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tv   Anthony Bourdain Parts Unknown  CNN  January 28, 2018 9:00pm-10:00pm PST

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>> swimmer: oh, we got it. that was amazing. that was incredible. >> anthony: that was unbelievable. ♪ ♪ anthony: there's trinidad and tobago. one country two very different islands, two very different places. one island is what you expected when you arrived wearing flip-flops and a hawaiian shirt or greased up with cocoa butter.
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the other ain't about that at all. ♪ ♪ i took a walk through this beautiful world ♪ ♪ felt the cool rain on my shoulder ♪ ♪ found something good in this beautiful world ♪ ♪ i felt the rain getting colder ♪ ♪ sha la la la la sha la la la la la ♪ ♪ sha la la la la sha la la la la la la ♪ >> singer: if i had the choice i would choose to live back when calypso brought the news.
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if had the choice, i would choose to live right back when calypso brought the news. no more reporters no anchormen, no recorder, no pad and pen. no nosey cameras to point and shoot no redding, talkers of the truth. >> anthony: many visitors come to trinidad for one thing, and one thing only -- carnival, which locals say is the biggest party on earth. the pre-lenten festival of costumes, food, copious drinking, and the kind of dancing you better be good at before trying it in public. it's almost two months before the party officially starts, but here in trinidad's capital port-of-spain the carnival season has already begun. >> lashaun: i said it was a pity that you weren't here during the peak of the carnival season. >> anthony: i'll tell you something really terrible about myself. i've never been to mardi gras, carnival in rio, any kind of carnival. like large numbers of strangers swarming through the streets dancing in uniforms.
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>> lashaun: doesn't do it for you? >> anthony: no. some of my deepest fears are having to dance or sing in public either of these would be terrifying. so this seems like a situation when that might come up you know. >> anthony: queens park savannah will be the epicenter of carnival. but tonight it's still trinidad's street food center. my dinner companion for some fried snapper is lashaun prescott, who is here to tell me about two essential skills necessary for the proper enjoyment of local nightlife, turns out i'm very good at one and suck epically at the other. >> anthony: what is liming? >> lashaun: liming is like our version of hanging out you know. >> anthony: right. >> lashaun: you're with friends, you're chilling that's liming. >> anthony: is alcohol involved? chances if you're liming you're sipping.
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>> lashaun: most probably, i mean you can lime without beer. >> anthony: what about the rum? i haven't had any rum here. how does one drink rum here and which rum should i be drinking? does one drink on the rocks or mixed? >> lashaun: so one drinks it with coke. >> anthony: with coke?!? >> lashaun: yeah rum and coke. >> anthony: but the rum is supposed to be really, really good here. what do i want to mess it up with coke for? okay we've established what liming is what's whining? >> lashaun: the technical term is the sick abduction of the hips. and it's a style of dance and if you're not used to the culture you don't understand what it means. you can interpret it the wrong way. when you see it for the first time, you can think it's seductive. you can think it's sexual. but people can whine on each other and not really mean anything. i can whine on you and it doesn't mean i want to take you home you know. it's something that's really about freedom and expression of self and it's something that crosses ages and races, ethnicities, especially
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during carnival time you see people from high status and people who are you know lower class. they both whine together you know barriers are no longer there. it's all just a mix of all the different ethnicities and stuff. >> anthony: the faces you see in the street are african, indian, chinese and middle eastern in features. and every shade of mix, in between. this patchwork of ethnic identities and colors is a direct legacy of trinidad's colonial past. located at the southern end of the caribbean sea, and seven miles off shore from venezuela, trinidad and tobago have long been important ports of call. like a lot of islands in the area, everybody's been through here at one point or another.
