The Writer and the World: Essays

by V. S. Naipaul

  It was this wish to be considered serious, this wish to fit people to theory, that led them into extraordinary ways. There was a problem with the Rastafarians. In Gairy’s time the Rastafarians had seemed to be on the side of the revolution, anti-Gairy, and rejectors of the capitalist system. But when the revolution came the Rastas had continued to be themselves. They refused to work or to send their children to school; they went about dirty and naked; they smoked marijuana and thought it legitimate to steal when pressed by need.

  The phenomenon was shaming to the revolution. It was decided that there were Rastafarians who were counter-revolutionaries, “counter-Rastas”; and some were picked up. There were proposals for putting Rastas in camps “with a rigid programme and pacifying music.” There were other proposals for prosecuting “lumpen” Rastas in the courts and sending them to prison farms. Criminal Rastas who couldn’t be convicted in the courts were to be put in hidden detention camps, and the militia was to provide “well-paid armed guards under supervision of party persons.” So, bizarrely, revolutionary pride, merging into an unexpressed racial pride, led some people of the central committee to contemplate the idea of the concentration camp.

  It was this kind of attitude, this wish for pure, dispassionate, classless revolutionary action, that led to the final, sudden madness: the placing of the leader under arrest, the sending of the army against the crowd, the execution of the leader and other ministers (all members of the central committee). The Revolutionary Military Council thought they had done the right thing. They were shocked by the unfriendly attitude of Fidel Castro, who refused to offer any help against an American attack. According to a hand-written note found afterwards, the Revolutionary Military Council thought the Cubans had taken “a personal and not a class approach to events in Grenada.”

  The Grenadian revolution, proving itself, destroyed itself.

  PSY-OPS were sending a team of marines on a hearts-and-minds mission to a country area.

  A CBS television crew was going with them, and I got a ride in the CBS mini-bus. The CBS evening news contained eight or nine filmed stories of about one hundred seconds each. The CBS producer hoped to make one of those stories. He had a cameraman, a woman sound recordist, a reporter (of deep, authoritative voice); a local driver, a local guide. At the end of the day a script would be telexed to New York. If New York liked the script, the producer had a helicopter, to take his film to Point Salines; and an aeroplane, to get from there to Barbados, to edit his film.

  There were so many sides to the American endeavour, so many separate ambitions feeding off one another. Grenada, again, became background.

  The mercy mission was half an exercise. The supplies the marines were taking were mainly Cuban leftovers: condensed milk, some of the tins bad. And, though there were to be visits to the sick, there were not many medicines.

  We went to a village called Munich, and stopped beside a grocery shop. It was green and wet and hilly all around. The board above the grocery door gave the name of the owner, Calliste, and said that he was the agent for a St. George’s firm who were “specialists in embalming and shipping.” The shop smelled of salt fish and oil and spices. A big, calm, middle-aged brown woman with glasses was behind the counter. She was Mrs. Calliste.

  A brown man said to her: “You see, if all-you behave yourself you all right. If you live right, police don’t come for you. You behave bad, and they come to help all-you put things in order.” Then, hurriedly, as though he felt he had said too much, he got in his van and drove away.

  A small young man, bare-chested and with the beginnings of Rasta-farian locks, came across the road. He talked about marijuana, and then, thinking I was one of the American team, he offered his services as a tracker. He was only playing bad; he was half-respectable, working a little family plot up in the hills, and suffering with other farmers from low nutmeg prices, bad transport, and no storage facilities for perishable produce. The Callistes were the biggest people in the area, he said; they had lots of nutmeg trees. In a two-storey house up the road there was another rich man; he ran a dance hall on the lower floor of his house, and he also had a bus. “He have mo’ cash. Dey”—and the young man reverentially rolled his eyes and tilted his head towards Mrs. Calliste, confident and calm behind her counter—“dey have more wort’.”

  Mrs. Calliste went to a back room. It began to rain and the chicken dung outside the shop was partly washed away. A barefoot black woman, shiny-faced, with dusty, uncombed hair, missing front teeth, and a dirty grey-blue dress, came in through the rain. She said to the girl helper, “Ask Mistress Calliste if she have clart for pocket.”

