West Side Drive October 5
I head out toward the Diego Martin River, pronounced D’ego, and leave the the sterile, gated ghetto of Westmoorings, with its high-end shopping mall, shiny SUV’s, and other quasi-modern conveniences. Crossing the river, I continue west along the coast of Trinidad’s last peninsula, home of a few towns, a quiet port, and a national park, not to mention the ferry to Guiria, Venezuela, presently closed due to a yellow fever alert and potential civil war.
I stop by TT Post in Carenage to see if there are any packages for the school, but really just to say hi to Rona. A little older than I, she is the perfect age to conceive of an independent Trinidad, beginning in the last years of colonial rule. With her paper money now sporting scarlet ibises instead of Elizabeth’s stiff maternal mug, Rona displays little Commonwealth fealty. Like most people, she is a nativist republican. She loves what her people made of this island, and she fears it is in danger, from without and within. She is a thoroughly radicalized grandmother, and she claims it is in keeping with family tradition.
“My fudda he’s an oilwooka. Very specialized skills, ya know. If he stop wookin’, ten wookin’ stop, ya know.“ Indispensable is the word for it, something not commonly associated with low-paying blue-collar jobs. The labor strikes that have ensued over the years have had the cumulative effect of shutting down refineries. Rona’s eyes water when she talks about the “tousands“ of newly unemployed oil workers after the closing of the Petrotrin plant. Unrest will spread like zika.
Naipaul argues that West Indians have particularly revolutionary proclivities. Starting with Haiti more than two centuries ago, the Caribbean islands have a long history of political class struggle, and they are receptive more than most to Marxist polemics, as the confinement of island societies tends to encourage collectivism. According to Naipaul, sugar was key to the radicalization, as cane manufacturing is an extraordinarily complex business, given the technical challenges, the perishability of the product, and the enormous money at stake. Despite their slave status, Trinidadians and their oppressed neighbors were the world’s first black industrial workers. When oil replaced cane sugar, they were uniquely poised to organize, and their brutal exploitation at the hands of European empires served as a crucible that forged a cohesive national identity from remarkably diverse ethnicities—African, Asian, European, Amerindian—Pan-Caribbean.
This island has a long association with foreign wars and subjugation, which is somewhat strange for such a remote location. Way back when Port of Spain was little more than a swamp, when the balance of European power was at sea, the Spaniards moored their fleet right here in Carenage and Chaguaramas, and these safe harbors proved the final refuge when King George the T’ird sent his turgid gentlemen a-sail with cannons and cutlasses. After the British conquest in 1797, the swamp was filled, and, but for the names of these places (Carenage means bleaching, or removing barnacles), Spain’s imprint was removed. For Trinidadians, the change was not so good, as Spain had essentially ignored the island for 300 years, while the British most decidedly did not.
Before the British knew they were leaving, the Yankee’s eastern fleet moved in, ostensibly to monitor German submarines and nearby Vichy-French islands, but also to employ the Monroe Doctrine in the Old World twilight. Winston Churchill, in order to win support for US armaments, conceded his government’s mass holdings in William’s Bay, Chagaramas, and beyond. This was in 1940, almost two years before Pearl Harbor. The American navy ended up staying in northwestern Trinidad for the next two decades. And the sailors were not particularly well behaved.
Carenage is where the navy boys went to have fun with the colored girls during and after the war, Naipaul observes, and the colored boys resented them both for it. When the neighboring village of Chaguaramas was evacuated to make way for the big ships and barracks, Carenage was suddenly presented with a housing shortage that resulted in a proliferation of flypaper shacks with roofs of discarded metal. This temporary ramshackle-residential vibe still accents the congested town and its testy attitudes.
Not until 1960, on the eve of TT’s inevitable independence, did the Americans finally end the military occupation, delivering these coastal towns to local control, and leaving it to the jungle to dismantle the military-grade concrete and oxidized iron hulks that once represented global might. A half-century later, the abandoned propeller and old officer’s club are overgrown with vines and calx, serving tonight as liming sites and furtive lovers’ retreats, but they always remind. A stench of callous exploitation hangs heavy in the seedy air, and Americans here can notice it. Or maybe that’s the fish market.
I cross the narrow traffic lanes at an inopportune moment, and the irritated driver refers to me as “yuh highness“ as he passes. For a second, I feel like I am a fading empire.