Shikasta

by Doris Lessing

  It was extremely hot. This was the key fact of the month, overriding everything. The large and commodious mess tents were partly in the shade of some ancient olive trees, but most of the tents were in the sun. The camp simmered and baked, day after day. Water was scarce. The sanitary arrangements were just adequate. By the end, this camp was an unsavoury place. If it had not been for some showers of rain the place would have been intolerable before the end of the first week.

  I have spent several hours rereading the agents’ reports, and this resulted in my reconsidering the event. There is something here that is puzzling. That these youngsters are brilliant organizers is no news to any of us: indeed, we can benefit from learning from them. But this went beyond ordinary common sense and even good timing.

  I remind you that this ‘Trial’ seemed to begin with almost a joke – there was that quality in the first news of it. ‘The kids are deriding us again’ – that sort of thing. It seemed in bad taste, not to mention pointless, considering the real and deep violence of the passion shown everywhere on racial issues. And then, from our reports, it became evident how seriously they were all taking it. Then there was the amount of preparation that went into it – the visit to Southern Africa, for instance, which was prepared for, and followed with interest, by the Youth of the world. And finally, the participation of the highest echelons of the Armies, and the presence, in the thick of everything, of George Sherban, who always seems to be around at key moments. Incidentally, he was recommended for removal but the orders were countermanded, in order to give him time to show his hand – and I believe he has done so.

  To continue. Why Greece? Rumours were at first plentiful that the ‘Trial’ was to be held in one of the bullrings in Spain, but it was given out, with more than adequate propaganda, that ‘this would prejudice the issue, bullrings are places of blood’. Without comment. The amphitheatres in Greece? For Europeans these elicit associations of civilization and culture. The old Greeks, not noticably in a peace-loving or particularly stable or democratic people – they were a slave-state, despised women, admired homosexuality – were revered by ‘the western tradition’. Without comment.

  The amphitheatres are circular empty spaces, surrounded by tiers of circular stone seating, like benches. Uncovered. The climate is bitterly hot or cold. Has the climate then changed, or were the ancient Greeks impervious to cold and heat?

  The ‘Trial’ organization solved the problem this way. They turned day into night.

  A session was scheduled every day at five in the afternoon, after the worst heat, until midnight. Then there was a meal of salad, grains, bread. The ‘Trial’ began again at four in the morning, and went on until eight. Bread and fruit were served. Between twelve and four, there was, every night, energetic discussion and debate-informal. To start with, the entire encampment was requested to sleep or rest from nine in the morning until four. But this proved impossible. The heat inside the tents was excessive, and there wasn’t shade enough. Some tried to sleep in improvised shelters, or in the mess tents, but in fact very little sleep was had by anyone during the month.

  It was requested that no alcohol be brought into the camp at all, because of the Moslems, and because of the difficulties of maintaining order. This was respected, at least at the beginning.

  Permission had been refused by us for floodlighting, indeed, any supply of electricity. This led to some very interesting results. In fact, the extreme heat apart, it was clear that the lighting was the most important factor of the ‘Trial’.

  The arena itself was lit by torches set at intervals around the periphery. These were of the usual impregnated compressed reeds. When the moon was strong, the arena was clearly visible anyway. Without the moon, the effect was patchy.

  We must imagine the tiers of seats rising from the arena, moonlit or starlit, but without other illumination, and the groups of contenders below, lit by the moon, or inadequately by the torches. The scene made a strong impression on all my informants, and it is clear the night sessions of the ‘Trial’ were the more emotional and hard to control because of the lighting.

  All around the upper rim of the great amphitheatre were guards, changed at every sitting, and arranged so that no race would claim preferment. There was a double line of guards, one line facing in to watch the crowds on the seats, and one facing out, because of the villagers who came as close as they were allowed. As the month went by, these uninvited visitors became very many, causing increased problems of organization and of hygiene. They were nearly all elderly or very old, or small children. All were in a poor condition from hardship. That the youth were in not much better a state seemed to mollify them, and permitted some fraternization.

  I have never heard of, or experienced, any occasion which seemed to promise more opportunities for violence, riot, ill-feeling, and which in the event caused so little.

  I now come to what the ‘spectators’ – the wrong word for such impassioned participants – saw below them on that stage.

  From the very beginning it was startling. The ‘Trial’ was never anything less than visually challenging … surely not by chance?

  The arena was not decorated in any way, no slogans, banners, pennants, on the ground of danger from fire. There were only the torches, thirty of them, each one with two attendants. These were from Benjamin Sherban’s Junior Youth contingent, children of ten or so, equally boys and girls, and mostly, but not all, brown or black. The central stage, then, was ringed by children, all in responsible positions, for the torches had to be watched, and changed as they burned down, which happened every hour. Incidentally, torches which burn for three or four hours were readily available, but it was not these which were chosen. The children were in fact in control of an important aspect of the proceedings, and this set a certain tone from the moment the ‘spectators’ took their places. The ‘youngsters’, the ‘kids’, the ‘inheritors’ were being forced to reflect, every moment they sat there, that they were shortly to be set aside by the newest set of ‘inheritors’.

