While I exist in a nebulous state between bureaucratic lines, so I'm neither in limbo nor above the bar, an unzoned taxpayer nevertheless, the kind of condition someone like Jorge Luis Borges, the blind Argentinian librarian, would have appreciated, I am firmly grounded in the east.
Prosaically and topographically squeaking (yes–eek eek) my place in Chinimad is west of Arima but east of Mount Hope. I've spent the best part of nearly 30 years in Tunapuna, St Augustine, Five Rivers, Monte Grande, Pasea, the "swamp" over the highway and St Joseph.
None of this was accidental. Before I arrived on a Commonwealth teaching exchange in 1987, I was asked where I would like to be located. I immediately replied, as close as possible to UWI; not because I intended to enroll, but because I wanted access to the library and particularly the West Indian collection. Nothing happens by accident. Even before applying for the Commonwealth Exchange I'd had intentions of crossing the Atlantic to reach the Caribbean.
Originally I was heading for Guyana, having read London-based Guyanese novelist Roy AK Heath's tortured Georgetown trilogy In the Heat of the Day, which gripped my imagination with the same intensity that Dostoyevsky's novels had done during adolescence.
I interviewed Heath at the office of his publisher–in those days Allison and Busby, Margaret Busby being one half of this husband-and-wife radical black imprint. Already a voracious reader of Caribbean literature and aware that there was little critical analysis of Heath's work, I decided to abandon the doldrums of Inner London teaching and resume the postgrad work I'd always intended until becoming thoroughly disenchanted with the academy in my final year at Oxford.
Ambitious and unrealistic, I thought a doctoral thesis on Heath would be just the thing. At that point–probably about 1983–I hadn't met Dr Amon Saba Saakana, who in 1996 would publish Colonialism and the Destruction of the Mind-Psychosocial Issues of Race, Class, Religion and Sexuality in the Novels of Roy Heath based on his own MA dissertation. I wouldn't get to meet Trinidad-born Saba for another ten years, although he was moving in the same west London ambit as myself. Another story, another time.
But back to 1983–my parents were living at one end of the same street in Bayswater, the other end of which flew the Guyanese flag over the High Commission. I made inquiries about travelling to Guyana, but met with polite yet firm rebuttal. Forbes Burnham at that point was more interested in getting rid of people rather than welcoming them.
I put the projected research and thesis on hold and turned my full attention to Trinidad, which had flared up in my imagination since the magic day I began reading CLR James' magnificent Black Jacobins. I met James one autumn afternoon, me bearing the introductory bottle of brandy, while he reclined on his bed in his Brixton billet and with total charm granted me a lengthy interview, recorded on arm-breaking video camera.
The interview began as James' thoughts on his old friend Ralph Ellison's The Invisible Man, but ranged much further, and I had the privilege and benefit of listening to one of the great minds of the 20th century–something I'd hoped for at Oxford, only to be bitterly disappointed.
When I managed to overcome my awe and resume my customary boldface mode, I explained I'd be using the video for some of my secondary-school literature classes. James was magnanimous–a true gent and scholar combined; he told me to visit anytime and bring my students with me.
Like the fool I'm always capable of being, I didn't return, swept along in the detritus of worthless metropolitan neuroses.
The next time I encountered James was at his funeral, right here in the East. I remember pausing beside the Priority Bus Route to watch tassa drummers heat their goatskin drumheads before joining the funeral procession to the Tunapuna cemetery.
I was immeasurably sad, feeling a great gap in my own life, the loss of a mentor and inspiration, whose influence on my life's trajectory is with me every time I sit down to write, or walk into a classroom to discuss the Caribbean and its world and its place in the world.
I wrote a poem, an elegy I guess, which of course I've lost but my only consolation, then as now, was and is the fact that James was a man from the East, a 'Puna man, peeping from the window of his family home at the cricket pitch, which became the locus of his life's work.I tried living in town; quite close to asylum, how appropriate. I almost lost my life, courtesy some young hillside banditos. I certainly lost my mind for a while, and then I came back east.
Now I'm in good company: my neighbours include George Padmore, Learie Constantine and at a stretch, John La Rose, another Trini from Arima who migrated west to London. More of him soon.