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the usual european hunters of fortune. the spanish came looking for gold. then the dutch, french, and british took their turns at the real money of the time: sugar. an economy built on plantation labor and slavery. finally the island hit the big money, oil. >> anthony: a pair of seemingly unrelated events had a big impact on the island's musical culture. during world war ii, the us navy built an oil depot to supply over sea strategic needs. and the ruling british banned drums made from traditional style animal skins, after a
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series of riots they insisted were inspired by african drumming. one improvises in such circumstances and all those oil drums were repurposed. ♪ >> anthony: this is phase two. one of only 11 large steel bands taking part of the worldwide competition, panorama that happens in a few weeks, winner gets $150,000. they have taken home the prize seven times in no small part due to this man lenox "boogsie" sharpe. ♪ the rehearsal space is called a pan yard and if you're lucky somebody nearby is making this, corn soup.
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split pea broth, dumplings and of course corn. kim johnson is a local journalist and historian who knows about this stuff. it's far more complex than you think. >> anthony: wow i've got to tell you that was incredible. i heard a lot of little steel drum bands around the caribbean but nothing like that. all percussion right? 100 percent. >> boogsie: yes. >> anthony: how did your interest in this develop? >> kim: i grew up here, later i became a writer. i discovered there were hundreds of stories. because in the early days up until the 60's the steel bands were partly like street gangs they would fight one another. the west side story kind of thing the steel bands doubled as that.
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i just got fascinated by tracking down all of these pioneers and getting their stories of how they got involved. >> boogsie: i'll be 64 years this year. i playing music since i was a little kid. >> kim: yeah there's stories that he grew up with them in one of his backyard so when he was about three years old he was going out playing with them. >> anthony: boogsie composes his pieces layering different types of drums on top of each other. the engine room made of unpitched percussion, lays down the groove. next a section of six bass pans drops a bass line. the guitar and cello pans add harmonies that sound like strumming. ♪
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and the frontline pans play a melody. ♪ the result a symphonic wall of sound. >> boogsie: i would like someday to marriage this with a big orchestra, symphony orchestra. yeah anthony, that's my dream. >> kim: it's because of the music africans survived slavery, but not just survived physically, survived psychically. it's a question of just improvising instruments. ♪
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♪ anthony: thanks so much. holy crap, okay. this is a challenge. people keep coming up to me in the street first thing they say is "have you had double yet?" so i'm eating [ bleep ] doubles alright. >> anthony: doubles are a caribbean take on the indian channa bhatura. two floppy, tender pieces of soft indian style bread, loaded with a wet heap of curried chickpeas, pepper sauce and mango. >> anthony: structurally i have questions. i don't want seepage, seepage is never good.
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if someone uses seepage in a sentence, nothing good is going to happen. what do i, suck the paper. i don't think there's meat in here and i still like it. i mean it's really, really good. >> anthony: a half century after trinidad became independent of the british empire, there are surprisingly few architectural remnants, but the fate of the country and its population, were forever changed when slavery ended in 1834 and great britain found itself in need of cheap, if not free, labor to work the plantations. they found it in east india. >> chan: at the abolition of slavery the plantation owners desperately needed to find labor to fill the void created by the
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slaves who turned their back on the plantations for obvious reasons. and they looked around they tried portuguese, they tried chinese, they tried many communities, until they found out that indians were the best suited because they've already planted sugar cane in india successfully. >> anthony: between the end of outright slavery and the beginning of world war i, 150,000 indentured servants were brought here from india. indentured servitude is slavery by another name. the people brought here from india were bought, sold and treated like property, but were told if they completed five years of often backbreaking labor, they would be set free. noon on a monday, ordinarily a workday, but today, the singh family is having a boy's river lime. chan, the patriarch is a retired
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diplomat. his son, keshav, is a music producer. uncle charlie is in charge of the cooking. >> anthony: how far back does the family go? >> chan: this family has gone back to 1845. >> anthony: 1845, those were hard times. life was not good for the family in india. >> chan: there was poverty, there were wars and all sorts of things, and yes they came into really hard times here because the indians emigrated from india, replaced the liberated slaves and the conditions were not very different. >> keshav: difficult times but it was a means to social mobility away from the situation in india. >> chan: and we are products of decedents of that generation. >> anthony: start with one whole duck, hack into pieces, rub with lime juice, season with hot peppers, garlic and the tropical herb chadon beni.
