Not only do we recognize the role of surplus distributions in constituting and (re)producing specific social positions and formations, but also the real and present option of different distributions and the distinct social identities and practices they might foster.
~ J.K. Gibson-Graham, Toward a Post-Structuralist Political Economy
When Shrutji, head instructor of a small Hindu school, walked over to our table to announce that everyone was going home, I glanced at my watch. The interview with Partap was well into the third hour and my ability to concentrate was rapidly deteriorating. We had gone through the moral degeneracy of modernity, the spiritually disturbing loudness of Trinidad’s maxi-taxis (small transport vans), the problem with Islam, the sorry state of Trinidadian schools, and we were just getting into how one might improve gas mileage by fixing magnets to a car’s gas tank when I shut down the recorder. Partap is a man of many words. His favorite conversational topic, sharing time with the success of his admittedly brilliant kids, is the moral decline of Trinidad. Though his theories about fuel efficiency may be marginal, his dissertations on Trinidad’s moral decay are far from fringe. The thesis that Trinidadians spend too much time reveling and not enough working is a popular one. This sentiment is so pervasive, so consistently articulated by so many different people, I have labeled it a narrative genre and collect its artifacts, both historical and contemporary. The Trinidadians Don’t Worknarrative genre circulates in a robust normative economy about what Trinidadians ought and ought not be doing with their time. A larger project will involve a genealogical tracing and cartographic mapping of the genre, but here I provide a more brief description and analysis of the problem of work in Trinidad. The observations and analyses that follow both emerge and diverge from my fieldwork and my interest both in the problem of “specific social positions and formations” (Gibson-Graham et al 2001) in a late capitalist global economy and the anxieties of abjection (Ferguson 1999) experienced by precarious states. As a divergence, the piece moves beyond strictly ethnographic accounts of the problem of work and into explorations of a critical theme in the “problem-space” (Scott )of public imaginaries.
Interrogating the disciplinary powerof work, Kathi Weeks opens her book, The Problem with Work, with a simple question: “Why do we work so long and so hard?” (2011: 1). Weeks’ question is directed toward an American audience, but coming from seven years of research in Trinidad, West Indies, I would respond: In some places, some people don’t. In Trinidad, tension between those that aspire to a productive nation and those who resist the nagging demands of work is palpable. Weeks goes on to question not so much that we must work or are expected to do so, but “that there is not more active resistance” to the hegemony of work (2011: 1). Formany Trinidadians there is, which is the subject of this paper. The Trinidadians that prioritize play and thus refuse capitalist logics of the ever- productive subject, imagine and enact a capitalism they prefer to live (on capitalist alternatives see Gibson-Graham 2006; also Graeber 2006). Indeed, for many Trinidadians play itself is a form of resistance and refusal (Burton 1997) that subverts disciplinary work ethics and transforms conventional idealizations of capitalism. Put another way, Trinidadians that party and sustain that as a national ethos call capitalism’s bluff – leisure must not be the episodic reward of labor but its equal, if not superior. It is evident then that in some places the disciplinary discourses that would regulate conduct and promote productive, work ready bodies (Foucault 1990; 1995) encounter creative opposition. Under analysis here are contemporary practices of leisure in Trinidad that contribute more to a libidinal economy than to a capital economy and the tensions that emerge between those that value the former and those that would rather promote the latter.
The phrase “Trinidadians don’t work”, used throughout this piece and succinctly emblematic of a pervasive sentiment in Trinidad, initially comes from an acerbically witted American artist and expat named Garold who had been living in the country for about a decade when I met him. One evening, I joined a couple friends for rum and Cokes at a bar in the rural area of Central. This was my first introduction to Garold and, as often happened with him, the conversation turned to impressions of Trinidad. When I asked him how he got by he related the challenges of working in Trinidad. “Trinidadians don’t work,” he emphatically stated. “This is the only place I’ve ever lived where you can get fired for working too hard.” New to the country, I was certain he had just offended our hosts. As I looked at them they nodded and laughed. “They told me at my last job to stop working so hard because it was making everyone else look bad.” There is, of course, substantial risk in quoting an outsider to speak for local life. And as a general rule it is a risk I wouldn’t take if the theme did not span the entirety of the country’s history from colonialism to the present. But even that is not all. Certainly, political and community leaders have voiced frustration about, drafted policies for, and enacted programs in response to Trinidad’s “lack of discipline”, in first Prime Minister Eric Williams’ terms. Yet that “lack of discipline” has a cultural-political life that involves labor histories and contemporary contexts shaped by local and global ideologies, practices, and policies. It involves idiosyncratic interpretations of those practices. It involves creative refusals of certain of capitalism’s demands and passive acceptance of others. In short, the social life of what work is and what it should be, how disciplined and productive a nation should be, are radically unsettled questions in Trinidad. The aim of this work is to identify some of the most well-worn narratives about the question of work in Trinidad and to analyze the most salient features of their influence.
