The mother’s picong : A discursive approach to gender,identity and political leadership in Trinidad and Tobago

Introduction

In his attempt to trace an ontology of Caribbean existence, Holger Henke (1997) said, ‘Perhaps nowhere else in the world do so many different people, value systems and logics cohabit in such a limited space’ (p. 43). This could certainly be said about Trinidad and Tobago, the southernmost islands of the Caribbean archipelago, shaped by a long history of Spanish, French and British colonialism and the overlapping fluxes of Amerindian, European, African, East Indian, Chinese and Middle Eastern diasporas.

The legacy of British colonial policies influenced many aspects of socio-political life on the island, marking and reproducing an Us vs Them division especially between the two major ethnic groups of East Indians (35.4%) and Africans (34.2%) (Trinidad and Tobago Central Statistical Office (TTCSO), 2011). Since its independence in 1962, the tension between these two ethnic groups has underlined much of the political history of the country. In this protracted competition for political control and allocation of resources, the Afro-Trinbagonian People’s National Movement (PNM) has been the ruling party for over 40 years, while an East Indian party was usually sitting in the Opposition (Premdas, 2007).

In this context, the 2010 General Elections marked a turning point in the history of the nation. Trinidad and Tobago elected Kamla Persad-Bissessar, its first female prime minister (PM) and only the second person of East Indian ancestry to hold the PM office since 1962. She won as the leader of a new coalition party, the People’s Partnership (PP), comprising the United National Congress (UNC), the UNC-derived Congress of the People (COP), the Afro-Tobagonian and autonomist Tobago Organisation of the People (TOP), the National Joint Action Committee (NJAC), a Black nationalist movement established in 1969 by the Trinidadian Black Power activist Makandal Daaga, and the Movement for Social Justice (MSJ), supported by the labor movement and led by the renowned labor leader Errol McLeod. Although coalitions had never had great political fortune in the Trinbagonian context, ¹ the PP was able to secure 29 seats out of 41 in the House of Representatives, defeating the incumbent Leader of the PNM Patrick Manning.

With this unprecedented landslide victory as a starting point, this article aims at exploring the discursive strategies behind Persad-Bissessar’s election campaign. The starting assumption was that Persad-Bissessar broadened her electorate not only by presenting a carefully engineered inter-ethnic coalition party, but also with the discursive construction and maintenance of a self versus other differentiation and polarization between her political figure and that of her opponent, Manning. Adopting a discourse-historical (Reisigl and Wodak, 2009) perspective, I set out to analyze how Persad-Bissessar engaged in a planned communication strategy based on the wider political dichotomy of ‘positive self-presentation’ and ‘negative other-presentation’ (Reisigl and Wodak, 2001: 46; after Van Dijk, 1984). The KPB 2010 corpus of data in analysis encompasses 25 political speeches (88,495 words) delivered by Persad-Bissessar as she was rallying the nation during her campaign (from 12 April to 24 May 2010), retrieved on the party official website as Speaking Notes. By offering a critical discursive perspective on the complex interplay among gender, identity and political leadership in Trinidad and Tobago, this work aims to represent a new prospect in the fields of both linguistics and Caribbean studies that would bridge the existing theoretical and analytical gap between the more socio-political macro aspects and the more micro aspects of linguistic analysis.

Analyzing Caribbean political discourse: A critical enterprise

Alongside the ever-growing mediatization of political messages, research in the field of language and politics has expanded considerably in recent decades. The increasing reception and pervasiveness of mediated political text and talk contributed to political discourse being increasingly regarded as ‘a complex form of human activity which deserves study in its own right’ (Chilton and Schäffner, 1997: 207). Nevertheless, the analysis of Anglophone political discourse has been characterized by a rather Western-centric attention to Euro-American politics, with major Western political figures like Winston Churchill, Margaret Thatcher, Barack Obama, Tony Blair and George W. Bush being the longstanding objects of interest of the Anglophone discourse analysts (see e.g. Charteris-Black, 2005). Correspondingly, there has also been a widespread tendency in Caribbean studies to focus on literary production, rather than political or media discourse, as a lens to interpret the post-colonial social world. While novelists have been rightly regarded as ‘important guides to uncovering the false naturalness’ (Harney, 1996: 8) of politics, nationalism and identity-building in the post-colonial Caribbean, political discourse from the Archipelago remains understudied from the point of view of discourse analysis.

Any political text can be considered as a highly culture-bound text that may look opaque if not fully contextualized, as it refers to ‘a wide range of cultural patterns of the society in question, including aspects of its economic, political and legal life’ (Trosborg, 1997: 145). This calls for a critical analysis of political texts: not merely an investigation of their linguistic features, but also an integrated socio-cultural ethnography of their historical and political contexts. The adoption of a critical stance when tackling political discourse implies both ‘subscribing to a careful analysis of empirical data coming from the world under study’ and ‘acknowledging the status of the analyst as an active part of this world’ (Okulska and Cap, 2010: 5).

