Interim: Letter from Trinidad

This letter from Trinidad was meant to be a letter from New Haven, Connecticut. It would have reported on this year’s Windham-Campbell Prize and its eight winners: Sigrid Nunez (fiction), Anne Enright (fiction), Patricia J. Williams (nonfiction), Rana Dasgupta (nonfiction), Roy Williams (drama), Matilda Feyiṣayọ Ibini (drama), Anthony V. Capildeo (poetry), and Tongo Eisen-Martin (poetry). It would have accompanied you into the glow of the Beinecke Library, where marble filters light to gentleness and lets the treasure of books know sunlight safely. It would have ventured into the archive of the Yale Centre for British Art and found 1851 Trinidad in landscapes by Michel-Jean Cazabon. It would have invited you into the big tent in a square with free food and extraordinary conversations. It would have introduced you to the supermarket robot built to look like a retro idea of a robot – a past’s future become present – calling out which tills needed a human. It would have told you about redlining, and the other supermarket, where goods are sold months out of date. It would have shown you a man begging for food and wanting a banana, not money or opioids, because he wants to be healthy but cannot afford the next step in his cardiac treatment. It would have sat with you and offered you bison steak, and farm-to-table vegetables, and packets of seeds to grow them yourself. It would have lingered in the dangerously well-stocked second-hand bookshop. It would have walked into jokes about a Jesuit, a Dominican, and a Franciscan. It would have adored Tongo’s twenty-one-month-old child, who accompanied us ...