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There has always been a love hate relationship with small islanders, even the bigger Trinidadians. Please read and its not funny:-
Wailing down the place
In our Time
Wayne Brown
Sunday, November 20, 2005
'Freshman, where you fram?'
'Sir! Trinidad, sir!'
This was at UWI, Mona, October '65, in the course of that licit ventilation of stupidity and sadism known as Freshman's Week.
'Say again, freshman?'
'Sir! Trinidad, sir!'
'Freshman! Shorely you mean Treeneedad-h'an'-Tabago!'
'Yessir. Trinidad and Tobago, sir.'
'But freshman, 'ow is dat possible?'
Here the squatting interlocutor turns to his fellow seniors, already beginning to grin bulbously in pleasant anticipation of the well-worn but apparently still hilarious punch line.
Wayne Brown
'Fellow Jamaicans! Fellow-lions of Chancellor! You nevah 'ear dem say Treeneedad an' Tabago is two deefrant h'islan's?'
Grins; giggles; grunts of 'So dem say,' and 'True, true.'
'Den freshman' - your interrogator turning back to you - 'You mean you a'kom 'ere an' tell we dat you barn' - and here he begins to shake with abdominal mirth, while, sitting around the room with legs crossed, more than one of his incontinent henchmen starts slapping his thighs or throwing his head back against the wall:
'You mean you gwine sit dere and tell h'aal dese grown men 'ere'...(gasp)...'dat you barn, hoo, hoo, hoo!' - he can't finish the sentence, spasms of mirth have begun erupting in its path like little minefields - 'dat you barn weed wan fute h'een Treeneedad h'an de h'adder...de h'adder...Oh Jesus' - tears are squeezing from his eyes - 'de h'adder fute h'een Tabago?'
Pandemonium. Seniors rolling on the floor, seniors gasping for breath, cross-legged seniors, heads back and hugging themselves, laughing till they're crying.
Great sense of humour, Jamaicans.
Yet in time you would come to see their point.
As either the name of a sovereign state or a constitutional arrangement, 'Trinidad and Tobago' makes no sense; makes no more sense than 'Trinidad, Tobago and Monos' would. What was required was a name that would encompass both islands in denoting a single political entity.
But this wasn't seen at the time - the British Government was in a rush - and in any case there's a glutinous gracelessness about what would doubtless have been the main candidate, 'Trinbago'.
Bahrain's Rashed Abdul Rahman (right) vies with Dwight Yorke of Trinidad and Tobago during their World Cup 2006 Asian qualifier in Manama November 16. (Photo: AFP)
So Trinidad and Tobago was proclaimed (were proclaimed?) a nation - a linguistic anomaly every bit as enervating as the geographical imprecision, touristy schmaltz and bad grammar of its national anthem. (Trinidad and Tobago don't stand 'side by side,' but cattacorner; they aren't 'islands of the blue Caribbean Sea': Trinidad, its east coast washed by the Atlantic, and its south and west coasts enclosing the Gulf of Paria, subsists in the brown gargle of the Orinoco; and 'every creed and race' doesn't 'find an equal place' here, it 'finds.' Or it ought to, grammatically, anyway).
So, as I say, in time I came to understand my Jamaican interrogators' point (if not their cretinous ecstasy). But that was many years later. At the time, 'Tobago' meant to me a place as substantively different from Trinidad as the Ionian Isles, say, are from Bulgaria; and, as for the titular disavowal of this, I suppose I merely ignored it.
Above all, Tobago meant - once and for always! - the beach where a golden girl in a sky-blue swimsuit, high-cut for those days, with yellow and white horizontal slashes, clasped her hands behind her bum as, thoughtfully, gingerly, balancing on the ball of one foot, she drew with the big toe of the other foot a perfect O (though perhaps it is memory that perfects it) in the central square of a large Noughts & Crosses game inscribed in the sand before her: a game which, miraculously, tramping humans and the normally dispassionate tide both left untouched for two days and a night.
After that I left Trinidad - or 'Trinidad and Tobago' - for Mona, in effect freezing the latter island in my mind, like a video left on Pause, so that for 20 years, in various countries, 'Tobago' went on meaning her (her of the bold-shy smile!) and an arc of beaches stretching from Store Bay to Mt Irvine.