Critical Discourse Analysis (henceforth CDA) emerged via a network of scholars in the early 1990s. Referred to either as a program of study (Wodak and Meyer, 2009) or as a form of critical social research (Fairclough, 2003, 2006), the approach was quite innovative in ‘establishing the legitimacy of a linguistically oriented discourse analysis, firmly anchored in social reality and with a deep interest in actual problems and forms of inequality in societies’ (Blommaert, 2005: 6).

As a ‘problem-oriented, interdisciplinary’ (Wodak and Meyer, 2009: 2) type of discourse analytical research, CDA is primarily concerned with power relations and how these are enacted, reproduced and resisted by written, spoken and visual texts in different public contexts. In this vein, CDA as a methodology for the analysis of political discourse contributes ‘to spell out the relations between subtle properties of text and talk and the various dimensions of the political context, the political process and the political system at large’ (Van Dijk, 1997: 44) by drawing on a broad range of diverse conceptual frameworks, methods and data.

Originating in the so-called Vienna School of Discourse Analysis, and situating itself within CDA, the Discourse-Historical Approach (henceforth DHA) has been focusing on the analysis of historical, organizational and political topics and texts since the late 1980s. DHA ‘finds its focal point in the field of politics, where it tries to develop conceptual frameworks for political discourse’ (Meyer, 2001: 22). One of the main insights of the interdisciplinary and triangulated discourse-historical method is taking into account four different heuristic levels of context, ranging from the immediate, language or text internal co-text to the broader socio-political and historical contexts (see Reisigl and Wodak, 2009: 93). The almost ethnographic focus on the socio-political context – and on its mutually influencing, pervasive relationship with language – gives DHA a strong potential for investigation in the post-colonial Caribbean, marked by ‘neo-colonial dependency, global capital’s assaults on sovereignty, cyclical and mass migrations of population, environmental and cultural ravages, and bitter ethnic tensions among the members of its disparate diasporas’ (Puri, 1999: 14).

In the ethnically diverse and socio-politically fragmented Trinidad and Tobago, political and national identity is constantly ‘constructed and conveyed in discourse’ (Wodak et al., 2009: 22) and becomes reality ‘in the realm of convictions and beliefs through reifying, figurative discourses continuously launched by politicians, intellectuals and media people’ (De Cillia et al., 1999: 153). More specifically, discursive strategies marking a distinction between us and them have come to represent a traditional polarization in politics (Greene, 2002; Kelly, 1988, 1989). As ‘identification [is] inherently relational’ (Bucholtz and Hall, 2004: 294), the delimitation and stabilization of the category we (the group to which we belong) as opposed to the category of the other (the group to which we do not belong) becomes crucial for any political party, especially during an election campaign, where electors are called upon to undertake an authentic process of identification through the means of voting (Weisberg and Greene, 2003: 89).

Originally conceptualized as the core of racist and anti-Semitist discourse, the discursive strategies of ‘positive self-presentation’ and ‘negative other-presentation’ (Reisigl and Wodak, 2001; Van Dijk, 1984, 1991, 1995; Wodak and Van Dijk, 2000) are highly ‘functional and effective in the political process’, especially ‘in the competition for votes, support, and the struggle for political survival and legitimation’ (Van Dijk, 1997: 28). The discursive construction of symbolic markers of identity in a political campaign is a continuing process ‘in which group boundaries are collectively generated, affirmed, maintained, and employed to mark differences between insiders and outsiders’ (McCallion, 2007: 2338). This binary ‘in-group’ versus ‘out-group’ dichotomy is at the core of the wider ‘Ideological or Political Square’ (Van Dijk, 2006: 734). Based on the ‘Emphasis/De-Emphasis of Our/Their Good/Bad Actions’ (Van Dijk, 2006), the square is considered the strategic principle of all ideological and political discourse, to the point that the core meaning of any political message could be succinctly summarized as ‘Vote for us and you’ll get more good; vote for them and you’ll get more bad’ (Hahn, 2003).

As a result, the topics of political discourse are often the very ‘political actors – politicians, elites, public figures and social institutions and organizations’ (Van Dijk, 1997: 28). Strategies and linguistic devices, therefore, tend to reflect the genre and the function of political discourse in the election process and are often widely reflexive. In the KPB 2010 corpus, Persad-Bissessar makes a wide use of the discursive strategies (Reisigl and Wodak, 2009: 94) of nomination (naming and linguistically referring to persons, objects, phenomena/events, processes and actions) and predication (attributing more or less positive or negative characteristics, qualities and features to social actors, objects, phenomena/events and processes) to refer positively to herself and her PP and negatively to Manning and the PNM.

