The Writer and the World: Essays

by V. S. Naipaul

  It is hard, with Malik, to speak of a plan; he was a man who moved from event to event. But it seems that when he came out of jail his thoughts turned to real power. In 1968 he joined the Black Eagles, a Negro fantasy outfit intended as a Notting Hill version of the Black Panthers. Malcolm X, Michael X; Black Panthers, Black Eagles. The “prime minister” of the Eagles was a former Trinidad steelbandsman who had given himself the name of Darcus Awonsu. Malik became his “minister without portfolio” and got a trip to Canada in a chartered aeroplane, to attend a Black Writers Conference in Montreal. Minister, writer; and now he found he had a reputation with Chicago and Toronto blacks as the only man in England to have gone to jail under the Race Relations Act. “Travelling first found out I was Hero”: this is from the notes for Requiem for an Illusion, and it also says something about his attitude to his earlier career as the ponce X. “Hero Image greater overseas.” He had somehow made it: he began to think that he was “the Best Known Black man in [the] … world.”

  There was further proof the next year. Nigel Samuel, the son of a property millionaire, offered money for a “Black House” project in Islington. A number of shops and offices, acquired on a twenty-one-year lease, were to be converted into a black “urban village.” It was a coup: the demonstration of the creative, “Panther”-like side of the black revolutionary. But Malik had no talents. To believe in the Black House was to believe in magic; it was to share Malik’s half-belief (the con man’s semi-lunacy, which makes him so convincing) that words and publicity made real the thing publicized. Within a year the Black House was failing; and like Hakim Jamal’s Malcolm X school, like RAAS, like the Black Eagles, like the ventures of so many Negroes who act not out of a sense of vocation but trap themselves into performing, as Negroes, for an alien audience, the Black House existed only in its brochures and letterheads.

  “Emergence of American Prototype like Panthers—with home base wanting carbon copy whereas the nation encourage self.” This is from the notes for Requiem. It reads like an attempt to rationalize the failure of the Black House, to suggest that it was part of his plan. But Malik was trying many things that year; he had begun to look beyond England. He had travelled with Nigel Samuel to Timbuktu in a chartered aeroplane, and later they had gone to Guinea to see Stokely Carmichael. He had sent a not very literate emissary to the OAU in Addis Ababa. And he and Steve Yeates and, fleetingly, Nigel Samuel had gone to Trinidad. Kingship called for a black country. Everything was now pointing to an eventual return to Trinidad.

  TRINIDAD in 1969 was moving towards a revolution. The black government of Eric Williams had been in power since 1956; and something like the racial enthusiasm that had taken him to power now seemed about to sweep him away. Political life in the newly independent island was stagnant; intellectuals felt shut out by the new men of the new politics; and American Black Power, drifting down to Trinidad, was giving a new twist to popular discontents. Black Power in the United States was the protest of an ill-equipped minority. In Trinidad, with its 55 per cent black population, with the Asian and other minorities already excluded from government, Black Power became something else, added something very old to rational protest: a mystical sense of race, a millenarian expectation of imminent redemption.

  A revolution without a programme, without a head: it was something Malik might have exploited. But he didn’t make much of a political start. He “marched” with some striking bus drivers, but he puzzled them when he spoke, not of their cause, but of one of his obsessions: the need to change the uniform of the Trinidad police.

  There was also talk of a “commune.” Randolph Rawlins, a left-wing Trinidad journalist and academic, a man wearied by the simplicities and cynicism of West Indian racial politics, went one Sunday to the beach house, the site of the planned commune, where Malik was staying. Malik played tapes of Stokely Carmichael’s speeches. Steve Yeates was there, and a “retinue” of young men. “They were totally subservient,” Rawlins says, “and would react immediately. Malik’s daughter was sick. He said to one of the men: ‘Go and get a doctor.’ The chap said he didn’t know where to find a doctor. Malik said: ‘Go and get the doctor.’ I got tired of sitting down and seeing this man look ominous and talking rubbish. I adjourned to the sea.”