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add generous helpings of masala and curry powder. marinate for a bit then sear in oil, and then simmer in coconut milk until tender. >> anthony: man that's good, they better kill some more ducks because that is --. >> keshav: when we have it like this when we're drinking before the actual meal, it's like an appetizer but we call it cutters because it cuts the alcohol. >> anthony: right, i'm sobering up as we speak. >> anthony: so look you're all trinidadian, trinidad first, indian second. >> man wearing blue shirt: i mean when the indians came 160 something years ago there was a disconnect with the motherland. >> chan: most of these indians were promised that they were going for a short tenure, to make a lot of money and then return home. >> man wearing blue shirt: they gave return passage or land. >> chan: so when the first indians took the option to go back, they couldn't find their families.
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and those who found their families were rejected because they said you guys abandoned us for five years. you might as well take that five acres of land and stay there. so there is no closure to decedents like us, who have not found any connection between our families in india. >> anthony: soft paratha dough cooked on a massive tawah and slathered in gee. but here, just as it's reaching peak flakiness, it gets a beatin'. >> keshav: here they call it buss up shut which means burst out of shirt. >> anthony: burst up shirt. >> man in white shirt: yeah because they take two huge parotta and then they whack it with two sticks. >> anthony: oh, okay. i thought you were talking about what's going to happen to my shirt. what about skin color? you look at jamaica, you look at haiti. i don't get what they say, but what they do is still a powerful determinant of where your status is in the power structure. does that exist here?
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>> man in blue shirt: it's not something that has consumed our imagination. being trinidadian is not necessarily color tune oriented, but its more and i think people really revel and enjoy is the common experiences. the food is the glue that binds this society together. >> chan: in spite of the problem that we have here we are still one of the most harmonious, multi-ethnic societies in the world and the multi-ethnicities of trinidad and tobago, multi religious tolerance are examples for the world to follow. we are a small island, and if you don't learn to live together you have to live in the sea. we had to. >> anthony: right. ♪ >> man wearing tan shirt: why trinidad is nice, trinidad is a paradise. why trinidad is nice, trinidad is a paradise.
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>> anthony: now my theory was that the whole world was going to look like trinidad in a 100 years. >> man wearing white shirt: that would be a great world. >> anthony: cheers to that. >> man wearing tan shirt: trinidad is nice, trinidad is a paradise. why trinidad is nice. trinidad is a para -- thank you. it's absolute confidence in 30,000 precision parts. or it isn't. it's inspected by mercedes-benz factory-trained technicians. or it isn't. it's backed by an unlimited mileage warranty, or it isn't. for those who never settle, it's either mercedes-benz certified pre-owned, or it isn't. the mercedes-benz certified pre-owned sales event. now through february 28th. only at your authorized mercedes-benz dealer.
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♪ >> man wearing black shirt: it started in 1898 more than 100 years ago, most of the by the turks, so there was an exodus of christians leaving syria. they boarded their ships from beirut, and as long as it was heading west they thought they were going to america. many of our parents landed in trinidad and that's when we started. that's the first generation. >> anthony: just outside port of spain, bay shore is one of the priciest neighborhoods in the country. i'm here as a guest of the sabga-abouds, a successful family of lebanese-syrian's. >> mario: look at this, isn't
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this amazing? >> anthony: beirut. >> mario: yes like beirut. you know arak, would you like arak? >> anthony: with a little ice and some water would be perfect. >> mario: perfect, my drink of choice is grey goose with coconut water. >> anthony: the family story is not an uncommon one. the first members came here during the collapse of the ottoman empire arriving penniless. they worked their way up as textile merchants and branched out to run businesses that sell everything from medical equipment to real estate. >> anthony: and how large is the community now, in trinidad? >> man wearing black shirt: it's a little under 5,000. >> anthony: that's still a fairly small percentage of the --. >> man wearing black shirt: extremely small, actually we're the smallest ethnic group in trinidad. >> mario: but the most powerful, almost the most powerful. >> anthony: it's not bragging. syrian-lebanese merchant class are generally seen as the elite. >> mario: actually i'm very big in the food business, i have 120 restaurants, they call me the starbucks of the caribbean.
