Chaguaramas, Trinidad: Site of an American naval base during World War Two, a key node in the Allied fight against the Germans, and a strategic post from which to protect American interests in Panama and Latin America. Valued for its deep-water harbor. Used for testing military equipment, access to refineries, and refueling planes. Communications hub. Largest US base in the entire British Caribbean. Makeshift home to 25,000 US troops, whose massive presence also transformed home for half a million Trinidadians.1 Employed over 40,000 local workers in 1942 to build the base2 and brought women into the labor force. Now home to independent Trinidadâs military.
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Chaguaramas: The site of contest and deals between empires. Trinidadian residents were dislocated from their land in a deal between empires: the 1940 so-called âDestroyers for Basesâ deal was struck between Britain and America to keep the Germans at bay. Still visible is the post marking the boundary and laying claim to the property: âUnited States Naval Operating Base Boundary Line Established March 29, 1941 by Base Lease Agreement.â Up on the hill behind Tucker Valley and near Macqueripe, looming over the valley, is a relic of the Cold War: a gigantic radar of the Ballistic Missile Early Warning System that operated from 1958 through the early 1970s.
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Chaguaramas: The name attests to a pre-Columbian and a Spanish history in Trinidad. Named after a species of palm in the language of Cumanagoto Indians, the word entered into the Spanish language with Spainâs colonization of South America. The Churchill-Roosevelt Highway, which connected Chaguaramas Naval Base and Wallerfield Air Base, inscribed later imperial histories on the landscape. The object of fierce struggle in nationalist discourse, Chaguaramas was at the center of the 1960 âmarch in the rainâ led by the Peopleâs National Movement; there, future Prime Minister of Trinidad, Eric Williams, burned a copy of the lease agreement in front of a thousands-strong crowd. Williams declared that the road to independence passed through Chaguaramas.3
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Chaguaramas: site of intimate encounters by day and night, encounters that shook up prevailing scripts of race and sex and class in both the US, which was segregated by law (by day), and in Trinidad, which had its own color lines and racial inequalities. Twenty-three thousand mostly white-male American soldiers vastly outnumbered Trinidadâs whites, who made up only three percent of its population; suddenly, inter-racial couples became a conspicuous presence.4 Moreover, there was often sexual competition and conflict between Afro-Trinidadian men and African-American soldiers, two thousand of whom were stationed in Trinidad. Chaguaramas was also a major point of post-war transfers of soldiers back to the US. Its recreation industry earned it the nickname âHoneymoon Base.â5 The base and its environs sported officersâ recreation areas, a beach club, a hotel, a bingo hall, a golf course, a drive-in cinema, and a thriving sex industry. Between 600 and 700 prostitutes worked in nearby Port of Spain alone, earning between $3 and $10 per encounter for their sexual labor, while as domestic workers for local families they earned only $12 per month.6 Point Cumana in Chaguaramas, the Wrightson Road area in Port of Spain, and the string of bars and brothels that line their streets bear witness to a history of militarized sexual encounters. Still visible at Chaguaramas is the chimney of an incinerator. It is said that the body of a prostitute who had been raped was disposed of there. Chaguaramas: the name is inseparable from a history of sexual encounter that tangled the economies of labor and pleasure.
