Selvon and Me

Trinidad, a late Sunday afternoon. I am in an SUV with four other women making a rare trip down South for a play, not a fete. We are on our way to Naparima Bowl to see a stage adaptation of Samuel Selvon’s 1952 novel, A Brighter Sun. It is May 21, 2023, the day after the author, journalist, and playwright would have celebrated his centenary birthday. From a grave memorial to public readings at a literary festival, commemorative events have taken place around the island all month.

San Fernando/Sando/South, a city now more populous than the country’s capital, is Selvon’s homeland. In A Guide to Trinidad in 1888, J. H. Collens wrote of the area: “San Fernando de Naparima, as it was originally named, is pleasantly situated at the foot of Naparima hill about 32 miles by water, and 42 by road from Port of Spain” (qtd. in Brereton and Besson 207).

In the driver’s seat is The Senator. Her impatience with the other Sunday drivers on the highway is palpable. She drives as one might expect a government official in the Caribbean to drive. We have been friends since 1993 when we, all of us, met at St. Joseph’s Convent, the oldest secondary school in the country, which was founded in 1836 by French nuns. Our polyethnic carload of past pupils would have caused bacchanal back then. In The Stranger Who Was Myself (2023), Barbara Jenkins, a student at the convent school in the fifties, wrote that it was “reserved for the daughters of the white merchant class and the plantation-owning cedula de la poblacion-descended Catholic, god-sanctioned elite” (119).

Conversation in the SUV is constant. Voices volley from the successes and shortfalls of past governments, to false eyelashes, to the economic perils of the pandemic, to who attended the small lime at The Senator’s house the night before, to the cost of private healthcare, to past pupil association politics at our alma mater, to guns and a woman’s need to know how to use one, to the strip of food trucks where we will eat after the play. We cycle through topics with the ease of gossiping schoolgirls. It is as though, on the cusp of middle age, we are caught in an exchange with our younger selves; a flickering push and pull between the past and present day. Everything and nothing has changed since lunchtime behind the locked school gates on Pembroke Street in Port of Spain.

We were sixteen or seventeen when we met Selvon on the page. A Brighter Sun was one of several books on the English Literature syllabus for our CXC examinations.¹ Our year group was part of the transitional generation as those in charge attempted to widen the distance from the British colonial beginnings of the education system in the country. But goat doh make sheep. The effort was tantamount to a practice in semantics. To this day, the curricula of secondary schools in Trinidad and Tobago, and up the archipelago to other CARICOM states, continue to be tethered to the colonial project in their philosophy and practice.

During our first five years at secondary school, I remember studying only one other Caribbean author alongside Selvon. Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John was the first book I saw myself in. We, the “crème de la crème,” as our principal described us from the chapel pulpit during the morning assembly of our first day of school in 1993, were raised on the fiction and plays of mostly white European and American authors. Our sense of self was created between the lines of books such as Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Flowers for Mrs. Harris, and Waiting for Godot. Thomas Hardy, Paul Gallico, and Samuel Beckett, three white men writing through time to an island built on the genocide of its indigenous peoples, colonialism, and forced settlement through the Atlantic slave trade and indentureship.

~

Laughter bursts forth in the SUV like a spring from the hills of the Northern Range during the rainy season. The Bank Manager has just belted out, “High hopes…high hopes!” Her rendition of the song popularized by Frank Sinatra refocuses our conversation in the car on a single topic. “Allyuh remember that?” She asks. She is speaking of the time when Mr. H., our drama and choir teacher, took us from town to South to perform for a school festival at Naparima Bowl. Her impromptu performance leads us back to the reason we are all together, back to Selvon’s play.

The Senator, The Oil and Gas Exec, The Caterer, The Bank Manager, and I, The Writer, discuss who remembers reading A Brighter Sun. All of us remember the book; few of us remember Selvon’s plot that follows the quest of Tiger, his sixteen-year-old protagonist, towards adulthood. Tiger seeks self-actualization as a man, husband, provider. “To my wife, I man when I sleep with she. To bap, I man if I drink rum. But to me, I no man yet” (Selvon 40). Tiger and his wife, Urmilla, a child herself, come of age in the new housing settlement of Barataria, just east of Port of Spain, form new relationships across race lines, and face the fallout of the Second World War.

