Little England: The poincianas, the flamboyants, the bougainvillea are all in bloom; even in this, the last slate-coloured light of day, you can see their reds, oranges, purples. I walked down through the Garrison Historic District to the Savannah and stood, in a mood of interested ambivalence, to look at the people walking the race track. If I'd had a cigarette and still smoked I'd have lit up, leaned in the crook of one of the lush trees, and wondered, based on the visual and the aesthetic loveliness of my immediate surroundings, why Barbados has always been a slightly unpleasant thought to me.
About 15 per cent of Barbados' total employment is based around tourism; out of a population of 260,000 that's 40,000. The immigration officer, the customs officer, the taxi driver who drove me to the hotel, the woman with the nice tits who checked me in, the man who took me to my room, the security guard at the gate, the four people in the Red Rooster - that's nine I've met so far, and each, although not exuberantly selling me Barbados, was pretty easy to deal with: no hassles, no rudeness, no bad attitude (so what am I complaining about?), all subtly letting me know that Barbados, Bim, is a good holiday buy. The thing is that this is a great place, aesthetically, culturally, socio-economically. One could make a life in a place as tropically dishy as this.
But, and perhaps it's just me, but there's an uninteresting-ness. This, after all, is 'Little England', with all the stuffed shirted-ness that image can conjure. Something is lacking; the wild verve of Caribbean-ness doesn't evidently exist here in any form of abundance, and I'm looking for it, for that sensuality of hot-island people. It's in St. Lucia in spades, the people, the women, who look at you oozing that semi-shy Frenchified 'Come f-k you-ness' through big brown eyes seeming just slightly oriental at the corners. In Trinidad it's there, sexy-bad, in the coolest of Barry White kinda ways. And in Jamaica it's sweating hot, looking for love, love out of its Sean Paul-like multi-racial rude-bwoy skin. So surely it's lurking here in Barbados, somewhere. There's verve here, I can feel it. But it's corseted, closeted, hidden away like buggerers, bullers and b...men. I can hear the lilt of that juicy social bounce in the people on the small basketball court at the Savannah. It's there: I know it is.
A note that I've written says 'Barbados lacks soul and that's what's wrong with it.' But the truth is that that is what Barbados is, it's not really something that's wrong with it, just a part of its essence. They don't flaunt, they just are. Friends tell me that they know another Barbados, a warm, welcoming one full of interesting fun-loving people. But they, these friends, when pressed, still agree that yes, definitely, there is a wall, albeit a low-slung, Georgian cut-stone wall, over which you have to climb before you can encounter this warm side of the Bajan spirit.
'I observe 'Wind bending grass to shape/ Sun causing shadows to come alive.' I'm watching the to and fro of the long stems of grass around the racecourse at the Savannah. The sun has dipped, the shadows have begun to overwhelm the light; it's the end of another day. But the walkers, the basketball players, the loiterers like me don't seem to care. We lurk. Objects at rest will remain at rest, objects in motion will remain in motion - it's the physics of life - until some other action causes them to change. Finally I turn turn and walk back to my hotel slowly. There's no warm expectation in my stride, the hotel holds only the interest of sleep; no soothing aesthetic, no ambience; the fabric in the rooms is wounding. The sunset behind me lingers, its orange still refusing to give way completely to the graunching attack of the dark. Twilight lengthens. I walk in its midst, alone, back the way I came.
The district is beautiful, but it's a beauty you feel as much as you see. Most of the historic seems to have gone from it. There are a few of the red brick buildings here and there that are the manifestation of memory of the past; I see them in the haze of dusk, but I don't examine them. Hidden behind named gateposts are a few historic houses, but I don't see theme
Toni Braxton's singing 'Un-break my Heart' in unison with the crickets chirping and the reckless sound of not too distant surf pestering the beach. On the pool deck the tipsy chuckles and gurgles of the crowd of packaged tourists, just in from various English parts, are accompanied by the music of 'Simply Red.' The bedspread is annoying me; I can't get comfortable on it, as if it is allergic to me and not vice versa. I give up and leave the room.
