Port of Spain

 

Text: Avram Goldmann

Images: Mira Zdjelar

 

All that remains from a city as it slowly fades away from the reality of the observer is a procession of shadows.

 

 

Shadows of decrepit old houses, imprints of faces in the distance, slivers of memory… A brief encounter with a new city resembles a passing love affair. Fearful glimpses in the beginning, light emerging slowly from the darkness of the unknown, marked by a burning desire to repeat the encounter, to make it last longer.

 

 

The eye of the traveller wants to see more, and thinks it sees more, half-recognizing how deceptive this new insight might be, but consciously suppressing that thought, driven by desire and beauty, not by the oppressive rationality of the mind.

 

 

A city curiously different than any city seen before, while offering an unsettling sense of familiar sameness, reveals itself slowly to the eye unused to its idiosyncrasies. Urban glory meets urban decay every day, everywhere, and both exist at the same time, levelling the playfield of perception.

 

 

Some spaces are hidden, abandoned, and some are common. They speak of the local pulsation of life, in its manifestations that can never be entirely clear to a passer-by. To truly visit a city doesn’t mean to conquer it; it means to allow it to show you what it wants, what it feels necessary, prudent, or merely impossible to hide. And that’s always an intricate interplay between the observer and the observed, who change their roles all the time, entangled in a maze of moments, images, chance meetings, and instances that may, or may not, lead to insight.

 

 

Slowly, people emerge from the pores of concrete. Unrecognizable in the beginning, lending their space to the intimidating presence of buildings, pavement, vehicles, of their own creations, they show up at the far end of the horizon…

 

Going in their own mental and physical directions, barely acknowledging the stranger, they continue the process of seduction, yet they are being seduced at the same time by the new, the fresh, the uncertain that the stranger represents. This seduction can be banal, exchange of memories for money in a souvenir shop, or profound, opening a mental door that will produce the joy of sudden cognizance, only to be substituted by a sense of loss that comes later.

 

If for a second, though, the passenger discovers that the reality of life in the city was a shared experience, with the lonely tourist transformed into a participant, no matter how small and insignificant that participation, the experience will remain long after the city has disappeared from sight.

 

What else can one do but follow? Following is a common manifestation of the drive to know more, experience more, or just satisfy human curiosity. Would we be doing in some other city the same things that all these real, yet imagined, people do in this real, yet imagined temporary site of our existence?

 

The procession of images from Port of Spain could continue here: calypso singers, dry wind blowing the Savannah, forest fires on the surrounding hills, shanty towns and office towers, idle people in the streets and other people busy selling corn soup and doubles, roti huts and KFCs, the ubiquitous uniqueness of a city touched by globalization, but also projecting its own identity and adding to the global matrix. That is the identity, or a series of identities, that a passer-by will never know, and should never pretend to know.

 

 

Nevertheless, a feeling, an atmospheric peculiarity remains, and that feeling is enriching and inspiring more than knowledge can ever hope to be…