The Writer and the World (50 page)

Some Frenchmen had come out from the bar on to the terrace, not warm now, the light a dusty ochre. They sat at the next table. They were businessmen. They took out papers and folders from briefcases and began discussions. One of the men became interested in Arlette. Exaggerating his attentions, he considered her legs, her big, full figure. She had her back to him and she didn’t notice. She was talking, and eating nuts and crisps as she talked.

In one of the conference rooms of the hotel there was a business conference of some sort, with many white men sitting at tables, listening to a man lecturing before a board: phantoms, preparing plans for things that were one day bound to perish. The sun was sinking in the haze of dust: the harmattan arrived at last on the coast. The lagoon was hazy; the far bank, lost in haze, was like a view from the temperate zone. To one side of the hotel works were going on in the grounds of new houses being built in this fast-rising area.

I said, “Arlette, you make me feel that the world is unstable. You make me feel that everything we live by is built on sand.”

She said, “But the world is sand. Life is sand.”

I felt she was saying what Hindus say as a doctrinal point, and feel as a truth in times of crisis: that life is illusion. But that was wrong: ideas have their cultural identity. And Arlette had arrived at her knowledge, her sense of the two worlds, by her interest in “esoteric studies” and African magic. This knowledge had come from her admiration of African tribal life: the chief’s gift of pardon, the annual ceremony of reconciliation, the initiation ceremonies in the sacred wood, when for three months seven-year-old boys were subjected to tests that gave them a new idea of the world and their place in it. The Hindu’s idea of illusion comes from the contemplation of nothingness. Arlette’s idea of sand came from her understanding and admiration of a beautifully organized society.

She spoke with passion; she spoke poetically. She nibbled all the time, and all the time the Frenchman at the other table was looking at her legs.

She had a high regard for the African wise man, the man venerated as the sage. There was such a sage at this moment in Abidjan, in the African district of Treichville. He was very famous; the president himself would
have liked to show him honour. But the sage preferred to live where he lived, in the courtyard of a simple house in Treichville. He said that if he moved to the middle-class area of Cocody the people who needed his help wouldn’t be able to come to him. They would have to walk, not having money for taxis. And the watchdogs of Cocody would bite them.

Arlette said, “Some time ago I went back to Martinique to see my parents. It was horrible for me. The people of the Antilles are sick people. Their life is a dream. I will tell you this story. The plane back—it was a special plane—was delayed for two days. And that made me distraught. My mother was hurt that I should be so anxious to get away from her. I love my parents, but my anxiety to get away from Martinique exceeded my love for my parents. They are small-minded people over there, broken down by their history. Life is so big. The world is so big, but over there if a man gets a little job in a government department he feels he has done enough with his life. They think they are superior to Africans. But their life is a dream.”

I asked her about Yamoussoukro. Why build that great city, if the world was sand?

She said, “It is the president’s attempt to integrate Africa into the modern world.”

And I thought she meant that to build a city like Yamoussoukro was not to accept what it stood for as the only reality. Ebony, the poet and civil servant, had hinted at something like that. Ebony’s father had said to him, “I am not sending you to the school to be a white man or a Frenchman. I am sending you to enter the new world, that’s all.”

As we walked out we passed the Harlem ladies in the lobby.

Arlette said, “We get so many people like them from the United States. Black people who come here to convert the Africans. They are like everybody else who comes to do that. They bring their own psychic sickness to Africa. They should instead come to be converted by Africa. They are mad.”
(“Ils sont fous.”)

November 1982—July 1983

   AMERICAN   
     OCCASIONS     

T
HE ADVENTURE
of Columbus is like
Robinson Crusoe.
No one can imaginatively possess the whole; everything beyond the legend is tedious and complicating. It is so even in Björn Landström’s book,
Columbus
, which makes the difficult adventure as accessible as it can be made. The text itself is a retelling from the usual sources. The maps and illustrations are more important. The maps make medieval ideas of geography clear. The illustrations, a true labour of love, are numerous and exact: ships, the islands, the people, the weather, the vegetation, and even the Flemish hawk’s bell which delighted the natives until it became a measure of the gold dust the discoverer required them to collect.

In the legend Columbus is persecuted by many enemies; he goes back to Spain white-haired, in chains, and he dies in poverty and disgrace. It is Columbus’s own picture: he had a feeling for theatre. His concern for gold exceeded his sovereign’s: he expected to get a tenth of all that was found. The chains were not necessary; he was begged to take them off. He wore them for effect, just as, after the previous disaster, he had returned in the Franciscan habit. That disaster had its profitable side. He had sent back slaves, as he had always intended. He claimed, or his son claimed for him, that he had got rid of two-thirds of the natives of Hispaniola in two years; the remainder had been set to gathering gold dust. (This was an exaggeration: he had got rid of only a third.) Even after his disgrace he fussed about his coat-of-arms, appropriating a red field for the castle of Castile, as on the royal coat-of-arms. He complained to the end about his poverty, but one of his personal gold shipments, again after his disgrace, amounted to 405 pounds. His father was a weaver; his sister married a cheesemonger; his son married a lady of royal blood. And at his death Spain hadn’t gained very much. Mexico was thirteen years away; and the Indies, the source of his gold, where he thought he had discovered the Terrestrial Paradise, had become, largely through his example,
anus mundi.

