Trinidad creole Quotes

“One avoids Creolisms. Some families completely forbid Creole and mothers ridicule their children for speaking it.”

“Creole is New Orleans city food. Communities were created by the people who wanted to stay and not go back to Spain or France.”

“You see, a witch has to have a familiar, some little animal like a cat or a toad. He helps her somehow. When the witch dies the familiar is suppose to die too, but sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes, if it's absorbed enough magic, it lives on. Maybe this toad found its way south from Salem, from the days when Cotton Mather was hanging witches. Or maybe Lafitte had a Creole girl who called on the Black Man in the pirate-haven of Barataria. The Gulf is full of ghosts and memories, and one of those ghosts might very well be that of a woman with warlock blood who'd come from Europe a long time ago, and died on the new continent.And possibly her familiar didn't know the way home. There's not much room for magic in America now, but once there was room.("Before I Wake...")”

“Belize: Hell or heaven? [Roy indicates "Heaven" through a glance]Belize: Like San Francisco.Roy Cohn: A city. Good. I was worried... it'd be a garden. I hate that shit.Belize: Mmmm. Big city. Overgrown with weeds, but flowering weeds. On every corner a wrecking crew and something new and crooked going up catty corner to that. Windows missing in every edifice like broken teeth, fierce gusts of gritty wind, and a gray high sky full of ravens.Roy Cohn: Isaiah.Belize: Prophet birds, Roy. Piles of trash, but lapidary like rubies and obsidian, and diamond-colored cowspit streamers in the wind. And voting booths.Roy Cohn: And a dragon atop a golden horde.Belize: And everyone in Balencia gowns with red corsages, and big dance palaces full of music and lights and racial impurity and gender confusion. And all the deities are creole, mulatto, brown as the mouths of rivers. Race, taste and history finally overcome. And you ain't there.Roy Cohn: And Heaven?Belize: That was Heaven, Roy.”

“I'm over the hill for come-on lines. On a quiet day, I can hear my liver rotting. For exercise, I fall down. ~ Clete”

“As a revolutionary people, we Americans won a probable victory over the best and biggest army in the world because we learned to fight from the Indians. You can do a lot of damage with a Kentucky rifle from behind a tree. You don't put on a peaked hat and a red coat and white leggings and crossed white bandoleers with a big silver buckle in the center of the X and march uphill into a line of Howitzers loaded with chain and chopped horseshoes.”

“Yuh cyah vex when soca playin”

“Trinidad may seem complex, but to anyone who knows it, it is a simple, colonial, philistine society.”

“'The White Woman on the Green Bicycle' is a love story mapped onto an unfolding political tragedy: that of the failure of the Independence era in Trinidad.”