The Writer and the World: Essays

  The Prime Minister has one bad eye, damaged by a cow’s horn when he was a child. The drawing-room of his new house in Port Louis, built on the site of his old house, is full of the mementoes of his long political life: signed portraits, photographs of airport meetings, ponderous official gifts in a variety of national styles. Here, among his souvenirs, he constantly entertains. He likes informal dinner parties, conversation, chat. He would like to retire, to become his legend, to be “above it all.”

  But tranquillity recedes. The barracoon is overcrowded; the escape routes are closed. The people are disaffected and have no sense of danger.

  1972

  Power?

  THE TRINIDAD CARNIVAL is famous. For the two days before Ash Wednesday the million or so islanders—blacks, whites, the later immigrant groups of Portuguese, Indians, and Chinese—parade the hot streets in costumed “bands” and dance to steel orchestras. This year there was a twist. After the Carnival there were Black Power disturbances. After the masquerade and the music, anger and terror.

  In a way, it makes sense. Carnival and Black Power are not as opposed as they appear. The tourists who go for the Carnival don’t really know what they are watching. The islanders themselves, who have spent so long forgetting the past, have forgotten the darker origins of their Carnival. The bands, flags and costumes have little to do with Lent, and much to do with slavery.

  The slave in Trinidad worked by day and lived at night. Then the world of the white plantations fell away; and in its place was a securer, secret world of fantasy, of Negro “kingdoms,” “regiments,” bands. The people who were slaves by day saw themselves then as kings, queens, dauphins, princesses. There were pretty uniforms, flags and painted wooden swords. Everyone who joined a regiment got a title. At night the Negroes played at being people, mimicking the rites of the upper world. The kings visited and entertained. At gatherings a “secretary” might sit scribbling away.

  Once, in December 1805, this fantasy of the night overflowed into the working day. There was serious talk then of cutting off the heads of some plantation owners, of drinking holy water afterwards and eating pork and dancing. The plot was found out; and swiftly, before Christmas, in the main Port of Spain square there were hangings, decapitations, brandings and whippings.

  That was Trinidad’s first and last slave “revolt.” The Negro kingdoms of the night were broken up. But the fantasies remained. They had to, because without that touch of lunacy the Negro would have utterly despaired and might have killed himself slowly by eating dirt; many in Trinidad did. The Carnival the tourist goes to see is a version of the lunacy that kept the slave alive. It is the original dream of black power, style and prettiness; and it always feeds on a private vision of the real world.

  During the war an admiration for Russia—really an admiration for “stylish” things like Stalin’s moustache and the outlandish names of Russian generals, Timoshenko, Rokossovsky—was expressed in a “Red Army” band. At the same time an admiration for Humphrey Bogart created a rival “Casablanca” band. Make-believe, but taken seriously and transformed; not far below, perhaps even unacknowledged, there has always been a vision of the black millennium, as much a vision of revenge as of a black world made whole again.

  SOMETHING of the Carnival lunacy touches all these islands where people, first as slaves and then as neglected colonials, have seen themselves as futile, on the other side of the real world. In St. Kitts, with a population of thirty-six thousand, Papa Bradshaw, the Premier, has tried to calm despair by resurrecting the memory of Christophe, Emperor of Haiti, builder of the Citadel, who was born a slave on the island. Until they were saved from themselves, the six thousand people of Anguilla seriously thought they could just have a constitution written by someone from Florida and set up in business as an independent country.

  In Jamaica the Rastafarians believe they are Abyssinians and that the Emperor Haile Selassie is God. This is one of the unexpected results of Italian propaganda during the Abyssinian war. The Italians said then that there was a secret black society called Niya Binghi (“Death to the Whites”) and that it was several million strong. The propaganda delighted some Jamaicans, who formed little Niya Binghi play-groups of their own. Recently the Emperor visited Jamaica. The Rastafarians were expecting a black lion of a man; they saw someone like a Hindu, mild-featured, brown and small. The disappointment was great; but somehow the sect survives.

