okay, this is much more like an open journal than any kind of journalism or polished writing. i'm basically recording my experience so i can go back and look at it later, and figured i may as well share it in the meantime.what follows has headings to make skipping ahead easier, and includes our hairy arrival, the slowest sandwich in the world, a huge party, a baby shower, and a cameo from lil jon. have fun, and i really wish you were here. i promise to make the next entry shorter.
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intro rambling
through the heaviest rains i've seen in the bay in so long, i steeled myself for the hourlong BART trip to the San Francisco airport. expecting the rain to pour under my collar and into my socks, my last minute bundling was interrupted by my sweetheart, who offered to drive from san francisco to come get me, only to drive me back through san francisco to the airport. spechless as i usually am at displays of true affection, he laughed and came to get me.
over the next day, i travelled to trinidad, through dallas and miami, including a strangely shaped 6am visit to my dear friend p's family home in the kind of thick sprawl that only lives in texas. my anxiety was billowing as we boarded one plane and another, because we weren't sitting together on either plane, and hadn't had a chance to talk about the trip for weeks beforehand. what would be like for us, being in a little bit of a funk with each other, to arrive in a foreign country, not in a hotel, but on a stranger's couch?!? yes people, welcome to
couchsurfing.com, our amenable travel agent for the journey.
so. we didn't know anything about antoinette, except her address and that she is obsessed with american television. i mean i didn't even have homegirl's last name. the miniscus of my anxiety spilled over as soon as i stepped off the plane and caught that first whiff of... mmm, us. The dank sweet frangance of a place where white people don't run shit, least as far as the eye can see. an hour or so of waiting in immigration and customs lines, strategizing about gender and perception of queerness, we emerge into a straight bedlam of waving aunties, sweaty cab drivers, exhausted children... okay, antoinette says she has on a red top and curly hair. a few hundred people crammed into and airport entrance the size of a holiday inn lobby. finally we find her, and we're off...
off to the feteso, antoinette is clearly pissed that it took so long for us to get through immigration - our plane was scheduled to land at 9:55, but we didn't make it into her sister therese's car til after midnight. trying to smile it off, she says we need to get dressed for the party in the airport bathroom and then make it to the party with her while our bags go back to the house with her sister. having expected half as much, i had been planning my outfit for the party, and pulled out a tube dress with leggings and cutesy sandals. we run back to the car, and i am reminded of driving in the third world. what seatbelts? why wait when you can overtake... directly into oncoming traffic!?
slowest sandwich in historyso, it's well past midnight, we tumble out of the back of the car at the arima dial, the centre (;-) of a small city 30 minutes from the airport, and 45 from where we are gong. antoinette, who we will soon learn is a magical ride-getting-machine, has "organised a ride" to meet us at the dial, which is a late night gathering spot. lots of overdressed teenage girls and shrewd-looking men. antoinette asks if we are hungry, and i give the perennial vegan answer, even when ravenous - "not really, i'm fine!" p gestures to the subway, which i enter with all my foodie disdain, only to find a wholly different restaurant than the chain it is supposed to represent. yes, they had the same bread choices, but the "veggie max" soya patty sandwich? give thanks (yet again) for the indian diaspora! and can i tell you that when i say these people were woking on their own time, i am so serious?!?! this sandwich took a good, eight or nine minutes, after which, of course, antoinette's "friend" also known as a cabbie, is awaiting us.
gauntlet taxi rideso in the taxi, which is basically indistinguishable from a car, we are greeted by ryan, who gives the too wide smile from the mirror and asks if p is my son. taken off guard (even though i probably shouldn't have been), i say too loud that she is my friend. somehow, we end up talking about food, and i share that i am veg, or ital as they say in the caribbean, which he then makes into this wierd joke about how i can cook him ital, and then he'll eat it, but his wife has to cook meat too. at this point, i was like, this fool better... obama is up next, and antoinette and i are talking about what kind of coverage US politics gets in T&T. ryan asks what obama has done so far, and i didn't realize that it was a test until too late. i mention obama's lifting of the ban on US aid to NGO's that provide abortions or even referrals for abortions. he says, "what's good about that?" and launches an argument. i was so glad that antoinette had my back, but even then i couldn't get a straight answer when i asked if abortion was legal in t&t; ryan said "legal fro doctors" and antoinette grumbled. after a while, to keep me safe in this man's car, i tried to tie it up with the classic state's rights appeasal of conservatives, that it shouldn't be the US's decision whether abortion is available in another nation, just because the US has money to bully people. whew. p didn't jump in, but given his situation, that was probably wiser than me anyway.
AC 7 - the greatest party in the world
okay, if this party, actually titled "alternative conception7: heavenly dreams" is any measure of what carnival is giong to be like, i am so not ready. so, first of all, it was hosted by machel montano, who is a soca megastar in trinidad. it's his annual pre-carnival fete, so i was expecting like, a club with a few performances and dj's. um, no. he had been onstage for an hour by the time we actually got in at 1am, and that shit went strong til 5 in the national stadium, on the soccer field and spilling out thruogh the bleachers. we're talking two story high tv screens with different angles on the onstage action; maybe 7 costume changes, dance crew, live band, etc. he brought out two little boys at differnt points, one black boy about 8 years old singing, "they say i'm too young for soca," and an indian boy about the same age sining a sone about unifying the different trinidad communities talkin buot, "i love you sister, i love you brother, i love you trinidad."
