some reports on Trinidad:

initial impressions

From jump I'm the outsider here. Which is not necessarily a bad thing, just a thing. And not just race-wise, though that's the immediate signal, but in dress, in carriage, in (of course) speech. The first night we're here, the warnings begin from everyone – Roger's mother, his cousin, some friends – that Trinidad isn't what it used to be, that crime is rampant and I should be very careful. Which I'd heard before I left, but it was different to hear it from people who live here. So we're careful, but it's hard to break the habit of my jumping from the car when I want to go buy a bottle of water while the driver waits – we have to park, go in together, just take money in hand and not a wallet, etc. -- but it all feels to me like a rough part of Brooklyn. Brooklyn with palm trees.

In any case, the people Roger knows and we meet are for the most part wonderful. Of course everyone wants to feed us, which is only an issue because (a) I can't digest or tolerate most of what's being offered, and (b) I just don't eat that much at any one sitting. So even when the food was something I either liked or could tolerate, I just could not physically eat enough to make people happy. I'll talk more about food later.

Let's talk about the beach. We first visited Maracas on Christmas Eve – yes, the beach on Christmas Eve. It was fairly deserted, of course, all the responsible people being home preparing for the holiday, so we had a stretch of warm sand and bath-temperature water nearly to ourselves. A few beers (Stag, “the beer for men”) and two bake-and-sharks (highly recommended) and we tackled the water, mad waves cresting and crashing – at this point I decide I could live here, at least for a while.

A few days later, Roger's stepfather came by and mentioned that his company had a house in Mayaro that we could use for the weekend if we wanted. Thanks to the reunion, we could only go for two days, but it was glorious. For the first night, it was Hyacinth, Roger, me, along with Larry and Mel and their three kids, Megsy who's 8, Rae-Ann who's 2, and the month-old baby Solana. We survived the ordeal of getting the family out the door and into the car, and took a tremendous curving palm-lined road about an hour and a half into Mayaro.

Trinidad has to be the most photographable place I've ever visited. For a color junkie like me, it's paradise. Even the cars are colorful. Then the stores, the houses, the red brick structures fallen into themselves – I'd love to come back with a good camera, or at least more free time and the battery charger for the digital. Of course, this is also the outsider perspective that finds the ordinary fascinating – but that's what outsiders are for.

fathers

If you sat down in a room with Roger, his brother Jamil, Roger's father Roosevelt, and Jamil's father Raul (who actually adopted and helped raise Roger,) without knowing any of them, I predict that it would take you about 5 minutes to realize who was born of whom. Even outside of the physical characteristics (Roger clearly has his father's brow, eyes, and cheekbones, as well as general build,) their energies are so matched it's eerie. Posture, speech patterns, laugh – it would make sense for Jamil to have his father's, but Roger didn't grow up with Roosevelt. I wish I understood more of genetics, though I think these are ephemeral issues even for scientists. How we come to carry the traits of people we've never met in our very cells – months ago I read an article about a glassblower who had come to some prominence in Chicago. He travelled to Europe to study – Italy, I believe – and in doing some research on his family discovered that entirely unbeknownst to him, his family had been glassblowers. The art had been out of his family for less than a hundred years, and he'd stumbled upon it as an art student, with no conscious knowledge of his family's history in the field. It's beautiful, and terrifying, the idea that much of what we believe is choice might be dictated by something else – divinity, genetics, divinely directed genetics? All the miniature and major decisions we make, marionetted by something we can't ever grasp or begin to know.

heterosexism

So I expected homophobia in Trinidad. Expected the usual drunk male habitual baiting and uberhetero-testosteronal talk, and the hushed-tone mentions by the better behaved living room couch-sitters of those “of that kind.” All expectations met, I kept my mouth shut, let Roger do the talking since I would just be the crazy American girlfriend no matter how much sense I made.

Then on a Saturday afternoon I'm sick with mosquito bites – you know the feverish ache that means you've crossed all the body's normal healing defenses – and we go to visit a family who lived behind Roger when he was very young. Let's call them Sherry and Nelson. Sherry and Nelson are born-again Christians. Their living room alone contains no less than eleven portraits of Jesus, complete with shimmering iridescent rays coming from the head and hands.