As she was campaigning for power after a period of authoritarianism and corruption, Persad-Bissessar advocated a strategic, refreshing interpretation of her public role as leader. Her position as the first female PM candidate in the history of Trinidad and Tobago could have possibly been instrumental in signaling and promoting an impression of political change able to bring a more inclusive approach to leadership and power in the ethnically divided Caribbean nation.

Strategies of positive self-presentation: Persad-Bissessar as ‘Mother of the Nation’

Throughout political history, the exercise of power and authority has often been seen as ‘a man’s prerogative’ (Campus, 2013: 10). Leadership has been closely associated with masculinity, with ‘the king, the father, the boss and the lord’ (Keohane, 2010: 121) being the widespread, stereotypical images of ruling power. In this male-oriented world of politics, gender-related expectations often mark how a female politician should act and speak (Kendall and Tannen, 1997): men politicians are regarded as ‘core members’ of the political public space, and ‘are placed as the political norm that female politicians ought to adapt to’ (Lilja, 2008: 89).

The common psychology of leadership tends to endorse the view of the great leader as a ‘Great Man’, who is ‘irredeemably masculine, heroic, individualist and normative in orientation and nature’ (Grint, 2010: 40). If this dominant model has given life to many Iron Ladies, women leaders very much in line with the Great Man stereotype, Persad-Bissessar seems to adopt a different strategy in her 2010 campaign, stressing aspects of motherly care, nurturing and provision of goods.

Persad-Bissessar’s family role as a mother and grandmother is often put to the fore in strategic moments of her campaign, as a support to her legitimation as an impartial, strong and caring leader for Trinidad and Tobago. One of these crucial moments is her first public appearance as PM candidate on 16 April 2010, following Patrick Manning’s announcement of the date for the General Election:

(1) Sisters and brothers, I stand here today as one of you, a woman, mother, grandmother, a wife, daughter, sister and friend. I am here too as a lawyer, public servant, and a Prime Ministerial candidate. (Hindu Women’s Organization, 16 April 2010, my emphasis)

(2) As a mother and grandmother, I am also deeply concerned about the extent to which our children are being introduced to human values. (Hindu Women’s Organization, 16 April 2010, my emphasis)

During the speech at the Hindu Women’s Organization, Persad-Bissessar employs a careful positioning that highlights her family roles (‘a woman, mother, grandmother, a wife, daughter, sister and friend’), together with her institutional ones (‘lawyer, public servant, and a Prime Ministerial candidate’). Brought up in the rural town of Siparia in a traditional Hindu family, Persad-Bissessar never identifies openly as a Hindu woman in the speech, as part of a wider strategy of religious vagueness and inclusivity in her pan-ethnic campaign (Esposito, 2015). However, by introducing herself as a ‘mother and grandmother’ as in (1) and (2), she is still able to create a bond with the audience of Hindu women (‘I stand here today as one of you’), positioning herself closer to their problems, concerns and needs as wives, daughters and sisters both in the closely knit Hindu family and in the wider Trinbagonian society.

Leading politicians often tend to publicize selected private information ‘to help construct a favorable impression of themselves’ (Stanyer, 2007: 81) and create a sense of trust and intimacy with the electorate. One of the private aspects put to the fore by Persad-Bissessar is a mention of the difficulties she experienced when trying to ‘juggle her roles’ of wife, mother and politician:

(3) It is never easy on a family when your wife and mother juggles her roles with her political life and so tonight I pay tribute to them for the way they have endured these years with love and selflessness. (Victory Speech – Rienzi Complex, 24 May 2010, my emphasis)

For women in power, going public about their private lives often means also being ‘compelled to show themselves to be able to perform their duties without sacrificing their husband and children’ (Campus, 2013: 27). At the same time, the issues related to finding ‘a balance between having a career in a demanding environment and being a mother or finding time for personal relationships’ (Wagner and Wodak, 2006: 405) are responsive chords that resonate with women, and represented an effective bonding strategy with an important segment of the electorate.

The female electorate has been appropriately regarded as one of the ‘decisive winning factors’ for the 2010 Elections (Bissessar and La Guerre, 2013: 152). Together with all the other female delegates of the PP, Persad-Bissessar hosted a rally in Diego Martin entitled Women in Partnership: the rally aimed to address women’s issues in Trinidad and Tobago, a country where women make up over 50% of the population. In the context of an all-female rally, Persad-Bissessar relied again on a self-presentation that highlighted her family roles of mother and grandmother. Although Persad-Bissessar served as Minister of Education between 1999 and 2001, and contributed extensively to the process of facilitation of universal Secondary Education in Trinidad and Tobago, her concern for Trinbagonian children’s issues is discursively mediated and reinforced by her family roles:

