You can drive out on the road to Chaguaramas in a few minutes because it is right outside of Port of Spain, Trinidad, and there is only one road. It winds along the coast and like many things in Trinidad it is beautiful. It is beautiful because it has green and blue, land and sea, and because of the little islands that sit right off the coast. It is to Chaguaramas that people of some wealth in Trinidad go ‘down the islands’ to their getaway homes, where one is reminded why the tropics will always contain some element of fantasy, some gesture to that Adamic world that was stripped from us in the Fall. Chaguaramas is also the site of Trinidadian independence: the fight got started there. It was there that Eric Williams put his foot down about an American military base left over from World War II that threatened to become another permanent example of the lingering attitude whose most succinct statement is the Monroe Doctrine.

Eric Williams was the first prime minister of independent Trinidad. A black Trinidadian who came back from Oxford, he was, in a sense, Trinidad itself from 1962 until his death in office on March 29^th, 1981. No one doubts that he was the father of the nation of Trinidad and Tobago. He understood that Trinidad couldn’t get to the business of figuring out what Trinidad was going to be until Trinidad got to the business of asserting that it had the space to do it, and that meant saying to the US that Trinidad wasn’t going to get anywhere with Chaguaramas as a site for US maintenance of order as the US understands that order to be. In a less distinct way it meant that Trinidad had to take the position that Eric Williams’ summed up in his speech of March 22^nd, 1961 entitled “Massa Day Done.” Williams asks in that speech exactly who this Massa is and he answers that “Massa was more often than not an absentee European planter exploiting West Indian resources, both human and economic.” So Massa Day Done is about ending colonialism, the particular kind of colonialism that dominated the West Indies after the Europeans came, and it is implicitly about figuring out what to do next. And while what to do next could be many things one thing that seemed obvious was that Chaguaramas shouldn’t be a site for a US military base. So the relation between the former brand of imperialism and US dominance of the Caribbean exists, it’s just that no one knows exactly how to characterize it.

You can’t come to Trinidad without sensing the whiff of colonialism wherever you go, as the olfactory backdrop for everything that happens. Everything in Trinidadian culture, politics, society is marked in some way by a relation to colonialism. Sometimes you feel that the struggle is about how not to be marked by colonialism, but that just marks it all the more. Maybe the most difficult thing that Trinidad faces is the fact that the very essence of what Trinidad doesn’t want to be has to do with what it became in the history of colonialism and that is also the very thing that defines what it is.  This makes it confusing to be in Trinidad and it makes it confusing to think about Trinidad. And it has made coming to Trinidad in early 2003 part and parcel of a greater confusion in which the problems of Trinidad are further complications to the story of where history is right now and where it ought to be going. It has made coming to Trinidad and trying to figure some things out about Trinidad suddenly crucial to working out confusions that have to do with everything else.

The confusions can be thought of as political but they aren’t going to stay there for very long. The Left is over of course, over and done. It will stay around for a long time and then maybe it will get reborn but that doesn’t change the fact that right now it is done. The long story about the end of the Left starts among intellectual circles in Europe in the nineteenth century but that is also the story about its beginning so there is no purpose in starting there. The other place to look for the beginning of the end is a bit after Communism got itself going in a few countries on the globe, and a good place to see where things started to get complicated is in Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia. Once Orwell provided the clarity that he provided the only Left that could honorably be upheld had to be an anti-communist Left. And then the problem of space takes off—how to preserve a little bit of space, how to have a position at all within this tiny slice that the Left becomes.  It raises the question as to whether there actually is any space between the communist Left and the anti-communist Right. It raises, already, questions about a third way. And the question even then is what to do about American power since American power is also anti-communist but what a price for anti-communism. One can have no illusions that US power bears much relation to the potential socialism that the Orwell’s of the world were still trying to defend. It starts to become complicated and sad to hold this space and it becomes lonely. These days it is harder and harder to find anyone who really understands what it meant to defend that space or how to do it. There are a million problems that come out of these issues and a million confusions. One of these is a simple question of judgment. In a world in which the US has become the sole global actor of any significant power what does it mean to oppose this power and what does it mean to form alliances with it? 

