Shikasta

by Doris Lessing

  ILLUSTRATIONS: The Shikastan Situation

  [On his return from Shikasta, Johor offered the records some sketches and notes made in excess of his mandate. He believed that, as is recorded above, students of this unfortunate planet would find it helpful to have illustrations of the extremes of conduct produced by such a low concentration of SOWF. Emissary Johor tended almost to apologize for these sketches, which he admitted he had written, sometimes, for his own use, to clarify his mind, as well as to assist others. For our part, we have to point out – and we do this with Emissary Johor’s full permission – that Johor had been within the Shikastan influences for some time when these sketches were made, and these are influences which conduce to emotionalism. Archivists.]

  In the extreme western island of the Northwest fringes (mentioned already in the case of Individual Eight), which, as has been said, suffered every kind of conquest, settlement, and invasion, and this over many centuries and by so many different peoples, a period of poverty intensified to starvation devastated the economy, forced millions into emigration, and intensified deprivation of every sort. A certain youth found himself without work or resources. Except for one. He had been bred in a slum, but grandparents still on the land had kept milk and potatoes supplied to the family, and he had grown tall, broad, and strong. And stupid. He did not have the wits to emigrate and make a new life for himself. Because of his physique he was recruited into the army of the latest conquerors of the island, given a showy uniform, regular meals, and the prospects of travel. This army, like all those of the Northwest fringes, was much stratified and officered by the class-proud and arrogant, and he was at the bottom of it, with no hope of ever being treated any better than the ruling caste’s domestic animals. For twenty years he was sent from one area of Shikasta to another, all parts of a (very short-lived) empire which was soon to crumble but was then at its zenith. The function of this victim was to police a multitude of victims. From the extreme east of the central landmass to the north of Southern Continent I, the poor wretch was set to lord it over peoples belonging to civilizations and cultures older, more complex, more tolerant, and usually more humane, than his own. He was permanently half-drunk: he had drunk too much from childhood, to forget the brutalities of his existence. He had a reddened, usually perspiring face, and a wooden look that expressed his determination never to think for himself: vestigial attempts in this direction had been at once punished, all his life. Sometimes an officer would write to his family on his dictation, and these letters would always include the words: ‘Here you have only to stick your foot out and the blacks clean your boots for you.’

  In every country he found himself – and he never knew more about them than their names before he got there – he took every occasion to seat himself in a chair in a public place, with first one boot thrust out, then another, a fatuous, proud, and condescending smile on his face, while some man made shadowy by poverty crouched before him, cleaning his black boots.

  He would swagger around the policed areas of cities with a comrade, two gigantic men sometimes almost twice the size of the local people, in scarlet uniforms, braid and medals everywhere, and in one country after another this red face and fatuous smile, the shouted orders and abuse, the contempt and dislike written on the face of the barbarian, became a symbol of everything that was brutal, ignorant, tyrannical. To them he symbolized empire. And when the empire crumbled, partly because of the extreme dislike the conquered felt for their conquerors, this red-faced ox would remain an image in millions of minds – to be recalled with hatred, and with fear.

  As for him, the climates of these territories where he had eaten and drunk too much for twenty years finally gave him a stroke when he was still in his middle years. He was sent home to an island where the poverty was worse than when he had left, and which was simmering with revolt and civil war. He decided to settle in the land of his own land’s conquerors, and worked as a porter in a meat market. He married a countrywoman, who had been a children’s nurse – eighteen hours a day, six and a half days a week, for her food, and a roof and a pittance. She had never had any prospect of escape but marriage and she was relieved to marry this strong soldier who stood nearly two feet taller than she, swaggering in scarlet, and soon to be pensioned off.

  This tiny pension was to her security, a haven; and in fact it did ward off the extremes of poverty, which were exacerbated by his drinking.

  There were four children alive from seven born.

  The wife and the children would sit in their wretched rooms in the evenings, waiting for him to crash and stumble up the stairs, hoping for the best that could happen, which was that this man would not shout and rage and threaten to hit them, and then weep and sit sobbing himself into a maudlin sleep; but would be in a good mood, and would sit at the head of the table, master of his household, great legs stretched out, his swollen and scarlet face complacent as he told them: ‘In them countries I had only to stretch out my foot and those blacks came fighting to clean my boots.’ And, ‘We ‘ad only to show our faces and them black buggers ran for it.’

  He died in a paupers’ hospital. He sat propped on pillows, his medals pinned to his pyjamas, his great face bursting with apoplexy, his little blue eyes popping from folds of red flesh, and his last words were: ‘We ‘ad only to show our faces and them black beggars ran for their lives.’