  These islanders are disturbed. They already have black government and black power, but they want more. They want something more than politics. Like the dispossessed peasantry of medieval Europe, they await crusades and messiahs. Now they have Black Power. It isn’t the Black Power of the United States. That is the protest of a disadvantaged minority which has at last begun to feel that some of the rich things of America are accessible, that only self-contempt and discrimination stand in the way. But in the islands the news gets distorted.

  The media cannot make the disadvantages as real as the protest. Famous cities are seen to blaze; young men of the race come out of buildings with guns; the black-gloved hands of triumphant but bowed athletes are raised as in a religious gesture; the handsome spokesmen of protest make threats before the cameras which appear at last to have discovered black style. This is power. In the islands it is like a vision of the black millennium. It needs no political programme.

  In the islands the intellectual equivocations of Black Power are part of its strength. After the sharp analysis of black degradation, the spokesmen for Black Power usually become mystical, vague, and threatening. In the United States this fits the cause of protest, and fits the white audience to whom this protest is directed. In the islands it fits the old, apocalyptic mood of the black masses. Anything more concrete, anything like a programme, might become simple local politics and be reduced to the black power that is already possessed.

  Black Power as rage, drama and style, as revolutionary jargon, offers something to everybody: to the unemployed, the idealistic, the dropout, the Communist, the politically frustrated, the anarchist, the angry student returning home from humiliations abroad, the racialist, the old-fashioned black preacher who has for years said at street corners that after Israel it was to be the turn of Africa. Black Power means Cuba and China; it also means clearing the Chinese and the Jews and the tourists out of Jamaica. It is identity and it is also miscegenation. It is drinking holy water, eating pork and dancing; it is going back to Abyssinia. There has been no movement like it in the Caribbean since the French Revolution.

  SO IN JAMAICA, some eighteen months ago, students joined with Rastafarians to march in the name of Black Power against the black government. Campus idealism, campus protest; but the past is like quicksand here. There was a middle-class rumour, which was like a rumour from the days of slavery, that a white tourist was to be killed, but only sacrificially, without malice.

  At the same time, in St. Kitts, after many years in authority, Papa Bradshaw was using Black Power, as words alone, to undermine the opposition. Round and round the tiny impoverished island, on the one circular road, went the conspiratorial printed message, cut out from a gasoline advertisement: Join the Power Set.

  Far away, on the Central American mainland, in British Honduras, which is only half-black, Black Power had just appeared and was already undermining the multi-racial nature of both government and opposition. The carrier of the infection was a twenty-one-year-old student who had been to the United States on, needless to say, an American government scholarship.

  He had brought back news about the dignity of the peasant and a revolution based on land. I thought the message came from another kind of country and somebody else’s revolution, and wasn’t suited to the local blacks, who were mainly city people with simple city ambitions. (It was front-page news, while I was there, that a local man had successfully completed an American correspondence course in jail management.)

  But it didn’t matter. A message had come. “The whites are buying up the land.” “What the black man ne
eds is bread.” “It became a phallic symbol to the black to be a log-cutter.” It was the jargon of the movement, at once scientific-sounding and millenarian. It transcended the bread-and-butter protests of local politics; it smothered all argument. Day by day the movement grew.

  EXCITEMENT! And perhaps this excitement is the only liberation that is possible. Black Power in these black islands is protest. But there is no enemy. The enemy is the past, of slavery and colonial neglect and a society uneducated from top to bottom; the enemy is the smallness of the islands and the absence of resources. Opportunism or borrowed jargon may define phantom enemies: racial minorities, “elites,” “white niggers.” But at the end the problems will be the same, of dignity and identity.

  In the United States Black Power may have its victories. But they will be American victories. The small islands of the Caribbean will remain islands, impoverished and unskilled, ringed as now by a cordon sanitaire, their people not needed anywhere. They may get less innocent or less corrupt politicians; they will not get less helpless ones. The island blacks will continue to be dependent on the books, films and goods of others; in this important way they will continue to be the half-made societies of a dependent people, the Third World’s third world. They will forever consume; they will never create. They are without material sources; they will never develop the higher skills. Identity depends in the end on achievement; and achievement here cannot but be small. Again and again the protest leader will appear and the millennium will seem about to come.

