Welcome to Trinidad
“WAY YOU going?” ‘St Ann’s.’ Way we going? ‘St Ann’s.’ Why we going there? We mad, we mad, we mad ... . This excerpt from David Rudder’s song, Madness, is about the mix of desperation and delight, fuelled by heady music and even headier alcohol, that typifies the din that is the climax of a ‘fête’, or party, in Trinidad.
Fortunately for me, I was heading south to the sprawling, growing town of Debe instead of the suburb of St Ann’s. This St Ann’s, outside of Port-of-Spain, is nothing like the St Ann that is the Garden Parish of Jamaica or the area of Barbados where you can find the St Ann’s Church, Fort, Garrison and Drill Hall. Instead, it is the site of what we now call the psychiatric hospital, but which is still known as the ‘mad house’ or ‘lunatic asylum’.
For a long time, the standard joke was, “St Ann’s? Not me, boy. You have to be mad to go there, yes!” And the reply is inevitably, “Not there alone, nah. With all the murders, is de whole of Trinidad. You have to be mad to live here, yes.”
As I left the city, I thought of another din, this time one named Gunga Din, the subject and hero of a poem written by Rudyard Kipling, who, according to the poet, was “of all the black-faced crew, the finest man I knew”. Gunga was a bhisti, or water carrier, working for the British army and was responsible for serving the paani, or water, to the troops. Debe, which means ‘debt’ or ‘debit’ in Spanish and ‘tin’ in Swahili, is one of the places where the descendants of Gunga Din, Indian indentured immigrants who had survived the hazardous sea voyage, ended.
SUFFERED SEVERELY
Kipling reputedly is responsible for the saying, “Only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the noonday sun,” but these people, for most of their lives, not only suffered severely from the back-breaking work in the cane fields, but survived by growing their own rice and vegetables, selling Indian food, especially the now ubiquitous doubles, at the roadside, and rearing chickens, ducks, goats and cattle. And then, with better education, a few of the second and many of the third generation got jobs in the public service, oil and other industries.
Motilal ‘Moti’ Boodoosingh is a thirdgeneration Trinidadian and the first in his family to complete secondary school. He got a job at the Texaco refinery when he was 19 and retired as an offshore production worker. He was 62 when he completed his BA in
literature and communications and now, at 67, has written a book of short stories called Kal Kahanis, Hindi for Stories of Yesteryear.
The characters are very much like those many of us who grew up in the country districts, especially the sugarcane and agricultural areas, know well – Paro, “who quit high school to elope”, and Tanty Moon, who left school at 13 and went to help her parents with cutting and bundling cane for the sugar company and her father, who, “although he usually came home late in the night after leaving the village rum shop, would wake at quarter to five”, by which time his wife would have their breakfasts packed all set to begin work at dawn.
There is Ghambir, who disappeared for two weeks and “everybody assumed he was making a jail or had run away to Venezuela”. Then, there was Lochan Mousa (Mousa is Hindi for an ‘uncle’), who was the best son-in-law for Paras Nani (grandmother) because “he had a good work at the San Fernando Borough Council, did not drink and always gave her two dollars and a pack of Anchor Special (cigarettes) when he and Doodoo Mousee (Aunt) visited from Debe every fortnight.”
COLOURFUL LANGUAGE
Paras Nani’s language was colourful with observations like “me mother pot don’t have cobweb”, “if you want to mind bird, get you own cage” and, when one of her sons ended up with an old Spanish lady, “Mutton dress up like lamb.”
I left the launch of Moti’s first book euphoric and contented. I knew his characters well, and, interestingly, because Moon was a common enough name among Indian women, I, too, had a Tanty Moon who worked in the cane fields. In fact, as I hustled quickly north, there was a little bit of moon peeping out among the stars.
Fortunately, it was not a full moon, so the lunatic in me bided its time and cooled its heels a bit even during David Rudder’s Mad Man’s Rant and
Madness, all of which featured in his ‘6.5’ birthday event held under the trees of the Hotel Normandie in, of all places, St Ann’s.
Rudder, at 65, has become the calypsonian’s calypsonian and the performer’s performer. He is called the ‘King’ and performs like one. We had gone to a concert he held just around carnival time in February and, voice hoarse and body tired, he delivered his range of memorable songs, some of which he repeated as his birthday gift to us, from his initial hit, Hammer (‘Where de man with de hammer gone?’) through
Calypso Music (‘It’s a living vibration/ Rooted deep within my Caribbean belly’),
Rally Round The West Indies and even his Dus’ In Dey Face, tempered by a slight drizzle and a large, appreciative crowd, all of us wanting more.
As Rudder sang his most recent calypso, Welcome to Trinidad, where
“half the country mad” and a place where “all we talk ‘bout is race” , I acknowledged the truth of this but still appreciated its potency as a creative force even in the midst of a growing divide. Moti and Rudder, on the same day, from and in the same country, one at 65 and the other at 67, contributing towards making the tossed salad that is our country into the melting pot which it will inevitably become.