  ILLUSTRATIONS: The Shikasta Situation

  This particular incident took place in the southern part of Southern Continent I, but it was repeated in a thousand ways during the time the Northwest fringes used an advanced technology to conquer other parts of Shikasta so as to rob them of materials, labour, land. This particular geographical area was well favoured, being high, well watered and wooded, with a healthy dry climate. The soil was fertile. It supported a wide variety of animals. And it was lightly populated by a tribe with a particularly agreeable nature, being peace-loving, good-humoured, laughter-loving, natural storytellers, and skilled in the crafts. All the inhabitants of Southern Continent I were embedded in music: singing, dancing, the making and the use of innumerable musical instruments were the ground of their natures. They lived in balance with their surroundings, taking no more than they were able to put back. Their ‘religion’ was an expression of this oneness with the land they lived in, medicine was an extension and an expression of their religion, and their wise men and women knew how to cure the sicknesses of the mind. This admirable state of affairs had not been long-lived: all Southern Continent I had been raided for slaves over centuries by other peoples, but the traffic had recently been stopped, and there had been a period without invaders from outside, or wars among themselves.

  These people had heard tales from the south about the white people who conquered and made slaves, who stole land: there had been explorers and travellers of various kinds, some of them ‘religious’. The wise men and women, seers and warners, had said that this part too would be visited by white people, and that they would have to fight for their existence. But the temperament of these tribes did not make for anxiety and foreboding.

  One day appeared a long column of white people, on horses or in carts. The watching black people were amazed, because of the bizarre appearance of these invaders. Also because of the horses. Someone laughed. Soon they could not stop themselves laughing. Everything struck them as comical. First, their colour, so pallid, and unhealthy. Then their clothes, they themselves wore very little, since the blessed climate made this possible. But the intruders were loaded with bunches and protuberances and excrescences of every sort, and they had extraordinary objects in their heads. Then, their stiff solemnity, their awkwardness. They could not move. Never before had the watchers had to think of their own accomplishments, but now they looked at each other and themselves and saw how well they stood, walked, sat, and how they danced. The changing pulses of the landscape they were part of fed their own flow of movement, but these newcomers they were examining with such incredulous laughter were unable to stretch out an arm to take
a step, were as clumsy as if they had been cursed. And then, their impedimenta: What sort of people were these who could not travel without enough baggage to load down so many waggons, drawn by so many oxen? Why did they need it? What did they do with it all?

  They wondered, they marvelled, and at evening they saw these sticks of people, so encumbered with their clothes, standing stiffly upright, their arms down by their sides, and emitting sounds … but what sounds could these be? There was no music in it, no rhythm, it was like the howling of hyenas.

  But. There were the horses. These people did not know horses except by rumour. The variety of ‘deer’ used to pull the waggons intrigued them, and the way they were ridden made them wish to do the same. And there were guns, which could kill at a distance. First they laughed, then admired; and only later were they afraid.

  When emissaries from the invading column came to ask for the use of their land, permission was readily given. The concept of ownership of land was unknown to them: land belonged to itself, was the substance of the people and animals who lived on it, was saturated by the Great Spirit who was the source of all life.

  And within a couple of years, they found their traditional lands and hunting grounds gone from them, and themselves being chased away, like animals. But above all, they were treated with a coldness and contempt which they did not understand, had no experience of, and which shrivelled the spirits of these amiable and warmhearted people. They had as little defence against this withering thing as ‘primitive’ peoples in other parts of the world had against the diseases the white people brought with them.

  Their wise men and women did not agree about what course was to be taken, or even about the probable outcome. That they had to fight for what had been stolen from them was clear. It was as if the invasion of these aliens had stunned the natural feelings of the natives, stopped their instincts and intuitions. How should they fight? When? Where? Above all, why? – when the country was so large and there was so much room in it. But the invaders seemed to be everywhere, already.

  The subjected ones, seeing that they would shortly have nothing left, rose in rebellion. The intruders, using the technology of their foreign culture, suppressed the rebellion with extremes of cruelty and ruthlessness.

  It is necessary to describe the cold distaste and dislike felt by the whites for the blacks, which remained their characteristic until the time came – shortly, but not until the culture they dominated was smashed, in ruins – for them to be thrown out again. Nothing is more astonishing than this characteristic, contemptuous dislike, described again and again by the conquered, and by many, too, of the conquerors, for not all the whites despised the blacks, some liked and admired them, though these were thought of as traitors by their own people.

  We may perhaps find illumination in the work of one of Shikasta’s own experts (Marcel Proust, sociologist and anthropologist). A servant of a rich family is ordered to prepare a fowl for the evening meal. She is chasing this fowl around a courtyard, muttering Filthy Beast, Disgusting Animal, and similar imprecations, while she catches the bird and kills it.

  So, too, a torturer new to his job, who has to inflict pain and humiliation on some person he knows nothing of save that this is the enemy: there in front of him or her stands, or lies, or sits a puzzled frightened creature, just like himself, but there is a remedy: the torturer will work himself up to the task by calling the victim all the frightful things his tongue can come by. Soon this individual exactly like himself is a disgusting beast, a filthy animal, and the work can begin. One might describe this process as a tax exacted by fellow-feeling (SOWF) on natures not yet entirely brutalized.

