A spate of imaginative books about TT’s social and cultural heritage have been published lately.
St Joseph: Through the Eyes of Godmother, Mother, Son, by Glenroy Taitt, and Growing Up Woodbrook: A Tapestry of Then and Now, by Dylan Kerrigan and jointly published by the National Trust, are just two that deserve our attention.
In the foreword to the former, historian Prof Emerita Bridget Brereton suggests that books like these are microhistory and take two forms: focusing on a definitive time span in the history of a nation; or on the past of a small community, defined by its size and location, known as local history. The author employs the latter in relating the fascinating 20th century cultural and social history of our first capital, San José de Oruña, founded in 1592 by the Spanish. The beautifully laid out coffee table book is presented in three parts, each using a different way of recording the past.
[caption id="attachment_997053" align="alignnone" width="814"] In this file photo, Dr Dylan Kerrigan with his book, Growing up in Woodbrook, at its launch at Mille Fleurs Heritage House, Queen’s Park West St Clair, in December, last year. - SUREASH CHOLAI[/caption]
Taitt, a St Joseph native and head librarian at the Alma Jordan Library at the UWI, St Augustine, is also a photographer who since the 1980s has been capturing the slowly disintegrating, diverse architectural relics of St Joseph. Forty-six pages of stunning black and white photographs of some uniquely Trinidadian buildings appear in Part III. In Part I, his godmother, Beryl Marcellin-Welsh, has recorded her recollections of the old city, using the oral tradition, and the author has transcribed them for publication. In Part II, he got his mother to pen a most illuminating and engagingly detailed recollection of her early life in St Joseph and edited those for inclusion. The result is a superbly light and approachable book – only 32 pages of text – which tells the personal stories of the life of people living in an important place in our history.
St Joseph has special meaning for me too since I lived there, as a teenager, and my mother’s paternal grandmother belonged to the Giuseppi family who owned the large cocoa, then sugar growing, Valsayn estate in the St Joseph outskirts (1790-1890s). It turns out that the author’s mother is also a descendant of that mixed Corsican-Spanish-free coloured family. My older sister lived there and my nieces both attended the convent there in the 1970s, one of them getting married there in the 1980s in the same 1800s Roman Catholic church where I once attended Sunday mass. They became blood relatives of the well-known local Flores family, who produced lots of cherry brandy and generations of paranderos. They may be related, at least in a pumpkin-vine fashion, to the Marcellins who have produced legendary musicians of their own and are relatives of the book’s author. That is to say, St Joseph is an old and tightly-knit community with a long and unique cultural history.
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