Then, one Easter in the mid-80s, I went over to Charlotteville, and after that Tobago also meant the big blue horseshoe bay which was as pretty as a postcard in a certain light, but whose villagers seemed irrevocably lost, consigned by the cramping hills to a forgotten sliver of the world where, on many of the doorsteps of the ugly concrete houses (and it was my 11-year-old daughter - also Mariel - who pointed this out) empty rum bottles stood in piles.
[double space]
The above is taken from an edition of In Our Time published in the Trinidad Guardian almost exactly 12 years ago - at which time this columnist was living in 'Tabago' - and I don't know why it sprang to mind last Wednesday when, while I was online here in Kingston, an email dropped into my Inbox from my elder daughter - the 'second' Mariel, now 31, and the real one, her vanished 'original' (who would now be, unimaginably, 59) having long ago been diffused to mythic stature in my mind.
'Everybody's watching Bahrain vs Trinidad,' my daughter wrote. 'Of course, I'm here at the office.'
And she went on about something else, until, suddenly: 'Oh lorse...We just scored!!!!! Yeahhhhhhh!!!!!'
At which point the above column leapt to mind, the train of thought delivering it via, I presume, these circuitous stations:
1) Dwight Yorke, the TT captain, is a Tobagonian. I was living in his island when I wrote it..
2) .and now, 12 years later, I live here in Jamaica, the island to which I was introduced by the gibberish of Freshman's Week, and their:
3) 'Treeneedad h'an Tabago'. The name still makes no sense, because once you get started, why stop there? Why not 'Treeneedad h'an Tabago h'an Jamaica'? Why not 'The English-speaking Caribbean', or, for that matter, 'The Caribbean'?
4) Tobago equals - still, after 44 years!- Mariel One, she of the bold-shy smile whose name gave rise to the real Mariel, who at 11 pointed out to me the drunken despair of the Charlotteville Tobagonians, and who now had just alerted me to the fact that 'we' - and hold those cherishing claws up to the light: who 'we'? - were at that very moment playing Bahrain in Bahrain for a place in the World Cup finals.
Or something like that, anyway.
I switched on TVJ and proceeded to spend an excruciating 20-something minutes watching the antics of the Soca Warriors as they stopped playing football and started 'playing themselves', 'gallerying' as if the match had already been won, while the Jamaican commentators added the dread of 'goat-mout' to their death-inviting performance by talking, too, as if it were already over and 'we' ('we'?) were already boarding the plane for Germany.
So that when it was in fact over and Mariel phoned, bubbling with excitement, I nearly bawled her out. 'This is why I hate being Trinidadian!' I told her. 'Did you see how hard those fellas tried to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory? They nearly gave me a blasted heart attack!'
The phrase was the Dark Lady's, my Trinidadian muse. And she must have heard me say it, for no sooner had Mariel and I hung up than she phoned.
'So what have you got to say now, Mr Brown?'
'I hear you Trinidadians hate us here,' I told her. How come?'
'You Trinidadians, eh?' She said laughing. 'Well, we don't hate you anymore. You can tell Jamaica that.'
[Jamaica: The Dark Lady says to tell you/us that we/they don't hate you/us anymore. She's the Dark Lady, so when she says something you can take it to the bank.]
I said: 'You know, I have a feeling the disallowed Bahraini goal at the end was really a goal. I mean, the TT goalie wasn't holding the ball; he had thrown it up into the air. You people nearly killed me, man! It's like you used to say: we (who 'we'?) always do our best to snatch defeat..'
'Now listen,' she broke in sternly. 'All you do, don't go and write that in the papers! Remember what happened last time!'
'Last time'. That would have been '89, when, with TT poised to go through - all we had to do was draw with the US at home - the deeply unpopular but quite ruthless NAR government jumped on the team's bandwagon and so cannibalised and orchestrated the build-up to the game that this columnist went into print denouncing that build-up as 'fascist'.
