Not watching the match, Part 7

My father's not happy about how the team is playing. He's wondering if coach Leo Beenhakker has told the players to "take it easy".

Snatch of TV commentary from the next room: "The sun was very, very hot."

In the half-time crowd shots, it looked like people were partying with a kind of grim determination--jumping up & waving their flags not for fun but to show they weren't dispirited.

Not watching the match, Part 6

Second half just begun. Still not watching, but now I've left the TV on at full volume in the next room. Georgia, meanwhile, is relaying live audio to her cousin in Washington via Skype.

Not watching the match, Part 5

Switched on the TV for five seconds: Play Whe drawing. So it's half-time. And no goals.

Not watching the match, Part 4

Back in 1989, even I had one of those red "Strike Squad" jerseys--I wore it just once, the Friday before the match, "Red Day", when, unprecedentedly, St. Mary's allowed us to ignore the strict rules about uniforms & nearly every boy in the school joined in the national display of--what to call it? Patriotism or madness? After 19 November I put it away at the back of a cupboard, & I suppose I must still have it somewhere.

Not watching the match, Part 3

Just switched on the TV for a minute. Commentator Ruskin Mark, in a hopeful tone: "Trinidad & Tobago being very patient here, which is good."

Not watching the match, Part 2

I didn't watch the famous match on 19 November, 1989, either--the one when we had merely to draw against the US to make it to the World Cup, but instead lost by a goal. The TV was on, I remember, but the whole thing was too nervewracking--the general excitement had got even to me--& I spent most of the hour & a half pacing up & down the lawn in the back garden. This time around, public behaviour has been far less frenzied. Partly because, I suppose, we learned that lesson sixteen years ago about not counting unhatched eggs; partly because of the worried & distracted state of the nation; & also this time it isn't as simple as winning (or drawing) a single match--after this evening there's the second game in Bahrain to decide things.

Not watching the match

I've managed to pay almost no attention this last week to the mounting excitement over this evening's T&T vs. Bahrain World Cup qualifying match, in progress as I type. This morning I was mildly amazed at the photos in the papers of thousands of people queuing for tickets, jumping fences etc. I've spent the afternoon calmly reading. But as match time approached, I felt little twinges of curiosity, & finally I switched on the TV in time to see Max Richards glad-handing the players, & everyone dressed in red in the stands singing the National Anthem (the steelband racing ahead of the voices), & then the coin-toss. As soon as the referee blew the starting whistle I switched the TV off.

But I'm idly wondering now if I should have tried to get a press pass, gone down to the stadium, looked & listened....

A Judge's Journal, Part 2

Who has time to worry about football? I've brought home a small stack of books requiring brief reviews--the new Shani Mootoo, a gothic novel by a young Jamaican named Marlon James, new collected editions of Nicolás Guillén & Edouard Glissant--& must start some serious reading-up for a Lloyd Best profile due in a few weeks, plus I have a month-end deadline for a Guyana Arts Journal essay. And then I glance at the calendar & realise the date for deciding the winner of the Derek Walcott Prize for Fiction is within arm's reach, & the box of typescripts sits beside my desk barely touched.

A couple of weeks ago the two other judges--Ken Ramchand & Marjorie Thorpe--& I worked out a system for dividing the labour of reading the eight novels so as to reduce the shortlist to a shorter-list. The first novel I tackled begins with a boy adopting a stray dog. In the opening pages the sex of the dog changes several times--he, she, he, she--entirely due to the author's oversight, as far as I can make out. I'm so distracted by this that I manage to temporarily lose the typescript in the El Tucuche of papers that rises vertiginously from my desk.

I bring the second novel home in its manila envelope & it quietly settles against a bookcase, where its neighbours are paperback volumes on the Reformation & Wedgewood's Thirty Years War.

This morning, as I sip from my cup of the hot & most strengthening, my eye falls on a note scribbled in my datebook, & a cold ping of fear races from brain to heart to spine. Surely the other judges have not merely read their allotted novels by now, but also turned out a concise, lucid, & witty precis of each?