  “Clan?” an old man said. “Clart? You have to start talking Yankee now. You have to say ‘cloth.’”

  “Yes, we have to talk Yankee now.”

  The girl came back. “Mistress Calliste say she don’t have cloth for pocket.”

  “No cloth for a foreign pocket?” Foreign pocket, a foreign packet, a parcel to be posted overseas. “Ain’t she have some shopcloth there?”

  But the cloth on the shelf was a little too fine.

  “All right,” the barefoot woman said, abandoning pride. “Gimme a flour-sack.” She pointed to the glass case. “Let me see that pack of biscuits. I don’t want to buy it, eh. I just want to look at it.” She held the pack in her hand. “What? T’ree-fifty for dis?” As though she hadn’t known. In her feckless poor-woman’s way she would have loved to throw away money on the dainty biscuits, but even at fifty cents they would have been too dear for her. All she could do was to make this little display, embarrassing the people in the shop who were sheltering from the rain, village people to whom her poverty would have been well known.

  Mrs. Calliste stood again at her counter. A black marine, appearing suddenly, said roughly to her, “You own the shop?”

  His accent was difficult, and he hadn’t introduced himself or said good morning. She didn’t know how to react.

  “Where’s the owner?”

  “He not home,” Mrs. Calliste said, speaking at last.

  “When’s he coming back?”

  “About four.” Mrs. Calliste looked worried.

  “I’ll be gone then.”

  The barefoot woman took charge. She said to the marine, “You can talk to her. She is Mistress Calliste.”

  But the marine had no special message. He wanted to say only what the Psy-Ops drill required him to say at this stage. He said, “We’re going to play some music and make announcements. It’s going to be loud and there’ll be a crowd.” And he was gone.

  But there was no crowd then. That came an hour or so later, after the Psy-Ops team, guided by a local nurse and followed by the CBS crew, had made health visits to various houses.

  The rocky dirty road down from the shop was slippery after rain.

  “De sight bad,” an old man said. “Ah, but de sight bad.” He had heard about the health visits and he had put on his good clothes. He picked his way down the red road behind me, thinking I was one of the team. But there was no one to help with his eyes. And there were no drugs for the old woman whose nerves had frayed. She too, and her room, had been made ready for the visit.

  “She had a nervous breakdown,” her builder nephew said, “and she went to hospital. So far this year she have four re-occurrences. She live in that house up the hill and I brought her down with me, nuh, when she get bad. She does itch here and she does itch there, and she got those pains in her back all the time.”

  The old lady, half-crazed with pain, raised her arms. “I got these nerves. I got this pain.”

  But there were no drugs for her. The Psy-Ops doctor was distressed; he said he would come to her the next day.

  The Psy-Ops men had trained in North Carolina. Grenada was their first venture among a foreign population. The population was friendly. There were no minds to win here. Psy-Ops had run into real need, real dependence; and the men, trained for a more macho role, didn’t have the means to cope.

  The loudspeaker on t
he jeep played a curious (perhaps “pacifying”) kind of reggae, an extra drumming in the noisy tropical rain. The recorded announcements, half-threatening, half-benevolent, were repeated. Word about the visit spread to other villages. And soon outside Mrs. Calliste ’s shop there were any number of people, men and women, wanting to have their “pressure” tested.

  The CBS team had filmed a lot, tramping about in the rain. The cameraman had slipped and damaged his elbow (but saved his camera). The film work, if it did make the CBS evening news, would have been the bigger American endeavour of the day. If it didn’t make the evening news, it would have been less than the Psy-Ops exercise.

  On the way back to St. George’s we passed three schoolgirls in white blouses and navy blue skirts. One of them shouted, “White—people!” It wasn’t a greeting. It was descriptive, the equivalent of a whistle, hovering between friendly satire and aggression, something from a very old Grenada, an acknowledgement of racial distance.

  PSY-OPS hadn’t thought it necessary to deface or remove the slogans of the revolution—except on the short street up the hill to Fort George. That was where the killings by the People’s Revolutionary Army had taken place.