  FIFTY years ago, writing at a moment when Spain seemed about to disintegrate, Ortega y Gasset saw that fragmented peoples come together only in order “to do something tomorrow.” In the islands this assurance about the future is missing. Millenarian excitement will not hold them together, even if they were all black; and some, like Trinidad and Guyana and British Honduras, are only half-black. The pursuit of black identity and the community of black distress is a dead end, frenzy for the sake of frenzy, the self-scourging of people who cannot see what they will have to do tomorrow.

  In We Wish to Be Looked Upon, published last year by Teachers College Press, Vera Rubin and Marisa Zavalloni report on surveys of high-school students in Trinidad they conducted in 1957 and 1961, at a time of pre-independence, messianic optimism. (Eric Williams had come to power, suddenly and overwhelmingly, in 1956.) The students were asked to write at length about their “expectations, plans and hopes for the future.”

  Black: I would like to be a great man not only in music but also in sociology and economics. In the USA I would like to marry a beautiful actress with plenty of money. I would also like to be famed abroad as one of the world’s foremost millionaires.

  Black: In politics I hope to come up against men like Khrushchev and other enemies of freedom. I hope I will be able to overcome them with my words, and put them to shame.

  Black: I expect to be a man of international fame, a man who by virtue of his political genius has acquired so much respect from his people that he will be fully capable of living in peace with his people.

  Black: I want to be a West Indian diplomat. I would like to have a magnetic power over men and a stronger magnetic power over women. I must be very intelligent and quick-witted: I must be fluent in at least seven languages. I must be very resourceful and I must say the correct thing at the correct moment. With these qualities and a wonderful foresight and with other necessary abilities which I can’t foresee, I would be able to do wonders for the world by doing wonders for my nation.

  East Indian: I will write a book called the Romance of Music and Literature. I will make this book as great as any Shakespeare play; then I will return to India to endeavour to become a genius in the film industry.

  East Indian: I want to develop an adventurous spirit. I will tour the earth by air, by sea, and by land. I shall become a peacemaker among hostile people.

  East Indian: When I usually awake from my daydream, I think myself to be another person, the great scientific engineer, but soon I recollect my sense, and then I am myself again.

  Coloured (mulatto): Toward the latter part of my life I would like to enter myself in politics, and to do some little bit for the improvement and uplift of this young Federation of ours.

  Coloured: I am obsessed with the idea of becoming a statesman, a classical statesman, and not a mere rabble-rouser who acts impulsively and makes much ado about nothing.

  White: I am going to apprentice myself to a Chartered Accountant’s firm and then to learn the trade. When I want to, leave the firm and go to any other big business concern and work my way up to the top.

  White: I want to live a moderate life, earning a moderate pay, slowly but surely working my way in the law firm, but I don’t want to be chief justice of the Federation or anything like that … Look around. All the other boys must be writing about their ambitions to be famous. They all cannot be, for hope is an elusive thing.

  White: By this time my father may be a shareholder in the company, I will take over the business. I will expand it and try to live up to the traditions that my father has built up.

  Without the calm of the white responses, the society might appear remote, fantastic and backward. But the white student doesn’t inhabit a world which is all that separate. Trinidad is small, served by two news-papers and two radio stations and the same unsegregated schools. The intercourse between the races is easier than inquiring sociologists usually find; there is a substantial black and East Indian middle class that dominates the professions. When this is understood, the imprecision of black and East Indian fantasy—diplomacy, politics, peacemaking—can be seen to be more than innocence. It is part of the carnival lunacy of a lively, well-informed society which feels itself part of the great world, but understands at the same time that it is cut off from this world by reasons of geography, history, race.