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The title of the most famous calypso from the period, Invaderâs âRum and Coca Colaâ (1943), evokes at once a history of plantation labor, the release from labor through alcohol, and US multinational power. The cocktail is a metonym for the mixing of American and Trinidadian economies and fluids, and it signals both a sexual and economic transaction. The refrain of the calypso goes thus:
Drinking Rum and Coca Cola
Go down Point Cumana
Both mother and daughter
Working for the Yankee dollar.7
Commenting on the same period, Mighty Sparrowâs hit âJean and Dinahâ (1956) is the most famous of a slew of calypsos that react to the humiliation of Trinidadian men at their rejection by Trinidadian women who leave them for Yankees stationed there through the mid-1950s. Ludically but not inconsequentially misogynistic, âJean and Dinahâ is a vengeance narrative that exults in the departure of the Yankees and the resulting assertion of the local maleâs economic and sexual control over native women: âYou can get them all for nothing.â Gone are the higher wages and the abundance of clients; âYankee gone and Sparrow take over now.â8
The remarkable reach of these calypsos placed sexuality inescapably at the heart of popular public imagination and memory of the World War Two period. But while the calypsos have made the sexual history of that period intensely public, they have also constrained the terms of discussion. In many ways, the punitive assertion of native masculinity in âJean and Dinahâ and Eric Williamsâs romanticized male savior narrative of Chaguaramas are but two faces of a patriarchal nationalism in which the struggle between nation and empire is understood as a contest of masculinities. My interest here is in identifying and preventing the erasures that such narratives enact by focusing on several literary narratives that reassess the role of sex work by women at what was a crucial moment of imperial transition in Trinidadian history.9
The title of Ralph de Boissièreâs 1956 novel Rum and Coca-Cola plays off the signifying power of Invaderâs calypso but breaks with both patriarchal and bourgeois nationalisms.10 The novel reveals that much nationalist criticism of US bases arose from the fact that this new imperial power threatened the economic and cultural power of the colonial elite. The US presence and the context of war loosened certain class and color boundaries, enforced others, and increased wages and the bargaining power of the working class. Yet, as one of the characters in the novel muses, the limited economic opportunities it opened up were far from liberating. âThe Americans permitted us to get to our knees because we were useless to them lying down.â11
Rum and Coca-Cola offers neither moral censure nor uplift. Social-realist in form, it is a leftist exposĂŠ and critique of class, race/color, and gender/sexual inequalities in Trinidad. In fact, it is a powerful caution against reductive readings of nationalism and literary realism. Its plot centers on several overlapping triangles of desire. Fred, a Black Trinidadian mechanic and calypsonian falsely accused of sexually harassing an American woman, is at the heart of a strike at Fort Read. He is torn between his intellectual admiration of Indra, a mixed-race middle-class woman, and his attraction to Marie, a beautiful light-skinned woman whose initial dependence on him enabled him to feel like a savior. In the course of the novel, we see Marie in a range of sexual encounters and relationships with Fred and various American men that span rape, consenting desire, and economic pragmatism; she is subject to both sexual exploitation and upward mobility. (Her liaisons enable her to open a restaurant and to lend money at interest). The novel keenly reveals how prostitution and marriage alike are economic transactions. Moreover, in a crucial scene, the community directly benefits from Marieâs sex work. When the Americans arrive to evict the locals from the land, one American offers money for Marie. Fred urges her to use her charms to get the Americans to listen. Marie thus âbuysâ the community time by trading her body. Meanwhile Indraâs class background and desire for social status, which she can achieve through liaisons with Americans and wealthy Indians, are at odds with her intelligence, her political consciousness, and her desire and admiration for Fred.
Political affiliations, sexual desires, moral beliefs, and economic motivations come into conflict throughout the novel for both Trinidadian and American characters. De Boissière explores the ways in which characters both resist and internalize the hierarchies of class, race, color, nation, and empireâhierarchies that are manifested in the sexual arena. As one character puts it: âAll are dirt, boy. All have iron too. And gold too.â12 The struggle, it insists, is both between and within.
The conclusion of the novel approaches but avoids a tragic mode, in part because of the very brevity and abruptness with which it recounts the events: Having contracted syphilis and become mentally unstable, Marie is about to leap from a parapet into the river; her baby falls to the riverbed below; stopped by a crowd from jumping, Marie throws herself under an American truck. The two deaths are recounted in a single paragraph on the penultimate page of the novel through exterior description only and without building tension or subsequent catharsis for the reader.13 The novelâs stark realism thus withholds the consolations of both romance and tragedy. The last page finds Fred facing an uncertain but not closed future:
He thought of how the white American occupation had broken down walls and snapped ancient chains without freeing him or [Marie] or anyone at all. But it had forced ideas upon him, ideas that could be weapons. Now that the walls had fallen, what lay exposed was a life of untrustworthy promises, treachery by those you trusted, servilityâŚBut for him, no: no more would he be stifled by that deathly pre-war night...