  The events of that day had already passed into legend. Details varied—nearly everyone claimed to be an eye-witness or participant; but there was an essential tale. When the leader had been released from house arrest by the crowd, he was weak. He hadn’t eaten for three days, either out of a fear of poison or because Cuban doctors had injected him with a dehydrating drug. He had been found naked, strapped to a bed. He couldn’t walk. The people had taken him in a car to the Fort. The soldiers there had come over to his side; his mother had sent sandwiches and orange juice for him. Then the Revolutionary Military Council had sent the armoured cars. It was an incomplete story. But it was the legend now, the story of a Grenadian passion.

  The Fort overlooked the entrance to the inner harbour. On the battlements were nineteenth-century cannon. The army barracks—police headquarters before the People’s Revolutionary Army had been created—were in a sturdy old colonial building, in the Italianate style of the Public Works Department. The American bombing had been precise and light: four holes close together in the green corrugated-iron roof. To one side of the courtyard was the prison section, rusting barbed wire stretched over the little yard into which the three small concrete cells opened.

  “Manners” had been imposed on counter-revolutionaries in that prison. Some of the prisoners had been Rastafarians; up to twenty had been held in that small space. Official red stencilled slogans—DISCIPLINE IS A MUST BE DISCIPLINED NOW AND WE WILL DIE RATHER THAN BECOME PUPPETS OF U.S. IMPERIALISM—were still mixed with confused or stoned Rastafarian protests: FOR WHAT IS A MAN OWN IF HE SHALL GAIN THE WHOLE WORLD AND LOUSE THE LOST OF HIS SOULD.

  All about the battlements was litter: flattened discarded Revolutionary Army uniforms, boots, padded boxes which had contained Russian weapons (the inventory on the lids in English), much paper, much writing. This army had studied. It had studied politics; it had studied a particular anti-aircraft weapon and done many simple written exercises. The barracks inside had more paper: innumerable written exercises, many communist magazines.

  The revolution depended on language. At one level it used big, blurring words; at another, it misused the language of the people. Here the very idea of study—a good idea, associated in the minds of most Grenadians with self-improvement—had been used to keep simple men simple and obedient.

  “My God, they’ve turned the guns on the people!” These are among the last recorded words of the leader of the revolution. A photograph taken at the time of the shooting shows the armoured cars, the army lorries, people running, and the slogan board—later painted over—at the foot of the Fort hill: POLITICS DISCIPLINE COMBAT READINESS EQUALS VICTORY.

  The revolution was a revolution of words. The words had appeared as an illumination, a short-cut to dignity, to newly educated men who had nothing in the community to measure themselves against, and who, finally, valued little in their own community. But the words were mimicry. They were too big; they didn’t fit; they remained words. The revolution blew away; and what was left in Grenada was a murder story.

  1984

  A Handful of Dust: Cheddi Jagan

  and the Revolution in Guyana

  IN THE EARLY 1930s Evelyn Waugh travelled into the interior of British Guiana, on the old Spanish Main. There were three Guianas then, British, French, and Dutch, wedged between Venezuela and Brazil. British Guiana was the largest of the Guianas. It was eighty thousand square miles, about the size of Great Britain, but with a population of only half a million. Much of this population—mainly East Indian and African—lived on the Atlantic coast, where the big plantations were. Inland, just a few miles from the colonial coast, was South American wilderness, going back to Brazil: hardwood forests, Amerindian villages, boulder-strewn rivers, falls: and, after that, the laterite savannas, with giant red anthills, and palm trees marking the course of occasional shallow rivers.

  It was on that savanna that the betrayed Waugh hero of A Handful of Dust (1934), looking for forgetfulness after his English travails, found a horrible form of social extinction: kept a prisoner on the almost empty savanna by the head of a dominant Anglo-Amerindian tribe, and made to read aloud the works of Dickens again and again.

  Guiana has always been a land of fantasy. It was the land of El Dorado; it was the site of the Jonestown commune. But what is remarkable about the Waugh fantasy is that two years after the book was published a young man from the plantation coast of Guiana started on a journey that was to echo the destiny of Waugh’s hero.

