Children of the twilight, everything is gonna be all right....

I was sitting at my desk yesterday afternoon reading galleys when S------ stuck her head round my door & said, "They're bulldozing the Jamaat!"

"Better switch on the radio," I said.

I wonder if this is how it starts, I thought, the Big Thing we're all expecting.

The Express already had a couple of "breaking news" blurbs on their website, but I didn't get the details of what was happening down on Mucurapo Road till I got home & switched on the TV. CNC3 had the best coverage by far, a reporter on the scene & Shelly Dass back in the studio quivering with enthusiasm.

An excavator, a jackhammer, rifles, bullets, policeman, soldiers, a "secret tunnel", an "underground chamber", the tape of Abu Bakr threatening "war" on wealthy Muslims, the Muslimeen praying in the middle of Mucurapo Road, & a mild-mannered, skullcapped man saying this was all the fault of "certain groups" scapegoating the Jamaat.

On my way to CCA7 I drove along the foreshore & glanced north to the Muslimeen compound, but couldn't make out signs of anything out of the ordinary.

Joe Boyd's A Film About Jimi Hendrix was on at StudioFilmClub, & before & after the movie 12 was playing, a full set, three songs to start, four or five after (including a cover of "Hey, Joe").

I sprawled in the front row of chairs, big sound booming around me, Sheldon Holder's big voice (big enough to contain its own echo, I thought). And Peter was projecting an old documentary about the Esso Trinidad Steelband as a backdrop for the band--gold & orange & pale blue light flickering across Sheldon's big, open face.

And as I chewed my pen & bobbed my head Sheldon seemed to have his eyes on me ("Tell me why oh why should I change my life"), & I smiled, even though I knew he couldn't actually see me.

We have the moon at night and the sun in the daylight....

The Stabroek News runs an incisive editorial today on the question of Bird Rock, a.k.a. Las Aves (a name Stabroek declines to use), the sandbar islet 140 miles west of Dominica that is claimed by Venezuela. Recall that last month Venezuela symbolically asserted its sovereignty over the islet by staging two weddings & three baptisms there, on the stilted platform that houses a small crew of sailors--a move that worries some Eastern Caribbean states. Stabroek considers the matter in the context of Hugo Chavez's PetroCaribe initiative as well as Guyana's own longstanding border dispute with Venezuela.

All those bedazzled by President Hugo Chavez's seeming generosity towards Caribbean states after he made available the PetroCaribe payments' facility, should perhaps pause for a moment's reflection to consider the full context of the accord. That context is a spurious claim on our Essequibo region, on the basis of which he has prevented us, among other things, from pursuing off-shore oil exploration, and a claim on Bird Rock (also called Bird Island) belonging to Dominica which interferes in a fundamental way with the maritime rights of a number of Caricom states.

I've long thought that the tricky question of maritime boundaries in this corner of the Caribbean--imaginary lines on the map that determine ownership of known & suspected oil & gas fields--could be the spark that starts real trouble, & increasingly unfriendly relations between Chavez & the US government bring the whole mess into starker relief. I look at the volatile state of things here in Trinidad these recent months & the little conspiracy wheels begin to turn in my head. What if we're just too close to discern the bigger pattern?

Mirrors, encyclopaedias, & butterflies in the House of Glass....

At the root of my artistic practice is the exploration of my identity in relation to that of a nation; that is, the dialogue that exists between me as an artist and my social space.

-- Rachel Rochford, from her short statement in the "catalogue" of her show of paintings & drawings, Atelier, currently on display at CCA7.

Last night I went to hear Rachel--who's just graduated from the University of Reading & moved back here to set up a studio--give an "artist's talk" at CCA. During the discussion period, the question of the relevance (fraught word) of her work to contemporary Trinidad was raised by the moderator, the formidable Pat Bishop. I suggested that the kind of self-scrutiny Rachel claims--& which is apparent in some of her strongest recent work*--is vitally "relevant" here & now.

*[Rachel's earlier work was largely abstract, it seemed from her career-overview slide-show. But in the last two years or so, as she's moved towards a conscious engagement with her "social space", human figures have begun to appear in her paintings & drawings--stylised figures in repeated poses, their otherwise unremarkable postures & gestures asked to assume some wider & as yet uncertain significance. Pay attention, this detail is important, the work seems to suggest--at least to my inexpert eye.]