Which, after TT lost - well, of course! The boys were stunned by the insane level of hype, they sleepwalked through that crucial, fatal game - most commentators interpreted to mean that 'Brong' had predicted we would lose (Brong hadn't), and proceeded to kick up your columnist for weeks. ('Word is that Wayne Brown was seen flying the stars-and-stripes on his car'; dangerous libels like that.)
'I won't,' I promised her, lying; but I was basking in her delight and didn't want her to stop. 'So now I suppose y'all going to wail dong de place!'
'Boy! We wailing already!'
We talked for maybe ten minutes, in that peculiar mix of giddy nationalistic happiness and dry-dry Trini 'spin'. Preparing to hang up: 'You sound good,' she said.
'I mus' be good!' I said, by now deep in the dialect. 'Ent we goin' Germany?' (No quotation marks around that 'we' now!)
We hung up. The phone rang.
'Daddeeeee!' It was my younger daughter Saffrey, just re-migrated to Trinidad from London a week ago. 'You saw the game?'
And so it went for the rest of Wednesday afternoon, the phone calls flying between Port-of-Spain and Russell Heights. And for most of Thursday, too, though by then the ecstasy had mercifully declined to a level that could be contained by emails.
'We don't hate Trinis,' said Sharon Leach firmly when I waggishly turned around the charge I'd leveled at the Dark Lady and accused her of it. 'All of Jamaica - at least, the Jamaicans I know - was backing TT to win.'
And I lifted my head and knew it was true, and that, just as all the Trinis I knew had been backing the Reggae Boyz in 97-98, so now the Jamaicans were backing TT. And, realising that to say - after eight years domiciled here in Jamaica - they 'they' were backing 'us' felt somehow just as imprecise as to say that 'we' were backing 'them', I came to the momentous conclusion that mine was a schizophrenia without tension, and that the truest formulation might yet be that We were backing us.
That was the old federalist sentiment, of course, and it brought bereaved thoughts of that short-lived entity, the West Indian Federation - the only arrangement that could have made sense of these scattered and preyed-upon mini-states.
But it was much too soon for such thoughts. Not while we were wailing down de place! Not while, following in the prints of a bouncing ball, through shared emotion the Word could still be made Flesh.
Wailing down the place
In our Time
Wayne Brown
Sunday, November 20, 2005
'Freshman, where you fram?'
'Sir! Trinidad, sir!'
This was at UWI, Mona, October '65, in the course of that licit ventilation of stupidity and sadism known as Freshman's Week.
'Say again, freshman?'
'Sir! Trinidad, sir!'
'Freshman! Shorely you mean Treeneedad-h'an'-Tabago!'
'Yessir. Trinidad and Tobago, sir.'
'But freshman, 'ow is dat possible?'
Here the squatting interlocutor turns to his fellow seniors, already beginning to grin bulbously in pleasant anticipation of the well-worn but apparently still hilarious punch line.
Wayne Brown
'Fellow Jamaicans! Fellow-lions of Chancellor! You nevah 'ear dem say Treeneedad an' Tabago is two deefrant h'islan's?'
Grins; giggles; grunts of 'So dem say,' and 'True, true.'
'Den freshman' - your interrogator turning back to you - 'You mean you a'kom 'ere an' tell we dat you barn' - and here he begins to shake with abdominal mirth, while, sitting around the room with legs crossed, more than one of his incontinent henchmen starts slapping his thighs or throwing his head back against the wall:
'You mean you gwine sit dere and tell h'aal dese grown men 'ere'...(gasp)...'dat you barn, hoo, hoo, hoo!' - he can't finish the sentence, spasms of mirth have begun erupting in its path like little minefields - 'dat you barn weed wan fute h'een Treeneedad h'an de h'adder...de h'adder...Oh Jesus' - tears are squeezing from his eyes - 'de h'adder fute h'een Tabago?'
Pandemonium. Seniors rolling on the floor, seniors gasping for breath, cross-legged seniors, heads back and hugging themselves, laughing till they're crying.
Great sense of humour, Jamaicans.
Yet in time you would come to see their point.
As either the name of a sovereign state or a constitutional arrangement, 'Trinidad and Tobago' makes no sense; makes no more sense than 'Trinidad, Tobago and Monos' would. What was required was a name that would encompass both islands in denoting a single political entity.
