The Middle Passage (10 page)

This, with its unintentional irony, its ignoring of the squalid history of the region, is a good Empire Day exhortation; not surprisingly, for this willingness to forget and ignore is part of the West Indian fantasy. Surely the words of Trollope and the white lady of Jamaica can give the West Indian a better perspective on his situation.

Twenty million Africans made the middle passage, and scarcely an African name remains in the New World. Until the other day African tribesmen on the screen excited derisive West Indian laughter; the darkie comic (whose values were the values of the Christian-Hellenic tradition) was more admired. In the pursuit of the Christian-Hellenic tradition, which some might see as a paraphrase for whiteness, the past has to be denied, the self despised. Black will be made white. It has been said that in concentration camps the inmates began after a time to believe that they were genuinely guilty. Pursuing the Christian-Hellenic tradition, the West Indian accepted his blackness as his guilt, and divided people into the white, fusty, musty, dusty, tea, coffee, cocoa, light black, dark black. He never seriously doubted the validity of the prejudices of the culture to which he aspired. In the French territories he aimed at Frenchness, in the Dutch territories at Dutchness; in the English territories he aimed at simple whiteness and modernity, Englishness being impossible.

*    *    *

Living in a borrowed culture, the West Indian, more than most, needs writers to tell him who he is and where he stands. Here the West Indian writers have failed. Most have so far only reflected and flattered the prejudices of their race or colour groups. Many a writer has displayed a concern, visible perhaps only to the West Indian, to show how removed his group is from blackness, how close to whiteness. The limits of this absurdity were reached in one novel when a light-skinned Negro (or, as the writer prefers to call people of this group, a ‘good-class coloured’) made a plea for tolerance towards black Negroes. In the context it was not the plea that mattered, but the behaviour: light-skinned Negroes, it was implied, have the same feelings as white people and the same prejudices, and behave just like white people in a certain type of novel. So the brown writer will have his brown heroes who behave whitely, if not well; they will further establish their position by being permitted to speak as abusively as possible of other groups. This yearning to be thought different and worthy is not a new thing. A hundred years ago Trollope found that ‘coloured girls of insecure class’ delighted in speaking contemptuously of Negroes to him. ‘I have heard this done by one whom I had absolutely taken for a Negro, and who was not using loud abusive language, but gently speaking of an inferior class.’ The black writer is now, of course, able to retaliate; he might speak, as one writer has done, of ‘English soldiers smelling of khaki and their race’. To the initiated one whole side of West Indian writing has little to do with literature, and much to do with the race war.

The insecure wish to be heroically portrayed. Irony and satire, which might help more, are not acceptable; and no writer wishes to let down his group. For this reason the lively and inventive Trinidad dialect, which has won West Indian writing many friends and as many enemies abroad, is disliked by some West Indians. They do not object to its use locally; the most popular column in Trinidad is a dialect column in the
Evening News
by the talented and witty person known as Macaw. But they object to its use in books which are read abroad. ‘They must be does talk so by you,’ one woman said to me. ‘They don’t talk so by me.’ The Trinidadian expects his novels, like his advertisements, to have a detergent purpose, and it is largely for this reason that there are complaints about the scarcity of writing about what is called the middle class.

In fact there is a good deal of West Indian writing about the middle class, but the people tend to be so indistinguishable from white and are indeed so often genuinely white that the middle class cannot recognize itself. It is not easy to write about the West Indian middle class. The most exquisite gifts of irony and perhaps malice would be required to keep the characters from slipping into an unremarkable mid-Atlantic whiteness. They would have to be treated as real people with real problems and responsibilities and affections – and this has been done – but they would also have to be treated as people whose lives have been corrupted by a fantasy which is their own cross. Whether an honest exploration of this class will ever be attempted is doubtful. The gifts required, of subtlety and brutality, can grow only out of mature literature; and there can be advance towards this only when writers cease to think about letting down their sides.

The involvement of the Negro with the white world is one of the limitations of West Indian writing, as it is the destruction of American Negro writing. The American Negro’s subject is his blackness. This cannot be the basis of any serious literature, and it has happened again and again that once the American Negro has made his statement, his profitable protest, he has nothing to say. With two or three exceptions, the West Indian writer has so far avoided the American Negro type of protest writing, but his aims have been equally propagandist: to win acceptance for his group.

‘Comedy,’ Graham Greene says, ‘needs a strong framework of social convention with which the author sympathizes but does not share.’ By this definition the West Indian writer is incapable of comedy; and, as we have seen, he is not interested in it. Mr Greene’s statement can be extended. A literature can grow only out of a strong framework of social convention. And the only convention the West Indian knows is his involvement with the white world. This deprives his work of universal appeal. The situation is too special. The reader is excluded; he is invited to witness; he cannot participate. It is easier to enter any strong framework of social convention, however alien. It is easier to enter the tribal world of an African writer like Camara Laye.

