Community Builder - Terry Brathwaite

Terry has served as the European Union's first black atlas expert and advisor to the Russian government. To our listeners, I want you to meet my dear family member, Terry Brathwaite. Terry, welcome!

The internship program, which I pioneered and research, which it would be the students being we're having supervisors appointed to them and overseeing the whole process of their research efforts towards getting a master's degree in law. I have been, traveling extensively over the past 24 years that I was there, to conferences and. One of the things that I was able to I was appointed in 2014 as the first black advisor by the European commission to the Russian government.

And I was a member of a five panel crew where we were involved in helping the Russian government and universities in Siberia, in particular to initiate. And develop programs that would I would say transfer from one type of employment journey to another. So if, for example, a lecturer wanted to move away from academia and get involved in something else, we would provide programs that would be online for them to be able to successfully make that transition.

And the focus there was tourism they wanted to develop the tourism sector and we helped them with that, which lifelong learning programs and so on. So I traveled to Russia. I traveled to Russia for four years in between the semesters to assist with that program. And that was completed just before I retired. Excuse me. We did a paper on that has been published online.

And upon my retirement, as I said, I was appointed the first honorary fellow at the faculty of law, St. Augustine University of the West Indies, St. Augustine campus. And I still there until this year for two terms. And I am now working with the office of the principal of the. The University of the West Indies at St. Augustine.

And in a sense, my, the last performance that we did was in 1980 at United Nations headquarters in New York. And while there I decided that I wanted to retire from the world of international dance and travel to meet my aunt, Joyce, who you knew her husband Edwin Stanley and Joyce Stanley, and they lived in Hamilton. So I traveled to see them on a holiday.

And we decided that let's explore what universities possible entry to universities that I could be able to take advantage of while I'm there and a friend introduced me to York university, Mrs. Alma Thompson. She's from Trinidad. She was on a scholarship at York university at the time. And I did the audition for the dance department. And I passed the audition and at York university and got a government scholarship to support me eventually for my tenure there.

Upon graduating from York University, I before graduating, a while, while there I met a young lady, a beautiful young lady from Jamaica, who had I think she had come first in the Caribbean in the law exams K through law school. Her name is, at the time was Dawn Fenton. And we. Struck itself, nice relationship, eventually got engaged and then traveled to Trinidad after my graduation from York. And we got married in Trinidad.

And then we had our two daughters and then Dawn said, after five years in Trinidad, because you have to serve the government for the period of time that they gave you the scholarship after five years there, she would like to go back to her country of birth and which was UK, because even though she grew up in Jamaica, she was born in the UK and we said, okay, let's go back to, let's go to the UK and give the girls an opportunity to, build their career, their life there and build their career.

And that's how we ended up in the United Kingdom and Dawn as a lawyer she was able to fit in quite nicely into the system. And then I following the management track, because even though I started dance at York university. I transferred from the dance department. My experiences there will be a bittersweet because of the racism in the dance department. And I ended up in the sociology department and then did a second degree in arts administration, international cultural relations.

So I had a management background and that is what took me back to Trinidad. And I worked at the university of the West Indies, the central bank and so on and so forth. And then starting in the United Kingdom. I got into social enterprise and then started at Coventry University in 1993. We went to, we traveled to England in 1991 and I started at at Coventry 94. So that's how we ended up there and of course, the rest is history.

That was happening on the ground all the time in pockets, and the dance department was just one pocket, where I was, there were only about two black students in the dance department at the time. And They promoted the white students, ahead of us, even though when I applied for my, to join the dance department as a student, a mature student, I was told during the interview that, my experience was so extensive because as I said, I traveled performing.

They said, why are you coming here to study dance? You should be teaching at the dance department, not studying dance. They said I don't have a degree and I need to have a piece of paper that says I can do what I've been doing for the past 10 years internationally. And I found that, the dance department in itself was very, quite limiting in scope because I was dancing. I was in my twenties.

And there were young students who just came out of university sorry, came out of high school and their aspiration was to perform downtown. Perform in downtown was their, A big thing for them was for me, that was like, excuse me, I just came from the United Nation headquarters in New York. I performed on Broadway, I performed on Macy's Parade. Macy's Parade is the grand parade of Thanksgiving in New York. The biggest parade that they have in the biggest store in the world.