But this wasn't seen at the time - the British Government was in a rush - and in any case there's a glutinous gracelessness about what would doubtless have been the main candidate, 'Trinbago'.
Bahrain's Rashed Abdul Rahman (right) vies with Dwight Yorke of Trinidad and Tobago during their World Cup 2006 Asian qualifier in Manama November 16. (Photo: AFP)
So Trinidad and Tobago was proclaimed (were proclaimed?) a nation - a linguistic anomaly every bit as enervating as the geographical imprecision, touristy schmaltz and bad grammar of its national anthem. (Trinidad and Tobago don't stand 'side by side,' but cattacorner; they aren't 'islands of the blue Caribbean Sea': Trinidad, its east coast washed by the Atlantic, and its south and west coasts enclosing the Gulf of Paria, subsists in the brown gargle of the Orinoco; and 'every creed and race' doesn't 'find an equal place' here, it 'finds.' Or it ought to, grammatically, anyway).
So, as I say, in time I came to understand my Jamaican interrogators' point (if not their cretinous ecstasy). But that was many years later. At the time, 'Tobago' meant to me a place as substantively different from Trinidad as the Ionian Isles, say, are from Bulgaria; and, as for the titular disavowal of this, I suppose I merely ignored it.
Above all, Tobago meant - once and for always! - the beach where a golden girl in a sky-blue swimsuit, high-cut for those days, with yellow and white horizontal slashes, clasped her hands behind her bum as, thoughtfully, gingerly, balancing on the ball of one foot, she drew with the big toe of the other foot a perfect O (though perhaps it is memory that perfects it) in the central square of a large Noughts & Crosses game inscribed in the sand before her: a game which, miraculously, tramping humans and the normally dispassionate tide both left untouched for two days and a night.
After that I left Trinidad - or 'Trinidad and Tobago' - for Mona, in effect freezing the latter island in my mind, like a video left on Pause, so that for 20 years, in various countries, 'Tobago' went on meaning her (her of the bold-shy smile!) and an arc of beaches stretching from Store Bay to Mt Irvine.
Then, one Easter in the mid-80s, I went over to Charlotteville, and after that Tobago also meant the big blue horseshoe bay which was as pretty as a postcard in a certain light, but whose villagers seemed irrevocably lost, consigned by the cramping hills to a forgotten sliver of the world where, on many of the doorsteps of the ugly concrete houses (and it was my 11-year-old daughter - also Mariel - who pointed this out) empty rum bottles stood in piles.
[double space]
The above is taken from an edition of In Our Time published in the Trinidad Guardian almost exactly 12 years ago - at which time this columnist was living in 'Tabago' - and I don't know why it sprang to mind last Wednesday when, while I was online here in Kingston, an email dropped into my Inbox from my elder daughter - the 'second' Mariel, now 31, and the real one, her vanished 'original' (who would now be, unimaginably, 59) having long ago been diffused to mythic stature in my mind.
'Everybody's watching Bahrain vs Trinidad,' my daughter wrote. 'Of course, I'm here at the office.'
And she went on about something else, until, suddenly: 'Oh lorse...We just scored!!!!! Yeahhhhhhh!!!!!'
At which point the above column leapt to mind, the train of thought delivering it via, I presume, these circuitous stations:
1) Dwight Yorke, the TT captain, is a Tobagonian. I was living in his island when I wrote it..
2) .and now, 12 years later, I live here in Jamaica, the island to which I was introduced by the gibberish of Freshman's Week, and their:
3) 'Treeneedad h'an Tabago'. The name still makes no sense, because once you get started, why stop there? Why not 'Treeneedad h'an Tabago h'an Jamaica'? Why not 'The English-speaking Caribbean', or, for that matter, 'The Caribbean'?
4) Tobago equals - still, after 44 years!- Mariel One, she of the bold-shy smile whose name gave rise to the real Mariel, who at 11 pointed out to me the drunken despair of the Charlotteville Tobagonians, and who now had just alerted me to the fact that 'we' - and hold those cherishing claws up to the light: who 'we'? - were at that very moment playing Bahrain in Bahrain for a place in the World Cup finals.
