Published in Lowestoft Chronicle, Issue 51
In the east side of Port of Spain, just beyond the samans and banyans of the Queen Park Savannah, sits the city’s original suburb: the community of Belmont. Its first residents were West Africans rescued from the stowage of slave ships by the Royal British Navy after the abolition of the British slave trade in 1807. Oyo, Yoruba, Asante, Fon—these freed men and women took their traditions, the music and magic, and planted them in Belmont, in Trinidad, in an area that they called Freetown. After emancipation in 1834, more freed men and women came from the now-abandoned coffee and sugar estates to Belmont looking for opportunities stronger than coffee seed and a life sweeter than sugar cane. Belmont itself was old sugargrass and in its stead sprung shacks, shanties, and settlements. Town planning was anathema, straight and comfortable lines foreign, for freedom prizes what is yours, not how it looks.
Walking through Belmont today, past the squished, colourful homes, I experience the nonsensical nature of the place firsthand. Alleyways careen and bend unexpectedly; others die at the foot of gates reading “Active Driveway. No Parking.” The afternoon breeze wafts the smell of gasoline over the caged shops and St Margaret’s steeple toward the Laventine hills further east, which at night twinkle with other scattered homes up along Lady Young Road, housing the great, great, great grandchildren of freedom’s first citizens. Cars squeeze past me as a dreadlocked father tells his daughter, twirling in her school uniform, to jump in his jeep parked nervously on the sidewalk, along with a few others. The space is intimate and brotherly; in fact, there is little space to speak of. Neighbours talk over fences and through hanging palm leaves and hibiscus bushes. The talk is of nothing of great importance: Carnival, cricket, calypso, the weather, which in this later hour, is refreshingly pleasant. And just up from Jerningham Avenue but before the Circular Road, right in the heart of Belmont, sits a particularly big guesthouse painted in a particularly light blue.
In my apartment, among the mustard-yellow walls, the calendars and signs warning of Jesus’s love, sits a small television set, whose screen remains dark. The landlady takes the remote, aims at the monitor, and presses on whichever buttons her bony and adroit fingers land. She has upgraded to high definition, she says, before laying the remote back on the bedside table and scribbling down the WIFI password, which she notes with a sly grin is her birth year. She is African-Trinidadian and is older than her country’s independence. The television stays dark, for which she apologizes.
Outside my apartment, on the house’s ground floor, are the living room and the kitchen, both of which are modest, efficient, and unassuming spaces. Her humble clothes are stained with paint and her hair is tied tight. In the kitchen’s corner, beside the fridge and behind a curtain, she has stacked a half-dozen empty paint cans. Carnival is in a few weeks, she says, bouncing and shooting across the floor in a torrent of energy curious for a woman of her age, and she has been busy painting her walls in a spectrum of colour, preparing her guesthouse for the flood of Carnival guests she expects in the coming weeks. The Caribbean is colour, she says, and points to one apartment coated in lilac shade. Despite the heat, she does not sweat.
She has guests coming from all over the world for Carnival, guests who have booked with her a year in advance. All the hotels in Port of Spain are booked, she says, and many charge their guests exorbitant rates. She shakes her hand in disgust, and the word “extortion” slips from her mouth. Not her. She is fair. And she respects and honours the guests who book with her, even cutting her rates for those who stay a little longer.
Her stature is diminutive yet muscled, her movements spry and scholarly. They reveal a wisdom that comes with practice and routine, of dogged diligence and discipline, of doing the same thing indefinitely until it appears correct and effortless, until it seems that there could be no possible alternative, no other way.
She says she is healthier than people twice as young as she. It is her diet. She only eats greens, no sugar. No soda. None of its chemicals. She says that when guests leave undrunk soda in their rooms, she uses it to clean the toilet. She laughs. She eats only natural things. A basketful of grapefruit is posed beside the sink, and she snatches one and tears its skin with a stubby, sharp knife. Sprinkling a little baking soda on the fruit, she says, helps stomach aches. She sorts through a plateful of leaves, from which plant she cannot identify, but uses them to make tea. Turmeric. Ginger. Lemon. She trusts products of the earth. Green things and chilled water fill her fridge.
