Santa is Reported Killed December 6
“Santa Shot Dead in D’Abadie,“ reads the TT Guardian headline. The victim’s given name was Andrew Noel Jack, of Reid Lane, and he was 31-years-old when a car pulled up next to him and unloaded a barrage of gun fire. His friends always thought Noel was a funny word from the Christmas carols, so the nickname stuck. Santa’s slaying brings the murder toll this year up to 483.
“The man wasn’t perfect, but he didn’t deserve to die like that. We used to call the man Santa. He was a cool going one and he liked children. So how you go come just before Christmas and kill the man? This country is madness.“
Six hours later, 33-year-old Roland Phillip, of Sunshine Avenue, enters the ledger as number 484. No one saw him die along the roadside in Laventille, in a pool of blood. They only heard the shots and the screeching wheels.
Despite pervasive brutality, the holiday celebrations in Port of Spain promise to be as joyous and otherworldly as the rest of them--Venezuelan Parang music, British-style yuletide, Afro-Carib Lime. Ferdy says that Limin’ originates from the white calcium oxide powder the Trini soldiers used to smear all over their bodies, to withstand the foot disease and stench of death in the trenches overseas. Now it is renamed as the Art of Doing Nothing—celebration reclaimed from suffering. Trini’s are so good at making lemonade out of the greenest lemons.
“It’s not Christmas without Pastels and Parang,“ says Hazel, our vivacious school receptionist, gobbling up what looks and tastes to the uninitiated as a meat-filled Tamal. She insists this concoction is a singular creation of Trinidad, but I have my doubts, as she unwraps the slimy green “fig“ leaf that mainlanders call “platano“, or banana. The Pastel is delicious but hardly unique. This Trini epicurean is in apparent denial over her love for pre-Colombian tamales. She insists I enjoy the full experience with a brew of Sorrel, a holiday drink unique to this place, except that it is not—continentals love it too and call it Jamaica tea, pronounced Ha-Mica. In the mad rush to embrace the ethnic alchemy of Trinidad, cultural pride runs amok, such that everything here was created here and exists no place else. Whereas in England, or the US, almost all of the favorite foods are categorized as “international“, here none of it is. Lasagne is described to me with details appropriate for a Martian anthropologist. I am invited to partake in a traditional yuletide feast of turkey and ham, featuring an odd fruit called a cranberry, as if toads and seaweed were the legacies of my own childhood.
“No one does Christmas like Trini’s,“ Hazel gushes. She really needs to get out more.