A Small Place (5 page)

Eleven million dollars that the French government gave to the Antiguan government for developmental aid has vanished. A high government official got millions of dollars in bribes for allowing a particular kind of industrial plant to be built. The salt floating around in the Antiguan air soon caused the plant to rust. All the airwaves in Antigua are owned by the government or ministers in government. On the airwaves, the opposition parties are never mentioned except to denounce them and to say that they are Communists and that they have received money from Fidel Castro and Muammar Qaddafi. Antigua was going to have an oil-refining industry. West Indies Oil, it was going to be called. The government built the big tanks to hold the oil before it was refined and the oil after it was refined. They built a platform far out at sea, where the large tankers would load and unload the cargo. The government built a refinery. Something went wrong. The refinery is rusting. The tanks are rusting. The platform is rusting. The foreigner who did the bad things in the Far East was involved in this. He is not rusting. He is very rich and travels the world on a diplomatic passport issued to him by the government of Antigua. He has more plans. He wants to build for the people of Antigua a museum and a library. The papers of the slave-trading family from Barbuda (the Condringtons), the records of their traffic in human lives, were being auctioned. The government of Antigua made a bid for them. Someone else made a larger bid. He was the foreigner. His bid was the successful bid. He then made a gift of these papers to the people of Antigua. And what does it mean? The records of one set of enemies, bought by another enemy, given to the people who have been their victims as a gift. The people who go into running the government were not always such big thieves; nor have they always been so corrupt. They took things, but it was on a small scale. For instance, if the government built some new housing to be sold to people, then a minister or two would get a few of the houses for themselves. They would then sell them outright, or rent them. Everybody knew about this. Some of the ministers were honest. One of them, a famous one in Antigua, a leader of the Trade and Labour Union movement, even died a pauper. Another minister, when his party lost power, had to drive a taxi. It is he, the taxi-driving ex-minister, who taught the other ministers a lesson. If you say to them, “Why you all so thief?” they say, “When I leave here, you want me to go drive taxi?” All the ministers have “green cards”—a document that makes them legal residents of the United States of America. The ministers, the people who govern the island of Antigua, who are also citizens of Antigua, are legal residents of the United States, a place they visit frequently.

And it is in that strange voice, then—the voice that suggests innocence, art, lunacy—that they say these things, pausing to take breath before this monument to rottenness, that monument to rottenness, as if they were tour guides; as if, having observed the event of tourism, they have absorbed it so completely that they have made the degradation and humiliation of their daily lives into their own tourist attraction.

*   *   *

An event in Antigua has been the founding, in 1939, of the Antigua Trades and Labour Union, an organization whose purpose was to obtain better wages, better working conditions, and just a better life in general for working people in Antigua. It eventually became, along with being a union, a political party, demanding universal suffrage, demanding that land in Antigua not be owned by syndicates made up of English people (most of whom still lived in England and had never laid eyes on Antigua), but by Antiguans, and demanding that Antiguans rule Antigua. An event in Antigua has been that the president of this union has headed the government in Antigua, as Premier and then, when Antigua became independent from Britain, as Prime Minister, for twenty-five of the thirty years that Antigua had had some form of self-government. Sometimes, when Antiguans look at this man, they see the event of George Washington, liberator and first President of the United States; sometimes, when Antiguans look at this man, they see the event of Jackie Presser, the head of the Teamsters Union in America, who is now serving time in prison for misappropriating his union's funds. For five years, Antigua had another Prime Minister. He stood for but was not re-elected to that office. The Prime Minister whose reign he interrupted then had him charged with using his office for personal profit, and he was sent to jail for eight months. The event of the Prime Minister whose career ended in political defeat and then jail is a sad event, for people had hoped that he would replace the old, dull, corrupt event with honesty, brilliance, and prosperity; instead, the sugar industry went bankrupt, the tourists did not come, his Minister of Public Works was dismissed because he was thought to have taken large amounts of public money, his illegitimate half brother, a member of his cabinet, spat on a stewardess while an aeroplane on which he was a passenger was in flight.

