By Tony Deyal
In 1969, Canada Hall in the University of the West Indies, St Augustine, Trinidad, was definitely not the right place for a slighter older, married Trinidadian to be inducted into campus life. It was a Hall full of Jamaicans, Guyanese and Barbadians, a tossed salad rather than a melting pot. Most Trinidadian students were advised to stay clear of it. The male students heeded the advice but, as I found out later when I lived there, this was the best advertisement the Hall needed for the Trinidadian female students.
Despite my giving as good as I got as a freshman or “grub,” I became the Hall’s chairman. Many years ago, the Canada Hall, where I was once the leader and representative, invited me to speak. It was great to be there after so long a time. As I joined the teachers and students in the Hall at their annual dinner, I told them how I got the nickname “Poet.” I was doing a comedy skit at the Canada Hall concert and tried to explain the difference between prose and poetry. I said that there was a young lady named Miss Glass who fell in water up to her ankles. I explained that is ‘prose.’ However, if the water was any deeper it would be ‘poetry.’ Worse, that night I switched on the radio because one of my poems, which I had read, was being used in the government media. Since then, not only was I in deeper waters than Miss Glass, but my nickname at the University was “Poet.”
I entered Canada Hall as a rare species, not just a Trini but also a “freshman” or “grub”, the lowest known life-form and a cross between a stone and a worm. However, not long after I was chosen to be the Hall’s chairman, a huge Jamaican youth was coming at me, screaming angrily at the top of his voice, and all I could distinguish was the word “matt-rass.” It sounded, to my unaccustomed Trinidadian ears, like an expletive deleted at the rear end of my immediate maternal ancestor. Fortunately, I did not take offense, but I took cover to avoid damage. My instincts were right. The youth was in a jam. Someone had taken his “matt-rass” and he planned to kill their mattrass.
I had not been back to Canada Hall since 1970 when the Black Power demonstrations had generated states of emergency and other curtailments of normal campus activities. One evening, a group of Canada Hall students went out into Tunapuna, a small town near the University. They “limed” too long and were stranded after the curfew. That was serious. Just a few days before, a man driving his car at considerable speed so he could reach home before the curfew started, was shot and killed by a policeman. A few men, hanging out to enjoy the few minutes before the curfew, were upset. They told the policeman that he had killed the man before the curfew started.
The policeman laughed and asked, “He from here?” One of the men said, “No, he’s from Arima!” The policeman laughed even louder and said, “That is about thirty miles away. He wouldn’t have reached.” I had warned my guys that if anything happened to keep them from reaching the University before the curfew, they should go to the police station and ask them for help. They did. The group’s spokesman was a Jamaican of East Indian descent. Because he was afraid, he kept on talking and describing what happened. The policeman looked him over and asked, “Where are you from?” The boy answered truthfully, “Jamaica.” The policeman stood up and shouted angrily, “They don’t have any Indian in Jamaica. All you damn coolie think you smart!” I had to get the support of the Campus police to bail them out.
My last Hall dinner, when I was chairman of Canada Hall and still a freshman, was a tragicomedy. I was presiding over the Valedictory Dinner of 1970. I spilt wine on the person seated next to me, the Vice-Chancellor’s wife, not once, not even twice, but three times. The dress was white. The wine was red. The lady got blue-blue vexed. My face got as red as the wine and the dress. Talk about the wine of astonishment! She had to go home and change. I had to listen to the Vice Chancellor ask the Warden of Canada Hall, the very genteel Dr Nazeer Ahmad, in a very loud whisper, “Is he drunk? Or is he mad?”
The Warden was not sure which of the alternatives applied. He replied, nodding wisely, “Yes.” What was worse is that the news spread around campus very quickly. The story started, “Poet throw down wine on the Vice-Chancellor’s wife’s dress.” But that turned out to be too complex a sentence for most of the students. What eventually became the talk around the campus was that “Poet wine on the Vice Chancellor’s wife.”
My response has always been, “Even if I “hall my rear” Canada Hall will always be one of the best places I ever studied and lived in.” I had spent only one year in Canada Hall and was hauling myself to CANADA all. There, after three years at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, I got a First-Class Honour’s Degree in Journalism. Later in life, as I travelled and worked in all the English-speaking Caribbean countries, I realised how much Canada Hall, followed by Canada itself, had helped me to prepare for life in the region and the wider world. Because of the Hall, I understood Jamaicans, slow-spoken Bajans and even Guyanese. It is true that I still cannot pronounce “Cohobblopot.”
However, I have kept my promise that when I am in Barbados for Crop-Over, I will never go to a show with a name I cannot pronounce. I avoid the word “Kadooment” because I am still not sure how to pronounce it. In Guyana, I follow the local custom of using the mandatory letter “s” in front of the common expression for the female sexual organ, and I never commit the cardinal sin of saying “sprick” or “scock.” My cousin in Jamaica, Father Gregory of the Mustard Seed Community, speaks enough Jamaican for our entire extended family. He pronounces “king” as “keeng” and “draps” his “h’s” so that “e heats is hamlet with am, hackee and ot hovaltine.” If I ever try this, I will get my tang “tongueled” up and “hend up in the ospital,” which in Barbados is the “horse-spittle.”
The most important thing I learnt at Canada Hall was that all the other West Indians roll their “r’s” much more than we do. However, in CANADA, despite catching my “r’s” in the cold and snow, I also found great folks who liked the jokes as much as I liked getting some money for teaching two groups with media and communications studies.
* Tony Deyal found out that there was at least one thing that Canada Hall and CANADA had in common. When asked to speak about sex, he said truthfully, “It gives me great pleasure.”
The post Canada Hall you what? appeared first on Caribbean News Global.