No writer can be blamed for reflecting his society. If the West Indian writer is to be blamed, it is because, by accepting and promoting the unimpressive race-and-colour values of his group, he has not only failed to diagnose the sickness of his society but has aggravated it.

It is only in the calypso that the Trinidadian touches reality. The calypso is a purely local form. No song composed outside Trinidad is a calypso. The calypso deals with local incidents, local attitudes, and it does so in a local language. The pure calypso, the best calypso, is incomprehensible to the outsider. Wit and verbal conceits are fundamental; without them no song, however good the music, however well sung, can be judged a calypso. A hundred foolish travel-writers (reproducing the doggerel sung ‘especially’ for them) and a hundred ‘calypsonians’ in all parts of the world have debased the form, which is now generally dismissed abroad as nothing more than a catchy tune with a primitive jingle in broken English. The knowing refusal of travel-writers nowadays to be taken in is as foolish as their previous indiscrimination, neither reaction being based on a knowledge of genuine calypso.

For this bastardization Trinidadians are as much to blame as anyone. Just as they take pleasure in their American modernity, so they take pleasure in living up to the ideals of the tourist brochure. They know that they are presented to the world as the land of calypso and steel band. They are determined that the world shall not be disappointed; and their talent for self-caricature is profound. The Americans expect native costumes and native dances; Trinidad will discover both.

Few words are used more frequently in Trinidad than ‘culture’. Culture is spoken of as something quite separate from day-to-day existence, separate from advertisements, films and comic strips. It is like a special native dish, something like a
callalloo.
Culture is a dance – not the dance that people do when more than three of them get together – but the one put on in native costume on a stage. Culture is music – not the music played by well-known bands and nowadays in the modern way, tape-recorded – but the steel band. Culture is song – not the commercial jingle which, as much as the calypso, has become the folksong of Trinidad, nor the popular American songs which are heard from morning till night – not these, but the calypso. Culture is, in short, a night-club turn. And nothing pleases Trinidadians so much as to see their culture being applauded by white American tourists in night-clubs.

From the
Trinidad Guardian
:

This talk of culture is comparatively new. It was a concept of some politicians in the forties, and caught on largely because it answered the vague, little-understood dissatisfaction some people were beginning to feel with their lives of fantasy. The promotion of a local culture was the only form of nationalism that could arise in a population divided into mutually exclusive cliques based on race, colour, shade, religion, money. Under pressure any Trinidadian group could break up into its component parts; there was no more pathetic demonstration of this than during the London race riots of 1958. White, coloured, Portuguese, Indian, Chinese thought that no rioters would attack them; there were Negroes who thought that only Jamaican Negroes would be attacked; some students and professional men thought that only lower-class Negroes would be attacked; and among respectable West Indians generally, white, brown and black, there was a feeling that the ‘black fellers’ had what was coming to them, and that the English people had been ‘provoked’. At a time when West Indians should have drawn together, many were anxious to contract out; Mrs Mackay’s son Angus, it will be remembered, used to tell people that he was Brazilian.

Nationalism was impossible in Trinidad. In the colonial society every man had to be for himself; every man had to grasp whatever dignity and power he was allowed; he owed no loyalty to the island and scarcely any of his group. To understand this is to understand the squalor of the politics that came to Trinidad in 1946 when, after no popular agitation, universal adult suffrage was declared. The privilege took the population by surprise. Old attitudes persisted: the government was something removed, the local eminence was despised. The new politics were reserved for the enterprising, who had seen the prodigious commercial possibilities. There were no parties, only individuals. Corruption, not unexpected, aroused only amusement and even mild approval: Trinidad has always admired the ‘sharp character’ who, like the sixteenth-century picaroon of Spanish literature, survives and triumphs by his wits in a place where it is felt that all eminence is arrived at by crookedness.

When in 1870 Kingsley visited San Fernando, a ‘gay and growing little town’, he was distressed only by the Negro houses, which were ‘mostly patched together out of the most heterogeneous and wretched scraps of wood’.

The picaroon delight in trickery persists. These are constant ‘leakages’ of examination papers; in 1960 the Cambridge School Certificate biology paper was known throughout the island days before the examination. Slavery, the mixed population, the absence of national pride and the closed colonial system have to a remarkable degree re-created the attitudes of the Spanish picaroon world. This was an ugly world, a jungle, where the picaroon hero starved unless he stole, was beaten almost to death when found out, and had therefore to get in his blows first whenever possible; where the weak were humiliated; where the powerful never appeared and were beyond reach; where no one was allowed any dignity and everyone had to impose himself; an uncreative society, where war was the only profession.