Letters from Port-of-Spain

I have twice had discussions with personnel at airports about whether the place of my birth, Trinidad, so named by Christopher Columbus more than 500 years ago, exists or ever existed. These were serious discussions as my being allowed to board  planes depended on my credibility. 

The first such discussion was with an airline representative at the check in counter in Los Angeles who thought the destination on my ticket, Port of Spain, Trinidad, was a mistake. He could accept my transit point, Miami, but  he was incredulous when I insisted that Port of Spain was an actual city and that Trinidad was a country. Eventually  with a “That must be a new place” shrug he completed my check in.

The second discussion fortunately took place many years before the paranoia that followed the hijackings of September 11, 2001, as I was about to enter a plane in Amsterdam for the flight back to the USA of which I had already been a citizen for most of my life. In those days there were occasional hijackings, usually to divert a plane from Cuba to the USA from its scheduled destination. The hijacker usually didn’t have any further interest in the passengers or plane once it landed. Violence was rare.

Whenever a hijacking occurred there would be some increased security procedures at airports in the area. Such was the situation in Amsterdam, and in this case the procedure was stationing two or three US security agents at podiums at the entrance to the jetway to planes bound for this country. The job of these agents was to form a psychological profile of each passenger depending on the kind of answers they gave to apparently random questions. My last question was where was I born? So I said “Trinidad”. My inquisitor shot back : “I mean the  country where you were born.” He repeatedly just would not accept “Trinidad”, until it occurred to me to direct him to the information printed on my wellworn US passport. I know how I silently profiled his knowledge. I don’t how he profiled me, but I am thankful that those were the days before people got put on “No Fly” lists. Who knows, I might still be languishing in some holding facility in Amsterdam, a man without a country. Nice melodramatic thought, no?

A recently published book Letters From Port of Spain by Ric (Ricardo) Hernandez will help convince any post-Google skeptics in a most gentlemany, erudite way that Trinidad, or to give it its present full political name: The Republic of Trinidad and Tobago, does actually exist and has existed for some time. Expats like Ric and myself remember it as a delightful island with a highly educated, ambitious and courteous population. As another Trinidad expat put it in an e-mail recently, it was an island where “being nice” was appreciated and where people responded to “niceness”  “like flowers turning towards the sun”.

The content and style of Ric’s writing reflect that, “niceness” being not syrupy triviality but a preference for sincere family and social ties, beauty, refinement, kindness, wisdom and knowledge.

I came across Ric Hernandez’ writing by chance when I read one of his weekly columns in the online edition of the newspaper, The Trinidad Express. His style stood head and shoulders above the usual fare. I enjoyed them as essays, in form and content erudite, articulate, with the sophistication of a writer who was well read, well educated, well traveled and had a very wide knowledge and understanding of the world.

I was very disappointed when he stopped writing those columns and I wrote to the Editor of the newspaper to say so. I copied that e-mail to Ricardo and so began our cyber correspondence. In September of this year I had the pleasure of actually meeting him and his wife Janice in person here in Seattle. At that time he showed me the proof copy of his book Letters from Port-of-Spain in which he has collated those columns. The book was just published and I am happily reading the copy I received from Barnes and Noble.

Many of the “letters” are recollections of life in the Trinidad of Ric’s and my childhood, adolescence and early adulthood. Others reflect his profound interest in literature. My reading will be interrupted for a few days while I am away from home but I look forward to continuing to read Letters from Port-of-Spain especially on those Winter days by my fireside that are made for nostalgia.

A week has elapsed since I wrote the above paragraph and as if to encourage me to delve right in again to Letters from Port-of-Spain, Nature greeted me with the residue of a snow storm as my plane landed in Seattle from sunny Hawaii.