Pitch Lake springs poetry

EVEN before we see it, we learn of it. It is endless, we are told. The largest asphalt lake on the planet, its pitch goes all over the world. Some say it has been used to pave the road in front of Buckingham Palace; others the tarmac at La Guardia Airport in New York. What better symbol was available to me when the time came to title my third book of poems, a book that places Trinidad at the rim of a bristling world? Everybody in Trinidad learns about the Pitch Lake in school. But few Trinis actually set foot on its strange surface; see its swathes of tar, water and mud; bathe among the lilies in its sulphur ponds; witness its effulgent discharges. Somehow we don’t need to. We have an idea of it in our mind, just as things we have never experienced can inhabit us powerfully.

Locals might take the lake for granted, but not tourists. Ambitious estimates place total visits at 20,000 annually. While tar-like deposits can also be found in Venezuela, Indonesia, Canada and the US, the Pitch Lake is the only source of commercially viable asphalt. As unglamorous as it is, it is perhaps one of our finest exports, up there with Angostura Bitters. It is important when we speak about economic diversification.

No continent has been left untouched. Trinidad Lake Asphalt Limited has dealings with the US, UK, Canada, Brazil, Suriname, Germany, Nigeria, India, Japan. Its output has reached the copper mines of Chile, the asphalt roofing industry of South Africa, and the bridges of Hong Kong. The biggest demand is in China.

Will the pitch really last forever? The official line is that the lake is not inexhaustible, though it sure comes close. The asphalt company estimates that at the current rate of mining it will last another 400 years. It has been around even longer. VS Naipaul’s The Loss of El Dorado describes Sir Walter Raleigh’s encounter with it in the 16th century. Raleigh wrote about pitch that, “riseth out of the ground in little springs or fountaynes” with “many springs of water and in and among them fresh water fishe”.

It’s hard not to feel this place has a connection to something ancient and infinite.

Every now and again a tree, perfectly preserved, rises at its centre as if straight from the past. The skeletal remains of animals, too, come to the surface: pitch lakes are death traps. Over the hundreds of years the lake has been used, the texture of the pitch has remained exactly the same. Quantity surveys are conducted from time to time and, despite regular mining, the lake’s residue is often slightly more than what analysis suggests it should be. Either something is going wrong with the accounts at Lake Asphalt or something else is astir.

The tar is not the only remarkable thing about the lake.

This place is incredibly noxious yet it is host to a dazzling array of life beneath its surface. A 2011 study describes, “an active microbial community of archaea and bacteria, many of them novel strains”. One study from 2011 describes a fungus that lives on nothing but asphalt. Imagine it: a microscopic monster, literally fuelled by oil. According to scientists, these creatures illustrate what life on other planets might look like under similar conditions. The Pitch Lake resembles the surface of Titan, Saturn’s largest moon. It should be no surprise that the closet thing to ET on this planet resides in Trinidad and Tobago’s melting pot. Everybody wants to be here! The implications are profound. If the function of life – as contended by cosmologist Sean Carroll – is to hydrogenate carbon dioxide, then the lake presents us with some of the most primordial beings we have ever discovered.

Its organisms straddle the boundary between rock and man.

None of this is to say I’ve tackled any of this explicitly in my book of poems. As I was writing Pitch Lake, I was mindful of Alfred Mendes’s 1934 novel of the same name. In that astonishing book, the lake is mentioned just once by the narrator. No character speaks of it. No part of the story involves it. Yet it haunts the novel.

Its materiality only emerges by the book’s devastating ending, and even then it remains a figment: it is an all-powerful curse. I opted to keep the lake just out of sight and, in this way, let readers see it in their own minds; make it more seductive, more dangerous. We are certainly living in dangerous times. Perhaps Rimbaud’s “systematised disorganisation” is now required.

How long did it take to write this book? The answer depends on how you define writing and writers. Does writing happen when a pen is put to paper? Or is a writer someone who lives life, who absorbs all that happens to her, who synthesises and analyses and lets ideas and experiences lay fallow? In one instance the process of writing took four years, in the other instance it took a lifetime.

And do we judge writers by individual pieces of writing? Is the process of assemblage not also a part of writing? A book of poems is a different beast from a poem.

A book allows the poet to curate spaces between the poems, to explore ideas inside the collection’s ecology in a way that looks inward as well as outward.

I like the idea of the Pitch Lake as a symbol of language, of sexuality, of society, as well as of the mysteries of life. Somehow the lake is real in our shared imagination.

But just as no person will ever experience the pleasures of sea-bathing in the exact same way, so too life and this lake.

Today, we can confidently say the lake was created by the process of subduction, when the Caribbean continental plate was forced under another plate over thousands of years.

But before any of us knew anything, the Amerindians had their own stories about the origins of “piche”. They perceived it not as a geological phenomenon, but as a link to the source of life: the gods.

One of legend involves Callifaria, who fled her tribe to be with to her lover, Kasaka, a prince of the rival Cumana tribe. Her father, Callisuna, attacked Kasaka’s tribe, kidnapped his daughter, and forced her to return home, tied to a horse. The winged Arawak god, Pimlontas, was so angry that he sunk the village under pitch. But one story was not enough for this lake.

Another story relates to the Chima Indians, who lived in La Brea. After winning a battle, the Chimas celebrated by feasting on hummingbirds, forgetting that hummingbirds were the spirits of their ancestors. As punishment, the winged god opened up the earth and summoned the Pitch Lake to consume the village.

This has always been an angry, dangerous place. A place where justice is done on behalf of ancestors and queer lovers. A fantasy space where creatures sink deep into the earth and then rise again, centuries later, in full flight.

Pitch Lake by Andre Bagoo is published by Peepal Tree Press. It will be launched at this month’s NGC Bocas Lit Fest on April 27.