(4) My friends, tonight you are probably wondering why Kamla have a milk pan with her, I brought this milk pan from home, you know I have two little grand-babies and I know how hard it is to buy milk for them and how difficult it must be for many mothers who rake and scrape to ensure that they get the money to feed their children, this milk pan represents the hope of a better future for our children and our babies. It represents my commitment to you that I will put our children first and foremost on the list of priorities of government. You can trust me, you can trust me with your children, because I too am a mother and a parent. (Diego Martin, 7 May 2010, my emphasis)

The rhetorical connection between Persad-Bissessar and her audience lies in this populist argumentum ad misericordiam (i.e. an appeal for compassion and empathy to win the audience over to her side). By posing a fairly unrealistic scenario in which Persad-Bissessar also experienced difficulties in buying milk for her ‘grand-babies’ (‘I know how hard it is to buy milk for them’), the PM candidate aims at shortening the distance even from the most underprivileged part of the electorate. The milk pan becomes the symbol of her commitment to children, who are premodified with ‘our’ and considered as children of the nation. The topos of trust, often employed by politicians during campaigns in their quest for votes, is here unpacked and explicated: trust has been earned by her longstanding role as ‘a mother and a parent’, rather than as a former Minister of Education.

In the same speech, Persad-Bissessar engages in an authentic appeal to solidarity, reprising the news story of a single mother being arrested for stealing baby milk. Holding a milk pan in her hands, she asks the audience to fill it with money to be donated to the single mother and her baby:

(5) Friends tonight I am asking each of you to make a contribution however small in the milk pan, it will be passed around at the end of the meeting. All contributions in the milk pan will be given to the baby Hannah fund. It will go to a child who needs a chance at life. Let us give our children that chance to live, love and learn. Our nation’s finest minds start with that very milk pan and tonight I signal that our children will not have to suffer much longer, because when we take government they too will rise. Instead of Manning drinking wine from golden goblets, our babies will have milk in their bottles. (Diego Martin, 7 May 2010, my emphasis)

In her appeal, Persad-Bissessar starts from the very grassroots of collaboration and solidarity, asking for a ‘contribution however small’, almost as if passing an offering plate in a church. Her appeal serves to create a strong polarization between her positive self-presentation as Mother of the Nation, and the negative presentation of Manning as an emperor, ‘drinking wine from golden goblets’ (see the following section). As a female PM candidate, she presented herself as ‘participatory and interpersonally oriented’ as well as ‘likely to adopt empathetic, supportive, and collaborative approaches’ (Kellerman et al., 2007: 16), meeting those very stereotypical expectations of facilitative female behavior in the workplace (Holmes and Marra, 2011: 318). In this respect, her gender difference could have possibly been instrumental in signaling and promoting a political transformation, as Persad-Bissessar portrayed herself as a feminine agent of change able to ‘clean up corruption in politics’ (Norris, 1997: 163), as well as to ‘heal the country and bring peace and reconciliation’ (Campus, 2013: 44).

Her Victory Speech on 24 May 2010 is another key moment in which Persad-Bissessar presents herself as a mother–politician. In Lakoff’s (1996) terms, Persad-Bissessar seems to phrase her activity as politician by adopting a ‘nurturant parent’ model rather than a ‘strict father’ one; when illustrating the key features of her future leadership, she adds ‘the nurturing nature of a mother and grandmother’ as an extra value to her political and government experiences:

(6) I bring to my leadership not just political experience and government experience but I also carry into the office of the Prime Ministership the nurturing nature of a mother and grandmother and I will look after each of you all as my own. (Victory Speech – Rienzi Complex, 24 May 2010, my emphasis)

Playing the role of Mother of the Nation seems to be Persad-Bissessar’s chosen strategy to inaugurate her mandate as well as her personal interpretation of the ‘femininity/competence double bind’ (Jamieson, 1995) as the first female PM of the political history of Trinidad and Tobago. What has been observed for Latin American countries, that is that ‘only on their cultural authority as mothers […] women can acceptably venture into the political sphere’ (Saint-Germain, 2013: 137), can also be applied to the context of Trinidad and Tobago. Traditionally, women had a definite role as mothers and caregivers within the institution of the family: within the mother’s role, the exercising of power by women was quite obviously legitimized (Wodak, 1997). The mother is not only a caring and supportive figure who takes care of her family, but also an authoritarian figure with the right to scold her husband and children. Drawing on discourse strategies associated with an acceptable feminine leadership role, such as the role of mother, could have represented an effective strategy to win over the more traditionally patriarchal segment of the Caribbean society during the campaign. As such, it may have helped Persad-Bissessar to avoid defensive reactions and negative evaluations from the mass media and the public, while dealing with the pressure of her professional performance as the first woman PM of Trinidad and Tobago.

