Village of One: the gift of history

Debbie Jacob

MY CHRISTMAS reading tradition always features a magical, unforgettable book that I can remember as a defining moment of that year’s holiday. This Christmas, my choice is Village of One: Essays on Trinbago’s Past, Places, People by Trinidad Express journalist Richard Charan.

In this remarkable collection of essays, which originally appeared as newspaper features, Charan leads readers on explorations – figuratively and literally speaking – through mountains, rivers, swamps and forests to discover TT’s hidden history.

Each piece is enjoyable and informative – works of art in their own right – with new images and realisations emerging from compiling pieces of the picture into a comprehensive whole. Readers see and feel how geography shapes history, something we often forget.

Charan’s vivid imagery, research and interviewing skills bring these stories to life.

“There was once a village in 19th-century Trinidad called Manantial,” Charan writes in the first sentence of the title essay. Distancing himself and readers from the fear and pessimism of this crime-ridden country, he invites readers to experience an enchanted place found in fairy tales. It’s a clever rhetorical device that creates a prevailing tone and mood for the rest of the book. We never again need to be reminded of this country’s magic.

Charan is a finely-tuned wordsmith, a master of imagery and structure. His sentences are as powerful and exquisitely written as those of Ernest Hemingway and VS Naipaul. Sometimes settings feel surreal and reminiscent of fictional places.

In the Lost Settlement of TCO, a remote area of Trinidad thrives on the oil industry, but eventually declines and is reclaimed by the forest. A similar event unfolds in the novel One Hundred Years of Solitude by Colombian Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez when the fictional village of Macondo prospers during the height of the United Fruit Company’s banana industry, only to ultimately be reclaimed by the jungle.

We think of crime as our biggest problem, but Charan shows these islands are often under siege from man-made disasters: oil spills, explosions, climate change and development. A Message from the Sea warns of Trinidad sinking as the ocean reclaims it. Lighter stories appear between the sobering ones. Jumbies haunt old plantations and shepherds watching mangy sheep in graveyards have bewildering experiences.

Each essay is a journey with unexpected twists and turns winding their way through stories like The Mountain Road to Maracas. Railroads and bridges connect the past to the present.

Village of One arguably combines journalism and history with anthropology. Charan’s interviews – especially with elderly subjects – document oral histories, which would have been lost if he hadn’t trekked to distant places most of us have never seen or experienced.

Charan divides his essays into eight sections: Ghost Villages, Streams into Rivers into Oceans, If These Walls Could Talk, The Treasure of Tobago, Every Line on the Railway, Black Gold Disasters, The First Citizens, and Extraordinary People.

One of my favourite sections is The First Citizens where archaeological artefacts that long predate colonialism offer clues to lost Amerindian civilisations and a fresh, new angle to honour TT’s original inhabitants.

This section contrasts with Extraordinary People, who are mainly ordinary people with extraordinary stories: stowaways, a man with a roadside stand, a hermit and sign painter, who conjures up images from Indian writer RK Narayan’s fictional village of Malgudi.

Expect the unexpected – even in a Christmas story set in a match factory (The Christmas Cataclysm of 1928) where a wooden ruler slips from Mr Hacksaw's hand, ignites some matches and causes an explosion that blows the roof off the room and injures 18 people.

The book ends with a simple, touching love story, a fitting conclusion for journeys that led readers to love this country on a new level.

Village of One is a monumental effort; a sweeping presentation of a land with contrasting images, surprises, a rich history and quirky characters. It pays homage to the aged and the ages.

The foreword by journalist Sunity Maharaj speaks of Charan’s “eye for the story, an adventurer’s intrepidity in following wherever it leads and a determination to get to the bottom of it all.” She says, “In accessing the past through the present, Charan focuses on the story aspect of history.”

Equally important and revealing is the preface in which Charan confesses his love for writing and his journey as a journalist.

You can find Village of One, an Ian Randle publication, in local bookstores. Village of One is an invaluable gift to unwrap long after the holidays. It is an epic journey conjuring up images of Homer making his way home.