Trinidad Noir

by Earl Lovelace

  The jumbie said, “We will make ourselves visible to all and sundry for that night only. Every person who get killed on this island since the beginning of the first injustice all the way to the present-day wantonness—from the native people in the days of the early Spaniards, to the slaves of the British, to the present-day victims of robberies and drug-related and poverty-related, greed-related and envy-, and jealousy-, and power-related crimes, all the people whose murderers weren’t caught. All of us on whom justice turn its back. We coming, thousands strong, head bash in, eye poke out, neck break, vagina rip apart, heart blown up, brains hanging out, hand chop off, blood dripping-dripping fuh so. You think the dead don’t bleed? Wait! You’ll see! Displaced monkeys, birds, snakes, mosquitoes, crapauds and all kind of creatures will join us too, and will provide the music to which we will shuffle. People, not realizing till later that we are the real thing, will vote us band of the century. They will run from one street to the next looking for our band because word will spread fast about ‘the band with the terrible yet amazing and mesmerizing costumes.’ They will even want to drag behind us to the sounds of forgotten animals and the beat of our shuffling feet. They will think we are so creative!

  “Every cell phone and small camera will be snapping-snapping come J’ouvert morning, but next day, not one picture will actually have been captured. But we, the jumbies and duppies of Bonnaire, want to appoint you as the official photographer of our band. Is only you, and you alone, who will be able to take our pictures. See duppies drag theyselves on de streets of Port of Spain. See every Tom, Dick and Harriet snapping away with cell phone, video camera, pocket camera and expensive-fuh-so camera. See not one of them did capture a single image. Young lady here is the only one who could photograph the dead. And every face from the last decade will be recognized by the people who they left behind, including those who were responsible for their deaths, and those who have done nothing about all this crime. J’ouvert morning, the people of the island will have seen us come back from the dead. So, when they see your pictures, they will know that you didn’t use them programs that does do fancy things with pictures, but they will know that you was special enough to actually capture them. You will be feared and respected, and your art will go international. Foreign will recognize you first, as usual, and then you will be on everybody A-list here. You ready for our assignment?”

  The thrill of the prospects as outlined by the jumbie sent chills of excitement down Nandita’s arms. “Where will I meet your band?” she asked, trying to appear nonchalant as she took a pen and paper from her knapsack to write down the directions.

  The jumbie laughed. “You get yourself on the street, any street you want, and you will meet them.”

  Nandita returned to her car, breathless again, but this time with awe and excitement. She switched on the engine and the headlamps, glanced back to make doubly sure that her camera equipment was on the backseat where she had just put it, and, in an appreciative farewell gesture, turned toward the path that had taken her into the forest. But she couldn’t see the path. She must have been rather disoriented, for even though she had just stepped off the path and into her car, the path was not where she had come from. Or where she thought she had come from. She looked again, farther up, then lower down. She was puzzled; it wasn’t possible that she’d so quickly lost her bearings.

  She unbuckled herself and leaned out the window. The moon had gone back behind the clouds, and the area was dark. That was it. It was too dark to see, she reasoned. She turned the car slowly and scanned the bushes lit by the headlamps. She repeated this manoeuvre, but now in the opposite direction. But the path had vanished. She drove on slowly, stopping every few seconds and leaning out the window to look toward the back of the car. Regardless of the distance she travelled as registered on the car’s odometer, there was, she saw, no road behind her, only high bush. She was making a list of equipment she would need for J’ouvert morning just as her car reached the top of the road and met the Lady Young Highway.

  ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

  Michael Anthony is a Trinidadian writer of short stories, historical works, and novels. He was born in 1930 and moved to England in 1954 on the encouragement of Canute Thomas. He began writing short stories for the BBC and he also contributed to the Barbados literary magazine BIM. His first of thirty-four books was published in 1963, and his best-known novel, Green Days by the River, is being made into a motion picture.

  Robert Antoni is equal parts Trinbagonian, Bahamian, and US citizen. He is the author of five novels, his most recent being As Flies to Whatless Boys, which garnered a Guggenheim Fellowship and the OCM Bocas Prize for best book. His novels have been widely translated, and have been awarded the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and an NEA grant. He is the recipient of a NALIS Lifetime Literary Award by the Trinidad & Tobago National Library.

  Wayne Brown (1944–2009) was a columnist, poet, editor, and teacher from Trinidad & Tobago. Widely known for his column In Our Time, which ran in Trinidadian, Jamaican, and Guyanese newspapers, Brown won the Commonwealth Prize for Poetry for his first collection of poems, On the Coast. He nurtured a generation of Jamaican writers through his workshops and an arts magazine which he edited for the Jamaica Observer.

  Willi Chen is a Trinidadian-born Chinese writer whose work experiences include shopkeeper, baker, printer, artist, refinery operator, and entrepreneur. His art, poetry, sculpture, set design, plays, radio dramas, and short stories have won numerous international prizes. He still lives in Trinidad.

  C.L.R. James (1901–1989) was a journalist, socialist theorist, and writer. He was a founder of the Pan-African movement, cricket correspondent for the Manchester Guardian, and a prolific author. James’s landmark works include the history The Black Jacobins, but he is also widely known for his writing on cricket, especially for the autobiographical Beyond a Boundary.

  Barbara Jenkins is a Trinidadian writer. In her late sixties, after a teaching career and the exodus of her children, she came to writing. Her short stories have won several international awards, appearing in Pepperpot, Wasafiri, Small Axe, and the Caribbean Writer. Her debut collection, Sic Transit Wagon and Other Stories, was awarded the 2015 Guyana Caribbean Prize for Literature. Her current hobbies are swimming in Macqueripe Bay’s green-gold waters and visiting the ophthalmologist.

