A Way in the World

by Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul

  I suppose that people had been looking for a galley shape on the island itself; they would have been looking for something big and noticeable. They wouldn’t have considered the worn rocks out at sea, which the admiral would have seen from the other side. The caravels were small; the galleys would have been even lower.

  It occurred to me that from that side, the ocean side, that first, fifteenth-century Mediterranean view might still exist; whereas from my position on the rocks I was looking at a remnant of the aboriginal island.

  It was hard to hold on to that romantic way of looking. I had never tried to do that as a child: pretend I was looking at the aboriginal island. No teacher or anyone else had suggested it as an imaginative exercise. It was something I had found myself trying to do, on visits, many years after I had gone away. And now, to leave the Point, to travel back along the county roads, the overgrown cocoa estates with their weathered grey-black cocoa drying-houses, the villages with the little wooden or concrete houses in dirt yards, to the crowded towns beside the highway, was to be taken back into a version of the colony I had known as a child. It was to be taken back to old ways of feeling, where no moment of beginning, no past, seemed possible, and the aborigines might never have existed.

  I USED TO feel—in the way of childhood, not putting words to feelings—that the light and the heat had burnt away the history of the place. I distrusted the ideas of glamour that were given us by postcards and postage stamps (ideas repeated by our local artists): certain bays and beaches, the Pitch Lake, certain flowering trees, certain buildings, our mixed population.

  Many years later I thought that that feeling of the void had to do with my temperament, the temperament of a child of a recent Asian-Indian immigrant community in a mixed population: the child looked back and found no family past, found a blank. But I feel again now that I was responding to something that was missing, something that had been rooted out.

  Like people of small or far-off communities, we liked the idea of being visited. And though I distrusted tourist-board ideas of glamour, I feel that without these ideas (if only as things to reject or react against), without the witness of our visitors, we would have been floating people, like the aborigines first come upon below Point Galera, living instinctive, unobserved lives.

  I suppose visitors, tourists, began to come in number when steam replaced sail. The tourists at the turn of the century didn’t come for the sun. They came for the sights; they protected themselves against the sun. With Edwardian layers of clothes, and with hats and umbrellas and parasols, they came to look at the diggings for the Panama Canal; they walked on the hard surface of the Pitch Lake; they looked at cocoa pods and coconuts growing on trees (crops requiring abundant plantation labour).

  They also came for the history. They wanted to be in the waters of the great naval battles of the eighteenth century, when the powers of Europe fought over these small, rich sugar islands of the Caribbean. After the First World War, that idea of glory vanished. The naval battles and the once great names of the eighteenth-century admirals were forgotten. The tourists came for the sun, to get away from winter and the Depression; they came to be in places that were unspoilt, places that time had passed by, places, it might be said, that had never been discovered. So history was set on its head; the islands were refashioned.

  EVERY YEAR the cruise ships brought one or two writers who were keeping journals and taking photographs for their “travel books.” These books, though descended in form from Victorian travel journals, were not like the books of Trollope or Charles Kingsley or Froude of fifty or sixty years before. There were no imperial “problems” now about the islands and the Spanish Main: no Victorian gloom about labour shortages after the abolition of slavery, about neglected or disaffected colonies, the rivalry of other powers, no nerves about an empire shrinking.

  These cruise books, though very much about travel in the colonies, were about a part of the world that had, as it were, been cleansed of its past. The grainy photographs of, say, the fortifications of Cartagena in Colombia were photographs of an antiquity, something dimly connected with gold and galleons and the Spanish. The ruins of the black Emperor Christophe’s Citadelle in Haiti were like an Egyptian mystery. This world was dead and safe.

  These cruise books resembled one another. They couldn’t have made much money for anybody, and I suppose they were a product of the Depression, written by hard-pressed men for public-library readers who dreamed of doing a cruise themselves one day in warm waters somewhere. Though this particular travel form required the writer to be always present, and knowledgeable, and busy, the books they wrote were curiously impersonal. That might have been because the writers had to get in everything earlier writers had got in; and also, I feel, because the writers of these travel books were really acting, acting being writers, acting being travellers, and, especially, acting being travellers in the colonies.

  The Trinidad chapter of such a book would begin with an account of docking in the morning. It would speak of the mixed population in the streets. One writer might observe African people walking about and eating bananas; another would notice East Indian women with their jewellery and Indian costumes. There might be a visit to the Angostura Bitters factory; the Pitch Lake and the oilfields; a bay; a visit to a calypso tent or, if it wasn’t the calypso season, a visit to a yard connected with one of the ecstatic local African sects, Shango or the Shouters.

  There would be a well-connected local guide in the background. He had acted as guide for other writers and knew the Trinidad drill. Apart from him—and he would be white or mulatto and slightly aloof—the local people were far away, figures in the background. Of these people anything could be said. The Africans who had been seen eating bananas by one writer might, by another writer, be put into two-toned shoes. They might be put into new and squeaky two-toned shoes; and the writer might go on to say that Africans were so fond of squeaky shoes that they took brand-new shoes to shoemakers and asked them to “put in a squeak.” As for the Indians of the countryside, they were a people apart; very little was known about their language or religion; and it was felt by the writer and his guide that this kind of knowledge didn’t matter.

