Who are We Trinidad & Tobago?
A blast of cold penetrates three layers of clothing. One hand is frozen around my train ticket in my pocket. Blink and blink, and sparkles upon sparkles, overhanging silver snowdrops, fairy lights, blinking Christmas trees.
Snatches of conversation on my way to the train in Victoria. “The thing is,” said a suited man to his work mate, “to have a plan.” In a lift in the underground, one bright-eyed woman, her dark hair spilling out of her reindeer scarf says breathlessly, “There’s no one I don’t love after two glasses of champagne.”
Another woman gets on. It’s in rush hour. She is short, swaying at the force of the train holding on to the railing. There are no seats left. She is wearing shades. Peculiar in a city that goes dark by four in the afternoon.
There is water on her face. No, it’s tears. She sees a hand, a tissue, someone guides her to a seat. She feels protected among strangers. People speak of the loneliness in big cities faced by solitary dwellers. Especially those who work from home. Days can pass and you don’t have to see anyone if you’ve got a decent amount of bread, cheese, cookies, butter, pasta and tea around.
Recently, a cousin locked himself in my bathroom; I didn’t hear him for ages. After we got the locksmith in at midnight, he says “Lucky it wasn’t you. You could have died in the toilet.” The locksmith laughs at this hysteria.
Yes, this weather requires comfort butter on everything. Yes, I’ve put on weight but I don’t mind. It’s a small price for living in a place where people aren’t afraid to show their vulnerabilities, foibles and kindness.
I’ve tried for years and years to understand why for a country that parties so hard, so diligently (don’t come between me and my mas, me and my fete, me and my Christmas), why our people are generally closed off.
Sullen shop girls, shooting a man dead during a dispute over a car accident are examples. In between there is the bravado, the chuckles, the hysterical shout of laughter. Yes, we equate the gentle, the open-hearted, the mannered, the vulnerable with weakness, impotence even. The result is we deny ourselves an essential humanity, softness, warmth.
Once in a low moment of my life, a friend from England advised me. She said listen, this could be a break down or a break through. She advised that I come completely apart in order to build myself up again.
She was so right. It’s the only way to heal. That’s why I wish we could do that collectively in Trinidad. No one should say: “Yeah, we were enslaved, branded, our families separated, dehumanised. Yeah, our currency was the cutlass but it’s over now.”
No, it’s not over. We are a wounded people. A wounded people are closed. A wounded people actually really need the release of a Carnival where we can absent ourselves from our lives with the ready help of alcohol to become someone else, a bird, a bikini, a Viking man in silver boots for a few days.
We need to talk about it. We need to talk about why so many of us dislike Wayne Kublalsingh so intensely. His fighting reminds us of our stupor, our carelessness about justice, transparency. We need to talk about what it means to be strong.
It doesn’t mean murdering old people. It doesn’t mean shooting a stranger dead. It means allowing ourselves to ask difficult questions. How do we feel about having enslaved and indentured ancestors?
Without the crutch of material things like Carnival and cricket, doubles and shark and bake, who are we? We were cut off from our old continents, places where people had thousands of years to develop an identity. We were placed here. Now what? We can’t have the conversation if we are buried in oil. We can’t have it if we live from fete to fete. We can’t say claim the pan if we can’t read music. We can’t say we are global without mastering global languages.
But we can slowly build, with learning. We can make (apart from the state-funded anesthesia of Carnival) a real culture, a high culture with many languages, get access to the literature, science and philosophy of the globe. Just imagine, a T&T where people speak Arabic, Bhojpuri, Hindi, Swahili, French, Spanish.
A T&T where every pan player learns to read music and can walk into the Royal Albert Hall and play any instrument including the pan in an orchestra because we have a music school. Think of the depth of our calypsoes and chutney if we understand what we are saying literally and on a deeper psychological level. We will all be long dead before T&T matures.
It could take 400 years. Right now we are savage teens killing one another over ten dollars. With our potential we can be the most amazing country in the world. We are saved with an inchoate love of our T&T— trudged through wounds and broken through a bloomin’ poinsettia lit in a thousand ways in our melting tropical surprise.