A House for Mr Biswas

That’s it.  That’s Mr. Biswas’s house.  Right behind the white car.  The street now resembles Union Turnpike more than anything in the novel, but the house is still there. 

Between San Fernando and Port-of-Spain lie the towns of Chaguanas, Waterloo, and Couva, the demographic center of the country’s East Indian population. 

When the British finally got around to abolishing slavery, the sugar plantations decided to import Chinese and East Indian indentured servants instead.  The Chinese soon stopped coming, because their government insisted on free return passage for its nationals.  Only 1500 arrived, mostly from Guangdong.  They now form an influential but small community of about 15,000 — a fellow named Dereck Chin built the island’s first multiplex, and as already-mentioned the NGC is led by one Frank Look Kin.  The white population — mostly Syrian Christian, with a few Portuguese and the strangely-named French Creoles, who are neither French nor Creole — is about the same size.   

The Indians, though, arrived in massive numbers.  By the time all was said and done, 150,000 of them had made a one-way trip to Trinidad.  Their descendents make up 40.3% of the population, as against a Afro-Trinidadian share of 39.5%.

Racial divisions shape Trinidadian politics.  The Afro-Trinidadian party is the People’s National Movement, founded by Eric Williams in 1956.  The main Indo-Trinidadian party currently is the United National Congress, founded in 1988 amid splits in then-ruling National Alliance for Reconstruction (NAR).  I think it’s a brilliant name, enough to hint at its ethnic base without ruling out the possibility of gaining support across the racial divide.

That said, the racial divide isn’t as stark as it could be.  21% of the population is mixed, up from 18% in 1990 and 15% in 1980.  Unlike the Guyana formerly known as British, communal violence is unheard of in Trinidad.  You see Hindu flags outside houses in mostly African suburbs—did you know that Hindus mark various family and religious events by flying colored flags?  I didn’t—and you can spot Afro-Trinidadians liming in most Indo-Trinidadian neighborhoods. 

It helps that most Indo-Trinidadian links to India have faded away.  Nobody knows what village their ancestors came from—hell, they don’t even know the state.  The Bhojpuri language is pretty close to dead, and spoken accents in English don’t appreciably vary between racial groups.  (I’ll admit it: it’s kinda cool when you hear a white guy or a Chinese fellow bust out in pure Trini.) 

Last year I found myself watching the Ukraine-Tunisia World Cup match in a run-down little bar in the town of Waterloo.  Most of the people in the place were Indo-Trinidadian, and the (Indo-Trinidadian) female propietor had hung a Union Jack over the counter.  When I asked her about it, she said, misunderstanding my question, "Oh, that’s the English flag.  Meh daughter and grandchildren live there, and we get a lot of English visitors out this way." 

Alerted, I began to spot "English" and Canadian paraphenalia in the area:  bumper stickers, posters, ads for cheap flights.  But links to India?  Nobody even seemed to know that Mittal was an Indian company.  One fellow sensibly-enough guessed it to be German.   

Migration has brought Trinidad many things, but special ties to one of the 21st-century’s emerging superpowers doesn’t seem to be one of them.

Comments

[Michael]

A friend of ours is Trinidadian (is that the right word?) She was homeschooling when we were, two years ago, and we met through mutual friends. They've just moved to St. Croix, unfortunately; our boys really hit it off well.

I positively love that accent. I can't imitate it to save my life, and that kills me. It's like verbal crack; she can say anything at all and it sounds charming.

[Doug M.]

-- As part of my graduation requirement for Yale's IR program, I had to do a speculative briefing paper. That is, I had to take a real-world country, imagine a plausible crisis that could arise there, lay out in detail how it would happen, and give a menu of policy responses.

Basically like writing a really long Usenet post, with cites. Fastest paper I ever wrote... one afternoon of research, one phone call with a retired former ambassador, then I sat down and wrote 20 pages in five hours or so.

My choice? A political crisis in Guyana, with relations between the two ethnic groups breaking down to the point of serious violence and ethnic cleansing.

I managed to scare myself. Maybe I got too close, but it looked plausible. (The former Ambassador said that it could have happened a couple of times already, and had been avoided less because of good will than because of general social torpidity and sluggishness.)

Guyana is really, really screwed up. I'm not sure if the bitter racial politics are symptom or cause, though.

Anyway, glad to hear that Trinidad ain't like that.

Doug M.

[Noel Maurer]

Doug! We miss you, man.

There are occasional frictions: for example, vandals recently trashed a rather famous seashore temple. It hasn't led to much, though. First, the vandals left scrawls that incited religious tensions, not racial ones. Strangely enough, that's a good thing ... because there aren't a whole lot of religious tensions to incite.

Second, everyone agreed that alcohol fueled the incident. I have no idea how they knew that, but I tend to think that it's a healthy first reaction.

Of course, there's still that racial divide, which politicians attempt to bridge in all sorts of funny ways. My favorite Trinidadian phrase (which few Trinis fully appreciate) is "agency brown."

The Philippines may have shown us much of the dystopic future of American politics, but I predict that "agency brown" is going to become campaign shorthand for the perfect middle-class racially-indistinct candidate.

Another way of putting it is that T&T politics can sometimes feel frightfully American. Even if the racial politics is different, it's still racial politics.

Consider the following editorial:

"We would rather engage in bacchanal and mudslinging than actually hearing what vision the parties might have paid some consultancy firm a few million to come up with. We have a lot of nice speeches written by nice, agency-brown, middle-class copywriters, liberally peppered with spur-of-the-moment thinly disguised racist rhetoric and scare-mongering."

Same commentator had an awesome description of the recent spate of poll-driven candidate-switches made by the ruling party:

"What with candidates for the PNM dropping faster than a black girl’s self-esteem in a passa passa dance, I’m in two minds about just how entertaining this year’s election is going to be."

On the other hand, a recent COP rally in Woodford Square brought out a pretty multi-racial crowd. So you never know.

Is there more interest in Trinidad's cultural divisions? They get pretty complicated, so I'd only want to write them if people are interested.

[Bernard Guerrero]

Can't hurt.

"Agency brown", eh? I gotta start working on my tan and digging up those black ancestors Doug was so sure I've got. :^)

[Dave MB]

I was surprised to discover, when looking up the English pop group The Magic Numbers on Wikipedia, that there was an Islamic coup attempt in Trinidad in 1990. I guess it makes sense that a substantial portion of all those Indian immigrants were Muslim, which makes for a lot of Muslims, but did they have any hope of bringing anyone else along with them?

[Carlos]

You know, they wrecked the yard that Mr. Biswas was so proud of.

Wonder what happened to Hanuman House. Catal Huyuk without the vultures.

[Noel Maurer]

Carlos: I wish I knew.

Dave: I have more to say about this. OK, a new post is on its way.

Claudia: Am I crowding you with this Trinidadian stuff? I'd be happy to hold off.