The Middle Passage (12 page)

It is sufficient to state that the antipathy exists. The Negro has a deep contempt, as has been said, for all that is not white; his values are the values of white imperialism at its most bigoted. The Indian despises the Negro for not being an Indian; he has, in addition, taken over all the white prejudices against the Negro and with the convert’s zeal regards as Negro everyone who has any tincture of Negro blood. ‘The two races,’ Froude observed in 1887, ‘are more absolutely apart than the white and the black. The Asiatic insists the more on his superiority in the fear perhaps that if he did not the white might forget it.’ Like monkeys pleading for evolution, each claiming to be whiter than the other, Indians and Negroes appeal to the unacknowledged white audience to see how much they despise one another. They despise one another by references to the whites; and the irony is that their antagonism should have reached its peak today, when white prejudices have ceased to matter.

Few non-Indians know much about the Indians, except that they live in the country, work on the land, are rich, fond of litigation and violence. There were undoubtedly small criminal and army elements among the Indian immigrants – one or two low Indian army ranks survive as surnames – and parts of the Indian countryside, with their recurring unsolved murders, used to have a
mafia
-like atmosphere. Everyone in Trinidad knows that to run over an Indian in an Indian village and to stop is to ask for trouble; whether it has ever occurred that the driver who stopped was beaten up I don’t know.
*
Nothing is known about Hinduism or Islam. The Muslim festival of Hosein, with its drum-beating and in the old days stick-fighting, is the only Indian festival which is known; Negroes sometimes beat the drums. Indian weddings are also known. There is little interest in the ritual; it is known only that at these weddings food is given to all comers. Even the simple distinction between Hindu and Muslim names is not known; and the Negro makes less effort than the average English person to pronounce Indian names correctly. This is partly because of the attitude that nothing which is not white is worth bothering about; partly because Indians are difficult to know; and partly because so many Indians have been modernizing themselves at such a rate that Indian customs have come to be regarded as things out of which people grow. So although Indians make up more than one-third of the population, their customs and ceremonies remain quaint and even exotic.

Everything which made the Indian alien in the society gave him strength. His alienness insulated him from the black—white struggle. He was taboo-ridden as no other person on the island; he had complicated rules about food and about what was unclean. His religion gave him values which were not the white values of the rest of the community, and preserved him from self-contempt; he never lost pride in his origins. More important than religion was his family organization, an enclosing self-sufficient world absorbed with its quarrels and jealousies, as difficult for the outsider to penetrate as for one of its members to escape. It protected and imprisoned, a static world, awaiting decay.

Islam is a static religion. Hinduism is not organized; it has no fixed articles, no hierarchy; it is constantly renewing itself and depends on the regular emergence of teachers and holy men. In Trinidad it could only wither; but its restrictions were tenacious. Marriage between unequal castes has only just ceased to cause trouble; marriage between Hindu and Muslim can still split a family; marriage outside the race is unthinkable. Only the urban Indian, the Indian of the middle class, and the Christian convert were able to move easily out of the Indian framework. The Indian Christian was more liberal and adaptable in every way; but, following far behind the Negro on the weary road to whiteness, he was more insecure.

Living by themselves in villages, the Indians were able to have a complete community life. It was a world eaten up with jealousies and family feuds and village feuds; but it was a world of its own, a community within the colonial society, without responsibility, with authority doubly and trebly removed. Loyalties were narrow: to the family, the village. This has been responsible for the village-headman type of politician the Indian favours, and explains why Indian leadership has been so deplorable, so unfitted to handle the mechanics of party and policy.

A peasant-minded, money-minded community, spiritually static because cut off from its roots, its religion reduced to rites without philosophy, set in a materialist colonial society: a combination of historical accidents and national temperament has turned the Trinidad Indian into the complete colonial, even more philistine than the white.

Much of the West Indian Negro’s drive arises out of his desire to define his position in the world. The Indian, with no such problem, was content with his narrow loyalties. Whether he knew his language or practised his religion, the knowledge that a country called India existed was to him a pole. He felt no particular attachment to this country. It is said that Indian Independence in 1947 encouraged Indian racialism in Trinidad; but the explanation is too simple. The Trinidad Indian who was concerned about the Independence struggle and contributed large sums to various funds, washed his hands of India in 1947. The struggle was over, the shame was removed, and he could settle without self-approach into the easy, undemanding society of Trinidad. Indians who went to India returned disgusted by the poverty and convinced of their own superiority. The relationship between Indians from India and Indians from Trinidad quickly developed into the relationship of muted dislike between metropolitans and colonials, between Spaniards and Latin Americans, English and Australians.

1947 is not the date. 1946 is the date, when the first elections were held under universal adult suffrage in Trinidad. Then the bush lawyers and the village headmen came into their own, not only in the Indian areas but throughout the island. Then the loudspeaker van reminded people that they were of Aryan blood. Then, as was reported, the politician, soon to be rewarded by great wealth, bared his pale chest and shouted, ‘I is a nigger too!’

Though now one racialism seems to be reacting on the other, each has different roots. Indian politicians have created Indian racialism out of a harmless egoism. Negro racialism is more complex. It is an overdue assertion of dignity; it has elements of bitterness; it has something of the urban mob requiring to be satisfied with bread and circuses. It has profound intellectual promptings as well, in the realization that the Negro problem lies not simply in the attitude of others to the Negro, but in the Negro’s attitude to himself. It is as yet confused, for the Negro, while rejecting the guilt imposed on him by the white man, is not able to shake off the prejudices he has inherited from the white man, a duality which is responsible for what the Jamaican novelist John Hearne, on a visit to British Guiana in 1957, described as ‘the pathetic nostalgia that corrupts so many Negroes. The retreat into apologies for their condition, their endless “historical” explanations and their lack of any direction. The sentimental camaraderie of skin which provides the cheap thrill of being “African”.’