  Already, though, a “retinue” in Trinidad; and when Malik and his family followed Nigel Samuel back to England, Steve Yeates stayed behind. After thirteen years in England, Yeates had come home for good. Letters from Malik—busy in London with the Black House, busy with Nigel Samuel in Africa—were infrequent that year, 1969. In October Malik sent regards to “all of the Brothers” and promised a second visit by Samuel; in November he announced his imminent return, with a party of thirteen. Nothing happened, but Steve Yeates waited. One day his father, who ran a little bar in Belmont, asked him about his relationship with Malik, and he said: “It’s a long story, pappy.” A long story: Steve Yeates, black, fine-featured, with “soft hair, soft curly hair you felt you wanted to touch,” but now with the English scar on his back, and now with the Black Muslim name of Muhammed Akbar, Supreme Captain of the Fruit of Islam, Lieutenant Colonel in Malik’s Black Liberation Army.

  A black woman who had known him in the old days, when “he was the love of all the little girls in Belmont,” fell in with him again.

  He said he would never go back to England. He never spoke much about his life in London or his time in the air force. He used to tell me that I wouldn’t talk to him if I had known him in London. Steve had lots of friends, but when he came back from London he was a loner. He didn’t like parties or where there were too many people. He walked. Every night. As long as he was in Port of Spain he walked around the Savannah. Sometimes he would stop and have a coconut-water. Sometimes, if I was with him, he would sit on a bench and chat. He wasn’t working, but he always had money. He had told me he was an aircraft mechanic. I asked him why he didn’t get a job with one of the airlines. He said he didn’t want to be tied down. He never told me what his views were, but he read a lot. Castro, Che Guevara. At one time he seemed to be in on this black scene. But then he would tell you he was living with this white woman and had two children with this woman, and you couldn’t understand where he was going to and coming from. He was kinda bored. At times he would be waiting for a call, and this coded call would come. He was definitely waiting on Michael. We broke up in 1970. Just like that. The last time I saw him was Carnival night.

  With the Carnival that year in Trinidad there came the Black Power revolution that had been maturing. There were daily anti-government marches in Port of Spain; revolutionary pamphlets appeared everywhere, even in schools; sections of the regiment declared for the marchers. Even the Asian countryside began to be infected. A spontaneous, anarchic outburst: a humane society divided in its wish for order and its various visions of redemption. But the police held firm; there was no need for Venezuelans or Americans to land. The outburst died down.

  Steve Yeates took no part in these events. And Malik was later to say unkind things about the revolution. “I cannot understand people who are hell-bent on all kinds of political nonsense,” the Trinidad Express reported him as saying. “They want power or the trappings of power, but that entails hard work.”

  This was now his line, and perhaps also his delusion: that his time in England had been a time of work, that he had become the best-known black man in the world through work, and that there were lots of bogus Negroes about who wanted to reap without sowing. It was his way of rebutting those who had begun to criticize his handling of Black House money. And it was also his way of saying that though he had missed the revolution in Trinidad, he was its true leader. Negroes existed now only that Malik might lead them: life hadn’t caught up with art, but play had ceased to be play: through jest and fraud, disappointment and self-deception, Malik had reached the position that every racist power-seeker occupies. And it can be no coincidence that in March 1970, immediately after the Trinidad revolution, he started on his largest fund-raising exercise
, to make the big killing before his return to Trinidad.

  HE ANNOUNCED a Black House Building Programme Appeal. The Bishop of London was asked for his “learned advice” about the “spiritual needs” of “the many thousands who will be participating in the Black House.” A more direct appeal was made to Charles Clore: “… a fantastic world-famous reality … unique project … let us show the world that Britain is not prepared to be a drop-out in the great race of culture and progress …”

  At the same time Malik consulted Patricia East of Patrick East Associates (International Public Relations), who did the PR for Sammy Davis, Jr., in England; and East offered to handle the account “personally.” The Black House, she said, should be registered at once as a charity. She thought they should aim at setting up a string of Black Houses throughout the country. And she outlined a campaign which would, among other things, “promote the name of Michael X as a household word for the good of the community at large.” There was a further point. For her services East required £3,500 (exclusive of expenses) for the first year, payable quarterly and in advance. This wasn’t perhaps what was expected; and East, as she now says, “lost touch” with Malik.