  And thus with the conquerors of a country, who will persuade themselves that these people whose land they are in the process of stealing from them are dirty, primitive, cruel, communists, fascists, capitalists, nigger lovers, white trash, or anything that comes to mind.

  Thus it is that seldom in Shikastan history has any race or people conquered a pleasant civilized and amiable race of people quite competent to manage their own lives.

  The white people who overran Southern Continent I, using every kind of trickery, lie, brutality, barbarity, cruelty, and greed to grab everything in sight, could never speak to a black person without a cold cutting edge of contempt, due to him or her as a backward and unenlightened person.

  Their religion reinforced their disabilities. Of all the major religions the most self-righteous, the most inflexible, the least capable of self-examination, this religion of the Northwest fringes, imposed often by forces on people in perfect rapport with themselves and their beliefs as children of the Great Spirit, was officered by individuals incapable of doubt as to their own capacities and rights. To add to the confusion and damage they caused, some were often of great bravery and dedication, with the utmost probity, and capacity – not to say thirst – for self-sacrifice. That they, too, were victims, of a religion as bigoted as Shikasta has ever seen, does not aid the chronicler of these events.

  But whatever the reasons, whatever the motives, whatever the excuses and the rationalizations, the dominating characteristic of these conquerors was their armour of righteousness, their conviction that they were in the right. Because of their empire. Because of their religion.

  Thirty years after this particular geographical area was subjugated, this was the scene: land that had been the home of people whose living on it had left no mark, no signs of depredation, had been parcelled out among white farmers there on favourable terms for the specific purpose of keeping it out of the hands of the blacks, who had been moved, by gun and by whip, into special reservations of the poorest land, from which they were forbidden to move unless to seek work. Great farms of many thousands of acres were in the hands of single families, and were already largely denuded of trees often cut for mine furnaces, were scarred by mine workings and prospectings, threatened by erosion, swept continually by fires.

  On each farm were ‘compounds’ of black farm workers, forced out to work by the imposition of taxes. The black people could be only labourers and servants.

  Their masters represented extremes from their own countries in the Northwest fringes. They might be the most enterprising, who needed more scope for energy and talent than an increasingly overpopulated area allowed them. They might be criminals hoping to escape notice, or people with criminal tendencies knowing that there would be room for these here. They might be too stupid or disabled to compete among their own kind. All these people, good or bad, competent or not, lived at a level higher than they could possibly have done in their countries of origin, and many became extremely wealthy.

  Let us eavesdrop on a moment of peculiar clarity among the subjected.

  The place is a white farm, and the black compound on that farm. This is a haphazard collection of mud huts thatched with straw, leaking, tumbledown, squalid: a pathetic version of the villages used by these people in their natural state.

  A big fire burns in the centre of this compound, as burns always in the villages, but there are subsidiary fires as well, and not only for the purposes of cooking: it is not one tribe here, but several, for workers have come from over a wide area containing many tribes. A dozen languages are being spoken, and this compound, based on the village whose nature it is to hold people together in a whole, is riven into factions, sometimes hostile. By one of the subsidiary fires a group of young men crouch, listening to an older man, who before the white man’s coming was a chief. A young man on the edge of this group softly taps a drum. Other drums sound from other parts of the compound. From the bush all about come the sounds of insects and sometimes animals, but the process is already advanced that will shortly clear the area of its stock of natural animals and birds: species are becoming extinct.

  There was a fight this afternoon among two young men of different tribes. Its cause was frustration.

  The white farmer had then lectured the two on their warlike spirit, their primitive ways. It was backward and primitive to fight, he ha
d said. The white people were here to save the unfortunately backward blacks from this belligerence, by their civilized and civilizing example.

  The older man was sitting upright, the firelight moving on his face, which was showing relish and enjoyment. He was entertaining them: his family had been the traditional storytellers of his subtribe. The younger men, listening, were laughing.

  The older man was surveying the white culture from below, the sharp slave’s-eye view.

  He was enumerating the white farms and the white men who owned them.

  This was about five years after the end of World War I, which had been presented to these black people as one fought to preserve the decencies of civilization. There were half a dozen farmers in the area who had fought on the other side in that war, who also presented their part in it as a defence of the fundamental decencies.

  ‘On the farm across the ridge, the man with one arm …’

  ‘Yes, yes, that is so, he has only one arm.’

  ‘And on the farm across the river, the man with one leg …’

  ‘Yes, only one leg, one leg.’

  ‘And on the road into the station, the man who has a metal plate to hold his intestines in.’

  ‘Yes, what a thing, that a man must keep in his intestines with a piece of iron.’

  ‘And on the farm where they are mining for gold, the man who has a metal piece in his skull.’

  ‘Ah, yes, it is true, his brains would spill everywhere without it.’

  ‘And on the farm where the two rivers meet, the farmer has only one eye.’