Life as a Teen: The Legacy of the Compound
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Otancia Noel is an award-winning Trinidadian-born writer, author and tutor. Her prizes and fellowships include, among others: the 2025 Anaphora Writing Residency, International Library Seminars in Nairobi, Kenya; the 2022 UK Island Voices Caribbean Contemporary Prize and the 2021 Vincent Cooper Literary Prize for Caribbean Vernacular. In addition, her writing has been featured in numerous publications in the U.S., the U.K., Africa and the Caribbean, including Solar Punk online magazine, KIZA BlackLit magazine, Lowle Pan African Literary Magazine; the Caribbean Writer Magazine and an upcoming feature in the U.K. Journal of Post Colonial Writing. She holds a degree in Mass Communication and Literature from the College of Science, Technology and Applied Arts of Trinidad and Tobago and an MFA in Creative Writing, Prose & Fiction from the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago. She enjoys gardening, reading, writing and cooking.
AN EXCERPT FROM
Life as a Teen: The Legacy of the Compound
BY OTANCIA NOEL
Copyright 2025. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
In retrospect, comparing the world within and the world beyond the Compound, I can see how the Jamaat-Al-Muslimeen compound at number one Mucurapo Road, St. James, Trinidad and Tobago could have been perceived as a cult by many on the outside. As one who lived in it for six years during my childhood, however, I can vouch that it was a relatively normal abnormal world. As a friend would later describe it, “Jim Jones without the suicide.” Granted, as an adolescent on his way to becoming a participant in the attempted coup of July 1990 that was led by the Jamaat leader, he may have had a good reason for perceiving it that way.
The Compound at Mucurapo was a world unto itself. As you drove down or up Mucurapo Road, you could see the green, black, white and red flags dancing and prancing, some with Arabic painted inscriptions along the extended iron fence of the compound. I remember fishing in the big drain a little lower down the road from the compound. It ran between a house on Mucurapo Road and Fatima College Grounds before heading straight out to the sea on the opposite side of the Audrey Jeffers Highway. To get to the area of the sea that we called “Hot and Cold,” we would pass under the highway, through the mangrove, the slush, the mud and the piles of rubbish.
Children from the neighbouring Mucurapo Junior and Senior Secondary Schools took a special delight in playing with us, the Jamaat children. To them, we were a novelty with the additional excitement of being forbidden. Some Muslim parents didn’t want their children mixing with “those kufr,” while likewise, some non-Muslim parents saw us as dangerous to their children. But children will be children—we just gravitated towards each other.
This was the case one afternoon after school when I joined a basketball game. My mother, Umi, had expressly forbidden me to leave home that evening but, tempted by the fun of playing with friends, I disobeyed her and went on the court in my socks. As bad luck would have it, someone stepped on my sock. I fell to the ground and broke my arm. Although highly annoyed by my act of disobedience, Umi did not have the heart to add a cut-arse to a broken arm.
Within the Compound, we children were a protected lot, given our limited exposure to life beyond the perimeter. Between us and the world beyond was the huge Mucurapo Cemetery, which provided a natural barrier. So, it came as a complete shock one late afternoon when a young man accosted my friend and me as we hurried back home from an errand at Meat Cottage, a grocery in St. James. Tall, slim-built, dark-skinned and seemingly in his early twenties, he walked up to us and asked if we knew Dick. I said I didn’t and my friend said the same. As far as we knew, there was no one at the Compound by that name.
“Oho,” he said. “Allyuh don’t know him? Well, let me introduce allyuh.” As he reached for the zipper on his fly we bolted and were out of there before you could say, “Yasin Abu Bakr.”
Fortunately for him, the team of brothers who rushed out looking for him could not find him. If they had, he would have felt the full wrath of men who would not have thought twice about protecting us with their lives. For the brothers in the Jamaat, molestation of women and children was an evil not to be tolerated.
Our teenage world was not one of social outings with friends our age but of being chaperoned to the movies—the movie trip was also a topic of debate, depending on what was showing. For some parents, everything was X-rated, but PG-13 movies were as far as we got. Our usual outings were to the library, or some other educational event by trusted adults, sometimes with the protection of the Jamaat’s elite security force.
