Ghost by Gloria Blizzard
Wasafiri is pleased to publish the pieces shortlisted for the 2022 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize. The poems, essays and short stories in this series showcase the best new writing from the best new writers across the globe — in all their diversity and complexity. This piece of life writing by Gloria Blizzard unfolds adult memories and new understandings of childhood trauma against the backdrop of political persecution in newly-independent Trinidad.
Even at nine years old I questioned the wisdom of parading that Carnival. I thought we were trying to stay safe and I was hardly low-key, wearing a giant costume covered in gold sequins and beads. Long tufts of cokiyea, the woody mid-section from the leaves of a coconut tree, extended my girth to about six feet in every direction. Dad said he’d did nothing wrong, he had the right to participate in the culture, he wasn’t hiding. He’d commissioned ornate individual costumes for my little brother and I and then, as he’d said, ‘taken the necessary precautions.’ In my case this meant providing me with a bodyguard named Stuart. My father introduced us to each other and then disappeared into the crowds, shirtless, with a flask of rum strung around his neck, to jump up and play mas’. I looked up into the hundreds of faces of costumed and bejeweled revelers around me. I looked at Stuart.
He was tall and large with very dark skin. His job was to be with me the entire length of the parade. This worked well, except when I needed to cross the stage for the competition. That I did alone, pulling my heavily costumed self up the wooden ramp to wait for my name, costume, and band to be called. I then launched myself from the eaves towards centre stage of the Red Cross Kiddies Carnival, chipping in time to the calypso road march, shaking the costume in front of the judges. I spun around, dancing back and forth the full width of the stage, flashing gold in the sunlight and shaking my cokiyea fronds for the stadium audience. Playing a big mas’ was an important rite of passage, my father had told us. ‘You have to know who you are and where you come from.’ Maybe he already knew that this would be our last Carnival on the island of Trinidad.
By the time we did pack out, I knew why we were leaving. Three thousand night raids had been executed on the family homes of the politically disobedient. To date, we had avoided an invasion and a ransacking, but the incidents had been adding up. The light aeroplane my Dad flew on weekends was a red-and-white Cessna 150. One day, its engine stalled in mid-flight: the air uptake valve had mysteriously been covered with a cap. The result was that the plane’s gas tank collapsed upon itself and the plane started to fall out of the sky. My father crash-landed the small two-seater on a dirt road just outside the village of Moruga, placing the plane’s wheels six inches from the weed-filled ditches on either side. ‘Air force training,’ he said. ‘Do it right the first time.’
Another day, he showed us numbers on a lab report confirming near-fatal levels of arsenic in his hair and fingernails. With his medical training, he’d determined that the white powder, a common weapon used in southern climes, must have been consistently added to his system on a regular basis. He had one person in mind who was often at his office.
Finally, after the tampered brakes of our white Volkswagen buggy left my parents careening down a curving hill, slowing and coming to stop only due to a flat section of road and an interaction with some bushes, they knew it was time to go.
Dad left first. My mother refused to leave right away. ‘It’s not me they are after,’ she said. She insisted that we finish the academic year in our various schools. The prospect of showing up in Canada with three disoriented kids in mid-June made her brave enough to stay put for a couple extra weeks.
She sold everything she could from the medical office and our home. Then there was Dawn, our simple-minded Alsatian with a sway back, a mild disposition, and a paucity of mothering skills. Most of her litter had died as she would rise suddenly, and stumble over the nursing puppies who fell from her teats. We needed someone to take her. Gabriel, a distant cousin, needed a guard dog or at least the appearance of one. We dropped Dawn off with him the day before departure. As we drove away, I turned for a last look. She stood tall, tail erect, watching us through the wrought iron gate.
On our final day, my mother handed us each a small suitcase to take to the waiting car.
As I’d had a thoroughly colonial upbringing that included embroidery, netball, and English folk songs, I could not bring myself to fits and howls of protest.
Instead, at some point during the drive to Piarco International Airport, on our way to Goose Bay, Labrador, Canada, I simply stopped speaking.
The year before our departure, my younger brother and I had been engaged in a favourite and covert activity – jumping on our parents’ bed. In the midst of our glee, a hard, shiny, black object slid from beneath our father’s pillow down the length of the polycotton sheet to nestle between us. We’d halted our exuberance and looked at each other. I picked up the gun. I put it back down.
This was the evidence that my then-sceptical 11-year-old self needed. We really were in some kind of trouble. His rants about subterfuge were connected to the world outside of us and were not just in my father’s head. I understood then that the gun was to point outwards towards a threat. However, even as I held the weight of it in my small hands, I fought cognitively against this new understanding. ‘This is stupid,’ I thought.
We called out to our mother. She came running. We protested its presence. Why? We demanded. Why is there a gun under Dad’s pillow? Mostly I protested that it was so close to her head, imagining that if it went off, it might leave us motherless.
Our mother shrugged, a helpless tilt of the head.
