Eighteen pieces of short fiction-eight from rural Trinidad and 10 set in areas from San Juan to Chaguaramas-comprise Trinidad Noir edited by Jeanne Mason from New York and Trinidadian Lisa Allen-Agostini.
It was a curious and perhaps ungracious decision by the editors to begin the collection with Allen-Agostini’s entry, ’Pot Luck’, despite the literary worth of the story. Trey, from Rich Plain, Diego Martin and the midnight black Danny with blond dreadlocks flee the crowded confines of city life for the surf, sea and ganja of Sans Souci. The bucolic setting for Samuel Selvon’s washerwoman is in this piece the place where ganja is grown, packaged and sold, facilitated by Aunty Zora’s sweetbread and cake shop.
Agostini’s story is rich in its description of landscape, sensitive in its representation of the world of ordinary men in emotional and sexual entanglements and it is an exposition on the popular sub-culture of marijuana trading and smoking; one lengthy paragraph is outstanding in its detail on the methodology of rolling ganja.
As Agostini’s story contemporises Selvon’s San Souci, Kevin Baldeosingh’s ’The Rape’ contemporises Derek Walcott’s Felicity. The village of the epic Ramayana that Walcott celebrated in his Nobel acceptance speech in 1992 is here the village in which the topic of conversation is kidnappings and rapes between Hemrajie, divorced after a four-year marriage of beatings and bad sex, and Feroza, a cigarette-smoking spinster. The character of the Felicity canefields, often represented as picturesque in the Trinidad imagination, is presented by Baldeosingh with control and reserve: ’a taska truck roared by, its giant cage rattling’ and later: ’The canes were a wall of black lances and the moonlit road beyond was empty and silent’.
With a touch of homoeroticism, Baldeosingh crafts a fantastic twist that ends the story of the moneyed, educated and lonely Hemrajie. The canefields that define Felicity still hold secrets of bizarre sexual fantasies.
Meanwhile, Vahni Capildeo, Trinidadian now living in Oxford, England where she studied Old Icelandic, submitted a terse story that intertexts with Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea. And a long entry by Jamie Lee Loy, ’Bury Your Mother’ is Kincaidian in its representation of a deeply troubled mother/daughter relationship.
Reena Andrea Manickchand, a 26-year-old, continues the fetishisation of the dougla figure that is commonplace in Trinidad’s literary history while uncommonly elevating this figure to the centre of her story, partly accomplished by its title ’Dougla’. The imprisoned Kwaesi Ramlogan is described as having ’wavy black curls’ and ’semi-full lips...he’d definitely have to thank his Afro mother for those lips and his Indo father for his eyes, ’cause he could enchant almost anyone with them’. He is hot-blooded, ’a side effect of being mixed’.
Uncommonly, too, he is homosexual and in a relationship with Vish, another dougla homosexual. Kwaesi’s ontology is overdetermined by his existence on borders. Like other dougla characters in Trinidad literature and Shiva Naipaul’s Singh in Chip-Chip Gatherers (1973) in particular, Kawesi rages against the inconveniences of his shared ancestry in Manickchand’s melodrama. The melodrama moves towards a prosaic ending. The young author has missed an opportunity in this story to meaningfully and artistically push at social and literary boundaries.
With few exceptions, the entries by more established writers in this collection-Shani Mootoo, Ramabai Espinet, Willi Chen, Oonya Kempadoo, Lawrence Scott and Robert Antoni-are subservient to the submissions by the emergent writers. Antoni has written, to my mind, the best entry, and Willi Chen’s ’Betrayal’, despite a weak ending, is distinguished by its readability and the author’s competence in storytelling. ’Betrayal’ is a portal into the world of drug trafficking between Trinidad’s South coast and Venezuela. It follows the greed and transformation of Sabagal, cloth merchant, entrepreneur and drug lord in order to comment on what buttresses Trinidad’s socio-economy-’the drug-and-gun game of power and death’ in which ’automatic weapons and more sophisticated rapid-fire Lugers and Smith and Wesson handguns were available, smuggled in in plastic kegs strapped under the hulls of fishing boats and even in the bellies of groupers and sharks.’
Trinidad Noir is an achievement. It represents Trinidad society faithfully and noir fiction is, in this moment, the most compatible genre for Trinidad’s hellish realities concocted from drugs, guns, sex and corruption. The stories turn Trinidad inside out, exposing its raw insides. It is a treat for those of us thirsting for good, new stories in new voices. But one story or one collection does not a writer make. If these new voices mean to proudly inherit-even if in order to ultimately separate from- their literary ancestors, they will need to repeat this accomplishment tenfold.
