...In Trinidad completes an immense visual journey from the realms of the sacred to those of the secular, worlds that are separate yet inter-connected through the fervour and intensity with which they are affirmed. One hundred years after Lafcadio Hearn expressed his fear that Martinique’s fabulous Creole world of legends, superstitions, festivity and colour in all its dimensions, might not survive time, change, and its own inherent and fierce animosities, Trinidad’s parallel and related multiethnic communities have, in face of the challenge of modernization and enduring divisions of race and class, devised complex strategies of interface and survival, maintaining and resolving the paradox of diversity and oneness, to produce shaky and fragile coalitions of convenience struggling to survive in this fractured land.

Gordon Rohlehr
Tunapuna, 2008

photographs taken 1997–2008

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