The depth of the Bocas

Three islands between the Paria peninsula and the northeast point of Trinidad create swift and treacherous tidal currents in the four deep channels between these islands and land masses. In 1498 Columbus, who for days could not sail out of the Gulf of Paria through these turbulent channels (at least not until he was able to figure out the flow of the tides—the remous) named them the Mouths of the Dragon—Bocas del Dragons.

The Bocas, as we commonly call these channels, have ever since then, been the sailing route which connected Trinidad to all the other Caribbean islands and beyond, to the rest of the world. Through the Bocas came the first Spanish settlers, various pirates and settlers, then the African slaves, then the indentured labourers from India, and in between, the French fleeing wars in other islands, and the British who captured Trinidad from Spain in 1797. They brought, and left a history of massacres, piracy, wars, cruelty, plantation life, slavery, emancipation and indentureship.

And Bocas was the name selected by the indefatigable Marina Salandy- Brown when she established our first Bocas Literary Festival here in 2011. The Bocas Lit Fest was envisaged and created to be a “lively celebration of books, writers, writing and ideas” with a Caribbean focus and international scope. It was the first such festival in the southern Caribbean.

The title, the name, of the festival is evocative for Caribbean storytellers (who is not familiar with the expression, mouth open, story jump out?) And the Bocas themselves, those deep, some narrow channels, are turbulent passages through which our ancestors sailed and were brought to our island, and sailing ships were often powerless in the grip of the remous, the rushing tidal current which sweeps through the channels.

That first Bocas Lit Fest was an outstanding success. Being the first of its kind, it had the whole history of Caribbean Literature to draw upon, and did so with style and verve! But how sustainable might it be? Could the event be repeated, over and over? After all, our literary history was not very long, was it? Maybe 100 or 150 years of our own writings? And, as new societies, we hardly had our own traditions, our own stories of which to tell, and to write.

But what the Bocas may have lacked in time spans, length and breadth (the channels are narrow and short) was easily overcome due to the depth of the water flowing through and the turbulence within the passages. Indeed, our whole island chain, for all its apparent gentle and scenic beauty, is beset by hurricanes, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes and wars, and conquest and slavery, and the extermination of most of the peoples who originally lived here. Almost all of us came here as strangers, and the stories we brought were the stories from other lands, and different experiences.

But these imported stories would, of necessity inspired by the human conflicts established in these new societies, give way to the tales arising from our own experiences here in these islands. Tentatively at first, like the beginning of the change of tides, Caribbean people began to describe, to write of their own experiences, stories of our lives, here in our settings, and beyond, in alien lands to which they had emigrated.

But these were little niche stories, beyond what we were reading, far less being taught in our schools across these islands.

As a boy growing up (in the 1940s and 50s) there was no Caribbean Literature in our schools. Other than Shakespeare and Dickens we had the likes of Robert Louis Stevenson, Daniel Defoe and Joseph Conrad. I distinctly remember my intense embarrassment standing in class at 11 and reading aloud passages from The Nigger of the Narcissus to a group of mostly black classmates! Today we proudly possess our own stories. Our authors win the Nobel Prize for Literature, and many other citations. Our lives and our experiences have swept out of the Bocas, through the Caribbean Sea to enlighten and educate the wider world via the written word. We have much of which we can be proud. But clearly this was not just one rush of talent and inspiration, one tide carrying our talent. As successive Bocas Lit Fests have shown there is an ongoing flow of new works coming out of our islands, and our diaspora, starting with (and thanks to Bocas for this especially!) children’s works, and embracing new writers along with those whom we already know and enjoy. May this remous c o n t i n u e to flow on through the Bocas!