  These books didn’t cause offence. Very few local people read them. Some of the more extravagant things—like the squeaks in the two-toned shoes—chimed in with the local African sense of humour, the calypso fantasy. And then—hard to imagine now—local people lived with the idea of disregard. You could train yourself to read through this disregard in books and find things that were useful to you.

  A book about Trinidad in the early 1930s had the pidgin or creole title of If Crab No Walk. It was by Owen Rutter, a name which has no other association for me. In his book Owen Rutter wrote this sentence: “The trains are all right, but the buses are a joke.” My father hung a whole article for a local magazine on these words of Owen Rutter’s. This would have been not long after I was born. Some years later—still a child—I came upon the magazine in my father’s desk. I was entranced by the article, with its comic drawings and its examples of the wit and nonsense destination-rhymes of local bus conductors. I looked at this article many times; I suppose it was one of the things that helped to give me an idea of where I was. Without the Rutter book my father might not have seen that the local buses were something he could write about. So there is a kind of chain.

  I am not sure, but I believe it was words of Owen Rutter’s again that a local literary magazine put below a photograph of a Trinidad beach: “The desolate splendour of a palm-fringed beach at sunset.” That was set next to a photograph of a sunset sky with some words from Keats below it: “While barrèd clouds bloom the soft-dying day.” Beaches and sunsets were beautiful, of course; but those words of Keats (though they didn’t match the photograph, and were mysterious) and Rutter’s foreign witness were like an extra blessing.

  We were not alone in this need for foreign witness. Even someone like Francis Parkman, with all his Boston security, when he was on the Or
egon Trail in the 1840s, felt on occasion, in the splendour of the American wilderness, that in order to show himself equal to a particular scene he had to make some comparison to Italian painting, which at that time he would have known only in imperfect reproductions.

  Perhaps there is no pure or primal gift of vision. Perhaps vision can only be tutored, and depends on an ability to compare one thing with another. Columbus saw a fifteenth-century galley where I, standing on the other side, saw a tumble of black rocks with trees that I would not have been able to recognize in another setting. Not many hours after seeing that galley, he was sailing close to the southern coast of the island, and he saw aboriginal village gardens as fair as those of Valencia in the spring. It was a comparison he had made more than once before, about islands far to the north, which are physically quite different. But it was the only way he had of describing vegetation he hadn’t seen before, and it is all that we have of the first sighting of the untouched aboriginal island.

  Centuries on, we needed our visitors to give us some idea of where and what we were. We couldn’t have done it ourselves. We needed foreign witness. But disregard came with this witness. And that was like a second setting of history on its head. Because in this traveller’s view—this distant view of people eating bananas and wearing squeaky shoes, this view of a smallness that a cruise passenger could take in in a morning or a day—we, who had come in a variety of ways from many continents, were made to stand in for the aborigines and were held responsible for the nullity which had been created long before we had been transported to it.

  AND THEN in 1937 a young English writer called Foster Morris came and wrote The Shadowed Livery, which was another kind of book. There was a big oilfield workers’ strike in Trinidad that year. I don’t know whether Foster Morris knew about local conditions before he came. But the strike and its personalities were at the heart of his book.

  Oil had been discovered early in the century; and much of the south of the island (where Columbus had seen the beautiful Valencia-like aboriginal gardens) had been turned into an oil reserve. Most of the oilfield workers in Trinidad were Africans from the small island of Grenada to the north. Local people, East Indians or Africans, could have been used; but the radicals said (and I suppose they were right) that the authorities didn’t want to disturb the local labour market and preferred to have an isolated labour force in the oilfields.

  Local people told stories about the poverty and ignorance of the Grenadians. A story I heard as a child (without fully understanding it, not knowing at that time who or what Grenadians were) was that they lived off ground provisions, which they cooked in a “pitch-oil” tin. Ground provisions were tubers—yams, eddoes, cassava, sweet potatoes. The “pitch-oil tins” were originally the tins in which vegetable oil was imported. Normally in Trinidad those tins were used afterwards for storing “pitch-oil,” which was the word we used for kerosene. So the story about the Grenadians boiling whole pitch-oil tins of ground provisions was not only a story about the grossness of their taste, the sheer bulk of the rubbishy food they could put away, but also a story about their poverty. They were too poor to buy proper enamel or black-iron Birmingham-made pots, like the rest of us; they cooked in tins that the rest of us used for pitch-oil.

  (I heard this story about the Grenadians from a quarrelsome aunt—and in my memory the aunt, as she told this story, in her usual shrieking voice, was using a woven coconut-leaf fan to get a Birmingham black-iron coalpot going on the concrete back steps of a small house in Woodbrook in Port of Spain. For two or three years many segments of our extended family, refugees from the countryside, were living squashed together in that Woodbrook lot, where there was as yet no proper sewerage. Some years later this aunt migrated to Canada. There, liberated from crowd and poverty and general wretchedness, she became an alert, generous, elegant woman—but nothing of that human possibility is contained in my memory of the shrieking woman fanning her coalpot on the back steps.)

