It’s not often that I’m in the right place at the right time but here I am on the threshold of 2006 so I’ll pour some libations and call on Papa Legba not only to open wide the gate to the New Year, but also to guide us all from this cross-roads of time along the chosen paths of our lives, or the paths we are yet to discover.

May health, happiness and success go with us all. May Shadow be crowned Calypso Monarch and Exodus be victorious in the Big Yard. May the Soca Warriors cause the biggest upset in the history of the World Cup and Ogun and Hanuman, if you are listening, let them mash up England on their way to the final 16.

Well this is a time for making wishes and as I know more and more on this winding camino de la vida: anything and everything is possible in the kingdom of this world. Take the unheard of calm at Casa Levi which has been straining at the seams these last two weeks, since the arrival of the Trini Christmas section.

The Hindu Princess, me mother-in-law, all the mini Levites and the madam self, have taken themselves off to the West End to storm the sales, leaving de ol’ Sio alone with the keyboard, Chuckles, the cat who invited herself over for Christmas and who shows no sign of leaving and a CD from Arnold Duprey, a knowledgeable Trini musician based in Las Vegas, who recently introduced himself via the Internet after reading a piece I’d written on the music of the Hispanic Caribbean. Arnold, I like your pan playing and the mellow vibe.

Besides the CD, the postman brought me another Trini gift, from a long-time partner and former Guardian colleague now masquerading as a construction worker in Canada. We’d shared an admiration for the work of novelist Harold Sonny Ladoo, so if you’ve ever been fortunate enough to come across his searingly poetic No Pain Like This Body, you’ll understand my delight when I buss open the envelope and found a copy of his outrageously funny, bawdy yet trenchantly subversive critique of Canadian evangelism in 19th century Trinidad.

Yesterdays, which is based on the missionary vision of one Poonwa: I will go into the white country with the Hindu Bible and the whip. The white Christians came with their bible and whips and they succeeded just like that. I will take the Bhagavad Gita with me and open a school in Canada and employ East Indian teachers. I will build a torture chamber in the school.

While I have no intention of stirring controversy or offending Presbyterian or Hindu, I do think Ladoo has been one of the few writers to explore the libidinous strata which underlies so much of Trini lifestyle and which is only otherwise dealt with by a few gifted calypsonians but more generally suppressed under the rubrics of respectability and more often hypocrisy.

Ladoo obviously touched some raw nerves with his novels (there’s another even more scandalous than Yesterdays, which is virtually impossible to find) and it’s not entirely surprising to me that his work was cut short when he was found with his throat slit in a Caroni ditch back in 1973.

This murder, as much as the untimely death of Spoiler, deprived the Caribbean of one of its unique voices and now that post-colonial studies are booming in the metropoles, hopefully Yesterdays will be recognised as a classic text.

Another book which I’m happily devouring is Antonio Benitez-Rojo’s The Repeating Island. It has already found a pre-eminent place in the Caribbean canon. I met Antonio when he was in Trinidad for the launch of the now defunct Faber Caribbean Writers series. It was a classic lime, fuelled by copious amounts of Cuban rum, and one which ended with me being ejected from a taxi somewhere on the Lady Chancellor Road, some minutes after midnight, when a Miami-based Trini novelist took professional umbrage when I started giving Caryl Philips some good fatigue.

But since I’m avoiding controversy this rounds, I’ll stick to the text, which is one of the most illuminating analyses of Caribbean thought, history and aesthetics I’ve come across. Without romanticising, Benitez-Rojo uses an intelligence rooted in the lived experience of the region (and not borrowed or adapted from metropolitan models) to penetrate to the heart of Caribbean complexity: How can we describe the culture of the Caribbean in any other way than by calling it a feedback machine?

Nobody has to rack his brains to come up with an answer, it’s in the public domain. If I were to have to put it in one word I would say: performance. But performance not only in terms of scientific interpretation, but also in terms of the execution of a ritual, that is, that certain way in which the two Negro women who conjured away the apocalypse were walking.

In this certain kind of way is expressed the mystic or magical (if you like) loam of the civilisations that contributed to Caribbean culture. When a people’s culture conserves ancient dynamics that play in a certain way, these resist being displaced by external “territorialising” forms and they propose to co-exist with them through syncretic processes.

The only good thing that walking, dancing, playing an instrument, singing, or writing in a certain kind of way are good for is to displace the participants toward a territory marked by the aesthetic of pleasure, or better, an aesthetic whose desire is non-violence the space of a certain kind of way is flooded by Caribbean discourse with a poetic and vital stream navigated by Eros and Dionysus, by Oshun and Elegua, by the Great Mother of the Arawaks and the Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre, all of them defusing violence, the blind violence with which Caribbean social dynamics collide, the violence organised by slavery, despotic colonialism, and the Plantation.