I ring Ramchand, the head judge. He is cleverly vague about whether he's done his reading or not. Our respective tones of voice seem to commiserate about packed schedules. We agree that another week should be enough to plough through the remaining reams of prose, & decide to meet next Saturday morning.

Nothing for it but tea, a comfortable chair, & strong light.

(And by coincidence I hear today that Walcott--whose watercolours are well known to his readers from dustjackets & the plates in Tiepolo's Hound--is about to have the first New York show of his paintings, at the June Kelly Gallery, 18 November to 30 December.)

Children of the twilight, everything is gonna be all right....

I was sitting at my desk yesterday afternoon reading galleys when S------ stuck her head round my door & said, "They're bulldozing the Jamaat!"

"Better switch on the radio," I said.

I wonder if this is how it starts, I thought, the Big Thing we're all expecting.

The Express already had a couple of "breaking news" blurbs on their website, but I didn't get the details of what was happening down on Mucurapo Road till I got home & switched on the TV. CNC3 had the best coverage by far, a reporter on the scene & Shelly Dass back in the studio quivering with enthusiasm.

An excavator, a jackhammer, rifles, bullets, policeman, soldiers, a "secret tunnel", an "underground chamber", the tape of Abu Bakr threatening "war" on wealthy Muslims, the Muslimeen praying in the middle of Mucurapo Road, & a mild-mannered, skullcapped man saying this was all the fault of "certain groups" scapegoating the Jamaat.

On my way to CCA7 I drove along the foreshore & glanced north to the Muslimeen compound, but couldn't make out signs of anything out of the ordinary.

Joe Boyd's A Film About Jimi Hendrix was on at StudioFilmClub, & before & after the movie 12 was playing, a full set, three songs to start, four or five after (including a cover of "Hey, Joe").

I sprawled in the front row of chairs, big sound booming around me, Sheldon Holder's big voice (big enough to contain its own echo, I thought). And Peter was projecting an old documentary about the Esso Trinidad Steelband as a backdrop for the band--gold & orange & pale blue light flickering across Sheldon's big, open face.

And as I chewed my pen & bobbed my head Sheldon seemed to have his eyes on me ("Tell me why oh why should I change my life"), & I smiled, even though I knew he couldn't actually see me.

We have the moon at night and the sun in the daylight....

The Stabroek News runs an incisive editorial today on the question of Bird Rock, a.k.a. Las Aves (a name Stabroek declines to use), the sandbar islet 140 miles west of Dominica that is claimed by Venezuela. Recall that last month Venezuela symbolically asserted its sovereignty over the islet by staging two weddings & three baptisms there, on the stilted platform that houses a small crew of sailors--a move that worries some Eastern Caribbean states. Stabroek considers the matter in the context of Hugo Chavez's PetroCaribe initiative as well as Guyana's own longstanding border dispute with Venezuela.

All those bedazzled by President Hugo Chavez's seeming generosity towards Caribbean states after he made available the PetroCaribe payments' facility, should perhaps pause for a moment's reflection to consider the full context of the accord. That context is a spurious claim on our Essequibo region, on the basis of which he has prevented us, among other things, from pursuing off-shore oil exploration, and a claim on Bird Rock (also called Bird Island) belonging to Dominica which interferes in a fundamental way with the maritime rights of a number of Caricom states.

I've long thought that the tricky question of maritime boundaries in this corner of the Caribbean--imaginary lines on the map that determine ownership of known & suspected oil & gas fields--could be the spark that starts real trouble, & increasingly unfriendly relations between Chavez & the US government bring the whole mess into starker relief. I look at the volatile state of things here in Trinidad these recent months & the little conspiracy wheels begin to turn in my head. What if we're just too close to discern the bigger pattern?

Mirrors, encyclopaedias, & butterflies in the House of Glass....

At the root of my artistic practice is the exploration of my identity in relation to that of a nation; that is, the dialogue that exists between me as an artist and my social space.