***
In Eric Williams, The Myth and the Man by Selwyn Ryan, there is a paragraph:
Between 1972 and 1974 there were numerous manhunts, as well as searches of homes, some belonging to prominent people including two doctors and a permanent secretary. The searches, which were often executed by the dreaded ‘Flying Squad’ under the leadership of the assistant commissioner, Randolph Burroughs, were carried on amid great show of force, and invariably nothing was found to justify the brutality.
My father underlined and wrote in every book that he read. Today, I recognise his careful hand. Written above the year 1974, he’d penciled in ‘1975’.
When I first picked up the 842-page tome, my father was still alive. I’d been skimming through it while sitting on the beige sofa bed where I often landed on visits to my parents’ home. When I came across this paragraph, I remember feeling something settle in me as words, phrases, fears, discomforts, and dismay all slid into place.
The book says the Flying Squad were Prime Minister Eric Williams’ henchmen. They harassed those who caused him displeasure. Burroughs was a name I had heard often around our fraught dinner table. But here, my childhood experiences had been organised, named, and had appeared in print. My father had not just been difficult or paranoid or crazy. Shit was going down. The breach in my perfect private-school island life and the flight to Canada had been for a reason. There were people after him. I looked up at him and asked, ‘Does this paragraph refer to us?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘We were never raided. One soldier told his commanding officer, “I’m not raiding doc’s house.” The plan was abandoned.’ A raid did not happen that night – to us.
***
In 1962, the newly-minted independent nation of Trinidad and Tobago had a new leader. Eric Williams was Oxford-educated and PhD’d. He’d written on the intricate connections between capitalism and slavery. He understood that this new nation was founded on the lands and lives of the Taíno, Caribs, and other nations, the theft of the lives of enslaved peoples from Africa, indentured labourers from India and China, and smatterings of others. A small Caribbean nation, all nine miles square of it, was now led by a Black man with vision, and plans. The United States, by contrast was a seething wreck of obfuscation and denial of its roots. It was hosing down and setting dogs on Black people who objected to living at the bottom of their caste system.
My parents, like Trinidadians ensconced around the world, were quickly drawn into the excitement of independence. The new national anthem began, ‘Forged from the love of liberty, in the fires of hope and prayer . . . . Let every creed and race find an equal place.’ And so on. Those must have been heady times.
‘The plan was always to go home,’ my mother says. By 1966, my father had accepted a job with the Trinidad Regiment caring for soldiers. My mother left Canada and returned to the island ahead of him with us three children. She wanted to get back by a certain time so that my older brother could sit his common entrance exam, the nationwide test for 11-year-olds that could determine your future. My mother also executed the couple’s other idea. She hired a carpenter to build a small private medical office in a building on Erthig Road.
Later, when the job working for the Regiment dissolved, the medical office became the only source of family income. They struggled financially, partly because they treated everyone, even those who could not pay. My mother recalls ducking out to the pharmacy around the corner, to buy medication for patients she knew would never be able to buy it themselves.
Several times, patients showed up injured at their office. It might have been the head wound that bled like a demon or the ectopic pregnancy that my mother, a trained midwife, spotted in an instant. If they could not treat them on-site, my parents packed them into the white Volkswagen buggy and drove them to hospital. Invariably, upon return, the remaining patients had cleaned up the blood from the office floor and were sitting there calmly in the waiting room chairs for their turn to be seen.
***
In 1976 we were back in Canada, the land of my birth. Over the next ten years my father talked exhaustively of these incidents. I say this with kindness now. I see how he dealt with his deep disappointment and dismay. For years, he debriefed over the dinner table in suburban Ottawa, his trauma lodging in the ears and bodies of his interlocutors: his children still at home and his wife who’d quietly slept with a gun pointed at her head.
‘They t’ief!’ my Dad would exclaim, answering his own query at the dinner table. We all sat and watched him. He’d set up his answer with the following questions: ‘How so-and-so could say, “I could buy Trinidad”?’ ‘How so-and-so could own skyscrapers in Canada?’ We occasionally egged him on with a familiar question. His voice would get louder at this opportunity to explain to us again what we well knew.
In my child mind, as far as I could gather, it was because of Eric Williams that our lives had been disrupted. I was resentful of that name. For years, I remained mad at my father as strongly as I resented the need for flight back to Canada. I hated leaving, myself, my body, my familiar being on the island, to once again become foreign. I learned to live in a generalised non-belonging, a kind of imagined invisibility. It took me decades to land.
***
Old harms train us. They can keep us circling like dogs on a spot of ground or they can lead us into new terrain. We choose. They can whisper toxins from the depths of memory or they can inhabit us with wisdom. I am still reading the tome on the contested legacy of the former Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago. Eric Williams' great treatise, Capitalism and Slavery, has just been republished in the United Kingdom. I will read it again - though I can just barely separate art from spectre.
Photo by Sachin Amjhad. .