Our destination is imminent. As our conversation reduces to a trickle, I look out the window at the “Monopoly houses” built by one of those governments we were talking about. The houses fail to live up to the hype they were built on. Stains of mildew weep down the once-pastel concrete walls. I am now thinking of how much the story of Tiger and Selvon’s cast reads like a story of grief. How does Tiger remake himself, while mourning the life he leaves behind? Or maybe I am just projecting. Grief has a way of taking up space.

~

The gold, the gold

The gold, the gold

The gold in Africa

Mussolini want from the Emperor

The play begins with a refrain from a Growling Tiger² calypso. Originally recorded in 1936, “The Gold in Africa” is a meditation on Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia. The choice of a calypso to open the show is well considered. Selvon was thought to embody the artform’s spirit (McGoogan 68). The influence of calypso is both documented and critiqued in relation to his work. The Lonely Londoners, which followed A Brighter Sun, in 1956, is one such text, widely discussed for its “presentation of women and for its propagation of triumphalising forms of black male heterosexual behaviour” (Houlden 24). The blame for this is laid partly on another calypso storyteller, The Mighty Sparrow, and his enduring yet controversial hit, Congo Man.

I, along with most children born in the early eighties I would guess, sang Sparrow’s lyric “eat she rawrrrr” gleefully long before we knew there was such a word as “cunnilingus.” The guttural tone of his voice was akin to a lion’s roar. It was simply child’s play, in our minds.

Innuendo aside, I wonder about the political significance of opening the play with music imbued with African traditions and history. Race relations, particularly those between the descendants of enslaved Africans and indentured Indians in Trinidad inspired Selvon throughout his career. Through Tiger’s introspection and relationships, Selvon reached across division lines drawn in part by Imperialism. A man before his time, some might say. This is unlike the current state of the nation’s party politics. What might the play authors’ choice suggest about calypso’s role as a magnifier of “colliding or overlapping ethnicities” (Rohlehr 324)? Or does this literary device foreshadow what is to come with the Americans in the then plantation society?

I wonder, too, what Selvon would think about the gospel-singing Sparrow of today.

As the curtains go up, all our laughter about the blonde-and-black toupéed man in gold soft pants from the carpark, along with our resulting concern that we may be underdressed for the occasion, disappears. We, along with the packed audience, are mesmerized. To borrow the words of Shazim Khan, a reviewer for the Trinidad and Tobago Performing Arts Network, “the stage is a visual feast.” Iere Theatre Productions worked with designer Narad Mahabir to create the 1940s set, which spotlights three main locations where the plot unfolds: Tiger and Urmilla’s mud hut, the board house of their neighbors, Joe and Rita, and Tall Boy’s haberdashery and rum shop.

Old habits die hard. My hands remember the practice of making notes in the dark while watching plays in Toronto. At the time, I was studying under Canadian playwright and dramaturge Judith Thompson in an MFA program. “Seeing comes before words” (Berger 7), and I attempt to draw what I am seeing on the page in a small notebook in my lap. Pen ready to jot down lines when they come. No actor has uttered a word, but I am already anticipating the words of Joe, Tiger’s reluctant friend in the story: “What is to is, must is.” This was Joe’s way of telling Tiger that his wish for a son was up to the cosmos. It is a line I still use as a mantra to this day for different reasons.

Soon the audience is introduced to the characters on the stage. The men are the focus at the top of the first act:

The set piece of Tall Boy’s shop reminds me of the pan yard of my childhood. His goods of flour and lard become the instruments of the orchestra. Boysie stands in for the rolling-stone men who visit the yard every night during Panorama but never play a note. Sookdeo is the stalwart who has been with the band before it had a sponsor. Crackshot Joe learns the music almost as fast as he drinks rum. When the bar in the pan yard is open during rehearsals, rum becomes the fuel to ignite debates. Where the proprietors of Tall Boy’s shop discuss the quality of crops, the men, and a few women, like my mother, discuss the quality of the music offered by the arranger. I am Tiger in this scene, hanging onto the words I hear and the ones I should not. My identity is shaped by the exchanges around me.

