The Writer and the World: Essays

  The Black House, after three weeks under Stanley Abbott, ended in chaos, in a general looting. And with that, Malik’s London career was over. Abbott saw Malik the night before Malik left. From a pile of five-pound notes Malik gave Abbott two hundred pounds. “Liquidized” assets: a glimpse of real money. When later, from Trinidad, Malik sent Abbott a letter with the one word “Come,” Abbott would take the next plane out.

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  AFTER fourteen years his London career had ended in flight, and it might have been thought that he was finished. But Malik flourished in Trinidad as a free man for one year.

  Trinidad in 1971 was his perfect setting. Trinidad, with its oil economy, was rich, with a standard of living equalled in South America only by Venezuela and Argentina. Every consumer comfort was at hand, and Malik was soon pleasantly settled in the country town of Arima, in a newish house with a large garden. But Trinidad was far away. In London, Chicago and Toronto, fund-raising centres, Trinidad could pass as an impoverished island where a black leader, fleeing persecution, and also reacting against “the industrialized complex,” might settle down, in a “commune,” to constructive work with despairing blacks, who needed only this leadership, and little gifts of money, to get started in black agriculture, black fruit-growing. And, later, even a little black fishing: a trawler (obtainable through “contractural relationships with … Schichting-Werft shipyard, Travemuende”) would cost £18,000, but “initial feasibility studies indicate that the profits … would exceed £30,000 a month.” Remote Trinidad held this kind of possibility for its enthralled blacks; all that was needed was the leadership.

  And in Trinidad Malik presented himself as a London success. Shortly after he came he sought out Raoul Pantin of the Trinidad Express. “He wanted me to do this interview. I was to prepare both the questions and the answers, and I was to make it sound good. He was hiring a skill. His comment when I resisted this was: ‘How do you think I became famous if I couldn’t find people in England to do this for me?’” Some people were also shown a letter purporting to come from an English lawyer, in which the writer said that Malik couldn’t expect a fair trial in England. Malik was also a friend of the famous. The names weren’t always known in Trinidad and could be mangled—Feliks Topol-ski becoming Saponski or Topalowski, painter of the Queen, Alex Troc-chi becoming Trotsky—and there were people who thought that Malik might only be a name-dropper. But the well-publicized visit in April 1971 of John Lennon as Malik’s house-guest stilled all doubts.

  He was successful; he had money; he had style. Rawle Maximin was a partner in the car-hire firm Malik now patronized. Maximin is a big, handsome man, half-Indian, half-Venezuelan, with no racial anxieties and no interest in the subject. But his business success, perhaps greater than he expected, now makes Maximin wish he were better educated; and he remembers Malik as someone who never made him feel less than a man.

  Michael impress me a lot when he come back. He always move in a big way. If they are selling orange juice in that bar there for a dollar a glass and they are selling the same orange juice in that other bar for two dollars, he want the two-dollars one. If you go to the supermarket with him he fulling up two trolleys, one with meat only. You only hearing these slabs of meat dropping in the basket like iron—you know how they freeze and hard. He don’t want all he buy and you know some of it will go rotten. But he want people around to see. Another thing. He never argue your price. And as friendly as we were he would never say, “Lend me that car.” He would say, “How much for that car?” He had his own car but he would hire mine, for the show. He want this crowd around him. “I am the leader.” I liked him very much. He never made me feel less than a man. And he always give. I still have a pair of black socks of his.

  Style, and money, were also noted by a black woman, a teacher, who went up to the Malik house in Arima at a time when there was some talk that she might teach the Malik children, who, because of the fear of kidnapping, couldn’t be sent to school.

  If you ran out of cigarettes you weren’t offered a pack. You were offered a carton. Soft drinks by the case. Michael talked about the prices he had paid for this and that, and talked about the dogs he was bringing down from London. I was impressed by the décor of the house. You could see money oozing out of everything. You walked into a room, you saw taste. The house was very clean, everything well chosen and put away.

  The local Belmont boy, with the common black mother who wore washerwoman’s clothes, had made good. And with his success there had come a change in his manner. Patrick Chokolingo, editor of The Bomb, had met Malik in London in 1965, at the beginning of his fame. “He told me that the white man was a devil. I said to him, ‘But you are living in a white man’s country and you are part white.’ He said, ‘That may be so. But my heart is black. They made it black.’ He did capture me; he did excite me.” Shortly after Malik’s return to Trinidad in January 1971, Chokolingo went to see him at the Chagacabana Hotel.