Strategies of negative other-presentation: ‘The Emperor has no Clothes’

The so-called Urban Development Corporation of Trinidad and Tobago (UDeCOTT) scandal ² is undoubtedly a core theme of Persad-Bissessar’s campaign, as it caused the snap election that would eventually bring the PP to victory. Persad-Bissessar often condensed the comments on Manning’s leadership style, his alleged corruption and private interests into a vivid nomination, Emperor Manning, and made a frequent use of this nomination strategy to refer to her opponent throughout the campaign. In the speech at the Harris Promenade in St. Fernando, she employs this nickname in a long intertextual reference to the short tale by Hans Christian Andersen, The Emperor’s New Clothes. In classical Aristotelian rhetoric, the narratio gives a more or less biased account of a problem under discussion. Similarly, Andersen’s tale is altered to serve Persad-Bissessar’s personal version of the UDeCOTT scandal as ‘a story of vanity and arrogance’:

(7) Tonight I want to tell you a story of vanity and arrogance. Once upon a time there lived an Emperor called Patrick – and he was a very arrogant man, who did not care about his people, he was a very vain man and not very bright. The Emperor liked to build monuments and wear fine clothes – all to show off to visitors from far away countries when they came for big waste of time meetings. One day, a Canadian smart man called Calder came to see Patrick and he told Patrick that he would make the finest clothes for him out of a special thread that only people worthy to be in the Cabinet would be able to see. Calder told the Emperor that the clothes would cost him $300 M and to make up the cheque in the company name with his initials CH because no one would make the connection. So Calder made the clothes and Patrick said he would wear it on 24th May, because that was an important day in the Country. And before the big day, the Emperor tried on the new clothes made of special thread and all the Cabinet ministers told him he lookin’ real good; except one called Keith and he was fired and accused of being a wajang. Once Calder got his money he disappeared with the money, fled the country. On the 24th of May, when Patrick came out in his new clothes made by Calder everyone in the country knew that the special thread was really a hoax and the Emperor had no clothes. The Emperor was so ashamed having been fooled because of his arrogance and vanity; he was never seen again … and everyone in the Country lived happily ever after. (Harris Promenade, St. Fernando, 5 May 2010, my emphasis)

One of the reasons why Persad-Bissessar decided to employ storytelling to talk about the UDeCOTT scandal could be its intricacy and the intensive media coverage that derived from it. According to Charteris-Black (2014), ‘the old stories and the familiar ways to tell them’ prove effective, especially when dealing with complex issues, as ‘the data may be too much to absorb or the arguments too complex to follow’ (p. 237). The extract can also be considered an example of the role of narrative in political speeches as ‘a device that supports the fundamental persuasive intention of presenting an ideologically biased selection of past events’ (Schubert, 2010: 143).

This form of satirical storytelling in Trinbagonian political discourse also links back to the tradition of picong, from the French piquant: ‘a local medium derived from an oral tradition of story-telling that was a combination of humor, hate, slander, sex and politics’ (Premdas, 2004: 36). Through the use of picong, similar to playing the dozens in the United States, politicians engage the crowd in a form of street theater, slurring the reputation of their adversaries and evoking laughter in the audience. At the same time, Trinbagonian crowds almost expect to be served up with a form of picong in exchange for the hours of listening to political propaganda (Premdas, 2004).

The narration serves Persad-Bissessar’s negative other-presentation of Manning, who is described as ‘very arrogant’, ‘very vain’ and ‘not very bright’, just like Andersen’s Emperor. The characters in Andersen’s tale are substituted by the three main protagonists of the UDeCOTT scandal: Manning is the Emperor, Calder Hart is the swindler figure (of which there are actually two in the original tale), and Manning’s Housing Minister (and fierce inter-party antagonist) Keith Rowley is the child in the crowd who blurts out that the Emperor is wearing no clothes. The plot is extensively altered by Persad-Bissessar, who includes real life events like Calder Hart fleeing the country after the scandal or Rowley being publicly called a wajang (a Trinidadian Creole term for someone behaving badly) by Manning. The Emperor’s procession with his new clothes is substituted by the Election Day, and while in Andersen’s tale the Emperor continues his procession, Manning will never be seen again in the country after 24 May, constituting the happy ending of the tale in Persad-Bissessar’s view.