And it's people can see it all over the world. It's on television. And performing at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Performed at the J. F. Kennedy Performing Arts. Center for the Performing Arts. You name it. We went right through the United States. Right through Europe. Israel. All these places. Wow. Are you coming to tell me about performing downtown? Toronto, that's a big thing. I just felt like I was, in a, in an environment where it was very claustrophobic.

And I used to talk to you about that sometimes, I come home from classes and I'm just Oh my gosh. Let me just do what has to be done and get this over with because, it's really tiring having white lecturers trying to tell you your thighs are too big or your body is to this or whatever it is. And I'm looking at these people and see that they, the gyrate, that's it, and the body, I have a great respect for body Caribbean dance, modern dance. We do that as normal routines in the Caribbean.

For them, they have to structure that in such a way that it became very artificial. So I just wanted to get through what I needed to get through. But there were lecturers there who basically did not like me. black, and there was another student there.

I wouldn't call her name, in the sense of confidentiality, but just to let you know, two of us were demoted after the first year, even though we did excellent work by this new chairman who came in and I had to fight to get back up, to the level that I was supposed to be at. And this other student eventually went on to become professor of dance and head of Dan's school at a top university in the United States. And she was quite popular in the United in Canada also.

So it just shows you that they were trying to keep us down, but you couldn't keep good talent down. And I moved out and this other student left and went to another university and was able to progress. So in a way it was bittersweet from that angle, sweet in the sense that I was happy to get into the university. I was happy to start my academic training.

I was happy to, and the route that I took was dance therapy, which actually I am now for the past 25 years, I've been the only Black dance movement psychotherapist in the United Kingdom. Even that has been a journey and a struggle in its sense, because across here, whereas in, in America, it's in your face, in Britain, it's very covert, so I've had to deal with the whole experience of racism, in North America and in the United Kingdom.

And so far, I have to say that I have survived and not just survived. I've thrived because even my children, my two daughters, but I should say our two daughters, my wife and I they have also, been quite successful. My elder daughter, Tasha, she's now a medical doctor, pediatrician. And she graduated from Oxford University Medical School, both at the undergraduate and postgraduate level. Then she went to the in Paris and she did a postgraduate diploma in French, graduating with a distinction.

And then she went to Harvard University and did a master's in public health there graduating with distinction also. And my younger daughter, she graduated from Cambridge University Law School. Both undergraduate and postgraduate. It's now a senior associate at one of the Silver Circle law firms in London.

Who is now the founder and chair of Fab Afrique, which is very much like a CNN version in Cameroon, excuse me and she has done so well that she has developed a one media group that is international in Europe and in Africa and she runs conferences in different countries, focusing on what you will call good human resource management. Techniques. And giving awards for people who have excelled in the field of human resource management.

I have another student in the field of dance, who has just written a book, published a book. I wrote the preface for it, Marguerite Peniel, and she's French. And she has developed this whole technique around body percussion. She has North African heritage. So I have introduced her to the element of what the Egyptians were able to do then, and she was able to integrate that into her work in the European context. I have the same student who I told you is now a professor of dance.

She was also a student of mine while I was at York because while I was there at York and to just keep myself occupied after classes in the day, I would then run workshops in the evening teaching other students. Who actually worked with me in the class, in the classes, during the day, teaching them advanced techniques in modern dance and Caribbean dance and so on.

So she is now, as I said to you, a professor, full professor, and she is now head of school, the dance school at one of the top universities in the United States. I can go on and on.

The students, one of the courses that I initiated at Coventry University was the first in the world, a master's degree in global development and international law which focused essentially on the whole focus was on developing the, what you would call the global majority community and looking at it from a legal point of view as well as a human development point of view. And I have students who would get six month internships, which is the internship program I told you about.

It wasn't just internships with any little, job, McDonald's or something like that. I'm talking about internships of, substance. And these students would have six month internships at the United Nations headquarters in New York, where they would go and work with, for example, an undersecretary general or senior advisor in the United Nations. And that is what we'll compliment what they're doing at the Coventry University. So we have those students.

I had one student in particular, but an internship to the UN. And when she came back, I wrote a reference for her and helped her to get into the United Nations university in Japan. And she went there for a three month period. And the only people who have passed certain exams at what you would call global affairs or foreign affairs training would get into the Japan based United Nations University. But she got in there as a student based on the degree that I had developed.

And she actually did the exam there and got a distinction when she graduated.

