Lisa Allen-Agostini - Trinidad Noir

Kwae dressed and gathered his belongings. He walked across the building and passed through the moss-green iron gate of the prison. Outside he took a deep breath — Ah, the fishy smell of canal water! And in the car park across from the jail, he heard the putt-putting of a car engine. It definitely needed a new transmission.

Santa Cruz

I was at a midlife crisis, though I had only just hit thirty — a fool, a failed musician/songwriter — and my question those days was always the same, Where to live? A migrant’s question, the first uprooting all it takes to turn you into a rolling stone forever. The song in my head had a title, “Migration Blues.” It had two or three unfinished lyrics too, what I thought of as the bluesy half-tones of my own makeshift life: Moving south / ocean waves / a backyard / mango trees, plum, and zaboca / ackee trees in sunlight / the sea at my back / would I still cry / I, and I and I / would I be happy / would I be sad / moving south again...

I had not been a successful migrant. This I will admit freely. Not that too many migrants make it anyway by dint of their own resource, especially taking into account the color scheme of these northern climes. No, it takes backative to make it: the sale of family land back home, the hitching of your wagon to a well-established husband, of the appropriate hue, maybe, a disconnected act of whoring or kissing ass, growing a thick hide where once there was skin.

Sometimes the need for a change of gears overpowered me, although at the time I was working in relative comfort and autonomy for a modest worker’s wage as a counselor in a shelter for battered women. I took offense one day when a lunchroom argument erupted about rough sex, which was fine, they all agreed, as long as the controls, put in place beforehand, remained intact. This got me irate. “How can anyone guarantee this?”

“Well,” and they spoke as one, their patronizing, indulgent tone setting me off further, “we discuss it before, agree on the limits, and then proceed. We are reasonable people and besides, who would risk a relationship for some excessive pleasure?” A relationship. The very word put my teeth on edge. A roughness that was smooth, smooth.

I couldn’t stop myself: “But how allyuh could program everything so? Yuh discuss everything beforehand? Sex too? Next thing dey go be setting up guidelines for ‘managing dangerous sexual adventures’ or some stupidness like dat...”

One of them spoke. Her voice was dangerously kind as she murmured, “And what would you know about it, you? Sexual adventures? Come on, now...”

The Trini in me was crazy, my anger too alien and damn ignorant altogether in that charnel house of political correctness. My rage let them off the hook. It left me sitting there perplexed and wondering about my own freakish take on everything. I would, if I wanted rough sex, have plunged into a maelstrom with my lover, his every move and mine unpredictable, dangerous, taking both of us into uncharted territory — or else why bother?

It hit me that I had to leave this city soon. I had worked at Carrie’s Place for two years, and its vibe was now claustrophobic. I was bred in such an ordered space — missionary zeal, appropriate codes of conduct, common sense — and the demon inside me busted off its fragile tapia roof as soon as it could. I left home alone, estranged from my family who migrated after I did and settled out west. I ended up here, in Toronto — one more immigrant, a visible minority worker counseling battered women and children. Their fright in the face of life’s blows, the cavernous wasteland of despair my job revealed, pushed my own unease into the background and helped in postponing my own reckoning.

I felt useful there. And I liked feeling useful. But I was lonely, no lover, no real friend except Ella from back home, she who had migrated too and married instantly and well to a prof in the university where she first landed a clerical job. Now she was the manager of the institution’s Office for Racial Equity, almost an ombudsman’s (-woman’s) position, she would brag, poking fun at my own lean and hungry ways.

“You need a good professional man who adores you and who you can grow to love, sweetie.” She would chuck my chin and threaten to introduce me to yet another engineering type from her husband’s department. “They come in all stripes these days, sweetie,” she would go on, until I collapsed, giggling at the thought of a procession of would-be suitors inspected by her, surreptitiously or otherwise, and all for my benefit, though a couple of times she did let slip that a meeting had gone on too long or a setup for me had, alas, boomeranged in her direction.

Ella would cheer me up but it would not last, the doom of the years ahead slamming into my lone wolf ruminations. It wasn’t another person so much as another beat that I yearned for, one not overcome by the ease of propriety, one with a cussed, impossible sense of style. It was Trinidad that I longed for — that crazy, maverick place, the strange logic of its illogic, its contradictions, that walk and talk that haunted me day and night, which would not, could not, leave me alone.

In this mood I telephoned Micah, not my lover really, although we had been lovers and friends for the last two years in what we saw as a thoroughly modern, noncommittal sort of way, separated by the wide Atlantic. I wailed and ranted about my sorry lot and in the end accepted an invitation to stay at his house while I sorted out the misery of my untidy life.

Flying low over the Northern Range, picking out the Rasta huts in small clearings, wondering who lived there and how they managed for everyday things — no road, no waterway even, just a hut, a vegetable patch maybe and then deep forest, the symmetry of valleys and mountains undisturbed for centuries. I could hardly contain my anticipation as the contours of my early island home defined itself, its odd shape, its forest, swampland, and undulating plains set out in such clear geographical alignment that surely, only a deliberate hand, the hand of an ancient god, could have achieved it.

Arriving at Piarco airport, the air washed clean after the rain, my heartbeat quickened as I spotted Micah waiting, exuding his usual restraint, looking older than our meeting last year, his beard now beginning to gray slightly. I felt tender toward him, his unconcerned elegance, his long tapering fingers, his deep sincerity. This is a man I could love, I thought, unlike Ella’s fix-ups. Micah held me close, his warmth a welcome relief from emptiness, and I thought how fine it would be to have a shoulder like his to lean on. The talk was light on the way to his house — the latest scandals in the country, corruption, crime, calypso, the IMF and World Bank antics, the dependency of the so-called Third World. I asked about his own assiduous grassroots work.

“The revolution ent happen yet?” I said it as a joke and he grinned wryly.

“Well, no,” he joined my mood, “but we still trying. It go happen soon, don’t fool yuh fat about that.”

We drove along the Eastern Main Road, ducking into the drive-thru market at the Croisee in San Juan, then continuing on the Saddle Road running deep into the Santa Cruz Valley, to his house secreted inside the mountains. The forested peaks lay serene, unmoved by the suburban elements cutting into their sides, the poor people at the bottom, still scrabbling in the dirt, the professionals at the top, their homes cut into terraced rock faces, the whole purple mountain range tumbling behind these architectural wonders perched on rocky promontories like wary gabilans, their claws and beaks at the ready, waiting to swoop down on prey as the opportunity arose. I shuddered at the thought and Micah put a protective arm around my shoulders. A kind man, a good man, but a gabilan all the same, poised for swooping.