The Writer and the World (23 page)

I told him I had found no trace of MMM doctrine in Triolet. The socialism his party had expounded seemed to have been absorbed into the paranoid myth of the enemy.

He didn’t answer directly. He said, “There is always
something
behind the myth.” And then, tentatively, like a man thinking aloud, he began to talk around the subject of myth-making. “Things can go fantastic distances in the minds of people here. I suppose the size of the island has something to do with it … There is a definite melodramatic tendency. In Port Louis, for example, I was said to have an
electric
baton. I don’t know what they meant by that. In Curepipe it was a baton with a chain. And my black leather jacket is supposed to be bullet-proof. And I suppose that if as I walk past the municipality office in Curepipe I am shot at; and if there is a minister, supposedly the protector of the black, who wears black leather and sits on a black horse; then you are in a situation that can give rise to any kind of myth.

“You live with certain things; you don’t put them together. There’s one of our ministers—it’s only now, as I am talking here, I see how extensive this myth-faculty is—this minister, on election day he wore his paratroop uniform. Ramgoolam [the Prime Minister] used to be a myth. The
chacha
or uncle of the Hindus. Very active and powerful, but somehow floating above it all. There is a biography of Ramgoolam by one of our local writers. It’s a biography without a date. It’s fantastic mythology and poetry and things … I believe the real depression comes when you go through our education system. There’s the linguistic aspect. The language we all use is despised.” (The MMM is romantic about the local patois, which it sees as an important part of a “national” culture.) “The Franco-Mauritians too have their myths. When I came back the
story among them was that
I
had brought de Gaulle down. You can find it still. ‘If Paul brought de Gaulle down, what chance does poor old Ram-goolam have?’ They all deal in fantasies. And it’s rooted in the colonial situation.”

He made the two hours pass quickly. As he left with his bodyguard he smiled and said, “I’ve got to go now and get some ‘tough guys’ for the forum this afternoon.”

But the tough guys were not needed. No one tried to break up the MMM meeting that afternoon, which was in the town of Rose Hill. The hall was packed with several hundred students. A racially mixed audience, a mixed platform, ideas being treated like news: it was the brightest gathering I had seen in Mauritius. And by its very existence it was—but perhaps only in the eye of the visitor—a tribute to the liberal administration that was being rejected.

“I
T IS AN IMITATION
,” Sir Seewoosagur Ramgoolam, the Prime Minister, says. “They are trying to imitate Mao, Fidel Castro. Fantasy? They are not dealing in fantasy; they think their ideas will take root here. There
is
poverty. But we are trying to contain that by social services. We spend about thirty million rupees on assistance. People criticize us for that, for giving things like family allowances. My reply is: ‘Children are born. I cannot allow them to grow up stunted. If they are well fed, well educated, they are not a burden on society. Otherwise they will become backward, mentally.’”

A different vocabulary, different concerns: a different life. The Prime Minister is nearly as old as the century; and that poetic biography Bérenger spoke about is an attempt to do justice to a subject which—though the scale is small, the setting restricted—is worthy of legend: the rise to power of a man born into a depressed and leaderless community, in an agricultural colony, in the darkest age of colonialism. Few colonial leaders have shown such courage and tenacity as Ramgoolam; few, having achieved power, have been so anxious to heal old enmities and rule humanely. But already the new state, as incomplete as it ever was, is threatened, and from more than one direction.

Bérenger says, “This hanging around ministers’ offices, people looking for jobs, this is encouraged by the ministers. Each minister is trying to succeed Ramgoolam and each is trying to play his card.”

The Prime Minister says, “Now we have the Public Service Commission. This waiting outside the doors of ministers is a mistake. It is a relic of colonial days.”

The old enemy. And also the new: “Colonialism is a destructive institution. It creates parasites and hangers-on. And they are still with us—people of all races who profited from the stay in this country of a foreign power. I don’t know whether they’ve completely reconciled themselves to the changes. I think this new movement, the MMM, is a devious approach by these same people to revive themselves. I think they want to have their own back on me especially and my party.”

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

T
HE
T
RINIDAD
C
ARNIVAL
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.

S
OMETHING
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.

S
O IN
J
AMAICA
, 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 needs 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.

E
XCITEMENT!
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.