Mohammed Pleasantview

1. Auflage 2021
ISBN: 978-1-913090-90-6
Verlag: Jacaranda Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 320 Seiten

Winner of the 2022 OCM Bocas Prize for Fiction. Shortlisted for the Society of Authors' McKitterick Prize 2022. Finalist of the 2022 Firecracker Award in Fiction. Coconut trees. Carnival. Rum and coke. To many outsiders, these and other sunny images are all they know about life in the Caribbean. However, if you want to learn how the locals truly live and experience the dark and often harrowing truths that lurk behind the idyllic imagery of Caribbean culture, then come visit the town of Pleasantview. Come during election season, and see how one candidate sets out to slaughter endangered turtles - just for fun. Or come on the day the other candidate beats his 'outside-woman,' so badly she ends up losing their baby. Then come on the night of the political rally, where this grieving woman exacts a very public revenge. Stay a while, and see how this single event has a trajectory far beyond the lives of the immediate actors, with often tragic and heartbreaking consequences. Written in a remarkable combination of Standard English and Trinidad Creole, Pleasantview showcases the entrenched political, racial, and class dichotomies of life in Trinidad: the generosity (yet cruelty) of the average Trini; the sense of optimism (and yet, despair) which permeates everyday interaction; and the musicality of Caribbean creole (kriol) expression that masks an ingrained and frequently violent patriarchy. Merging the vibrancy and darkness of recent Caribbean writers such as Ingrid Persaud and Claire Adam with the linguistic experimentation of Marlon James's A Brief History of Seven Killings, Pleasantview is a landmark work in international fiction.

Celeste has been a lawyer since 2001 but she has been telling stories all her life. A native of Trinidad and Tobago, in 2016, she graduated from Lesley University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, with an MFA in Creative Writing (Fiction). Celeste's goal is to dispel all myths about island-life and island-people, and to showcase the musicality and resonance of Trinidadian creole (kriol). Her work has appeared in The New England Review, Litmag, Epiphany, The Rumpus, among other places. She is the recipient of a 2018 PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. She was also awarded the 2019 Virginia Woolf Award for Short Fiction, and the 2017 John D Gardner Memorial Prize for Fiction.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Mohammed, Celeste

Leseproben

Prologue:
The Dragon’s Mouth (Bocas del Dragón)1

It have a benefit to being on this prison island, this tiny dot in the Gulf between Venezuela and Trinidad: freedom. The officers don’t take we on much; they don’t lock up too tight, because where it have to run? We can’t go nowhere. Or so they feel.

Straight from the cell, me and Richards, my cellmate, we stroll out.

Officer Babylon watching TV. We tell him exactly where we going: “Down by the water, Boss. To light up, li’l bit.”

“Allyuh going and smoke? Or allyuh going and bull?” he say, squawking like a seagull.

“Nah, we could do that anytime we want in the cell,” I say, not because me and Richards in any bullerman thing, but because that kinda fleck-up answer is the best way to block Babylon from saying something worse, something that might make me lose my head and buss he throat.

Tonight is not to fight. No, when your head in the dragon mouth, you ease it out real slow.

Me and Richards trot down the incline, to the nibbling edge of the water. The place warm, warm—not a breeze blowing, but that good for us because the water go be flat. It have a full moon, though, grinning like it know what we planning and so it come out for spite, to make sure everybody see we. We didn’t expect this damn moon—I shoulda check beforehand, my mistake—but is do or die tonight. All the dominoes done line up and people waiting on we.

So, me and Richards stand up, watching the silver water and sighing, like if we’s really lovers. Me ain’t know what he thinking, but I studying Consuela, she there on the other side, on the mainland. Not Venezuela (although that’s where she come from), I mean the big island, Trinidad. Consuela working in one of them so-called “guesthouse” in Pleasantview. She know I coming, at least I think so—I did send message with my pardnah, Stench: “Pack and get ready. I comin’ for you Thursday night.”

Consuela waiting; she can’t wait forever—she done wait too long already. Time to move.

“Light the thing, nah, bai,” I tell Richards, “before the man get suspish.”

Richards pull a li’l spliff and a lighter from he pants pocket. He take a pull, I take two, we blow out the smoke and the air start to smell like herb.

I rest down the joint on a rock, and prop it up nice, nice. “You ready?”

“Yeah, let we go.”

With that, me and Richards walk into the sea and just keep walking till we disappear. We lucky: not everybody could do what we doing. Only a few fellas on this prison island, even counting officers, could swim good. But Richards say he born and grow down Ste. Madeleine near a pond, he say nobody in the village was faster than he. But I tell him fresh water different to salt, and pond have edge; the sea ain’t got none. But he say that don’t matter. Me, I born in this Gulf: Icacos, to be exact. If Trinidad is a boots, Icacos is the toe. On a clear, clear day, we used to see Venezuela plain as we hand. My father is a fisherman, he father was a fisherman, and so it go and so it go... all the way back through history. From small, I was always on the pirogue with Daddy; I learn to swim before I could walk, I learn to dive before I could read and write. That’s why I slapping this water, making it splatter outta my way, like is nothing more than melt-down ghee.