Across the road is the Red Rooster pub. It seems lonely and incongruous. Its parking lot is empty. It is a single story, mock mock-Tudor building. The pub is just as empty inside and doesn't seem at all pubby by any of the standards I remember. But I suppose the guests, often English, must find it comforting to read the word 'Pub' on a building, with its connotations of home.
'What paradise seekers really want,' wrote Peter Benchley, 'is a place that is spoilt, a place that looks unchanged but that has - hidden amongst the trees - aqualungs and water skis, movie theatres and salons, night clubs and dance bands - the very aspects of a life at home that they affect to despise.' And it's not a bad thing, this want to have something familiar in the unfamiliar, a sense of safety like a night light in the dark of a room.
I ate my dinner on the veranda. All the guests were eating on the veranda. That is to say, a small, young family was at the next table, foreign, French, I believe, because they spoke French. The children were both blonde and cute, although the parents both had dark hair, his chestnut, hers a light brown. They made me think of my own children. The veranda seemed even less pubby than the pub itself, less English; certainly less Bajan and more something else, something European, continental. The floor was red. But the food was very good.
I was alone at my table, I should have brought my book. Instead I drew on the napkin something that might pass for the art of a child.
The morning, shedding a brighter light, doesn't necessarily change anything, but it does illuminate the faded charm of the Hastings district: little neighbourhoods down roads to the beach; quaint cottages clinging precariously to the edges of beach cliffs; the constant surf and dishevelled loveliness and bohemian artistic air that lends a kind of 'surf city' air to the whole thing, like some very south Venice Beach. There's a 'Shotgun' cottage on the beach side that is bright blue, with a white roof and white accent around the gables; its Jalousie windows are also white but the frames are yellow, with an accent of green further out. Almost next to it is what I think of as 'turn-of-the-century Australian' - not this century, that one. It has a straight up-and-down cut-stone central core of two stories, with an apron roof around its middle that's painted red, and the 'porch' has a balustrade of white, wooden, neatly turned pins in a double hourglass shape. Both the apron roof and the three small, pitched triangles that make up the main roof are made of corrugated tin that's painted red. A lot of the houses have the multiple pitched roofs in a line.
There's a small surf shop, full of boards for skating and surfing, across the street and I wander in. This is the alternate version of me, the me I would have been had I not been so willing to please; the hippie poet-boy riding the wave of the world - I'm sort of only half of that now. Inside I see that 'would have been me' version of me, young and sitting in a corner all locksified, his hair in blonde dreadlocks, his skin a darker shade of tanned; he is neither black nor white, tall nor short.
'Easy,' I say.
'Cool,' he replies.
'Jus' looking,' I add.
'Hmmm!' And he goes back to doing little or nothing.
I want to ask him if he smokes herb and if he has any and if he can light up and give me a burn, and then I'd buy a deck and I'd skateboard the uneven Hastings pavement while listening to something coolly lame, like 'Breakfast at Tiffany's'. She said, I think I remember the film and that we both kinda liked it.
But instead, eh, I leave and continue my walk around the neighborhood, without the effects of a spliff or the clack-clack of celluloid wheels on the road. I recall, the last time I was in Barbados, lots of pigeons, doves, big and cinnamon brown and constantly cooing at me while I drank my morning coffee. Now I don't see or hear any as I walk; no birds, hardly any noise. There is the quiet 'fffrrrrrrr' of the breeze through the trees and around the sharp edges of the houses, and the fresh smell of hot dry air that's been filtered through grass and dust and salt off the sea.
There are no stray dogs wandering the roads, no wild chickens. This must be another Caribbean reality all together.
Down one back road I see a hand-lettered sign on the gate of a ramshackle little house with a bedraggled yard and atrophied cars: 'Collateral damage has a bad habit of bleeding.' It's a good point, given the twin facts that this is a surfer's house (I can tell by the surfboards) and that we are an entire world very much at just that kind war, the kind filled with bleeding collateral damage. I'm reading - not now, but generally - Dark Star Safari by Paul Theroux. I like his writing, especially now. What read like arrogance in the writing of his youth seems now to have mellowed into an intellectual curmudgeon-ness that is much like that of his long time friend V.S. Naipaul, whom I've also been reading. And I'm comparing the collateral damage, both physical and emotional, that fills its pages, to this. I like reading about Africa; it reminds me so much of the Caribbean, and there always seems to be a dearth of good writing on the Caribbean but a boon of it on Africa.
