“I miss the rhythm of the place,” says Trinidad-born writer, Nathalie Taghaboni, after having lived in Canada since she was 15. “Not just the music, eh? The rhythm. It’s in the walk and talk of the country.” When Taghaboni writes, she wants her fellow Trinis to ‘remember when’. She also writes to teach North American readers a few things about us. “I’d like them to know we don’t all live on the beach and wear swimsuits in the road and reply to everything with, ‘Yeah, mon!’ I want them to hear our accent and not be threatened by it, to know we’re similar, just our colour is of a deeper saturation.” Her latest novel, Across from Lapeyrouse, is a scandalous, brutally funny story of love, sex, drugs, crime, power, status, and plenty Mas. You know, the good stuff. The Carnival baby, who grew up ‘behind the bridge’ and spent her early years in the middle of the bacchanal, admits she’d happily die from “an over-dose of Carnival.” “One of my hopes is that this novel gets into the hearts and minds of non-Caribbean readers. I want them to not only read this book, but SEE the Mas. I want them to HEAR the pan and FEEL the rhythm of the country.” Beautiful, bumptious and larger than life, Taghaboni’s Facebook alter ego, Queen Maccomeh, rules her little corner of the Internet with a sharp tongue, blistering wit, and knack for phrasing her zingers in Trinidad Creole, in ways that Standard English never could. But her subjects, who tremble in her online presence, would be shocked to learn that she was quiet and introverted back in Holy Name... or so she says.
She shares one memory of her school days, when, an avid tennis player, she used to walk across Memorial Park to the courts on the other side. One morning, she challenged a young man she met there to a game. “Those were the days when a child could do that,” she reflects. “He wiped the courts with me. I was gasping and sweating like a boar-hog by the end. We shook hands, and I airily told him he wasn’t bad and might even be able to compete locally if he’d tighten up that backhand. He smiled and told me I was a worthy opponent. I said, “My name is Nathalie.” He replied, “Great to meet you, Nathalie. My name is Arthur... Ashe.” Nowadays, Queen Maccomeh is the self-styled Dean of Commess University, where she awards “Bacchanal Laureate Degrees in Commess and Mauvais Lange and Drevay and Goat Mout’ PhD’s.” Translated into plain English, this is where Her Royal Highness helps writers, mainly West Indians, prepare and publish their works, which makes her a godsend in a day when publishing conglomerates chew up and spit out small writers like other people gnaw on toothpicks. “Some brilliant books are sitting, rejected, in a writer’s drawer. My company hopes to breathe those into life.” This ambition was born out of the stinging rejection of her own first collection of short stories, “Tales from Icebox Land,” which became the first volume to roll off Commess University presses.
Post-publication, she also supports Caribbean writers via her Facebook book club, See Nen Nen News, where West Indians here and abroad gather to old blague about good literature. In her domestic incarnation, she is a wife and mother of two. “I live with the only man on this planet capable of living with me without losing his mind,” she says. It’s a constant struggle to manage multiple careers as author, publisher and critic without making her family feel left out.
Carnival is the season when she misses her native land the most. Asked how she handles being so far from the action, she jokes, “I’ve often thought of committing a crime and getting myself deported... but then I remember that I have an active shame-gene and can’t do these things. It’s tough. I teeter on the brink of insanity from each November to each Ash Wednesday.” Being far from Trini Carnival doesn’t mean she doesn’t play herself on other Carnival stages, however. Toronto does, after all, have a pretty good Carnival of its own. “I’ve played Mas in Trinidad twice and in Toronto’s Caribana several times. If I were able to visit every country that hosted a Trini-styled Carnival, I would go.” In the mean time, Taghaboni prepares for a return visit to these shores, to launch Across from Lapeyrouse sometime next year. This, she’s sure, will come as a great relief to her ancestors, who sat on her shoulder and ‘boofed’ her all the way through the first draft. But apart from promoting her excellent book, she’s simply looking forward to enjoying warmth that doesn’t come from a fireplace, pastelles made with real banana leaves, and the rhythm she longs for.
Across from Lapeyrouse is available at traditional online booksellers and CommessUniversity.com.