Obesity and diabetes ravage the younger generation. She pronounces those foreign words with such inflection and intonation that they sound unreal, fabrications, products of fevered imagination. She laments for this junk food generation, laments for their perpetually tired, unworked bodies, clunking through their days in lethargic and lazy motions. Not her. She eats only what gives her energy. She switches on the kettle. She is interested only in energy, only in what can keep her going deep into the night. She drops a teabag in a mug. The kettle whistles. She glides over to it, dumps the hissing water onto the bag, and with a spoon, presses the bag to the mug’s side, releasing its contents and dyeing the water a soft green. And when she sips her tea, a warm nostalgia must take her, I think, reminding her of simpler times, of regal Union Jacks and unscrupulous land barons, a childhood filled with chewing raw tannia, plundering avocados, and plucking cocoa pods.
She leans over the counter and has her chin resting in her palm. Tense and edgy, muscles wrought and ready, she sips her tea as I do mine. And when the question comes, she must feel it inevitable, as if it were beyond her control, distant from her human mind, coming from a divine presence, she a mere prophet, a devout proselytiser fulfilling providence. What do you think of Donald Trump, she asks. She appears reflective, returning to a question she has long philosophized over, but then it snaps and the mania comes in great waves. My eyes can no longer follow her. She paces. She darts. She jitters.
I like him, she says. And it follows from there, the long harangue, a stream of vitriol so unfocused, so blurred, that it sounds of possession. She has become a conduit, a portal, for a skittish spirit hell bent on restoring the idyllic past, the pastoral and bucolic fields of a forgotten youth. Despite the bombastic quality of her speech, it has a conspiratorial flavour. She softly advances, as if to whisper a forbidden notion or to impart some family secret, then retreats again and flays her arms to the ceiling.
Eight years ago, she had a vision that Obama would destroy America. Her church group laughed at her, but she told them just to watch that black man. She pounds the counter and points her finger at me. She says that Obama should have never stirred trouble in a white man’s country. And Black Lives Matter? Terrorists all of them. And in the next breath, he’s a seditious Muslim, born in Indonesia, and a secret CIA operative. She has a confident gloss in her eyes, a robust pride that says she alone has held the truth for these long eight years. Look at the evils he has brought to America, she goes on, more gay marriage, more abortion. He has rebelled against God’s will. Look at the millions of dollars he has given to the Palestinians, Hamas, and Hezbollah to support the lie of Islam. Look at how he has thrown the Israelis under the bus. She looks at me hard, unflinching in her obstinacy, a resolve solidified over her seventy plus years. But Jesus, she says, does not forget. Every day she prays that Obama will spend the rest of his days in a federal prison. Hilary, too.
Her movements are unpredictable and hazardous. She turns and strides toward me. It’s a disgrace, she says. She comes closer, stealthy, her feet unheard across the floor, and says there were two gay men in the White House for eight years. And she nods to confirm it, suspecting my disbelief and incredulity. She shakes her head in deep sadness. It’s true, she says, Michelle’s a … but her words fumble and are audible only to her. A disgrace, she repeats, but Jesus does not forget. A smile forces itself across her face. The evangelicals knew what Obama was doing, she says, and they elected Mr. Trump. Jesus has brought Mr. Trump to save America’s soul.
Mr. Trump. She never forgets his title, his affectation, and would never demean his aura with a given name. It would be unbecoming to disrespect the anointed one in such a haughty way, and messiah he is, for he shall deliver the world to the outstretched hands of the devout lying prostrate on the floor who promise to cut away the sin. She becomes emotional whenever the monosyllabic Trump—her tongue teething and pushing that first tough and riotous consonant into the world—streams from her mouth. Mr. Trump. Her voice rises and her fists clench while she purls and pivots and pirogues across the tiles, across her pulpit. Mr. Trump. The great redeemer. The great restorer. The great avenger. Mr. Trump. She spits out a long list of grievances in shadowy sentences, which darken, disappear, and then are resurrected in new, hateful light. She despises the liberal Hollywood conspirators, flown in from LA with their dirty money, for undermining Mr. Trump’s presidency, and the sanctuary cities for housing illegal terrorists stealing resources and votes, and the FBI for alleging election tampering and sullying Mr. Trump’s name, and Germany for welcoming refugee rapists, Muslims most of them. She promises that Merkel will not finish the year as chancellor. She breathes. Only a brief respite. Alert. She is always alert. And when she reluctantly takes her leave, to go watch her YouTube videos, she pauses at the foot of the staircase and tells me that I should take a stroll to the Savannah and try some street food, maybe sip from a coconut or lick some ice shavings.
