Aji Story: Amílcar Peter Sanatan on Visualising History and Our Grandmothers
“Aji Story Taller Than Cane” is a call to remembrance, responsibility, and reimagining. Intrigued by the way creators navigate different media to tell layered stories — blending creative processes, materials, and memories, I reflect on the histories of our ajis and lives of our grandmothers in conversation with Amílcar Peter Sanatan. He reminds us that grandmothers are not just figures of the past, but living archives of resilience, tenderness, and untold struggle. Their stories rise across generations and landscapes, shaping who we are and who we become.
Amílcar is an interdisciplinary artist, educator, and activist. Known for his poetry, his words bring attention to the voices of everyday resistance in communities throughout the Caribbean. Now, his work plays with poetic text and visual art. In this interview, he shares the backstory behind his painting and poem. We discuss his thoughts on cultural inheritance, the gendered division of labour, and the transformative role of art. Fittingly, the discussion took place between Mother’s Day and Indian Arrival Day in Trinidad and Tobago. Together, we reflect on the power of storytelling — not only to remember but to reshape our futures.
Great-grandmother, Sancharia Rampersad. Family photographs of interviewer, Kamille Andrews
“Aji Story Taller Than Cane” by Amílcar Peter Sanatan, acrylic on canvas, 24”x24” , 2025
Kamille Andrews: In “Aji Story Taller Than Cane,” are you visually representing one particular aji in mind or are you addressing a collective of ajis?
Amílcar Peter Sanatan: In the case of this specific painting, I did not have one aji in mind. I understand the risks associated with portraiture and reductive representations of wider histories. I do not think a single person could ever be a stand in for a people and their culture. But, I wanted to provoke the reflection on the figure of aji in our family and the national imagination. How do I face the life history of my grandmother? What do I see when I reckon with the aesthetics and sociology of her background? I received positive feedback from friends and gallery visitors who shared personal stories about their grandmothers - joy, sacrifice, domestic violence stories and more. Overall, the encouragement was “Amílcar, I want to see you do more work on this theme.” I think we all can do more for our grandmothers in poetry, music, dance, art, the economy and nation-building. It is important to recognise and amplify voices that are silenced by forces of exclusion and neglect.
The title of the painting is the same title of the poem you wrote. In your poem, you aim to “resurrect the divinity of aji.” Which one did you create first - the painting or the poem?
I completed the painting first. I prepared the canvas for a Rotunda Gallery call for submissions on International Women’s Day. At the time, I was moved to contribute to the national celebration of women’s rights and their advances by unmuting histories of aji. Some people had the privilege of being around vocal, mobile, and publicly engaged grandmothers. Many people in Trinidad and Tobago and the Caribbean have seen their grandmothers relegated to duty in the home. The housewife ideology historically disregarded and degraded the labour, care, voice and equality of women. I speak of the housewife ideology to make clear that I am not chastising people who exercise the choice to stay, work and care from home. The housewife ideology was meant to impose and reinforce an unequal gendered division of labour, rooted in beliefs about women’s inferiority. This, of course, is contrary to the exploitative and labouring conditions upon which Indian women, as with many other women and men who came to the New World, met. I deliberately chose to frame aji in the fields. The fields are the memory and material conditions of the majority of women’s lives in my context.
When I completed most of the painting, the title came to me. I said aloud, “Aji Story Taller Than Cane.” The title said it all. Later, I was invited to a special event of the Women Parliamentarians of Trinidad and Tobago where the work was exhibited. I wrote a poem to communicate my vision. Some people refer to my work artwork as cartoons. I welcome that. My work is meant to be magical in the eyes of children first. At the same time, there is a depth to this image that we all are grappling with in our lives – the struggle against hegemonic narratives, respect for people with dark complexions, state investment in an ageing population. The painting, title, and poetry were all necessary components of the work.
What responsibility do you feel as an artist in doing this work?
I have a responsibility as a grandson to honour my grandparents. I have a responsibility as a son to honour the memories, complex lives and cultural patterns that freed and imprisoned mothers and fathers all around me. I have never been one to make the biography of the artist, the art of the artist in a deterministic way. For me, I have a responsibility to every person, yard, and flower of my island and the spaces that I travel in the world. I am accountable to this space and this present. I see the discomfort people feel thinking about and working through a space filled with many people, cultures and contradictions. I also see the backward glance creators make without acknowledging their challenges of working with the present. I produce art with the intention for thought and action here and now.
I feel blessed to live in Trinidad and Tobago. This is a country where I am given the license, for the most part, to share in and contribute to a subject, people might protest me having the right to openly address in another place. This is very much part of my understanding of co-imagining our present and futures. We live, work and dream together. This is something more generative than co-existence.
The history of Indo-Trinbagonians is no less the history of all Trinbagonians. While walking through Bamboo Settlement #2, I noticed a small banner for Career Day on the entrance gate of the primary school. One of the people in the advertisement is a woman Indian dancer. This was a powerful image. What is communicated to the child in Bamboo Settlement Government Primary School about economic livelihoods and personal fulfillment in our society by putting up an image of a doctor, engineer and Indian dancer in the same frame?