Occasionally we went to concerts in the stadium, which for me, was like going to heaven. Once I even went to Panorama—the national steel pan festival held around carnival time in Trinidad, which was a real challenge for a short person like me. I was constantly in fear of being trampled, and it felt like I was trapped by a herd of elephants. Throw in the dust being constantly kicked up by hundreds of feet and the situation became downright claustrophobic. I might be Muslim, but I don’t think the desert is my kind of place.
These outings were usually supervised by my dearly beloved Hassan Anyabwile, who believed that, as Trinbagonians, we should engage the culture and do some things that teenagers enjoy. Of course, some parents objected, saying that such activities had no basis in our Islamic lifestyle or education.
At times, our outings were a source of controversy on the Compound, as happened when we played a netball game against a group which included a few boys. Some girls from our team opted out of the game because of the mixing of the sexes. Not me. Being the troublemaker, I was among those who played. By the time we got back, the game was already a heated issue at the Jamaat. A meeting was summoned, out of which a decree was handed down instructing that there were to be no more netball games outside of the Compound. Further, any team coming in to play the sisters would have to be all-female.
To the average teenager, it might seem overly restrictive, but this system supported solid educational practices and promoted strong sibling ties. Our teachers were dedicated, and we had the advantage of being able to spend quite a lot of time in their homes. The family values and the unity taught at the Jamaat helped to anchor us to a strong moral and spiritual centre. Being required to adhere to structure and rules helped to discipline our energies and impulses. To be honest, it didn’t always seem like a good thing to us teenagers. Speaking for myself, I wanted to experience life on the other side sometimes. I was and still am a rebellious sort, having my opinions and being the one who told all and sundry exactly how I felt, sometimes with fiery language.
Also, in looking back, I would say the idea of communal living has its pros and cons, and religious or social communal compounds don’t necessarily make life safer or better for children. Now, I would say the compound was a place that I would not have chosen to live or raise a family. Apart from the great school structure, one downfall I have seen with compound living was having an influx of people coming to live there also, some of whom were not characters that I would have allowed my children to freely engage with just based on Muslim brotherhood. Another point of observation is that sometimes one brings to children the exact things that adults want to shield against. And I am saying this from the point of first-hand experience in my life on the compound.
In fact, once I was embroiled in a bacchanal. It happened one day while I was minding my business, heading to the front of the compound for Arabic class. I walked down the track that connected our house to the front of the Compound. Two of the boys were liming on the track, foolishly playing with a weapon.
I walked by and then there was a bang! Followed by, “Shit, you shoot meh.” It was an unfortunate accident, but one boy was an early compound resident, while the other, who allegedly pulled the trigger, was a new arrival that came in with the now-reformed souls. There was tension building on the Compound between these two groups, because it had been mentioned in some circles that a bit of favouritism was being shown to the new arrivals.
Anyhow, I was called upon to testify to what happened during this accident/incident, and my view was that Boy X, the new arrival, did not deliberately pull the trigger on Boy Y, the early compound resident. Let me assure you, this was also the view of both individuals involved in the incident, or at least I assumed such. But in the world of compound politics, some people tried to pursue me to say otherwise because, according to them, I should be “standing with our boys of yesteryear.”
Now, let me remind you, I am still a mere girl-child, around fourteen. I was never, nor will I ever be politically inclined, so you know how that went down, with me getting a few cut eyes and one or two disgruntled stares. My mother wasn’t having any of this nonsense. The Jamaat authorities were questioning me about the incident as I had witnessed it, and my mother was not having any more of them questioning me about it. My father, for once, agreed with her. I must give my father some credit. He was never one to involve children in these types of situations.
Not everyone who lived at the Compound made their living by working there. Some had regular jobs in mainstream society; others, including my father, tended to the Jamaat’s affairs and had to attend meetings regularly and therefore could not accept employment elsewhere. Some of these individuals taught us in the school. Others went to “look for it for the mosque,” meaning that they went out to bring in money, by fair means or—I am tempted to say—foul.
