Alive, Alive Oh!

by Diana Athill

  In this tropical place the body enjoyed freedom, and so did the mind. There was so much to look at that the ‘I’ could forget itself, which left the feeling of a full day passing quickly, but was profoundly restful.

  The sea might be the eye’s main joy – but its beauty doesn’t surprise. You know beforehand that the Caribbean will be blue and green like liquid jewels, and sometimes (when it lies shallow over white coral sand) lambent, as though light were shining up through it. Its beauty is recognized, not discovered, belonging as it does to a recent public dream of the place in which only its beaches exist. To me it seemed astonishing that I should be in this dream, but not astonishing that it was there.

  The mountains and the forests, on the other hand, belong to a different and far older dream.

  The plunging valleys jostle with leaves like open hands, like elephants’ ears, like saws, like feathers, like fans, like frayed wickerwork. Flowers clamber and perch as though they had claws and wings. Birds are secretive but unafraid (this is not a place where men have preyed on birds). At the bottom of valleys run streams hidden by dark arches of bamboos, and the sound of water makes it seem cool even though there is more moisture than chill in the air. Cascades. Pools. A zigzag drift of butterflies. Small snappings and patterings, mysterious creakings. Fear? The tangle of green is so rampageous, the air is so heavy . . . But there are no dangerous animals on Tobago, no poisonous snakes (two kinds of those on nearby Trinidad but none here). Stand quietly, reminding yourself that this forest won’t hurt you, and fear fades. You can walk further into it, following one of the many traces. You can get to know it.

  Any botanist or ornithologist would be drunk with excitement in five minutes. My ignorant eye was drunk with beauty and strangeness – and with a dizzy sensation that the strangeness was familiar.

  This familiarity was discovered, not expected. I thought, ‘Rousseau, Le Douanier, painted this forest – perhaps that’s why I know it.’ But no. What he painted had existed before him: a version of the ancient pastoral dream in which all is sweet ease and irresponsibility. It was a version dreamed in the cold and strenuous parts of Europe, a vision of the tropics as the sun’s country untamed, the other side of life where people went innocently naked in forests like these and fruit fell into their hands. That was the dream that I was in.

  It is to be seen not only in the forest but also in the pastoral glades of the little coastal plain where fawn cattle are tethered in the patterned shade of coconut palms – great groves of palms tilting gracefully this way and that, their fruit lying in the grass beneath. And you see it in the village gardens with their dark-leaved fruit trees. ‘You know, don’t you,’ I was told, ‘that you can always pick a fruit if you are thirsty? No one here will mind if you pick a fruit from his tree.’ It was El Dorado. The mountains of diamonds and cities of gold had soon faded away, but the abundance, beauty and silence of the landscape which, inseminated by greed, gave birth to those illusions were still here. I felt that now, in these happy post-war years, I had come home to a dream and I wanted to go on living in it.

  Many Europeans and North Americans were feeling this, and some of them had enough money to act on the feeling. They bought land and they built a house. I knew one very lovely house where friends of mine lived in elegant and knowledgeable enjoyment of the island. They had learnt its history and studied its flora and fauna; they followed its politics; they participated in local life. They lived a long way from the town, so their neighbours appreciated their running a fishing boat and selling their catch, breeding pigs and selling their meat, both very cheaply. They gave sick people lifts to hospital and helped when the authorities had to be approached about a pension or the sale of land. They invited young people to their house for ‘talk-ins’, knowing how frustrated they could be in a society too small to offer much intellectual exercise. They did a great deal that is useful and kind, besides enjoying themselves greatly, with so much discrimination and charm that it almost seemed their raison d’être. They seemed to have mastered the art of coming home to a dream without being lost to waking life. But although I liked and admired them, they made me feel uneasy.