Strange that some 500 years separate our Caribbean history, white man's and black man's alike, from something common with Africa. There are the more modern histories in the Caribbean, 300 years of the Indian and the Chinese, and the more ancient, 600 years separate us from a common history with Europe. Yet our modern social temperament is very much that of Africa's: the socio-economic problems, the race relationships, the echoes of colonialism.
That we in the Caribbean should share a more common historical-umbilical with Southern United States would seem likely, but we don't. Our emergence from the slave and colonial experiences has been quite different; certainly, our political rhetoric, our 'Television-isation', has been driven by the 'American' social phenomenon; and therefore our politically-minded, having been weaned on the black American experience, often try to parallel the latter, to find American-style racism and marginalisation here where it doesn't really exist. The neglected truth is that America is a white man's country, in which only 13 per cent of the population is black or having one black parent, and this is not the political or the demographic reality of the Caribbean. We are a series of ex-colonial, black man's countries in which a few white people live; and so, as a modern people, our recent historical experience is more that of Africa than it is of America.
And then her T-shirt said, on the back, 'School of Hard Knocks', and I read the words out loud and she turned to smile at that, at this white man with the rough Jamaica accent. She was young and black and strong and cleaning the road around the Savannah. She was not beautiful, not ugly, just there, a person. I smiled back and said 'Morning', and she smiled still and I nodded and kept on my way to take photos of the racetrack and
the Stewards' lookout posts, which interested me although they were no different from lifeguard stands with a roof.
The woman in the shirt is part of the busy-ness that's going on all around me. I see no indications of what Earl Lovelace termed 'a religion of laziness', that tropical island indolence that is one of the symptoms of oppressive heat and the weight of unemployment. I once introduced myself to Earl Lovelace before a lecture he was to give. He made a joke to me about how he would open his speech. I suggested that he use the line, 'As unaccustomed as I am to public speakingÉ' He laughed. He was dressed all in white and wore a furtive nervousness, and seemed well accustomed to both. His eyes were very oriental, and he reminded me of someone whom I couldn't quite recall, and still can't; just that he seemed very familiar. He was at issue with his nervousness and did not want to chat; unemployment is sometimes chronic in a Caribbean where micro-economies, government corruption, First World aggressive trade practices and corporate avarice make an indelicate mix. But here in Bridgetown people are making the environs neat and clean, cutting, trimming, sweeping. There's civic pride, keeping the roads clean, keeping things real. And there's something about the feel of a racetrack in the early morning: the sound and smell of the horses exercising.
Three athletic bays are warming up at the far end of the track. They're sidling, necks turned inward in the way that all contained racehorses do, trying to escape the bits in their mouths: they're sprinters, they want to be let loose, to run-run-run. When a racehorse runs its gait is fluid, pulling in and then stretching out, but held in like this they're ragged and ungainly. The jockeys give them a little of their heads; the necks straighten, they try to stick their chins out, get a bit more freedom from the bite.
There's nothing for me to do here, no beautiful people to watch, nor bone-ugly either; nothing beyond the horses. And, in the immortal words of V.S. Naipaul, 'One has done the horses now.'
The question then became what to do next. I could sit around and hope to run into Jemma Kidd, quote-unquote ex-Supermodel and sometime-Bajan, whose father owns the historic house and polo field, 'Holders'. I look around but I don't see her, and she and her sister Jodie would be hard to miss; they're very tall. And all the while I'm thinking this, 'Crash Into Me' is playing in my earphones and is followed shortly by 'Do you Really Want to Hurt Me', and I don't know what, if anything, the music's trying to tell me, but I don't hold out much chance that Jemma will be arriving soon; so I leave.
I'd thought that writing this might be a linear experience; you know, a flight takes you to a place, you talk about the place and then move on and talk about the next place. But the experience wasn't like that. Each new destination came complete with its own baggage of appended memories of other places and times; chords weren't struck in any linear way. An acquaintance I had made in the Cayman Islands said to me that, coming from a flat island, he found the mountains in places like Jamaica 'intimidating', that he much preferred the gently undulating hilliness of Barbados. Barbados certainly does have a pleasant roll and tumble to it, a soothing little upsy-daisy, and this taxi ride reminded me of another ride and a house in similarly rolling countryside; this one outside of 'Benque Viejo Del Carmen' in Belize, a house that hadn't been there the last time I'd been so close to the Guatemalan border.
