In 1927, Walter “Railway” Douglas wrote and performed the calypso “Why Mih Neighbour Vex with Me”. The verse from the hit calypso quoted in the epigraph describes a jealous neighbour spying on the calypsonianprotagonist's bedroom within a yard. Here the yard is presented as a place of dangerous jealousies, voyeurism and sexual encounter. Above and beyond this, it appears to be a porous site where private and public boundaries dissolve and blur. There are no walled rooms in which inhabitants are hermetically sealed from prying eyes, only partitions with apertures that allow for observation and eavesdropping; sex is made visible and what is clandestine is easily exposed.

Taking its lead from Douglas's calypso, this chapter mines the literary foundations and definitions of the Trinidadian urban yard and marks the psychosocial “spatial” dynamics often associated with a locus which disturbs the boundaries between public and private, open and closed, discrete and indiscrete. The 1920s–1930s “yard” literature pioneered by the Beacon group, a literary circle spearheaded by Albert Gomes, C. L. R. James and Alfred Mendes, forms the primary discussion. The Beacon group's fiction is contextualized particularly against the backdrop of literary Modernism, and other literary and cultural forms—namely journalism and calypso—to illustrate the interrelated portraits of the yard and its predominant image as a working-class, or even underclass, abode and subject. Often closed and cramped, the yard dwelling, it is argued, features in Trinidadian writing and song as a site in which susceptibility to spatial disorders—claustrophobia in particular—is increased and where transgressive acts—social, sexual and criminal—are played out.