14
UWI TODAY
– SUNDAY 2 JUNE 2019
OUR PEOPLE
Dancingwomenholding flowers.
Placard slogans for peace.
Fists flying high in protest.The imagery of the Flower Power
era and the local Black PowerMovement had a seminal effect
on a generation. And one teenaged girl from south Trinidad
watched with eyes wide open.
By the time Patricia Mohammed graduated from
Naparima Girls’ High School in 1971, seeds of activism
had already been planted. “My generation was optimistic,
as well as visionary. We had a sense that we could change
the world for the better.”
After over four decades of teaching and research atThe
University of theWest Indies, Professor PatriciaMohammed
is reflective as she prepares for her retirement on July 31.
She has led a distinguished and prolific career of pioneering
feminist scholarship in the Caribbean-wide movement.
“A renaissance thinker”, Mohammed has had a “catholic
approach to education”, seeing all subjects as interconnected.
She has a practical sensibility for the differences in
disciplinary methodologies and theoretical positions, a trait
essential to her strong performance in her decade-long role
as Campus Coordinator and Director of Graduate Studies
and Research at The UWI’s St. Augustine Campus.
But before a career in academia was even a thought,
a 17-year-old Mohammed had a revolutionary experience
as a hospital worker. An old woman offered Mohammed
money in exchange for medical attention, but she declined
assuring her that it was her job to help. Mohammed earned
a new sense of custodianship through encounters with the
poor, and viewed the palpable lack of agency and imbalance
of power they suffered as due for remedy. “I want to make
the link between that and how I still treat students today,”
she says.
At this, I confessed how she had left her imprint on me
while supervising my undergrad Women’s Studies thesis
two decades earlier. One day I showed up at Professor
Mohammed’s office for our appointment. Let’s go outside,
she said. She’d chosen a sunny spot on the concrete steps
somewhere behind the engineering block, and thumbed
through the document.
I was touched by her empathetic response to the neatly
bound mayhem disguised as academic prose. Kindly, she
said that what I had was okay, but that I needed to “sharpen
thought” and to think of the writing process as continually
sharpening a pencil as one’s points became dulled with
overwriting.
It’s this pursuit of perfection that has led to some
eminent feminist discourse where she would unravel
inequalities faced by two women in her life. That they
endured an abusive, alcoholic husband, or “old-style
attitudes to Indian women”, and yet remained, was a tragic
contradiction.
“I was always confused about how both things could
coexist. It shaped in me an understanding how the nuances
of gender and gender relations couldn’t be just cut through
with slogans or with divisions like ‘masculinity’ and
‘femininity’.” Compelled “to make sense of how Indians
negotiated their gender relations”, Mohammed would
produce two academic breakthroughs, anMSc in Sociology
in 1987 with a demographic study of women in education
in Trinidad and Tobago, and later on, aPhD thesis, titled
Gender Negotiations Among Indians in Trinidad 1917-1947
(2002).
This was in 1975 “when the ideas had filtered in” from
the global women’s movement and the UN First World
Women’s Conference. Mohammed found a connection
with the activism of Hazel Brown, who had started The
Housewives’ Association of Trinidad and Tobago (HATT),
and with Diana Mahabir, then a senator, and very vocal in
women’s issues.
LEAVING A FOOTPRINT TO FOLLOW
Patricia Mohammed, academic giant and Caribbean feminist, retires
B Y S A B R I N A V A I L L O O
This was the turning point. “I got involved in the
People’s Popular Movement that created the Concerned
Women for Progress as its women’s armand the first second-
wave feminist group in Trinidad; I became de facto one
of its leaders. So I was very much an activist as well while
doing a Master’s thesis on women — there was always the
combination of the political and the social, and education.”
As aMaster’s student, Mohammed’s academic roadmap
steered her towards receiving a Commonwealth Fellowship
to work with Professor Kate Young at the Institute of
Development Studies at the University of Sussex. Young had
just established the first Women, Men and Development
Study course, requiring Mohammed to work as a research
assistant for a year. During this time in the UK, she
worked shoulder to shoulder with some 30 international
scholars. “This was a very rich period of movement, so my
feminism and my outlook which was always regional, went
international,” she says.
Mohammed inevitably crossed paths with people
who would become deeply influential, personally and
intellectually. A 15-year partnership that counts as a major
intellectual influence on Mohammed did not emerge out
of academia, she notes with some irony. She praises the
friendship as a training ground for critical thinking and
debate, and for how it led to new pathways of learning.
Similarly, her marriage of over 25 years to British-
Caribbean artist Rex Dixon has been the second most
learning experience of her life, surrounded every day by his
knowledge and practice of painting.
Among a list of inspiring academic colleagues,
Campus Principal Professor Brian Copeland, Professor Mohammed, UWI St Augustine Professor of Practice Dr Sterling Frost and Ms Chelsea
Seetahal, Research Assistant at the School for Graduate Studies and Research.