And that memory continued me on from Benque, into San Ignacio (De Cayo) down that dusty white road. The years hadn't treated it well, it had sprawled, like some young Mayan cutie of a misspent youth who has grown to a round short unattractiveness of 30 years older. Here are these two beautifully situated 'twin' towns, Santa Elena and San Ignacio, at the bend of a river, at the edge of surrounding hills and in front of a wide fertile valley.
On that day we drove across the Macal, on the Hawksworth Bridge, past the great La Cieba tree with the iguanas in its limbs, and into Santa Elena. And then, near Dido's gas station, we turned back down to the river and back across, lower down, below the market where there hadn't been a bridge in my older memory. Men were washing their cars, women were washing their clothes, children splashed. The reds and blues of the plastic buckets used for laundry were very familiar. I forgot to pay attention to their noise. There's so much you miss even when you think you're looking for it.
I'd spent much of my teenage-hood lurking in the streets and bars of these two dusty, interestingly dingy frontier towns. And I'd fallen in real love here, for the very first time.
The heat is hot, but this time not stifling. We drive along the coast, through Oistins. I really begin to like the level vibes of this part of the country, you know, the almost un-Caribbean Caribbean-ness of it, this Georgian-Edwardian-Californian thingy-thing that it's got going on, the lack of pretension in the architecture, at least in this little stretch. I find myself wanting to spend more time than I've got, wanting to surf and wander the beaches, drive the roads in some convertible Volkswagen thing and eat the food and drink the beer, smoke the cigarettes I don't smoke anymore, and drink the coffee. In my youth I used to think you could judge a place by the quality of its cigarettes and its coffee - given half a chance, I might still feel that way - and its rum.
'Do you like cricket?' The taxi driver asked. He wanted to turn up the radio, I think; he was missing an innings. I like salt fish and ackee, Red Stripe Light Beer, and, of course, cricket. Well, I like it. Ish.
'I try,' I said.
The West Indies were playing Sri Lanka. He blew his horn and it went off with a kind of rhythmic 'booyaka, booyaka, booyaka'; all the horns in Barbados seem to make this sound, no beep beeps or toot toots. As a West Indian, someone from the Caribbean, I should love cricket, but, truth is, I love cricket if I'm playing it. I like watching it when there's limited overs, but watching a five-day test is akin to a three-day jazz festival or watching paint dry. I once heard someone refer to jazz as the musical equivalent of jerking off. All through what used to be the British Empire people play cricket, treat it like a religion, treat it like an American treats baseball.
George Bernard Shaw said of the two: 'Baseball has the great advantage over cricket of being ended sooner.'
And Robert Mugabe, the violently anti-social president of Zimbabwe, said of cricket: 'Cricket civilizes people and creates good gentlemen, I want everyone to play cricket in Zimbabwe; I want ours to be a nation of gentlemen.'
Of course he must have said that during another phase of his life, or perhaps he himself doesn't play cricket. But all that's beside the point, because the man who is perhaps the greatest ever all-round cricketer, Sir Garfield Sobers, was a Bajan; cricket is, after all, the national sport. But Sobers has long retired, and today the game belongs to Lara and to Chanderpaul.
'How are we doing?' I ask. We'd recently lost dismally against England, and West Indians were still nervous every time their team took the field. He coughed up a score of something large for two men out; we were doing well.
'The sun is a shapely fire turning in the air', even the breeze off the sea is warm, but I'd left hotter than this behind in the Cayman Islands to reach Barbados. There had been a haze there, left by the humidity after days of rain, a haze so dull and heavy you could almost taste it. Here people are on the narrow beaches, worshipping the sun, allowing its heat to penetrate the hollows of their innards, warm their spleens and livers. I can smell the baked sea and the roasted asphalt and I wish it would rain, not because of the coolness it would bring but for the odour that so reminds me of childhood: the smell of a small rain on superheated pavement. I used to love that smell. I still do.