Not long before going to Trinidad I met Christopher Hitchens at the Harper’s magazine holiday party and we talked for a short time about Left Internationalism, a term I threw out, I think, and not he. But it is a term that resonates for many people interested in just that space that Orwell was trying to defend. Hitchens was, as people often are, both different than one might have expected and the same. He was gracious and he listened, as those in the position of not having to listen often do not. He was more likable and less irascible than I probably would have guessed and not as drunk as the rumors would have it. Perhaps that also made him less formidable. I mumbled something about his work being galvanizing to discussions within my circle of peers and he seemed pleased by the idea, even somewhat humble and shame-faced about the idea. He didn’t seem entirely comfortable with the idea but that he might like to become so and I liked that. I might have said that some of his claims of late had helped me to become confused and that the categories one lays upon the world had become so blocky and brutal that everything was a mess, as it probably always is. But I didn’t say that, I probably didn’t even think it. That would have been grand and there was nothing grand about the short exchange, it had been simple. I didn’t realize it at the time, but it was a prelude to Trinidad.

I had carried A Bend in the River and A Way in the World by V.S. Naipaul to Trinidad with the inchoate notion that they might bring further understanding. In a way it was a silly grasping. But over the years the Trinidadians I have known had installed in me a kind of conceptual terror about the place. None of their descriptions or explanations about it ever really made sense, or they didn’t quite cohere, or they seemed fantastical and outrageous. They talked in vagaries and then to each other with a knowingness that seemed like cheating. It always made me suspicious. And I have never paid great attention to Naipaul except in having read this or that over the years and feeling that this was someone who is able to understand things. His prose had seemed too basic for me, it never moved me, but I was impressed by the understanding and now I know that that is why I brought the books. Of course, I was wrong about everything else too. No prose is more difficult to write than the kind he writes and the books are as beautiful as anything. They make you angry because they say everything that needs to be said and still seem to have done little to nothing at all. You cannot sum up the ideas and the understanding of such a person but one thing became clear. He is a tragic writer. He simply understands and explains the terribleness about things in a way that makes them less terrible and more so too.

Just off the plane we made a series of stops around Port of Spain and then ended up at Mr. Nunez’s house, the father of my friend Jason and the catalyst for many things that started to unravel and become less solid. He was a member of the Trinidadian government for many years and there are old, not particularly well-kept, pictures hanging here and there around the house of him shaking hands with the Pope and other international figures during his years of service. The house is also filled with newspapers and with televisions tuned to various stations carrying local and international news. He has reams of photocopies and clippings from articles on any number of subjects and they are all underlined and circled with something that verges on mania. His is a mind interested in some form of understanding. I spoke with him often, in the mornings drinking Carib beers with the TVs blaring from every room and two radios on, in the evenings drinking rum and coconut water when the small frogs start bleeping sitting out on the front porch, in the afternoon at Brooklyn bar in Port of Spain while a tropical shower blows by outside and the worn paint and broken down stools take on a temporary melancholy. I asked him about American power and the current discussions about intervening in Iraq. His response was fairly standard in content, a revulsion against imperialism, arrogance. Not that these aren’t the very question of the matter but the force of the argument was one you could have found in any number of places, from any number of individuals. What was striking to me and what stuck with me was the way he said it, the things he emphasized versus the kinds of things that tend to be emphasized in debates in the US, the tenor of the approach. What struck me, perhaps, was the sense of tragedy that he brought to the argument. “But can’t it be to the greater good of the region that a terrible despot be removed and pressure be put toward democratization of the region?” I asked. “Well this, of course, is what is always said,” he said. And that was all he said. It was effective that he stopped there. It was effective that for him the US couldn’t be thought of in terms of ‘us’ because he didn’t identify with it enough to call it ‘us’. Few people in Trinidad do.