  I went to another house about a mile away from theirs: one of half a dozen strung out along a mountain road, built of wood and corrugated iron, propped on groggy-looking stilts and appearing to European eyes more like a henhouse or a garden shed than a dwelling place. I was seeing a man about some pillowcases – he was the only person left who still practised the craft of painting on fabric, which used to be quite common in Tobago. My friends knew about this craft and liked to put work in the way of its last practitioner. His house had two small rooms and a porch on which stood the oil stove for cooking. The room I saw was unpainted, carefully swept but looking dirty because all its brown-grey surfaces were so worn that they could not look otherwise. It contained a table, one chair (there was another on the porch), a shelf nailed to the wall with an enamel basin and a few cups and plates on it, a calendar, and a cotton curtain on a wire across the window, so faded that its colours were unidentifiable. The man was not out of work – he could paint pillowcases only at weekends – so he was not unusually unlucky, and his family was small. It was common to see many children playing around or under just such a house, and until then I had not wondered how they all fitted in at night and how they looked so neat and clean on their long walks to and from school. At school-out time the roads swarmed with beautiful children trooping home, and only a few of them looked as though they lived in houses without drainage, where water had to be fetched from a standpipe down the road. The painter was perhaps unusual in that his family was all afflicted in some way – he had a diseased eye, his wife was dropsical and his son had impetigo – but after I had visited him and had started to look more attentively at the villages I passed through, I began to suspect that the impression of healthiness given by the people on this island as a whole might be superficial.

  It would be hard to starve to death (though easy enough to be malnourished) in the middle of so much abundance, in such a kind climate. If you wanted to go naked you could do so without discomfort, so having no shoes and only a ragged shirt wouldn’t kill you either. But it was the very richness of what surrounded them that made the houses’ poverty so shocking, as though you split a glossy fruit to find only a little wormy dust. I met Europeans who had come to run businesses in Tobago who said of the people in the villages, ‘They never do more than they absolutely have to’ – and I heard black people say it, too: black people who had escaped. The closer you looked, the more you wondered that so many did escape, because simply becoming accustomed to a life so reduced, which a person naturally has to do if it’s the only life on offer, would shrink his mind and dry up his energy. Inertia was inevitable and simple-mindedness unsurprising. Only the truly exceptional individual can rise above being bone-poor in a tiny and remote society.

  These people were here, in this condition, because their ancestors were enslaved by ours in order to keep the beautiful European dream going when it turned out that the only gold Tobago would provide would come from working the land: a let-down compared with conquering mythical cities, but not too bad if you could put enough two-legged livestock to work at no cost. When this stopped paying we tinkered about with other methods, and when they stopped paying we pulled out, congratulating ourselves on granting independence to what we left behind. Which, seen as an organized society, was the empty shell of European greed from which the omnivorous mollusc that had determined its shape had withdrawn; and seen humanly was a collection of people who had to decide what kind of society to become, given that they lived in very small places on the edge of the world, with few resources.

  One method of survival had been to allow the white organism back on terms which suited it better than overt possession. It was the easiest method, bringing in quick money and avoiding an alarming collapse of the shell – the form of society to which everyone had become accustomed. It has been followed throughout the Caribbean except i
n Cuba. Oil, bauxite, sugar, bananas, citrus fruit, pitch, copra: they can all make money for someone, so it wasn’t a question of coaxing the old mollusc back. Keeping him out – that would have been the problem (and has been, in Cuba).

  Tobago is governed by its larger sister island, Trinidad, and had little say in the decision to exploit almost the only asset it possesses: its beauty. What other decision could have been made? But it is humiliating to have one’s role decided for one, and worse when one can’t afford to play it. No doubt Tobagonians would have been delighted to build their own resort hotels and make as much money as possible from their visitors, but they could operate on only the smallest scale. If a lot of tourists were to be tempted in, others had to finance the industry – so in came the companies from Britain, America and Canada, in negotiation with Port of Spain, the distant capital. They were making big investments, and when a development company makes a big investment it is because it confidently expects that it – it, and no one else – will make a big profit. It will grant, of course, that the profit must be taxed by the country in which it is operating, but it would take it ill if the tax approximated to what it would have to pay at home.

