The Temple. The panyards. Rialto Cinema. The Naipauls. These distinct features of St James were woven together in a recent presentation from Friends of Mr Biswas, a group that seeks to educate T&T about our country’s rich literary heritage.
The St James of the Naipauls and the Capildeos, a lecture presented on October 25 by journalist Robert Clarke through words and photographs, is the first in a series of events meant to show how literature is linked to everyday life and culture.
“We’re going to find out who are all the writers, panmen, pan sides and creative people in St James,” Friends chair Prof Kenneth Ramchand said during a Q&A after Clarke spoke.
Friends is not “just a literary group,” he added. “We feel free to move into cultural literacy, which is knowing who you are, where you came from, where you’re going, what does the place mean to you.”
The group plans to make similar presentations about other communities. The next event will take place in Arima and have Prof Brinsley Samaroo talk about former Arima Mayor FEM Hosein. It will feature readings from Hyarima and the Saints, a play Hosein wrote about the 1699 Arena massacre.
In introducing Clarke, writer and Friends member Anu Lakhan, who grew up in St James, called the community “Trinidad writ small”.
“It is the most cosmopolitan place in Trinidad,” she said. “Within that space from east to west what you’ll find is every social division, every ethnicity, every religion.”
The Naipaul home on Nepaul St in St James, where Sir Vidia spent four years of his life before permanently immigrating, influenced his popular novel A House for Mr Biswas.
“Nepaul Street was home to Indo-Trinidadians,” said Clarke. “It was they who had begun the settlement of St James, transforming it by degrees from former cane lands to residential communities and a suburb of Port-of-Spain. But by the late 1940s it had already assumed its multiethnic character.”
Vidia’s mother Droapatie—a descendant of the Capildeo clan—was a founder of the landmark Hindu temple on Ethel Street.
The original building was designed by architect John Newel Lewis, a British expat. Sculptor/ masman Ken Morris made the mace on Hanuman’s murti. The smaller temples were designed by a Chinese-Trinidadian, John Yip Young.
The temple, said Clarke, “is truly a Trinidadian structure”.
St James had a greater impact on the life and work of Vidia’s younger brother, Shiva, than it did on the Nobel Prize winner. After the family moved there from Chaguanas, Shiva spent most of his childhood at what’s now called Naipaul House, a heritage site/ museum run by Friends of Mr Biswas.
Clarke pointed to the preface to Beyond the Dragon’s Mouth, where Shiva called himself a “town boy through and through”. Pan legend Anthony Williams lived nearby and Shiva took up the instrument.
“News of which Vidia in London found distressing,” said Clarke, to a ripple of laughter from the audience in the auditorium of Port-of-Spain’s City Hall.
“There was no lack of options for an aspiring pannist in St James in the 1950s,” said Clarke. “North Stars on Bombay Street. Five Graves to Cairo in Belle View. Tripoli at the corner of Ethel Street and Mucurapo Road.”
He continued: ““From the second story window of his snug, box-shaped home, Shiva could see the Rialto Cinema at the corner of Agra Street and the Western Main Road, where nine cents would get you a wooden chair in pit for a double feature of westerns that proved so influential in the naming of St James pansides.”
Shiva used St James as the location for short stories The Tenant and The Beauty Contest. Doon Town in the latter, said Clarke, “stands in for St James”.
“It is a story about suburban development, American cultural imperialism and a parochial shopkeeper spurred on by an ambitious wife to ever more ridiculous competitive feats. In it you recognize a St James that exists even today,” said Clarke.
Comparing Shiva’s work to his brother’s, Clarke said: “It is in Shiva’s stories that you are invited to his St James, just as you were introduced to the characters of Luis Street, Woodbrook, through Vidia’s Miguel Street.”
During the Q&A, Prof Ramchand encouraged the public to get involved in what he called “The St James Project.”
“If you know anything about St James, any persons in St James, any events in St James, tell us,” he said.
More info: Visit: friendsofmrbiswas.org or call 791-1320.