To understand Trinidad you probably have to understand Eric Williams and I’m not sure that anyone fully understands Eric Williams. Eric Williams became something close to a dictator and was always an extraordinary man, though every autocrat, one imagines, is therefore extraordinary in some way. Eric Williams re-thought what it meant to think about colonialism and capitalism and slavery and he never compromised on the idea that Caribbeans could be independent. He almost single-handedly shaped and molded the idea of Trinidadian independence. Trying to understand Eric Williams perusing the Trinidad and Tobago Review among piles of magazines on one of Mr. Nunez’s shelves I stumbled across Lloyd Best. Best has been a kind of unaffiliated intellectual in Trinidad for forty odd years, something between an academic, a writer, a critic, and an organizer. He was a central figure of the Tapia House Movement n the 1970s, which was always more interested in intellectual political leadership than in direct governance. The Tapia House Movement was trying to play a role in Trinidad’s self-definition after Eric Williams thrust independence upon it. It was trying to figure out what post-colonialism is going to be, after it has been figured out what it isn’t. There was an essay by Kirk Meighoo in the Review. It said, “Best does not share with the radical tradition—in the Caribbean or elsewhere—its apocalyptic and millenarian vision—Marxist, Garveyite, or other—of working class, racial, or nationalist triumph. . . . Applying these borrowed constructs actually hinders our understanding by providing ready-made problems and implicit solutions. Attractive and easy as it is, it is the opposite of what is needed, which is to find out how politics, economics, and society actually work in the West Indies.” I liked Best immediately. I liked the picture of him on page fourteen of the Review in a white button down shirt, open at the collar, over a white t-shirt and his bald head and scruffy white beard. I liked the bemused look in his eyes the most. He writes like someone who has no time and every sentence has to go three ways. It is the opposite of Naipaul who marches steadily into confusion, who gives you confusion simply. But there was something the same too. Meighoo again, “In addition, Best—like CLR James at his finest, Vidia Naipaul, or George Orwell—sees with a novelist’s eye. People, personalities, histories, idiosyncratic tensions—in short, drama,—combine with a long-view to generate understanding. This way of seeing has allowed all these men to be so innovative, free of ideological restriction and conventional wisdom, and thereby, full of deep insight and understanding.” At this point I was simply excited, excited about Best and excited that these names like CLR James and Naipaul and now Orwell kept coming together somehow as if they had to be united and were going to be united one way or another. And with Orwell and CRL James you have to think of Hitchens again, who has always cited their work, and I was thinking that it is all these figures who are trying to find a way out. First they’re trying to find a way out of time, they’re trying desperately to find a way out of the twentieth century and its options. They’re trying to find other ideas. And they are trying to find a way out of spaces and the way spaces determine things, the identities that certain spaces have. They are restless, James and Naipaul particularly. Or they stay in one place doggedly, in Trinidad for instance, like Best, and they rage there trying to move the mind of the place. I was thinking that these are the resources for those of us in exile from the Left as it has dissolved into nothing. I was thinking that one shouldn’t be afraid as one can get afraid in the US amid so much stale nothing.

Pan is nothing like what you might think it is if you had only seen one or two pan players on the streets of New York City. I was thinking about an idea that Lloyd Best had when he said that pan is creating something out of nothing. It is creating something out of nothing because it starts when you take an old metal drum and you turn it over and start banging on it. But people are never content just to bang and so they start to fiddle. After they fiddle for a while they figure out that you can start to ‘tune’ the drum by hammering at parts of the surface and then you have notes. You get enough pans together and enough pan players and then you have an orchestra and you can orchestrate anything you like.

At the pan finals, the Panorama, on the big stage in the middle of Port of Spain you can watch scores of pan orchestras as they wheel out hundreds of drums onto the stage and set up to play. It’s dark under the overhang where the seats are and most people have coolers filled with beer and rum and what-not and everyone is stumbling over one another and around the seats and it smells vaguely of sweat because it’s hot and everyone is close. When the music starts it generally does so all at once and as a wall of tinny sound. There is too much to listen to, probably, unless you’ve trained your ear a bit so you just kind of give yourself up to it. Trinidad has many moments like this, moments in the crowds, moments in the street, moments in a rum shop in St. James where the dull heat and the light breeze, the bright days and the sharp sounds, the washed out colors and the sharp sky all come together and create one long experience of stretched out time. You can understand why people would want to leave this place, to get out from under those moments. And you understand why people would always want to come back, to get under those moments again. A famous Calypsonian, David Rudder, wrote a song called Trini to de Bone that played over and over during the weeks leading up to Carnivale:

Of course, he lives in Toronto and he wrote the song from Toronto. But everybody seems to understand and there’s no great desire to condemn him for it.