The Receding Mirage: A Brief Political Economy of Trinidad
Societies that aspire to and achieve development are disciplined in terms of both the setting of rules and in ensuring conformity and obedience to the rules…Lack of enforcement of rules [in Trinidad and Tobago] is pervasive.
~ Terrence W. Farrell, Fellow of the Institute of Banking and Finance of Trinidad and Tobago, The Underachieving Society(emphasis added)
Prosperity, it has become painfully clear, is all too ephemeral. Like its constructed opposite, poverty, it is a relative signifier whose contingency lends it animportant “practico-social function”(Althusser 1970: 231; 1995; see also Storey 2009: 71). That is, the contradictions, or antinomies (Weeks 2011), of capital – a wealth generative system that engenders poverty on a global scale – must be resolved through “images, myths, ideas or concepts” (Althusser 1970: 231) that elide systemic failure. In the face of numerous forms and metrics of capital, how does a nation or its citizens know if they are prosperous, poor, or somewhere in between? How much capital constitutes prosperity? Is prosperity merely the presence of capital? Is it certain volumes of capital? Distributions? If econometrics of accumulation fail to capture lived experiences of capital, by what measures of habitus and from whose criteria do we establish prosperity? How much money does a state have to have and how readily accessible must it be to the nation?
By nearly any econometric analysis, Trinidad is prosperous. By shear numbers, it is thriving, far surpassing its closest Caribbean competitor, Barbados, by billions of dollars. The island’s prosperity would seem to be its reward for more than simply the geological blessing of oil and natural gas in abundance, but also a diversified economy that includes a strong petrochemical industry and several aluminum and steel smelters. Trinidad also enjoys open access to free secondary education and socialized medical care[1].The twin island republic’s official unemployment rate, currently at 5.8%, is the lowest in the West Indies, lower even than that of the United States[2]. Many of the most popular markers of prosperity are evident in Trinidad’s economic profile. Equally evident, however, are the markers of economic instability, ineffective wealth distribution measures, and social decay. Violent crime is at an all-time high, with nearly two murders a day plaguing a nation of little more than a million people. Poverty rates remain lodged at levels recorded in many less prosperous developing nations. Drug and alcohol addiction is rampant. Most alarming, Trinidad has become a key staging area for drugs moving from South to North America, generating drug gangs indifferent to crime rates and contributing to a culture of corruption vexing even to the most cynical of observers (for Trinidad’s culture of corruption seeKerrigan 2013[3]; on the role of cynicism in Trinidad see Naipaul 1978).
There is little terribly unique about a country with a relatively large GDP on the one hand, but troubling poverty and crime statistics on the other. Plenty of countries, both in the center and at the periphery, enjoy large annual revenues but endure distressing levels of poverty, crime, pollution, and corruption. Such extremes are, virtually without exception, the predictable product of wealth inequality (Goode and Maskovsky 2001[4]). Trinidad’s mechanisms of wealth distribution are indeed lacking, but on the margin, not abysmal. The island has a decent, if anxious, middle class that isclearly present statistically and socially[5]. Trinidad’s enigmatic contradiction then rests between economic indicators that suggest prosperity on the one hand, and popular vocalizations that Trinidadians do not want to work, and would much rather party, on the other.
‘Trinidadians Don’t Work’ as Song of Praise: A Politics of Bodies that Party
That Trinidadians ‘love they parties’, as one of my neighbors in Port of Spain once put it, is obvious to anyone who sets foot on the island, and likely to a good deal of those who haven’t (Lewis 1968)[6]. Trinidadians’ adoration of revelry is not exactly the stuff of hard-nosed ethnographic inquiry. The statement that Trinidadians ‘love they parties’ constitutes a single strand in a narrative thread woven throughout the island that situates Trinidad as place where the people like to play. For many Trinidadians though, the phrase is a commentary on a set of values that distinguishes the island (its counterpart, Tobago, is another matter) from other potential tourist destinations and, more importantly, from the Protestant West. It is not that Trinidadians utter the phrase to parrot Tourist Bureau clichés that entice work weary Americans and Europeans to come unwind on a flamboyantly playfulisland. Tourists don’t visit Trinidad, at least not in the numbers much of the rest of the Caribbean endures, so participating in the economy of marketing is unlikely. Rather, the phrase articulates how many Trinidadians prioritize life’s obligations, happily avoiding the labor-induced stressors suffered by the highly motivated and productive nations to the North.
