Recognising the need to tell the untold stories of women who work in the energy field, Celeste Mohammed’s non-fiction debut, A Different Energy, Women In Caribbean Oil and Gas, provides an intimate look into the compelling stories of eight women in the oil and gas industry.
Mohammed, a lawyer turned award-winning author, and publisher Deborah Benjamin launched the book at the TT Energy Conference at the Hyatt Regency in Port of Spain on January 23.
In a panel discussion moderated by former CNC3 news anchor Shelly Dass, Mohammed said contrary to what people may think, the book is not a “male-bashing encyclopaedia.”
Instead, she said, it encapsulates her natural love for storytelling, memoir and literature to humanise what she described as the systemic issues women in the energy industry endure.
“I would say that the book is about trying to address what I would call the perception gap that still exists between how women actually experience the industry and how they are presumed to experience it by persons both in and outside the industry.”
Planning and Development Minister Pennelope Beckles endorsed it, saying, “I am happy to recommend this book to a broad audience of academics, gender and management studies, researchers and persons in and around the oil and gas sector.”
In an interview with Business Day, the award-winning author, whose first book, Pleasantview, won a trifecta of awards in 2022 – the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, the CLMP Firecracker Literary Award for fiction and the Caribbean Readers Award, also for fiction – said when Benjamin contacted her that year about writing the book, she immediately accepted the challenge, but did not know how to go about it.
“It took me six months to come up with a sort of proposal, go back to her and say, 'This is the book I would like to write,' and when she said yes, it just flowed from there.”
Mohammed, who is mother to a little girl, said while she wanted to write the book as a favour to herself as a professional woman, she was also motivated to do so for her daughter .
“I realised that the natural resources of this country belong equally to my little daughter as to the little boys in her class. She should be able to grow up and participate in the industry as a worker or contractor on the same terms, no less favourable than guys.
“I want that for her. So if this book can continue that conversation in a way that is effective, then I am happy to do it.”
Benjamin, the managing director of ASCO Logistics Ltd – a company that supports exploration and production activities regionally, with major clients in the hydrocarbon industry like Shell – said she commissioned the publishing of the book through her company Words Matter Communications as a personal passion project, after reflecting on the obstacles she had to overcome as a female leader in the energy industry.
“When I recognised that a lot of other prominent women in the industry – those that paved the way and those that were on the same journey and timeline that I was – were facing