Lloyd Best is a more human individual than Eric Williams was, perhaps because he never had the relationship to political power that Williams did.  You get the sense that Best has both an attraction and revulsion to Williams and the same feeling came across in my discussions with Mr. Nunez. Maybe Best would have liked to be Eric Williams had he had the chance but given that he didn’t have the chance he had the luxury of not being Eric Williams and then he had the moral high ground of showing how he would never be Eric Williams. Eric Williams finished a certain thing when he died and he put Trinidad in a place where it can never go back. Lloyd Best was smart enough to know that there can only be one Eric Williams and noble enough to resist the authoritarian impulses that drove Eric Williams. Best resigned himself to being a critic and it brought out something remarkable in his mind. Williams had a chance to build something and he built it ruthlessly in the way that nation builders always tend to be ruthless. He had an understanding and he applied it to the world with purpose.

Eric Williams was remarkable. He was a brilliant student at Oxford and he wrote Capitalism and Slavery as his thesis. It’s a book that would mark him as a special Trinidadian in that he took the most sophisticated thought England had to offer and then turned it on its head. It’s neither a product of the Marxism that it was supposed to be nor its obverse. It fits somewhere in that crease where one can also find C.R.L. James.

When Eric Williams came back to Trinidad he came back to be its philosopher king. And that is what he was for twenty years, in every sense of the term. The relationship between Lloyd Best and Eric Williams almost seems scripted as an illustration of the old Platonic paradox. The paradox says that the man truly fit to rule would not desire it and the man desirous of rule couldn’t, thereby, be fit for it. Williams turned himself into a brand of tyrant and Best paid for his purity by pouring forth a stream of high mindedness that is rarely able to touch ground. The paradox holds.

It has long been something of a joke that the real Trotskyists of the day are the American neo-conservatives. Part of this comes from the historical fact that so many of the Trotskyists around Alcove 1 at City College in New York City in the thirties and forties became the leaders of the neo-conservative movement in their later years. So there is a continuity. Part of it comes from the sentiment oft cited by Hitchens that it is these same neo-cons who have become the real revolutionaries. They have a kind of idealism and a willingness to take chances in order to change the world. The old Right and the old Left have settled into a preservation mode, the former interested in preserving the current regime of international order, the latter trying to protect themselves and the world from American power. And none of the terms in this debate really make sense outside of the context of the total failure and collapse of the Left during the twentieth century. The current discussions about American hegemony are possible because of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the collapse of the Soviet Union was merely the last, merciful, petering out of the Western attempt to realize Socialism. A comedy impossible to laugh at.

And thus we are back to Orwell’s little plot of space, the little sliver that remained for the anti-Stalinist Left after the thirties. It was traversed by those brave souls, like Irving Howe, who were outspoken in their anti-communism and yet who held out for the idea of Socialism as an open question, a problem, something to be worked on. And they held out for Socialism as an intellectual position from which the realities of American society and Western society could be critiqued against the ideals. They held out for Socialism as a philosopher’s stone. They recognized that Socialism had always been the dream-world of the real. The hope, perhaps never entirely conscious, was that some mechanism might be discovered by which history could be made continuous with that dream-world without it becoming a nightmare. In this camp with Irving Howe stand C.L.R. James and Lloyd Best and Eric Williams. In a literary vein this is the place for V.S. Naipaul as well, and it is the tradition from which Christopher Hitchens has been writing for many years. One of the commonalities weaving all these figures together is the realization that the revolution isn’t nigh at all. There is no revolution. There is no reign of the righteous. And so the question is what to do now.