  THE SUB-TITLE of Rubin and Zavalloni’s book is “A Study of the Aspirations of Youth in a Developing Society.” But the euphemism is misleading. This society has to be more precisely defined. Brazil is developing, India is developing. Trinidad is neither undeveloped nor developing. It is fully part of the advanced consumer society of the West; it recognizes high material standards. But it is less than provincial: there is no metropolis to which the man from the village or small town can take his gifts. Trinidad is simply small; it is dependent; and the people born in it—black, East Indian, white—sense themselves condemned, not necessarily as individuals, but as a community, to an inferiority of skill and achievement. In colonial days racial deprivation could be said to be important, and this remains, obviously, an important drive. But now it is only part of the story.

  In the islands, in fact, black identity is a sentimental trap, obscuring the issues. What is needed is access to a society, larger in every sense, where people will be allowed to grow. For some territories this larger society may be Latin American. Colonial rule in the Caribbean defied geography and created unnatural administrative units; this is part of the problem. Trinidad, for instance, was detached from Venezuela. This is a geographical absurdity; it might be looked at again.

  1970

  Michael X and the Black Power

  Killings in Trinidad: Peace and Power

  I

  A CORNER file is a three-sided file, triangular in section, and it is used in Trinidad for sharpening cutlasses. On December 31, 1971, in the country town of Arima, some eighteen miles from Port of Spain, Steve Yeates bought such a file, six inches long. Yeates, a thirty-three-year-old Negro, ex-RAF, was the bodyguard and companion of Michael de Freitas—also known as Michael X and Michael Abdul Malik. The file, bought from Cooblal’s Hardware, cost a Trinidad dollar, 20p. It was charged to the account of “Mr. Abdhul Mallic, Arima,” and Yeates signed the charge bill “Muhammed Akbar.” This was Yeates’s “Muslim” name. In the Malik setup in Arima—the “commune,” the “organization”—Yeates was Supreme Captain of the Fruit of Islam, as well as Lieutenant Colonel (and perhaps the only member) of Malik’s Black Liberatio
n Army.

  Malik’s “commune” was a residential house in a suburban development called Christina Gardens. The house, which Malik had been renting for eleven months, ever since his return from England, was set in a one-and-a-half-acre plot. On this land, with its mature garden and mature fruit trees, Malik and his commune did “agriculture.” Or so Malik reported to old associates in England and elsewhere.

  Malik had spent fourteen years in England. He had gone there as Michael de Freitas, a Trinidad seaman, in 1957, when he was twenty-four. In Notting Hill, where he had settled, he had become a pimp, drug pusher and gambling-house operator; he had also worked as a strong-arm man for Rachman, the property racketeer, who specialized in slum properties, West Indian tenants and high rents. A religious-political “conversion” had followed, and Michael de Freitas had given himself the name Michael X. He was an instant success with the press and the underground. He became Black Power “leader,” underground black “poet,” black “writer.” In 1967, when he was at the peak of his newspaper fame, he was convicted under the Race Relations Act for an anti-white speech he had made at Reading, and sent to jail for a year. In 1969, with the help of a rich white patron, he had established his first commune, the Black House, an “urban village” in Islington. This had failed. At the same time there was more trouble with the law. And in January 1971 Michael X—now with the Black Muslim name of Michael Abdul Malik—had fled to Trinidad.

  The agricultural commune in Christina Gardens was not Malik’s only “project” in Trinidad. He was simultaneously working on a “People’s Store.” Letterheads had been printed, and copy prepared for a brochure: “Empty shelves Shows the lack of Genorosity [sic] of the haves to the have nots … The wall of honour bears the name of our heroes and those that give … All praise is due to Allah the faults are ours.” The only thing that was missing was the store; but in a note on the scheme Malik had written: “Public Relations are the key-words to success.” During his time in England Malik had learned a few things; he had, more particularly, acquired a way with words. In Trinidad he was not just a man who had run away from a criminal charge in England. He was a Black Muslim refugee from “Babylon”: he was in revolt against “the industrialized complex.” Trinidad was far enough away; and so, in a country town, in the mature garden of a rented suburban house, Malik could say that he did agriculture, with his new commune.