  On either side of the arena was a small table and a dozen chairs. That was all. Tone, arrangements, atmosphere, were casual throughout.

  On the prosecuting side was George Sherban, for the Dark Races. He has the ivory skin of a certain type of racial cross, but he is black-haired and black-eyed and could easily be an Indian or an Arab. But visually, white-skinned. With him, a changing group of every possible skin colour.

  On the defending side, it was visually as provocative. The whites always included a few brown and black people.

  The attending groups on either side changed with each session, and during the sessions there was a continual movement from the arena to the tiers and back again. There is no doubt that this was a policy designed to emphasize the informality. The Defender John Brent-Oxford was the only old person present. As I suggested before, this could be interpreted as a deliberate attempt to weaken the white side. He was white-haired, frail, obviously unwell, and needed to sit down, whereas all the others stood or walked about. He was therefore unable to use tricks of self-presentation – the sudden gesture; or stopping, arrested by new thought, in the middle of a movement; or flinging back the arms with a chest presented to the hazards of fate – all the little calculations which, my dear friend, we know the effectiveness of so well.

  He had nothing but his feeble presence, and his voice, which was not strong, but was at least steady and deliberate.

  Throughout, and the point was of course lost on no one, he was attended by two of Benjamin Sherban’s Children’s Contingent, one white and one jet black, a Britisher from Liverpool in England. These, it was soon known, had a personal attachment to him, having been befriended by him when their parents died. He was, in short, in the position of foster-father.

  Benjamin Sherban was nearly always stationed behind the old white’s chair, in a posture of responsibility for the children. His position with the Children’s Camps, which was well known to everyone, had its effect.

  My infor
mants were all without exception, struck by this disposition of the arena, that there was no clear-cut, unambiguous target for their indignation. I feel I must remark that my reports throughout this ‘Trial’ were far from boring: I wish I could say this more often.

  I come to what was heard. Now comes an interesting point. Whereas every other one of my recommendations was countermanded – troops, extra rations, standpipes for water, proper lighting – one was permitted. This was provision for loudspeakers. Yet loudspeakers were not used at all.

  Why were loudspeakers permitted? Perhaps an oversight! It is not too much to say that a large part of the time of every administrator must be spent in wondering about the possible inner significance of events that are in fact due to nothing more than incompetence.

  Why did the organizers not avail themselves of them?

  The effects were negative, increasing tension and irritation. To sit on crowded stone seats from five in the afternoon till midnight, straining to hear; to sit crammed on hard gritty surfaces from four in the morning through the rising heat of dawn until eight, straining to hear – this was hardly calculated to alleviate the general hardship.

  One of my agents, Tsi Kwang (granddaughter of one of the heroes of the Long March), sat high up on the rim of the amphitheatre in order to be able to observe everything. She reports that to begin with, when she realized she would have to strain to catch every syllable, she was angry. Murmurings and complaints filled the tiers of people. Shouts of: Where are the microphones? But these shouts were ignored, and it was left to these five thousand delegates to infer that 'The Authorities’ (us, by implication, and on this occasion in fact) had not only refused extra rations and so forth, but also ‘even’ microphones.

  Tsi Kwang reports that at that height, ‘it was as if we were looking down at little puppets’. ‘It had a disturbing effect.’ She felt ‘as if the importance of the occasion was being insulted’. (All of our agents were of course emotionally identified with the anti-white side, and were hoping that the Trial would show the whites up as total villains. Which of course it did up to a certain point. How could it not?)

  With no microphones, only the unaided human voice, everything said on that small space far below (I am seeing it as I write through Tsi Kwang’s eyes) had to be simple, because it had to be shouted. And this added to the challenge of the spectacle, for everything else was kept informal. Casual. (Except of course for the necessary guards.) But what was said had to be reduced almost to slogans or at least to simple statements or questions, for from halfway up the tiers no one could have heard complex argument, legal niceties.

  Everyone present – and all had come with their minds full of historical examples, memories of their own, or their parents’ or their ancestors’ experience of being oppressed, ill-treated – every person present had come burning with the need to hear at last! (as Agent Tsi Kwang put it) the Truth.

  The ‘Trial’ began straight away, on the first evening. The delegates were still arriving, were exhausted and some famished. Makeshift trestles stood about among sparse trees on the parched grasses, with jars of water and baskets of the local bread. These supplies vanished instantly, and everyone understood the signs of parsimony to come. The tents were going up over several acres. The first lootings had taken place and been stopped. Thousands of young people milled about. Some, from the extreme north, the Icelanders, the Scandinavians, were devastated by the heat. The deep burning skies were particularly noted by Agent Tsi Kwang. (She is from Northern Province.) The cicadas were loud. The usual dogs had arrived from nowhere and were nosing about for what they could find. At precisely four o’clock the word went around that the ‘Trial’ would begin at once. And even as those travel-tired, hungry delegates crowded on to the hot stone seats under that scorching sky, with no preliminaries at all, the two groups of contenders filed down into the arena and took their places. The torches had not yet been lit, of course, but the children were in their places, two to a torch.

  On the small wood tables were no books, papers, notes – nothing.

