The Writer and the World: Essays

  In scattered houses along the road, and in jeeps and trucks in dirt lanes off the road, there were marines, taking their ease but watchful. At a junction there was a roadblock.

  Lennox, the taxi-driver, said, “I was wondering. I did hear they was stopping and searching today.” He spoke calmly; he had learned to live with big events.

  The marine didn’t wave us down. He dropped to a half-crouch and pushed his clenched left fist at our car. Theatre. And it seemed that all the children of the little village were standing by to watch. One marine was black, one was Chinese, one looked Hispanic. Questions were asked while luggage was searched and the car was searched. A transistor radio on the roadside was turned on very loud, until a marine asked a boy to turn it down.

  And it was only when we were on our way again that I made a whole of the dislocating experience, and understood that the radio had been turned on by the boy, that music had soon given way to Spanish speech, and that it was my reaction to the Spanish language that was being assessed by the Hispanic-looking marine who had asked trivial, disconnected questions. Psy-Ops, Special Warfare. All these search procedures had been well rehearsed. In Grenada the Americans were still looking for Cubans.

  The road began to go down through the wet, ferny, forest reserve area to the west coast. Emblems of the revolution—a red disc on a white field—appeared on walls and fences. Near the capital, St. George’s, the slogan boards of the revolution became more numerous. They had not been defaced. Some of the slogans were about “production.” In the peasant setting it seemed a very big word, a strange word. It could never have had its proclaimed meaning; it must always have stood for the power of those who ruled.

  In Grenada—eighty-five square miles, 110,000 people—the revolution was as much an imposition—as theatrical and out of scale—as the American military presence it had called up.

  MOST GRENADIANS were glad when the New Jewel Movement took power in a coup in March 1979. The island had been ruled for too long by Eric Gairy. Gairy, a man of simple origins, had organized a big strike in 1951. Starting in this way, as a redeemer of the black poor, he soon won political power, and held on to it. In power he became stylish. He had money; he was elegant; he wore white suits; it was said that even white women fell for him. The poor country folk in the little houses of Grenada understood. They felt that Gairy’s triumphs were a black man’s triumphs and therefore also their own, and they loved him; they voted him into office again and again. It was Gairy who took Grenada to independence.

  But over the years Gairy—like some other small-island Caribbean folk leaders of his type—had developed into a feared and somewhat eccentric Negro shepherd-king. At international gatherings he talked about UFO’s; at home there was a large gang that dealt with opponents. In the post-colonial Caribbean Gairy increasingly became an embarrassment, hateful to the children of the very people to whom he had once given hope.

  The New Jewel Movement, founded in 1972, represented the first educated generation in Grenada. Its leader was a handsome young man who had completed his education in England. The overthrow of Gairy by this movement of the young and educated was doubly popular. And the New Jewel Movement used this popularity to offer Grenada—without elections, ever—the revolution. It was a full socialist revolution. Cuba became Grenada’s ally; imperialism became Grenada’s enemy.

  The slogan-writers of the party called the revolution the “revo” or “de revo.”

  Is only now I seeing how dis Revo good for de poor an ah dam sorry it didn’t come before.

  People’s speech, phonetic spelling—the party used it to make the more difficult parts of its doctrine and practice acceptable: to make the many rallies and “solidarity” marches appear more folksy; and to make all the imported apparatus of socialist rule and patronage—the organizing committee of the party, the political bureau, the central committee, the many “mass” organizations, the army and the militia—to make all of this appear carnival-like and Grenadian and black, “de revo.”

  The apparatus was absurd. But the power was real. And for the four and a half years of its rule the party kept Grenada under “heavy manners.” The words, Jamaican street slang, were adopted by the revolution, and became part of its stock of serious jokey words. “Manners,” “respect” for the revolution and its leaders, were required from everyone. There could therefore be no elections, no opposition newspaper: the people’s will was as simple as that. “To manners” became a revolutionary verb. To “manners” a “counter” was to teach a counterrevolutionary a lesson: to harass him, to dismiss him from a job, to imprison him without charge or trial. Hundreds were imprisoned at one time or the other. Trials were a form of “bourgeois legality.” The “revo” needed only people’s law, “heavy manners”; and the very words could turn the loss of law into just a subject for calypso. To impose manners, an army was created—and that meant employment of a sort with the party.

  Cuba provided the arms for the army. And it was Cuba that—to the alarm of both the United States and other Caribbean territories—began to build the big two-mile airport at Point Salines.

  At least two hundred “internationalist” workers, socialists, were brought in to help administer the revolution. Half of them were from Europe and America, half from other West Indian territories. Strangers to Grenada, exigent guests at the other man’s revolutionary feast, these visitors were anxious for the socialist mimicry to be as complete, as pure, as possible. Hence, in the Grenada of the revolution, the obsession with forms, organization, structures, committees. Grenada even had a Writers’ Federation. Almost at the end of the revolution a West Indian visitor from the United States spotted an omission. In Grenada, he said, he had found no House of Culture; socialist countries had houses of culture. So in Grenada they began to work on a House of Culture.