I politely decline a beer, and accept some buss up shut. This, for the uninitiated, is curried meat (in this case chicken) accompanied by a kind of bread, a sort of thin pita almost, that you tear off in chunks and wrap around the hunks of meat, which are still on the bone. Incidentally, I was told that it's called “buss up shut” because the bread looks like busted up shirts. Which it sort of does, though that wouldn't have been my first thought.

In any case, after the eating is done and I'm feeling slightly worse (more on my physical reaction to curry in another post), Roger and Nelson and I retire to the porch, they to talk and I because (a) there's no place else to go that doesn't threaten conversation about babies and marriage and (b) it's stifling hot in the house and I'm nauseous as hell.

We (well, they) begin talking about what everyone in the country talks about every time we sit down with them: rising crime, widespread unemployment, and the Americanization of Trinidad. Which becomes a conversation about the effectiveness of the death penalty, which becomes a conversation about America's potential impending downfall, at which point Nelson says America is the next Babylon and will fall – just look at what's going on there, drugs, gay rights, people even talking about gays getting married.

I am quiet. Roger says, “you don't think gays should have rights?” and it all goes to hell from there. Metaphorically speaking, of course. A few comments into this leg of the conversation, after realizing that this is not a dialogue about gay rights but about the right to be gay at all, I decide a beer is a good idea after all and head into the house for it, hoping this will be over when I return.

Of course it's not, and I can barely participate because the man's not operating from any kind of logic base and I'm trying not to feel personally attacked because of course the man's not attacking me personally except that he is, without knowing it. And Roger is arguing beautifully and rationally and I want to be anywhere else but there, doing anything but listening to this man who clearly is not a bad person and is clearly capable of logic quote scripture in response to simple, direct questions – watch him surrender rational thought in the name of religion.

And at this point it's not homophobia, but heterosexism, heterocentricity – not so much fear, but a deep-seated belief that not only is heterosexuality the right way, but the only way, such that anything else is the destruction of... the world? life? order?

And this is not what I'd expected. I realized at this point that with the myriad conversations I've had with people about their use of words pertaining to queerness, about the illogicality of denying legal marriage to committed same-sex couples, about the irrationality of denying adoption or custody to same-sex couples, I had never in my life sat in a room and listened personally to someone argue that (a) their God is the only god, that (b) their God would never create a gay person, and (c) therefore queerness of any kind is a sin, a crime, and deserving of punishment.

What do you do with that? How do you have a conversation with someone who believes their pastor when the pastor says, “Pay no heed to those doubters who would criticize you and what you believe. Time you spend defending your beliefs is time you could be spending with your family.” In other words, just listen to what I say, ignore everyone else, and make more believers.

curry

I like the way curry tastes. The first night we were in Trinidad, I had a beef roti. This is similar to buss up shut, except that the meat and potatoes are wrapped up in the bread for you, rather than your having to pick the meat up piece by piece. I was rampantly nauseous for most of the next day, but we blamed it on this particular roti shop, as Roger's stomach was also upset.

On New Year's Eve (or “Old Year's Night” as it's referred to in Trinidad), I ate a fair amount of buss up shut containing what I believe was curried goat. It tasted pretty good. I wouldn't seek it out, but it was reasonably tasty. About a half hour later, some heartburn set in. Within a few hours, when we went to bed, I was pretty sure something had managed to burrow into my abdomen and was now dying an agitated death.

Curry is the devil. And it turns your fingers yellow. How weird is that.

poetry

So in the mad rush to leave (see Roger discovering at 9 a.m. Saturday morning that our flight was to leave at 10:30 rather than 2 p.m., as he'd insisted it did), I brought only the book of poetry that was in my backpack – Landscape at the End of the Century by Stephen Dunn. And I'd almost finished it already! Tragedy. However, having just the one book and a fair amount of time to spend looking at it (for example, while the boys played cricket and football for hours upon hours at the QRC reunion) forced or allowed me to really study the work in ways I wouldn't have otherwise.

Of course, I think I left the book and all its marginal scribblings in Brooklyn when I re-packed, but I highly recommend the practice of taking one book and spending hours examining how the poems relate to each other, how each is constructed, what makes the poems live on the page. Even for those of us who love poetry, reading it often becomes like watching TV – we read through, thinking I like this, I love that, etc., without stopping to deconstruct and think, how did he DO this? why do I feel this so viscerally? It's a great exercise, one I've neglected since grad school.

If we can't explain how a poem that moves us works, how are we to make our own accomplish similar goals?