Original subtitles

♪

There's Trinidad

and Tobago.

One country,

two very different islands,

two very different places.

♪

One island is what you expected when you arrived

wearing flip-flops and a Hawaiian shirt,

all greased up with cocoa butter.

♪

The other ain't about that at all.

♪

♪ I took a walk through this ♪

♪ Beautiful world

♪ Felt the cool rain on my shoulder ♪

♪ Found something good in this ♪

♪ Beautiful world

♪ I felt the rain getting colder ♪

♪ La, la

♪ Sha la, la, la, la

♪ Sha la, la, la, la

♪ Sha la, la, la

♪ Sha la, la, la, la

♪ Sha la, la, la, la, la

♪ If I had the choice, I would choose ♪

♪ To live back when Calypso brought the news ♪

♪ If I had the choice, I would choose ♪

♪ To live right back when Calypso brought the news ♪

♪ No more reporters, no anchormen ♪

♪ No recorder, no pad and pen ♪

♪ No nosy cameras to point and shoot ♪

♪ No red ink to cross out the truth ♪

♪

Many visitors come to Trinidad for one thing

and one thing only, Carnival,

which locals say is the biggest party on Earth,

a pre-Lenten festival of costumes,

food, copious drinking, and the kind of dancing

you'd better be good at before trying in public.

It's almost two months before the party officially starts,

but here in Trinidad's capital, Port of Spain,

the Carnival season has already begun.

I thought it was a pity that you weren't here

during the peak of the Carnival season.

I'll tell you something really terrible about myself.

Like, I've never been to Mardi Gras, Carnival in Rio,

any kind of Carnival. Okay.

Like, large numbers of strangers...

That is very interesting.

Swarming through the streets dancing in uniforms?

- Doesn't do it for you? - No. Some of my deepest fears

are having to dance or sing in public.

Either of these would be terrifying,

so this seems like a situation

where that might come up, you know?

♪

Queen's Park Savannah will be the epicenter of Carnival,

but tonight it's still Trinidad's street food center.

♪

My dinner companion for some fried snapper

is La Shaun Prescott,

who's here to tell me about two essential skills

necessary for the proper enjoyment of local nightlife.

Turns out I am very good at one and suck epically at the other.

What is liming?

Liming is, like, our version of hanging out, you know?

- Right. - You're with friends.

You're chilling. That's liming.

Is there alcohol involved? Chances are if you're liming...

Of course, probably.

Well, I mean, you can lime without beer.

What about the rum? I haven't had any rum here.

How does one drink rum here,

and which rum should I be drinking?

Does one drink it on the rocks or mixed?

- So one drinks it with Coke. - With Coke?

Yeah, rum and Coke.

But the rum's supposed to be really, really good here.

Yeah.

Okay, so we've established what liming is.

What is wining?

The technical term is the circumduction of the hips,

and it's a style of dance.

♪

And if you're not used to the culture,

you don't understand what it means,

you can interpret it the wrong way.

When you see it for the first time,

you can think it's seductive, you can think it's sexual.

♪

But people can wine on each other

and not really mean anything. Right.

I could wine on you, and it doesn't mean

that I want to take you home, you know?

It's something that's really about freedom

of expression of self,

and it's something that crosses ages, races,

ethnicities, especially during Carnival time.

You see people from high status and people who are,

you know, lower class, they both wine together.

You know, the barriers are no longer there.

It's all just a mix of all different ethnicities and stuff.

♪

♪

The faces you see in the streets are African,

Indian, Chinese,

Middle Eastern in features

and every shade of mix in between.

This patchwork of ethnic identities and colors

is a direct legacy of Trinidad's colonial past.

Located at the southern end of the Caribbean Sea,

seven miles offshore from Venezuela,

Trinidad and Tobago have long been

important ports of call.

Like a lot of islands in the area,

everybody's been through here at one point or another.

The usual European hunters of fortune.

The Spanish came looking for gold.

Then the Dutch, French, and British took their turns

at the real money of the time, sugar,

an economy built on plantation labor and slavery.

Finally, the island hit the big money...

oil.

During World War II,

a pair of seemingly unrelated events

had a big impact on the island's musical culture.