Or something like that, anyway.
I switched on TVJ and proceeded to spend an excruciating 20-something minutes watching the antics of the Soca Warriors as they stopped playing football and started 'playing themselves', 'gallerying' as if the match had already been won, while the Jamaican commentators added the dread of 'goat-mout' to their death-inviting performance by talking, too, as if it were already over and 'we' ('we'?) were already boarding the plane for Germany.
So that when it was in fact over and Mariel phoned, bubbling with excitement, I nearly bawled her out. 'This is why I hate being Trinidadian!' I told her. 'Did you see how hard those fellas tried to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory? They nearly gave me a blasted heart attack!'
The phrase was the Dark Lady's, my Trinidadian muse. And she must have heard me say it, for no sooner had Mariel and I hung up than she phoned.
'So what have you got to say now, Mr Brown?'
'I hear you Trinidadians hate us here,' I told her. How come?'
'You Trinidadians, eh?' She said laughing. 'Well, we don't hate you anymore. You can tell Jamaica that.'
[Jamaica: The Dark Lady says to tell you/us that we/they don't hate you/us anymore. She's the Dark Lady, so when she says something you can take it to the bank.]
I said: 'You know, I have a feeling the disallowed Bahraini goal at the end was really a goal. I mean, the TT goalie wasn't holding the ball; he had thrown it up into the air. You people nearly killed me, man! It's like you used to say: we (who 'we'?) always do our best to snatch defeat..'
'Now listen,' she broke in sternly. 'All you do, don't go and write that in the papers! Remember what happened last time!'
'Last time'. That would have been '89, when, with TT poised to go through - all we had to do was draw with the US at home - the deeply unpopular but quite ruthless NAR government jumped on the team's bandwagon and so cannibalised and orchestrated the build-up to the game that this columnist went into print denouncing that build-up as 'fascist'.
Which, after TT lost - well, of course! The boys were stunned by the insane level of hype, they sleepwalked through that crucial, fatal game - most commentators interpreted to mean that 'Brong' had predicted we would lose (Brong hadn't), and proceeded to kick up your columnist for weeks. ('Word is that Wayne Brown was seen flying the stars-and-stripes on his car'; dangerous libels like that.)
'I won't,' I promised her, lying; but I was basking in her delight and didn't want her to stop. 'So now I suppose y'all going to wail dong de place!'
'Boy! We wailing already!'
We talked for maybe ten minutes, in that peculiar mix of giddy nationalistic happiness and dry-dry Trini 'spin'. Preparing to hang up: 'You sound good,' she said.
'I mus' be good!' I said, by now deep in the dialect. 'Ent we goin' Germany?' (No quotation marks around that 'we' now!)
We hung up. The phone rang.
'Daddeeeee!' It was my younger daughter Saffrey, just re-migrated to Trinidad from London a week ago. 'You saw the game?'
And so it went for the rest of Wednesday afternoon, the phone calls flying between Port-of-Spain and Russell Heights. And for most of Thursday, too, though by then the ecstasy had mercifully declined to a level that could be contained by emails.
'We don't hate Trinis,' said Sharon Leach firmly when I waggishly turned around the charge I'd leveled at the Dark Lady and accused her of it. 'All of Jamaica - at least, the Jamaicans I know - was backing TT to win.'
And I lifted my head and knew it was true, and that, just as all the Trinis I knew had been backing the Reggae Boyz in 97-98, so now the Jamaicans were backing TT. And, realising that to say - after eight years domiciled here in Jamaica - they 'they' were backing 'us' felt somehow just as imprecise as to say that 'we' were backing 'them', I came to the momentous conclusion that mine was a schizophrenia without tension, and that the truest formulation might yet be that We were backing us.
That was the old federalist sentiment, of course, and it brought bereaved thoughts of that short-lived entity, the West Indian Federation - the only arrangement that could have made sense of these scattered and preyed-upon mini-states.
But it was much too soon for such thoughts. Not while we were wailing down de place! Not while, following in the prints of a bouncing ball, through shared emotion the Word could still be made Flesh.
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