The Writer and the World: Essays

by V. S. Naipaul

  Two hundred miles away, beyond the forest and the brown savanna land with the giant anthills, lay the Brazilian border. It seemed that he was making for this, but later he said: “I knew of a person in the interior who was a good and wise person to counsel with. I thought I would find this person … I have always been to counsel with people who can see things. You have a man here in Trinidad called Harribance. I go to him. I like these people. I thought I would go to this person and counsel with him and find out what is happening because it was not something I could reason out.”

  He was on the trail for three days. He was now barefooted: the new shoes that had been bought for him in the capital didn’t fit or had become too painful. About four or five in the afternoon of the third day he saw two Land-Rovers. Government Land-Rovers: a survey team: a camp. He waited for two or three hours. About half-past seven he went to the men in the camp. He said, “Good night, gentlemen,” and introduced himself as a journalist. They gave him a cup of coffee. He said—too vaguely—that he wanted to go “down the trail”; and after about half an hour he and a man called Caesar and another man left the camp in a Land-Rover.

  Malik asked Caesar about the road to Brazil, and about his religion. Caesar, a handsome man, big and very black, said he belonged to a local Africanist group which was something like a Black Power group. Malik—the X again—said that police all over the world were looking for him. But then he must have had an intimation of betrayal. And his mind worked fast. He said there were two messages he wanted Caesar to take back to Georgetown, the capital. One was for Mrs. Malik: Caesar was to tell her that he, Malik, was safe. The other message was for Caesar’s Black Power Leader: Caesar was to tell him that there was a police informer in the group.

  After five or six miles Malik, who had become restless, was set down at a place called Bishop’s Camp. Bishop was a small elderly Negro, a solitary in his bush “farm”; and his “camp” was two thatched shelters, one with no walls. He gave Malik some stew-and-rice and “sweet broom” herb tea. Thousands of police were after him, Malik said; and Bishop said (the real-life adventure, now in an unexpected forest setting, echoing that scrap of Malik’s man-on-the-run fiction) that Malik could stay in the camp for the rest of the year.

  Malik was tired, and during this last night of freedom his talk was disordered. He asked repeatedly about Brazil, and his safety in the camp; he said he had no faith in Caesar. He remembered the Trinidad commune, and that fantasy of “agriculture” became fact. He said he would teach Bishop “how to grow greens.” He said he wanted a job: he could “plant.” Bishop should plant mustard and celery in boxes and after three weeks plant them out eighteen inches apart. He asked Bishop if the river was far. Bishop said it wasn’t far; but Malik said he would show Bishop how to get water from the river without walking to the river. He remembered England, and especially Rachman, the slum landlord for whom he had worked in the early days in London; and Bishop must have been puzzled. To Bishop it seemed that Malik was saying that he had owned a big boarding-house in London, with a big garden, that he had kept a big dog and a revolver, and that when tenants couldn’t pay he had put them out, but that he had always been nice to Guyanese.

  Bishop made up a low “cot” for Malik in the open shelter. Malik, lying down, seemed to groan. He said his feet were cold; Bishop gave him a sack for his feet. Malik presently fell asleep. But Bishop didn’t sleep: he was frightened of Malik’s “piece of cutlass.” All night he watched Malik.

  At about half-past five, when it was still dark, the camp dogs barked, and Bishop saw the police; Caesar was with them. They surrounded the shelter and waited. It quickly became light, and “the form of a fair-skin man lying on the lower or western cot” became distinct to the police superintendent. At five to six they began to close in. Bishop, still watchful, pointed to Malik’s airline bag and cutlass. At six, daybreak, the superintendent tapped Malik and awakened him.

  When he saw the police he was, as he said later, relieved. His feet were hurting; he doubted whether he could walk. He was taken to Georgetown; the next day he was declared an undesirable immigrant and flown back to Trinidad.

  THE DISCOVERY of the body of Gale Benson had been the sensation; but the first inquiry was about the killing of Joseph Skerritt, who had been buried below the lettuce patch, and it was for the murder of Skerritt that Malik and three of his commune were tried four months later. When the grave was discovered, an anonymous woman caller had told The Bomb that the body, then not yet identified, was that of a “brother” who had failed to “abide by the rules of the organization.” And Skerritt’s killing was indeed in the nature of an execution.

