Trinidad - The Traveller's Tree: A Journey Through the Caribbean Islands - page 107

lish is extremely peculiar, and often incomprehensible to a non-Trinidadian; almost a very mild English
equivalent of Créole.
Unfortunately, we came to Trinidad a couple of months too early to hear Calypso in its proper set-
ting—in the tents where the Calypsonians rehearse their songs for Carnival. These are roofs of palm leaf
or corrugated iron held up by wooden supports and filled by the admirers of the different virtuosi. We had
to search for them in night clubs—enormous, rather exciting oases miles from the capital in the middle of
trees, where, if one stays late, taxis become so scarce that one has to trudge all the way back in the small
hours through what seems a limitless and virgin forest. But all the restaurants and dives are haunted by
itinerant Calypsoplayers with enormous repertoires, who produce a faint replica of what Calypso must
be like in its proper setting: strident, truculent and breathless tunes with words that are split up into a
scanned and rhythmic wail, or which race along in a headlong and alliterative jumble which only the beat
can marshal into some kind of symmetry.
Every year brings forth a fresh harvest of Calypso songs. Some of them comment on world events,
like the famous ones about the Abdication or the Marriage of the Duke and Duchess of Kent, others deal
with internal Trinidadian affairs. They are a vehicle for lampoon and political satire and hard luck story,
and all of them are couched in the curious naif-grandiloquent jargon which has become the vernacular of
Calypso. One of the best known, composed by Attila the Hun in the early 'thirties to celebrate the visit of
the Graf Zeppelin, is an excellent illustration of the high-flown, almost euphuistic language:—
'I gazed at the Zeppelin contemplatively
And marvelled at man's ingenuity.
To see that huge object in the air,
Maintaining perfect equilibrium in the atmosphere,
Wonderfully, beautifully, gloriously
Decidedly defying all the laws of gravity:
'Twas the Graf Zeppelin which had
Come to pay a visit to Trinidad.'
Words with endings like 'tribulation,' 'embezzlement,' 'calamity' occur again and again in Calypsos,
always with the accent on the last syllable: tribulay-shón, embezzle-mént, calami-tée. One, by the—for a
Calypsonian—democratically styled Reggie Joseph, is typical of the domestic-moralist school:—
'They clever, they sly, and so tricky, [8]
So they should 'cat' women who commit adultery.
Hit them damn hard, make them understand
That a woman must be true to her husband.'
'Some women today get married just for so
Live with their husbands a few days, then off they go.
So when to keep marriage vows they fail,
I think they should get the cat-o'-nine-tail.'