The U.S. Navy built an oil depot

to supply overseas strategic needs.

And the ruling British banned drums

made from traditional-style animal skins

after a series of riots

they insisted were inspired by African drumming.

♪

One improvises in such circumstances,

and all those oil drums were repurposed.

♪

♪

This is Phase II, one of only 11 large steel bands

taking part in the worldwide competition, Panorama,

that happens in a few weeks.

Winner gets 150 grand.

♪

They've taken home the prize seven times,

in no small part due to this man,

Lennox "Boogsie" Sharpe.

♪

The rehearsal space is called a pan yard,

and if you're lucky, somebody nearby is making this,

corn soup,

split pea broth,

dumplings, and, of course, corn.

Kim Johnson is a local journalist and historian

who knows about this stuff.

It's far more complex than you think.

♪

Wow. I got to tell you, that was incredible.

I heard a lot of, you know, little steel drum bands

around the Caribbean, but nothing like that.

All percussion, right? 100%? Yes.

How did your interest in this develop?

I grew up here. Later I became a writer.

I discovered there just hundreds of stories.

Because in the early days,

up until the '60s the steel bands

were partly like... Like street gangs.

They would fight one another,

the "West Side Story" kind of thing.

The steel bands doubled as that.

♪

So I just got fascinated

by tracking down all of these pioneers

and getting their stories of how they got involved.

I'll been 64 years this year.

I play music since I was a kid.

And his story is that he grew up with them

in one of his back yards.

When he was about three years old,

he was going out playing with them.

♪

Boogsie composes his pieces

by layering different types of drums

on top of each other.

Engine Room, made of unpitched percussion,

lays down the groove.

♪

Next, a section of six bass pans drops a bass line.

♪

The guitar and cello pans add harmonies

that sound like strumming.

♪

And the frontline pans play the melody.

♪

The result? A symphonic wall of sound.

♪

I'd like someday to marriage this

with a big orchestra, symphony orchestra.

Yeah, that's... that's my dream.

It's because of the music Africans survived slavery,

not just physically, survived psychically.

It's a question of just improvising instruments.

♪

♪

Thanks so much.

Holy crap, okay.

This is a challenge.

People keep coming up to me in the street.

The first thing they say is,

"Have you had doubles yet? Did you get a doubles yet?"

So I'm eating doubles, all right?

♪

Doubles are a Caribbean take

on the Indian chana bhatura,

two floppy, tender pieces of soft,

Indian-style bread

loaded with a wet heap of curried chickpeas,

pepper sauce, and mango.

Structurally, I have questions here.

Yeah, I don't want seepage. Seepage is never... never good.

If somebody uses "seepage" in a sentence,

it... it... nothing good is gonna happen.

I'm gonna suck the paper.

I don't think there's meat in here,

but I still like it.

It's really, really good.

♪

♪

A half-century after Trinidad

became independent of the British Empire,

there are surprisingly few architectural remnants,

but the face of the country

and its population were forever changed

when slavery ended in 1834

and Great Britain found itself in need of cheap,

if not free, labor to work the plantations.

They found it in East India.

At the abolition of slavery, the plantation owners

desperately needed to find labor

to fill the void created by the slaves

who turned their backs on the plantation

for obvious reasons, and they looked around.

They tried Portuguese. They tried Chinese.

They tried many communities

until they found out that Indians are the best suited

because they were already planting sugarcane

in India successfully.

♪

Between the end of outright slavery

and the beginning of World War I,

150,000 indenturedservants were brought here from India.

Indentured servitude is slavery by another name.

The people brought here from India were bought, sold,

and treated like property but were told that

if they completed five years of often back-breaking labor,

they would be set free.

♪

Noon on a Monday, ordinarily a workday,

but today the Singh family is having a boys' river wine.

Chan, the patriarch, is a retired diplomat.

His son, Keshav, is a music producer.

Uncle Charlie is in charge of the cooking.

♪

How far back does the family go?

This family goes back to 1845.

1845? Those were hard times.

Life was not good for y... For the family in India.

There was poverty, there was wars

and all sorts of things, and yes.