-- Rachel Rochford, from her short statement in the "catalogue" of her show of paintings & drawings, Atelier, currently on display at CCA7.

Last night I went to hear Rachel--who's just graduated from the University of Reading & moved back here to set up a studio--give an "artist's talk" at CCA. During the discussion period, the question of the relevance (fraught word) of her work to contemporary Trinidad was raised by the moderator, the formidable Pat Bishop. I suggested that the kind of self-scrutiny Rachel claims--& which is apparent in some of her strongest recent work*--is vitally "relevant" here & now.

*[Rachel's earlier work was largely abstract, it seemed from her career-overview slide-show. But in the last two years or so, as she's moved towards a conscious engagement with her "social space", human figures have begun to appear in her paintings & drawings--stylised figures in repeated poses, their otherwise unremarkable postures & gestures asked to assume some wider & as yet uncertain significance. Pay attention, this detail is important, the work seems to suggest--at least to my inexpert eye.]

There's a general & growing consensus that Trinidad is in a state of crisis--& "crime" is just a symptom of the real problem. To my mind, our prolonged crisis is one of national self-identity--the dilemma of what it does, can, could mean to be "Trinidadian", now that so many of the old Independence assumptions have proved flawed or false. Who are "we", what do "we" have in common, is there even a coherent "we"? You could argue this is nothing new, this "crisis" is the story of modern West Indianness, but it seems to me that the query--& the imperative to try to answer--is becoming increasingly urgent as we strain & twist under the forces of global politics & economics. Simply: we do not understand ourselves.

I thought about this again, from a different angle of approach, when, after Rachel's event, I was talking with a young editor from the Venezuelan magazine Plátano Verde about the current literary scene here in T'dad. I began by explaining that many--most?--of our best or best-known writers still live elsewhere, in bigger, colder countries. Then I began to follow the thread of an idea that started when I was reading B.C. Pires's recent book Thank God It's Friday: that some of the most interesting work by contemporary Trinidadian writers does not come in conventional fictional or poetic forms--the forms mastered by the "canonical" West Indian writers of an older generation--but rather in the form of fragmentary, discontinuous, first-person non-fiction narratives in the periodical press, i.e. newspaper columns, which we may have some difficulty identifying as "literary"--or identifying as "narratives"--because of the format of their publication.

I'm thinking here of B.C.'s short essays--originally written for various newspapers--the best of which I have no qualms about describing as literature. And the best of Keith Smith's columns (some of them collected recently in an Express supplement). And the best of Wayne Brown's "In Our Time" pieces (such as those collected in The Child of the Sea), & the best of Raymond Ramcharitar's earlier newspaper pieces.

These writers, I've been thinking, are or were* creating characters based on themselves--"B.C. Pires", "Keith Smith", etc.--& showing us how they respond, in real time, to the social forces at play around them. And these short stand-alone pieces eventually, it seems to me, add up to narratives of a sort. Ostensibly this is "journalism"--writing for today about today's questions--but, at their best, these writers are or were writing with a breadth of vision, depth of concern, & virtuosity of style that gives their narratives the permanence of literature (if we accept Pound's idea that "Literature is news that stays news").

*[I use this clumsy duo of tenses because, of the four writers I name, B.C. Pires no longer writes a weekly column (& his monthly space in the T&T Review does not allow the same rapidity & flexibility of response); Wayne Brown now writes for a Jamaican audience in the J'ca Observer, & only infrequently about his home island; & Raymond Ramcharitar, after many embattled years, seems to have lost the gladness of prose that made his biting commentary essential reading. Only Keith Smith continues to spin his "narrative" five days a week in the Express.]

Rambling, inconclusive, & not entirely coherent thoughts....

Looking for love on a Saturday night

jointpop, Saturday 5 November, 2005, Port of Spain

The November Trinidad & Tobago Review is out today; it includes a piece I worked up from my long blog post a fortnight ago on the 22 October "death march". Unfortunately it appears in the TTR minus much of its punctuation--quotation marks, em dashes--but a more definitive version is online here.

