Taneja with her classmates at her all-girls high school in Trinidad

BY TANEJA YOUNG

I was born in Barbados and grew up on the island of Trinidad in the Caribbean. Trinidad has a rich and varied culture, having been colonized by the Spanish, the French and finally the British. Under British rule, indentured labourers from India and slaves from Africa came to work on the sugar-cane plantations. When I was growing up, the multicultural history and ‘cosmopolitan’ nature of our nation was  portrayed as a beautiful thing in all my social studies text books. Trinidadians touted the island as a rainbow nation, where all different colours of the human race got along in blissful harmony. But as I got older I became aware of the inevitable underlying tensions that exist among the different races and classes in Trinidadian society and the disparities in education, ownership and wealth that ultimately fuelled these tensions. This was in part why I began to yearn for what else was out there in other parts of the world, and it was the introduction of cable TV in my home that stirred my obsession with Western culture and the utopia which the West seemed to promise.

When I was younger, cable television was still something of a novelty to the Caribbean, nowhere near as ubiquitous as it is today. I remember feeling vaguely triumphant when I casually recalled to my friends at school what I had seen on cable the night before. “Oh, you don’t have cable?” I’d say nonchalantly, inviting them to listen to the stories I’d seen or heard via my sole link to the developed world of the West. I remember fantasizing about Payless shoes and American restaurants like Red Lobster and Chuck E. Cheese’s – whose advertisements I would watch in between episodes of Legends of the Hidden Temple and The Secret World of Alex Mack.  When I finally visited the U.S. for the first time at the age of fourteen, I made sure to save my Victoria’s Secret and Claire’s shopping bags for use as lunch bags when I returned to school: I knew that they would make excellent conversation starters, and reinforce my status as a true Westerner.  America had become my connection to being hip, cool, popular, and everything a teenage girl could wish for, and I imitated everything I saw – right down to the American accent.

Now that I am a college student in the US and living my dream I realize the fantasies in television that characterized my adolescent years. Humans often have a fascination with ‘over there’ – illusions spurred by shows we watch on TV, music we listen to, and new styles we see in magazines or on the Web.  Once upon a time, ‘over there’ was but a distant dream for most Trinidadians and its elusiveness spurred an even deeper fascination with the West. However, I believe that the growing reach of television and even new media such as blogs, Facebook, and Twitter are actually providing a strong and effective linking device between developing countries such as Trinidad and the Western world.  Through the advancements of technology and globalization, it is becoming much easier for Trinidadian adolescents to actually experience life in the developed world rather than merely dreaming about what they see on television. In addition to being obsessed with Gossip Girl or The Bachelor, it seems like all my high school friends have a Facebook account, and I have an increasing amount of Trinidadian acquaintances choosing to further their studies in America or Britain.  As we begin this new decade, I think we will continue to see adolescents’ dreams about what is ‘over there’ in the developed world increasingly become reality.

Taneja Young is a Sophomore at  Yale University majoring in Chemical Engineering.  She is currently studying abroad in Scotland.