It is characteristic of the intellectual honesty and pugilistic tendencies of Christopher Hitchens that he has been willing, essentially, to say that the Left is over and done with. No sentimentality there. The Left has nothing to offer but moralisms without a vision or a program. The recognition is that the critical stance taken by figures like Howe was still essentially predicated on the possibility of a future Socialism, even if that possibility had been indefinitely forestalled. For the generations of the twentieth century such a possibility, however vague, was enough to continue a tradition. For Hitchens, the tradition, as a living one, has run itself out. And worse than that, it has prevented the capacity for having a clear vision about new realities that do not necessarily fit into the pre-existing framework. Questions, of course, about how to confront things like Al Qaeda and the Hussein regime in Iraq. And other kinds of questions too, questions about how to extend the legal-juridical rights that are enjoyed in the industrialized West and Far East (Japan, etc.), questions about the global impact of the International human rights movement.

But it has become so triumphant with Hitchens, this march of history. He has adopted his own form of Hegelianism and now talks of die List der Vernunft, the cunning of reason. It is the cunning of reason that has America suddenly doing the work of freedom, perhaps despite itself. At least that is how Hitchens would have it.  But it is difficult to be so triumphant here in Trinidad, where every liberation has been at the cost of ways of life, peoples, certain ways of doing things. You can’t exactly celebrate all the liberations here because some of them led to disaster. But you can’t condemn them either for they were, in their own ways, liberations.

I finished Naipaul’s A Way in the World on a beach about forty minutes over the hill from Port of Spain. Port of Spain is not a beautiful city. It has no center, it meanders, it doesn’t take advantage of its waterfront and the various examples of colonial architecture stand forlorn around a medium sized brown field that seems to have little to no purpose except during Carnivale when it holds cars, vending stands, and toilets. Port of Spain feels like a city that just happened and there are many such cities throughout the world. They come to be cities through various circumstances and that is that. Its name harkens back to the story of battling colonial powers and the presence of Spain, France, and England in the Caribbean region. Eventually the English won out in Trinidad and it is difficult to trace much of the Spanish or French presence anymore. It is entirely impossible to trace the presence of the Amerindian tribes that inhabited the island before the colonists came. Trinidadians now are overwhelmingly of two types, descendants of Africans brought as slaves by the Europeans and descendants of East Indians brought as labor when you couldn’t bring slaves anymore. It is a historical irony of Trinidad that it was first discovered by Columbus as he searched for East India and then later populated by the very East Indians he had been searching for.

Maracas beach is a little paradise just over the hill from Port of Spain. The road to get there was built by the Americans after World War II. It is a treacherous road and every so often a Trinidadian misses a turn and drops off the road and over the cliff that leads down to the sea. My friend Jason says he saw an Indian man sitting on the side of the road once with a bloody face. He stopped and asked what happened. ‘I went over,” the man said, “but luckily my seat belt wasn’t on and I went through the window and into a tree.” There’s something particularly Trinidadian in that.

Naipaul had written in his book, “Centuries on [after Columbus], we needed our visitors to give us some idea of where and what we were. We couldn’t have done it ourselves. We needed foreign witness. But disregard came with this witness. And that was like a second setting of history on its head. Because in the traveler’s view—this distant view of people eating bananas and wearing squeaky shoes, this view of a smallness that a cruise passenger could take in in a morning or a day—we, who had come in a variety of ways from many continents, were made to stand in for the aborigines and were held responsible for the nullity which had been created long before we had been transported to it.” This passage became a swirl for me of the things that were difficult and troubling to the mind about Trinidad and about Naipaul’s relation to Trinidad and what I was doing there trying to understand Trinidad and trying to understand the confusions of a different world through Trinidad. There is a story about colonialisms and imperialisms in these lines that is more complicated than the morality tale some want to tell and no less tragic, tragic in the real sense of the term. Tragedy not as something bad that happened but as something that has become necessary through its historical fact, another word for fate, and thereby has become the condition of possibility for the world we face. Probably I was trying to be some version of Naipaul’s visitor. And probably by doing so I was replicating something of the constant overlay of forms of disregard. Probably Naipaul has tried to make himself his own version of the visitor and thus both subject and object of new forms of disregard. Probably there has never been such a thing as real anti-colonialism, whatever that would be. There are versions of Eric Williamses throughout the Caribbean and Latin America and Eric Williamses up and down the still relatively newly independent countries of Africa. Saddam Hussein is a kind of Eric Williams, though an infinitely more malignant kind. All of them have come back to re-mold their countries after having re-made themselves as some form of visitor. Even if they never spent the proverbial time at Oxford they all spent their time at Oxford in one way or another. Perhaps for Hussein it was in the simple act of reading Western Socialism into his own brand of tribal modernization. The questions about the ongoing story of colonialisms and imperialisms are not questions about whether but wither. There is no going back. Trinidadians aren’t Africans or Indians anymore, they haven’t been for a long time. I’m not sure what they are, I’m not sure they’re sure what they are. Says CLR James, “Their own struggle for posts and pay, their ceaseless promising of jobs, their sole idea of national development as one where everybody can aim at getting something more, the gross and vulgar materialism, the absence of any ideas or elementary originality of thought; the tiresome repetition of commonplaces aimed chiefly at impressing the British, this is the outstanding characteristic of the West Indian middle class. The politicians they produce only reproduce politically the thin substance of the class. Let us stay here for a while. These people have to know what they are. Nobody except our novelists is telling them.” It doesn’t get you all that far just to say Massa Day Done because then there is the question of what you’re going to be.