It is in the shop where we watch Tiger and the supporting cast congregate to navigate a central conflict in the plot: the Americans and their plans to build a highway through the farmlands of the settlement. Tiger stands to benefit if he gives up his land to the Americans. He is attracted by the prospect of achieving his dream of progress, the measure of a man, more quickly than the sale of provisions can provide. His neighbor, Joe, shows him what is possible with American money. Joe works on one of the American bases established on the island during the war. He has a bed, galvanized roof, forks and spoons. These, and an education, are the symbols of manhood that Tiger wants. He ventures to ask Sookdeo to teach him how to read.

~

While writing this essay from Toronto several months after our journey to San Fernando, I raised the question of our school booklist in a WhatsApp group chat with other “old girls.” “Besides Annie John and A Brighter Sun, what other books by Caribbean authors did we study between Form 1 and 5?” I asked. I hoped to prove myself wrong. Titles popped on the screen in white and green speech bubbles. A virtual head scratching ensued. “Harriet [‘s Daughter] and A Raisin in the Sun were African American if I’m not mistaken,” one past pupil asserted. M. NourbeSe Philip, author of the former, was born in Tobago and lives in Toronto. Another past pupil, expressed regret at the missed opportunity to study a book such as Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night, a chance she encountered at an American university. “They would never have done that one at convent,” she added. If Mootoo’s book had made it onto our booklist, her themes of queerness and sexual violence would have likely led to a book ban. A lawyer and international environmental law specialist, she also tried to convince the group about the significance of John Wyndham’s The Chrysalids to our current reality. This title received mixed reviews in the chat. “It’s an amazing parable about how we just don’t know ourselves as a species or what we’re capable of.” An hour or half a day passed. When I looked at my phone again, the non-exhaustive list was proof positive.

~

Selvon’s Dry River in A Brighter Sun lives in memory as my paternal grandmother’s house on upper Oxford St. There, I am playing in red dirt, despite her swizzle-stick threats that never turn into licks. I am pulling the stamen from her ixora flowers, hungry for the tickle of honey against my tongue; picking the raisins out of her sweetbread until she decides to bake a small one for me without them. I am playing catch, my sweat still smell-free, in a yard across the street where a boy named Stokley Carmichael (Kwame Ture) used to live. Peering over his wall on tiptoe or, maybe, an old pitch oil tin, he watched my father and other boys in the neighborhood pitch marbles, play bat and ball; his eyes twitchy with nerves, as he waited for his aunt’s bicycle to round the corner of Observatory and Oxford Streets.

These are also the days when I would sit on my grandmother’s couch with my mother, my hair Daxed and dress pressed, waiting to see my father who had just come to visit from away.

At the time of writing, my grandmother is ninety-nine. She can no longer knead flour; can only squeeze water onto the plants in her gallery from an old plastic sweet drink bottle, but when her mout’ open, the stories still jump out. “What Granny could tell yuh…,” she starts. From Casablanca to COVID, she is a theater.

Selvon’s Ma Lambie could have been my grandmother, and her nephew, Joe Martin, raised as her grandson, my father. Perhaps as he wrote Selvon believed that all that separated us in the wash of the river was opportunity. He certainly gave voice to those who had very little of it. Though, I would not understand the value of texts such as Selvon’s till much later. At sixteen, I read as I was told.

As an aside, WhatsApp has also become the CDN (Caribbean Diaspora News) of the “Dry River.” A place to share grief in images I do not have the belly to describe. The ability to click and share these images also means the ending of a world to me. But how did we reach here? To the lives lost and the lives watching.

~

When we became “convent girls” in 1993, Selvon was living in Trinidad, having just returned to the island to write his personal story. He had lived “outside” in the UK and Canada for more than forty years by that point. A descendant of migrants from India and Scotland, Selvon’s middle-class upbringing was in stark contrast to Tiger, in A Brighter Sun, who made his life in the soil, following the path laid by his indentured ancestors. But Selvon seemed to follow the credo of his friend, Austin Clarke, a Caribbean compatriot and fellow writer who believed writers should let the world “come at them.” A mentee of Clarke’s shared his teaching at a 2017 conference hosted by York University and University of Toronto to celebrate his life, work, and legacy.

