”The food, if you look at it, is this incredibly harmonious stewpot,” Anthony Bourdain said of Trinidad and Tobago, back in the day. ”But I guess life doesn’t work as well as food.” And there it is.
Two solitudes. Trinidad and Tobago are often named in the same breath, but as Anthony Bourdain noted in his Parts Unknown outing in June 2017, the program’s 71st episode overall, one is not like the other. Oil is part of the reason — Trinidad, officially the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago, is the southernmost island country in the Caribbean and lies just offshore from Venezuela, an oil state if ever there was one — and tourism, the life blood of Tobago, is at odds with the island nation’s dark history of colonialism, indentured servitude — aka slavery — and gang violence. Trinidad and Tobago is a land of contrasts, in other words, and contrasts lie at the heart of much of Bourdain’s work throughout Parts Unknown’s dozen seasons on CNN.
Trinidad is famous for its Carnival — think New Orleans couple with Rio de Janeiro, similar and yet different — but Bourdain was uncomfortable with carnivals in general and at one point in the program confesses he has never been to a proper carnival, not so much out of a fear of feeling the vibe of good times in a street setting as his fear of being seen dancing in public and fraternizing with clowns. Bourdain, as most people with a passing familiarity of him know — and he was quick to remind, on and off camera — had a mortal fear of clowns.
Trinidad is not particularly memorable as Parts Unknown episodes go — it rarely makes anyone’s bucket watch-list on Reddit, for ex — but it is worth watching just the same, if only for Bourdain’s uncanny ability to mix fun — Trinidad’s catchy street food scene, the different ways to mix rum, figuring out local lingo like “liming” (just chillin’) and “wining” (dancing, baby, dancin’) — and serious social issues such as racism, social integration, the complex connection between endemic poverty and street violence, and the burden of history that comes with an island state that was settled and colonized in turn by the Spanish, the Dutch, the French, the British, and now … American tourists.
Bourdain: “Many visitors come to Trinidad for one thing and one thing only: Carnival, which locals say is the biggest party on Earth, a pre-Lenten festival of costumes, food, copious drinking, and the kind of dancing you better be good at before trying in public.”
Bourdain claimed at the time that he was no good at dancing — I say ‘claimed’ because there’s a small part of me that suspects he would be accomplished at just about anything he tried, and his affinity for martial arts would appear to make him a natural for shaking his booty without making a fool of himself — so that took care of that. He came for the beaches but stayed for the history.
“The faces you see in the streets are African, Indian, Chinese, Middle Eastern in features, and every shade of mix in between. This patchwork of ethnic identities and colours is a direct legacy of Trinidad’s colonial past. … Trinidad, it should be pointed out right now before you start packing your Speedo and your cocoa butter, is an industrial island. And, like so many places, industrialization is changing the landscape here. But some things persist, remain, echo from all the way back then.”
And not always in a good way.
Bourdain: “It ain’t all good for everybody here by a long shot. Trinidad, with a population of only 1.3 million people, had 463 murders last year, giving Port of Spain a higher per capita murder rate than Detroit, Oakland, or Chicago.”
The music, though, is different. The music is bright, lively, cheerful — both counterpoint and antidote to the island nation’s violent past, volatile present, and uncertain future.
Trinidad, for lack of a better way of putting it, is the birthplace of calypso music, noted for its use of steel pans — a holdover from the oil days, when would-be musicians of limited means figured out a way to use all that shapeshifting metal from discarded oil drums.
Trinidad would become to calypso what Jamaica was to reggae, and, like Jamaican reggae, calypso had elements of political messaging.
Bourdain again: “Boogsie [legendary steel-pan composer-arranger Lennox ‘Boogsie’ Sharpe] composes his pieces by layering different types of drums on top of each other. The engine room, made of unpitched percussion, lays down the groove. Next, a section of six bass pans drops a bass line. The guitar and cello pans add harmonies that sound kind of like strumming. And the front line pans play the melody. The result: a symphonic wall of sound.”
It wouldn’t be Bourdain without a mention of food, of course, and Bourdain isn’t just talking about Trinidad — or Tobago for that matter — when he notes, “The food is the glue that binds the society together.”
It’s a mantra that, for Bourdain, applies just about anywhere.
“As in Brazil and the Deep South, African slaves were given little to work with when it came time for the meal. More often than not, if they wanted meat, they had to make do with what the slave masters did not want: a tongue here, a cow foot there. Here, as elsewhere, they figured out how to make something tender and delicious from whatever there was, like souse — pig foot … pickled in be chadon beni, onions and hot peppers, and then topped off with cucumbers. …
“The food, if you look at it, is this incredibly harmonious stewpot. But I guess life doesn’t work as well as food.”
Across the water, just a skip and a hop away: a completely different way of life. And being.
Bourdain again: “Thirty miles east of Trinidad, its sister island Tobago: A whole different vibe around here, more like what you hope for when you waddle away from the buffet on the SS Norwalk cruise ship. Lazy beach days, boat drinks, villas, all set to a calypso beat.”
And if you go there, don’t forget that Speedo and cocoa butter; the sun at these latitudes can get mighty fierce.
Bourdain being Bourdain — and this is one of the reasons so many follow his every word to this day, so many years later — his final thought resonates, by managing to imbue lazy days on the beach with a deeper meaning.
“No island in the sun is paradise on earth, however it might look from the concrete blocks, glass cubicles, or wood boxes we may live in. And all the dancing and music and great food in the world can never hold together, by itself, what would keep us apart. What might look like a utopian stew of ethnicities and cultures living together under swaying palms is of course a far more complicated matter. But Trinidad has done better than most and in proud and unique style.”
And how.
Supplementary reading:
https://explorepartsunknown.com/trinidad/freetown-collective-a-band-in-search-of-freedom/
https://eatlikebourdain.com/anthony-bourdain-in-trinidad-tobago/
https://explorepartsunknown.com/trinidad/recipe-corn-soup/
The full episode is available on YouTube at:
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