There's a general & growing consensus that Trinidad is in a state of crisis--& "crime" is just a symptom of the real problem. To my mind, our prolonged crisis is one of national self-identity--the dilemma of what it does, can, could mean to be "Trinidadian", now that so many of the old Independence assumptions have proved flawed or false. Who are "we", what do "we" have in common, is there even a coherent "we"? You could argue this is nothing new, this "crisis" is the story of modern West Indianness, but it seems to me that the query--& the imperative to try to answer--is becoming increasingly urgent as we strain & twist under the forces of global politics & economics. Simply: we do not understand ourselves.

I thought about this again, from a different angle of approach, when, after Rachel's event, I was talking with a young editor from the Venezuelan magazine Plátano Verde about the current literary scene here in T'dad. I began by explaining that many--most?--of our best or best-known writers still live elsewhere, in bigger, colder countries. Then I began to follow the thread of an idea that started when I was reading B.C. Pires's recent book Thank God It's Friday: that some of the most interesting work by contemporary Trinidadian writers does not come in conventional fictional or poetic forms--the forms mastered by the "canonical" West Indian writers of an older generation--but rather in the form of fragmentary, discontinuous, first-person non-fiction narratives in the periodical press, i.e. newspaper columns, which we may have some difficulty identifying as "literary"--or identifying as "narratives"--because of the format of their publication.

I'm thinking here of B.C.'s short essays--originally written for various newspapers--the best of which I have no qualms about describing as literature. And the best of Keith Smith's columns (some of them collected recently in an Express supplement). And the best of Wayne Brown's "In Our Time" pieces (such as those collected in The Child of the Sea), & the best of Raymond Ramcharitar's earlier newspaper pieces.

These writers, I've been thinking, are or were* creating characters based on themselves--"B.C. Pires", "Keith Smith", etc.--& showing us how they respond, in real time, to the social forces at play around them. And these short stand-alone pieces eventually, it seems to me, add up to narratives of a sort. Ostensibly this is "journalism"--writing for today about today's questions--but, at their best, these writers are or were writing with a breadth of vision, depth of concern, & virtuosity of style that gives their narratives the permanence of literature (if we accept Pound's idea that "Literature is news that stays news").

*[I use this clumsy duo of tenses because, of the four writers I name, B.C. Pires no longer writes a weekly column (& his monthly space in the T&T Review does not allow the same rapidity & flexibility of response); Wayne Brown now writes for a Jamaican audience in the J'ca Observer, & only infrequently about his home island; & Raymond Ramcharitar, after many embattled years, seems to have lost the gladness of prose that made his biting commentary essential reading. Only Keith Smith continues to spin his "narrative" five days a week in the Express.]

Rambling, inconclusive, & not entirely coherent thoughts....

Looking for love on a Saturday night

jointpop, Saturday 5 November, 2005, Port of Spain

The November Trinidad & Tobago Review is out today; it includes a piece I worked up from my long blog post a fortnight ago on the 22 October "death march". Unfortunately it appears in the TTR minus much of its punctuation--quotation marks, em dashes--but a more definitive version is online here.

Strange people in the neighbourhood is something that I have always paid attention to, but now everyone gets some scrutiny. I actually have things laid down throughout the property should I need to defend myself. I trimmed trees and bushes for a clear line of sight from the house itself. Am I paranoid? No, just careful. But where is that line between careful and paranoid?

Over the last 3 years, I've known people kidnapped. I have known people beaten and robbed, including an Aunt in Carlsen Field who is still recovering. I've personally had guns pointed at me a few times (and not from police or security) - and before my father passed away, he was chopped with a cutlass on the family property. I've chased one fellow with a cutlass from this yard once. So I'm paying attention, and I'm careful.

So what do I think about the Death March? I think it was a well intentioned, poorly named and poorly recognized start to something that needs to happen.... Basically if there is a position of authority the person filling the position just doesn't care....

The saddest thing, I suppose, is that I don't really care anymore. I know that calling the police is generally useless - from experience (they wait a few hours and show up, if they do show up). I don't read the newspapers, I just ask people what the number of murders and kidnappings is up to. I keep my eyes and ears open.

This is not the Trinidad and Tobago that I grew up in, and it's a matter of time before people really do have enough - and then it's anyone's game. I hear the Prime Minister saying that they want to get crime down to an acceptable level. I laugh. I expect nothing from them, and I no longer expect anything from the police.

-- Taran Rampersad, in a long, thoughtful post on the personal impact of our ongoing crisis.