The PP positive self-presentation forged an image of solidarity and inter-ethnic collaboration, led by a caring mother–politician and democratic leader. Conversely, in order to construct and differentiate the PNM as the ‘out-group’ led by Manning, Persad-Bissessar often employs specific referential strategies similar to those found in the discourse of racial discrimination and the discursive construction of immigrants as out-groups. More specifically, the PM candidate employs ‘genericisation’, representing individuals as a generic type, and ‘collectivisation’, representing individuals as part of a collectivity (Reisigl and Wodak, 2001; Van Leeuwen, 1996). Ideologically, both genericization and collectivization are plural, generic references to social actors as group entities that ‘impersonalize social actors’ (Hart, 2014: 34) and contribute to stereotyping:

(8) Each might seem like a massive problem on its own, but each one is an individual link in the chain of poverty … so when we attack poverty, we attack crime. Ent that is common sense? Well if you know that and I know that, how come Manning and them doh know that? (La Brea, 17 May 2010, my emphasis)

(9) And so when Patrick Manning and his friends get desperate and start the lies and the dirty tricks, and that’ll be soon, believe me … it’s not going to work. This time it’s different. (St. Augustine, 16 April 2010, my emphasis)

(10) VISION 2020 is proof that the government knows what the country needs. But Mr. Manning and his band do not care about that! (St. Helena, 19 April 2010, my emphasis)

However, the impersonalization and indetermination that tends to characterize strategies of genericization and collectivization is counterbalanced by a form of categorization of the PNM social actors. Manning’s ministers and collaborators are identified in relation to the association they have with him (relational identification), and through specific collective names with a markedly negative prosody. These reference strategies contribute to reinforcing the representation of ‘Manning as Emperor’ as the members of the PNM are collectivized to resemble a feudal court, rather than a modern party:

(11) The people are fed up of the incompetence, arrogance and the bankruptcy of the minds of the Manning and his minions who have the audacity to shut down your parliament and then come back to you to ask for your vote. (Harris Promenade, St. Fernando, 5 May 2010, my emphasis)

(12) And a lady told Manning here last night he must wear white if he wants to win. Well, I tell you tonight Manning losing this election whether he wear white, black or red … he cyar win even if he wear YELLOW, because the people have decided that they have had enough on Manning and his clique! (Harris Promenade, St. Fernando, 5 May 2010, my emphasis)

(13) An independent committee comprising UWI lecturers, private sector representatives and Ministry officials found that Manning and his cohorts pursued this project for blatant political mileage and ignored geo-technical reports that predicted failure. (Arouca, 8 May 2010, my emphasis)

These nomination strategies have two major implications. First, they imply Manning appointed his ministers and collaborators to positions of authority, regardless of their qualifications. PNM members are portrayed as faithful servants (‘minions, clique, cohorts’) ready to please their PM as subjects would do with their emperor. Second, they imply that the relationships inside the PNM are highly hierarchical and founded on mutual private interests of a dubious nature (‘friends, band’) rather than on the common good of the nation.

Demontage and bonding: The role of Trinidadian English Creole in political discourse

The Trinidadian creolist Alleyne (1965) was among the first scholars to raise a key issue on the role of language in the political process of the early post-Independence era in the Commonwealth Caribbean. Trinidadian Standard English has always been the language of formal political life, in which administration and parliamentary debates are habitually conducted. In this respect, Alleyne denounced an alarming language gap between the educated elite who had inherited political power, and the Creole-speaking mass of the population on whose behalf power was supposedly being exercised.

Since the 1960s, the literacy rate in the country has been steadily growing, reaching 98.8% in 2011. ³ The status of Trinidadian English Creole, or Trini-Talk, has also been constantly evolving, especially since 1975, when it was recognized as a language variety in its own right and was allowed as medium of instruction in primary schools (Mühleisen, 2013). However, any use that politicians might make of Creole in their speeches does not necessarily imply that the variety enjoys any kind of official status in the political system. In fact, the functions of Creole languages in a political speech in the Caribbean are limited and include ‘sloganeering, telling jokes, abuse and as an emotional rhetoric device’ (Devonish, 1986: 100), while political content is always expressed in Standard English. The use of Creole, therefore, seems to link back to its connotation as the ‘language of solidarity’:

Increased status for the Creole and an identification with it as the language of the territory have made for greater use of it in public contexts, such as parliament; motivation towards a pure Standard is disappearing since most people balance out their use of standard and creole in relation to the demands of each situation. If StE (Standard English) is the language of power, TrnC (Trinidadian Creole) is the language of solidarity, and appropriate language use necessarily entails balancing the two varieties. (Youssef and Winford, 2004: 513)

Throughout the KPB 2010 corpus, Persad-Bissessar switches from Standard English to Trinidadian Creole exclusively when she is talking about her opponent Patrick Manning and the PNM. She seems to use Creole for the very same reasons described by Devonish (1986): as a strongly metaphoric and idiomatic rhetorical device to make people feel closer to her opinions and reinforce her in-group. Exploiting the ‘affective’ and ‘metaphorical’ functions of code-switching (Holmes, 2013: 38ff), she uses Creole whenever she sloganeers against him or other members of the PNM, or ironizes/mocks their work during their last mandate.

