TERRENCE W FARRELL
TT is renowned for its harmonious diversity. We are a people of multiple heritages, religions, ethnicities, united by our shared spaces, shared histories and shared values. If one wished to experience a particular aspect or element of our mosaic – Hosay or Ramleela or Shango – you could go to a particular place on one or other island to do so.
But if you wanted one place which encapsulates what our harmonious diversity looks and feels like, you would probably go to Woodbrook!
This is the striking effect of the wonderful compendium of stories and histories produced in Growing Up Woodbrook: A Tapestry of Then and Now. Produced by the Woodbrook Residents Committee and authored by UWI anthropologist Dr Dylan Kerrigan, with Ken Jaikaransingh, this book traces the origins of Woodbrook from a sugar estate on the outskirts of Port of Spain to a middle-class residential community, then to today’s residential-cum-commercial district.
The project of producing this book was long in the making and was slowed, but not stopped, by the covid19 pandemic. It involved many hands and many minds, including those of Lynette Dolly, Miguel Browne and Wendy Sealy, who helped collect and research the stories.
[caption id="attachment_989193" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Shell Invaders' J'Ouvert sailor mas parade in Woodbrook to commemorate Republic Day on September 24. Invaders is one of the bands that emerged out of Woodbrook in the 1950s and 1960s. File photo/Jeff K Mayers[/caption]
What made the Woodbrook community unique, yet paradigmatic in the TT social landscape, is its geographical location adjacent to the capital city and the fact that its growth and development, as a well-laid-out middle-class town, with parks and squares and its own architecture, attracted Trinidadians of every ethnicity – people of African, Indian, European, Chinese and Middle Eastern descent, and mixtures of these.
The urban upper class was domiciled in upscale St Clair to the north, and across the city centre to the east, the older lower-class towns of Laventille and Belmont had long been established. Woodbrook emerged in the early 20th century, when the Siegert family sold the estate to the Port of Spain Council.
The list of people who grew up or lived in Woodbrook at some time in their careers is astonishing. A veritable Who’s Who of TT, it includes Eric Williams, Rudranath Capildeo, VS Naipaul, Victor Bryan, Audrey Jeffers, George Bailey and many others whose biographies appear in the book.
This would have been impressive enough, but Growing Up Woodbrook argues that the place, because it attracted people of every ethnicity who collectively embraced a certain ethos and set of values, became a crucible of “creolisation,” which as George Lamming described it, is “…an open-ended process of collective self-definition and deepening indigenisation.” Creolisation is open to multiple influences, but, importantly, absorbs those influences and produces to the world something new and different.
So it is no surprise that Beryl