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>> anthony: i can't tell you how happy i am about this meal. i love the food. >> woman in blue shirt: this is rokubi. >> women #3: best rokubi you'll ever eat in your life. >> woman in blue shirt: this is the fried version which is stuffed with the lime stuffing and then we have the typical hummus. this is muhammara, which made from chili paste and ground nuts. the best muhammara in trinidad. >> mario: muhammara makes the best. >> woman in blue shirt: then we have falafel patties, we have grilled wings with garlic which is every arab loves. fish in tahini sauce you ever had that? >> anthony: yeah, beautiful. >> woman in blue shirt: i'm going to pour some olive oil over our lovely things because olive oil is a must. >> anthony: mean how closely do people stay in contact with family or relatives in lebanon and syria, if at all? >> mario: well there's not very much. >> vanessa: we are trinidadians too as much as we are lebanese and syrian, we are trinidadians. trinidad has been good to us and we know it. >> man in black shirt: well life is good here in trinidad, life is very good. there is a measure of concern in the fact that, at one time we used to have a huge middle
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class, which was sort of a security in terms of any possible conflict between the haves and have not's. but now that's eroding and they're getting poorer. so they're starting to get angry. >> anthony: what do you think the biggest danger is right now? >> man in black shirt: civil commotion. >> anthony: civil commotion. >> man in black shirt: yeah, we have a crime problem, related only to gangs. >> mario: it's a gang related warfare. >> anthony: it ain't all good for everybody here, by a long shot. trinidad with a population of only 1.3 million people had 460 murders last year, giving port of spain a per capita murder rate higher than detroit, oakland or chicago. mark bassant covers the subject of drugs and gang related violence as an investigative journalist. >> anthony: people want you dead. >> mark: you can say that. >> anthony: who wants you dead do you think?
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>> mark: well, two years ago i did a piece about the state prosecutor dana seetahal was shot dead. >> mark: when state prosecutor dana seetahal left the ma pau car park just before midnight on may 3rd, she had no inclination that it would be her last moments alive. >> anthony: when mark began to look into the murder of the prosecutor an informant told him there was a 20 thousand dollar contract on his life. >> mark: they had people following me over a period of time, some law enforcement officers and so on. so my company put me on a plane, i stayed under an assumed name for about three months in a location outside of trinidad. >> anthony: generally speaking when people want you dead, they get you. why are you back? >> mark: i guess to quote great us journalist walter cronkite "it's not what you want people to know, it's what they need to know." we need to have people held accountable for certain things. with drug trafficking being one
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of the biggest businesses in the world. trinidad continues to be a major transshipment point for drug dealers to get that product out to north america and europe. so you find now the explosion of violence that we have is for those that are involved locally with the drug trafficking, there's fight for territory. >> anthony: an estimated 3.5 billion dollars worth of narcotics move through the caribbean each year. trinidad's porous borders, busy port, proximity to venezuela and the inevitable corruption that comes with numbers and threats like that make it, unfortunately, an ideal transshipment point. >> anthony: how bad is high level corruption alleged to be? >> mark: fairly deep, i think that the complicity comes across the law enforcement agencies, customs, police officers are even at the higher levels. >> anthony: and with corruption,
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poverty, hopelessness, add some radical ideology to that and trinidad has proved relatively fertile ground for the recruitment of isis fighters and terrorist. >> mark: it's quite alarming, trinidadian nationals being one of the highest in the region going to syria and there are over 100 on the list. a fbi list. they feel that it's the calling from isis that they need to go. >> anthony: so what's the future look like what do you think? how's it going to go? >> mark: wow that's a loaded question. there are really good people here in trinidad. really, really good people that could make a difference on all fronts. if we go down the path that we're going down, there will be all bad. (vo) dogs have evolved,
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♪ anthony: in 1990, the radical islamist group jamaat al-muslimeen laid siege to trinidad's parliament. claiming they were responding to rising inequality, poverty and religious discrimination. what ensued was a violent and terrifying disaster.