The UDeCOTT scandal that brought Manning to call the snap election in 2010 is one of the PNM-related topics on which Persad-Bissessar more frequently makes ironical comments in Trinidadian Creole:

(14) When you told us Manning was protecting Calder Hart and called you a ‘wajang’ when you spoke about the lack of cabinet oversight, we believed you. But when you flip flop and now tell us, leave Manning alone, we cyar believe yuh! When yuh tell us, stay on de ship no matter what state it in, we ayah believe yuh! Yuh could sing fuh yuh supper, but yuh would never get ah chance tuh eat it because Manning and the PNM will not be there after May 25th! Will you now help Manning defend this corrupt transaction that occurred under his nose and watch? Manning upstaged you on this. I want to tell you that this is a big, big leak, Keith. Yuh goh have tuh hire de Chineese tuh help yuh tuh plug it because the PNM ship is sinking! Keith, yuh say it eh have no court martial! Well, ah want tuh tell yuh dat there is a court martial! The date for de court martial is May 24th and the people will be the jury. (Arouca, 8 May 2010)

In this excerpt, Persad-Bissessar is addressing the PNM former Housing Minister Keith Rowley, who was dismissed by Manning in 2008 because he had demanded Cabinet oversight over a multi-million dollar project being undertaken by Calder Hart’s UDeCOTT. Here the PM candidate is speaking in response to Rowley’s declaration of 7 May 2010, when he announced his lasting faithfulness to the PNM using a number of cross-domain mappings: a ship metaphor to refer to the PNM party, with Manning as the captain and himself as a sailor. ⁴

Metaphors are typically used in persuasive political arguments (see Semino, 2008) as they ‘represent a certain way of viewing the world that reflects a shared system of belief’, and they are ‘important in influencing emotional responses’ because of their ‘cognitive and culturally rooted role’ (Charteris-Black, 2005: 20). The Nation-as-Ship or the Party-as-Ship are conventional metaphors widely used in political discourse which suggest ‘a large container holding many people’, ‘a society moving forward through space’ as well as ‘the idea that political events are partially determined by the (metaphorical) weather’ (Grady et al., 1999: 109f). By speaking Creole, Persad-Bissessar aims at ridiculing Rowley’s declaration of faithfulness to the PNM and his use of metaphors to make his speech more elevated and inspiring. She defines the UDeCOTT scandal as a ‘big, big leak’, with the result being that the ‘PNM ship is sinking’, by choosing metaphors in the same domain to link back to Rowley’s declarations. The reference to hiring the Chinese to ‘plug the leak’ in the PNM ship is another metaphorical reference to the complexity of the UDeCOTT scandal, as well as a reference to the alleged exploitation of a vast number of Chinese immigrant workers on the construction site of the Heights of Guanapo Church in Trinidad and Tobago.

Persad-Bissessar also switches to Trinidadian Creole when addressing the internal tensions in the PNM during the 2010 campaign. In particular, she addresses Manning’s rejection of the PNM Senator Penny Beckles as a candidate for the Constituency of Arima, where she had been Member of Parliament (MP) since 2002:

(15) Why don’t you talk about why you throw out Penny Beckles. Why don’t you tell the people that you ’fraid she? She won the seat for Arima in 2007 Mr. Manning, she was deputy speaker of the House of Representatives … but YOU THROW YOUR PENNY OUT AND NOW YOU BANKRUPT so you getting farse and minding we business. (Harris Promenade, St. Fernando, 5 May 2010)

According to Persad-Bissessar, Manning rejected Beckles’ candidature because he was ‘’fraid she’ (afraid of her), portraying Manning as a weak, sexist politician. Persad-Bissessar takes Penny Beckles’ side by underlining her value as politician and the loss that her rejection represented for the PNM with the name pun, ‘you throw your penny out and now you bankrupt’. As a female candidate with a strong network of female supporters and 11 female MP candidates (herself being the 12th as candidate for the constituency of Siparia) out of 41, Persad-Bissessar aimed at creating a sharp contrast between the modern and women-friendly PP and the PNM throughout the campaign.

Another example of the use of Trinidadian Creole when describing the PNM party’s internal tensions is when Persad-Bissessar portrays the personalities of PNM ministers as weak or problematic and Manning as incapable of coordinating them, in the established custom of picong:

(16) He re-shuffled his cabinet and pretended not to hear the cry from his own party to give Dr Keith Rowley the Ministry of National Security. Instead, he put Keith in the doghouse and end up firing him. And he doh want Keith tuh talk. Not at all. Having put him in the PNM doghouse, he now trying to muzzle him! Buh wait, all hell will break loose soon … yuh ever hear ah plot hound muzzle ah Rottweilier?!! (Couva, 6 May 2010)

Here Persad-Bissessar is referring to Manning giving the Ministry of National Security to Martin Joseph instead of Keith Rowley during the reshuffle. Using the metaphorical idiom ‘being put in the doghouse’ (i.e. being the object of someone’s anger or disapproval), Persad-Bissessar goes on to create another metaphorical reference in the same domain. Not only did Manning fire Rowley, but he is now trying to ‘muzzle’ him in order to keep him silent on the PNM’s internal issues. According to Persad-Bissessar, he will not succeed: Manning is only a ‘plot hound’ too weak to compete with Rowley, who is pictured as a ‘Rottweiler’, a stronger and more aggressive dog.

