By Tony Deyal
It was evening. The guys from my community were sitting under the road “lamp” wasting time when our man who called all the shots and was in charge of everything, came out of the nearby hideaways without roads and lights. For me, as I wrote after, “It was evening then it was night, you know how it is especially right, after rain fall late in the day. The place was quiet, as a man with a woman in a room and she husband come, He eh have nothing to say…” This is when our best man with the ladies in the area came out and told us, “Wake tonight!”
With nothing much to do, and days after many more days to do it, I started writing when I was eighteen. My first major attempt was my version of “Wake Tonight.” Then a friend suggested that I should send it to the Trinidad Guardian Newspaper to see if they would use my work, maybe give me a few dollars. Their response was even better. They sent it to someone who was a Saint Lucia poet and playwright who worked for them.
After a while, not hearing anything about my work or money, I went and demanded, that I should meet the boss. They called him on the phone, and he told me, “Stick with the story of the ‘Wake’ and others like it. Forget the other crap you send for me to read!” It was then I found out that his name was Derek Walcott and, because he was one of the few people who had given me advice about my writing, I followed his work and development. I was happy when he received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1992, especially since his work was a combination of poetry and plays, many of which had a mix of humour and wit. During our school years, especially in literature and writing, we had to deal with only English. Derek Walcott did, and more importantly, didn’t!
This is why Derek Walcott became known for his rich and complex poetry. He explored Caribbean identity and history, but also added his writing with humour and wit. That helped me as well because it gave me the support I needed to mix the English with my Caribbean. In following Derek Walcott’s work, I saw a different city from the one in which I was the only “India” youngster there.
He said: “This is Port of Spain to me, a city ideal in its commercial and human proportions, where a citizen is a walker and not a pedestrian, and this is how Athens (the Capital city of Greece) may have been before it became a cultural echo.” Unfortunately, one of my “Trini” (Trinidadian) school friends asked me, “Walcott boy? He eating Greece?” In fact, I did it because Walcott also used humour to address the complexities of language and identity, acknowledging the “wrestling contradiction of being white in mind and black in body.” For a long time of going to schools from Trinidad to Canada and the US, that was me and many others as well. As Walcott said, and it could have been me, “…and either I’m nobody, or I’m a nation.”
Walcott took me from a nobody to a writer of sorts and swallows. Then I went to the University of Trinidad and Tobago to start my studies. The night that I was supposed to go through being humiliated and degraded at the same time, my “Wake Tonight” was on the government’s radio.
The next day, our lecturer asked me what other Caribbean columns I wrote, and I said: “None. In our school, we had to do everything in English.” I was then forced to read my first Trinidadian “school” book, “Miguel Street” by V.S. Naipaul. I had been reading the newspapers when I was 3 years old, and then read everything else I could get my hands on, especially the English writers.
Whether it was Treasure Island or Huckleberry, Watership Down or The Lord of the Flies, I lived, night and day, in my own Treasure Island of books and more books. What V.S. Naipaul’s work did was to make me a reader who eventually learnt from. And became a writer regardless of poetry, prose, or even while I worked at companies like the World Bank, the Pan American Health Organisation, and the West Indies Cricket Board. Over the years, even though V.S. Naipaul also became a Nobel laureate, he never stopped making social commentary with humour and perspectives on Caribbean life and culture.
As he said: “My life is short. The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it. The world is always in movement.” He was always clear on his work. As he said, “My life is short. I can’t listen to banality.” He added. “The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.” What I learnt from him, and my own work, was, “One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria.” Also, as he said, “An autobiography can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies; it reveals the writer totally.”
I will complete this “male” trio with Austin “Tom” Clarke, a Barbadian novelist and essayist, who was based in Toronto, Canada and was considered “Canada’s first multicultural writer.” I was at Carleton University in Carleton in Ottawa, but had a lot of friends in Toronto. From the beginning, in addition to Austin Clarkes themes of identity, race and class, I loved his dark humour especially, “Few realise that English poetry is rather like the British constitution, surrounded by pompous precedents and reverences.”
He also said: “Reform and exchange in English poetry are as slow as in the British constitution itself.” I was never sure why he also had concerns about women from Ireland, “Passion in Ireland is denounced as evil and obscene. Women are the snares set for us by the Devil.” Worse, Tom’s mother was a tough lady who had her way of dealing with children and family.
In his article, “Pig Tails ‘n Breadfruit” he wrote: “In my mother’s book, a vegetarian is somebody who is not concerned with his or her diet and health…Someone who prefers bush and grass, as if they is sheeps and cows, is somebody who don’t have enough food to put in his mouth, she always said…a person who is “catching his arse”—has to eat dryfood. A person at this stage is a person one remove from having to cook bakes for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.” It sounded like some of my days as a student in Canada.
*Tony Deyal will bring women next week to show the men a thing or two or, most like, three!
