The Enigma Of Arrival - pg. 143

These references -- to the Spanish Empire and the Haitian revolution -- would not have occured to me when I had lived on the street. Even when at school I had got to know (as part of school learning) the historical facts about the region, they did not have any imaginative force for me. The squalor and pettiness and and dinginess -- the fowl-coops and back yards and servant rooms and the many little houses on one small plot and the cesspits -- seemed too new; everything in Port of Spain seemed to have been recently put together; nothing suggested antiquity, a past. To this there had to be added a child's ignorance; and the special incompleteness of the Indian child, grandson of immigrants, whose past suddenly broke off, suddenly fell away into the chasm between the Antilles and India.