Trinidad’s love of partying is evident everywhere. Rum shops, bars, clubs, fêtes, pan yards, and limers (clandestine groups of people simply ‘hanging out’, usually drinking) fill the island’s material and ideological geography (for a social history and economics of drinking in the West Indies, see Smith 2008, specific to Trinidad see pages241, 245). There are few nights of the week that go unassailed by raging Soca fêtes, which respect few, if any, zoning ordinances. One is equally likely to encounter a dance party in full thrust on Monday as on a Friday night, and as much in a suburban area as in a nightlife zone. And Trinidadians are loath to break a lime; breaking up or leaving a discussion or party early is tantamount to a social faux pas. Trinidadian street life is the most readily accessible venue of the island’s public culture and is the site where some of its most essential, and contested, values are enacted.
Hereford’s is typically rather quiet as rum shops go. Located on Maraval Street, just a block from my apartment in Port of Spain, the bar sees fairly regular traffic, though of a generally more subdued spirit than the bars of St. James, a working class neighborhood legendary for its raucous rum shops, or Ariapita, known more locally as simply “the Avenue” and popular among the middle and upper classes as a nightlife hotspot. Hereford’s is more of an after work bar where people from the large Tatil office building or the nearby Digicel offices might unwind. On Monday and Wednesday evenings you might find a few members of the Trinidad Cycling Federation sharing some Stags after the group rides around the Savanna. But rarely is the shop blaring Soca music at levels that render conversation impossible. They leave that to Emoticons, the obnoxiously loud rum shop at the other end of Maraval Street that, as far as I can tell, is only ever populated by the owner and his two friends. Hereford’s goes through a transformation however on the Thursday and Friday nights between Christmas and Carnival[7]. Limers gather in front of the bar and across the street, rum bottles on curbs and car hoods and hands full of Stag bottles or Styrofoam cups filled with ice, Coke and rum. After Christmas, Thursdays are especially rowdy. Pre-Carnival fêtes set up in front of the bar, complete with soca djs, percussion and brass bands, MCs, provocative dancers, stadium worthy sound systems, and enough rum to fuel Trinidad’s navy.
Maraval Street’s pre-Carnival party is a burlesque of thumping music, heavy drinking, and evocative dancing. MCs, performing a well-documented style of Caribbean masculinity (Wilson 2001; Niranjana 2006: 131-168; Hope 2007; Murray 2010) yell instructions to the street partiers to wine (partner dance, similar to twerking), drink, join dance trains, or, inexplicably, pay attention as their drunken friends perform stunts like gyrating while standing on their heads on the roofs of moving cars. The street, normally busy with workers shuffling between work and home, erupts into a frenzy of activities difficult to categorize but vividly emblematic of distinctly Trinidadian approaches to leisure. The streets in Trinidad then are not merely avenues of traffic that funnel people to certain destinations. The streets are themselves destinations. They are both cartographicplaces and social spaces. The former can be found on a map, the latter only by imbibing Trinidad’s street life. Streets then are also avenues, in a symbolic sense, of leisure, fun, and extravagance usually reserved in the US for clubs, organized events (Burning Man, Rainbow Gatherings, etc.) or private parties. Streets in Trinidad are therefore places linked in an imaginative geography withthe same carnivalesque of formal establishments (Bhaktin2009). By becoming places, or locales, they also become spaces where the public performance of dancing, drinking, intimacy, radical gender andsocial experimentation (“winin’ on a stranger” as a popular soca tune has it, for example), become not only acceptable but expected. A libidinal economy emerges that opens sexual possibilities on the very streets that hours before indicated little such potential.
Mimi Sheller’s (2012) articulation of sexuality and citizenship in Jamaica has many parallels in Trinidad.Sheller contends that analyses of sexual citizenship concern “collective processes, public spaces, and forms of interrelatedness that are sexual or sexualized. Thus, it is a politics that is closely linked to public performances and to the performativity of public actions and, hence, a politics in which bodies are central and cannot be ignored or bracketed as in classical liberal theory” (2012: 41). Sheller’s critical analysis of the intersection between gender and sexuality and nationalist projects neatly captures the ways in which bodies – their uses and pleasures – are sites of competing interests. The body, Foucault has aptly illustrated, became a site of governance and regulation throughout and after the Enlightenment (1990; 1991; 1999; 2003). Throughout the colonial project in the West Indies those regulatory technologies took on a scope and dimension of much vaster proportions than anything experienced in Europe. What some have termed ‘coloniality’ (Moraña 2008) involved the thorough regulation of bodies both through knowledge regimes and corporeal punishment (Paton 2004; for use of games,particularly cricket, as regulatory technology, see Lazarus 1999: 144-195). Slave and indenture societies were so regulated that a body not at work was subject to savage brutality (Hall 1992; Williams 1971; 1994; Knight 1990). Strategies of opposition emerged among slaves (Burton 1997) that involved radically subversive uses of the body (read: ‘unproductive’ uses). Contemporary practices found in party environments – bars, fêtes, Carnival – emerge from these refusals of both bourgeois sexual norms and logics of productivity.