- Famine. - They came into real

hard times here because the Indian

immigrants from India replaced the liberated slaves,

and the conditions were not very different.

Difficult times, but it was a means to social mobility

and away from the situation in India.

We part of the descendents of that generation.

♪

Hey!

Start with one whole duck, hack into pieces,

rub with lime juice, season with hot peppers, garlic,

and the tropical herb shado beni.

Add generous helpings of masala and curry powder.

Marinate for a bit, then sear in oil,

then simmer in coconut milk until tender.

Mmm, man, that's good.

The pepper's soft. Really hot peppers.

- Yeah. - That's really good.

We got to kill some more ducks 'cause that is...

When we have it like this,

when we're drinking before the actual meal,

it's like an appetizer, but we call it cutters

because it cuts the alcohol.

Yeah.

Right, I'm sobering up as we speak.

So, look, you're all Trinidadian?

- Mm-hmm. - Yes.

It's Trinidad first, Indian second.

- Yeah. - 'Cause, I mean,

when the Indians came,

you know, 160-something years ago,

there was a disconnect with the motherland.

Most of these Indian were promised

that they were going for a short tenure

to make a lot of money and then return home.

They gave return passage or land... or land.

So when the first Indians took the option to go back,

couldn't find their families. Right.

And those who found their family were rejected

because they said, "You guys abandoned us for five years."

- Wow. - "You may as well take

that five acres of land and stay there."

So there's no closure to descendants like us

who have not found any connection

between our families in India.

Soft paratha dough is cooked on a massive tawa

and slathered with ghee.

But here, just as it's reaching peak flakiness,

it gets a beating.

Here they call it buss-up-shut,

which means "burst up shirt."

- Burst up shirt? - Yeah.

Because they'd make a huge paratha,

and then they whack it with two sticks.

Oh, okay, I thought they were talking about

what's gonna happen to my shirt after I eat it.

What about skin color?

Look, you look at Jamaica,

you look at Haiti.

I don't care what they say,

but what they do is it's still a powerful determinant

of where your status is in the... In a power structure.

- Yeah. - Does that exist here?

It's not something that has consumed our imagination.

Being Trinidadian is not necessarily color-tone oriented,

but it's more... and I think what people really revel in

and enjoy is the common experiences.

The food is the glue that binds the society together.

In spite of the problem that we have here,

we are still one of the most harmonious,

multiethnic society in the world,

and the multi-ethnicity of Trinidad,

the bigger multi-religious tolerance

are examples for the world to follow.

We are a small island, and if you don't learn

to live together, you have to live in the sea.

We have to. Right?

♪ Oh why Trinidad is nice

♪ Trinidad is a paradise

♪ Trinidad is nice

♪ Trinidad is a paradise

♪

Yeah, my theory was always the whole world

is gonna look like Trinidad in another 100 years, anyway.

- It'd be a great world. - Well, I think so.

Cheers to that. Cheers, cheers.

- Cheers. - Cheers to that.

♪ Trinidad is nice

♪ Trinidad is a paradise

♪ Why, Trinidad is nice

♪ Trinidad is a paradise

Thank you.

♪

It started in 1898, more than 100 years ago.

Most of the Christians were being persecuted by the Turks,

so there was an exodus of Christians leaving Syria.

They boarded the ships from Beirut,

and as long as it was heading west,

they thought they were going to America.

Many of our parents landed in Trinidad,

and that's when we started.

That's the first generation.

Just outside of Port of Spain,

Bayshore is one of the priciest neighborhoods in the country.

I'm here as a guest of the Sabgavuds,

a successful family of Lebanese Syrians.

- Look at... isn't this amazing? - Beirut.

Oh, yes, like Beirut. You know arak?

- I do indeed. - Would you like arak?

A little ice and some water

would be perfect. It would be perfect.

My drink of choice is Grey Goose and coconut water.

The family's story is not an uncommon one.

The first members came here

during the collapse of the Ottoman Empire,

arriving penniless.

They worked their way up as textile merchants

and branched out to run businesses that sell

everything from medical equipment to real estate.

And how large is the community now in Trinidad?

A little under 5,000.

That's still a fairly small percentage of the...

Extremely small.

