10
UWI TODAY 100
TH
ISSUE
– SUNDAY 17 DECEMBER, 2017
Laventille
– as both physical landscape and cultural site
of memory – holds an iconic location in the burgeoning
multi-ethnic, multicultural nation’s symbology and narrative
of how it came to construct and name itself. The sprawling
settlement, which overlooks the capital city of Port of Spain,
was a catchment for a substantial cross-section of the newly
freed slaves who embraced emancipation in 1834–38 by
fleeing the estates in pursuit of a better life.They were joined
by waves of immigrants from other Caribbean nations
who flocked to the then oil-rich Trinidad in the early and
mid-1900s.
Laventille is a large and complex community with
its fair share of upwardly mobile as well as impoverished
citizens and districts. While some areas exist under siege;
others are peaceful. All are resilient. Laventille has its
towering heroes as surely as it has its villains.
Laventille is also iconic because, as Earl Lovelace
powerfully evokes, it was out of this hillside ghetto of
the urban poor that restless and denigrated young men
produced their compelling acts of resistance and creativity.
Trinidad and Tobago’s primary cultural export – the
carnival arts – was crafted by this and other settlements
on the periphery of Port of Spain. Trinidad-style carnivals
have grown exponentially; they have been exported to
metropolitan centres to become the world’s largest street
festival and gathering place for migrants of the Caribbean
diaspora and beyond. More significantly, Laventille and its
people have led the way in generating what Rawle Gibbons
terms “a theatre of self-liberation.”
The nation, which has proven to be highly effective
in incorporating the community’s energies and creative
potential, has failed spectacularly in terms of alleviating its
ills. This diverse and evolving community has come to be
symbolically flattened and reduced in the national psyche.
It has today become iconic of the grim living conditions
generated by persistent poverty, State neglect, the emergence
of virulent gun and gang violence and the challenge of
healing dis-eased communities.
Walcott published the poem “Laventille” and the essay
“What the Twilight Says” in 1970, the year of the tumultuous
Black Power revolution in Trinidad and Tobago, in which
suppurating fissures of woundedness were erupting to shake
the foundations of the social order. The opening lines of
the poem allude briefly to the emblem of hope, creativity
and potentiality hammered out in this terrible crucible:
“It huddled there / steel tinkling its blue painted metal
air, / tempered in violence, like Rio’s favelas.” The persona
ascends the hill for the christening of a child destined for
a journey between the “habitual womb” – the repository
of seed sprouting from loveless, passionless, mechanical
couplings – and the “patient tomb”, which is content to wait
quietly, certain of its harvest. The life of this child will follow
a trajectory “fixed in the unalterable groove / of grinding
poverty.” The persona attributes this condition to psychic
woundedness caused by the ruptures of theMiddle Passage:
PROFESSORIAL LECTURE
Something inside is laid wide like a wound,
some open passage that has cleft the brain,
some deep, amnesiac blow. We left
somewhere a life we never found,
customs and gods that are not born again,
some crib, some grille of light
clanged shut on us in bondage, and withheld
us from that world below us and beyond,
and in its swaddling cerements we’re still bound.
The physical surroundings externalize the grim quality of
the people’s lives:
we climbed where lank electric
lines and tension cables linked its raw brick
hovels like a complex feud,
where the inheritors of the middle passage stewed,
five to a room, still clamped below their hatch,
breeding like felonies,
whose lives revolve round prison, graveyard, church.
Below bent breadfruit trees . . .
Walcott sketches in highly compressed word pictures
an external environment which reflects grim socioeconomic
and psychic realities. The electric wires convey both the
dense interconnectedness of the people in the community
and the inevitable tensions generated by overcrowding,
poverty, frustration, flouted desire and hopelessness. To
ascend is to descend. The journey uphill causes the poet
to envision a metaphorical parallel – the middle passage
– as inflicting a deep wound through a violent blow which
has cleft the brain and caused the amnesia, which Walcott
identifies in “The Muse of History” as the “true history of
the NewWorld.”The journey sent dispossessed peoples into
futile repetitious cycles of time, space, oppression and loss,
which undermine attempts to plot a trajectory for escape.