  I happened to meet people working for such companies right at the start of my visit to Tobago, and it was apparent that for them the charm of a Caribbean island lay largely in its being so manageable. Their talk was all of the frustration – or the comedy – of inefficiency; but it is worth being frustrated almost to ulcer point when you can persuade a government that you are doing it a favour by operating in its territory, and can pay its people very modestly for their labour while getting credit for employing them at all. It is precisely the inefficiency which is valued. A people who operated as you operate, and expected from life what you expect, would be far more tiresome to deal with.

  ‘The level of education,’ I was told, ‘is pathetic. One isn’t supposed to say such things nowadays – ha, ha – but the best most of them can do is learn like parrots.’ (That was one of the remarks which made me marvel at the lack of self-consciousness: how could he not realize that he was sounding just like a caricature of himself?) The level of education was low. You only had to talk to a few teachers to see it, either from the criticism of the system provided by the intelligent, or from the examples of what it produced provided by the dull. What shocked was the underlying (and probably unconscious) gloating: the unsaid, ‘And long may it stay that way.’

  Local people, even if liked, were spoken of with condescension. If a European described a local as able, he sounded as though he were trying to convince me of something surprising; if he said someone was ‘a friend’ there was a fractional pause in which I was supposed to note his broad-mindedness. The usual tone was knowing and jocular: they were ‘priceless’, these people, and some story would follow about bribery at high level or comic ineptitude at low. The ‘pricelessness’ of servants was a particularly popular subject: being ‘priceless’ was part of the servant’s role (and it was not only the masters who knew it). All of them said how much they loved the place and its inhabitants. The secret of their knowing jocularity was that they loved it all because they felt themselves to be on top of it.

  My friends in the lovely house didn’t want to be on top of it. They were making no money out of it – were in fact contributing something to it and were eager to contribute more. What made me feel uneasy about their situation was what made me feel uneasy about my own. They lived in this place, and I was visiting it, because it was so enjoyable . . . and an element in our enjoyment would have been missing if everyone there had been having the same kind of good time as we were having. It was not just the simple matter of having more servants than you could have had at home: it came from being surrounded by people who reflected a flattering light on you. In such a society a sophisticated European knows more, and knows it better, than almost all his neighbours; whether he wants to be better equipped or not, in many ways he is. Part of the lingering dream of the sweet and easy life is being among sweet and simple people on whom you would in some way be able to look down, were you not too kind and understanding to do so. These people furnish your dream.

  And while they do so – this is something you don’t always notice, although you certainly should – you are furnishing theirs. Your money, your mobility, your education, your house, your clothes, your food, your books: they are dreaming of all this and they want to live in that dream more passionately, and with far better reason, than you want to live in yours.

  I know from experience that this can’t help being a corrupting relationship. Having been assured by a travel agent that the only hotels in the Caribbean were the expensive places designed for tourists, and having been offered a free stay in one of them by the company, which apparently believed that the words ‘publisher’ and ‘publicity’ are more closely related than they are, I had started my visit to Tobago in such an establishment. It was well-run and very comfortable, and I couldn’t stand it. There may have been – probably were – people staying there who hired cars and drove about to see more of Tobago than I ever did, but if so I failed to see them. Rich old Americans wanting to enjoy familiar comforts in the sun, settling snugly into an ambience designed specifically for them – that was what I saw, and I decided at once that two days of polite acceptance of the hotel’s hospitality must be endured, after which I must find somewhere else.