I hadn’t known exactly what to expect from Carnivale. It still wasn’t clear to me exactly what it meant to people even up to the moment it was beginning. Probably it means different things to everyone anyway. The most amusing thing was how much Carnivale was a constant subject of debate and reflection within Trinidadian society. This is how you first realize that it is an institution of the highest order. The paradox of it all is that the discussion usually revolves around questions as to whether Carnivale has been corrupted or not, whether it is still pure or not. But the institution itself is centered around the idea of corruption and chaos, the overturning of social roles, the sudden dissolution of social mores. The way people moralize about Carnivale you would think that it is the heart of order and value. But it is the reverse of order and value. Of course the reversal might be at the service of the order and value it temporarily overturns. Perhaps this is why discussions about Carnivale so easily slip into discussions about the nature and trajectory of Trinidadian society as a whole. It is like reading a negative image, but it is an image none-the-less.

The experience of Carnivale is hard to describe because it happens in one long extended moment that cannot be picked apart. It happens in a high that builds up from direct sun and too much rum so that at a certain point one begins to think differently. It happens in the rhythmic march behind all the trucks blaring Soca, the dance oriented version of Calypso, which is the sound track for Carnivale. Jouvert, the street event that happens in the early morning, is the demonic side of Carnivale and Masis the pretty side. In the one you cover yourself in paint and mud and wait for the sun and in the other you put on shiny things and traipse about in the light. Whether Carnivale really plays anything like the social role it once played is hard to say. It is being commercialized and packaged like anything else. But there are amazing moments out in the street locked in with a bumbling mass of people where one’s social sense of things gets pushed to some kind of edge and it all feels different for a short while.

Most people in Trinidad I spoke to seem to think that V.S. Naipaul despises them but I don’t think he does. To say that Naipaul doesn’t write to be loved isn’t quite the point. Maybe he does write to be loved, but he writes to be loved by a kind of ideal audience that cuts across space and time according to an index of freedom that drives a certain kind of writer. Trinidadians will love him on some day in the future and then maybe at some later date they’ll learn to hate him again. It will all depend on how those indices match up. I feel sad for Trinidadians sometimes because of how they are locked away from Naipaul in the way that I don’t feel locked away from Naipaul and they can’t get the simple comforts of his tragic vision. But they are terrible comforts anyway. Sometimes you feel that Naipaul is trying very hard to write for Trinidadians but it’s all quite impossible and then he becomes mean. And when he’s mean he says a lot of true things. It’s hard to picture him in Port of Spain or anywhere else in Trinidad for that matter. It is hard to picture him as a Trinidadian. That’s probably where some of the resentment comes from too, the fact that he has simply gone away from Trinidad. Naipaul had to leave Trinidad because he particularly understood how devastating a place like Trinidad is since it can’t really be any one thing at all. You realize how important a thing like identity is when you understand Naipaul and you understand why he could never really go back to Trinidad. But he can’t really be in India either, or England, or Africa, or anywhere else. He can’t be anywhere, which is his remarkable freedom and something of his doom. CLR James mentions in his essay about discovering literature in Trinidad that, “When I wrote Beyond the Boundary, I told in the first part of my early life and how I grew up. I remember that Vidia Naipaul wrote me a letter in which he said ‘I have only read half of the book so far but I want to let you know at once I am extremely glad because it lets these English people know who and what we West Indians are’.” Naipaul has been trying to do that for a long time but it is always some version of failure. Still, it is a moving failure and being in Trinidad only makes it that more potent.

