And everything I saw and felt and experienced then was tinged with celebration: the hills, the spreading shacks, the heat, the radio programs, the radio commercials, the noise, the route taxis. That landscape — with all its colonial or holiday motifs: beaches, market women, coconut trees, banana trees, sun, big-leaved trees — had always, since I had known it, been the landscape of anxiety, even panic, and sacrifice. The education that had made me had always been like a competition, a race, in which the fear of failure was like the fear of extinction. I had never, as a child, felt free. On afternoons like these, where now in 1960 I could go for drives or dawdle over lunch, I had had to stay with the books; on nights like these, when now I could go visiting or could simply talk, I had had as a scholarship boy to study or memorize things to a late hour. My abstract learning had been dearly bought!
If there was a place, at this stage of my career, where I could fittingly celebrate my freedom, the fact that I had made myself a writer and could now live as a writer, it was here, on this island which had fed my panic and my ambition, and nurtured my earliest fantasies. And just as, in 1956, at that first return, I had moved from place to place, to see it shrink from the place I had known in my childhood and adolescence, so now I moved from place to place to touch it with my mood of celebration, to remove from it the terror I had felt in these places for various reasons at different times. Far away, in England, I had recreated this landscape in my books. The landscape of the books was not as accurate or full as I had pretended it was; but now I cherished the original, because of that act of creation.
And it was as if, then, having won through to a particular kind of achievement, and having come to the end of a particular kind of fear, my relationship with my island had come to an end. Because after this I never found in myself any particular wish to go back. When for one reason or another I did go back, I found that, having neither fear now nor a wish to celebrate, my interest in the island was satisfied, even sated, in a day. I might, on the way from the airport on the morning of an arrival, be struck by the colors, and think I would like to stay for many days or weeks. But after the first day and first night and the first jet-lagged predawn rising, and the first sight of the hummingbirds in the garden, I became restless, anxious to move on.
People had no news; they revealed themselves quickly. Their racial obsessions, which once could tug at my heart, made them simple people. Part of the fear of extinction which I had developed as a child had to do with this: the fear of being swallowed up or extinguished by the simplicity of one side or the other, my side or the side that wasn’t mine.
It was odd: the place itself, the little island and its people, could no longer hold me. But the island — with the curiosity it had awakened in me for the larger world, the idea of civilization, and the idea of antiquity; and all the anxieties it had quickened in me — the island had given me the world as a writer; had given me the themes that in the second half of the twentieth century had become important; had made me metropolitan, but in a way quite different from my first understanding of the word, when I had written “Gala Night” and “Life in London” and “Angela.”
When, in 1960, with that mood of writer’s celebration on me (as I have described), I began my first travel book, it was from my little colonial island that I started, psychologically and physically. The book was in the nature of a commission: I was to travel through colonies, fragments of still surviving empires, in the Caribbean and the Guianas of South America. I knew and was glamoured by the idea of the metropolitan traveler, the man starting from Europe. It was the only kind of model I had; but — as a colonial among colonials who were very close to me — I could not be that kind of traveler, even though I might share that traveler’s education and culture and have his feeling for adventure. Especially I was aware of not having a metropolitan audience to “report back” to. The fight between my idea of the glamour of the traveler-writer and the rawness of my nerves as a colonial traveling among colonials made for difficult writing. When, the traveling done, I went back to London with my notes and diaries, to do the writing, the problems were not resolved. I took refuge in humor — comedy, funniness, the satirical reflex, in writing as in life so often a covering up for confusion.
In order to do more of this kind of writing, it was necessary for me to acknowledge more of myself. I soon had the opportunity. Not long after finishing that first travel book, I went to India, to do another. This time I left from England. India was special to England; for two hundred years there had been any number of English travelers’ accounts and, latterly, novels. I could not be that kind of traveler. In traveling to India I was traveling to an un-English fantasy, and a fantasy unknown to Indians of India: I was traveling to the peasant India that my Indian grandfathers had sought to recreate in Trinidad, the “India” I had partly grown up in, the India that was like a loose end in my mind, where our past suddenly stopped. There was no model for me here, in this exploration; neither Forster nor Ackerley nor Kipling could help. To get anywhere in the writing, I had first of all to define myself very clearly to myself.
So, from the starting point of Trinidad, my knowledge and self-knowledge grew. The street in Port of Spain where I had spent part of my childhood; a reconstruction of my “Indian” family life in Trinidad; a journey to Caribbean and South American colonies; a later journey to the special ancestral land of India. My curiosity spread in all directions. Every exploration, every book, added to my knowledge, qualified my earlier idea of myself and the world.
But Trinidad itself, the starting point, the center — it could no longer hold me. It was no longer connected in my mind with an Atlantic crossing, a journey by ship over a fortnight, with the ship ritual, the change of the weather, the putting back of the clocks every other morning, the colors of the sea and the sky, the waves and swells, the rainbow-shot spray, the dolphins, the flying fish that, once one entered Caribbean waters, flew at night at the ship’s lights and could sometimes in the morning be found expiring, slippery and flapping, on the decks. Passenger ships no longer went to Trinidad or anywhere else; Trinidad was an airline halt, its airport the scene of matter-of-fact departures and arrivals. And it was easy for me to quell whatever longing I occasionally felt for the landscape of my childhood by recreating in my mind the tedium that I knew would come to me on the second day, after the glory of arrival and the glory of the first dawn.
Then I accepted a commission from an American publisher to write a book for a series on cities. I chose my own city, Port of Spain, to write about, because I thought it would be easy for me and also because I thought there was little to write about: Trinidad, after its discovery and dispeopling, had not been peopled again or settled until the end of the eighteenth century. I thought of the project as the labor of a few months, journalism in hard covers. Then I discovered that the source books didn’t really exist. The idea that historical truth is preserved somewhere in libraries, in semi-divine volumes, with semi-divine guardians, is something that many of us have, I suppose. But books are physical objects, created or manufactured to meet a demand; and there were no such semi-divine source volumes about Trinidad. I had to go to the documents themselves. Such an irritation; but then the documents began to draw me in; and the longer I stayed with them the harder it was to give up the project.