The Middle Passage

by V. S. Naipaul

  Editor, ‘Guardian’

  In the ‘Trinidad Guardian’ of October 22, the heading covering the falls of gold prices read [sic] ‘Golds Lose Glitter’, and this reminded me of the well-known quotation: ‘All that glitters is not gold.’

  As a matter of literary interest, the passage is misquoted, and should read: ‘All that glisters is not gold.’ It comes from ‘The Merchant of Venice’. True enough, both ‘glitters’ and ‘glisters’ convey the same idea, but if I may say so, ‘glitters’ is not Shakespearean. ‘Glisters’ is the word that has come down to us and it behoves us to pass it on without change or alteration.

  This is not to be taken as reproof towards those who have mistaken one word for the other.

  Rather it is a plea for the preservation of those words and phrases that constitute, in part, our literary legacy.

  Norman A. Carter, St Augustine

  No one was deeply interested in the emigrants on the Francisco Bobadilla. There was more concern about the number of immigrants in Trinidad. The population had jumped from 560,000 in 1946 to 825,000 in 1960. Immigrants had come from England, America, Canada and Australia as well as the other West Indian islands. Two new white suburbs had been established, but Trinidad directed all its annoyance against West Indian immigrants, and Grenadians in particular. Grenada, immemorially, has been as funny a word in Trinidad as Wigan is in England; and the occasional expulsion of Grenadians and other small islanders is a subject for calypso.

  Shortly before my arrival there had been another police campaign, reportedly of exceptional rigour, against illegal immigrants. The attitudes to immigrants are the same the world over – the stories about West Indians in England (‘twenty-four to a room’) are exactly matched by the stories about Grenadians and others in Trinidad – and there was great public enthusiasm as Grenadians scattered in terror all over the island and went into hiding. (Many were harboured by employers who valued the cheapness of their labour. In the remote Ortoire district I was to come upon a nest of Vincentians gathering oysters from mangrove roots for a local entrepreneur.) The calypsonian called Lord Blakie sang:

  Move, lemme get me share.

  They beating Grenadians down in the Square.

  Lemme pelt a lash, lemme get a share.

  They beating Grenadians down in the Square.

  Since they hear we have Federation

  All of them packing up in this island.

  Grenadians were altogether in the news. The latest Trinidad personality was a Grenadian of twenty-four who had married a Trinidad woman of eighty-four. Their photographs were often in the paper; cinema managers were trying to get them to make personal appearances; and a rumour, started perhaps by a government supporter, had it that the acting leader of the opposition had asked the Grenadian to stand as one of the party’s candidates at the next general election. In an interview with the Sunday Guardian – with photographs of the bride feeding her chickens, the groom acting as linesman in a football match – the Grenadian said he had four children in Grenada (thus giving the lie to one persistent rumour). He had left their mother because she, and her family, had wanted to ‘rush’ him into marriage.

  They were discussing this in a Port of Spain taxi one morning.

  ‘She have too much vice in she old tail, if you ask me,’ the fat woman beside me said. ‘God! What she must be does look like in the morning? I ain’t fifty, and it does frighten me like hell to see my face when I get up.’

  ‘When that man I have started getting fresh,’ the woman in front said, ‘I does be mad to give him a clout. Is only backside for him, you hear. And I breathing deep and pretending I sleeping sound sound.’

  ‘You right, child. A neighbour was telling me that this Grenadian only want to go away to study. He go away, doing this studying, and she stay home, feeding those chickens. You see she in the Guardian, feeding chickens?’

  From the Trinidad Guardian:

  FASHION SHOW

  The management of the Starlite Drive-In and Pollyanna, a new children’s dress shop, put on a delightful children’s fashion parade at the cinema on Sunday afternoon before the first show. Apart from the very lovely frocks, and they were adorable, the little models, boys and girls, one little youngster not quite 2, were positively amazing, perfectly self-possessed, and poised. The array of garments ranged from bathing suits ‘Balon’, a Brigitte Bardot type, but certainly B.B. could not have done fuller justice to her suit than did Christine Cozier and Renata Lopez; not to mention Master Barry Went in his Marlon Brando bikini … Among the most appreciative audience were Mrs Isaac Akow and her grands, Mr and Mrs A. Dickson, Mr and Mrs Dennis Crooks and their kids, Mr and Mrs Frank de Freitas and their family.