"That line between careful and paranoid" is a boundary none of us can avoid contemplating these days. And the kind of frustration & quiet, urgent anger Taran describes is slowly becoming--I think, I hope!--a unifying force, linking us across the small, unstable chasms of ethnicity & class (whatever "class" means). The question is, will we achieve a critical mass of citizen anger in time to save this unwieldy experiment in "independence" that we volunteered for 43 years ago?

Today's Stabroek editorial puts the recent (& ongoing) flare-up in Buxton into a wider historical & social context:

We have always had something of a penchant for unreal debate in this country, but never more so than now. As the polarisation process continues in the penumbra of the 2006 elections, and the sense of insecurity and/or foreboding about what could happen grows, we seem to be spending more and more time railing against the miasma. We operate in a twilight world of half-truths, quarter-truths, myths and falsehoods, and the constructs being used to explain the inconvenient portions of reality which poke through the fog are neither grounded in a full appraisal of the facts, nor in a commitment to the truth.

(V.S. Naipaul in 1962: "In British Guiana it is almost impossible to find out the truth about any major thing. Investigation and cross-checking lead only to fearful confusion.")

Traditionally we have closed our eyes to any illegality committed by members of our own group, particularly if the perception is that it has contributed to making us feel more secure. On the subject of illegalities committed by the other side, however, we have always been voluble. It was in this context - as well in the larger one of our political history in general - that the Buxton crisis evolved. And the opposing accounts of that crisis, which still has not ended, continue to obfuscate reality and serve as an impediment to getting any handle on how the other side really feels....

The simple truth is that if one group is unsafe, then everyone is unsafe. True security can only come with the rule of law, effective law enforcement and strong, independent institutions; there is no alternative. And in the meantime, a little more honesty in debate all around would be helpful so we can grope towards discussing the real problems of the nation in a meaningful way, rather than unreal constructs which if taken to their conclusion can lead us into anarchy.

All artists worthy of the name wear the pain of the world, like scars, or radiant armour. And for Minshall, a white boy in a black country, there had to be a blessed liberation in refusing to be penned up in suburbia's ghetto but, to the contrary, in being perennially and vitally involved in 'their' world. And how vitally!

-- From Wayne Brown's column, in today's J'ca Observer, on Peter Minshall.

Ten years later, here in Jamaica, I had just that day returned home from bypass surgery in Havana when, from Trinidad, Minshall phoned. He was as usual aghast about something; he talked on and on. I was weak and very tired; after five minutes I was ready to hang up, and if it had been anybody else, I would have excused myself and done so.

But I didn't. Minshall proceeded to talk for a full hour, and long before he was finished I was blind with pain. But I lay there and took it, because it was Minshall - no, because it was Trinidad - calling; and when your country calls, you don't hang up.

At first glance, reading is a waste of time, turning us all into versions of Don Quixote, too befuddled by our imaginations to tell windmills from giants. We would be better off spending the time mating or farming. Darwinists have an answer - or more accurately, many possible answers. (Literary Darwinists like multiple answers, convinced the best idea will win out.) One idea is that literature is a defense reaction to the expansion of our mental life that took place as we began to acquire the basics of higher intelligence around 40,000 years ago. At that time, the world suddenly appeared to homo sapiens in all its frightening complexity. But by taking imaginative but orderly voyages within our minds, we gained the confidence to interpret this new vastly denser reality. Another theory is that reading literature is a form of fitness training, an exercise in "what if" thinking. If you could imagine the battle between the Greeks and the Trojans, then if you ever found yourself in a street fight, you would have a better chance of winning. A third theory sees writing as a sex-display trait. Certainly writers often seem to be preening when they write, with an eye toward attracting a desirable mate.

-- D.T. Max, in today's NY Times Magazine, on Literary Darwinism.

(Are there selection pressures on mooncalfs and sprites?)

And three cheers for literarians!

Being Here Now

Ucill Cambridge, reporting in yesterday's Express:

Police are now investigating a claim that a number of people in the Diego Martin area are tagged for execution once the Eid fast has been broken.

The Express has been reliably informed that there exists a list with the names of persons in the West End district who are to be all killed once the Muslim festival of Eid-ul-Fitr ends today. The death squad is said to be a religious group from the Bagatelle area.

The Express spoke with a senior investigator from the West End Police district who said he was unaware of the existence of any list but promised to investigate the claim.