Left, right, left, right.

I did tell Stench to wait by the next small island, a li’l cove it have there. Wait and keep the boat quiet, no engine till I reach. Bring change of clothes, I did say. And have a car waiting in Carenage. We heading straight for Pleasantview, straight for Consuela. By that time, they go sound the alarm on the prison island, and while they huntin’ for we in the north-west, we go dash down South, to Icacos. I have to see Daddy and Mammy before I leave for Venezuela. I have to collect back the money Daddy holding for me. With that, me and Consuela go set up weself nice, nice, nice, back in Tucupita, she hometown.

Left, right, left, right. That cove is half a kilometer from here—so the map say. Left, right, left, right. Half a kilometer is about 1,600 feet. That’s all. Feet. Freedom is just feet away from me. And freedom have a next name: Consuela. Consuela, Consuela. A kind of madness take over: I turn barracuda in the water, one arm over the next, I going faster and faster. I ain’t feeling nothing, I ain’t ’fraid nothing, I not looking back, I not going back.

I hear a siren and I know is for we.

I shout for Richards and he shout back but he sounding far, like he lagging behind.

“Richards!” I bawl again, “they comin! Swim!”

That’s all I could say because I pushing through the water, pushing hard.

Then I hear a vessel, the Coast Guard fastboat. Then voices, Richards bawling, other voices. It sound like he fighting with them; he not going easy. I sorry for him but I glad same time, because them so busy with he, I get chance to swim faster, push harder, lungs burnin’ till I feel I go dead.

“Jesus!” I gasp and spit brine.

Jesus used to lime with fisherman, so he go hear me. I only have energy to swing my hand one last time and I touch a log. I latch on... and name it Hallelujah. Hallelujah keep my head above water till I reach the cove. I can’t believe I actually reach, I ’fraid to let go Hallelujah, but them fellas grab and pull me on the pirogue.

We take off for Carenage.

I so tired, I barely breathing, but I have to ask Stench, “You tell she I comin’?”

He say, “Yes, bai. And I just talk to she. She ready and waiting.”

She glances again at the clock, strategically placed on the side wall of her room. From any angle, she is always able check if a customer’s time is up. A self-taught trick—that, and many more. It is just after 10:00 p.m. Sunil sent a message earlier to say, “He coming tonight; pack and get ready.” So yes, she’s packing, but with only half a heart. She is not at all sure if she should believe in him.

Sunil has been in jail for the last year.

In Venezuela, jails are never easy to walk out of, but this is Trinidad—everything is different, easier in many ways. The night-news talks of prisoners and their “rights”. She isn’t sure what exactly that means, though, and if she has those too.

Consuela shrugs like she’s taking off an invisible blouse, but her doubts remain, even as she moves the last two items from her clothes drawer. She dumps them into the faded nylon duffel bag Sunil gave her seventeen and a half months ago—she’s been counting. She’s collected lots more clothes, nicer clothes since then: tights, frothy blouses, jeans and pretty lacy panties, all bought in Pleasantview Junction from roadside people who shout, “Mamacita, take a walk inside! Take a walk inside!” They are accustomed to seeing “Vennies” scurrying around the back streets—to them, every Latina is a Venezuelan whore—so they take her money and ask no questions. She pays a higher price for their silence. She is safe in Pleasantview. As long as her Boss Lady makes sure policemen have free service at the guesthouse, she is safe. She has never even thought of boarding a maxi-taxi and going anywhere else in Trinidad. Where can she run without a passport and a man to protect her from other men? Here, at least, she has Mr. Jagroop.

She approaches the closet where her “good clothes” hang—a couple dresses and some shinier, more bling-bling versions of the same things that were in the drawer, most acquired only recently. The $200 Sunil has been sending now and then can’t do much for her, but she struck jackpot a few months ago when Mr. Jagroop approached Boss Lady about “permanent arrangements”. Friday nights with Consuela became his, and he pays dearly for them. But he can afford, Boss Lady says, because he’s a businessman and, rumor has it, he’ll be a candidate for the next local elections. He is a good man to fuck.

Consuela backs away from the closet and sits on the edge of her bed, staring at the gold lycra of a jumpsuit. She is worth something here in Pleasantview. Does she really want to leave? She isn’t even sure she’s the same person who fell in love with Sunil, who promised him, “I will wait,” last year, when he’d called her to say he was turning himself in to police. But she is very sure she’s no longer the tender seventeen-year-old who did as her mother asked and got on a boat with Sunil and his father and the other men, to cross the Gulf. No, this -year-old Consuela has trained herself to let go of many things, to squelch and drown other things. She’s learned how to focus only on the words spoken during those last moments with her Mama. She has trained herself not to remember her own dread and her own secret trembling at being married off to a boy she barely knew, to a land she’d never seen.

“Promise me, she... only one,” Mama pleaded with Sunil’s father before he left Tucupita. He always visited Mama’s bed whenever he docked in the village; he always paid with cash but tipped with foodstuff. He was one of the honest smugglers; his promise carried weight with her.

“Yes, only she,” Sunil’s father said. “I don’t bring in people on my boat. I only making exception this time because of...