From: frampton@vicuna.ocunix.on.ca (Steve Frampton)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.caribbean
Subject: A write-up on Trinidad!
Date: Wed, 07 Oct 92 22:01:58 EDT
Reply-To: frampton@vicuna.ocunix.on.ca
Followup-To: soc.culture.caribbean
Distribution: world
Organization: Vicuna Systems, Kingston, ON (613) 547-5066
Content-Type: text

Taken, without permission, from the November, 1991 issue of "Vogue",
is a *great* write-up on Trinidad!  My wife just brought it to my
attention while going through her back-issues, and because of it
being a year old and not likely to be read by any of my breddas, I
thought I'd post it here.

"Vogue Style - Beyond The Beach" - Here is a writer's impression of
Trinidad, as expressed by Daisann McLane.

Seen on a picture postcard, Port of Spain, Trinidad, almost seems like
some photographer's idea of a joke: instead of the usual dreamy,
palm-treed Caribbean village nestled by a turquoise bay, there's a
third-world urban confusion of concrete and corrugated iron sprawling
alongside a hazy, pea green gulf.  "An ugly, slimy town with a lovely
bit of beauty inside," quips my friend David Rudder, who for years now
has been guiding me to the unexpected beauty behind Port of Spain's
ragtag facade.  Rudder is a calypsonian writer and singer of the
intricate, wordplay-wise poetry that is the national literature of
Trinidad.  It was through his eyes -- or more to the point, his ears --
that I began to discover the hidden riches of this little-known cultural
capital, this tropical Dublin.

"Hear me nuh," hollers Rudder as he leads me, weaving, down crowded
Frederick Street on a white-hot midday, through the babble of sidewalk
sellers, tabloid hawkers, and lunch-time gossipers.  "Hear me now!" is
what Trinidadians yell when they're trying to get somebody's attention;
the joke is that it's usually impossible to be heard over the clatter and
boom, the ting-aling, and the rat-a-tat-tat of Port of Spain, a town that
never shuts up.  You don't look at Trinidad, you listen to it; this is
an island of poets and musicians.  Where the peanut vendor pulls a couple
of verses of calypso out of his back pocket; where your taxi driver is a
virtuoso of the steel drum, or pan (invented right here, a stone's throw
up the Laventille Hill Road); where the percolating rhythms of ordinary
daily speech will drive you to drink, or to dance.

Brash, sassy, hopped up, uncompromising, quirky, street sharp, a jumble
of faces and races from Africa to India, China to Lebanon -- Port of
Spain isn't anything like what you imagine as the Caribbean, I tell my
friends from New York, from London, while urging them to book tickets
straight-away.  Most of these friends already have heard about Trinidad
Carnival, the two-day pre-Lenten blowout during which the streets of
Port of Spain become an enormous open-air electric circus, throbbing with
rum- and sweat-drenched bodies covered, just barely, in Lurex and
Day-Glo.  Tens of thousands of Trinidadians clog the capital for the
festival, as do a sprinkling of foreign regulars (Mick Jagger is often
spotted wearing satin tatting alongside the son of the late Norman
Parkinson, a longtime resident of Trinidad's sister island, Tobago).
But what most people do not know is that these two hypercharged (and
overbooked and overpriced) days are preceded by almost two months of
build-up that is as much fun as, even more than, the actual event.

It's during the preliminaries, from Christmas till Carnival (March 2-3,
1992), that Port of Spain becomes its most essential self, the way New
York does in October.  Culture comes alive: the steel-drum bands,
hundreds strong, begin to practice for hours every night in vacant lots
scattered throughout the city.  They play the classics, intricately
arranged, from Bach to calypso's Lord Kitchener.  The pan yards are open
to everyone and are easy to find: you follow your ears, stay as long as
you like.  Chances are you'll end up eating pepper-steamed boiled corn
and drinking crisp Carib beer all night with a bunch of local pan
fanatics who argue over the merits of the top bands as passionately as if
they were football teams.  The first tinkling of steel drum in the warm
night air also signals the arrival of the calypso season and the opening
of the tents -- outdoor theatres devoted to the art of verbal agility.
Here, for five dollars admission, you can sit on old steel folding chairs
and listen to calypsonians, the original rap masters, insult each other
with sublime grace, spin sexual innuendos, and cast aspersions on the
fiscal policy and virility of the prime minister (who may well be sitting
on that rickety chair to your right).