But Beryl McBurnie was the mother of dance, still considered the mother of dance in Trinidad. I joined the Junior Awax Dance Company. Which she initiated the Iraq dance company in my city in San Fernando, and I joined it. That's a senior company, and I joined the junior company in around 65. And worked my way up. I won what you would call Britain's, what you saw America's Got Talent. You might have seen that on television.

And we had our version in the 1960s, Teen Talent and 12 and Under. 12 and Under would be for young people. 12 and under and I won the national competition, not as a dancer, but as a drummer, an African drummer. And that was the first time that ever happened in the history of that program, because 12 and under was normally the type of program where you will see high colored children playing classical music or singing classical songs, some of the music and so on and using classical instruments.

They never had. Indigenous drums, African drums. Another colleague and I were the first to enter and we won that in 1970. That is significant because 1970, we also had the black power revolution, which was influenced by the situation in Canada. Where we had students, I think, I can't remember, it's one of the universities in Canada, was it Concordia or George it slipped my mind, but I think,

We wanted the trip to Barbados and then from Barbados travel to Grenada and then to New York and started traveling with Amber Kyler. So dance to me was not just a hobby. It was a way of escaping a lot of what was going on in Trinidad at the time, because we had this fight between the lower classes. The middle classes and the 1% with the colonial scenario. What was happening with Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael. Stokely Carmichael, as was a Trinidadian. He was banned. We had Sir Walter Rodney.

Sorry, Dr. Walter Rodney. Guyanese was banned from Jamaica. And we had all these tensions and young people like myself at that time, we're trying to make sense of all that was going on. So dance helped me to stay grounded and to try and understand my culture rather than trying to become something that I definitely was not, which is a version of the colonial master.

And she teases me all the time by telling me, she's eating mango. So that, that, that is one aspect of it. And then, the students getting the opportunities. I want to say something here that it's an observation we have in the Caribbean, for example, the University of the West Indies, which is the top regional institution, and they have taken on board a lot of the old colonial values from, because as we started as a medical school in Jamaica, and then it mushroomed into what it is now.

And that was, at that time it was part of the University of London. So we have kept some of the old, scaffold scaffoldings, colonial scaffoldings, and we have tried to improve on that in some ways, but there's also the struggle between those who are old school, and those who are progressive, just like you have in the US. Congress and so on, where you have the progressives and then you have the conservatives. So we have the same thing at the University of the West.

Now, this is not a criticism, it's an observation. I remember, for example, when I, at the age of 16, as I said, I entered many of these competitions in Trinidad, and did extremely well, winning some of them and so on.

And even choreographing for them at some point, I started choreographing for television at the age of 16, believe it or not, and the person who I coached came first in the preliminaries, first in the semifinals, and third in the finals of the teen talent version of the 12 and under version that I told you about.

He was 17 and I was 16, and I tried it. And the work that I did was excellent to the point that he came first in the preliminaries, first in the semifinals, and then tied for third in the finals. And that and outta that, I got a scholarship to lead University of the Western League Summer school.

In 1973, and that scholarship, I worked with, Canadian ballet master, Professor Alex MacDougall Torrance Mohammed, who was the local Caribbean dance master, and Claire Evelyn, who was modern dance, Martha Graham tutor who came down from New York. And what I'm telling you the story is because I want you to understand, based on the question you asked me about opportunities, here is one example. I am that example of being given an opportunity to study dance at the University of the West Indies.

Extramural, in those days we called it extramural department. And you know what was the view on the ground with people? Oh, that's just an extramural course. That is not important. That is not real university. If you get where I'm coming from. So here you have the opportunities available for you to people who are not able to enter university immediately because I was 16. And were able to do, the actual training on the ground with the experts.

But yet it wasn't considered valuable by the general public because they thought, oh, that's just extramural, like a hobby.

His view was that you can use dance as a sort of a platform for better understanding the human personality. And in understanding the human personality, you get to understand the underpinning issues that affect us or afflict us. as people, as human beings. And of course, this is a European based thing, but it can be extended if we do it properly to the rest of the world, if we look at it in context. So let's look at it in context of Carnival.

Carnival to you is just a jump up, or it may be to others as just a jump up. I just said you, because I know you're a bit more sophisticated in your thinking. But to others, it's just a jump up. But do you know that without the Carnival, Let me put it another way. The carnival is a safety valve. It's a safety valve. You take away the Carnival from the Caribbean in general, not just Trinidad and Tobago, where, the real thing originated.