Strange people in the neighbourhood is something that I have always paid attention to, but now everyone gets some scrutiny. I actually have things laid down throughout the property should I need to defend myself. I trimmed trees and bushes for a clear line of sight from the house itself. Am I paranoid? No, just careful. But where is that line between careful and paranoid?

Over the last 3 years, I've known people kidnapped. I have known people beaten and robbed, including an Aunt in Carlsen Field who is still recovering. I've personally had guns pointed at me a few times (and not from police or security) - and before my father passed away, he was chopped with a cutlass on the family property. I've chased one fellow with a cutlass from this yard once. So I'm paying attention, and I'm careful.

So what do I think about the Death March? I think it was a well intentioned, poorly named and poorly recognized start to something that needs to happen.... Basically if there is a position of authority the person filling the position just doesn't care....

The saddest thing, I suppose, is that I don't really care anymore. I know that calling the police is generally useless - from experience (they wait a few hours and show up, if they do show up). I don't read the newspapers, I just ask people what the number of murders and kidnappings is up to. I keep my eyes and ears open.

This is not the Trinidad and Tobago that I grew up in, and it's a matter of time before people really do have enough - and then it's anyone's game. I hear the Prime Minister saying that they want to get crime down to an acceptable level. I laugh. I expect nothing from them, and I no longer expect anything from the police.

-- Taran Rampersad, in a long, thoughtful post on the personal impact of our ongoing crisis.

"That line between careful and paranoid" is a boundary none of us can avoid contemplating these days. And the kind of frustration & quiet, urgent anger Taran describes is slowly becoming--I think, I hope!--a unifying force, linking us across the small, unstable chasms of ethnicity & class (whatever "class" means). The question is, will we achieve a critical mass of citizen anger in time to save this unwieldy experiment in "independence" that we volunteered for 43 years ago?

Today's Stabroek editorial puts the recent (& ongoing) flare-up in Buxton into a wider historical & social context:

We have always had something of a penchant for unreal debate in this country, but never more so than now. As the polarisation process continues in the penumbra of the 2006 elections, and the sense of insecurity and/or foreboding about what could happen grows, we seem to be spending more and more time railing against the miasma. We operate in a twilight world of half-truths, quarter-truths, myths and falsehoods, and the constructs being used to explain the inconvenient portions of reality which poke through the fog are neither grounded in a full appraisal of the facts, nor in a commitment to the truth.

(V.S. Naipaul in 1962: "In British Guiana it is almost impossible to find out the truth about any major thing. Investigation and cross-checking lead only to fearful confusion.")

Traditionally we have closed our eyes to any illegality committed by members of our own group, particularly if the perception is that it has contributed to making us feel more secure. On the subject of illegalities committed by the other side, however, we have always been voluble. It was in this context - as well in the larger one of our political history in general - that the Buxton crisis evolved. And the opposing accounts of that crisis, which still has not ended, continue to obfuscate reality and serve as an impediment to getting any handle on how the other side really feels....

The simple truth is that if one group is unsafe, then everyone is unsafe. True security can only come with the rule of law, effective law enforcement and strong, independent institutions; there is no alternative. And in the meantime, a little more honesty in debate all around would be helpful so we can grope towards discussing the real problems of the nation in a meaningful way, rather than unreal constructs which if taken to their conclusion can lead us into anarchy.

All artists worthy of the name wear the pain of the world, like scars, or radiant armour. And for Minshall, a white boy in a black country, there had to be a blessed liberation in refusing to be penned up in suburbia's ghetto but, to the contrary, in being perennially and vitally involved in 'their' world. And how vitally!

-- From Wayne Brown's column, in today's J'ca Observer, on Peter Minshall.

Ten years later, here in Jamaica, I had just that day returned home from bypass surgery in Havana when, from Trinidad, Minshall phoned. He was as usual aghast about something; he talked on and on. I was weak and very tired; after five minutes I was ready to hang up, and if it had been anybody else, I would have excused myself and done so.

