“A national psyche is loosened when someone is allowed to publicly flaunt the agreements we have all made with one another.”
Crime, punishment, and the legacy of TRINIDAD AND TOBAGO’S failed coup.
These were among the remarks delivered to the people of Trinidad and Tobago on Friday, July 27, 1990, by Yasin Abu Bakr, né Lennox Phillip, a former police officer turned community organizer, whose paramilitary organization, the Jamaat al-Muslimeen, had, just a half hour prior, overseen the capture and command of the islands’ lone TV station, as well as Parliament, where the prime minister and members of his cabinet were being held hostage. Community organizer here being a loose term. The Muslimeen’s attempt at a coup covered a six-day span, during which the police headquarters was bombed, a member of Parliament was killed, intense looting spread throughout the capital anyway, and Prime Minister Arthur Robinson, when ordered by his captors to instruct the mobilizing armed forces to stand down, using the megaphone provided, famously yelled: “Attack with full force!”—an act of heroism for which he was shot in the leg. While under duress, Robinson was also coerced into signing an amnesty agreement granting the usurpers full clemency in the eyes of the law, should anything go wrong with their plan, a scheme so harebrained and legally dubious that it is only with a sense of incredulity that we can imagine him to have signed his name to the agreement, believing that anything can be promised to men who are soon doomed to die.
In 1990 I was two years old, on an extended visit to Trinidad to stay with my grandmother while my parents were in Virginia, where we lived at the time. My grandmother resided in Belmont, on Archer Street, on the same plot of land where she had raised my mother and her other children, though not in the same building: one of my mother’s first orders of business after making some money of her own had been to fund the transformation of the wooden house where she’d grown up into the brick-and-mortar one I would come to know, replete with hard tiling, a washing machine, and a small, fenceless veranda that Granny Sylvia was always warning me not to stand near the edge of, lest I fall. For Caribbean children, the world is for the most part made up of places not to go and things not to touch. It is only imagination that lends the remaining space its endless bounds. My slice of Trinidad shrank even further when my daily walk with Aunty Laverne was indefinitely postponed. Ordinarily we would hold hands for the few blocks to the local parlor shop, where I would get a sweetie, or chilli bibbi—a candy of flavored ground corn sold in thin cones of wax paper—but one day we instead had to stay inside. Many people were staying inside during that eternal week, awaiting further news, except for the looters, who I guess must not have owned TVs or radios. Of that time I have only the impression of hushed concern from the adults, which nonetheless did nothing to dampen the general excitement that characterized my vacation as a whole. I was reportedly so happy during the six months I spent in Trinidad that when, one day much later, a pair of strangers entered our home and told me I had to come with them, I refused and hid behind my grandmother’s leg. They were my parents, back from the US to collect me, and whose existence I had in the meantime forgotten. Only my dad’s promise of a bicycle was enough to lure me away; he was sitting on the edge of the washing machine and miming a pedaling motion in the air. “Bicycle! Look, bicycle.” I agreed to go with the strangers. In my early understanding of material gain as a substitute for love, I had taken a vital step toward becoming a Trinidadian.
As a matter of fact, the amnesty agreement did stand up in the courts, and in the months following the surrender, arrest, and jailing of Abu Bakr and his forces, the cynical validity of their legal loophole would soon become apparent. In a ruling from Justice Clevert Brooks, based on the precedent of governments acting in the interest of restoring national stability, the forcibly signed amnesty agreement was considered part of a negotiated settlement aimed at ending the coup and was thus valid and binding. Which is to say: they were free to go.
Absent of wars, not every nation is afforded so obvious a fork in the road between who they are and who they might have been. One such moment in Trinidad’s recent history was the failed attempt in the late 1950s to form, alongside nine other islands, a West Indies Federation. With the federation’s shared currency, open borders, and collective government, we might have grown resilient against the meddling influences that were the World Banks and IMFs of the time, whose entrapments of debt we have been long in recovering from. The other moment was this coup, which offered us an alternative destiny, not in its potential success (this seems too unlikely), but in the response to its failure. In setting the men free, we exposed ourselves to a mocking revelation, one that is the unspoken fear of any new nation that was once a colony: that we were an unserious country. Our laws were written on paper and nowhere else; they had not made their way into the mettle of who we were. As a Nigerian friend of my father’s once opined upon hearing the story of the Muslimeen, “Say what you want about Africans. At least we have the good sense to round up our traitors for the firing squad.”