TEDxPortofSpain, to me – four years on

TEDxPortofSpain is one of those things in Trinidad and Tobago which serves as a light to sighted citizens in our dark intellectual national landscape

I say that because since I was quite young growing up in Trinidad I felt surrounded by persons who didn’t see: didn’t see the possibilities of our nation, didn’t see the irrationality of our elders, didn’t see the inanity of comments and discussions considered quintessentially ‘Trini’, didn’t see the danger of our ethnic and class-based residential segregation, didn’t see the inefficiencies in our conventional practices. I grew up feeling suffocated, and couldn’t wait to study abroad.

I remember feeling strongly after finishing my high school education, that I must get out. I felt limited here. I felt oppressed, like I wasn’t allowed to be my full self, to think and say my true thoughts, in every society to which I had been exposed, of the only country I had ever known as home.

I think that TEDxPortofSpain provides a gratifying sense that citizens who can see, or who imagine differently from others, and are confident, knowledgeable and daring enough to think and state their different thoughts, ideas and informed opinions are not alone, and gives them by so doing a sense of security, which, however different we are, we all need to varying degrees, especially in a small island where being different may mean victimisation and ostracism.

It helps those who may be friends of such persons, who are not necessarily looking outward to other countries or sensitive to any fundamental problem within the nation, be exposed to the opportunity for self-examination as a citizen of Trinidad and Tobago, by examination of issues arising within the nation itself. Without lurid bacchanal, without overt entertainment content, without an incitement to ethnic or ideological separatism,

TEDxPortofSpain provides a safe space for the exercise of fundamental human rights: freedom of conscience, thought, expression/articulation, and opportunities arising there with that are truly useful and absolutely necessary for nation building: reflection, introspection, intrapersonal and interpersonal communication.

TEDxPortofSpain is the space that was absent when I was growing up in this country. And for this alone, the light of TEDxPortofSpain burns bright in the ever darkening narco-economic Trinidad and Tobago social reality.

May it burn for many many years to come, until, one hopes, its light is no longer needed, and through it and its offshoots we have allowed the daystar of our own inner consciousnesses to shine on us and bring us to true nationhood: independence, discipline, productivity, acceptance and respect.

With hope,
By Nzinga S. Job
2012 TEDxPOS Speaker