The man who told the Express about the existence of a list has also reported receiving a death threat shortly after the interview was completed.

Attillah Springer, writing in today's Guardian (no permanent link yet; my bold):

I am tired of Manning and Panday. I am tired of microwaved speeches delivered by frothing-at-the-mouth masters of rhetoric and old blag.

First the Daddy Oh Manning says he knows the "Big" man in the bombing business. Then the outside father Panday reveals his heretofore undisclosed seerman powers by declaring that soon Indo-Trinidadians would be the targets of bombing sprees.

So what I want to know is, if Manning knows and Panday knows, then how come the police don’t know who to go and arrest?...

One thing Mr Panday is right about. We should not lie down and accept discrimination. And what the politicians of the two overruling parties are doing is discriminating against the many many people of T&T who see through their games. Who cannot be lured into a false sense of belonging by party cards and fever-pitch speechifying.

Debbie Jacob, writing in the Guardian last Monday:

By the age of 16, my son, Jairzinho, has witnessed a security guard being shot, three acquaintances being kidnapped, and the horrific death of a beloved teacher's husband. I know he is not the innocent child that he could have been if he was not touched by such events....

I don't know about you, but it doesn't make me feel good to see Abu Bakr in the newspaper saying he is going to find the trash can bomber. It doesn't make me feel good to open up the newspaper and read that the FBI is in Trinidad.

These headlines smack of one feeling: hopelessness. When we look around us we see a government paralysed by ineffectiveness. Do you think the enraged, disengaged, disenfranchised people who graduate into criminals don’t look around them and get the same messages we're getting?

And two days ago, in the course of a wide-ranging four-hour conversation, an artist colleague asked me this question: how do we know that this new FBI presence in Trinidad doesn't have as much to do with President Chavez across the Gulf as with the Port of Spain bombings? And what better listening post than a small English-speaking island, heavily dependent on trade with the US; an important base of operations for foreign energy corporations with large expatriate staffs already engaged in (ostensibly geological & economic) intelligence-seeking; & flooded with young middle-class Venezuelans likely to come from anti-Chavez families?

The sun was high in the clean blue sky, & the mice were singing their songs....

News from Rome

The rumour that Keats is dead.
A poet itching verbs
like tattoos into his skin.
Limbs stitched into his bed.
The furniture chopped and burned,
the pink house sweet with smoke.
Severn destroys the umpteenth draft of his letter,
the legend is still absurd,
these names sinking in stone.

A letter to London takes one month.
A letter to me takes 183 years.

It's not included in the online edition, but today's Guardian reports on 3Canal's concert last Thursday night at Bois Cano:

Rapso artiste Wendell Manwarren weaved a stinging commentary into his group 3Canal's Kapok Hotel performance on Thursday night, lashing out at junior National Security Minister Fitzgerald Hinds and critics of the Death March....

3Canal was one of the groups that performed free for the march.

"It was about people doing something for a change," he told a selection of T&T's art, music and media elite.... Manwarren, working in his comments at the end of one of their songs, also challenged criticisms that the march was for the middle and upper classes and not the poor black community, the source of the majority of the country's 310 murder victims.

On this point, band member Stanton Kewley retorted, "What wrong with being middle class?"

Hammer, nail, direct blow to the head. "What wrong with being middle class?"

I entirely understand the causes of the vituperation with which the (sometimes self-appointed) representatives of the working class, black or otherwise, have responded to the Keith Noel 136 Committee & last Saturday's "death march". But surely the only route out of the crisis we're all snared in starts with recognising common concerns, common hopes, a common cause--& believing that these outweigh our differences and grudges?

The middle classes are frightened & angry, & last Saturday they did something dramatic to express that fear & anger. (When last, outside of Carnival, did you see white people marching through town in the hot sun?) To dismiss them out of hand is to say that blind loyalty not so much to class or ethnicity but to the PNM is more important than the good of our society; that party trumps country. And very little that the PNM under Mr. Manning has done suggests that the party has any meaningful goals apart from holding on to executive power. Ditto for the UNC under Mr. Panday. Maybe that's what it comes to--party or country? It's a symptom of our crisis that, it seems, there can be no coincidence of the two.