….
Later, on the verandah, twilight low in the sky, I push the key into its hole and before turning it, she emerges from behind the ferns and asks what it is I got up to. I tell her I walked through Woodbrook along Ariapita Avenue, with its cafes, Chinese restaurants, and Jerk establishments and then with much trepidation, crossed the endless traffic on Tragarete Road and passed Nelson Mandela Park—children jumping through playsets, men and women striking tennis balls, families lazing on the grass. I tell her I visited St. James, with its thin streets named after Indian cities, where many South Asian workers settled after finishing their indentured contracts and where churches, temples, and mosques stand as neighbours among a melee of bars blasting music of every note and instrument, the restaurants serving roti and curry, shops selling sofas, beds, and refrigerators. I tell her I circled the Savannah, with its massive willows, branches hanging over the pathway, and watched the men dressed in white playing cricket with the sun dropping behind the wickets and the boys kicking a football around and the girls doing short sprints, and noticed the colourful huts and tents lining the pathway readying for Carnival.
She tells me about the Magnificent Seven—a series of ostentatious colonial mansions on Maraval Road on the western edge of the Savannah—and about how the city bought the Savannah from the Peschier family in the early nineteenth century and how the family is still buried there. She says that in the evenings vendors assemble under the trees and sell grilled meats, coconuts, and oysters. She says that during Carnival the Savannah is filled with people and is madness. She does not go near the park. Roads are closed for people and her narrow little lane becomes packed with screeching cars and the noise of revelers.
She is anxious and agitated again, and paces with unswept thoughts. I try to direct her to simpler subjects, but she bends away and loses herself in that hot hyperbole. She decries the judges fighting Mr. Trump’s executive order barring citizens from seven predominantly Muslim countries from entering America. She despises them and notes in mocking derision that Mr. Trump will have the final word. Then she stares at me a moment longer than usual and it seems that one thought has settled and has become still and sharp. Something happened in Canada, she says. I close my eyes and fiddle with the key with a greater sense of urgency. Yes, I say, six Muslims shot dead in their mosque in Quebec City.
After that I stop listening and I know I should not. I say yes and ok every few seconds while I struggle to open the door. I hear her but I do not see her. I put her words away and want to hold instead an image of her helping her granddaughter with homework, of her playfully admonishing me for eating junk food after I earlier complained of an upset stomach, of her laughing and talking with neighbours and colleagues, of her attending church for hours and visiting her gravesite, which she cares for with a holy fastidiousness. I want to see this instead of her simmering rage and resentment erupting every other sentence, her hunting fingers and bellicose hands grabbing and clawing at air, and her mind drowning in acute antagonism from anything that ruffles her planted and natural things. But I do not see it.
I do not ask why. And I do not ask how. I do not reconcile these images of hospitality and hatred, of love and loathing. I do not tell her that I took a picture of Queen’s Royal College, from where CRL James graduated. I do not tell her I passed an office of the People’s National Movement Party that hangs a giant photograph of Eric Williams. I do not tell her I paused for a moment outside Derek Walcott’s Trinidad Theatre Workshop just down the street on the corner of Norfolk and Jermingham. I do not tell her that along Pelham Street, outside of an autoshop, full of wasted batteries and old sparkplugs, an unhinged man screamed and pointed at me. And I do not tell her that in my bathroom there was a cockroach, the size of a baby’s fist, that sat near the bristles of my toothbrush, sat there under the light and the gaze of my eyes and did not shift, sat there obstinate, brash, and daring, tempting me to succumb to a baser and brutish self.