Lisbon

Upon entering the streets of Lisbon, the first sensation to engulf me is its warmth. It immediately pushes me back to a time in my youth when walking on the pavement in such heat was the norm back in Port-of-Spain. I will later learn that it is unseasonably warm for this time of the year and I find myself engaged in the sacrilegeous and tabu act of secretly thanking Global Warming.
Lisbon is like a sleeping giant who is gnarled yet beautiful and gentle. Walking its steep cobble-stoned inclines I am again transported to childhood hikes up Covigne Road in Trinidad to visit a friend who we'd gently tease should buy a helicopter, so high up in the hill she lived. The faces of all were familiar--old wrinkled brown-faced peasants summoned my grandfather, Ewart G. Balbirsingh, while the broad-buttocked yellow woman, my aunt. Old ladies with strong legs dressed in flowered smocks recalled my grandmother, Mummy Hildred and Yoruba black women my Aunty Audrey. Seeing the tips of castles atop hills made me realize why Portugal was once cocky enough to refuse Columbus' master plan and the heat and hilly terrain taught me why they flourished throughout the Caribbean and Africa.
I had always been told that we had Portuguese in my family. It was my family's way, I suppose, of sifting through the obvious to find what they believed to be past gems in our family's genealogy. What I loved about these stories though, were the racial inconsistencies: The East Indian who married the Creole (African) woman because he wanted to marry "up", the "Negro" family with the Portuguese name who disowned a relative when she married a "coolie" (Indian). The way this black Portuguese family revered an Aunty Vivie, a warily white woman, as though she were the Queen herself. My uncle John, now a crotchety old man who spends his time leisurely lounging in his hammock with his rum and coke and a good book, used to declare, "Is Portuguese that give we the brains, and is the African that give we the strength!" He was the Secretary of State to Eric Williams. I never begged to differ with him and point out the many intellectuals among our own race, but that would have been mute. My uncle knew more about Black intelligence probably more than anyone else I know. Why? First of all, he himself was an intellectual who grew up in a period of post-Colonial history bubbling over with intellectuals like C.L.R. James, Eric Williams, Dr. Julius Nyerere and Jomo Kenyatta. I never realized how radical my uncle was until one day we both were watching television and there was Kofi Anon with his wife. "It does hurt your eye eh?" And not for the first time, we exchanged knowing glances.
I loved the old-school shops full of useless trinkets peppered throughout the streets, the concrete, candy-colored low level houses and wrought iron railings. I loved the palm trees brushing up against the pine, the insane driving that an unrelenting sun seems to inspire (they drive just as crazily in Trinidad) and I must have had a momentary lapse of sanity when I agreed to take a topless tour bus with my son and sit in the very front--I did not imagine the driver taking that bus where it did--narrow streets with fast oncoming cars. Add the cable cars into the mix and you see the strong connection between Southern Europeans and Caribbean folks. In short, I felt at home in Lisbon.
Truly I was not there long enough to delve deeper into its culture, its darker, definitely more seedy side. I know there's racism there (The Portugese were the first European slave traders and the last to give independence to its Colonies Brazil and Mozambique among others) but then you gotta think: Brazil has the largest population of Blacks outside of Africa so you know, there must be a LOT of beauty that has traveled from our Ancestors throughout Brazil and then here, out to the world. I just wish I knew some Portuguese to tap into it.
Peace,
the lab