About Queens and street signs
Recently there’s been quite a bit of debate and disapproval in some quarters about a decision taken by the Port-of-Spain City Council to rename a street in the capital of Trinidad and Tobago. Actually, they’re not entirely proposing to rename the street currently called “Queen Street”. They’re just naming it after someone they regard as deserving of the honour; the 1977 Miss Universe winner Janelle Penny Commissiong.
The numerous negative reactions to this decision are perplexing. Immediately after announcing the proposed “name change”, many people started clutching their pearls and voicing their dissent. Letters to the editor were written. History “experts” found themselves on the television news talking about how sad it was that this change was happening. The Port-of-Spain (POS) City council was accused of the unforgivable crimes of trying to “erase” and “rewrite” history. And then came the barrage of Facebook posts talking about how history needs to be preserved, and so the city should find another way to honour Penny’s historic win.

It is a confusing task to attempt to understand why people are so emotionally affected by this. First of all, the street was never even named after an actual queen. That “Queen” could refer to Queen Victoria, Queen Elizabeth, the Queen of the Damned or Queen Cersei Lannister. No one can tell from its current name which queen it refers to. It is therefore a bit difficult to understand just about which portion of history is going to be forever permanently erased by adding a few names to a street sign.
Secondly, with all due respect to the POS City Council, I don’t think that they have the power to erase or rewrite a history as deeply and pervasively entrenched as our colonial history. They can barely manage to get the city to stop flooding when it drizzles. Sleep easy. Centuries of your beloved colonial rule, the relics of which you wish to preserve, will not be undone by the changing of a street name. We will still have English as our only official language, while looking down on Trinidadian Creole as a bastardised “broken” form of English, reserved for the uneducated. We will still have the completely useless, outdated and ill-fitting Westminster parliamentary and legal system, that even the Brits themselves have since adjusted to suit their modern needs. And we will still have other city streets that are arbitrarily and non-specifically named after British royal titles, such as “King”, “Prince” and “Duke”.
What I really want to know though, is why are you so mad about THIS? Why are you so upset about a poorly-named street, but you’re virtually silent about the fact that you can’t walk that street at night without the thought that your life is in danger? Why are you so mad about an arbitrary land marker dedicated to the queen with no name, but you’re fine with our capital city being transformed into a disastrous swamp every time a cloud passes over POS? Why are you so hot and bothered about adding some words onto a street sign, but you’re cool with our city streets routinely being decorated with an assortment of trash and smelly human waste, left by the homeless persons who sleep on them? Why all the sudden outrage about this “erasure” of history, but you have nothing to say about the fact that thousands of children leave our primary AND secondary schools yearly, not even knowing the basics about our nation’s history? The logic behind your selective indignation is mind boggling.

What some people don’t seem to get is just how much the history they wish to preserve, STILL contributes to the exclusion and oppression of many people currently residing in sweet T&T. For many of the descendants of European-owned slaves and indentured servants, we have great difficulty looking at that gruesome portion of our country’s history and feeling any sense of warm nostalgia. Many of us are still very much negatively affected by the systems, ideologies and inequalities entrenched by colonial rule. So please forgive us if we do not understand why we need to preserve the monuments dedicated to royals who pleasurably presided over our subjugation.
As a decolonisation effort, this name adjustment is cosmetic at best, but it’s definitely a step in the right direction. Being the first black woman to win a global pageant of that magnitude was a major achievement in 1977, given that the idea that beauty comes in different shades and colours, was even less pervasive then, than it is today. As we are no longer politically tethered to any major global superpower, we need to constantly remind ourselves that though we may be small and perhaps insignificant, we still can contribute to positive changes occurring across the globe. This is a great way to remind us of that.