  Trinidad considers itself, and is acknowledged by the other West Indian territories to be, modern. It has night clubs, restaurants, air-conditioned bars, supermarkets, soda fountains, drive-in cinemas and a drive-in bank. But modernity in Trinidad means a little more. It means a constant alertness, a willingness to change, a readiness to accept anything which films, magazines and comic strips appear to indicate as American. Beauty queens and fashion parades are modern. Modernity might also lie in a name like Lois – pronounced Loys in Trinidad – which came to the island in the 1940s through Lois Lane, the heroine of the American Superman comic strip. Simple radio is not modern. Commercial radio is: when I was a boy not to know the latest commercial jingle was to be primitive.

  To be modern is to ignore local products and to use those advertised in American magazines. The excellent coffee which is grown in Trinidad is used only by the very poor and a few middle-class English expatriates. Everyone else drinks Nescafé or Maxwell House or Chase and Sanborn, which is more expensive but is advertised in the magazines and therefore acceptable. The elegant and comfortable morris chairs, made from local wood by local craftsmen, are not modern and have disappeared except from the houses of the poor. Imported tubular steel furniture, plastic-straw chairs from Hong Kong and spindly cast-iron chairs have taken their place.

  In an article in the Caribbean Quarterly, a journal of the University College of the West Indies, Dr Alfred P. Thorne studies the economic consequences of this ‘apparent psychological trait’. ‘Large numbers of middle- and upper-class islanders,’ he writes, ‘avoid regular consumption of many local roots or ground provisions, and prefer imported items of corresponding food value (and usually higher cost).’ He suggests that political leaders and the new élite should set an example, which would be more effective than ‘fervent imprecations and exhortations’.

  Is there any good reason why, in the prestige system, sweet potatoes and the like should not be among the foods of the middle and upper income classes of the communities? Do not elegant English barons and earls, and, indeed, even most gracious royal princesses share common ‘Irish’ potatoes with English dock labourers? Not even the ‘Cockneys’ renaming these humble roots as ‘spuds’ have diverted the aristocratic consumer.

  It is an old West Indian problem. Trollope complained about it in Jamaica in 1859:

  But it is to be remarked all through the island that the people are fond of English dishes, and that they despise, or affect to despise, their own productions. They will give you ox-tail soup when turtle would be much cheaper. Roast beef and beefsteaks are found at almost every meal. An immense deal of beer is consumed. When yams, avocado pears, the mountain cabbage, plantains, and twenty other delicious vegetables may be had for the gathering, people will insist on eating bad English potatoes; and the desire for English pickles is quite a passion.

  Charles Kingsley, who ten years later spent a winter in Trinidad, tells the story in At Last of a German who, because Trinidad produced sugar, vanilla and cocoa, decided to make chocolate in Trinidad. He did, and his price was a quarter that of the imported. ‘But the fair creoles would not buy it. It could not be good; it could not be the real article, unless it had crossed the Atlantic twice to and from that centre of fashion, Paris.’ One of the complaints of tourists in Jamaica is that
they cannot get Jamaican food. And once in a small intellectuals’ club in Port of Spain I asked for guava jelly: they had only greengage jam.

  Modernity in Trinidad, then, turns out to be the extreme susceptibility of people who are unsure of themselves and, having no taste or style of their own, are eager for instruction. In England and America there are magazines for such groups; in Trinidad instruction is now provided by advertising agencies, which have been welcomed by the people not only for this reason but also because the advertising agency is itself a modern thing.

  There was a time when Trinidad had no agencies and the nearest we got to copy-writing was Limacol’s ‘The Freshness of a Breeze in a Bottle’ and Mr Fernandes’s ‘If you don’t drink rum that is your business; if you do drink rum that is our business.’ For the rest we made do with each store’s list of bargains and the usual toothpaste sagas about bad breath. This has now changed. It has been said that a country can be judged by its advertisements, and a glance at Trinidad advertising is revealing. A man with a black eye-patch is used to advertise, not Hathaway shirts, but an alcoholic drink. Bermudez biscuits are described as a ‘Family of Fine Crackers’, with the ‘Mopsy’ biscuit for ‘the young in heart’, which is as puzzling as the slogan for Trinidad Grapefruit Juice: ‘The Smile of Good Health – in a Tin’. ‘Crix’ (of the Bermudez family) is ‘a meal in itself ‘. One examines the copy for the point; and it seems that this is to persuade Trinidadians that Bermudez biscuits are really ‘crackers’, American things which Americans in films and the comic strips eat. Old Oak Rum was introduced with a Showdown Test. (It might have been a ten-second showdown test, but I may be confusing it with other tests.) In this Showdown Test a number of laughing, well-dressed Trinidadians, carefully chosen for race, stood at a bar. None was clamorously black. A genuinely black man was used for the garage-hand in the ‘I’m going well, I’m going Shell’ advertisement; black faces are normally used only in advertisements for things like bicycles and stout.

