Welcome to Chaguanas

He lost the election. The next day a crowd of about 1000 of his supporters attacked the supporters of the candidate that had won. Panicking, the bus driver mowed through the crowd. At the end of the riot one man was dead, another had lost an arm. Seventy summonses were issued by the police. All this took place in Chaguanas a mere 70 years ago.

I must confess, I have never really given Chaguanas much thought. In school, I learnt to attach certain ideas and certain traits to different areas. Port-of-Spain was "town," the capital, with various streets named in homage or perhaps unimaginativeness after various men of prominence and power in its history. Arima was one of the territories of the Amerindians and later their mixed descendants. San Fernando was far, with the hill. Siparia had the "La Divina Pastora." Santa Cruz was old cocoa plantations and cool, green drives. Very systematically I had divided my little world into comprehensive and distinctive parts.

But Chaguanas. As I got older, a coworker convinced me great bargains were to be had there and one Saturday, armed with this knowledge, I made my way down to the humid, choked streets of the town. The sight of food and people and shoddy goods was too much and I had left with none of the stunning purchases I was supposed to have made off with. Now, how many years later, Naipaul "in another country and in another life" offered me a different view of Chaguanas.

It was a view that he had to leave this country, this life, to discover. Somewhere, buried in the dusty and mildewed confines of some history book, silverfish slithering madly across the faces of the pages, this story must be written. But history can only be brought to life by the actions of those that live and, unfortunately, we bury quite effectively.

Napoleon Bonaparte said, "What is history but a fable agreed upon." In this country it seems we agree upon no fable. It is like a mean child. It is a game where one child has been singled out for ostracism from the group. No matter what toys he may produce, what delights he may offer, the group closes in upon itself to leave him out, to pretend that he doesn’t exist. And for the child at the receiving end of this punishment, it is cruelty maddening in its effectiveness.

It’s only 15 years since the attempted coup took place. Two weeks ago, I noticed a young mother, perhaps my age, walking holding her son. She was waiting to cross the street when her attention was called away by the son pointing at something behind her and asking, "Mummy, what is that?" She spun around and watched the Eternal Flame for a few minutes. "Aye, aye! Boy, I eh know nah," she replied and proceeded to cross. We look outside this country constantly, looking for something bigger, something more tangible, more significant than our own petty existence. History for most of us stops at what our grandparents remember and choose to speak about, most of which we forget until we, too, get older and wish to create a sense of the past but by then, often it is too late. Already there are children who don’t know what the coup was about, who have no idea of the days of uncertainty and panic and terror. That July I was 13. Helicopters flew overhead constantly, my father came home with tins of Crix. Abu Bakr on TV was like a parody. My mother was watching absentmindedly, packing groceries or cooking when he came on. She thought it was a play. For weeks it seemed we were living in dead days, like the year had paused on July 27 and what we were living out were facsimile, in between days. It was quietly horrendous, this suspension of time and place and reality.

Every year a handful of journalists who lived it get together and try to agree upon the fable, try to remind us that the "jokey coup" we are already forgetting was no joke at all.

But perhaps that chapter is already doomed to the pages of some history book, where, 70 years after it took place, another generation will read about it and wonder at the country they never knew.

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