It is a story of extended horror. But it isn’t only the horror that numbs response. Nor is it that the discoverer deteriorates so steadily after the discovery. It is the banality of the man. He was looking less for America or Asia than for gold; and the banality of expectation matches a continuing banality of perception. At the heart of the seamanship, the toughness, the avarice, the vindictiveness and the brutality, there is only this:

This is from
The Book of the First Voyage
, when he was at his most alert. The concrete details are deceptive. The sea and its life are observed, but mainly for signs of the nearness of land; just as, at the moment of discovery, the natives are studied, but only by a man “vigilant”—his own word—for gold. “Their hair is not curly … they are not at all black.” Not an anthropological interest, not the response of wonder—disappointment rather: Columbus believed that where Negroes were, there was gold. Beyond this vigilance the words and the perceptions fail. The nightingale, April in Andalusia: the props of a banal poetry are used again and again until they are without meaning. They are at an even lower level than the recent astronaut’s “Wow”—there is nothing like this pure cry of delight in Columbus. After the discovery, his gold-seeking seaman’s banalities become repetitive, destroying romance and making the great adventure trivial. A book about Columbus needs to have pictures, and this is why Mr. Landström’s book is so valuable.

The medieval mind? But Queen Isabella wrote during the second voyage to find out what the climate was like. April in Andalusia wasn’t enough: she wanted pictures, and the romance. Marco Polo, whom Columbus had read, dealt in romance; and Amerigo Vespucci, after whom the continent is not unfairly named. Vespucci thought it worth mentioning that the natives of the islands and the Main pissed casually into the hot sand during conversation, without turning aside; that the
women were wanton and used a certain animal poison, sometimes lastingly fatal to virility, to increase the size of the male member. Perhaps he made this up; but though he too was vigilant and his own voyage ended in profitable slave-trading, he sought in the tradition of travel-romance to awaken wonder at the fact of the New World.

The facts about Columbus have always been known. In his own writings and in all his actions his egoism is like an exposed deformity; he condemns himself. But the heroic gloss, which is not even his own, has come down through the centuries. When the flagship ran aground at Haiti on the first voyage, the Indians were more than helpful: they wept to show their sympathy. Columbus was vigilant: he noted that it would be easy to subdue this “cowardly” unarmed race. This is what he presently did. Mr. Landström suggests that it was unfortunate and not really meant: it is the traditional gloss. On the third voyage Columbus thought he had discovered the Terrestrial Paradise. Mr. Landström, again following the gloss, says that Columbus wasn’t very well at the time. But it was just this sort of geography that had made him attempt the Ocean Sea.

In this adventure, as in today’s adventures in space, the romance is something we ourselves have to supply. The discovery needs a hero; the contempt settles on the country that, in the legend, betrays the hero. The discovery—and it would have come without Columbus—could not but be horrible. Primitive people, once exposed, have to be subdued and utilized or somehow put down, in the Indies, Australasia, the United States, Southern Africa; even India has its aboriginal problems. Four hundred years after the great Spanish debate, convened by the Emperor, on the treatment of primitive people, Rhodesia is an imperial issue. The parallel is there; only the contemporary debate, conducted before a mass-electorate on one side and a dispossessed but indifferent primitive people on the other, is necessarily more debased.

There is no Australian or American black legend; there is at the most a romantic, self-flattering guilt. But the black legend of Spain will persist, as will the heroic legend of Columbus. The dream of the untouched, complete world, the thing for ourselves alone, the dream of Shangri-la, is an enduring human fantasy. It fell to the Spaniards to have the unique experience. Generosity and romance, then, to the discoverer; but the Spaniards will never be forgiven. And even in the violated New World the Spaniards themselves remained subject to the fantasy. The quest for El Dorado became like a recapitulation of the whole New World adventure,
a wish to have it all over again; more men and money were expended on this in twenty expeditions than on the conquest of Mexico, Peru and New Granada.

Robinson Crusoe
, in its essential myth-making middle part, is an aspect of the same fantasy. It is a monologue; it is all in the mind. It is the dream of being the first man in the world, of watching the first crop grow. Not only a dream of innocence: it is the dream of being suddenly, just as one is, in unquestionable control of the physical world, of possessing “the first gun that had been fired there since the creation of the world.” It is the dream of total power. “First, I made him know his name should be Friday, which was the day I saved his life. I called him so for the memory of the time. I likewise taught him to say master, and then let him know that was to be my name.” Friday is awkward about religion; Crusoe cannot answer. Power brings problems. Crusoe sees some cannibals about to kill and eat a man. He runs to liberate. But then he stops. What is his right to interfere? Is it just the gun? Some Spaniards are to be rescued. How will his freedom and power continue? How will they obey? Where do sanctions start in the empty world? They must sign a contract. But there is no pen, no paper: a difficulty as particular and irrational as in a nightmare. It is from more than a desert island that he is rescued. The issues can never be resolved.