then comes the complicated part - machel says - who wanna see trinidad's next soca monarch? and the crowd gets all excited when there is a big ass gong niose, and a red chinese new year's dragon comes out on the stage, and machel is all like, "who would have thought that a soca star woule be
chinese?!?!" the crowd starts laughing, and a singer named "Chinee" comes out in a totally random sterotype outfit with a straw hat, slippers and a white kung-fu-movie-type outfit, singing a whole song about being Chinese. my man even had take-out containers spinning as screensavers on the big screens as he performed. to top it off, he brought out and older chinese calypso singer whose name was, no kidding "Chinese Laundry." They did a duet that was basically a string of asian stereotype jokes, and Chinee closed with a moment to give thanks for his Chinese heritage, before he did a weird kung-fu movie dubbing impersonation. i'm like,
really!?!? it was clear that machel was bringing folks out from different racial backgrounds on some, "let's all be trini together" shit, but it was really striking how much it was accepted and maybe expected that asian folks were a token at best, and a mess of sterotypes at worst, which then got me thinking about how marginalization works in a context without whiteness... (there has been a small, but steady chinese popultion on the island since the 1800's when merchants first came owver thorugh the extended british empire)
okay so all that happens, then a vaguely familiar comes out with machel and starts singin "finally the herb come around," but i was like, that dude is black, isn't he? then, machel starts taklin bout the US, and who has been there - me and p all yelling, then i hear the unmistakable , "YEEEEAAH!" and i'm like,
"lil jon?!?" yes people, and the light skinned cat was pitbull. me and p are like, what the f*$#@?!? can i tell you the crowd was not even that excited after they first came out! these fools is perfoming "pool palace (snap your fingers)" and "ay chico," and the trinis are going to get drinks! but as soon as machel came back, they were amped again. that moment gave me glimmer of hope as the limits of american media hegemony had not reached to the hearts of the trinis who knew that their hometown boy was worth way more energy, not to mention he put on a WAY better show. okay, i didn't even mention the confetti grenades and 90's house/dance music throwback set, but you get the picture.
our couch...arriving at 6am, we had no idea what the household was really like. okay, so "CouchSurfing" means just that, and a caribbean couch is quite a different notion from a laz-y-boy! children running, cooking, all that hapening, i wake up groggy around noon to find a full house, with our host nowhere in sight. EEEEEK! who are these people? are they even cool with antoinette having random americans stay, or do they just tolerate it cause she helps pay the bills? over the next couple hours, i met the siblings luann, benton, ashford (fordy for short), therese (who had picked us up), brother in law jason; the kids: aurelia & aurelius, ashley & alia, not to mention antoinette's parents ann and sanchez. oh, and one more sister i saw but didn't meet. yes, a household of 13, sprawled into rooma with concrete floors under the corrugated tin roof ubiquitous wherever brown people are.
but as soon as we took all that in, it was time to go. i had tried to make myself as useful as i could in the morning, still in shock from the cold shower (i haven't seen a hot water tap yet). i helped benton re-stuff the couch pillows into new covers, chopped onions for luann, and gave the kids the bubbles i brought with me as a treat. however, in the midst of playing, antoinette invited us to an afterparty for her friend's baby's baptism. as with most free things in foreign countries, i like to say yes - and it was lovely! after our first ride on trinidad public transit - a string of taxis and maxi-taxi (vans) hurtling down the road, it was so grounding to recognize myself in multigenerational circles of brown women holding babies and making meaning in the absence of men. of course, when we realized that the hostess's husband's computer had its screensaver on porn images, we had a good laugh and it was great to watch her regulate on him in a public, loving way. after a while, the rain returned, hindering our rturn journey via transit. as usual, antoinette was able to "organise a ride," but we had to wait. i was fading so fast, i actually took the hostess up her offer to let me rrst in her bed until we left. i was so grateful that it took me until i laid down to remember my germaphobe side, and i wasn't quite ready to sleep on a redolently sweaty (hah GRE word!) messy bed. exhaustion won over snobbery and i laid my headwrap down as a psychological buffer and was out.
morning in arimaarmed with vague directions and each other, me and p headed down to "righteous lane corner" to catch a taxi down to the arima dial. of course, we didn't know what anyone meant when they said, "rigth down the way" in a maze of teeny roads with no sign. we ended up asking the first women we saw, who pointed us in the opposite direction than we had been headed. a great street food brunch of doubles, 2 cell phone stores, and a maxi ride later, we get picked up byour host at "five rivers junction," which as far as we could tell was a river of trash flowing under an intersection. go figure. she brought us on an errand, and now we are her in her office at the Cocoa Research Unit on the campus of the University of the West Indies, using free internet and watching international undergrads walk by, looking suspiciously like their conterparts in the states.
musingsomeone asked me if i was having fun, and i didn't know how to respond. i think i come to laces like trinidad, like south africa, like the d.r. for something different than a weekend getaway. like for nuorishment, for a reminder of what's in the other side of my psychic umbiical cord. without coming to places where brown people run shit, i feel untethered, compassless. like, i smell that smell and i'm okay - we're a little free someplace. the accented words tumble past my ears liike music that i never got to play. and yes, that is hella romanticized and it's free cause i get to get back onthe plane, etc, but it's where i'm at right now.
if anyone actually spent this much time reading to get to this point, as jay-z says, "you must love me." i sure nuff love you.