Actually, we are the smallest ethnic group in Trinidad.

But the most powerful, almost the most powerful.

Small but the most powerful, huh?

That's not bragging.

Syrian-Lebanese merchant class are generally seen as the elite.

Actually, I'm very big in the food business.

I have a 120 restaurants.

Call me the Starbucks of the Caribbean.

I can't tell you how happy I am about this meal.

I love, love the food.

This is raw kibbeh,

the best raw kibbeh you'll ever eat in your life.

- Yeah. - This is the fried version,

which is stuffed with the nice stuffing,

and then we have the typical hummus.

This is muhammara, which is made from chili paste

and ground nuts, the best muhammara in Trinidad.

Then we have falafel patties.

We have grilled wings with garlic, which is...

Every Arab loves,

Fish in tahini sauce. You ever had that?

- Yeah, beautiful. - See, I'm gonna pour

some olive oil over our lovely things

'cause olive oil is a must.

I mean, and how closely do people stay in contact

with family or relatives

back in Lebanon or Syria if at all?

- Not very much. - We are Trinidadians too.

As much as we are Lebanese and Syrian, we are Trinidadians.

Trinidad has been good to us, and we know it.

But life is good here in Trinidad.

Life is very good,

but there is a measure of concern in the fact

that at one time we used to have a huge middle class

which was a sort of a security

in terms of any possible conflict

between the haves and the have-not.

But now that's eroding, and they're getting poorer,

so they're starting to get angry.

What do you think the biggest danger is right now?

Civil commotion.

- Yes. - Civil commotion?

Yeah. We have a crime problem related to gangs.

Gang warfare. Related to gang warfare.

It ain't all good for everybody here by a long shot.

Trinidad, with a population of only 1.3 million people,

had 460 murders last year, giving Port of Spain

a per capita murder rate higher than Detroit,

Oakland, or Chicago.

Mark Bassant covers the subjects of drug

and gang-related violence as an investigative journalist.

People want you dead?

You could say that.

Who wants you dead, do you think?

Well, two years ago I did

a piece about the state prosecutor,

Dana Seetahal, who was shot dead.

When state prosecutor Dana Seetahal left

the Ma Pau car park just before midnight on May 3rd,

she had no inclination it would be her last moments alive.

When Mark began to look into the murder of the prosecutor,

an informant told him

there was a $20,000 contract on his life.

They had people following me over a period of time,

some law enforcement officers and so on,

so my company put me on a plane.

I went... I stayed under an assumed name

for about three months in a location outside of Trinidad.

Generally speaking, when people like that want you dead,

they get you.

Why are you back?

I guess, to quote from a great

U.S. journalist, Walter Cronkite,

"It's not what you want people to know.

It's what they need to know."

We need to have people held accountable for certain things.

With drug trafficking being one of the biggest businesses

in the world,

Trinidad continues to be a major transshipment point

for drug dealers

to get that product out to North America

and to Europe,

so you find now the explosion of violence

that we have is for those

that are involved locally with the drug trafficking,

this fight for territory.

An estimated $3.5 billion worth of narcotics

moves through the Caribbean each year.

Trinidad's porous borders,

busy port, proximity to Venezuela,

and the inevitable corruption that comes with numbers

and threats like that make it,

unfortunately, an ideal transshipment point.

How bad is high-level corruption alleged to be?

Fairly deep. I think that the complicity

comes across the law enforcement agencies,

customs, police officers, even at higher levels.

And with corruption, poverty, hopelessness,

add some radical ideology to that,

and Trinidad has proved relatively fertile ground

for the recruitment of ISIS fighters...

and terrorists.

It's quite alarming, Trinidadian nationals

being one of the highest in the region going to Syria,

and it's over a hundred on a list, FBI list.

They feel that it's their calling from ISIS

that they need to go.

So what's the future look like?

What do you think? How's it gonna go?

Wow, that's a loaded question.

There are really good people here in Trinidad.

They're really, really good people

that can make a difference on all fronts.

If we go down the path that we go now,

there will be all bad.

♪

In 1990 the radical Islamic group

Jamaat al Muslimeen laid siege to Trinidad's parliament,

claiming they were responding to rising inequality, poverty,

and religious discrimination.

