Measures of Expatriation

by Vahni Capildeo

  The antique shop selling the same garden furniture, cold whitepainted iron that used to support hot slave-owning bottoms. The same same garden furniture has been there years now. Like nobody wants it. Like…

  Stop it! Damn it! The jumbie lady is in the shop! Why is she crawling on the ground? She thief something else?

  Oh my God. I can smell fire.

  She is looking at the car, and I can smell burning rubber; I am smelling black history smells, asphalt, molasses, skin, ink and fire.

  TUESDAY

  I’m telling you I want to go out into the cane field, but there are lines and rows and swooshes of people who all look like her and also like my relatives, in this pink room with the grown-up souvenir dolls in glass cases; and every time I try to get up and go out, the people press me back down into the doily-infested armchair. They press gifts into my hands: little bags with sweets and glass bracelets, little books of photos, and I have to be polite, I am that kind of girl. I re-become that child here, on the unchanging island. I have a mysterious and compelling obligation to look at all these little gifts, before I can break through the line of people and go outside. I feel she buried it in the field. She buried the thing I need to find out about… the thing she didn’t exactly steal from me, though I am sure it is mine and somehow it has passed from me; it is part of the past, like her, part of the living past; and my country has become another country, and being here always means having left, having left here or being about to leave here, being here is returning to being here and returning surely is about leaving, so this above all is the place that makes me feel alive-and-dead, it is a birthplace.

  WEDNESDAY

  If being Trinidadian means travelling with suitcases packed with food – smuggled sorrel leaves and gallons of ginger beer; entire Christmas cakes with a poundage like turkeys; saucy doubles that could stain up your clothes – then I was never Trinidadian. My family were Trini kitchen traitors. We had a 1970s American cookbook, not a grandmother in the countryside; we made pizza, not roti; rissoles, not dumplings; pinwheel sandwiches, not currant roll. My homesickness could not be measured out in dashes of Angostura bitters. At the end of the day, my lonely long-distance-line good nights did not scald my lips like scorpion pepper sauce.

  So, although it was very nice and thoughtful of the person who brought this piece of Trinidad-cake-artist birthday decorative sponge to London for me, I can’t find home in a piece of cake. The piece of cake is its own sweet home, a construction of icing sugar roses wrapped in wax paper and tinfoil.

  But some ingredient in this cake is drying out my mouth. I am feeling strange. The wind is like… fingers stroking my hair. I wonder what chemical makes the icing sugar roses so yellow? What a slant the sun is taking. I never saw it so yellow. Not on this island. Not this island… I am starting to feel light. Late. Light. Starting to feel too light.

  The yellow poui is flowering. That means rain. Will that be enough to put out the bush fires on the hills?

  I want to see it. (I need to find it.) Now while it is flowering; while it is still light.

  Where the yellow poui is flowering, the fire hasn’t reached yet on the hills.

  THURSDAY

  Take a flower.

  Put it there.

  Take another flower.

  Put it there.

  Her hands are full of flowers.

  My hands are filled with flowers

  Now take the fire. Now.

  Ash in the air, pyre on the ground, body in the pyre, camphor on the tongue.

  This is a kindling.

  Go away.

  Fuck off, they say in England.

  Haul your arse.

  The body is a garment.

  It is burning.

  Her hands are empty.

  My hands are in her hands.

  We are on fire.

  Where am I?

  FRIDAY

  The cathedral is like a forest, and the pillars are like trees. The man in a dress is talking life and death, but I come here for the music. I love the music. I love the trees.

  The children are quiet. I can’t see which way their feet are going. That lady has a nice dress, too. The shade makes everything here seem kind of violet.

  The route taxi taking so long to come. I didn’t even know it did stop in the forest.

  Last night I dreamt Old Woman and I dreamt Big Snake. What Play Whe you would have bought? I didn’t buy anything.

  Lady, is how long you waiting for the taxi? Lady? You was already here when I arrive. You here long time?

  Oh God. Like she got my number.

  My number’s up.

  Lady, since when you driving taxi?

  Let me out.

  Here. Here it is.