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26 people were killed in skirmishes and the hostage takers, would be revolutionaries, gave up in exchange for clemency after six days. little changed. muhammed muwakil's father took part in the attempted coup. he grew up in fact in the jamaat al-muslimeen compound, but he's chosen to take a different path, music. ♪ he's the lead of freetown collective, a band named after a port-of-spain neighborhood that was once a settlement for freed slaves. >> muhammed: they say we can't make no love song, live fast and we die young, they say we're doomed to fail. they say we're prone to violence, and i sink in silence.
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don't know what they're saying. >> anthony: much like a lot of reggae his songs call out the socials ills that have been disproportionally visited on the afro-caribbean population. >> muhammed: i see bodies lying in the streets nations collapse in the midday lord i need to cool my head. they're calling it a brave new world, freedom for brave new boys and girls. what good is freedom if you're dead. >> muhammed: if you look around my city right now a lot of people are choosing death over life because the life that they look at doesn't feel like it's substantiated by anything. >> anthony: in the freetown neighborhood now called belmont he lives with his 81 year old granny, neila nathim. >> muhammed: the thing is that recently we've had a lot of people, people who i've known, who i've grew up with who've gone to fight in syria, who left here. i mean they will tell you that the official count is 140.
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i would say it's more. >> anthony: you'd say it's more? >> muhammed: i'd say it's more. >> anthony: and why do you think people would go? >> muhammed: i would have to go back into my childhood to explain that. the coup that happened here happened when i was six years old. they had all these young people in there who had this idea, you know, we're they were going to build this thing. there's this community that's going to stand up to what's going on in trinidad, that's going to stand up against the drugs, and stand up against poverty and stand up against crime and nothing happened. >> anthony: in none of these causes religious fundamentalism or fervor has not come up. every issue you mentioned has been perceived inadequacy of social justice. >> muhammed: right, yeah. >> anthony: so these kids going off to syria, do they have any idea what they're doing or are they just pissed off? >> muhammed: no they do not. people say that poverty breeds crime. i don't think poverty breeds crime in a sense. i think exclusion breeds crime because if i truly care for you, if i truly feel you are a part of the thing that i exist in, then i won't hurt you.
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i may come in your house and steal some food, but when you see that kind of violence being enacted you have to ask yourself, it's not just somebody saying "i need this table cloth i'm going to take this" no "i want this table cloth, and you've had this table cloth for too long so you know what i'm going to take this out on you, this is going to happen or that's going to happen" and that's what we're seeing now. i mean how long can people put up with something before they decide this is enough. you know what i mean? >> anthony: would you say carnival and that carnival attitude, the liming culture, might as well be a brilliant strategy to narcotize the people into being satisfied with the status quo? >> muhammed: everything here is somehow designed to pacify it without us really realizing. so our music which is supposed to give us adrenaline as well as sleeping pills sometimes just throwing out sleeping pills. go ahead enjoy yourself, enjoy yourself, enjoy yourself. you're a trini, trini means fun loving and happy and whatever despite whatever it is.
