"Trinidad is the home of calypso...it sounds like somewhere quaint, exotic, a tropical backwater into which the tensions of European life scarcely intrude. Trinidad is not like that at all...They (the population) constitute what is perhaps the most mixed population in the world.
Africans, Indians, Spaniards, Chinese, Syrians, French, English, together with every conceivable–in a literal sense–combination of these, mix in the streets; mix, but do not mingle, for in spite of the propaganda about dwelling in unity together, the nerve-jangling suspicion and distrust that exist between the various races can be felt all the time, and erupt occasionally in acts of meaningless violence.
"Trinidad's murder and road accident rate is one of the highest in the world...Port-of-Spain is like a modern American city dropped suddenly and complete on the tenth parallel, a pocket Detroit...fighting to realise its own portion of the American dream...it has few shared standards and traditions and no measure of success save material wealth.
The split-level house...the electric gadgets and the wife or mistress starlit with jewels–these are the only valid symbols of achievement, and, once they are obtained, there are few who trouble to ask by what means.
"In the city proper, traffic jostles bumpers through the gridiron of streets, races three abreast down the one-ways to beat the lights, clogs into honking, cursing jams hundreds of yards long. Everywhere new office blocks are going up...A car over two years old is a rarity worth comment; like Americans, Trinidadians seem sold on the idea of expendability, on the swift expansion of the economy which alone can make this possible...Even the skies have a tense, anxious air, are taut with a nervous cross-hatching of overhead power lines...At night, as in so many American cities, there are streets where no law-abiding citizen dare walk. Back of the waterfront, gaudy cabarets pump a vitriolic calypso-tinged jazz into the hot night, offer prostitutes of all colours to seamen from every port in the world. Yet, embedded like fossils in these neon-age strata, one finds Indian tribal customs, primitive African rites and beliefs, proletarian attitudes and patterns of behaviour more typical of the 19th than the 20th century, all mixed incongruously together in a sociologist's nightmare, presenting contrasts as violent as the physical surroundings of the city themselves."
The passage above (apart from the reference to "calypso-tinged jazz") might well apply to our inglorious island of 2014: ethnic tensions; American consumerism; horrendous homicide and road-fatality rates; grand auto obsession and jamming traffic; the pre-modern jostling the postmodern.
I quoted so extensively quite deliberately, as apart from problematic racism/western superiority towards the end, it is just as valid in some of its observations as are Naipaul's in the much-berated The Middle Passage. I am emphatically distancing myself from Sir Vid's dismissal of the Caribbean as a place with no history, where nothing happened, but thinking more of sections like that on the inbred community of St Joseph.
Both texts were published in 1962, although it's probable that the passage I quoted (from English journalist/Creole language scholar Derek Bickerton's The Murders of Boysie Singh) was written pre-Independence. Bickerton was an outsider but by virtue of his dual career can be trusted more than his dismissive imperialist compatriot Froude, who has already received the cuta--e he looked for and by a man far more competent than me to deliver it–the brilliant 19th-century linguist JJ Thomas.
While the tone of Bickerton's passage (extracted from the introduction to his invaluable biography) has some elements of journalistic raciness, his training in research and his meticulous corroboration of facts by interviewing multiple witnesses are cogent arguments for accepting his observations.
His mini-vignette of pre-Independence Trinidad suggests that some of the symptoms of our current implosion have in fact been in place for some time, at least 50 years. If we examine the biography which follows, we'll realise that homicide, violence and skulduggery of every shade have been part of the landscape for a very long time and cannot be attributed to any one ethnic group or minority. Boysie "The Raja" Singh may have only been convicted on one count of murder (shades of present-day abysmal levels of detection) but in his day he certainly enjoyed the reputation of a mass serial killer, with a count of corpses suggested by some as high as 400. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, his piratical exploits at times kept the entire fishing fleet of Port-of-Spain in harbour.
Our memories are shorter than our tempers in Trinidad and Boysie's depravities go as unremarked today as those of Bhadase Maharaj or Dole Chadee.
It is ingenuous at best or intellectually dishonest at worst to attribute our present state of attrition to the Afrocentrism that has characterised some of our post-Independence cultural politics or small islanders, illegal or not. Like America, we are a society founded on violence, murder and exploitation. We won't find a way through this with malicious mauvais langue and bad mind.