  He was occupying one of the cabanas, and with him was Steve Yeates. I found he was trying to impress me—which I didn’t think that time in London. He was selling me Michael, and his entire demeanour had changed. In the Marble Arch flat in London he had looked a little bit wild, a little bit fanatical, excitable, moving about in fits and jerks. In Trinidad he sat cross-legged in a reclining chair and his voice had changed. It had become very soft and persuasive. This was the first thing that struck me—that I was talking to a completely different person.

  The new light voice, the relaxed manner: other people noticed the change as well. Malik was made by words, his and other people’s. He needed a model always, and a clue to his new manner may be provided by the ghosted autobiography of 1968. Malik doesn’t say much about Rach-man, the London property racketeer for whom he worked as a strong-arm man. But what he says is oddly admiring. Rachman, in his book, is cool and stylish, almost a Hollywood character, “a good-looking man with a strong face.” He is introduced, Hollywood-fashion, sitting at a desk, surrounded by his Alsatians, and with two bodyguards, one just sitting, one reading a newspaper. “He was very well dressed and groomed and spoke in a quiet voice which I never heard him raise. In short, he exuded quiet charm.” Rachman, in Notting Hill, was in his “manor.” It might be that Malik, in Trinidad, fancied that he was in his.

  Chokolingo asked Malik to write for The Bomb, and found that he was “pushing at an open door.” Malik began a series on brothels. “He would not be satisfied, he said, until he had wiped brothels off the face of Trinidad. He did not see how Chinese men could come here and destroy the little girls of Trinidad. He was particularly aiming his barbs at the Korean Chinese who were running brothels in Port of Spain. Two were prosecuted. One hanged himself in his cell.” But then the police came to Chokolingo and told him it was a shakedown: Malik had raised ten thousand Trinidad dollars, £2,000, from two brothel operators. Rich Trinidad, demoralized by years of racial politics, and tense after the Black Power upheaval of 1970, offered this kind of possibility. Later, when he had settled in, Malik thought of a £50,000 “foundation,” to be named after his wife; and he prepared a list of local people who might be asked to contribute.

  And he didn’t neglect the “agricultural” side. Chokolingo says:

  Sometime in ’71 he went up to Toronto and Chicago, and one day I got a call from Michael in Toronto. He said, “Do you remember that worm that was destroying the cabbages of the dirt-farmers on the Highway?” Worm? Cabbages? And then I realized that he had an audience at the other end, and I said, “Oh yes. Yes.” And he said, “Well, I’ve got the people at the University of”—I can’t remember—“who are prepared to investigate this, and I would like you to put some of those worms in a bottle and mail it to me at this address.” The next time it was from Chicago. That time I was a little wiser. “That project we were discussing about those farmers and their arid lands on the east coast—I’ve got some people who are prepared to move the silt from Orinoco basin and deposit it in this area. So you can pass the message on to
the farmers.” Shortly after he came back he started to splurge. He bought a Humber Super Snipe and a jeep.

  And in Trinidad the “commune” grew. No agricultural commune grew so fast; on no kibbutz did fruit trees mature so swiftly. Within months, from his suburban garden, Malik was reporting to a correspondent in the United States on the expanding commune’s need for “more moving equipment—another tractor, a bulldozer,” claiming at the same time “a [sic] impressive surplus of coconuts, limes, oranges, grapefruit, mangoes, milk, Anthorium [sic] lilies, cow and horse manure.”

  He had an option to buy the Arima house at the end of the year—the £1,000 he had paid was in effect a year’s rent—but people believed the house was his. One day he told a visitor—the black woman teacher—that he had also bought the large French-style house at the back and was going to have it redecorated. Ringo Starr was the next Beatle coming down, and that was where he would stay. He looked over a £4,000 piece of land in Guanapo, in the hills to the north; he didn’t buy, but he later “incorporated” it into his commune as “extra land acquisition … able to absorb from the U.S. initially sixty young men and women on a construction redevelopment programme.”