What ensued was a violent and terrifying disaster.

26 people were killed in skirmishes,

and the hostage-takers, would-be revolutionaries,

gave up in exchange for clemency after six days.

Little changed.

♪

Muhammad Muwakil's father took part in the attempted coup.

He grew up, in fact,

in the Jamaat al Muslimeen compound,

but he's chosen to take a different path, music.

He's the lead singer of Freetown Collective,

a band named after a Port of Spain neighborhood

that was once a settlement for freed slaves.

♪ They say we can't write no love songs ♪

♪ Live fast and we die young ♪

♪ They say we doomed to fail, yeah ♪

♪ They say we doomed to fail

♪ They say we prone to violence ♪

- ♪ Violence - ♪ And a sinking silence

♪ They don't know what they say, no, no, no, no, no ♪

♪ No, no, no, no

Much like a lot of reggae,

his music calls out the social ills

that have been disproportionately visited

on the Afro-Caribbean population.

♪ I see bodies lying in the streets ♪

♪ Nations collapse in the midday heat ♪

♪ Lord, I need to cool my head ♪

♪ My head

♪ They calling it a brave new world ♪

♪ Freedom for brave new boys and girls ♪

♪ What good is freedom if you're dead? ♪

You look around my city right now,

and a lot of young people are choosing death over life

because the life that they look at doesn't feel like

it's substantiated by anything.

In the Freetown neighborhood now called Belmont,

he lives with his 81-year-old granny, Neela Natu.

The thing is that recently we've had a lot of people,

people who I've known, who I grew up with

who've gone to fight in Syria, who've left here.

I mean, they will tell you that the official count is 140.

I would say it's more.

- You'd say it's more? - I'd say it's more.

And why do you think people would go?

I'd have to go back into

my childhood to explain that to you.

The coup that happened here

happened when I was six years old.

They had all these young people in there who had this idea,

you know, we're going to build this thing.

There's this community that's gonna stand up

against what's going on in Trinidad,

that's going to stand up against the drugs

and stand up against poverty

and stand up against crime, and nothing happened.

In none of these causes,

religious fundamentalism or fervor has not come up.

You... every... every issue you've mentioned so far

has been perceived inadequacy of social justice.

Right, yeah.

So these kids going off to Syria,

do they have any idea what they're doing?

- No, they do not. - Or are they just pissed off?

No, they do not. People say that poverty breeds crime.

I don't think poverty breeds crime in a sense.

I think exclusion breeds crime because if I truly care for you,

if I feel like you are a part of the thing that I exist in,

then I won't... I won't hurt you.

Might come in your house and steal some food,

but when you see that kind of violence

being enacted, you have to ask yourself.

It's not just somebody saying,

"I need this tablecloth. I'm gonna take this."

No, "I want this tablecloth",

"and you, you had this tablecloth for too long,

"so you know what, I'm gonna take this out on you.

This is gonna happen. That's gonna happen."

And that's what we're seeing now.

I mean, how long can people put up with something

before they decide this is enough, you know what I mean?

Would you say that Carnival and that Carnival attitude,

the liming culture is a...

Might as well be a brilliant strategy to narcotize

the people into being satisfied with the status quo?

Everything here is somehow designed to...

pacify it without us really realizing,

so our music, which is supposed to give us adrenaline

as well as sleeping pills sometimes,

it's just doling out sleeping pills.

Like, go ahead, enjoy yourself. Enjoy yourself.

Enjoy yourself. You are Trini.

Trini means fun-loving and happy

and whatever despite whatever it is.

Ah.

It's a big and delicious home-cooked meal.

I caught this myself.

- Really? - Yes, sir.

- Red snapper? - Yeah, yeah.

The snapper is seasoned with lime juice,

shado beni and onion.

What's this dish called? Is there a name for it?

- This is called oil down. - Oil down?

- Yeah. - For oil down

they season breadfruit

and meat with dasheen and green figs,

then simmer in coconut milk.

And, well, she uses pork, as you can see,

which I... now I can't have any, so that's okay.

Now your grandma, not a Muslim?