In a conversation with Kenneth Ramchand for Canadian Literature: A Quarterly of Criticism and Review in 1982, Selvon divulged that he was living in Barataria, where the novel is set, between 1945 and 1950. The book was released two years after he left for England. I imagine the conversations he was a part of, or better yet, eavesdropped on like a maco to imbue his characters with their authenticity. However, when asked by Ramchand about those choices, the “design of the novel, the structure, the choice of characters and even some of the conversations,” Selvon said no more. “I start a book and I allow this creativity/charisma that writers are supposed to have to do its thing” (Selvon 58).

What about the autobiography never finished? I imagine the questions on process and form I would have liked Selvon to divulge. How would he have reflected on the “urban, creole, and western” influences on his life to render himself on the page (Ali 2023)? Would he have chosen a muse as C.L.R. James did with cricket for Beyond a Boundary? What scenes from his life would he have selected as his “autobiographical example”? Hartman attributed this phrase to the scholarship of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Nahum Dimitri Chandler in an interview in Anthurium with Patrica J. Saunders about the work of telling untellable stories in “the aftermath of slavery” (Saunders 5). “The autobiographical example…is not a personal story that folds onto itself; it’s not about navel gazing, it’s really about trying to look at historical and social process and one’s own formation as a window onto social and historical processes, as an example of them” (5). Hartman linked this process to reflections on her book, Lose Your Mother. Would Selvon have curated “the archival material, both intimate and impersonal…” of his life (Smith and Watson 9)? Would he have experimented with form and hybridity producing a multimodal work that blended the page and stage?

“There has long been a tradition in the theatre for imagining the voice of the specter, and subsequently, through the novel and poetry, writers could address themselves to the ghost” (Saunders 5).

~

I have been addressing ghosts for some time now, which is to say writing a memoir. I attempted to conjure my first muse, Vaughn, through a play called VOWS. In the play, the character of Vaughn is speaking from the afterlife to a woman named Akeisha, who is loosely based on younger me. Akeisha is getting married and reflecting on the privilege to love a woman out loud, while Vaughn, her uncle, was relegated to the shadows for loving the men he did.

In real life Vaughn and I shared no blood, but he was family. He was our neighbor and my maternal grandmother took him in after his father threw him out because he was gay. I have no memory of his moving in, I was about two years old at the time, but I latched on to him like moss as I grew up. After my grandmother died, he remained, sleeping in the bedroom next to the one my mother and I shared. Until one day he left our house or was asked to leave. I am unclear about the cause and effect of the events. The next minute, or so the measure of time seemed in my pre-teen mind, he was dead. The day we got the news I watched my mother from the passenger seat of her Datsun Sunny as she spoke in hushed tones to Vaughn’s brother outside our gate. He had been warded at Caura hospital for months, a place where people are known to go to die. “Vaughn died of AIDS,” my mother said when she came back to the car. Then she put the handbrake down, the gear into neutral, and rolled the car down into our yard. A chapter of my life closed noiselessly. That was the last we ever spoke of his death or his life. He died a year or so after I entered the convent school.

There is no one, alive or dead, that I could have a meaningful conversation with about Vaughn that would not end in a pejorative. No one to whom I could speak about his dreams, his anxieties. If his nose favored his mother’s. Or where he learned to laugh. So, I made us meet again in a story.

The second ghost, my mother, is more slippery. I was an adult newcomer to Canada when she died suddenly of a heart attack in Trinidad one December. As I attended to the remains of her life in the wake of her death in my birth country, I contended with the emergence of unexpected forms of grief in the one I now called home. A story my mother recited to me, her only child, lived in that splintered grief. “I raised a total woman,” she said after I told her about the woman I met in a Toronto steel band with whom I was falling in love. Being queer, in her eyes, seemed to mean we had both failed at the project of making me, a “good girl” into a “good woman.”