  In Carenage, a seaside slum settlement west of Port of Spain, he rented a L35-a-month house from Oswald Chesterfield McDavidson, the black Guyanese entrepreneur involved with things like beauty competitions who was the husband of a Trinidad government minister. This house was “The People’s Store.” Its “trustees” were Steve Yeates and Stanley Abbott and it handled the “produce” of the commune. Letterheads had been printed and copy prepared for a brochure. According to this, the profits of the store were to be handed over each month to a different black cause.

  In Arima itself there was a racing stud farm, owned by a Portuguese who was another Belmont boyhood friend, and with whom Malik now struck up a relationship. That was also “incorporated” into the commune: it was the source of the milk and the manure that formed part of the commune’s “impressive surplus.”

  Everything in Malik’s commune existed; nothing belonged to him. It was like a return, in maturity, to that time of his childhood in Belmont when he had stolen a bicycle and had been arrested. He hadn’t stolen an ordinary bicycle. He had stolen a distinctive racing cycle that belonged to a well-known racing cyclist, St. Louis; and then, claiming the cycle as his own, a gift from his uncle, he had cycled about Belmont, where St. Louis lived.

  Trinidad was Malik’s manor. Trinidad has a population of just over a million. Much of this population lives in the north-west of the island between the Northern Range and the flat sugar belt, in an urban or a semi-urban sprawl, seemingly unplanned and grabbing, that begins five miles west of Port of Spain and ends about sixteen miles east of the city. Agricultural land is steadily invaded; the hillsides are scratched higher and higher with houses and squatters’ shacks and show more brown every year; open spaces, both within the city and outside it, are filled in. The built-up areas choke; the highways are clogged with motorcars; the railway system has been abandoned. Black carrion corbeaux guard the entrance to Port of Spain; and over much of the eastern end of the city, where green hills have been quarried by illegal immigrants from the other islands into dusty red shanty towns, there now hangs the reek of the city’s new rubbish dump, burning in the mangrove that once sheltered the scarlet ibis.

  It is a “consumer” squalor. It is not supported by agriculture, which declines, or by industry, which, where it exists, is rudimentary, protected and inflationary. It is supported by what the visitor seldom sees: oil, drilled for in the sea to the north and the south-east, and inland in the south, in forest reserves that are like a country within a country.

  Trinidad’s urban north-west is a great parasitic suburb, through which money is yet magically cycled. Much of the population is superfluous, and they know it. Unemployment is high but labour is perennially short. The physical squalor, the sense of a land being pillaged rather than built up, generates great tensions; cynicism is like a disease. Race is an irrelevance; but the situation is well suited to the hysteria and evasions of racial politics. And racial politics—preaching oppression and easy redemption, offering only the theory of the enemy, white, brown, yellow, black—have brought the society close to collapse.

  Malik, an operator acting always in the racial cause, found in Trinidad his perfect camouflage. He created nothing; but he converted race into money (it didn’t matter whose) and success; and that was what many hoped to do. A young “Black Panther”—connected with a heavily subsidized ninety-acre agricultural cooperative, unproductive because unworked—said admiringly of Malik, even after Malik had fallen: “He was prime minister of himself and his little group. He was like a little country by himself.” In his year in Trinidad Malik penetrated the society at many points. It was known what he was, but among the cynical and parasitic new men of Trinidad that was like respectability.

  He might have risen higher. But then, towards the end of the year, his life took a new twist. Hakim Jamal and Gale Benson arrived from Guyana: Benson, the twenty-seven-year-old English divorcée, in her self-created role as white-woman slave to Jamal’s black master, Jamal himself more or less living off a German and anxious about money and his hustling projects. Jamal’s line was black schools for the very young and black publishing. He had abandoned his family in California; and he and Benson had been together for about a year, an itinerant hustling team, travelling about the United States in a Volkswagen minibus. They had just been to England to promote Jamal’s autobiography; and there they had arranged to come down to Guyana to do a little black business in publishing. Jamal had hoped to take the Guyana government into partnership. But after a month in Guyana he was asked to leave.

