Jumbie on the Seawall December 31
“There is something wrong with this city. There is something that underlies the problems of disorder and crime, and there is something responsible for the fear and for the way of thinking. And they will tell you that your city is rich, beautiful, and that the steel-band is a wonder, calypso an achievement, and carnival is the greatest spectacle on earth. And all of this is true. But there is something else here, something dark, poisonous and stinking, something like a sore in this city.“
Earl Lovelace, the man from faraway Toco, wrote this fifty-four years ago in While Gods Are Falling, his first novel, and his tune about this place never changed, I’m told. VS Naipaul was of a similar pessimist mind, so much so that he refused to return to his native Point of Spain. My own stabbing attempts to cover the news of this city, to highlight a pervasive belief that situations are spiraling downward, the economy is tanking, the senseless violence is spiking, the social fabric is unraveling, etc., seems to be old news. Trinidad has always been broken. The handwringing is as constant as the temperature. Rising seas and tectonic apocalypse have come to this island too late to affect anyone’s dire outlook. It is hard-wired. This may explain why the poor will mortgage their whole lives for Carnival—on a foundering ship, the fete is what we all can hold onto.
“We Too Violent“ is the TT Guardian headline—PM Keith Rowley’s response to Trinity Island’s milestone of 500 murders reached earlier this month, but the record-setting pace is nothing new. 550 were killed in 2008, and almost as many were slain in 1990 when the military battled an Islamist insurrection downtown. The most chilling effect of decades of unrest is the unprecedented flight of the middle class from the nation’s capital: In the past twenty years, the city population has fallen by 30%—from 48,000 in the ’90’s to 34,000, according to a 2014 census. Those with lifeboats have already left.
On my sunset constitutional, I take my Nikon Monarch binoculars to the seawall, scanning a horizon in fade, dotted with big tankers and oil derricks. I strain for a glimpse beyond the earth’s curve, with an eye keen to escape this island, as if the mainland (Venezuela, my God!), or the past, offers anything better. Then something better happens right beneath my feet—the return of the hawksbill turtle, inquisitive head bobbing, this time with a mate. And his girlfriend is a big one, like a tractor hub.
“A sign from the gods,“ says a perfect stranger, watching the beaked lovers. “There will be luck in the new year.“
Who the hell is this woman beside me? I have never seen her before. Indeed, I have yet to be directly addressed by someone on this seawall, certainly not the taciturn Japanese fisherman; but here she stands to witness two turtles introducing themselves, and to provide color commentary about gods. She is dressed like an American, old-school, in faded Levi 501’s and a flannel shirt, but her speech is Trini, a musical lilt which insists on emphasizing the unaccented syllables, like bad lyrics. In the low orange light, her dark curls shimmer like satin.
I tell her that spying the couple is a first for me, and she says she knows, but how could she? I want to tell her that she is not real. She must be some figment of my starving imagination, an undigested piece of stew meat, a mere distraction from my unresolved essay on despair, but I remain a gentleman to the end. I politely say nothing and walk away. Happiness is for turtles.