But I didn't. Minshall proceeded to talk for a full hour, and long before he was finished I was blind with pain. But I lay there and took it, because it was Minshall - no, because it was Trinidad - calling; and when your country calls, you don't hang up.

At first glance, reading is a waste of time, turning us all into versions of Don Quixote, too befuddled by our imaginations to tell windmills from giants. We would be better off spending the time mating or farming. Darwinists have an answer - or more accurately, many possible answers. (Literary Darwinists like multiple answers, convinced the best idea will win out.) One idea is that literature is a defense reaction to the expansion of our mental life that took place as we began to acquire the basics of higher intelligence around 40,000 years ago. At that time, the world suddenly appeared to homo sapiens in all its frightening complexity. But by taking imaginative but orderly voyages within our minds, we gained the confidence to interpret this new vastly denser reality. Another theory is that reading literature is a form of fitness training, an exercise in "what if" thinking. If you could imagine the battle between the Greeks and the Trojans, then if you ever found yourself in a street fight, you would have a better chance of winning. A third theory sees writing as a sex-display trait. Certainly writers often seem to be preening when they write, with an eye toward attracting a desirable mate.

-- D.T. Max, in today's NY Times Magazine, on Literary Darwinism.

(Are there selection pressures on mooncalfs and sprites?)

And three cheers for literarians!

Being Here Now

Ucill Cambridge, reporting in yesterday's Express:

Police are now investigating a claim that a number of people in the Diego Martin area are tagged for execution once the Eid fast has been broken.

The Express has been reliably informed that there exists a list with the names of persons in the West End district who are to be all killed once the Muslim festival of Eid-ul-Fitr ends today. The death squad is said to be a religious group from the Bagatelle area.

The Express spoke with a senior investigator from the West End Police district who said he was unaware of the existence of any list but promised to investigate the claim.

The man who told the Express about the existence of a list has also reported receiving a death threat shortly after the interview was completed.

Attillah Springer, writing in today's Guardian (no permanent link yet; my bold):

I am tired of Manning and Panday. I am tired of microwaved speeches delivered by frothing-at-the-mouth masters of rhetoric and old blag.

First the Daddy Oh Manning says he knows the "Big" man in the bombing business. Then the outside father Panday reveals his heretofore undisclosed seerman powers by declaring that soon Indo-Trinidadians would be the targets of bombing sprees.

So what I want to know is, if Manning knows and Panday knows, then how come the police don’t know who to go and arrest?...

One thing Mr Panday is right about. We should not lie down and accept discrimination. And what the politicians of the two overruling parties are doing is discriminating against the many many people of T&T who see through their games. Who cannot be lured into a false sense of belonging by party cards and fever-pitch speechifying.

Debbie Jacob, writing in the Guardian last Monday:

By the age of 16, my son, Jairzinho, has witnessed a security guard being shot, three acquaintances being kidnapped, and the horrific death of a beloved teacher's husband. I know he is not the innocent child that he could have been if he was not touched by such events....

I don't know about you, but it doesn't make me feel good to see Abu Bakr in the newspaper saying he is going to find the trash can bomber. It doesn't make me feel good to open up the newspaper and read that the FBI is in Trinidad.

These headlines smack of one feeling: hopelessness. When we look around us we see a government paralysed by ineffectiveness. Do you think the enraged, disengaged, disenfranchised people who graduate into criminals don’t look around them and get the same messages we're getting?

And two days ago, in the course of a wide-ranging four-hour conversation, an artist colleague asked me this question: how do we know that this new FBI presence in Trinidad doesn't have as much to do with President Chavez across the Gulf as with the Port of Spain bombings? And what better listening post than a small English-speaking island, heavily dependent on trade with the US; an important base of operations for foreign energy corporations with large expatriate staffs already engaged in (ostensibly geological & economic) intelligence-seeking; & flooded with young middle-class Venezuelans likely to come from anti-Chavez families?

The sun was high in the clean blue sky, & the mice were singing their songs....