And here's the thing about the middle classes: they have been the least prone to blind party loyalty, switching their vote to whichever group seems most likely to address their concerns (remember the ONR? the NAR?). There's nothing wrong with that--that's the foundation of politics, seeking your own interests, but also recognising that often the best way to get what you want & need is to learn what your friends & rivals want & need, & find compromises that achieve a common good. The alternative is to allow selfish interests to tear our society apart--& that is exactly the crisis we're in. All are guilty: working, middle & upper classes, black people, Indian people, white people, everybody. "More unites us than divides us", read one of the placards at last Saturday's march--lyrics from "Trini to de Bone", of course, a song whose cliches still make me cringe, but cliches often derive from truths.

What unites us most urgently now is that few of us feel safe, few of us feel we're truly benefiting from the massive energy boom convulsing our economy, & few of us feel the party politicians care about our concerns. Can we not agree on a common thrust to address these matters on everyone's behalf? And does it matter who starts or leads that thrust?

Remember this: Henry Alcazar, A.A. Cipriani, Albert Gomes, even Eric Williams, were all men of the middle class, & they all led battles on behalf of the wider populace. There's nothing wrong with being middle class.

From a report by Yvonne Webb in today's Guardian:

Reeling under pressure from various sectors to curb the spiralling crime rate, Prime Minister Patrick Manning said on Wednesday that he hoped the people who are attacking his Government were not guilty of criminal activities themselves....

Last Saturday, thousands of citizens participated in the Death March in Port-of-Spain. The march, organised by the Keith Noel 136 Committee, highlighted the need for the Government to fix crime.

Referring to this, Manning said, "A number of people are attacking us for crime and I hope, and I am very careful with my words, I hope that those who are attacking the Government on crime are not guilty of criminal activities themselves."

I didn't think a Trinidad & Tobago politician could still surprise me, but I'm astonished today--this is how Mr. Manning responds to the 15,000 people who marched in Port of Spain last Saturday? No, I'm astonished--by the pettiness, the callousness, the spite.

Reporters sans frontieres has released its fourth annual worldwide press freedom index. Trinidad & Tobago is once again close to the top of the ranking (higher means freer), tying for 12th place this time with Hungary, New Zealand, & Sweden (last year T&T ranked 11th). By comparison, Germany ranks 18th, Canada 21st, the UK 24th, & the US 44th. Of other Caribbean nations, Jamaica comes 34th, the Dominican Republic 51st, Haiti 117th, & Cuba, near the bottom of the list, is 161st.

How did RSF decide T&T has such a free press?

Reporters Without Borders compiled a questionnaire with 50 criteria for assessing the state of press freedom in each country. It includes every kind of violation directly affecting journalists (such as murders, imprisonment, physical attacks and threats) and news media (censorship, confiscation of issues, searches and harassment).

It registers the degree of impunity enjoyed by those responsible for such violations. It also takes account of the legal situation affecting the news media (such as penalties for press offences, the existence of a state monopoly in certain areas and the existence of a regulatory body) and the behaviour of the authorities towards the state-owned news media and the foreign press. It also takes account of the main obstacles to the free flow of information on the Internet.

Three cheers for Trini boldfacedness & macociousness.

This week's Caribbean blog roundup over at Global Voices takes the form of a chat between Georgia & myself about the state of the Caribbean blogosphere--who's doing what, why, how, & where could it all go? Or something like that.

Over at Alien in the Caribbean, Jessie has emerged from hibernation to comment on the current state of Trinidad & Tobago, point out parallels in St. Lucia, where she's been living for the last three years, & ask the question many of us are preoccupied with right now: what next?

I know I am living in the "third world" but until a few years ago, that was never even an issue. Although our islands were never big contenders on the world's economic landscape, I certainly never felt like a "third world" citizen and there was always a feeling of hope. Our ability to cope, innovate, commune, rally our spirits compensated for much inconvenience and social problems. We held this spirit that things could get better and we would live to see it get better. My generation especially felt like the one with the ideas, energy, will and power to make it happen.

Could it be that we are actually running out of that juice that nourished us in the face of challenges? As I struggle not to once again fall into the pit of living from paycheck to paycheck like I did in Trinidad, even while I work harder than I ever did professionally and all the while coping with the very palpable human misery all around me, I feel one overwhelming feeling....... FATIGUE. Not of body but of spirit. I understand so completely the way Trinis are right now, "to themselves" reserved, withdrawn and holding fast to personal strength. There is none to share anymore. Those of us who give, give, give, give, give and give some more of our positive energy, ideas, creative expression know what I am talking about. And yet, still I keep thinking maybe just maybe there is a very good reason for all of this. We've had it GOOD the past twenty years or so and what have we REALLY accomplished for our country with all of our BIG ideas, creative endeavors and philosophical thinking and talking over wine at our dinner parties?...