  IN 1936, WHEN HE WAS EIGHTEEN, Cheddi Jagan, the grandson of indentured immigrants brought from India to work on the coastal plantations, left British Guiana with five hundred dollars to go to study in the United States. He stayed in the United States—in Washington, New York and Chicago—for seven solid years, until 1943. He did various jobs while he studied: he finally became a dentist. Towards the end of his time in the United States he married a beautiful American woman. He also had a Marxist illumination.

  When Cheddi Jagan returned to Guiana in 1943 (his American bride following soon after, to astound the Jagan family), it was as a man with a fixed political cause. Whatever he may have thought about his Hindu or Indian or Guianese background, whatever historical or social bewilderment he may have grown to feel, was submerged in his Marxist ideas of surplus value and the universal class struggle. That was vision enough. And for fifty years, like a version of the Waugh figure—through the ending of the war, the re-emergence of Germany and Japan, the winding down of the European empires, the disintegration of black Africa, the coming and going of the Cold War, the end of European communism, through the independence of Guyana itself (spelt after independence in this new way, for no good historical or etymological reason)—Cheddi Jagan has sat waiting for his moment.

  Almost from the start he had “the oppressed sugar workers as his base”—to use words from the back cover of the 1966 East German edition of his autobiography, The West on Trial. After nearly fifty years, those workers (or their descendants) are still there, more or less. And it may be that the very purity of Cheddi Jagan’s Marxist view has helped to freeze people in their old roles.

  SUCCESS came early to him. In 1947 he became the youngest member of the colonial Legislative Council of British Guiana. In 1950 he and others launched the People’s Progressive Party. This was an extraordinary alliance of the two main racial groups of Guyana—the Africans (as they were called), descended from the slaves, and the East Indians, who had replaced the Africans on the plantations. In 1953 this party came overwhelmingly to power. It seemed then that Jagan was about to become the first leader of the first communist state in the New World. (Fidel Castro was to emerge five to six years later.) Jagan and his wife, Janet, became very famous. For a time they were demon figures in the British popular press, filling this journalistic hot spot somewhere in the int
erim between Mossadeq of Iran, who nationalized his country’s oil, and Nasser of Egypt, who nationalized the Suez Canal.

  But British Guiana was not Iran or Egypt. British Guiana in 1953 was only a colony. After three months in office, the Jagan administration was dismissed by the London government, the colony’s constitution was suspended, and British troops were sent. Under this pressure the PPP split easily into its African and Indian components. The African and Indian populations of Guyana were almost evenly balanced. Below the Marxist words on both sides Guyana went back to its more instinctive racial ways.

  The Indian vote returned Jagan to power in 1957 and again in 1961. But it was the African party that—with American help, and after serious racial disturbances—won the pre-independence elections of 1964. Ever since then, through a series of rigged elections, Cheddi Jagan and his Indian followers have been kept out of power, while—until 1984—Guyana followed a kind of Marxist-African way and became a “cooperative republic.” For the last six years there has been a turning away from “cooperative” principles; but Guyana is now as wretched as any place in Eastern Europe.

  Every important industry—bauxite, rice—was taken over by the African-controlled government; and the government gave jobs, or created jobs, for its supporters. So the communist-style tyranny of the state was also a racial tyranny; and the corruptions, petty and big, had a further racial twist. Everything became rotten in this state; everything began to lose money. More and more money was printed; in the racist state, the Guyana currency, once on a par with the currency of a place like Trinidad, became almost worthless. Imports were regulated, many items banned. Guyanese of all races began to pine for certain simple and cheap foods they had grown up on—New Brunswick sardines, Canadian flour, Canadian smoked herrings and salted fish. At a time of plenty in neighboring Trinidad (because of the oil boom of the 1970s), Guyana was experiencing want. Guyanese began to leave, legally and illegally, Indians at first, and then others; they went to Trinidad and Canada and the United States. More than a third of the Guyanese population now lives abroad.