  Malik was uneducated, but people in England had told him that he was a writer; and he did his best to write. There were also people who had told him—ponce, con man—that he was a leader (though only of Negroes). So he had read books on leadership; and once, borrowing a good deal from what he had read, he had even written a paper on the subject. “I have no need to play an ego game,” he wrote, explaining his position, “for I am the Best Known Black man in this entire [white western world deleted] country.” Leaders were workers, doers, finders of tools, “be it money, hammers or saws”: the “masses” came of their own accord to such leaders. But it was not always pleasant to be a leader. “Leaders are feared even by those closest to him … and others will envy him … here one needs an Iron Hand for one may be tempted to placate the doubter with a gift, and the only real gift one can give is silence.” Borrowed words, almost certainly; but Malik was made by words. And Joe Skerritt was a doubter.

  The previous year, when Skerritt had been charged with rape, he had gone to Malik for help, and Malik had talked the girl out of making trouble for Skerritt. But then Skerritt had become uneasy with Malik; he began to hide from him; and to Mrs. Skerritt it even seemed that her son was being ungrateful. At last, on February 7, Malik came with some of his commune to the Skerritt house in Port of Spain; and they took away Joe with them to Arima “for a few days.”

  Skerritt loafed about the garden that day, doing the odd jobs. In the evening he and three of the commune got into a hired car and went for a drive. When they were on the Arima-Port of Spain highway, Abbott, the driver, said they were going to raid a police station for arms. Skerritt said he wanted none of that; and Abbott immediately drove back to Christina Gardens. Malik said, “Joe, boy, you say you ready for work, and now that I’ve sent you to work, you refuse to go?” He looked at Skerritt and shook his head, and said to the man escorting Skerritt to his sleeping quarters that he should give Joe a Bible or something to read.

  A sudden decision, it would seem; but—from the evidence given at the trial—what followed was well planned. In the morning Steve Yeates drove Mrs. Malik and her children to Port of Spain. That wasn’t unusual. Malik announced that the commune was going to dig a “soakaway” that day. That wasn’t unexpected. The ground flooded easily; a soakaway helped drainage, and Malik had taken advice from a qualified man about soakaways. A pit had to be dug down to where the soil changed; and then it was to be filled in with a bottom layer of stones and a top layer of earth.

  So all morning—Malik from time to time interrupting his “writing” in the “study” to superintend—some men dug and two others brought jeeploads of stones to the house. Joe Skerritt, in his “old clothes,” jeans and a green jersey, helped with a wheelbarrow, taking the stones from where the jeep dropped them to the far north-western corner of the garden. At about one o’clock the pit was deep enough. Malik told the two men in the jeep to go and “cool off” at a farm they all knew and then to bring a load of manure.

  When they left, there remained in the garden Malik, three men, and Joe Skerritt. One of the three men walked away from the hole. Malik, with his revolver in a shoulder holster, and with a cutlass in his hand, went down into the pit and said to Abbott, “I am ready. Bring him.” Abbot locked his arm around Skerritt’s neck and jumped with him into the pit. Malik, using his left hand to hold Skerritt by his long
Afro hair, chopped him on the neck and then, still with his left hand, threw him aside. The gesture, of “contempt,” appalled Abbott. Skerritt cried out, “Oh, God! Oh, God!” and began stumbling about the pit. Malik, now out of the pit, lifted a large soakaway stone with both hands and brought it down on Skerritt’s head, and Skerritt, close to death, cried out like a child, “I go tell! I go tell!” Malik hurled three or four more stones at Skerritt, and then Skerritt was quiet. Then the four men—the fourth man called back to help—began to fill in the pit, the stones below, the earth on top.

  When the two men returned with the jeepload of manure from the farm, they saw that the stones had disappeared, the soakaway was half–filled in; they helped finish the filling in. And when presently the Malik family returned from Port of Spain, the commune was the commune again. As for Skerritt, “the strange young man” who had turned up the day before, he had just gone away again. The foolish boy had gone to Canada or the United States, but he was going to find things hard “outside”: that was what Mrs. Skerritt was told. And that, at the trial, was Malik’s story: that Joe Skerritt had just disappeared.