  This is it?

  This is it.

  Here I am.

  Measures of Expatriation — VI

  Five Measures of Expatriation

  I. THE FAN MUSEUM

  This used to be a private house in Scandinavia. It once belonged to a fan collector, who was a great traveller, and was not known to have lived there. There were no signposts to it, although it featured in some listings and I had picked up a brochure for it in a café where there were the most beautiful biscuit tins for sale that I have ever seen, with designs of apples, and a Happy Blonde Lady wig in some coffee-drinker’s shopping bag hung on the coat racks at the entrance, for this was summer. Place dissolved, as it tends to do: if the hedge had been less twiggy and the wrought iron more like weaponry, this approach to a stepped doorway via a modest paved path between wildly undimmed replaceable flowers could have been the way into a genteel dwelling in older Port of Spain. I shut up about this, as I tend to do.

  (Becoming quieter and quieter so as not to appear to be living in the past: if your friend likes you his eyes will brighten and he will want to drag out fixed explanations of what for you felt like a fleeting reference to a permanent elsewhere that is continuously living and evolving within, in parallel to, and away from you. Call this the norm.)

  There was a push-button doorbell but the door was on the latch so I pushed it and peeked in to a very blank hall that was not any tidier than a private house would be if one counted the ghosts of garden scissors and calling cards, stray reprimands and childish outbursts, that dropped dahlia-like into the faintly radiating silence. The ceilings were twice the height of my accustomed English rooms (ssh). A table of dieted elegance, offering more brochures, maintained its poise in an alcove to the right, unpersoned.

  (I travel alone so as not to be quiet except by choice: an increase in wordlessness that is not pegged to explanation, like a national currency that has been floated in favour of independent devaluations.)

  The doorway into the main space was without a door but blocked by a wrought iron trellis of the kind expected in a conservatory in a black and white film. I edged past it and straightened myself out. This manner of entrance positioned the visitor in such a way that the giant fan appeared side-on, though fully opened. Had I not known that this was the Fan Museum I could have thought that the fan in profile was a crack in a doorway to nowhere, for its side was ebony heavily covered in black lace, and the spread, the thickness of it did not appear. I walked round and looked first at one side, then at the other. It was embroidered with scarlet poppies, corn stalks and vine leaves, on a black background.

  The house was narrow: in front of me I could see double glass doors, locked, to a courtyard. To either side were smaller halls with staircases turning steeply to the upper floors of this house that was narrow but winged.

  I had a strong, irrational aversion to making a left or right turn. I looked around for a guide to the display, but saw only two identical mirrors in ornate gilt frames on the slightly rounded corners to the left, and a tall, spindly, gilded clock in the right corner, ticking so quietly as to add weight to the silence. The other corner, to the right, had a light patch on the caramel paint, and some protruding metal remains that looked as if a small cabinet had been affixed to the wal
l just too high for my comfort, at average adult Scandinavian reach. ‘Hello!’ My voice reverted to a kind of Trinidadian that it had never used in Trinidad: a birdlike screech that would carry over a wrought metal gate (painted orange) across a yard with frizzle fowls and the odd goat.

  I quickly went to the left. The room had no windows but two doors at the further corners. These were bolted and locked on the outside. In the middle was an item of furniture like two pine dressers back to back, with many drawers and one or two cupboard sections instead of shelves. I pulled open a hand-width drawer at waist height. Sealed fans were stacked in there like hairbrushes. I felt like an invader and shut it quickly. I reached up to the cabinet knob but decided against opening the door. I opened another drawer at waist height and took out the single fan that was in there. I could not tell if it was sealed or had simply dried shut. It was of light wood and dark lavender paper. Silver-white plum blossom flowered in my mind, but the fan would not open.

  My hands started to hurt with the desire to touch or the recollection of touch. They developed a nervous disorder all their own. Something like cramp started to shoot up my arms. My throat and forehead felt hot. I walked around the cabinet and re-crossed the hall of the giant fan. The air seemed exceptionally still. Every one of those fans shut in the possibility of breeze. Every fan existed in the implication of stillness.