  He went to work on his own. A standard begging letter on the theme of “Peace and Love” was devised: “… The difference in culture should not prevent men from living in peace. The men of culture are true apostles of equality.” A more businesslike letter went to Canada Life Assurance; they said no. Charter Consolidated said no, twice. A reminder was sent to Charles Clore, who hadn’t replied; and now Clore’s secretary said no.

  It must have occurred to Malik at this stage that there was something wrong with his “image.” Canon Collins was invited by “Brother Francis (Director, Planning and Development)” to pay another visit to the Black House, “this time at least for lunch.” And Malik drafted letters—“Dear Brother”—to the presidents of the university unions of Cambridge, Oxford, Reading, Swansea, Cardiff, Edinburgh and Glasgow, and asked to be invited to speak on Black Power or the Alternative Society. He claimed to have spoken at most of those universities “about three years ago”; he referred jocularly to his jail sentence; he used words like “confab” and “relate with”; in his letter to Edinburgh he said he was mentioning the names of Alex Trocchi, Ronnie Laing and Jim Haynes “as friends because it is possible that the only one you know me by could be Michael X.”

  At the same time, as a Muslim, “a worker and producer,” a builder of a mosque, a converter of the infidel and a trainer of the young (“we are able to train in excess of 500 directly and an unresearched multiple indirectly”), he was making an assault on the treasury of the Emir of Kuwait. He wrote to the Kuwait Student Union and asked to be invited to Kuwait: “As an articulator for our people I am invited to speak by all of our major universities in England.” He sent an autographed copy of his ghosted autobiography to the Kuwait embassy and, no doubt for reasons of drama, asked for it to be packaged in the presence of an embassy official and sent by diplomatic carrier to the Emir, together with a letter. He wrote two letters to the Kuwait ambassador. One asked for an “audience even if it is only for five minutes,” and drew attention to the second letter, which had been put in an envelope marked “X.” X marked the spot: “As you know, the biggest property owners in this country are Jews. Our landlords are Jews. We must get them off our backs … We ask you to deal with this our request of direct financial aid as an urgent and top priority matter. In terms of money the figure of £100,000 (one hundred thousand pounds) is a very realistic and immediate need … Yours in Islam, Michael Abdul Malik.”

  It was as another kind of Muslim, Harlem and very devout, that he wrote to his Black Muslim contacts in the United States. He reported success (“an urban village … a beautiful place to live in”); he confessed his fears about the Jews. But he reversed the Kuwaiti approach. The hard request came first; the flannel followed. “We need most desperately, a large injection of capital … Sometimes I feel very much abandoned and alone when I preach the word of the Messanger [sic]. Sometimes, when our need is very great and there seems no way to turn a Brother who has never spoken to the Holy Aposle [sic] would say to me ‘Why don’t you bare your heart to him, surely he will help.’ But somewhere in my head and maybe this is because I had the honour to sit with him and look in his eyes, I feel that it is my duty to go out and search for our needs in the wilderness of Babylon.”

  Later, in a statement at his trial, Malik summed up this period. “I returned to the United Kingdom and started winding up my business, liquidizing certain of the assets that my family had acquired for the many years we spent in Europe.”

  He encouraged some of the people around him to believe that he was successfully “liquidizing”: money or the show of money would win him those “recruits” he was looking for. But he went too far. Like a man touched by the fantasies of his own begging letters, he began to speak of fantastic sums; and he trapped himself. He said he had got £250,000 from Nigel Samuel for the Black House; and there were people who believed him. (In the Sunday Times of March 12, 1972, the “Insight” reporters gave an outside figure of £15,000.) But the Black House had little to show for £250,000; in February 1970 a cheque for £237 to the London Electricity Board had bounced; and it began to occur to some people, during this fund-raising year, that Malik might be preparing to get away to Trinidad with the equivalent of a million Trinidad dollars.