  ABBOTT, who had jumped with Skerritt into the pit, was sentenced to twenty years. Malik was condemned to hang. Some people stood by him. One of them was Rawle Maximin, a boyhood friend, the garage owner whose cars Malik had often hired. Maximin visited Malik at the Royal Gaol in Port of Spain. One day, many months later, when he was waiting for the verdict on his appeal, Malik said to Maximin, “You were with me that day when I went to see Harribance. Can you remember what Harribance said?” “He hadn’t forgotten,” Maximin says. “He just wanted to hear me say it. So I said to him, ‘Harribance told you that you would leave Trinidad and go to Jamaica, and then you will be the ruler of the Negroes in the United States.’ And he said, ‘Good, good.’ And began to pace up and down that little cell.”

  To be the ruler of Negroes: so that, at the end, for Malik and his well-wishers abroad (mainly white, and they continued to send him money), Negroes existed only that Malik might be their leader. Malik saw himself as a man who had always risen: a semi-educated Port of Spain idler, one of thousands; then a seaman; then a Notting Hill pimp and gangster; then the X of London; then, at thirty-seven, “the Best Known Black man in this entire white western world.” It was as a London success that he had come back to Trinidad in January 1971. “I’m not here to make my way,” he told the Trinidad Express. “I’ve made that already.” But he believed he could “help.” “I’m not interested in elections and stuff like that. The only politics I ever understood is the politics of revolution—the politics of change, the politics of a completely new system.”

  Revolution, change, system: London words, London abstractions, capable of supporting any meaning Malik—already reassembling his gang, his “commune”—chose to give them. There were people in London who were expecting Malik, their very own and complete Negro, to establish a new government in Trinidad. There had been a meeting; someone had made a record. The new government was going to underwrite the first International University of the Alternative, “the seat of the counter-culture of the Alternative.” Words, and more words: “I cannot go into details,” Malik had said. “But I can say this. The new university will be an experimental laboratory of a new and sane life-style.” But—the eternal warning of the X, the eternal thrill and flattery—the white people who came to Malik’s Trinidad (an airbus service was promised to all international capitals) had to remember that there was “a just hatred of the white man” in the heart of every black; and they had somehow to get over the fact that they “belonged to the race of the oppressors.”

  The leader, the unique spokesman of Negroes dangerous with a just hatred; but the crowds at his trial were good-humoured, even gay. No one jeered; he was a martyr to no cause. Only Simmonds, the white woman who had had “total involvement” with Steve Yeates during her six weeks at the commune, only Simmonds, flying down from England, gave the photographers a clenched-fist salute; but she had a return air ticket. To the Trinidad crowds Malik had become a “character,” a Carnival figure, a dummy Judas to be beaten through the streets on Good Friday. Which was all that he had been in London, even in the great days of his newspaper fame as the X: the militant who was only an entertainer, the leader who had no followers, the Black Power man who was neither powerful nor black. He wasn’t even black; he was “a fair-skin man,” half-white. That, in the Trinidad phrase, was the sweetest part of the joke.

  2

  IT WAS IN LONDON that Malik became a Negro. And perhaps only someone who knew that he wasn’t really a Negro—someone who knew that when the time came he could go off and play another game—could have worked so hard at the role, and so guyed it. He was shallow and unoriginal; but he sensed that in England, provincial, rich and very secure, race was, to Right and Left, a topic of entertainment. And he became an entertainer.

  He was the X, the militant, the man threatening the fire next time; he was also the dope peddler, the pimp. He was everybody’s Negro, and not too Negroid. He had two ideas of his own. One was that the West Indian High Commissions in London paid too little attention to their nationals. The other, more bizarre, was that the uniform of the Trinidad police should be changed; and this was less an idea than an obsession. Everything else was borrowed, every attitude, every statement: from the adoption of the X and the conversion to Islam, down to the criticism of white liberals (“destroying the black man”) and the black bourgeois (“they don’t know the man from the ghetto”). He was the total 1960s Negro, in a London setting; and his very absence of originality, his plasticity, his ability to give people the kind of Negro they wanted, made him acceptable to journalists.