I am proud of being a Sanatan. In this work, I also have a responsibility to people who loved me. My paternal grandfather was an Indo-Trinidadian. He had two families - one with a woman of African descent and the other with a woman of Indian descent. My grandmother was a dark, Afro-Trinidadian woman named Norma. She died before I was born. I have seen very few photographs of her, but people have shared stories about “Ma Forde” with me over the years. In time, I will find a way to illustrate her life and voice in my work. Respect to you, Norma. So, in childhood, I only knew my grandfather with his second wife, Dora. I vividly remember family trips to Point Fortin where they lived. At their house, I ate the best roti and kuchela I had in my life. Nostalgia is a special kind of flavour. Dora was the grandmother I met as a child. She spoke much more than my stoic grandfather when we sat in the yard and played around the hammock. Respect to you, Dora.
Dora in Point Fortin, Trinidad and Tobago. Photograph retrieved from Amílcar Peter Sanatan
Violence seems to linger quietly in your work — suggested rather than shown, such as in the way the sari drapes over the aji’s hand, evoking an arm in a cast. How did you approach the presence of violence in this painting, especially in relation to history, gender, and power?
The violence is there. The cane is painted in gold. Our people died for gold. The New World and West Indies were founded on myths - the myths of El Dorado, the myths that sustained colonial extraction, myths of modernity and industrial development in Europe. Violence is a necessary ingredient of a myth-making project; it justifies force against the ‘other’; it denies the dignity of people, landscapes and spaces. These histories, when considered, provoked writers like Rajiv Mohabir to question the celebration of Indian “arrival” in the Caribbean. In gender studies, scholars Patricia Mohammed and Rhoda Reddock provided necessary groundwork for us to understand Indian women’s complex negotiations of social, political and sexual relations during and after indenturership in the Caribbean context. Furthermore, the coalescence of colonial and Indian patriarchal systems drove violence against Indian women in our societies. These are some of the early cases of femicides in our history. In my youth, I read Cheddi Jagan’s The West On Trial: My Fight for Guyana’s Freedom. It is a text that blends memoir, social history and political direction. There is a canefield consciousness to Jagan’s politics and nation-building project. I want to enrich the understanding of canefield consciousness articulated by our artists, thinkers and leaders.
In my activist work, I’ve responded to women who were abused for shopping “too long” in the eyes of their husbands, when they ran Saturday errands. I’ve engaged families where the husband attacked his wife with a cutlass for cooking dhal and rice “again.” This is taking place on our island. Ethnicity and culture are in my representation, but I hope people can embrace its resonances with social class. The cruel license given to people with symbolic and material power in our society to denigrate the bodies of the poor and people in the margins must be eliminated. Through art, I give that glimpse of beauty and dread. I do not want to communicate the harms of violence by visually representing violence. That is uninteresting. Yet, I have no intention of shielding inequalities with aesthetics that put forward a picture that does not create a sense of urgency.
Family video archive of interviewer, Kamille Andrews. Eulogy of Sancharia Rampersad read by Angelina Rampersad (grand-daughter)
Looking at your painting, I remembered the story of my great grandmother and her story about leaving Tamana. I am thinking about our stories and how they move across spaces and generations. The compelling title of your painting and poem invites me to imagine a world where grandmothers lived. I think of their personal stories growing beyond the cane like moko jumbies who were able to see beyond their immediate surroundings, even when they were rooted in a particular place. I am interested in the “Taller than Cane” part of your title. How do we see people’s lives taller than violence and torture?
Your aji’s spirit and life outgrow the torture of her oppressors. As an independent nation of independent-minded people, we are called to ensure that people persevere with peace, love and dignity. Today’s market logic of capitalism does not eliminate the worth of our grandmothers.
I imagine my art in community operating in the form of liberated zones. Liberated zones were essential transformational areas in a revolutionary struggle that cultivated the minds of comrades and children. These zones focused on nutrition, medical care, literacy and political education. Liberated zones modeled the emancipatory future comrades imagined, even when that reality was not available in the present.
In your poem, you wrote, “Consider mornings she made roti, roasted baigan/left brown paper bags on the table for little ones/knowing they would swallow shame.” Why do you bring up the issue of the stigma Indians in Trinidad experienced in childhood in the poem?
Experiences of racism and classism are part of childhood as much as playing hopscotch and learning to write within lines in copy books. I celebrate the beautiful ways we carry on as a people that sees difference and diversity as natural in our everyday life. Still, we have sections of our children who hid their brown bags with roti in primary and secondary schools. They were subjected to racist and classist insults by children within and outside their ethnic group. Their grandmothers and mothers took time to prepare them a meal to sustain them as they learned. They were shamed for that. “Bush this” and “bush that” were derogatory terms to separate us from our culture and the majority of the population. Shame doesn't live and die with an individual. Often, it is passed down. With art, we can address these experiences, create safe spaces for dialogue, exchange and empathetic understanding. Art can open the possibility for healing.
