Tomorrow

Tomorrow I have a test. A test of my proficiency in understanding the "sophisticated English" of Caribbean Nobel Prize winner Derek Walcott. A test of my tolerance of a man who is obsessed with the past, who will not let go of colonialism. Given by a teacher who preaches "the Caribbean experience" of having "no identity" to me. I was born here. I grew up here. Don't give me that bullshit about having no identity. I have an identity. It's people like Derek Walcott who won't let themselves acquire the good parts of someone else's culture because they're too busy whining over what their ancestors lost generations ago when my European ancestors enslaved them.
For God's sake, it's not my fault. I played no part in it. Don't punish me by being racist. Hating the white people is not going to get you anywhere in a world that becomes progressively whiter and whiter with each generation.
I'm not saying to be completely assimilated. I'm not saying you shouldn't retain parts of the culture and traditions of your ancestors. But at the same time, why do you want to start a "back to Africa" movement? You would hate it in Africa, just as the Indians here would hate it in India. Anyone would hate it there - they're more third-world than this goddamn place. And that's saying something.
I hate this country now. It was beautiful to me once, with the long curved beaches of Mayaro and Manzanilla where the waves crash onto the shore and the water is colder than you'd ever think it in a tropical climate, where coconuts litter the shoreline and where if you're not careful while you're running like a demon on the sand, you can step on a jellyfish and seriously hurt your feet. This mad country with its hills and its vast undulating plains, where everything is green unless it's dry season and if you're not careful you could twist your foot in a crack in the ground. I almost broke my ankle like that in my own backyard one hot year.
But now? Now the people have made it ugly. Who isn't racist is too concerned...good God, this furor in the paper about wanting to change the name of the football team from the Soca Warriors to the Soca Chutney Warriors because they think soca is a black music form and it doesn't adequately represent the 40% Indian population of this country - which chutney, an Indian music form, does. Christ, if you want to be all-inclusive, you'd have to call them the Soca Chutney Steelpan Carnival Hosay Parangsoca Ragga Soca Calypso Rapso Warriors. And I mean, come on, that would be ridiculous.
The people here are ugly. They're narrowminded with a vengeance. They won't look past their own noses. They say there is tolerance and acceptance, they speak of Trinidad as a cosmopolitan place where all ah we is one, but they lie. I know the truth, I live it every day.
Here the Indians marry the Indians and say the "Creoles" - the common term for black people, generally used by those of Indian descent - are barbaric. Meanwhile the blacks deride the Indians as greasy and stupid (this is because of, I believe, the tradition of Indian women staying with their husbands through years of abuse) and say the Syrians are running the country - behind a black government with a black Prime Minister - and of course, everybody hates the whites. We're the cause of every evil this country possesses, because we colonized it with slaves. Betcha anything if we gave them all free one-way tickets back to their homelands of Africa and India they'd be crying to come back in a week.
I'm so sick of it here. I want to leave. When I'm finished A-levels in June (so close, so far), I want to forget formal education. I can get a job as a barista, behind a counter in a deli, in a bookstore, it doesn't matter. A normal nine-to-five with a salary that lets me pay my rent and survive. I don't have to be rich - I don't expect to be...or want to be. I measure my success not by the balance in my bank account, the rung I occupy on the social ladder or the person who designed the clothes on my back, but by what I've achieved for myself internally. Whether I'm happy with the person I am, whether I like that last paragraph I've just typed. Whether I think tomorrow's going to be a beautiful day.
Tomorrow I turn eighteen. Tomorrow I am legal to do anything in this place. The age of consent passed at sixteen, driving at seventeen. At eighteen I can drink, smoke, vote and leave my mother's house and she will hold no claim on me. She will not be able to tell the police to bring me back.
Tomorrow, I see freedom. It will not be until June that I can grasp it.