You take away the Carnival from the people and you will have, I wouldn't go as far as to say riots, but you will definitely have a very, tense and like a pot full of pressure. Pressure cooker, experience with the community. All sorts of things will be happening because people have all these pent up emotions.

So what I'm saying is it's a therapy and people will say it's therapeutic. Yes, but you can even go further now to take dance as a therapy, meaning that we can study it as a science and understand using psychotherapy, how your body movement, your body language, can give answers that you may not even be able to give verbally because the body doesn't lie. I can say something to you Oh, Rita, you're beautiful, which you are, but then do I really mean that verbally?

But then my body language, you can just look at it. And it's genuine because the way that I would say it and the way that my body would express it, they synchronize. So we study dance.

You, Elton, might have achieved, you might have climbed Mount Everest, academically, career wise, whatever. You might have even become the president of the United States. I'm just making this up, but I guess you, you get the gist. You have achieved the highest high, but you did it as an individual. What we tend to do is when we reach these levels, we tend to pull up the ladder because we have been brainwashed into thinking that we must not trust each other. We must not work together.

We must not, they stopped us from beating drums. They stopped us from singing. Calypso came out of that that, issue where if we sang. The slave master would think that we are communicating. We would create, very creatively, sing, send messages to each other in calypso form, which would be double entendre, mixed what do you call, hidden messages. The drums, we couldn't play the drums, we couldn't dance and all these things. We have really been brainwashed into not trusting each other.

Even skin tone has become part of it. Not trusting each other, not working together. What the carnival does is it breaks down all of those barriers and we work together. We live together. We dance together. Everything is together. So I wanted to try and harness that essence of collectivism, which ties into the African principle of Ubuntu, which is I am because you are, and we are all part of one, one, one, one, one experience, one life experience, just doing things, like waves in the ocean.

So I wanted to explore that and see with the Carnival, dance, street dance, theater, the steel pan, the carousel competitions, all the different facets of carnival. I wanted to look at that in detail and see how it made not just the performer, but the audience felt a sense of relief, to see, for example, a hero. To, to these to the people of the Caribbean.

So when you see, just like you look at Bob Mali, people identify with him internationally because he's a hero, but for us in particular, he looks like us as opposed to if Elvis Pley went to Trinidad, and you have black people jumping up and say, no, my gosh, Elvis president's our God. But you know that will create issues. But you see the mighty. Bob Marley, Jimmy Cliff, and we could go on and on, all the top artists, Marshall Montano is the most, the younger generation.

When you see people like that, David Rudder, when you see them on stage, and they command the whole situation, you feel that, yes, this is me. I see me. So then that gives me the confidence to build my own agenda within, from within the principle of life. from within and it's a healing experience. It's a very healing.

I don't know if you can put the two together somehow.

Gyration is just one essence of, the movement, but from a cultural perspective, it is a Europeanized movement as opposed to say, The Caribbean and African Africa, you might have to, but in the Caribbean, what we call the wine. Now you look at a wine, which is the same circular movement, but there is something with the body and the expression on the face that when you see a man or a woman in the Caribbean on Carnival Day, for example, wine in St. Mighty Sparrow.

When you see him on stage and he's the movement of the hips. You can't call that it says it dance, but you can't call that a duration in the way that you will look at it as European, where the hips, you can actually see all the hips. 1, 2, 3 that, that. Which sparrow? It's a, it's like a top turning and it's just so organic and so rhythmic. So there is a difference in the two of them. But who's to say, There is something called the, what you call the the happy cells in all of us.

Scientifically, it's known as endorphins. Endorphins, right? Yes, endorphins. Yeah, the happy cells, right? So whether you're gyrating in Europe or you're whining in Trinidad, once there's a sense of happiness involved, then, the healing begins automatically. So this is where dance therapy moves across, not just, genres, it moves across nationalities. And that is beautiful for me because diversity and inclusion is a very important aspect of the element of dance.

And I want to thank you for giving us an opportunity to learn so much about you, your way of living, the individuals that you've talked to, and have benefited from your educational opportunities. We really appreciate this and I'm sure that the individuals, our audience will certainly take this and they're going to leave feeling happy because they learned something that they can use every day. in terms of to communicate with our people. And thank you.

And we hope that in the future, we have another opportunity to have a conversation with you on SpeakUP! International.

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