  “Michael X once told me,” Richard Neville writes in Playpower, “that hippies were the only whites his people could talk to.” And Malik was always willing to be instructed in his Negro role. Late in 1965, when he was working on his autobiography (subsequently ghosted by an Englishman, and published in 1968 under the title of From Michael de Freitas to Michael X), he sent the manuscript to an English adviser, and received a long memorandum in reply. “… At this juncture you may look at the negro’s relationship with the whiteman throughout the world. Use South Africa, Rhodesia, England, Portugal and America to speak of the heart-lessness of white society. Use slavery, use the recent massacre of the Jews at Auschwitz and Belsen … Chapter 15 You ought to close powerfully, frighteningly perhaps, on ‘This I Believe.’ Your own true statement of one displaced black man in this particular context of history …”

  So cliché led to cliché. And, inevitably, the racial clichés that Malik was led to, via the “counterculture,” were sometimes pre-revolutionary. Once, aiming no doubt at the underground press, he wrote a kind of parable about an Anglo-Saxon called Harold, a Jew called Jack, and a Negro, who was himself. “All we have in common is two hands, two feet a head. I must admit mines are infinitely nicer to look at for their bodies are covered with a sickly pale whitish skin and even they can recognize it for what it is. Harold expressed a desire early in our talk to go somewhere in the sun and transform. I see his point for when he was saying this I followed his eyes caressing my beautiful golden brown skin my inheritance from my African [insertion: and Portuguese] forefathers.”

  It is a “difficult task for three people of as diverse Racial Charisterics as ourselves to truly communicate.” But they are good friends, and agree to talk of their “most secret desires.” Harold the Anglo-Saxon wants to search for truth. “Jacks not as simple as that”: Jack the Jew wants to “make things for people, the people he’s closest to are naturally his own people, Jews he will make whatever they need, money, Clothes, Factories.” And Malik, the Negro, sees “the great divides that exist between us of different Races for my own search is one of happiness to create Joys for myself and others to hear Laughter, to give … But what a strange dilima this throws us into when I give to him the seeker after truth my humble present and he in his search looks into my little gesture for a deeper
motivation or Jack when he makes a garment, and I say how lovely, could I have one and he tells me x Pounds.”

  Malik’s ghosted autobiography was a publishing failure; one of his white patrons bought up most of the copies. The tone of the book is determinedly gay; there are lots of sex and parties—the ghost, easily turning oppressed blacks into abandoned spooks, seems in places to have excited himself with thoughts of a Michael X musical. But it is not an easy book to read.

  It is not the story of a life or the development of a personality. The narrator, from his London eminence as the X, the reformed Negro ponce who is now the Negro leader, assumes that the events of his life are well known; and he is concerned only to present himself in all his Negro roles. Events accumulate confusedly around him; he is without a personality; he is only a haphazard succession of roles. At the time of his meeting with an unidentified young property millionaire, who is interested in art—the narrator appears, without warning, as a painter (“my abstracts and surrealist portraits”); and he supports this role for exactly seventeen lines. Equally sudden, equally successful, and almost as brief, are his manifestations as Negro poet, writer, and even as a teacher of “basic English” at something called the London Free School.

  The only other considerable figure in the autobiography is Malik’s mother; and she is as puzzling as Malik. She appears first of all as a ferocious old-fashioned black woman, concerned about appearances and forever preaching the beauty of whiteness. She doesn’t like her son to play with black children or to get his hands dirty; she is snobbish; when she goes to the Port of Spain market she refuses to speak French patois to the marchandes and insists that her son speak English; she sends her son to an “exclusive” school. This is overstated, but it has a certain logic. But then, just twenty pages later, the mother is suddenly a drunkard, hysterical, quarrelsome, wearing appalling Negro-woman’s clothes. One day her son finds her sleeping in the fowl coop, which she says she has converted. Suddenly she is a “hustler”; suddenly, coming to London, she is transformed into a successful and jolly brothelkeeper.