Lisa Allen-Agostini - Trinidad Noir

People think they know the Caribbean, the white-sandy-beaches-rum-and-Coca-Cola-smiling-natives-waving-palms Caribbean — you know the one. And sure, the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago has sun, sea, beaches, the whole tourist schtick. But this southernmost country in the Caribbean archipelago is filled with paradoxes. She isn’t always the idyllic tropical dream. Far from it. Sometimes she’s a nightmare.

In Trinidad Noir , you’ll trail the country’s criminals, her prostitutes, her officious bureaucrats, her police, her ordinary citizens. Expect to be intrigued. Expect to be entertained. But don’t expect to understand Trinidad.

It’s ironic that this volume is the first noir collection to come out of this country because, in a sense, Trinidad was founded on crime. Christopher Columbus’s arrival in 1498 was the start of a criminal enterprise of epic proportions: it began with the theft of the island from its indigenous Carib people, then their genocide, followed by African slavery and the importation of indentured labor to man the obscenely lucrative cocoa, sugar, and coffee plantations of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Today, Trinidad’s political climate of excess and corruption is buoyed by an economy bloated with oil and natural gas monies and by an element of society afloat in drugs and guns. There’s fodder enough here for ten volumes of Trinidad Noir .

Trinidad’s history is imprinted in the faces of her people: East Indian, Portuguese, and Chinese indentured laborers; descendents of African slaves; European colonials; and the Syrians and Lebanese who migrated here in the early twentieth century. Black, white, dougla, East Indian, Chinese, and Middle-Eastern Trinis — you’ll meet them all in these pages.

The country’s profound cultural diversity has produced a resilient people. Trinis are characteristically God-fearing, family-oriented, and generous, but despite their apparent insouciance they can also be unscrupulous and divisive. They are often deeply religious yet ridiculously carnal, living a Victorian double-life. By night they love the same neighbors whom they claim to hate by day. Tension among these groups, most notably between the predominant East Indian and African populations, makes for political minefields in almost every aspect of national life. Yet in their everyday lives Trinis coexist peacefully: they live side by side, they intermarry, they lime and fete together.

Each spring most Trinis throw propriety to the wind and strip down to soul essentials for Carnival. Carnival combines the pre-Lenten celebrations of the French planter class during slavery with African masking traditions to form what is arguably the greatest show on earth. Masquerading as characters inspired by fantasy, film, Vegas, nature, and whatever else catches the designers’ fancies, hundreds of thousands of people take to the streets. Together they jump and wine — a sensual dance involving hip gyration — to calypso, soca, and pan, indigenous music created largely by the black working class.

This collection includes stories by some of today’s most acclaimed Caribbean writers, and for such a small country, the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago has an impressive literary legacy. Among the endless traits that typify Trinis — depending upon whom you ask — is a graciousness which is humbling to encounter. We would like to thank our contributors for their immediate and enthusiastic responses to our requests for noir stories, an entirely new genre for some of them. In fictionalizing crime in the real crime setting of Trinidad, they have created a decidedly literary noir collection with their sometimes lyrical, sometimes humorous, sometimes nostalgic, sometimes shocking, but always inventive stories. Their quality characterizations, plots, and styles concurrently reveal the country’s darkness and its appeal with an unexpected and gratifying result: the Trinidad that emerges makes Trinidad Noir as much a delightful crime romp as it is an exposé of the seedy side of life.

Although Trinidad has big-city aspirations in her two main urban areas of Port-of-Spain, the capital, and San Fernando, there is still plenty of country life in her cane-farming central plains, her southern swamps, and her coastal fishing villages. Set in the various parts of the country, these stories reflect the island in all her contradictions. As you turn the pages, you will experience a nation like no other. See for yourself, but bear in mind: there’s nothing a Trini won’t do for you, and there’s nothing a Trini won’t do to you.

Lisa Allen-Agostini & Jeanne Mason

Port-of-Spain, Trinidad

May 2008

Sans Souci

She always left him, wandering off like a cat without provocation or explanation, returning just as suddenly and without comment after a day or a week or a month. He loved her, but it was hard to keep track of where he stood in her life. He kept her clothes neatly stacked in a chest of drawers and hoped for the best.

One day she just didn’t come back. He only found out by accident after six weeks that she had actually moved in with another man in his — their — neighborhood. It was a guy he knew well. They had smoked together and that made them friends of a sort. Not very good friends, evidently, as this guy had had no problem taking his woman away.

After that Trey lost his appetite, partly because eating usually meant buying ingredients at the shop at the corner opposite her new home in Diego Martin’s mostly working-class suburb of Rich Plain Road. He saw her through the fence sometimes in a tiny pair of white short pants, new ones that she didn’t have when she lived with him, hanging kitchen towels out to dry on the lines strung outside. The pants were skintight and he recognized the imprint of her labia through their dense denim folds. The lower curve of her round ass hung just under the frayed hem. Instead of wanting to eat potatoes and corned beef, he’d taste her memory, salty sweet. He grew thin.

Tabanca like that has two cures — new love or exorcism. He chose the latter, only because he saw her in the face of every woman he met and feared that any new partner would also prove fickle and desert him for another man.

Leaving her clothes in the drawers and her compact of cheap brown face powder on the dresser, the only things she had left behind, Trey took off from Diego Martin’s close houses and cramped streets and headed north.

Trey pored over the small pile of dark green herb in his left palm. Nimbly, he shredded the sticky, soft leaves and brown flowers hidden in the mass, picking out the polished black seeds and putting them aside. When the mix was cleaned to his satisfaction, he reached into the front pocket of his colorful nylon shorts and extracted a balled-up piece of white paper. This he unfolded into a two-inch square and poured the cleaned herb onto it. Behind his ear was a single cigarette. Trey pulled it from its nesting spot and broke off about half an inch. He sprinkled the tobacco onto the herb on the paper, then placed the end of the cigarette on the smoothed-out sheet. Rolling the herb into the shape of the cigarette, he meticulously straightened the emerging cylinder. When it was perfectly flush, he wrapped the paper around it, put it to his lips, and licked the flap shut.