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>> anthony: it's a big and delicious home cooked meal. >> muhammed: i caught this myself. >> anthony: really? >> muhammed: yessir. >> anthony: red snapper? >> muhammed: yeah, yeah. >> anthony: the snapper is rubbed with lime juice, chadon beni and onion. >> anthony: what's this dish called, is there a name for it? >> mamme this is called oil down. >> anthony: oil down? >> muhamd: yeah. >> antho: for oil down they season breadfruit and meat with dasheen and green figs and simmer in coconut milk. >> muhammed: and well she used pork as you can see, which now i can't have any, but that's okay. >> anthony: now your grandmother is not a muslim? >> muhammed: no, the roman catholicist of roman catholics. >> anthony: roman catholic, old school. >> muhammed: sacred heart up on the wall. >> neila: kind of a perfect one for you sir you have this. >> anthony: oh beautiful. thank you. >> muhammed: pastel. >> neila: this is mostly when the spaniards were here they introduced this, this is spanish. >> anthony: pastales are the caribbean cousin to the tamale. minced beef is wrapped in corn
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meal dough, then in banana leaf, then steamed. >> muhammed: she will feed you till you burst, like any grandmother you know right? >> anthony: going to be well looked after. >> muhammed: and that is once a year. >> anthony: so when are these ordinarily --. >> muhammed: christmas time. >> anthony: this is very, very delicious. >> neila: thank you very much and one thing i'm vex about right now is why you didn't put ice in his glass. >> muhammed: it's good it's fine. >> neila: so he must say thanks to everything you did. tell muhammed it's not good. >> muhammed: so you have that generation, very proper, like very, very proper and one of the things about trinidad --. >> neila: muhammed, don't bad talk me. >> muhammed: i'm not bad talking you, i only speak the truth. that generation very much believes in independence and that this nation would be something and then they told their children, study and come and help this nation, build this nation you know it's going to being something. and that generation, which was my parents they did that. >> anthony: right. >> muhammed: and then they had kids, you know? and all of a sudden it was like, all of these things you been saying about building a nation
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or whatever, how come i'm seeing these people benefit and i'm not? how come i'm seeing this and seeing that, and there were very few answers. you know what i mean. >> anthony: so who runs this country? >> muhammed: like everywhere else that one percent, like everywhere else. >> anthony: everybody here is very eager to tell you what a wonderful mix it is, and the food if you look at it is this incredibly harmonious stew pot, but i guess life doesn't work as well as food. >> muhammed: no, the only thing we agree on in this place is how much salt to put in anything, that's the only thing we agree on. >> muhammed: man we're on a mission, a whole world to change, a whole world to change. evacuations are underway
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♪ >> anthony: trinidad it should be pointed out right now before you start packing your speedo and your cocoa butter is an industrial island. and like so many places, industrialization is changing the landscape here. but some things persist, remain and echo from all the way back then. when west african slaves would covertly do this, kalinda. >> rondel: this martial art based on our research is maybe
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500/600 years old. >> keegan: stick fighting variations occur throughout the caribbean but in trinidad and tobago it's like deep in their blood. >> anthony: this martial art was illegal for many, many years yes? >> keegan: yeah. >> anthony: i mean certainly during slavery times it was illegal. >> rondel: to this date i believe there are still laws on our books that ban this stick and if you're caught with it you can go to jail. >> anthony: the laws of slavery times forced this sport underground. like capoeira, it often has to be disguised as a dance, but this ain't no dance. >> rondel: the guys with the whip and the guys with the stick were all the guys saying you have not broken us. we will continue to resist till the ends of time. ♪ >> anthony: rondel benjamin and keegan taylor studied fighting styles from around the world
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before coming around to their own, homegrown martial art. >> anthony: now what's legal? >> rondel: what's not legal. >> anthony: or let's say what's not legal? >> keegan: you can't hit to the legs. >> anthony: you can't? oh damn, 'cause that would be the first thing i think of. i'm thinking, oh i've got to get that knee in particular. >> keegan: now to be honest in stick fighting, legal and illegal is a concept, but it doesn't stop that kind of stuff from happening. >> anthony: but i mean let's face it, this is a pretty heavy object. if i get a good swing, if i tee off and i get a clean shot on the head --. this is what the new york police department would call a deadly weapon. >> king david: yes sir. if i'm fighting, if i'm really fighting, i'm a monster. i got to lick you down, i got to kill you, i got to dig you up, i got to bury you, i got to murder you, i've got to take you out. the demon in me is going to come
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out. i call a demon to walk with me. >> anthony: king david is one of the old school street fighter who has kept his form from fading over the years. >> anthony: as in brazil, the deep south, african slaves were given little to work with when it came time for the meal. more often than not, if they wanted meat, they had to make do with what the slave masters did not want: a tongue here, a cow foot there. here, as elsewhere, they figured out how to make something delicious and tender from whatever there was. like souse, pig foot is pickled with chadon beni, onion and hot pepper, topped off with cucumbers. >> anthony: this is a martial art, you either win or you lose. >> rondel: correct. >> anthony: how do you win? what decides winner? >> rondel: who draws blood first wins, all it requires is the end result. all you have to do is
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cut the guy. >> king david: blood is blood. >> anthony: what's the worst injury you've ever had in a fight? >> king david: this finger. >> anthony: what's the worst injury you've seen in a fight? >> king david: i've seen a man lose he eye. also i saw a man die. you have to be a real warrior, born, born, fighter to stand up there and face that demon which walking like a man. >> there is always more to a story. head to the all new explore parts unknown.com. nutrient-dense, protein-rich, real meat number one. this is a different breed of natural nutrition. purina one, true instinct.