I am what remains of my mother. The memoir is the story of my making and re-making as a woman who must reconcile her identity of being black, queer, and Caribbean in the Diaspora.

Selvon died of a heart attack in 1994 before completing his life story.

~

I am sixteen. It is the year before the CXC exams, the term is not yet a week old, and I am in mourning. Tupac Shakur has died. I walk the halls of the convent school wearing a looped black ribbon on the lapel of my school blouse. America is in my imagination, beamed into my living room via cable television, and West Coast rapper Tupac is my latest teenage infatuation.

I earned a distinction in the English Literature exam and close the book on Selvon for decades.

~

The dreams of “going away” started long before our television went from two channels to infinity (this was the feeling), with American cable TV stations. The dreams were in shipping barrels that arrived from New York smelling of Irish Spring bath soap and containing small appliances like a microwave. These were sent by my mother’s friends who left from the “Dry River” in the sixties. The dreams were in photographs of my mother wearing a mauve faux fur coat standing on the stoop of the building in the Bronx where she lived while going to secretarial college. She had followed a man from the “Dry River” whom she thought she would marry. Incidentally, my father was from the same area, but this was before him. Speaking of my father, the dreams lived through him too. He lived in Canada, which was the same as America to me, at the time.

~

As the play moved through its second act, it was not the dreams of the characters that captivated me. Among the palm fronds, and spray-painted plywood, what I saw instead were ghosts on the stage to be grieved. There was Tiger’s grief about leaving his old way of life. When Urmilla is pregnant with their first child, it was his belief that only a boy child was to be celebrated. The baby girl that is born is his grief to bear. And they share grief at the loss of their second child.

Joe, too, battled grief. “When you go thru all de ting I go thru, you go drink rum too,” he says to Tiger. Ghosts had also followed him from the “Dry River” to Barataria. He tries to drown them in the bottle, lashes out at his wife, Rita.

Then there is grief that the Americans have something better to offer than the Trinidad the villagers know, something worth giving away their land for.

~

I was mostly silent during the road trip to the play. Once or twice, I offered my own anecdote, like one about a local private hospital in St. Clair. My wife had been discharged a few days earlier after a persistent strain of gastroenteritis that we traced back to green plum chow bought on the way to Maracas beach. As her body remembered and then removed everything she had consumed for the past week, my mother’s friend who we were staying with shoo-shooed prescriptions about coconut water and other remedies.

My auntie had been side-eying my wife since we arrived, testing her knowledge of blue food, bush tea, and “boy days.” And now, this. It was not until I was almost back in Toronto that I understood what her illness might have revealed. She was as sick as a foreigner. As a result, her Trinidadian-ness was in question. The illness became a mark against the truth of her heritage. Everybody gets gastro, my auntie tut-tutted days in, but nobody (read: nobody here) gets sick so.

~

I first read the term “Caribbean expatriate” while exploring Selvon’s life and writing through a digital archive created by Caribbean Beat magazine, in collaboration with Bocas Lit Fest. Selvon was said to have assumed this narrative (Ali).

None of the “expats” I have seen in Grenada, St. Lucia, Barbados, Dominica, Tobago look like me. Neither did Selvon.

Though I am sure when he described himself as such, he was not speaking of the brand of expat that is encouraged by PR and citizenship by investment campaigns. About the cycling of capital within the privileged networks of high-net-worth white people who carry British, American, or Canadian passports.

And yet…

An incident during my May trip, shortly before I saw Selvon’s work on stage, gave me pause. I was raised on dasheen, have (unwillingly) drunk karilie bush tea, and (happily) played in more canal water than with dolls, but I no longer know the price of fresh coconut water in Trinidad. This is an everyday grief I was confronted with when I went to Queen’s Park Savannah with my anti-gastro prescription.

The coconut vendor is a YouTube sensation, a regular face in the music videos of soca artistes. As he was filling my two-liter bottle, a young woman approached him. She was vying for the title of Ms. Trinidad and Tobago, looking to make him a star again in an Instagram reel to satisfy a challenge for the semi-final round. The coconut vendor was in the middle of telling me the story of the foreday morning attack that left his left hand and arm severely damaged. His fingers on that hand are now no more than decoration. Luckily, he is right-handed.