  George Sherban stood by the table on one side, with his group, where the shade was soon to engulf them. On the other, in full sun, sat the frail old man, the white villain, whose history of course they all knew, since word of mouth is the fastest, if not most accurate, means of conveying information. Each young person on these tiers knew of George Sherban and that the villain had been of the old British left, had been imprisoned for crimes against the people, and rehabilitated, and brought here by the Youth Armies to defend an impossible case.

  It was a restless crowd. They shifted about on the hard stone, grumbled because of the heat, the lack of microphones, that the ‘Trial’ had begun even before many delegates had come. There were the greetings of people who might not have met for years or months, at some Conference perhaps halfway across the world. And there was an under-mood of desperation and of anxiety, which did not relate to the present scene at all, but to our general preoccupation that war is obviously imminent. And perhaps, even then, before so much as a word had been exchanged between accuser and accused, it was evident to everyone that the ‘Trial’ was hardly central to humanity’s real problems, that it is not enough to ascribe every crime in the book to any particular class or nation or race – I say this relying on your understanding, for I do not want it to be thought that my long (or so it seems to me) exile in these backward provinces has caused any softening of my ability to see things from a correct class viewpoint. But our human predicament is grave indeed, and it was not possible for those five thousand, the elected ‘cream’ of the world’s youth, to sit there in those surroundings face to face, in all their gaunt threadbare hungry desperation, and not to see certain facts writ clear.

  They were allowed no more than half an hour for settling themselves, for the absorption of what they could see – of what they were being forced to see – when George Sherban opened the ‘Trial’ by strolling forward two steps from the table and saying:

  ‘I have been elected to represent the nonwhite races in this Trial by – ' and he recited a list of something like forty groups, organizations, armies. Agent Tsi Kwang said the silence was profound, for almost at once the moving and the whispering and the coughing ceased as they all understood they had to remain completely still to hear anything at all. And this was the first opportunity they all had to absorb the assault on their expectations of the man’s appearance.

  He had no list in his hand, but recited the names, long ones some of them, and some often sounding absurdly bureaucratic (I make this comment relying on our old understanding of the necessary absurdity of some forms of organization) without any aid to memory. He stood there, so said Agent Tsi Kwang, quite calm, relaxed, and smiling.

  He stood back two steps, and waited.

  The old white man in his chair then spoke up. His voice was weaker than George Sherban’s, though clear, and the silence was absolute. It seems to me that this was a silence of more than hatred or contempt, for even Agent Tsi Kwang commented that he made ‘a figure you had to think about’. For one thing, I believe that most of the youth do not see an old or elderly person from one year’s end – or decade’s end even – to the next, except as ancient creatures hurrying away from them in fear, or as clothed skeletons lying on the streets waiting for the Death Squads, or perhaps in glimpses of them forgotten in institutions waiting to die of neglect and famine. The youth do not see the old. They are not programmed to see the old, who are cancelled, negated, wiped out, ‘removed from the honourable record of history’, as Tsi Kwang so happily puts it. She was unable, she said, to take her eyes off the ‘old criminal element’. The sight of him filled her with ‘a correct and concrete loathing’. She felt he should be wiped off the face of the earth ‘like a beetle’. And similar remarks, quite reasonable in the circumstances. You will have observed that I quote this agent as often as I do – and intend to throughout this account – because of what might perhaps be described as the classic correctness of her viewpoi
nt. She can be relied upon always to supply the apt comment. The other agents, none of them up to her level, have been useful to me in my attempt to present a picture of appropriate light and shade.

  What the old ghost said was that he represented the white races – and at that point there was no reaction of boos or jeers, only silence – and he had been appointed to do this by … and here there was no long list of organizations from every part of the globe, but only ‘The Combined Coordinating Committee of the Youth Armies’.

  He remained silent in his chair, while George Sherban stood forward again and called up loudly and clearly the following words, pausing between phrases, and looking around the tiers.

  ‘I open this Trial with an indictment. This is the indictment. That it is the white races of this world that have destroyed it, corrupted it, made possible the wars that have ruined it, have laid the basis for the war that we all fear, have poisoned the seas, and the waters, and the air, have stolen everything for themselves, have laid waste the goodness of the earth from the North to the South, and from East to West, have behaved always with arrogance, and contempt, and barbarity towards others, and have been above all guilty of the supreme crime of stupidity – and must now accept the burden of culpability, as murderers, thieves and destroyers, for the dreadful situation we now all find ourselves in.’

  Throughout this there was not a sound, but as he ended and stood back, the great crowd let out a hissing groan, and ‘it was more frightening than if we had cursed the villains or hurled insults at them’. This is the comment of another of our agents, not Tsi Kwang, who confined herself to: ‘No stone was left unturned to shame the criminals standing at the bar of history’. Another comment was from a letter written by Benjamin Sherban, intercepted by us. ‘Farce has ever been my meat and drink, but I tell you that if I hadn’t eaten too long and too full of sheer bloody lunacy so that I can’t react any longer, I would have dropped dead from fright at that hissing.’ I quote this as contrast to our ever-admirable and to-be-relied-on Tsi Kwang. (You will remember that Benjamin Sherban was standing immediately behind the Defendant.)