And then we pass through the flat along the beach and into a row of old Oaks.
I was born in Jamaica. My paternal line has been in the Caribbean since the early 1600s, moving through successive generations from Martinique to St. Lucia, Grenada and Jamaica. I wonder if much earlier Aqu‰rts had been to Barbados and what they thought of it. What did Barbados hold for them in 1694, 1753, 1807?
Barbados became a British Colony in 1625 and since then has been a fair jewel in the crown. In its early days, as a producer of sugar, its exports may have been small in comparison to the greater estates of Jamaica and Guyana, but on a hogshead per acre performance it almost doubled the output of Jamaica. It seems that Barbados has always been a performer. In the 1980's it was in the Top 20, on some lists, of the best places in the world to live, based on factors such as social services and standard of living; it actually outranked the USA. In 1639 Barbados established a Parliament, making it the third-oldest parliamentary democracy in the world. But it may have been inhabited 1,000 years earlier. Before the coming of whitey, before the Portuguese, the Spanish and then English, Barbados was a heavily forested place where bearded fig trees (from which it is deemed to have gotten its name, 'Los Barbudas') and cedar were abundant, and where Lacono Indians lived a somewhat peaceful pastoral life.
That was before the axe and the saw and the influenza, small pox, tuberculosis, syphilis and slavery changed the face of the nation.
Today, on Broad Street, the views are like those of some small but very hot European city: the shops, the African faces, the feel of the buildings, the railings along Constitution River. But the cars in the taxi ramp are all wrong, the African faces aren't speaking French, or Dutch or Swahili, for that matter, and at the CafBlue the pastries are American, not European. The Bajans all seem very erect, proud, strong. It's a good way to be if you don't take it that step too far and become too serious about who you are. The Bahamians have done that; the Virgin Islanders, too. They've become rude and insular, trying on a superiority in order to mask their feelings of inadequacy.
The downtown cores of Caribbean cities, especially those of the Eastern Caribbean, have become cruise passenger marketplaces, catering to the basic American need for familiar food in familiar settings in unfamiliar places. These parts of our countries have become extensions of the local shopping mall in Boise, Idaho, with warm weather and colourful music and T-shirts with Rastas on the front and the words 'No Problem' emblazoned - just add the name of the country you're in today. And nothing wrong with that, because otherwise these might all be little downtown Kingstons, ghetto-ized, dangerous and dilapidated. Downtown Bridgetown, on the other hand, is vibrant and, let's face it, quite civilized.
I've never eaten flying fish. I'm not picky, it's just that the opportunity never arose before; and it doesn't now on this trip. These islands all have national dishes. I try to look up an American national dish on the internet but find nothing; there's a national symbol, the Bald Eagle, a national flag, the Stars and Stripes, a national anthem, 'Oh say can you see É' - but no national dish. The Big Mac might work, or the Kentucky Fried Chicken 2-piece meal. I'm not being facetious; these things are typical Americana. Flying fish is typically Bajan. But I'm hungry and at CafBlue they have coffee and pastry, but no flying fish.
And sitting there at the window looking out on Broad Street I am not as light and airy as I might expect. There's a weight of emotion travelling with me, as if something in the chi of my life is out of whack, something Karmic this way comes. I pack up my stuff and walk out onto the street. Music, music music: I could use music to give me levity, smooth the mental bumps. But as I'm walking the street I notice a lack of that music. These islands all have a talent for music, some homegrown, some copied, but there's always a rhythm going and music playing. I love music; I love Caribbean music, especially reggae. I have to be partial to that, don't it, being a Jamaican? But music's not very noticeable here, it isn't booming everywhere, you can move quietly about without a soundtrack. You can't do that in Port-of-Spain, St. Georges or Kingston. And today I miss the music.
A brown girl, pretty and tall, walks by, and in another Caribbean country the music would have changed her rhythm, given it a sway and saunter, added a twitch and a subtext that was all sexuality and verve and 'Coo hya look pan me, I sweet bwoy, truly I sweet, yea yea yea.' As it is, I feel burdened. I want to see more of Barbados.
END
Shane Aqu‰rt