The truth is that revolution requires a massive dose of desperation to ignite it. Many of us have always been the fire proof buffer of reason and status quo maintenance. We would think of protesting, of starting a revolt but then we'd chicken out because we have "responsibilities" and a "reputation". To be honest, few of us have felt it like we do now and there is a dangerous excitement about it. Let's not become afraid again. Let us embrace our rage and perhaps we can find in it the fuel we need to fire our activism against our corrupt and inept governments and disempowered societies.

In the face of a massive outpouring of concern about the crime situation on Saturday, with thousands of people gathering around placards, music and theatre to demonstrate the need for more effective action, the PNM was able to issue one clear directive and that was to its party members, ordering them not to attend.

Chairman of the committee organising the march, Stephen Cadiz described the no-show as contempt for citizens and an insult to the nation, but it was, more likely, another indicator of the haplessness of the ruling party when faced with problems outside the traditional boundaries of politics.

The problems of crime in Trinidad and Tobago aren't being faced decisively because there is little in the machinery of political representation to prepare those elected to high office to handle the outpouring of violence, anger and lawlessness that has characterised crime in the country over the last five years.

-- From today's Guardian editorial (their archiving system is annoying. Read the editorial here today, here from tomorrow), which also refers to the results of the UWI/ANSA McAl Psychological Research Centre poll published in yesterday's edition. Asked whether the government's crime-fighting measures were "having any serious effect on crime", 90% of the respondents said no. 54% said Martin Joseph should resign. But 52% said there was no one else in the PNM administration they thought could do a better job with national security, & 19% said they didn't know. Just 2% said Patrick Manning himself would do any better. By any fair standard, these numbers add up to a damning vote of no confidence in the Manning administration's ability to deal with the security crisis, & give the lie to claims that Saturday's marchers were not representative of Trinidad & Tobago as a whole.

The Guardian editorial concludes:

It's time that this government left the safe perch of continuous planning to execute a strategy to manage crime that the public can understand, endorse and engage.

A lucid, stringent and clearly-articulated plan to limit opportunities for unlawful activity is unlikely to win friends and votes in a country that so dearly loves its freedoms, but the alternative is a slow and steady loss of confidence in the capacity to lead that now registers the Government's management at a nadir in public perception even as it continues to drop.

"A lucid, stringent and clearly-articulated plan" "that the public can understand, endorse and engage"--exactly. But I disagree with the Guardian's implication that such a strategy need curtail our "freedoms". We don't need a curfew, draconian new legislation, or the suspension of habeas corpus (as permitted during a state of emergency by the constitution). We need to have our existing laws properly enforced. We need for our elected officials and members of the security services to do their jobs faithfully & efficiently. And we need for ordinary citizens to stop putting up with the minor infringements--littering, petty vandalism, unsafe driving--that help create an atmosphere in which major infringements like murder, kidnapping, & theft thrive & breed. Above all, we need for the current government to take responsibility for its failures. But when Mr. Manning, a day after the "death march", describes Martin Joseph as "one of the best Ministers of National Security ever in Trinidad and Tobago" (as quoted in this Express article), it's utterly clear that taking responsibility is the last thing on his mind.

He promise the fire next time, he promise the fire next time....

Addendum to the preceding

I've just noticed this NY Times story on a World Bank report on the effects of "brain drain" on developing countries around the world.

Poor countries across Africa, Central America and the Caribbean are losing sometimes staggering numbers of their college-educated workers to wealthy, industrialized democracies, according to a World Bank study made public today.

Its conclusions are based on a far-reaching survey of census and other data from the 30 countries that belong to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which counts most of the world's richest nations among its members....

The World Bank's study is part of a broader intellectual ferment about the role that migration plays in the development of poor countries. Scholarly research has tended to focus more on the impact of foreign aid, global trade and foreign investment, but there is a growing sense that the movement of people is also a major and little-understood factor.

The four Caribbean countries examined in the report are Jamaica, Haiti, Cuba, & the Dominican Republic. Some of the statistics are, literally, shocking--such as the estimate that 80% of Jamaican & Haitian nationals who have been to university live in developed OECD countries. The percentage for Trinidad & Tobago is almost certainly lower (but by how much?); I imagine the figure for Guyana is about the same.