  Jamal, true American, travelled with his hustler’s paraphernalia: life-size printed photographs of himself, brochures of his non-existent Malcolm X Montessori school, and copies of his autobiography. He used the book to introduce himself at Rawle Maximin’s garage. He gave Max-imin a copy and Maximin told him that Michael X was in Trinidad. “And it was as though I had told him there was a million dollars under that chair there.” Later Maximin drove Jamal from the Port of Spain Hilton to Arima. “He asked how far I had got in the book. I said not very far. He took the book and as we were driving he started reading it out. And when he started reading, like he don’t want to stop. He spent that night by Michael. In the morning I went to the Hilton and moved down Gale to Arima.”

  THE RELATIONSHIP among these three during November and December 1971 cannot now be known. Jamal used to claim, especially with those white people whom he knew the claim would excite, that he was God; and as God he was Benson’s master. But in the Malik commune at Arima, Jamal recognized a more successful outfit and saw its great potential; and Jamal almost immediately decided that Malik was his master. He settled in right away, in the house obliquely opposite, which he rented; and soon he was writing a hectoring half-farewell note to a white friend in California, saying that he was through with white people and was for the first time among friends.

  Money was short—at the end of November Jamal deposited five hundred Trinidad dollars, £104, in a Canadian bank in Port of Spain, and a month later was down to ninety-four dollars, £19—but ideas came thick and fast. Jamal’s black schools and black publishing merged with Malik’s black agriculture into a stupendous black cause. On 10th December Malik wrote to a correspondent in the United States: “We are now producing reams of literature.” Much of this—copy for the commune—was knocked off by Jamal on the typewriter. Malik was no writer; to Jamal, an American, salesman’s prose came naturally. Jamal needed a harbour; Malik depended on other men’s ideas. Their talents and roles were complementary; they did not clash.

  And it is possible that Gale Benson now became more of an outsider than she had been. She wore African-style clothes that were extravagant even in Trinidad; she had given herself the name of Halé Kimga, an anagram of Gale and Hakim; she went on begging errands for her master. But her cult was
of Jamal alone. She didn’t appear to be serving the general cause; and she had a way of putting people off. Rawle Maximin found her “very serious.” When he offered to show her local nightclub dances, she said, “I haven’t come here for that.” When she met Lourenço, the Portuguese owner of the stud farm Malik had “incorporated” into his commune, she spoke to him in Spanish; and Lourenço didn’t care for that.

  At the same time there was some displeasure in the United States. Jamal, serving Malik and the commune, had been neglecting some of his old associates; and Benson was blamed. It was felt that she possessed him too completely. In December, three weeks before Benson was stabbed to death, an American, writing critically of Benson to some friends in Guyana (and the letter got to Jamal in Trinidad), drew a distinction between Halé Kimga, the devotee, and “Gailann the secretary.” And that points to something else: Benson’s Englishness in spite of her African clothes, and the middle-class manner that seemed at variance with her slave role. “She was sort of a fake”: this was what Malik’s wife said later.

  Jamal served Malik. But it is possible that he also took him over and gave him a new idea of his role in Trinidad. Jamal dealt in the vehement racial passions of the United States and was obsessed with white people. He didn’t understand a place like Trinidad; he didn’t understand Malik’s position in black and independent Trinidad as “prime minister of himself and his little group.” He saw it in American terms, as the triumph of a “nigger.” And so he celebrated it in an eight-page article about Malik (part of the commune literature) which was intended for younger readers—Jamal’s first love was black Montessori schools.

  He is always giving. You feel bad that there are people who misunderstand him. He teaches, not just by talking, he shows you, for example; he grows orchards [sic]. In his front yard, hanging from his trees there are orchards, dainty flowers that need intense care, but they [yield and deleted] blossom. He grows vegetables for his table and also feeds those passersby who need food … His chicken farm that feeds thousands of Trinidadians meat. His cows that give milk for babies and for our own health. Then too, there is the stable of horses, thoroughbreds. As he shows them to you, he lectures, but the lecture is real because as he talks about a certain horse, there is the horse. When he speaks of milking cows, you are at the farm, seeing the cows being milked … You are almost worthy of hearing this man, seeing this man, talking with this man. A man, that England would try to destroy, because they know that somehow this slave, this captured African, had the power of UNDERSTANDING—and what’s worse—he understands the slave—he loves the slave—and Brother Michael Abdul Malik, has the nerve, the gall—to be black. Even in a time when he could be anything he wants to be, rich, famous, fashionable, safe—it seems Brother Malik is already too busy being happy as a NIGGER.