When 18-year-old up-and-coming artist Celine Raean Sampson sits in front of her easel in the balcony of her Carenage home, looking out to the Gulf of Paria, it is more than a work of art she’s trying to create.
Through her paintings, Sampson gives expression to her deep longing for the different races of T&T and the Caribbean to become one people and have one identity, and her abhorrence of racism and discrimination.
One of her pieces portrays three women—an East Indian, an African and a Chinese—their faces close together. Sampson said they are actually three separate panels and when they are separated, each woman looks incomplete.
An Upper Six student of St Joseph’s Convent, Port-of-Spain, and saxophonist with the University of Southern Caribbean (USC) music band, Sampson said she got a brutal introduction to the racism that exists in T&T last year when, for the first time, she voted.
“I turned 18 last year and became eligible to vote and followed the September 7 general election campaign with intense interest.
“But I was shocked at what I saw and heard. I am disturbed by racism.”
Sampson, of mixed parentage, said she has been deeply bothered since by the racial divide in T&T. She said based on what she has been taught at school, we were taught to hate one another.
“Our ancestors were taught to hate. Colonisers defined for them what was beautiful and told them what should be valued and encouraged in order to maintain control over them.
“Somewhere along the road after slavery, people started confusing being proud of your own ethnicity to degrading and devaluing someone else’s.
“I think if our people are made fully aware of how this all started we can begin a reformation, so, instead of hating, upcoming generations can spread genuine love and strike a balance between knowing where they came from and who they are.”
The racism, Sampson believes, is the reason we have no one Trinidadian, or Caribbean, identity.
“We don’t know who we are as a people. I feel as a Caribbean young person I am never really going to be able to know who I am unless we incorporate all the different ethnicities and cultures in our society together.”
She said our society is becoming more and more Americanised and said she has found there is actually one trait that identifies a Trinidadian, his ability to take something from someone else and fashion it into his own. To compound the racism, she has been noticing growing class divisions resulting from the recession, she said.
“This is a very serious situation and could go quite badly,” Sampson, also an economics student, said.
“As big businesses lay off workers to maintain a profit, the margin between the haves and have-nots is growing.”
Her paintings are unique because she only uses three bright colours, yellow, red and blue, and some black to paint mostly faces. And she does not use a regular brush but a plastic knife. Sampson uses women in her paintings because, in art, they can represent the birth of a new era, a revolution, she said.
And while she is searching for identity and unity through her art, she is also planning to use her paintings to fund her schooling.
“I got accepted to USC and will begin a psychology degree there in September. There are questions around the Government Assisted Tertiary Education grant and we are not certain about it. In any case, I still have to find money for registration and residency fees and for textbooks.”
The last of three children, Sampson said she really wants to help out her parents. “My dad is a customer service representative and my mom is just starting her own ceramics business.”
She is actively involved in youth programmes and said one of the things she thoroughly enjoys is reaching out to the elderly and others in her neighbourhood and putting a smile on their faces with a kind word.