  “… Within found out that threats become Real—like being shot at—Problems with Black and Whites on organization.” The notes for Requiem for an Illusion are cryptic. But, as in the autobiography, Malik distorts one story by fragmenting it into many scattered stories; and the notes themselves later provide the key. “Relation with outside—myth of immense wealth—How did this come about.” Malik was beginning to feel that in London he was close to danger. And even later, in Trinidad, he was never to lose the fear—perhaps some threat had been made—that his children might be kidnapped.

  And there was trouble with the law again. Earlier in the year Malik and seven of his followers had been charged with demanding money with menaces from a London businessman—“a local Jewish businessman,” Malik had written to a Black Muslim in the United States. It was a complicated story about an employment agency, a black American, a job, a ring pledged in lieu of a fee. The sum involved was small, five pounds. But the businessman had been led about the Black House in a dog collar, and the case had attracted attention. Malik, for some reason, had written to the New China News Agency asking them to take an interest in the case; but what had appeared “farcical” became less so when in November Malik and five of his men were committed for trial at the Old Bailey.

  Flight to Trinidad was now urgent. But Black Power had provided Malik with a complete system; even at this stage he made it fit. He gave interviews; he went on television; and he spoke now like a Black Panther. He was giving up Black Power, he said; henceforth he was going to devote himself to constructive work. He handed over the management of the Black House to Stanley Abbott, a fellow Trinidadian to whom—in the absence of Steve Yeates in Trinidad—Malik had grown especially close during the past year: Abbott of the pale complexion and the dreamy, bruised eyes, five feet six, neat and powerful, with a straight back and immensely muscular arms. Abbott was now thirty-three, fifteen years away from home, with a life already in ruins, with fresh convictions during the two previous years for possessing marijuana, for theft and for assault. Abbott believed that Nigel Samuel had given £250,000; Abbott believed that Malik was rich, and Abbott was loyal.

  All was now set for Malik’s flight to Trinidad. Steve Yeates was there, waiting, a bodyguard. But then Malik, remembering the Black Power revolution that had failed in Trinidad, remembering the Stokely Carmichael tapes he had played and the strikers he had marched with, became anxious about how he might be received. One day, playing records to “mood” him, “for this city is full of—and viciousness and I want to feel clean and talk the truth,” he began to write to Eric William
s, the Trinidad Prime Minister. The letter quickly became hysterical, marijuana-hazy, and spread through a long postscript to seventeen pages.

  He wrote, as he had so often written, to explain himself. The bewilderment of his early life had turned, with success, to awe at himself; he could put so many patterns on his disordered experience. And now, once again, he spoke of the poverty of his boyhood; of his name of de Freitas (“there was so much dirt with him”); of his Notting Hill success (“I ran the most successful string of Gaming house and Whore houses that any Black person ever did in England”); of his great fame (“I know my name is a household word”: the Patricia East PR proposals “to promote the name of Michael X as a household word” had clearly made an impression on him).

  As he wrote, his awe at himself grew. He saw himself “living in danger on the real front line,” and from this military metaphor he developed a fantasy about his life in England:

  Up here we are walking a tightrope, at the moment its like a suicide mission, you cannot come to our aid Militarily but here we can aid you they cannot Bomb London, Birmingham Liverpool etc. to get us, it must be man to man, we are ready. There are 52,000 English troops in Germany the Reserves are low, the Irish conflict contained enough explosive Power to draw 9,000 out of Germany, and they were ill equipped. I don’t know how much longer we can hold out, A few weeks ago they were talking of Gas Ovens in the English Parliament but our morale is high.

  So many personalities during this last year in England, so many voices: the real man had long ago been lost. Yet, promoting himself as a Negro, he everywhere “passed.”