Discursive animalization is often employed in political discourse to serve a purpose of dehumanization and inferiorization of one’s political opponent, instrumental to self-legitimation and positive self-presentation. Political enemies are portrayed either as insects (small, but insidiously damaging) or aggressive animals that can attack with violence (Chovanec, 2010). Animal metaphors are almost invariably used to create a negative evaluation and at the same time ‘to add colour and a touch of lightness and humour’ (Charteris-Black, 2005: 109), an effect amplified by the use of Creole in (16).

Good public speakers ‘are skilled to listen to the familiar ways through which ordinary people adjust to the world’ (Charteris-Black, 2014: 237): Trini-Talk discursively creates a talking politics very similar to what you would hear on the streets and in the homes of Trinidad and Tobago. Code-switching proves a powerful communication strategy in Persad-Bissessar’s speeches for two main reasons. First, it allows her to talk freely about her opponents, using a stronger and more derogatory language. Second, and more importantly, Creole works as a political communication facilitator, similarly to kaiso (calypso) music in Trinidad and Tobago (see Regis, 1999). Speaking in colloquial language that is familiar to the people allows Persad-Bissessar to create a strong, immediate connection with her audience and helps Persad-Bissessar to ‘avoid defining the interaction to any specific social arena’ (Myers-Scotton and Ury, 1977). With her vivid imagery and straightforward Trini-Talk, Persad-Bissessar reinforces her image as one of the people, in opposition to Manning’s Emperor image, detached and deaf to the people’s needs.

Conclusion

Traditional perceptions of gender roles and stereotypical attitudes, paired with women’s disproportionate share of family household responsibilities and the lack of maternity leave for female parliamentarians, can be regarded as major structural and cultural barriers hindering women’s successful participation in political leadership in the post-colonial Caribbean (Ellis, 2003).

Given the history of opposition and struggle for political visibility of the East Indian community in the country, the election of a female PM candidate of East Indian ancestry was an even more significant novelty in the political scenario of Trinidad and Tobago. Predictably, Indo-Caribbean feminism quickly fell into triumphalist rhetoric, seeing the ‘ascendancy of Kamla’ as ‘the apex’ and ‘the fulfilment of the steady progress of Indo women in all walks of public life’ (Kanhai, 2013: 1). Considering their starting point as trophies of masculinity and status in the male-dominated colonial demography, Trinbagonian women unquestionably made tremendous gains in terms of equality and rights throughout the 20th century. While forms of gender inequality and inequity still persist, in the Trinidad and Tobago of the 2010s women participate in the political life of the country, not only as voters, party canvassers and supporters, but also as parliamentarians and ministers.

In this article Persad-Bissessar’s success has been contextualized and analyzed mainly as part of a wider political trend that sees female candidates triumph during hard political times, especially in Latin America and the Caribbean (Saint-Germain, 2013). By playing the role of Mother of the Nation, she strategically chose to negotiate discourse practices as one of the first female politicians in the Trinbagonian public space, as well as her personal interpretation of the ‘femininity/competence double bind’ (Jamieson, 1995). The referential and predicational strategies highlighting the nurturing nature of her family roles as mother and grandmother relate to the most culturally approved model of female leadership. This motherliness might have contributed to smooth the way for the first ever election of a female PM candidate by appealing to the segment of Trinbagonian society – both male and female – holding the most traditional patriarchal values.

Persad-Bissessar’s positive self-presentation was closely connected to delegitimizing Manning’s leadership style and authority. In the ‘negative other-presentation’ of Manning, Persad-Bissessar also made wide use of two discursive strategies linked to the tradition of political communication in Trinidad and Tobago: picong (satirical storytelling) and switching to Trinidadian Creole, both aimed at dismantling Manning’s power and distancing him as the Emperor. Her picong against Manning is a legitimate, established custom that discursively posited a space where she was able to both ridicule her political adversary and foster a ritual process of bonding with the audience. Similarly, strategic switching to the colloquial and familiar Trini-Talk worked as a political communication facilitator, reinforcing Persad-Bissessar’s image as ‘one of the people’, in opposition to Manning’s ‘Emperor’ image, assigning him to the Afrosaxon PNM elite detached from the people’s needs.