The horrific journey cannot be relegated to the past if two
centuries later its survivors still live the legacy of its horrors
daily “clamped below their hatch, breeding like felonies.”
A pervasive culture of criminality emanates from both the
historical blow and the contemporary social environment.
Walcott grounds his representation of grim outcomes
of the trans-generational transfer of trauma in place. This
compelling socio-symbolic construct does not emerge
from an internal perspective which Walcott constructs in
“The Spoiler’s Return” as a confident and condemnatory
calypsonian. This persona uses his elevated vantage point
in the hills of Laventille where he is “crowned and mitred
as bedbug the first” to pour stringent critique of the post-
independence political order. In stark contrast, the persona
LAVENTILLE –
A Living Vibration
B Y P A U L A M O R G A N
of “Laventille” speaking as a sympathetic outsider constructs
the community as a site of raw pain in which poverty,
denigration, hopelessness and despair are created anew
with every passing day.
The vantage point is as significant in life as in literature.
In life, those who aspire towards the hegemonic Euro-creole
sensibility steeped in amnesia and / or shame generated
by the African presence in must bear Laventille’s intrusive
enactments of cultural rituals of transcendence and
resistance, the embodied assertion of the ancestral danced
faiths of the Orishas and Spiritual Baptists, the rhythms
and energies of drumbeats transmuted into “steel tinkling
its blue paintedmetal air, / tempered in violence” (Walcott).
In life, despite overall real family and community
gains and accomplishments, too many inhabitants of the
hill remain locked out of potentiality, upward mobility and
trans-generational progress which have been accessed by
more privileged descendants of slaves and indentees. While
this social condition is not the full nature of the sprawling
leviathan released by the Middle Passage, it is certainly its
dark underbelly.
This is a 1970 poetic evocation of the impact of psychic
and direct trauma on a community. Let us leap forward some
forty years to 2009 to the online site
to gauge reactions to the news the “Despers Flee the Hill:
Crime Forces Laventille Panorama Champ to Seek Shelter
in Belmont.” (
Daily Express
). The fuller reading analyses
both the newspaper report and a range of online responses
to this disturbing news. Time this evening will allow me to
zero in on one example of how Laventille is constructed in
discourse, as a social barometer for the entire nation:
Pan started in those hills. Men died to play.Their deaths
marked the path that pan took to reach this place, in this
time. Now, in its birthplace, people are simply being killed
and a pivotal, iconic band has to tear up roots. It’s just pan I
know.There are more important things like food and shelter
and clothes on your back. Those people who are doing the
crimes don’t really see what pan has to do with anything. An
old piece of tin can’t stop a fella from hacking off your wrist
for that watch or slamming a bullet in your belly becuase
[
sic
] you looked at him the wrong way.
They big and strong and armed and dangerous and
ruling the hills now. And where once the pan identified
Trinidad and Tobago, they are now the symbol of what we
have become. (Soca Warriors 2009, reply #1)
Here, as is invariably the case in the popular imaginary,
the commentator synthesizes the competing legends and
narratives of origin, and the diverse experimental processes
which rolled out in numerous panyards in and around Port
of Spain in the late 1930s and early 1940s, into a single
understanding: “Pan started in those hills.”
The second synoptic statement, that “men died to play”,
constructs the steelpan as bathed in the blood of martyrs. At
the inception of the steelband movement, it was perceived
by representatives of the colonial hegemonic order as the
“Our societies are still reeling as a result of extremes of wealth and poverty, with shrinking middle classes
struggling to hold on to hard-won gains in the standard of living, and a substantial cross section of our
populations still enduring structural inequity, lack of opportunity, racism and denigration.” In her Inaugural
Professorial Lecture, Paula Morgan argues that this scenario is rooted in historical trauma with contemporary
legacies of physical and cultural traumas, which need societal healing. In this excerpt she focuses on how literary
and popular discourses function to situate Laventille as a site of collective memory and trauma.