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it has long been called storm of tiny bubbles, the champagne of beers. ♪ if you've got the time welcome to the high life. ♪ we've got the beer ♪ miller beer afi sure had a lot on my mind. my 30-year marriage... ...my 3-month old business... plus...what if this happened again? i was given warfarin in the hospital, but wondered, was this the best treatment for me? so i made a point to talk to my doctor. he told me about eliquis. eliquis treats dvt and pe blood clots and reduces the risk of them happening again. not only does eliquis treat dvt and pe blood clots. eliquis also had significantly less major bleeding than the standard treatment. eliquis had both... ...and that turned around my thinking. don't stop eliquis unless your doctor tells you to. eliquis can cause serious and in rare cases fatal bleeding. don't take eliquis if you have an artificial heart valve or abnormal bleeding.
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the winter of '77.uring i first met james in 5th grade. we got married after college. anbut then one night, a truck didn't stop. but thanks tour rester, neither did our story. and that's why we'll always drive a subaru. 30 miles east of trinidad, its sister island tobago, a whole different vibe around here. more like what you hope for when you waddle away from the buffet
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on the cruise ship. lazy beach days, boat drinks, villas, all set to a calypso beat. ♪ ♪ in the 1800s, they would sing the gossip of the day to an african beat. later musicians added european style melodies and calypso was born. the long-time reigning queen of this music and absolute pioneer of the form is calypso rose. ♪ ♪ ♪
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she was the first woman to win the calypso king title which tells you what the environment was like at the time for a female artist. ♪ ♪ ♪ >> rose grew up in a large and strict baptist family in tobago until she was nine years old and sent to live with her aunt in trinidad. so, she grew up with a foot in each island. what's the difference between growing up in trinidad and growing up in tobago? >> very different. 99% african, the african slave descend ants, the culture is more african.
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and this, this here is the corn. they call it foo-foo in africa. >> and this is calalu? >> this is made from the leaves of -- dasheen. >> dasheen. everybody who comes must eat crab and dumpling. the juice of that coconut, they put it in the pot with the little ingredient like tomato, onion, and your curry. >> crunch it up. >> good eat. if you have picnic -- >> all right, so far so good. here's what really fascinates me, is you started singing ka lip o
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calypso music and writing songs when it was only men. >> my mother was against it. my father was baptist minister. my father said calypso belongs to the devil. >> calypso belongs to the devil? it also belonged to men. and here you are at age 15 doing -- >> 13. >> 13, doing what was considered a completely revolutionary thing. what was it about you that made you strong enough and different enough and determined enough to choose to do such a difficult and unusual thing when everybody was against it? >> my fans, because some people at home, they're sad. they're going through so much financially, economically. they have been abused by their spouse, and they come out to have a good time. and when they come out, i bring joy to the heart. >> so, is making beautiful things enough? >> yes, making beautiful things enough.
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when you start thinking consciously and beautiful things, like how the sea is rolling there. ♪ ♪ >> how the sea is moving, novemberin moving, moving, making beautiful things. >> it is. ♪ ♪ >> no island in the sun is paradise on earth. however it might look from the concrete blocks, glass cubicles and wood boxes we may live in. all the dancing and music and great food in the world can never hold together by itself what would keep us apart. ♪ ♪ >> what might look like a utopian tsu of ethnicities and cultures living together under gently swaying palms is, of course, a far more complicated matter. though trinidad has done better than most in proud and unique style.
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♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪

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