Last weekend I had a back-to-front d�j� vu, which in some ways returned me to the Trinidad of 1987. While passionate about history, I don't tend to dwell in either a collective or personal past. When I read history I'm there, as I was in London during the torrid summer when I first read CLR James' The Black Jacobins, which burst off the page with the vengeance of Dessalines and the concealed smiles of Toussaint L'Ouverture, transporting me to Saint Domingue of 1793 long before I ever got to Haiti.
The spirit of a place can infuse one with all the sensations and a torrent of sensory and cognitive memories that hearing a favourite song from an earlier time in your life evinces. And places, some more than others, have a habit of absorbing traces of the people who've frequented them. So it was for me, last Saturday, when I returned to the home of the Blue Thunder, El Dorado East Secondary School, formerly El Do Senior Comp.
I was back in the same school hall where I had made a halting farewell speech back in July 1988, after my year as a Commonwealth Exchange teacher had so abruptly ended. I didn't want to leave then, but I'd signed an immutable contract. Within a couple of months of the farewell speech I was back in London. But then a couple of months after that, I was back in Trinidad and I'm still here. Some things you really can't see coming, however much you wish for them.
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