History and geology have conspired to make Trinidad a place that an
outsider can explore and truly get to know from the inside out.  Unlike
many other Caribbean islands, Trinidad never experienced the worst
excesses of plantation slavery: Columbus discovered the island, then the
Spanish forgot about it; the French made some half-hearted attempts at
agriculture; the English arrived, abolished slavery, and imported
hundreds of thousands of East Indian labourers to do the sugarcane
harvesting the Africans refused to continue.  There are African families
in Port of Spain that have never known slavery.  The sorry habits of
master and slave relations, of duplicity and seething hatred, didn't get
much chance to root here.  Nowadays if a Trinidadian doesn't like you, he
won't smile and pretend -- he'll cut you off with a "Go nuh!  Ah cyant
take dat!"  Thanks to some modest deposits of offshore oil, Trinidadians
don't need your tourist dollars, either, thank you very much.  It's this
independence and straightforwardness that make the island unique in the
Caribbean.  You make a friend here, and it's for real.  And the door to
the country really does open.

Stay in the hilltop Trinidad Hilton if you must have scalding hot
showers, instant long-distance access, and rum punch on demand.  Seasoned
Trinidad hands prefer the Queen's Park Hotel, a fading Caribbean Deco
dowager smelling of intrigue, mildew, and whisky.  (At Carnival time the
poolside is crowded with Brits reading Graham Greene.)  But if you want
to enter the universe of the calypso, the secret, deliciously sexy and
gossipy Trinidad of V.S. Naipaul's "Miguel Street" or C.L.R. James'
"Minty Alley", then you must stay in a guesthouse or a private home (the
Trinidad tourist board keeps a list of bed-and-breakfast spots).  The
first time I came to Port of Spain, I ended up renting a room from an
Indian family in a sprawling house in the bustling suburb of St. James.
All day, chickens and goats traipsed nonchalantly through the courtyard,
eventually to reappear in curry, wrapped in flat roti bread, on my plate
that evening.  A Rastafarian with waist-length locks conducted some sort
of business from a shack in one corner of the property.  And every
morning, an aged Hindu woman wrapped in filmy white gauze would emerge
from the house next door and begin holding a loud conversation with her
parrot.  She was, I learned later, V.S. Naipaul's mother.

"So, you want to go to the _beach_?" asks Rudder, laughing at the word,
because in Trinidad, nobody "goes to the beach."  You _bathe_.  This is
an activity that most definitely does not involve large towels, Evian
water, and assorted tubes of sunscreen.  Instead you hop in a car and
drive twenty minutes from Port of Spain on a spectacularly heart-stopping
two-lane road over a thickly forested mountain range to Maracas Bay, an
unimpressive -- by Carribean standards, anyway -- half-moon of dark, wet
sand at the base of the mountains.  The "bathe" ritual begins far from
the sea; first it is obligatory to check out the line of food vendors
along the road.  Street food is Trinidad's haute cuisine -- the Indian,
African, Lebanese, and Chinese cooks of this polyglot population have
spawned a thousand delicacies.  Maracas has some of the best fast food in
the land: Trinidadians will drive all the way there just for the saheena,
a superb Indo-Trinidad sandwich made with spinach-spiraled ovals of deep-
fried bread stuffed with chick-peas and a pepper sauce made from pickled
mangoes.

From the alfresco food court, Rudder and I approach phase two of the
Maracus ritual: the wall.  Here is where you sit, bare toes dangling,
while philosophizing at top volume about any and all subjects and
covertly checking out everybody else passing by, an activity that
Trinidadians have developed to a fine art and even have a special word
for: macco.  Today in Rudder's estimation, Maracas is a particularly
rich macco field, a sandy canvas ripe for his calypso literary
imagination.  He points out the women passing by, notes the way they
strut and bob their hips in private, sensuous rhythms that are
quintessentially Trinidadian.  To "roll de bum bum" in Trinidad,
rhapsodizes my friend, is to make a patriotic gesture.  I take Rudder's
observations in with a chuckle, but I'm having an epiphany of my own,
surrounded here by faces tan, brown, and black, and a United Nations of
hair textures, and with the hammer of Hindi pop music, steel drums, and
calypsos in my ears.  Swimming contentedly in this multicultural sea, I
imagine what Columbus would think if he could see Trinidad now.  And
wonder if I will ever, on my Caribbean vacation, bother to go into the
water.
           - by Daisann McLane

That's all, pretty nice write-up, isn't it?

+-----------------------------------------------+--------------------+
| Steve Frampton - frampton@vicuna.ocunix.on.ca | Steve Frampton     |
| I collect postcards!  If you send me one from | 501-A Princess St. |
| your area, I'll send one in return.  Send to >| Kingston, Ontario  |
| (Don't forget both email and mailing address) | CANADA   K7L 1C3   |
+-----------------------------------------------+--------------------+
Newsgroups: soc.culture.caribbean