  As the mimicry was perfected, so the excitement grew among the faithful in many countries; and the Grenadian revolution had a good press abroad. Little Grenada, agricultural, backward and black, had not only had the revolution; it had also had an eruption of all the correct socialist forms. The mimicry was like proof of the naturalness and rightness of the cause.

  Then the revolution went sour. Its success in the socialist world had been too great, too sudden. There was some dissension at the top, in the central committee, some call for the sharing of power. There was a feeling that the leader had became too taken with his foreign fame, his visits abroad; and that the revolution at home had begun to drift.

  The leader prevaricated. He agreed that he was being petit bourgeois in some ways, but he really didn’t want to step down. He had made the revolution after all; the people were loyal to him. So, finally, the “manners” that had been applied to hundreds of others were applied to the leader himself. He was placed under house arrest by some of his colleagues on the central committee.

  The people didn’t like it. After a week a crowd stormed the house and the leader was released. There was confusion; a civil war was in the offing. The leader and his supporters went to the army post at Fort George (at that time named Fort Rupert, after the leader’s father) and talked over the soldiers there. The Revolutionary Military Council, rulers of Grenada since the crisis, sent armoured cars to the fort. There was firing; the unarmed crowd stampeded and an unknown number of people were killed—anything from seventeen to one hundred; and the leader and five former ministers were executed. A twenty-four-hour curfew was placed on the island, and for almost a week the people of Grenada lived in terror of the People’s Revolutionary Army. Then the Americans invaded, and manners heavier than Grenada had known were applied to everybody.

  The Americans found no revolution. That had vanished in the preceding week of terror. The Americans, serving their own cause, invading Grenada according to a plan prepared at least two years before, found themselves welcomed as liberators. The invaded island, more full of noises than Caliban’s island, was full of informers; the detention facility at Point Salines was quickly peopled.

  TH
E WEST INDIAN sugar colonies were richer than the American colonies in the eighteenth century. The ships that came to take the slave-grown sugar to Europe sometimes brought bricks and clay roof tiles as ballast. These tiles and bricks give an eighteenth-century feel to corners of old St. George’s, a little town built on the steep slope of the horseshoe–shaped hill that encloses the inner harbour.

  At harbour level was the main street of this toy-town: fire brigade, cigarette factory, airline office, restaurant, main post office. At the top of the hill—easily seen, taken in in one roving look—were the official buildings that had been touched by the recent drama. On the south-western promonory was the green-roofed fort where the leader and others had been shot. Across the bay was the red-roofed house where the leader had been held under house arrest. Not far from that was the civilian prison where members of the Revolutionary Military Council and other former members of the central committee were now held.

  On the northern end of the hill, the top of the horseshoe, was the very grand house which was the Governor-General’s residence. It had a wide verandah, stone-flagged where not tiled; a reception room with tall doors, a high timber ceiling elaborately moulded, gilt mirrors and craftsman-made furniture. There, some days later, the Governor-General, a black man, formerly a schoolmaster, a man who now incarnated what was left of the authority of the state of Grenada, witnessed the swearing-in of the members of his new advisory council. The men swore allegiance to Queen Elizabeth II and kissed the Bible.

  Legal authority in Grenada still derived its forms from the British Empire. But the most important witnesses that day—apart from the correspondents and the television teams—were General Farris, slender, white-haired, in uniform, commander of the 82nd Airborne, and the man in a blue suit who was the de facto American ambassador, the civilian arm of General Farris’s de facto authority.

  In a glass case in the rough little museum in the centre of the town was Britain’s gift to Grenada at the time of independence nine years before: a silver coffee service and twenty-four Wedgwood bone china coffee cups, all laid out on undyed hessian.

  The New Jewel Movement had resisted that independence. They had feared Gairy’s excesses in an independent Grenada. The leader of the movement and others had been badly beaten by Gairy’s men during a time of protest. And in another glass case in the museum were souvenirs of that occasion: the leader’s bloodstained sports shirt, the stone that had cracked the leader’s head and left him with double vision.

  Violence had indeed come to independent Grenada. Ten years later the leader had been executed by the army he had created. And this time there were no souvenirs. The leader’s body still had not been found.

  It was the rainy season in the eastern Caribbean. At dawn the rain clouds rose as fast as smoke above the eastern hill of St. George’s. The sky darkened; the rain poured, feeding the vegetation in the empty rubbled spaces between the eighteenth-century buildings; the sky cleared again. In the late afternoons the golden light, trapped within the curving hill and reflecting off the bay, made all the buildings a rose colour against the dark vegetation and the milky blue eastern sky.

  Black helicopters crossed the view, as they had done all day. They hovered for minutes over the civilian prison.

  “That’s the military,” an American correspondent said. “Haven’t you been with them before? They like activity.”

  THERE was, amazingly, an American “internationalist” worker still on the island. Her name was Michele Gibbs; she was from Chicago. She had been “invited” by the American military to leave Grenada; and she intended to go. She no longer had a cause in Grenada.