The basic thesis of Eric Williams’ Capitalism and Slavery can be found in the following lines, “When British capitalism depended on the West Indies, they ignored slavery or defended it. When British capitalism found the West Indian monopoly a nuisance, they destroyed West Indian slavery as the first step in the destruction of West Indian monopoly. That slavery to them was relative not absolute, and depended on latitude and not longitude, is proved after 1833 by their attitude to slavery in Cuba, Brazil and the United States.” Today the idea doesn’t sound so shocking. The idea that slavery was not simply abolished out of a moral recognition but that the history of slavery and its abolition is tied up with the political and economic history of the colonization of the New World is something roughly acceptable to the intellect. It is so partly because of the influence of Eric Williams’ scholarly work. The tale told is a morally ambiguous one, or at least it suggests that the morality comes in a posteriori. The history of the colonization of the West Indies is one of continuous disaster crowned by a liberating moment that occurred, in a sense, because no one cared anymore. Still, would one then spite the crowning? The neo-conservatives of today talk about the new forms of imperialism, without particularly wanting to call it imperialism, as the coincidence between morality and interest. In a sense, it is a page taken from Eric Williams’ book. But the other lesson from Eric Williams’ book is that the interest tends to set the stage for the possibility of morality. It is not a story of economic determinism, but of contexts and conditions. At one point the imperial powers actively fought against ending slavery and later they were essentially indifferent to it. The question in, for instance, the Middle East, is precisely what this relation between interest and morality really is. The US is interested in ending a regime not because it is the right thing to do as such but because it may be the right thing to do from a situation in which interest makes it a desirable thing to do. Those who might agree that it is the right thing to do are in the tricky situation of trying to maximize the rightness and minimize the interest.

Colonialism of the type that ended in Trinidad with the final fight against Britain and the US at Chaguaramas isn’t the issue anymore. The politics of a radicalism that was born out of the struggles that resisted that form of imperialism haven’t a place anymore. They told a story that, in a sense, posed the solving of various specific historical problems as such in terms of an overcoming of the problem of history altogether. But history has won simply by lumbering on. It doesn’t lessen the story of the great West Indian independence movement, from Toussaint L’Ouverture on, to say that post-colonialism simply presented a new set of problems and that those problems create their own mess. It doesn’t help very much to understand Saddam Hussein in terms of colonialism. It helps to understand him in terms of post-colonialism.  But Iraq will have to have its Chaguaramas sooner or later regardless of what happens to it in the next months and years. That is why it both fits and doesn’t fit to talk of colonialism now. It isn’t what it used to be but it is still something. There is no inexorable historical process by which we are carried along toward anything at all. This is obvious but it helps to repeat it on occasion. This is another way of saying that things have to be fought for and sides have to be taken.

I’ve always liked airports and am never sad to spend time in them. Airports are places directly connected to other places without being very place-like in themselves. They communicate more with each other than with the particular nation or city they happen to be in. And yet every airport bears traces of the place where it is located. The airport outside of Port of Spain jumps back and forth from first to second to third world as rapidly as anywhere I’ve been. It has the efficiency and anonymity of any international airport and yet feels small and more human than most. You sit on the plane as it takes off and in just a moment or two the island is gone, it is behind you. Soon you see the ocean and from the left side of the plane the coast of Venezuela and the South American continent stretching endlessly beyond. Below you and before you is the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean sea and the little islands that are sprinkled in that crescent from Cuba to Trinidad. They seem lost in the sea and before long they have dropped away and there is only blue ocean and blue sky.