  (A feeling like being cornered on a veranda in a house in Kingston in an area where the drug barons maintain their beautiful houses, cornered by nothing but the social impossibility of stepping into the street, for these areas boasted a winning safety.)

  I went into the right-hand room. There was a bench with a green velvet seat and no fans, and nothing on those two walls. The bench was side on to the door and side on to a portrait facing the door. If life-sized, this portrait was of a tall man who had the shape but not the years of youth and who was turned three-quarters away. His back was bent and shaded across the shoulders as if by the habit of paying painstaking attention. This could have been his main form of love. Instead of getting up, I turned my head to look at the picture. The bench was, unusually, exactly the right height for me.

  When it grew dark I thought that it might be time to take the latch off the front door and lock it. I have been laughed at for sleeping like a statue. (It is more yogic and less static; with the spine at full stretch, the lungs can excavate the air. (Ssh.)) Now sleep emerged from the borders of the body like a well-trained force whose first, long-ago, unworded battle was with their own tentativeness and who therefore show little hesitation advancing into alien terrain. First my feet folded one on to the other, soles partly touching; the seams of my legs twisted and relaxed, clasped into position like an enchanted dress gone back into a nutshell. My arms did the same and even my ribs felt as if semi-detached like a purring cat’s. I was shutting up. My eyelids shuttered. Under my tongue a word tucked itself like the head of a bird under its wing and my hair curtained the face like a blackout blind over the copper pagoda bird cage.

  The sleep voice in my head was a clear murmur. What a coincidence, how productive of accidents it might have been if at that moment I had heard his name!

  I was glad to visit the Museum of Fans.

  II. THE GOD OF OBSTACLES

  Expatriation: my having had a patria, a fatherland, to leave, did not occur to me until I was forced to invent one. This was the result of questions. The questions were linked to my status elsewhere. Transferring between elsewheres, I had to lay claim to a somewhere, sometimes a made-up-on-the-spot somewhere. Gradually this Trinidad began to loom. Then it acquired detail. I never have returned home to it, though, not to the place that I have had to hear my own voice describe when in conversation with the Priests of the God of Obstacles, they who wield the passport stamps. This luxury of inattention, invention, and final mismatch… a ‘Trinidad’ being created that did not take my Trinidad away (my Trinidad takes itself away, in reality, over time)… that is expatriation, no? An exile, a migrant, a refugee, would have been in more of a hurry, would have been more driven out or driven towards, would have been seeking and finding not.

  If the Schengen Agreement had been a person, it would have been old enough to join the army, drive, vote, marry, have a proper job, be punished in serious ways for serious offences, all this and also have a gap year before going to a carefully selected non-Oxbridge university, in its own countries. It would not have been nearly as old as I was, when I applied for a visa according to its rules. It was a whippersnapper. I would not have dated it. It was ordering me around.

  Trips home to Trinidad folded neatly into trips home to the UK. My aeroplane was a double-headed snake belting across the Atlantic. Now, as a graduate student, I started to think about travelling. I had been going back home to Trinidad at every possible opportunity. My father, in Trinidad, was very ill, as he had been ever since I had known him. In my early twenties, I realized that this illness was not going to change except gradually to get worse. In some ways this realization was freedom. I started looking to cross other waters.

  I had almost enough proof to satisfy the Schengen authorities that I could apply for a tourist visa: being in full-time education, the co-owner of a family house, and in a permanent relationship with a native-born UK citizen so blond, athletic and well-spoken in more than one language that he frequently was mistaken for a German. Almost enough proof.

  Hopping off from Oxford to spend a spontaneous few days in Munich, I only had to book and pay for my flights and get my other half to wheedle a formal letter of invitation from the Stiftung Maximilianeum (he was on an exchange scheme there; they didn’t know me). Oh yes, and just rustle up a few other documents, all perfectly reasonable: evidence of accommodation for the duration of the stay, declaration of ports of arrival and departure and borders to be crossed: before ringing the automated visa line and getting an appointment six weeks or so in advance of travel. Lastminute.com travellers, eat your hearts out! Who can complain when everything is planned? Proof sufficient had I given: it was no dream of mine to quit my DPhil at Christ Church to sell oranges in the streets of Europe or, perhaps, travel with a donkey, like R. L. Stevenson, or with a circus, like Robert Lax, or with a notebook, like a young man with a white shirt black poloneck recycled half-zip fleece and a flair for poetry. Thus was I saved from turning into a travel writer. Unease is relative.