  This is the work of expatriate advertising agents, and Trinidad is grateful and humble. At a time when the whole concept of modern advertising is under fire elsewhere, Trinidad offers a haven: it is officially recognized that Trinidadians are without the skill to run advertising agencies. And, indeed, without outside assistance commercial radio might not have been so easily established. At a quarter past seven in the morning, in those early days, Doug Hatton was there with his Shopping Highlights, a programme of music and ‘information’. Sometimes, he telephoned people to ask whether they knew the name of the ‘number’ he was playing; if they did they got a prize, provided by some firm willing to contribute to the public merriment. At eight Hatton went off the air, to make way for a little local news, a little more information and the death announcements. But at half past eight Hatton’s associate Hal Morrow came on, with Morrow’s Merry-Go-Round, a programme of information and music. This lasted until nine, and for the rest of the day there would be no more of Hatton and Morrow until they came on in the evening with a quiz, perhaps, a talent show, records and more information. They retired, Hatton and Morrow, somewhat prematurely; but Trinidad has never ceased to honour them: simple people of whose work the wider world shall never know, who turned their backs on metropolitan success and renown and devoted their energies to the service of a colonial people.

  So Trinidad, though deserted by much of the talent it produces, has always been fortunate in attracting people of adventurous spirit.

  ‘I’m a second-rater,’ a successful American businessman said to an Englishman, who told it to me. ‘But this is a third-rate place and I’m doing well. Why should I leave?’

  With this emphasis on America, English things are regarded as old-fashioned and provincial. One of the more pleasing aspects of Trinidad modernity is that it is possible to eat well and from a number of national cuisines. I found myself one day in an English restaurant. Trollope’s remarks about the potato still apply; and the restaurant, which was an ‘and chips’ place, attracted depressed expatriates and some of the English-minded Trinidad élite. The waiters were dressed up. My joylessness was matched by the waiter’s until I asked what there was for a sweet. He looked embarrassed; and when at last he said, ‘Bread and butter pudding,’ his voice half-broke in a laugh, disclaiming all responsibility for such an absurdity.

  So Trinidad gives the impression of a booming, vigorous, even frenzied little island. Helped by a series of fires, the main streets of central Port of Spain have been rebuilt, and the Salvatori building stands for all that is modern. Elsewhere the flat-façaded stone-walled houses remain: dwelling-houses turned into stores to meet the needs of an expanding city. Traffic crawls in the choked streets; parking is a problem. In the stores the quality of unbranded goods is not high, the prices extravagant; the mark-up is fifty or a hundred per cent, and on some goods, like Japanese knick-knacks, as much as three hundred per cent: Trinidadians will not buy what they think is cheap. In December 1959, after the civil servants had received another of their pay rises, Port of Spain was sold out of refrigerators. In betting shops you can bet on that day’s English races. And there are numerous race meetings in Trinidad itself; when I was a boy there were only three a year. Horse-racing, one of the island’s few entertainments, has always been popular and now, with more money circulating, gambling has become universal. It is respectable; it is almost an industry; and I was told that as a result not a few civil servants are in the hands of moneylenders.