The event of the corruptness of the other Prime Minister of Antigua is traced to another event. They say that when this Prime Minister was a young man he worked for a merchant-importer who was also one of the largest bakers in Antigua. He worked for this man as a bookkeeper, and as a young bookkeeper he earned a salary that a young bookkeeper would earn, but the merchant-importer noticed that this young bookkeeper owned brand-new motorcars and seemed generally prosperous. In Antigua and in the 1930s, very few people owned cars or were generally prosperous, so the merchant-importer asked to look at his books. Whatever was wrong with the books the young man did not want the merchant-importer to see, for he took the books and ran with them to the bakery, and, with his incredibly long arms, he threw them into the furnace, where they perished immediately, never to be seen by mortal eyes again. And so they anchor the merchant-importer's books being burned to the event of the original, honest leaders of the Antigua Trades and Labour Union being maneuvered out of the union they founded and dishonest people taking their place; and they anchor that to the decline of one sort of colonialism and its debasement and its own sort of corruption; and they anchor that to this man, this Prime Minister, who from time to time had seemed like a good man, so well could he spell out the predicament that average Antiguans found themselves in. They anchor all of that to this other event: In Antigua, when a man goes into business, he will put up a sign announcing it, and on the sign he states the sort of business he is open to conducting and he states his own name, followed by the words &
SON
, so that it might read this way:
DAVID A. DREW & SON, CABINETMAKER AND CARPENTER.
In Antigua, people say that the man who has headed the government for twenty-five years perhaps by now thinks that the government of Antigua is his own business, for two of his sons are members of his cabinet, holding the most important posts after the post of Prime Minister. They are in charge of the Treasury, Tourism, Public Works—departments of government through which large amounts of money pass. And after they look at the father and the sons, they say, What next? for it occurs to them that a family that has been wielding political power for so many years might not give it up easily, might not give it up if they find themselves defeated at the polls, might not let themselves be defeated at the polls, might not even allow any polls. They note that Antigua has an army of sorts, an army that can only stand around as a decoration, the way it did in Grenada when the United States invaded that island; an army, then, that can only lend legitimacy to illegitimate acts. And though this army cannot really fight a war, is not trained to really fight a war—Antigua, after all, has no enemies—the men in this army can shoot at people, and if they cannot fight a war but can shoot at people, what people will they shoot at? And so people see anchored to this father and his two sons who have wielded power in Antigua for so many years, and who might find it hard to quietly relinquish this power and sit in New York spending the contents of their enormous bank accounts, the event of Haiti and the Duvaliers. The father, they say, is old and weak, and needs daily injections of powerful things to keep him going. They point, then, to one of the sons. They say how much they are reminded of Baby Doc and the opulent and fun-filled life he led in his poverty-stricken country. And they point to the other son and say that they are reminded of Papa Doc himself, for he is the ruthless son, the one who is not afraid of anything, the one who won't resign his post in government, even though he has been unable to account for large sums of money for public-works projects. But then, sitting with the prospect of that event facing them, they, Antiguans, say, perhaps not, perhaps that event will not be the event to take place, because the Baby Doc-like son who loves opulence and fun really loves opulence and fun, and like Baby Doc, he is not really a leader at all; and the other son, the Papa Doc-like son, is dying of leukemia or some other dreadful blood disease and has to go to New York every month for treatment. And so then they imagine another event, the event of Maurice Bishop in Grenada, and they imagine that such a man will materialise in Antigua and he'll do Maurice Bishop-like things and say Maurice Bishop-like things and come to a Maurice Bishop-like end—death, only this time at the hands of the Americans.

 

 

ANTIGUA
is beautiful. Antigua is too beautiful. Sometimes the beauty of it seems unreal. Sometimes the beauty of it seems as if it were stage sets for a play, for no real sunset could look like that; no real seawater could strike that many shades of blue at once; no real sky could be that shade of blue—another shade of blue, completely different from the shades of blue seen in the sea—and no real cloud could be that white and float just that way in that blue sky; no real day could be that sort of sunny and bright, making everything seem transparent and shallow; and no real night could be that sort of black, making everything seem thick and deep and bottomless. No real day and no real night could be that evenly divided—twelve hours of one and twelve hours of the other; no real day would begin that dramatically or end that dramatically (there is no dawn in Antigua: one minute, you are in the complete darkness of night; the next minute, the sun is overhead and it stays there until it sets with an explosion of reds on the horizon, and then the darkness of night comes again, and it is as if the open lid of a box you are inside suddenly snaps into place). No real sand on any real shore is that fine or that white (in some places) or that pink (in other places); no real flowers could be these shades of red, purple, yellow, orange, blue, white; no real lily would bloom only at night and perfume the air with a sweetness so thick it makes you slightly sick; no real earth is that colour brown; no real grass is that particular shade of dilapidated, rundown green (not enough rain); no real cows look that poorly as they feed on the unreal-looking grass in the unreal-looking pasture, and no real cows look quite that miserable as some unreal-looking white egrets sit on their backs eating insects; no real rain would fall with that much force, so that it tears up the parched earth. No real village in any real countryside would be named Table Hill Gordon, and no real village with such a name would be so beautiful in its pauperedness, its simpleness, its one-room houses painted in unreal shades of pink and yellow and green, a dog asleep in the shade, some flies asleep in the corner of the dog's mouth. Or the market on a Saturday morning, where the colours of the fruits and vegetables and the colours of the clothes people are wearing and the colour of the day itself, and the colour of the nearby sea, and the colour of the sky, which is just overhead and seems so close you might reach up and touch it, and the way the people there speak English (they break it up) and the way they might be angry with each other and the sound they make when they laugh, all of this is so beautiful, all of this is not real like any other real thing that there is. It is as if, then, the beauty—the beauty of the sea, the land, the air, the trees, the market, the people, the sounds they make—were a prison, and as if everything and everybody inside it were locked in and everything and everybody that is not inside it were locked out. And what might it do to ordinary people to live in this way every day? What might it do to them to live in such heightened, intense surroundings day after day? They have nothing to compare this incredible constant with, no big historical moment to compare the way they are now to the way they used to be. No Industrial Revolution, no revolution of any kind, no Age of Anything, no world wars, no decades of turbulence balanced by decades of calm. Nothing, then, natural or unnatural, to leave a mark on their character. It is just a little island. The unreal way in which it is beautiful now is the unreal way in which it was always beautiful. The unreal way in which it is beautiful now that they are a free people is the unreal way in which it was beautiful when they were slaves.

Again, Antigua is a small place, a small island. It is nine miles wide by twelve miles long. It was discovered by Christopher Columbus in 1493. Not too long after, it was settled by human rubbish from Europe, who used enslaved but noble and exalted human beings from Africa (all masters of every stripe are rubbish, and all slaves of every stripe are noble and exalted; there can be no question about this) to satisfy their desire for wealth and power, to feel better about their own miserable existence, so that they could be less lonely and empty—a European disease. Eventually, the masters left, in a kind of way; eventually, the slaves were freed, in a kind of way. The people in Antigua now, the people who really think of themselves as Antiguans (and the people who would immediately come to your mind when you think about what Antiguans might be like; I mean, supposing you were to think about it), are the descendants of those noble and exalted people, the slaves. Of course, the whole thing is, once you cease to be a master, once you throw off your master's yoke, you are no longer human rubbish, you are just a human being, and all the things that adds up to. So, too, with the slaves. Once they are no longer slaves, once they are free, they are no longer noble and exalted; they are just human beings.