  And on the second day I visited the public beach and was greeted by Mr Peters, who ran it. The beach had been provided for ‘the people’ as a sop after other and finer beaches had been leased to developers, but there were still miles of lovely shoreline from which anyone could swim, and the people would have preferred the money to be spent on roads, or a school, so Mr Peters and his staff had little to do, and a visitor had to be celebrated with a drink. When he asked where I was staying I told him, adding that I didn’t much like it and found it hard to believe that no other kind of hotel could be found. ‘Surely,’ I said, ‘there must be places where ordinary people stay?’ There was a moment’s hesitation while Mr Peters avoided exchanging a glance with his lieutenant and I remembered being told in Port of Spain that ‘ordinary’ in local usage meant ‘niggery’; but they kindly decided to accept the word in my sense and said that of course there were. Mr Peters could take me to one then and there if I wished.

  I could not have found a pleasanter little hotel – a small old estate house adapted and run by a retired schoolmaster and his wife, lifelong friends of Mr Peters, who would have been friendly to any guest and were specially so to me, because I was their very first (I was even shown the inside of the oven – spotless! – in the kitchen). And Mr Peters told them that I was ‘all right’. I don’t assume this; I heard him say it. He came by for drinks every evening, bringing friends to entertain me – he was a modest old man and thought himself dull company. We often talked politics (almost as inevitable in the Caribbean as in Ireland) and once or twice someone would pause and look embarrassed after being carried away into an anti-white remark. ‘Don’t worry,’ Mr Peters would then say with proprietorial satisfaction. ‘She’s all right, you can say what you want to her,’ and there would be a little stir of approval. It was not unmixed. There were undercurrents of suspicion (or at least, ‘Let’s wait and see’) and embarrassment. But because they were friendly people and the smallness of the community made any stranger interesting, they let approval prevail – and it was flattering.

  I could not resist enjoying it. One evening Mr Peters recalled my asking for a hotel where ‘ordinary’ people stayed, and we all laughed. They knew I hadn’t particularly meant ‘black’, but that’s what it had amounted to and I hadn’t minded, so I was ‘all right’ and it could become a joke. And I, alas, felt pleased with myself. These people appeared to overvalue me, and I was enjoying it. In other words, I was getting pleasure as a result of other people’s degradation: for what is it but degradation when black people have been conditioned to see it as something of an event when a white person accepts their compan
y? And I think it was this kind of dubious pleasure that the island offered as a subtle ‘extra’ to my friends in their beautiful house.

  The people I was with, who were also enjoying our evenings together, were just as capable as I was of recognizing its ambiguity, just as likely to feel uneasy at the little extra kick we were all getting out of each other’s company because our skins were different colours and we were acting as though they were not. Absurd as it was that we should even notice it, history had dictated that we did. And if they recoiled from this fact they would have a great deal more reason to do so violently than I would.

  I don’t say that one shouldn’t visit Caribbean countries because of this legacy, or that my friends should not have built a house there. If a dependent island becomes independent it has to learn to let the international bloodstream run through it, and the only way individuals can become sane about race is by plodding stubbornly on through the insanities. Many of them can be left behind, even within the span of one individual’s experience, so something is gained: in spite of the undercurrents, encounters like those between me and Mr Peters and his friends are better than none. But I do say that the white visitor to the Caribbean should remember that the dream he is pursuing is remote from reality, and that reality was poisoned by his own ancestors and is still being poisoned by his brothers.

  At the tail end of all colonial situations there are white people protesting that they didn’t deserve to have stones thrown at them by black men, or their houses burnt down, because they never took a penny from the place and devoted years to serving it – and often they are not lying. But even when they are not, their lament reflects their illusions rather than the injustice of the event. The black people who gathered on Tobago’s beaches to shout ‘Get out Whitey!’, and marched into hotels where they tore up visitors’ books and broke ashtrays (they were by nature a mild and law-abiding lot who didn’t want to hurt anybody) may conceivably, one day, burn down houses such as that of my friends. If that is all they do – and it may well be all, since there are few signs of constructive political thinking in Caribbean opposition politics – they will contribute nothing to their own welfare, but they will at least be expressing a more acute awareness of the truth than the people who built the houses. They will be saying that even if they cannot alter the economic structure which condemns them to exploitation, they will no longer stand being used as live furniture in someone else’s beautiful dream.