Reluctant Neighbors

  Sometimes when I reflect on him, I think to myself, “An African could stand on the soil of Africa and speak of freedom.” When I’m in Europe, to what degree can I speak of freedom? Of course, I can go to bed at night without expecting that I will be removed and sold into slavery once again. But this is not the whole of freedom. When the African speaks of freedom, he doesn’t have to qualify it. When Sékou Toure talked to his people and said, “We once again possess our homeland and it is ours to build and to shape as we wish. We can either fail ourselves and our inheritors or we can establish the pattern for success,” he was saying this without thinking, “This is all right but we might be limited, there is a hotel over there that might not accommodate us, there is a part of Conakry where we might not live,” no such qualifications. When I think of freedom, because I am not an immediate son of Africa the whole thing becomes quite different, and I find that my freedom is curtailed in spite of myself …

  “So you wouldn’t wish to live in Africa? To settle there?”

  “I couldn’t answer that. I really don’t know.”

  Reflecting, inside myself, that Africa is a huge continent, with a wide variety in peoples and customs and religions and social attitudes. I’d visited a small part of Africa and though the experience was exciting, I was only visiting. Naturally, some aspects of the visit were of special significance and meaning to me. In Ghana, for instance. I would be walking down a street and wherever I looked there would be black men and women walking tall, walking pridefully. Some of them, because of their position or social status or wealth, dressed in the glorious Kinte cloth, that beautiful hand-woven, one-piece, local robe of purple, gold and blue colors. Ingeniously wrapped around the body, with one end thrown over the left shoulder the way ancient Romans wore the toga, the right arm uncovered; this dress seemed to dictate the regality with which they moved. Looking at these men and women I felt stirred inside myself, happy to be an extension of them.

  This was for me exciting because, so recently a welfare officer in England, my extensions had been invariably humiliating when I saw other black people being abused or debased. In Ghana I felt ennobled by being part of the prevailing nobility or sense of nobility shared by everyone, prince or peasant. Going into the open-air market and moving among the traders. I felt there was something special about them as if they knew that Africa was royal earth and each of them a prince or a princess. Even I, a stranger, was allowed to share; nobody questioned my right to it. Without asking anyone’s leave, I, too, could wear the mantle of nobility and move around as just me, a human being full in my skin and happy that the skin was black because blackness was beauty, blackness was nobility, blackness was grace, blackness was honor, blackness was pride, blackness was all those things for which I had been hungering so long. Blackness was personal industry and application, and a determination to independence. I could have my fill of it all, without ostentation, without noise, without posturings. Just help myself.

  It was an extraordinary experience, the kind of experience that once it touches you, never leaves you. Since then it doesn’t matter what the circumstances which have attempted to humiliate me, I can reflect on those moments, and walk with a sense of grace. I can walk with a sense of pride.

  “Did you have a chance to get back home—to British Guiana in the course of this job?” he asked, intruding on my musings.

  “No, not in the course of the job. I went back to Guyana very much later, on invitation from the government. On the eve of its independence.”

  “I was just wondering what you thought of it, coming back to it, as opposed to having grown up there.”

  “It was a very special experience. One of these days I’ll discover the right words for expressing it.”

  I couldn’t discuss it with him. He didn’t really care. Even now the full import of that return was only gradually revealing itself to me. In retrospect. I’d left British Guiana, the colony, as a boy. I returned to Guyana on the eve of its becoming an independent entity and perhaps I had imagined that this would mean returning to a Guyana that would be very much like a Ghana. Perhaps I had not realized that although Ghana, too, had been colonized, the Ghanaians were on their native earth. They bore the pressures of the colonizer but all the time they bore it on their native earth. They were in touch with their continuous past and their sense of dignity had never been really disturbed. No matter what happened to them they were in touch with their earth; they had not been removed from it. Whereas in Guyana we were the offspring of the enslaved. I prefer to use the term enslaved than to use the term slave, which seems to be such a final term as if to be a slave is to be encompassed forevermore. But when one uses the term enslaved one is considering a transient situation out of which one is determined to free oneself. Returning to Guyana I discovered that of course the British were leaving, but the conditioning would remain, perhaps for a long time.

  “Had the English elected to leave?”

  “The colonizer never elects to leave unless the colony has been bled white and is no longer advantageously exploitable. They left Guyana only after a bitter struggle.”

  “I seem to recall that there was something of a civil war. Blacks against Indians. How come you never felt you should go there and fight or help—was there some kind of guerrilla movement there?”

  I didn’t answer that. Inadvertently he’d touched on a very sensitive spot. Oh, yes, I’d often thought of going back to join in the struggle. But it had stopped there. I lived in Europe and had my own private little battles and those battles bore out the old adage that the piece is much larger than the whole. I was struggling to live, to find myself, to overcome a situation which at one time had threatened to destroy me. Of course I was interested in the fortunes of Guyana and I sought to learn everything I could about events there. I wanted Guyana to emerge free from British control and domination; still, at no time did I feel, at no time did I imagine, that my returning to Guyana would in any way affect the general situation. Perhaps I was extremely selfish in this respect. But there it is. At the time of the struggle I did not elect to return. The truth is, I could not afford to return. Simple matter of money, or lack of it.

