Caribbean writers have routinely appropriated Caliban as a symbol of the struggles of Caribbean people against the mastery of European Prosperos. However, because most of the European colonies lay in the US backyard, the struggle for independence entailed facing not one but two Prosperos. This dilemma became acute in war-time Trinidad. About a year into World War II, the British government decided that, in exchange for fifty ‘mothballed’ naval destroyers, the USA could establish a number of military installations in the British West Indies (the lend-lease agreement). Between 1941 and 1947 the Americans established and operated key bases in Trinidad, located at Chaguaramas and Waller Field.
Neptune argues that, while independence did not come to Trinidad and Tobago until 1962, what Trinidadians dubbed the ‘American Occupation’ proved to be a key period for Trinidad national development. It would have been difficult to conjure up a greater contrast with the occupation, and its superfluity of cash, than the preceding decade of the 1930s, which had been economically depressed. Rising unemployment and declining wages had taken their toll of East Indian and black workers alike, whether employed in the sugar or oil sectors of the economy. Labour rebellions and unionisation under Tubal (not Turbal) Uriah ‘Buzz’ Butler and his East Indian ally, Adrian Cola Rienzi, had thrown down a challenge to employers, and had chimed with labour struggles throughout the British West Indies. As Neptune admits, ‘minus these popular attacks on the colonial order, the railings of dissident intellectuals against the demerits of Britishness would have lost considerable resonance’ (p. 21).
Trinidadian intellectuals of the 1930s (themselves white or light coloured) set out to banalise Britishness, to disturb its air of invulnerability and, indeed, inevitability. Race was at the centre of this debate, since ‘Britishness stood as an identity inextricable from the culture of white supremacy’, and local patriots proceeded ‘to undermine the rhetoric of empire’ and to expose its ‘complicity with tropes of whiteness’ (p. 27). The Beacon, a local journal, disparaged British-inspired literary and debating clubs as ‘monstrous caricatures’, and its contributors rejected the notion of the British Empire as a racial democracy, arguing that it was, in reality, predicated on racial hegemony. Disparagement of whiteness and empire went hand in hand with the elevation of elements of popular culture to local significance, notably the calypso – a locally-composed song with salacious topics and/or witty social commentaries.
Drawing on British, Trinidadian and US archives, and reading between the lines of local newspaper articles and reports, Neptune describes and analyses how Trinidadians approached the occupation in ways that were inventive and Caliban-like, siding with the British or Americans as it served their own ends. Examining the economic effects of the US bases on the consumption patterns of the labouring population, the influence of American culture and values on local music, and relationships between American troops and local women, he shows how the occupation increased consciousness of race and class among the white elite, the brown middle stratum and the black masses, though the rural East Indian minority remained largely untouched.
Cash pumped into the colonial economy by the American military at the end of the Great Depression enabled Trinidad's ‘barefoot man’ to invest in US-style jitterbug shirts (worn outside the trousers), and to portray himself as a saga boy. ‘Saga, however, signified more than flair for fashion that meant ready-made success with girls in occupied Trinidad; it marked a sub-cultural lifestyle distinguished by a mode of dressing idealized in the glamorous zoot suit’ (p. 120). Zoot suits (with wide-shouldered jackets, ankle-tight trousers, and shirts, ties and hats all in matching colours), were worn with accessories such as fob watches, gold-topped walking sticks and jewellery: all warnings of ‘the seductively colonizing commodities of American modernity’ (p. 128).
Americans arrived in Trinidad at the moment when the local patriotic intelligentsia had declared the calypso the epitome of local culture. The situation was profoundly affected by the US troops, who offered the calypso both money and legitimacy, since many locals assumed the Yankees were cultural authorities. Inevitably, the Americans dramatically reconfigured the music market, exemplified by ‘Rum and Coca-Cola’, a song released in Trinidad by Lord Invader in 1943 and recorded in the USA by the famous Andrews Sisters in 1944. It related the scandalous sexual relationships between mercenary local women (‘both mother and daughter working for the Yankee dollar’) and moneyed American men.
American servicemen (often themselves racist) posed many problems for Trinidad society. As Neptune comments, ‘if ever there was a place that seduced white men across the colour line, surely this tropical colony was it’ (p. 164). The longer the white Americans stayed the less the colour of the girls mattered, and fraternisation was rife. The armed forces responded by outlawing marriage with locals without the commanding officer's approval, and elite whites (deeply opposed to cross-race liaisons) attempted to provide vetted white girls as hostesses for the troops, to little avail. The blacks of the Anti-Aircraft Coastal Artillery, because they were subject to less surveillance, were especially popular with the mopsies of Port of Spain. But local black men were marginalised by the American troops, whether white or black, and the intellectuals despaired at the Americans' corruption of the calypso and Trinidad womanhood (though they were sympathetic to the financial pressures on both).
This cautionary view is amplified in the coda, which details the circumscribed ‘nationalisation’ of Chaguaramas on the eve of Trinidad's independence in 1962, and enumerates the various US interventions in the Caribbean from the Bay of Pigs to Grenada via the Dominican Republic. Neptune identifies the USA as the one and only Prospero of the post-colonial Caribbean – attractive but dangerous. However, it is not for this opinion that the book will be remembered, but rather for Neptune's detailed and perceptive account of the important cultural and political awakenings that Trinidad experienced in the 1930s and 1940s. These awakenings anticipated changes that were inspired by the black intellectuals of the 1950s, who led Trinidad and Tobago to independence and re-wrote history as though the American occupation had never happened.