Before he raised his cutlass with his good hand, he asked about the sick and the ailment. I said gastro and he said only the young coconuts will do. Before the bottle was filled, I asked the price. This was a mistake. He then called a price and stopped looking at me. Our eyes no longer made four. I was stunned, but I did not know any better. I should have asked my aunt before I left her house; I should have walked to another vendor; I should have haggled. All I could think of was the color that had left my wife’s face. Besides, what did I know about the price of coconuts these days? I asked myself. I forgot the price as soon as I paid him.

~

In Dreaming of Elsewhere: Notes on Home, Esi Edugyan writes that “Home is the first exile.” Born in Calgary, Selvon’s final foreign homeland, to Ghanaian parents, the writer’s words were first offered at a Henry Kreisel Memorial Lecture in 2013. I found them in 2018 when I started dreaming of, then attempting to write a story about grief. About losing my mother and finding myself in and out of exile.

~

My mother hawked and spat out of our bedroom window each morning, watering the bush below; sometimes she peed standing up in our shower; and she abhorred “green” verbs. An executive secretary for her entire working life, she trained in New York and Scotland and was a stickler for the standard English conjugation of verbs, along with cocoa spice pantyhose and starched trousers. Though neither her last name nor her love of the English language could save her from European racism when she lived in 1960s Scotland. She was invited to interview for every secretarial job she applied for and was promptly rejected when the people hiring saw the black, five-foot-nine woman who appeared. She eventually found a job with a Nigerian doctor, who eventually wanted to marry and take her back to his home. She promptly turned him down, fearing she would lose her freedom on the continent.

True to Selvon’s literary style, the play’s script features Trinidadian dialect throughout. As the narrative nears its end, I revel in the joy of hearing our language. It is the same language that nearly made Selvon a problem at the convent school. His use of a Trinidadian dialect tripped up some of the students. Mrs. F., our literature teacher, was a woman who slipped in and out of the “Queen’s English” and Trinidad English as easily as one might mistakenly swallow instead of suck a plump chenette seed. And she felt safe to do so with us. One day a student took Mrs. F to task for her “loose” tongue. She questioned Mrs. F’s position as our English teacher who uses “green” verbs. Mrs. F cut her down to size like a mango tree with blight.

~

Toronto, December 2023. I am sitting in a rented cubicle, a long way from mango season and Sando. Outside, on the block between Parliament and Sherboune, frozen hunched bodies make an obstacle course of Queen Street. Winter is coming, but the weather is not to be blamed. Fentanyl, or some similar opioid cocktail, courses through their veins.

What would Selvon write about this heartbreak, in the largest city of a country he loved?

The cubicle is self-imposed, a way to create structure as I work through revisions on the memoir manuscript. Sometimes writing yourself out of a box requires going into one.

I crave space because I am living with my father again, after twelve years, and when he watches television, he watches it for the neighborhood. The volume ranges between 20 and 40 clicks. He prefers the BBC for what he believes are more balanced views of the Gaza genocide. When the grief suffocates, he finds breath in televised sports.

Before I moved to Canada and into his apartment the first time as a “permanent resident,” our time together could be measured in Carnivals. As in, I only saw him at Carnival. He started to return to Trinidad after I was born; timed his visit with Calypso Fiesta in Skinner’s Park, another treasure of the South.

When he is not watching television, attending funerals, serving on his co-op board, liming with his contemporaries, he is reading. Books litter his bed. One day I see the seven-year-old boy in him as he lies on his stomach, legs bent at the knees and dangling in the air. Only the neck pillow, and the bald spot at the back of his head, bring me back to the present. In the library of his downtown Toronto apartment, the landscape of Caribbean literature is mangrove thick. Selvon is there. It is with my memories of Naparima, ole talk, and home that I am grateful to have read Selvon when I did. He is among the writers who teach me about the nuance of Caribbean Diaspora storytelling and how to reach beyond the boundaries of my imagination.