  Obtaining the visa was no great shakes. My other half accompanied me to the German Embassy’s hall-style waiting room. The Wielder of the Passport Stamps, plump with brown fondant hair, melted sweetly at our cross-cultural devotion. His many blushing nods embellished the ceremony of passport-stamping. He did not so much dismiss as bow away our case. This happy send-off carried me into the aloneness (I was alone most of the time) of being appreciably foreign (but in a nice way) in Munich. In the early mornings I took the air in the Englischer Garten. Large men with baying hounds bounded out of the mist and hollered greetings largely. I camped out on a guest bed in the Stiftung Maximilianeum, in a room stacked with nineteenth-century copies of the Pall Mall Gazette. Some mornings I limbered up with a swim in the basement pool of the Stiftung, which also housed the Bavarian Parliament. A single parliamentarian might be wallowing determinedly across it. Again there would be the greeting, this time something like ‘Well swum!’ Without functional German and determined not to speak English, I tactlessly negotiated my way in French throughout streets and markets, and was given a handful of free postcards for no discernible reason at an art exhibition where the gallerist took a non-predatory shine to me. Whereas the Alice in Wonderland porters at the Oxford college where I read for my BA, MSt and DPhil with few exceptions challenged me at the college gate several times a week in a sudden fit of misperceiving me as a tourist (my floaty hot pink shirt was the trigger), the Parliamentary guard at the entrance to the Stiftung only failed to recognize me on one occasion. The minute I gave the Stiftung guard a big smile and pointed up at the window of the room where I was staying, he looked genuinely remorseful f
or running at me with his gun and shouting; he acknowledged our shared embarrassment with a shy All’s Clear.

  In springtime I thought of travelling from Germany to Italy. My other half would be there on another exchange. With disbelief he witnessed my insistence on looking up the paperwork for such a land of sunlight. A fault line appeared in our communications. Why did he not understand? I was spontaneously attempting to cross a border! Being from a small island, I was historyless (perhaps three friends bothered to remember that I had a family background) yet I could not live up to anyone’s hope of finding a malleable girl dropped from the sky. Paperwork stuck to me, like the paper slippers shredded on the feet of a fairytale person setting off on a highway of glass. I heaped myself for hours into the seats at the relevant building in Munich. Eventually, all was clear. This stamp was diamond-shaped.

  Sick on the train with gin and disagreements till the air seemed yellow and accursed, I felt nightmarish unsurprise when the people with the printed list arrived in our carriage. They were checking passports. They were not sure that Trinidad was a country, though the visa itself looked all right. Some strange blindness seemed to strike them as they looked at the list. Trinidad was not on the first page; the second page had an apparent heaviness or stickiness, it would not more than half turn… What god of obstacles was moving in these officials? My then other half addressed them Germanly. I was curiously sidelined; eye contact was not made, verbal contact seemed not possible. In that moment of sidelining, the god of obstacles visited the passport controllers differently, and the name Trinidad manifested itself on their printout.

  I tried to trace what shocked me in the momentary non-existence of my smaller island. To my horror, it was that I felt they should have heard of it because… because… I reposed a trust in cricket and football (games which for me fulfil two conditions of storybook romance: I admire but do not understand them) to put us on the map. I secretly did not credit our Nobel laureate(s) with making us known usefully, for example to people who checked lists in trains. I interrogated myself further and uncovered an amoral willingness to locate Trinidad geographically with reference either to tourism in Barbados or the American invasion of Grenada, possibly both, according to nothing more than what I could guess of my interlocutor’s likely interests. The important thing was to convince the list-holder that my country existed sufficiently to deserve to be looked up. How things have changed: nowadays a mention of Venezuela should be enough.