  Reflecting that I’d not been completely out of touch. I’d met the leaders in London, in those far off days when Cheddi Jagan and Forbes Burnham were together in the struggle against the British. I met them whenever they came up to push the case for independence with the members of a resistant British Government. I’d tried to entertain them as I was able, to let them appreciate my identity with their joint struggle.

  One disturbing thing on visiting Guyana again was the realization that there was no inclination to unity now that we had rid ourselves of the oppressor. But even more than that, although he was going, one saw plenty of evidence that we hungered for his presence. We hungered for the things that were identified with him. We hungered for the titles that he occasionally conferred upon us—the knighthoods and the orders. We hungered for them and we fought and schemed for them. Perhaps because I had lived so close to those things in Britain itself and had seen other black knights from other places humiliated in the streets of London during the Notting Hill riots and during the Birmingham riots and the Nottingham riots, I realized that as far as the Englishman is concerned, the titled black man is a joke. He’s an anachronism—he doesn’t really belong.

  In Ghana men wore their regality in their skins and in their hearts. Following their struggle for political independence they’d revived old titles, reinstituted old social forms as part of the total re-establishment of themselves and their nobility. The Ghanaian had all this. And something else. He had his own language.

  It’s an important thing, language, because through it African can talk to African and be sure of understanding. They can also use the language of the stranger in order to satisfy certain circumstances which relate more to the stranger than to themselves. Yet their own language is there, together with a variety of tribal cust
oms which reinforce their sense of belonging and of being. Some of these customs are steeped in ancient belief and religion, but each one is part of the enduring ties that bind African to African, irrespective of social and economic levels. I found it extraordinary that while in Ghana I would talk with men who had been educated in Europe, men of substance and standing in the community, men who were considered eminent even by the stranger, the white stranger, who is inclined to think nothing black could really be eminent, and discover that some of these men, when ill, would seek out what is called the witch doctor in preference to the European doctor or the European-trained doctor of contemporary medicine. The problem was not with them but with me, for failing to understand the many-faceted cement which bound African to African and Africans to Africa.

  They could fight with one another, they could kill one another, but they would still remain linked by a common destiny. Part of this destiny was involved with the food they ate, the clothes they wore, the language they spoke, the spirits of the living past in which they believed. In the United States it is quite different. In Europe it is different. In Guyana it is different. We have been conditioned to dependence. We have no language of our own. We were stripped of everything we possessed. More than that, we were stripped in a way which rendered us spiritually naked. We were made to see ourselves as unworthy, so it is not surprising that decades of conditioning would have produced inside of us a belief in our own inequality and insufficiency. Now we have the hard work of re-educating ourselves to an appreciation of our own worth, or our humanity, our dignity and our strength. Attaining political independence was only a beginning. The acid test of our pride in ourselves lay in our ability to make that independence work.

  I can remember the first time I visited Ghana. I had a reservation at a hotel on the edge of the airport. One of the porters collected my bags in a hand truck to take them over to the hotel. He looked at the baggage tags and said to me, “You visiting Ghana?” I said, “Yes, I am a visitor.” He asked me where I came from and I told him. Then he asked, “Why are you here? What are you doing here?” I said, “I’ve come to take a look at Ghana and find out a little about it because I do a little writing and I want to write about Ghana.” He immediately stopped the truck, struck a pose and said, “If you want to know about Ghana, ask me. I am Ghana.” I thought this the most extraordinary observation I had heard. He was a porter. He didn’t say to me, “I am Ghanaian. Ask me about Ghana.” He said, “I am Ghana.” I’ve never forgotten that.

  Here I am living in a country where no black man says to me, “I am America.” Many black men say to me, “I am not American” because they feel no sense of identity with the earth that is America. However, the time must come when they will have to feel the same way about America as that Ghanaian felt about Ghana. They must feel that their blood is involved with the soil, their life past, present and future involved with the soil, and involved with it irrevocably. There is nothing that anyone can do which could excoriate their contribution from the solid state of America. And therefore if they dismiss this as unimportant, then it means that they’re more rootless than they ever imagined they could be. Their dignity and their nobility must relate to them as men and as Americans.

  “Tell me about your homeland, Guyana. You say you were invited to visit by the government. When was that?”

  “In 1963.”

  “Were you offered a job with the government?”

  “No.”

