A Hall of a good time

Tony Deyal

CANADA HALL in the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, Trinidad, in September 1969, was definitely not the right place for a slightly older, married Trinidadian to be inducted into campus life. It was a Hall full of Jamaicans, Guyanese and Barbadians, a tossed salad rather than a melting pot. Most Trinidadian students were advised to stay clear of it. The male students heeded the advice but, as I found out later when I lived there, this was the best advertisement the Hall needed for the female Trinidadian students.

I entered Canada Hall as a rare species, not just a Trini but also a freshman or grub, the lowest known life-form and a cross between a stone and a worm. The experience was enough to turn the densest, hardest rock into jelly, and the worm into bait for those who had the good fortune to precede him into the hall. It was the first time I heard the word mattress pronounced matt-rass. A huge Jamaican youth was coming at me, screaming angrily at the top of his voice, and all I could distinguish was the word matt-rass, matt-rass. It sounded to my unaccustomed Trinidadian ears like an expletive directed at the rear end of my immediate maternal ancestor.

Fortunately, I did not take offence so much as take cover, feeling that I would have the stuffing knocked out of me. My instincts were right and showed that I was made of the proper moral fibre. Someone had taken his matt-rass and he planned to kill their mattrass. As I explained a few months ago to the assembled denizens of the Hall at their annual dinner, it was then that I got the nickname 'Poet'. I was doing a comedy skit at the Canada Hall concert and tried to explain the difference between prose and poetry. I said that there was a young lady named Miss Glass who fell in water up to her ankles. I explained that is prose. However, if the water was any deeper it would be poetry.

Since then, I have always been in deep waters. I had not been back to Canada Hall since 1970 when the Black Power demonstrations had generated States of Emergency and other curtailments of normal campus activities including my infrequent attendance at lectures. One evening, a group of Canada Hall students went out into Tunupuna, a small town near the university, and got stranded after the curfew fell.

Not wishing to be shot on sight, they went into the police station and tried to explain the situation to the policeman on duty. The group's spokesman was a Jamaican of East Indian descent. He volubly described their plight. The policeman looked him over and asked, "Where you from?" He answered truthfully, "Jamaica." The policeman stood up and said angrily, "They don't have any Indian in Jamaica. All youh coolie think you smart!"

I had to get the support of the campus police to bail them out. My last Hall dinner, when I was chairman of Canada Hall and still a freshman, was a tragi-comedy. I was presiding over the valedictory dinner of 1970. I spilled wine on the person seated next to me, the Vice-Chancellor's wife, not once, not even twice, but three times. The dress was white. The wine was red. The lady got blue - blue vexed. My face got as red as the wine and the dress. Talk about the wine of astonishment! She had to go home and change. I had to listen to the Vice Chancellor ask the Warden of Canada Hall, the very genteel Dr. Nazeer Ahmad, in a very loud whisper, "Is he drunk? Or is he mad?" The Warden was not sure which of the alternatives applied. He replied, nodding wisely, "Yes."

What was worse is that the news spread around campus very quickly. The story started as "Poet throw down wine on the Vice-Chancellor's wife's dress. But that turned out to be too complex a sentence for most of the students. What eventually was rumoured around campus was that "Poet wine on the Vice Chancellor's wife." For awhile I was both hero and villain.

I left campus before the story got shortened even further. The word wife might have been left out, leaving the reputable sociologist, who was the Vice Chancellor at the time, severely embarrassed. I owed Canada Hall a great deal.

Later in life, as I travelled and worked in all the English-speaking Caribbean countries, I realised how much Canada Hall had helped me to prepare for life in the region. Because of the Hall, I understood Jamaican and slow-spoken Bajan. While I appreciated the sub-titles in the movie The Harder They Come, I did not need them for every scene.

I still cannot pronounce Cohobblopot but have kept my promise, when in Barbados for Crop-Over, never to go to a show the name of which I cannot pronounce. I avoid the word Kadooment because I am still not sure how to pronounce it.

In Guyana, I follow the local custom of using the mandatory letter 's' in front of the common expression for the female sexual organ, but do not commit the cardinal sin of saying sprick or scock. My cousin in Jamaica, Father Gregory of the Mustard Seed Community, speaks enough Jamaican for our entire extended family. He pronounces king as keeng and stonas stan, and has got far enough to drop his hs so that e heats is hamlet with am, hackee and ot hovaltine. Were I to try this I would get my tang tongueled up and hend up in the ospital, which in Barbados is the horse-spittle.

The most important thing I learnt at Canada Hall was how to distinguish a Trinidadian from the other students. You ask him (or her) to pronounce the word c-o-r-n-e-r. As my Jamaican mentor pointed out, Trinidadians cannot pronounce the letter r. We say koh-nah. His explanation remained with me and was made manifest as I travelled in the other West Indian islands and countries. It is true, much as we Trinis like to think otherwise, that other West Indians roll their rs much more than we do.

Tony Deyal was last seen telling the Canada Hall students they should have asked him to speak about sex. He would then have said, truthfully, Ladies and Gentlemen, it gives me great pleasure.

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