  We went to the races, leaving Port of Spain by the dual-carriageway Wrightson Road that runs between the town and the reclaimed area of Docksite, the former American army base. We passed the Technical College, still being built – a few years later than British Guiana’s, but a promise of the future; we passed the modernistic headquarters of the Seamen and Waterfront Workers Trade Union, the new Fire Brigade headquarters. Then we drove along the Beetham Highway, the new road built over reclaimed swampland to relieve the overburdened Eastern Main Road. To our right lay the city rubbish dump, misty with smoke of rubbish burning in the open. On our left was Shanty Town, directly outside the city, extending right across and up the hills: oddly beautiful, each shack with its angular black shadow on the reddish hill, so that one would have liked to sketch the scene into a rough wet canvas. Corbeaux patrolled the highway. These black vultures are never far away in Trinidad; they perch on the graceful branches of coconut trees on the beaches; and when on the highway, as we saw, one of the city’s innumerable pariah dogs is run over, the corbeaux pounce and pick the starved body clean, flapping heavily away from time to time to avoid the traffic. Scarlet ibises flew with an awkward grace over the mangrove to our right. And at regular intervals on the highway English-style traffic signs urged motorists to keep to the left except when overtaking.

  We had music while we drove, from the two radio stations. With their songs, commercials, constant weather reports (as though this was at any moment liable to spectacular change) and news ‘every hour on the hour’, they suggested that we were in an exciting, luxurious metropolis which was supported by a vast, rich hinterland. Soon this hinterland appeared: occasional horse-carts, small houses, people working in small vegetable gardens. We with our car-radio on the highway were in one world; they were in another.

  An approaching car blinked its lights.

  ‘Police,’ my friend said. ‘Speed trap.’

  Every car that met us gave the warning. And soon, sure enough, we passed a disconsolate, ostentatiously plain-clothed policeman sitting on the verge looking at something in his hand.

  Country people, mainly Indians brilliantly dressed, were walking towards the races. We turned off the main road and found the way blocked as far as we could see with cars, new, of many colours, shining in the sun. This was nothing like the Trinidad I knew.

  When Charles Kingsley went to the Port of Spain races in 1870 he came upon a dying horse surrounded by a group of coloured men whom he advised ‘in vain’ to cover the horse with a blanket, ‘for the poor thing had fallen
from sunstroke ‘. Kingsley did not go to the races to bet – it was the first time he had been to a race-ground for thirty years – and he does not speak of gambling. He speaks of a run-down French merry-go-round (‘a huge piece of fool’s tackle’), people sitting on the grass (‘live flower-beds’), and the ‘most hideous’ smell of new rum. He had gone to the races, he says, ‘to wander en mufti among the crowd’. He was greatly taken by their racial variety, and the engraving which accompanies the chapter shows a group of Trinidadians – Negroes, Indians and Chinese – at the races. The Negro man and the Negro boy are wearing straw hats, loose collarless shirts and three-quarter-length trousers, a tropical abridgement of eighteenth-century European garb which has been revived in night clubs as a folk costume. A Negro woman is wearing a turban and many well-starched skirts such as Anthony Trollope, getting off the West Indian steamer at the island of St Thomas late in 1858, saw on the flower-seller on the quayside; these skirts ‘gave to her upright figure’, he said, ‘that look of easily compressible bulk which, let Punch do what it will, has grown so sightly to our eyes’. The Indian men are in turbans, Indian jackets, and dhotis, and carry the quarterstaff; the Indian woman wears the long skirt of the United Provinces and the orhni. The Chinese are in Chinese peasant clothes; the man has a pigtail and carries an open umbrella.

  No dying horses surrounded by helpless jabbering men will be found on a Trinidad race-ground today. No pigtails; no calypso folk costumes; and turbans are rare. Dress is uniform, national tastes emerging only in colours. The three groups in the Kingsley engraving stand in three isolated cultures. Today these cultures, coming together, have been modified. One, the Chinese, has almost disappeared; and the standards of all approximate to the standards of those who are absent in the engraving: the Europeans.

  * * *

  Outside the Royal Victoria Institute in Port of Spain an anchor, still in good condition, stands embedded in concrete, and a sign says this might be the anchor Columbus lost during his rough passage into the Gulf of Paria. So much, one might say, for the history of Trinidad for nearly three hundred years after its discovery. The Spaniards were more interested in the profitable territories of South America, and the island was never seriously settled. The abundance today of Amerindian names speaks of this absence of early colonization: Tacarigua, Tunapuna, Guayaguayare, Mayaro, Arima, Naparima. In Trinidad you do not find the Scarborough and Plymouth of Tobago, the Hampstead and Highgate of Jamaica, the Windsor Forest and Hampton Court of the British Guiana coastland.