No, the Roman Catholic-est of all Roman Catholics.

- Old-school? - Sacred heart up on the wall.

I got a kind of a perfect one for you, so you have this.

- Oh, beautiful, thank you. - Pastel.

This is mostly when the Spaniards where here,

introduced this. This is a Spanish one.

Pastels are the Caribbean cousin to the tamale.

Minced beef is wrapped in cornmeal dough,

then in banana leaf, then steamed.

Table for sure.

She will feed you till you burst like any grandmother.

You know, right? Yeah.

- I'll be well looked after. - And that is once a year.

- So when do these ordinarily... - Christmastime.

Christmas, oh. This is very, very delicious.

Thank you very much, and one thing I've asked about.

Why you didn't put ice in his glass?

It's good. It's fine.

So he must say thanks to whatever you made.

Tell Muhammad it's not good.

See how... see how that generation, very proper,

like, very, very proper,

and one of the things about Trinidad is that...

Muhammad, don't bad-talk me.

I'm not bad-talking you. I only speak the truth.

That generation very much believed in independence

and that this nation would be something,

and then they told their children,

"Study and come and help this nation.

Build this nation, and it's gonna be something."

And that generation, which was my parents, they did that.

Right.

And then they had kids, you know?

And all of a sudden it was like, okay, all these things

you have been saying about building a nation and whatever,

how come I'm seeing these people benefitting, and I'm not?

How come I'm seeing this, I'm seeing that, I'm seeing that?

And there were very few answers, you know what I mean?

So who runs this country?

Like everywhere else, that 1%. Like everywhere else.

Everybody here is very eager to tell you

what a wonderful mix it is,

and the food, if you look at it,

it does... is this incredibly harmonious stew pot.

Right.

But I guess life doesn't work as well as food.

No. The only thing we've agreed on in this place

is how much salt to put in anything.

So that's the only thing we've agreed on.

♪

♪ Man we on a mission

♪ A whole world to change

♪ Yeah a whole world to change ♪

♪

♪

Trinidad, it should be pointed out right now,

before you start packing your Speedo

and your cocoa butter, is an industrial island.

And like so many places,

industrialization is changing the landscape here,

but some things persist,

remain, echo from all the way back then...

When West African slaves would covertly do this,

Calinda.

This martial art, based on our research,

is maybe 500, 600 years old.

Stick fighting variations

occur throughout the Caribbean,

but in Trinidad and Tobago it's, like, deep in their blood.

This martial art was illegal for many, many years.

Yes? Yeah.

I mean, certainly during slavery times it was illegal.

To this day, I believe there's still laws

on our books that ban this stick,

and if you're caught with it, you could go to jail.

The laws of slavery times forced this sport underground.

Like Capoeira, it often had to be disguised as a dance,

but this ain't no dance.

The guys with the whip and the guys with the stick

were all the guys saying, "You have not broken us.

We will continue to resist to the ends of time."

♪

Rondel Benjamin and Keegan Taylor studied fighting styles

from around the world before coming around

to their own homegrown martial art.

Now, what's legal?

- What's not legal is... - Oh, they say what's not legal?

♪

I can't hit to the legs, knees.

- You can't? - Can't.

Oh, damn, 'cause that would be the first thing I'd think of.

I'm thinking, "I got to get that knee... that knee in particular."

Now, to be honest, in stick fighting,

legal and illegal is a concept,

but it doesn't stop that kind of stuff from happening.

Right, but I mean, let's face it.

This is a pretty heavy object. Yeah.

I get a good swing, a tee off,

and I get a clean shot on the head...

This is what the New York Police Department

would call a deadly weapon.

- Yes, sir. - If I'm fighting,

if I'm really fighting, I'm a monster.

I got to look you down.

I got to kill you. I got to dig you up.

I got to bury you. I got to murder you.

I got to take you out.

♪

The demon in me is gonna come out,

but I call that demon to work with me.

King David is one of the old-school street fighters

who has kept this form from fading over the years.

♪

As in Brazil and the Deep South,

African slaves were given little to work with

when it came time for the meal.

More often than not, if they wanted meat,

they had to make do with what the slave masters did not want,

a tongue here, cow foot there.