In the Negro–Indian conflict each side believes it can win. Neither sees that this rivalry threatens to destroy the Land of the Calypso.

It is characteristic of the Trinidad sense of humour, with its ability to turn grave international crises into private jokes, that the unsavoury and dangerous night-club stretch of Wrightson Road in Port of Spain should be called the Gaza Strip –
Gunplay in Gaza Strip
was a headline I saw – and that by this local association the name should be repeated in country cafés by proprietors anxious to give a touch of drama to their unpretentious establishments. It was not surprising, therefore, with the Congo occupying the headlines for weeks, that the sonorous names of the Congolese leaders, Kasavubu, Lumumba, Mobutu, should have caught the Trinidad imagination. Anyone in authority, particularly foremen and policemen, became Mobutu: ‘Look out, boys. Mobutu coming.’ The names of Kasavubu and Lumumba could be applied to anyone; and I came across one person whose temporary nickname was Dag (Hammarskjöld). This sophisticated play-acting is part of that Trinidad taste for fantasy, already noted, which finds its full bacchanalian expression on the two days of Carnival.
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Then comedy turned to tragedy. Lumumba was captured, his humiliations were photographed, and he was killed. Some weeks after the news of Lumumba’s death I came upon a procession in one of the main streets of Port of Spain. It was an orderly procession made up wholly of Negroes. They were singing hymns, which contrasted with the violence of their banners and placards. These were anti-white, anti-clerical and pro-African in an ill-defined, inclusive way. I had never before seen anything like it in Trinidad. It was a demonstration of that ‘sentimental camaraderie of skin which provides the cheap thrill of being “African” ‘ of which John Hearne had written. It represented all that was barren in Negro racialism. The Gaza Strip and the policeman who was Mobutu stood for the Old Trinidad. This hymn-singing procession was the new.

I thought then that it was a purely local eruption, created by the pressures of local politics. But soon, on the journey I was now getting ready to make, I came to see that such eruptions were widespread, and represented feelings coming to the surface in Negro communities throughout the Caribbean: confused feelings, without direction; the Negro’s rejection of the guilt he has borne for so long; the last, delayed Spartacan revolt, more radical than Toussaint L’Ouverture’s; the closing of accounts this side of the middle passage.

F
ROM THE AIR
Trinidad’s Atlantic coast was outlined as on the map, the waves steadily rolling lace-patterned foam towards the shore, green edged with yellow. The waves began far out and rolled in evenly. On the bright blue water cloud shadows were like submerged rocks or like dissolving drops of ink. Soon blue water turned to brown, its progressively darker shades neatly contoured and sometimes marked off in white. Then the South American continent: a grey-green tufted carpet, worn brown in patches, with rivers like cracks in drying mud. For minute after minute we moved rapidly over the unchanging, unwelcoming land, a small corner of a vast continent, where trees grew and collapsed on muddy shores.

One can learn much about British Guiana from the air: its size, its emptiness, the isolation of its communities. Six hundred thousand people live in a country the size of Britain, and when you fly over the populated eastern coastal strip you see why there is so much unrest in a country which, from its bigness, should be a country of opportunity. The land here is fertile. The sugarcane fields, intersected by ruler-straight ditches, are like machine-made carpets. They go on and on, until the pattern is broken by a huddle of white-and-rust wooden houses, laid out as precisely as the fields: workers’ houses: sugarcane land, you feel, going to waste, and the site arbitrarily chosen, for the settlement could have been put down anywhere else in that clear green expanse. ‘To force the Negroes of the Virgin Islands to work,’ Michael Swan writes in
The Marches of El Dorado
, ‘the Danes cut down their soursop trees, and today in British Guiana sugar must use a hundred subtle methods to maintain asufficient labour force – tropical people prefer a subsistence and little work to hard work and a higher standard of living.’

And emptiness. Fly to the interior. First you go over the sugarcane fields beside the brown Demerara River. Abruptly the fields stop and bush begins; and in the bush there are little irregular areas of timorous destruction – indicating attitudes you will learn to associate with British Guiana – where forest has turned to marshland, for the soil here is poor and hardwood trees cannot easily be made to grow again. Within minutes towns, fields and clearings are passed, and you are over the forest, thick and choked and even, occasionally flawed by a river that is black or, when caught by the sun, glinting, a vein of gold or red through the dead green. And the forest continues. You cease to look, until, thirty or forty minutes later, the land breaks up into hills and valleys, beyond which lie the savannah lands, in the dry season marbled in green and brown and ochre, scratched with white trails, the beds of diminished streams lined with rich, succulent-looking palm trees. Brazil is not far away, equally empty, a vastness not to be comprehended.

It was strange then to find, as one drove from the airport to the city, that the houses were set close to one another, as on any cramped West Indian island. Bush screened the Demerara River along which we drove and which would have reminded us that we were on a continent. As it was, only the elegance of the wooden houses on tall stilts was not of the islands. The Guianese know how to build in wood; the humblest wooden dwelling has a rightness of proportion and style, while the newer concrete buildings have the recognizable West Indian insipidity and clumsiness. In wood the Guianese have built mosques with minarets and Hindu temples with balustrades and domes; they have built a cathedral; they have even managed Victorian Gothic. They are profoundly ashamed of these wooden buildings, regarding them as signs of their poverty and backwardness, shabby substitutes for the concrete of a rich island like Trinidad; and since everyone also agrees that wooden houses are firetraps, it seems likely that soon only the very poor will live in attractive houses, and that Georgetown, the most beautiful city in the West Indies, in its elegance, unity and spaciousness, will be destroyed.