  Actually, some possibilities were discussed with me but I expressed unwillingness to accept any of them for reasons which seemed sufficiently valid to me. In the wake of the bloody interracial strife which preceded independence, Guyana became racially and politically polarized. Accepting an appointment inside Guyana presupposed identification with and membership in the ruling political party, the predominantly Negro P.N.C. (People’s National Congress). This would immediately have alienated me from any meaningful contact with non-Negro Guyanese, particularly those of Indian origin. Additionally, all who had actively supported the P.N.C. and its leaders’ successful bid for power understandably expected to be rewarded by political or other office. My nonparticipation in those troublous times would have been sufficient ground for their opposition to my appointment. Quite naturally, my presence in Guyana caused considerable speculation. Some of the more militant and vocal P.N.C. activists considered the foreign-based native sons expatriates who had enjoyed the good life abroad, while the faithful suffered and triumphed, and now were returning to appropriate to themselves the fruits of that triumph. I think I was enough of a political realist to appreciate their point of view. I returned to my job in Paris.

  “Were you in any way tempted to resettle yourself in Guyana, as an established writer in a newly independent country? Your own country? Perhaps your very presence there would have been of considerable social significance. In any society, new or otherwise, an artistic nucleus sometimes provides the thrust towards social and political reform. Wouldn’t you agree?”

  Christ, the way the words poured out of him! Mention a situation and he had the answer, packaged and ready. All we needed now was a tidy little jingle to go with it. He was just using words. What did he know about living away from one’s roots because of the force of circumstances, the need to eat?

  He was asking a whole spate of questions which I’d often asked myself, without giving myself any definitive answers. As a native son, I was happy to be at home, to see faces and hear voices of childhood friends; to enjoy the revival of childhood memories. I had left British Guiana an inexperienced youth full of ambition and energy. The years between had provided harsh lessons in personal survival. The idea of resettling myself in Guyana did occur to me. But as what? As a writer? I had lived all the intervening years away from Guyana. Such abilities and talents as I possessed had been nurtured or prodded into activity in conditions and circumstances very different and far removed from the Guyana scene.

  I write as I am stimulated and I am stimulated as I am involved. Very soon during the visit it seemed very doubtful that I could become involved in the essential fabric of Guyanese life without declaring some political identity. No political party commended itself to me. Furthermore, I was not a full-time writer, dependent only on my literary earnings. I had a job which paid me well and which I enjoyed. I argued the matter with myself, and the argument favored returning to Europe.

  “No.” I told him.

  “Was that your last visit to Guyana?”

  “No. In 1964 I received another invitation, this time to participate in the Independence celebrations.”

  For me the most impressive moment of those celebrations was at a simple ceremony when the British flag was run down the flagpole for the last time, and Guyana’s own national colors were unfurled to flutter in the evening breeze. For me that was a particular moment of fulfillment. I was standing close to the Duke of Kent, the Queen’s representative at the ceremony. I looked at him, resplendent in his heavy official accouterments, flushed and damp from the oppressive heat, yet coolly impassive, as if quite unaffected by so piffling an exercise.

  “And still you had no wish to remain there?”

  “Oh, I often wished, but inevitably the realities of living would intervene and disperse the wishes. I was grateful and happy to have been witness to so special an occasion. After all, it would happen only once in a lifetime.”

  “But you didn’t stay?” Persistent as hell.

  “No. I returned to my work in France.”

  Before leaving I had had a meeting with the prime minister at which he expressed the hope that native sons and daughters living abroad would feel encouraged to return home to participate in the urgent responsibilities attendant on political independence. I was invited to express my view and told him about my own reservations. His supporters would expect to benefit from his and his party’s success and would be embittered by, and opposed to, the appointment of those whom they were labeling ?
??Guyanese expatriates.” I would be willing to serve Guyana if I could do so away from the mill-stream of parochial politics and in an area consonant with my experiences and ability.

  “So that was the end of that.”

  “Yes.” Thinking of leaving it there, then as suddenly deciding to give him another bit of a shock. “You may remember that early in 1965, Sir Winston Churchill died. Quite unexpectedly I received a telegram requesting me to meet Guyana’s prime minister in London where he would be attending the funeral. At that meeting I was invited to join Guyana’s fledgling diplomatic corps, as her ambassador to the United Nations.”

  “Good Lord! Just like that?”

  “Just like that.”

  “You had no inkling it was coming?”

  “None!”

  “Fantastic. And you accepted.”

  “Yes.”

  “But that would be a political appointment, would it not? So you would have to, shall we say, toe the party line?”

  “It was a political appointment, but there was no suggestion that I become a party member.”

  “Would you have refused?”

  “Yes. I had already publicly stated my position on party membership. The invitation to join the diplomatic corps was made with the full knowledge of that position.”

  “But as an ambassador you’d have to carry out the party’s dictate … ”

  “As ambassador I would carry out my government’s dictate and I could tell myself that the government’s decisions to some degree included opposition opinion. Perhaps it was a naïve way of accommodating a political reality, but there it is.”

  “So you became an ambassador. You know, you amaze me. Who would expect to find an ambassador riding in this compartment on this train? I’d bet that not another person on this train knows there’s an ambassador among the passengers.”