Here, as elsewhere, they figured out

how to make something delicious and tender

from whatever there was, like souse.

Pig foot is pickled in shado beni, onions

and hot peppers,

and then topped off with cucumbers.

This is a martial art. You either win or you lose.

- Correct. - How do you win?

What decides winner?

Who draws blood first win.

All it requires is the end result.

All you have to do is cut the guy.

Blood is blood.

What's the worst injury you've ever had in a fight?

This finger.

What's the worst injury you've seen in a fight?

I lost... I see a man lost the eye.

And also I saw a man die.

You have to be a real warrior,

a born, born, born fighter

to stand up there and face

that demon which walk in like a man.

30 miles east of Trinidad,

its sister island, Tobago.

A whole different vibe around here,

more like what you'd hope for

when you'd waddle away from the buffet

on the S.S. Norwalk cruise ship.

Lazy beach days, boat drinks, villas,

all set to a calypso beat.

♪

♪

Oh, solo.

In the 1800s slaves would sing the news

and gossip of the day in a Creole patois

to an African beat.

Later musicians added European-style melodies,

and calypso was born.

The longtime reigning queen of this music

and absolute pioneer of the form is Calypso Rose.

♪ They say that I reign too long ♪

♪ Forgetting that my constitution is strong ♪

♪ Instead of respecting my long, long reign ♪

♪ They making threat to take down my name ♪

♪ I've been breaking down walls ever since I was tall ♪

♪ They would stand up tall and strong ♪

♪ Like a wrecking ball, I go knock them down ♪

♪ They say that I reign too long ♪

Come on, baby!

She was the first woman to win the Calypso King title,

which tells you what the environment was like

at the time for a female artist.

♪ Everywhere I reign supreme

♪ The one and only calypso queen ♪

♪ No man alive or dead

♪ Could come and take the crown off me head ♪

♪

Rose grew up in a large

and strict Baptist family in Tobago

until she was nine years old

and was sent to live with her aunt in Trinidad,

so she grew up with a foot in each island.

What's the difference between growing up in Trinidad

and growing up in Tobago? It's much different.

Tobagonians are 99 1/2% African.

They're African slave descendants.

The culture is more African,

and this, this here is the cornmeal cou co...

They call it fufu in Africa,

but in Tobago they say cou co...

And this is callaloo?

And this is the callaloo made from the leaves-

- Dasheens. - Of dasheen, you know?

But the great thing is the crab.

♪

Everybody come to Tobago must eat crab and dumpling.

They dry coconut.

They grated the coconut, and the juice of that coconut,

they put it in the pot

with your little ingredients like tomato, onion,

thyme and your curry.

Crunch it up.

Good teeth.

If you have false teeth, be careful.

All right. Yeah, so far, so good.

Here's what I... What really fascinates me,

is you started singing calypso music and writing songs...

Of course.

At a time when it was only men.

Your father was not...

- My father was against it. - Against it?

My father was traditional Baptist minister.

My father say calypso belong to the devil.

Calypso belongs to the devil, but it also belonged to men,

and here you are at age 15 doing...

- Age 13, I start writing. - 13?

Doing what was considered a completely revolutionary thing.

What was it about you that made you strong enough

and different enough and determined enough

to choose to do such a difficult

and unusual thing when everybody was against it?

My fans, because some people at home, they're sad.

They're going through so much financially, economically,

they're being abused by their spouse,

and they come out to have a good time,

and when they come out, I bring joy to their heart.

So is making beautiful things enough?

Yes, making beautiful things enough.

Well, when you start thinking consciously on beautiful things,

like how the sea is rolling there...

How the sea is moving, moving, moving,

making beautiful things is enough.

It is enough?

♪

No island in the sun is paradise on Earth,

however it might look from the concrete blocks,

glass cubicles, or wood boxes we may live in.

♪

And all the dancing and music

and great food in the world

can never hold together, by itself,

what would keep us apart.

♪

What might look like a utopian stew

of ethnicities and cultures

living together under gently swaying palms

is of course a far more complicated matter.

♪

But Trinidad has done better than most

and in proud and unique style.

Solo, solo.

♪