Cocoa

"The cocoa woods...they were like the woods of fairy tales, dark and shadowed and cool. The cocoa-pods, hanging by thick short stems, were like wax fruit in brilliant green and yellow and red and crimson and purple."

V.S. Naipaul - The Middle Passage



Photo taken in San Pedro Estate, Gran Couva

 

The Butterfly

The Butterfly

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Two Types of Heat

It was a hot day. A very hot day, and it was slowly driving me insane. It was a combination of things, and the first thing that made the heat more unbearable than usual was the unwelcome appearance of worms in the kitchen. This made me feel terribly violated, for the kitchen, of course, is one of my sanctuaries, and worms make me feel extremely queasy inside. I've tried to source the root of this phobia, and have narrowed it down to two traumatic childhood experiences which both involve overripe guavas and my grandfather's garden. I will not go into detail.

The second factor leading to my breakdown was the previously mentioned heat. I literally felt as though I was living in an oven and was slowly being baked alive. I just could not take it anymore. I felt that I had to do something or I was going to go mad. Opting for a non-violent course of action, I pulled out my notebook: a fat leather-bound brown thing that I had splurged $60 US on two summers ago, and began to write. Yet despite my best efforts to turn my experience into flowery prose, all that I could squeeze out were short, jilted phrases; more a list of words than an actual compilation of sentences. The heat, it seems, was dictating the rhythm.

This is what I wrote:

Stillness. Heat. Oppressive heat. Hot walls.  Suffocating. Still air. Stale air. Stale conversation. Lethargy.  Rubbish. Maggots. Constant stream of maggots crawling out of the molding. Inactivity. Life in suspension. Uncertainty. Paranoia. Walled in. Locked in. Always locked in. Walking on a tightrope. Stilted.

I knew that the weather, as well as my foul mood, would eventually change, and so said, so done. The rains came a few weeks later and the house began to feel cool and cozy once again. The summer equinox, the longest day of the year, had passed and it seemed as though the dry season heat was beginning to give way to the pleasant reprieve offered by the rainy season.

But there are other types of heat down here, you see, and they are, for lack of a better expression,  sweet too bad. Firstly, there is the soft heat of the sun; the yellowy warm heat that beams down steadily throughout the year. It is this heat that provokes the most envy from those that are forced to deal with the capricious seasons of the North. This heat is also the one which has earned the Caribbean the strange reputation of being a paradise.

Then there is the heat of human warmth; the feeling of being connected to others who have shared your own experience; others who are in some way (loosely or tightly) knotted to you, whether by blood or shared common space. And then there is the heady feeling of heat that arises from Caribbean style bacchanalian bliss; heat generated from the pure energy of humans in motion, humans who dedicate two days to nothing other than celebrating their humanity. The power of our carnivals is not to be underestimated.

Finally there is the feeling of belonging.

But this one comes in waves and is more elusive than the rest.

The Return - First Impressions

Two hundred and forty days; the longest that you have ever spent away from the island. Spend enough time away and you find that your thoughts about your homeland begin to change. You begin to imagine that you have become a different person and that there is no way that you could fit back in to that life you were living before you left.

Then you come back home, and all of these illusions disappear.  The airport doors open and the hot dry season air rushes in and hits you - 'bap' - right in your stomach. Within moments, all of the old feelings and sensations come rushing back. The old European city that you have just left starts to feel like a distant dream, and you begin to have the strange impression that you never left the island in the first place.

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You wake early the next morning, your body still wired to foreign time, and you suddenly remember how wild and sacred the dawn can feel in the Caribbean. You step out of your front door to the low chorus of yellow breasted kiskadees singing out their names: kiss-kee-dee, kiss-kee-dee, kiss-kee-dee. The pale tropical sun is nestled in that place where the two hills meet. The valley is cool and expectant.

You take a seat on the damp wooden bench, the one that sits in the middle of your small front garden, and you let your gaze fall on the thick tufts of bright red ixora flowers that line the bottom of the chain link fence. You had forgotten the way that the cool dewdrops sit like little glass pearls on the petals. It is possible, you remember, to suck the sweet nectar from the ixora stems.

The dogs begin to bark; pots and pans bang together in the neighbour's kitchen; the bright red garbage truck creeps past your house.

You are home again.