  She was an attractive brown woman in her late thirties, slender with a small bust, and with unshaved armpits—oddly aggressive, those mats of hair, hard not to look at. Her political cause had been given her at birth, she said: both her parents—her mother a Russian Jew, her father a black man from Texas—had been communists.

  The revolutionary black state of Grenada had been a kind of paradise for Michele for three years. She felt she had come home, and she had hoped to live there forever. She had found an apartment on the lower floor of a restored old house on a favoured cliffside spot, just below the Prime Minister’s office. Bougainvillaea shaded her sea-facing front room and her little circular terrace from the afternoon sun. In these conditions, which must have appeared idyllic to someone from Chicago, Michele had served the Grenada revolution, helping with education, doing her revolutionary paintings and writing and publishing her revolutionary poems (handwritten and photo-set).

  de forest move

  de land watch

  de folk talk.

  de cat mew

  de dog bark

  de revo start.

  Now, more than three weeks after the disaster, she was still a little dazed. People were “morally in shock,” she said; they felt they had been “betrayed by their own.” And, speaking of the American invasion, she said that people were “relieved that the situation was taken out of their hands.” All she wanted for herself now was to go “far, far away.”

  The communism that had been given to her as a cause had committed her to an almost mystical personal search. In Grenada she had found what she wanted and needed to find; and though among her poems there were some poems of rebuke to someone who appeared to have run out on the revolution, it was not really surprising that Michele’s poems about Grenada were abstract, little more than party slogan-making. Her poems about black life in Detroit were more personal, more concrete, unexpectedly tough, many of the barbs turned inwards. The cause in America had been a kind of pain: it was possible here and there to detect something like weariness with the life of struggle in America. One of Michele’s longer poems was autobiographical.

  So livid were police to see

  we three:

  Ted, black

  Paula, white

  and me

  together and at liberty.

  Michele had written this poem in Grenada after she had heard that her mother, at the age of seventy-two, had been shot and killed in the United States by a street thief, who might have been black—though the poem didn’t say.

  The irony of this death was like the irony of the destruction of Michele’s cause in Grenada. And perhaps her life was full of ironies because of her way of looking or her way of not looking. Her Grenada was private; and her position in Grenada wasn’t what she thought it had been. She hadn’t been taken seriously by all the revolutionaries. She had too American a sense of the self; with her poems and her paintings and her general manner she had seemed too self-promoting. She—like other American internationalists—had been thought of as people “having a holiday” in the revolution, people with American causes, people more concerned with protest than with the use of power.

  After I left Grenada I met a West Indian woman internationalist from another territory who thought that Michele might even have been a CIA agent. The West Indian woman had also felt at one time that her own job might have been taken away from her and—as a result of machinations by Michele’s patrons in the revolution—given to Michele.

  The revolutionary life—which Michele had painted as an idyll—sounded a little cut-throat. The leaders and the privileged helpers had a vision of a purified people correctly led and living cooperatively together. But at the top and just below the top there had always been dissension, the clash of personalities, the play of human passion that the administrators of the socialist utopia would have liked to deny to the people.

  THERE was a purely Grenadian story. It was the story of a retarded island community hijacked by people slightly more educated into the forms of a grandiose revolution. Separate from this, superimposed on it, there was an American story—the story of the U.S. military in Grenada. And it was on this that the American correspondents concentrated.

  They hadn’t liked what they had seen of the detention facility at Point Salines. When they came back to the hotel they spoke of eight-feet-square cells set down on the groun
d, with PVC covers, and four-feet-high entrance flaps. It worried the correspondents that the army people should have been so pleased with the facility and anxious to show it off. Perhaps the facility had been designed beforehand? Perhaps the invasion of Grenada was just an exercise for the invasion of Nicaragua?

  The humanitarian concern of the correspondents was genuine, but mixed up with it were newsmen’s professional instincts. Grenada was a small part of a larger American story; and distrust of the military was a necessary part of the equipment of the good correspondent. In Grenada this distrust was great. American correspondents felt they had been shut out of the invasion, and they took it personally.

  “It’s an adversary relationship,” a photographer said. And in a small but irritating way the military were still winning. They were moving in from their field tents and taking over the working hotels day by day. They dug up the beaches to fill sandbags; they put sandbags and a new kind of barbed wire on the lawns; they parked trucks with machine guns among the coconut trees. Correspondents who had been treated by hotel staff as guests in the morning might find themselves challenged for a password in the evening by a nervous sentry. There were women among the marines. The fact was sometimes revealed only by a feminine call, in the night, of “Halt!”

  The Grenada Beach Hotel, formerly the Holiday Inn, was the headquarters of the 82nd Airborne. Some of the rooms in one wing had been bombed during the fighting; but the American bombing had everywhere been wonderfully precise, and the hotel was in working order. The Psy-Ops briefing was held in the open dining room, next to the garden, where the barbed wire, new and shiny, as yet unrusted by the sea air, was barely visible. The waiters, as correctly uniformed as the soldiers, were laying the tables for lunch.