Carisa Lee

Re­porter

carisa.lee@cnc3.co.tt

Thir­ty-five years af­ter the 1990 at­tempt­ed coup, au­thor Otan­cia Noel has chan­nelled her mem­o­ries and imag­i­na­tion in­to Town on Fire, a col­lec­tion of short sto­ries root­ed in one of the coun­try’s most trau­mat­ic events.

Un­like many pre­vi­ous works in­spired by the 1990 in­sur­rec­tion—such as Monique Rof­fey’s House of Ash­es and Louis Lee Sing’s mem­oir—Noel’s fic­tion stands apart for its deeply per­son­al con­nec­tion. She grew up on the Mu­cu­rapo Road com­pound where the Ja­maat-al-Mus­limeen mosque is lo­cat­ed, and al­though she was not phys­i­cal­ly present dur­ing the coup, the ex­pe­ri­ence left a last­ing im­pact.

Speak­ing dur­ing an in­ter­view at Guardian Me­dia ear­li­er this week, Noel ex­plained that her up­bring­ing on the com­pound gave her a unique per­spec­tive.

“I didn’t just speak to the peo­ple that I grew up with,” she said. “This is not about that. I spoke to peo­ple who were hostages.”

The six-day in­sur­rec­tion be­gan on Ju­ly 27, 1990, when mem­bers of the Ja­maat-al-Mus­limeen stormed the Red House and TTT, tak­ing then-prime min­is­ter ANR Robin­son and sev­er­al gov­ern­ment of­fi­cials hostage.

The siege end­ed on Au­gust 1 un­der an amnesty agree­ment, but left 24 peo­ple dead and the na­tion trau­ma­tised.

Noel was just 16 years old at the time. She re­called watch­ing the coup un­fold on tele­vi­sion, par­tic­u­lar­ly the shock­ing im­ages broad­cast live from the TTT stu­dios.

In one of her sto­ries, she fic­tion­alis­es a mo­ment where she iden­ti­fies the Ja­maat leader—“the Khalif”—on screen by a pop­py pin she had giv­en him days ear­li­er.

“On the screen, not the aliens, guess who sit­ting down in a big ex­ec­u­tive chair like he go­ing to read the news that night—the Khalif,” she wrote.

That scene comes from one of the sto­ries that opens Town on Fire, told from the point of view of a char­ac­ter ob­serv­ing events from the com­pound. It blends fact with fic­tion, in­clud­ing ref­er­ences to a Ju­mu’ah ser­mon, a foot­ball match at the Queen’s Park Sa­van­nah, and a dra­mat­ic run-in with po­lice by char­ac­ters who un­know­ing­ly trans­port weapons in­to town.

“Af­ter Ju­mu’ah, Smal Boy and four oth­ers jump in a taxi from by the mosque to go to town ... Next thing is Wee oww! Wee oww! Well, them thought they was sit­ting ducks,” the sto­ry reads.

While fic­tion­al, these ac­counts are drawn from re­al mem­o­ries, com­mu­ni­ty nar­ra­tives, and the charged at­mos­phere Noel ex­pe­ri­enced grow­ing up dur­ing and af­ter the coup.

The sto­ries span not just the in­sur­rec­tion it­self but the weeks lead­ing up to it and its af­ter­math.

One par­tic­u­lar­ly poignant end­ing imag­ines the Khalif aban­don­ing his call for mar­tyr­dom in or­der to live, while a teenage fol­low­er is not as lucky: “Meh sev­en­teen-year-old broth­er, he did not get the chance to walk out­ta it like meh fa­ther and he leader.”

Oth­er sto­ries in the 16-piece col­lec­tion ex­plore the per­spec­tives of Mus­lim women and teenagers, and one even draws par­al­lels be­tween the com­pound’s lat­er evo­lu­tion and the rise of ISIS. Noel al­so weaves folk­lore in­to the col­lec­tion, ded­i­cat­ing three sto­ries to her grand­moth­er.