  Ismith Khan (1925–2002) was born in Port of Spain, Trinidad. He attended the Queen’s Royal College and went on to become a reporter for the Trinidad Guardian. In 1948, he left Trinidad for the United States, where he earned his master’s degree from Johns Hopkins University. He taught at Medgar Evers College in New York for fifteen years. He wrote three published novels and a collection of short stories.

  Harold Sonny Ladoo (1945–1973) was born and grew up in Trinidad. He emigrated to Canada in 1968, where he published No Pain Like This Body. Shortly afterward, in 1973, Ladoo died an untimely and violent death on a visit home to Calcutta Settlement, Trinidad. He was twenty-eight. Ladoo’s novel Yesterdays appeared posthumously in 1974.

  Earl Lovelace is an award-winning novelist, playwright, and short story writer. His many publications include the novels The Dragon Can’t Dance, Salt, and The Wine of Astonishment. His latest novel, Is Just a Movie (2011), explores Trinidad’s changing society in the aftermath of the black power movement in the 1970s. Since its publication, Lovelace has been awarded the Grand Prize for Caribbean Literature by the Regional Council of Guadeloupe and the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature.

  Sharon Millar is a Trinidadian writer who has won the 2013 Commonwealth Short Story Prize and the 2012 Small Axe Short Fiction Award. Her debut collection, The Whale House and Other Stories, was short-listed for the 2016 fiction category of the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature. She is a part-time lecturer at the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, where she teaches prose fiction (creative writing).

  Shani Mootoo was born in Ireland, and grew up in Trinidad. She is a visual artist, video maker, and fiction writer. He
r novels include Moving Forward Sideways Like a Crab, long-listed for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, short-listed for the Lambda Literary Award; Valmiki’s Daughter, long-listed for the Scotia Bank Giller Prize; He Drown She in the Sea, long-listed for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award; and Cereus Blooms at Night. Mootoo divides her time between Grenada and Canada.

  V.S. Naipaul was born in Trinidad in 1932 and went to England on a scholarship in 1950. After four years at University College, Oxford, he began to write, and since then he has followed no other profession. He has published more than twenty books of fiction and nonfiction, including A House for Mr. Biswas, A Bend in the River, and A Turn in the South. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001.

  Elizabeth Nunez is the Trinidadian-born author of nine novels and a memoir. Both Boundaries and Anna In-Between were New York Times Editors’ Choices; and Bruised Hibiscus won an American Book Award. Nunez received the 2015 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in nonfiction for Not for Everyday Use and a NALIS Lifetime Literary Award from the Trinidad & Tobago National Library. She is a Distinguished Professor at Hunter College, CUNY. Even in Paradise is her latest novel.

  Jennifer Rahim is a widely published poet, fiction writer, and literary scholar. She worked for many years as a senior lecturer at the University of the West Indies, Trinidad. She edited and introduced two collections of literary and cultural essays with Barbara Lalla. Her poetry collection Approaching Sabbaths (2009) was awarded a Casa de las Américas Prize in 2010. Ground Level: Poems appeared in 2014. Songster and Other Stories (2007) is her first work of fiction.

  Eric Roach (1915–1974) was born in Tobago, served for the South Caribbean forces in World War II, and worked in Trinidad as a teacher, public servant, and journalist. Though he devoted his later life to writing, producing many poems, plays, and short stories, his work was largely forgotten following his suicide in 1974. His collected poetry was eventually published as The Flowering Rock in 1992, cementing his legacy as a prescient and towering figure in Caribbean letters.

  Lawrence Scott, a prize-winning author from Trinidad & Tobago, was awarded a NALIS Lifetime Literary Award by the National Library of Trinidad & Tobago. His most recent book is Leaving by Plane Swimming Back Underwater. His novels are: Light Falling on Bamboo, Night Calypso, Aelred’s Sin, Witchbroom, and the collection of stories Ballad for the New World. He is the editor of Golconda: Our Voices Our Lives. For more information visit www.lawrencescott.co.uk.

  Samuel Selvon (1923–1994) was a Trinidadian writer best known for his novels The Lonely Londoners (1956), groundbreaking for its use of Caribbean creole, and Moses Ascending (1975). He received two Guggenheim Fellowships and the 1969 Trinidad & Tobago Hummingbird Gold Medal for Literature. In 2012 he was named the recipient of the NALIS Lifetime Literary Award by the National Library of Trinidad & Tobago.

  Derek Walcott is a Saint Lucian poet and playwright. He moved to Trinidad in 1953, where he cofounded the Trinidad Theatre Workshop. He received the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature. He was also the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 1981 and the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 1988, among many other honors. His latest work, a book of poetry based on the art of Peter Doig, was published in 2016.

  Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw was born in Trinidad and is a senior lecturer in French and Francophone literatures at the University of the West Indies. She is the author of a collection of short stories, Four Taxis Facing North, and the novel Mrs B. Her short stories have been widely anthologized and translated. She has also coedited several works, including Border Crossings: A Trilingual Anthology of Caribbean Women Writers and Caribbean Research: Literature, Discourse and Culture.

  ABOUT THE AKASHIC NOIR SERIES

  The Akashic Books Noir series was launched in 2004 with the award-winning anthology, Brooklyn Noir. Each book is comprised of all new stories, each taking place within a distinct location within the city of the book. Stories in the series have won multiple Edgar, Shamus, and Hammett awards and the volumes have been translated into 10 languages. Every book is available on our website, as eBooks from your favorite vendor, and in print at online and brick & mortar bookstores everywhere. For more information on the series, including an up-to-date list of available titles, please visit www.akashicbooks.com/noirseries.htm.

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