  This story about the Grenadians and the pitch-oil tins I heard during the war, some years after they had made a name for themselves in the strike of 1937. So in the years before 1937, when they would have been even less regarded, things would have been very hard for them. And then, from among them, in all their isolation and backwardness, a leader appeared.

  The leader was a small bearded man with a long name, Tubal Uriah Buzz Butler. He was a preacher, and there was something in his passion or derangement that took the oilfield workers to a pitch of frenzy. He attracted other people as well. Many radicals, people who described themselves as socialists or communists, attached themselves to him. The strike he and the trade unions called came close to being an insurrection. A policeman was burned alive in the oilfield area. The government began to recruit and arm volunteers. The atmosphere would have been like that of 1805 or 1831, when there was talk of a slave revolt. And then, as happened in the slave days, passion died down, and people returned to being themselves.

  This was the subject of Foster Morris’s book. He wrote about Tubal Uriah Butler and the people around him. He wrote of them with the utmost seriousness. He gave them families, backgrounds; he treated what they said without irony. Nothing like this had been written about local people before. He wrote of them as though they were English people—as though they had that kind of social depth and solidity and rootedness.

  It was well-intentioned, but it was wrong. Some of the people he wrote admiringly about, like certain lawyers and teachers, were even embarrassed by Foster Morris’s misplaced social tributes. What was missing from Foster Morris’s view was what we all lived with: the sense of the absurd, the idea of comedy, which hid from us our true position. The social depth he gave to ordinary people didn’t make sense. That idea of a background—and what it contained: order and values and the possibility of striving: perfectibility—made sense only when people were more truly responsible for themselves. We weren’t responsible in that way. Much had been taken out of our hands. We didn’t have backgrounds. We didn’t have a past. For most of us the past stopped with out grandparents; beyond that was a blank. If you could look down at us from the sky you would see us living in our little houses between the sea and the bush; and that was a kind of truth about us, who had been transported to that place. We were just there, floating.

  Foster Morris, with all his wish to applaud us, didn’t understand the nature of our deprivation. He saw us as versions of English people and simplified us. He couldn’t understand, for instance, that though Tubal Uriah Buzz Butler was a kind of messiah, though in the high moments of the strike educated people like lawyers attributed to him almost miraculous powers, and felt that where he led no harm could come, these very people felt at the same time, in their bones, that he was a crazed and uneducated African preacher, a Grenadian, a small-islander, an eater of ground provisions boiled in a pitch-oil tin.

  It was that idea of the absurd, never far away, that preserved us. It was the other side of the anger and the passion that had made the crowd burn the black policeman Charlie King alive. Foster Morris didn’t appear to understand that Charlie King wasn’t hated in Trinidad; that he was to become, in fact, in calypso and folk memory, a special sacrificial figure, as famous as Uriah Butler himself, and almost as honoured, and that the place on the road where he was burned was to be known as Charlie King Corner: a little joke about a sanctified place.

  In 1937 I was five years old. So all this knowledge of the oilfield strike came to me later, when there was the war to worry about, when the Americans were in Trinidad, and the place was full of money; and the Butler affair (at least in the mind of a child) was receding fast.

  All through the war Butler was interned. There was a little excitement when he was released; but only a little. The man who had gone in as a revolutionary came out as a clown, a preacher with a grey beard, a fly whisk, a fondness for suits. He was an embarrassment to the lawyers and others who had drawn strength from him in the great days of 1937. He had brought on a new kind of politics; but h
e had himself become an anachronism. There was a new constitution; there were elections. Butler re-started his party—it had the absurd name of the British Empire Workers and Citizens Home Rule Party—and he won a seat in the new legislature; but there were more important parties now. As a member of the legislature he did nothing. He went away for long stretches to England, “to take the cold,” as it was said; and he was supported by contributions from his old Grenadian supporters. Once, when he came back, he insisted on thanking the crew of the aeroplane.

  The Foster Morris book which had seen in this man a revolutionary, a figure like Gandhi, a man who had thought out his position, someone contributing to the general unravelling of the old order, now seemed even more wrong. By the time I had left Trinidad in 1950 the book had faded, like If Crab No Walk by Owen Rutter, and all the pre-war cruise books with titles like Those Wild West Indies.

  LATER IN England, and especially after 1954, when I left the university and went to live in London and was trying to write, I began to know a little more about Foster Morris. In Trinidad we had seen him as a kind of English renegade, someone who went against all the racial ways of our colony. In England things looked differently. He had written a book about growing up, in the vein of Alec Waugh’s Loom of Youth, and some novels in the style of early Graham Greene. He had a reputation of sorts. He was a man of the thirties, very much part of the intellectual current of the time, one of the radicals waiting for the war, each man in his own way, and in the meantime going abroad on travels, not the cruise travels, not the travels of Victorian times, but travels that were helping to undermine the nineteenth-century European empires. Auden and Isherwood went to China; Orwell and others went to Spain. Graham Greene went to West Africa and then to Mexico. Geoffrey Gorer went to West Africa and wrote a new kind of book about Africa, Africa Dances. And Foster Morris went to Trinidad and wrote The Shadowed Livery.