The Compound also maintained a schedule of outside activities. Some brothers went out on the streets and engaged people in troubled communities, cleaning up drug dens, helping people look for kidnapped loved ones and assisting with problems that desperate people from all over the country would bring to the Jamaat in their search for solutions. Only the men were involved in these activities; some of them were young boys who came to the compound as loners or with others. I can’t say much about those activities because, as a child, and a girl at that, we weren’t involved in them. Sometimes we young ones would make placards and be required to attend a march or a town meeting if the Imam organized one, but that was about it.
It took a long time, but eventually a small shopping area like a mini mart was built onto the front of the Compound. On top of it was the residence of one of the Imam’s three wives. A high-end boutique and a unit offering sewing classes for women emerged as entrepreneurial activities began taking shape, putting the Jamaat on a business footing. There was even a small greenhouse established by the then wife of a key member of the Jamaat.
In time, all the families had their own apartments, with a few having built separate houses for themselves. My family was among these. My mother, a strong woman in those days, being one of the few women who were not afraid to oppose the leader of the compound, declared that she had “no intention of continuing to live in a rat-hole while the Imam basks in his palace.”
When our house was being built, the Imam, who enjoyed the luxury of his own private bath facilities in his house, insisted that my father not put any toilet and bath in it and that we should use the communal facilities to the front. My mother put her foot down. “If you agree to that,” she told my father, “You will have to be the one who empties the pail this family will be using.” I don’t think that my father relished the idea of being the “pail man,” so we got a full bathroom and toilet in our house.
There was also a dormitory for the brothers who lived on the Compound, as well as for the itinerant residents in need of temporary protection. We lived in our own little world, governed by our own set of rules, some Islamic, some invented on the spot. About these, the less I say, the better. But I am a Trini, so just for bacchanal, some brothers had more clout on the compound based on who they were, and these brothers could sometimes get away from repercussions for not following rules. Like every other thing in life, this was not necessarily fair, it is just how it was. I like to think about it as the Compound’s hierarchy system.
A typical day at the mosque began with classes at the Jamaat school, followed by the return home, then evening classes for both children and adults, along with sporting and other activities. These included first aid classes on Wrightson Road and Youth Training and Education Partnership Program (YTEPP) classes at Mucurapo Senior Comprehensive, along with the business of the Jamaat with people in and out for one reason or the other, to have a word with the Imam and the big boys.
On grand days, like Eid-ul-Fitr, the Compound was a cool place to be. On those days, large crowds of beggars and vagrants would descend on the place in expectation of food and alms. Apart from the occasional loss of our shoes to vagrants while we were bare footed at prayers, the atmosphere was one of great conviviality, with a sense of security and family as we enjoyed food, friends and fun with our toys.
In the days leading up to Eid, the excitement and togetherness on the Compound was something special to behold. Sometimes we stayed up all night helping in the big kitchen, peeling pumpkins, cleaning and seasoning meat, chopping up mango and decorating the Compound. Since childhood, I have loved cooking, so I was invariably to be found in the kitchen, which, for me, is the beating heart of a home. In the lead-up to Eid, we would go shopping for gifts, shoes and cloth to make our special Eid outfits. For my Christian and Hindu brothers and sisters, imagine Christmas or Divali and the excitement of the days leading up to these festivities. That’s how it was at the Compound.
One of the sisters had a little parlour next to the Jamaat-al-Muslimeen mosque. Her business survives as a witness to the ups-and-downs of the Compound. It was there before the little shopping area was built, and is still there, serving suck-a-bags, pies and other delicacies that always kept us coming back for more.
In the Jamaat’s heyday of the late eighties, the big crowds on Friday for Jumu’ah prayers drew vendors offering everything from food to household items to jewelry under the big shed or hall next to the mosque. Decades later, some of those same vendors have graduated into very successful businesspeople. Friday was also the day that everyone and anyone would choose to come to the Compound, some for alms, some needing a favour from the Imam, some with a business proposal, some just checking it out because of hearsay, some coming to join the cause.
On Friday nights, the action was at one of the sister’s tasty chicken and chips shop on the eastern side of the Compound where the apartments were. The atmosphere there could rival any Friday night lime by the doubles man on Independence Square. The Compound was the place to be. The leader led his flock with a golden tongue and they happily hippity scotched along … right up to the coup.
Today, myself and all other children who grew up on the Compound carry the brand of our fathers on our forehead. Apparently, to many people, we are all terrorists by manner of inheritance.