The Middle Passage (9 page)

A Board of Censors, which knows about the French, bans French films. Italian, Russian, Swedish and Japanese films are unknown. Indian films of Hollywood badness can be seen; but Satyajit Ray’s Bengali trilogy cannot find an exhibitor. Nigerians, I believe, are addicted to Indian films as well as to those from Hollywood. The West Indian, revealingly, is less catholic; and in Trinidad the large and enthusiastic audiences for Indian films are, barring an occasional eccentric, entirely Indian.

If curiosity is a characteristic of the cosmopolitan, the cosmopolitanism on which Trinidad prides itself is fraudulent. In the immigrant colonial society, with no standards of its own, subjected for years to the second-rate in newspapers, radio and cinema, minds are rigidly closed; and Trinidadians of all races and classes are remaking themselves in the image of the Hollywood B-man. This is the full meaning of modernity in Trinidad.

From the
Trinidad Guardian
:

In the country it was quieter except when a loudspeaker van, volume raised to a fiendish pitch, ran slowly about the roads advertising an Indian film. I often went to the country, and not only for the silence. It seemed to me that I was seeing the landscape for the first time. I had hated the sun and the unchanging seasons. I had believed that the foliage had no variety and could never understand how the word ‘tropical’ held romance for so many. Now I was taken by the common coconut tree, the cliché of the Caribbean. I discovered, what every child in Trinidad knows, that if you stand under the tree and look up, the tapering chrome ribs of the branches are like the spokes of a perfectly circular wheel. I had forgotten the largeness of the leaves and the variety of their shapes: the digitated breadfruit leaf, the heart-shaped wild tannia, the curving razor-shaped banana frond which sunlight rendered almost transparent. To ride past a coconut plantation was to see a rapidly changing criss-cross of slender curved trunks, greyish-white in a green gloom.

I had never liked the sugarcane fields. Flat, treeless and hot, they stood for everything I had hated about the tropics and the West Indies. ‘Cane is Bitter’ is the title of a story by Samuel Selvon and might well be the epigraph of a history of the Caribbean. It is a brutal plant, tall and grass-like, with rough, razor-edged blades. I knew it was the basis of the economy, but I preferred trees and shade. Now, in the uneven land of Central and South Trinidad, I saw that even sugar cane could be beautiful. On the plains just before crop-time, you drive through it, walls of grass on either side; but in rolling country you can look down on a hillside covered with tall sugar-cane in arrow: steel-blue plumes dancing above a grey-green carpet, grey-green because each long blade curves back on itself, revealing its paler underside.

The cocoa woods were another thing. They were like the woods of fairy tales, dark and shadowed and cool. The cocoa-pods, hanging by thick short stems, were like wax fruit in brilliant green and yellow and red and crimson and purple. Once, on a late afternoon drive to Tamana, I found the fields flooded. Out of the flat yellow water, which gurgled in the darkness, the black trunks of the stunted trees rose.

After every journey I returned to Port of Spain past Shanty Town, the mangrove swamp, the orange mist of the burning rubbish dump, the goats, the expectant corbeaux, all against a sunset that reddened the glassy water of the Gulf.

Everyone has to learn to see the West Indies tropics for himself. The landscape has never been recorded, and to go to the Trinidad Art Society Exhibition is to see how little local painters help. The expatriates contribute a few watercolours, the Trinidadians a lot of local colour. ‘Tropical Fruit’ is the title of one painting, a title which would have had some meaning in the Temperate Zone. Another, startlingly, is ‘Native Hut’. There are the usual picturesque native characters and native customs, the vision that of the tourist, at whom most of these native paintings seem to be aimed. The beach scenes are done with colours straight out of the tube, with no effort to capture the depth of sky, the brilliancy of light, the insubstantiality of colour in the tropics. The more gifted painters have ceased to record the landscape: the patterns of the leaves are too beguiling. In art, as in almost everything else, Trinidad has in one step moved from primitivism to modernism.

Many years ago, in Jamaica, Mrs Edna Manley had to judge some local drawings and paintings. Not one, she reported, portrayed a Jamaican face. ‘Even worse, there was one little study or sketch of a Jamaican market scene, and believe it or not, the market women under their scarlet bandanas had yellow hair, pink faces, and even blue eyes.’ It would appear at first that this has changed, for in Trinidad even the advertisements are now in blackface. But the impulse that prompted the Jamaican artist to give yellow hair and pink faces to people he knew to be irremediably black still exists and is, if anything, stronger.

It was the blackface advertisements that disturbed me. I suppose I was too used to seeing white people winning new confidence after using Colgate’s and keeping that schoolgirl complexion with Palmolive. The trouble was, paradoxically, that the advertisements were not in blackface but only in blackish face. The people undergoing the Showdown Test for Old Oak rum were not really black; their features were not noticeably un-European and lighting made them scarcely distinguishable from white. The only truly black person was the garage-hand in the Shell advertisement. Who, then, were these people of the middle class, for whom these advertisements were meant, who would be offended by the black image of themselves?

They sat around in night clubs and applauded at the end of a ‘number’, just like Americans in films, particularly those old musicals where the heroine burst into song in the restaurant and looked surprised and embarrassed when the clapping started. They had drive-in cinemas. They had barbecues – a custom of the Caribs, and a word from the Caribs, returning with changes to the Caribbean. Their houses, decorations, amusements and food were copied from American magazines. This was the Hollywood B-world. With one difference.

A new magazine appeared in Trinidad while I was there. It was called
West Indian Home and Family
and was described as ‘the West Indian magazine for women … 
your
magazine, created and printed right here in Trinidad’. Already in the first issue ‘family problems are answered by a qualified psychologist’. Trinidad has two psychiatrists, I believe; and from internal evidence, both problems and psychologist in this magazine comes from America in the form of a syndicated column. ‘Dreams are interpreted by Stephen Norris, who has been writing on the fascinating subject for over 20 years.’ This column is a little harder to place. ‘I dreamed,’ Mrs. J. H. writes, ‘that my husband and I were in Egypt, fighting off attacking Arabs …’ The romantic serial,
Latin Love Song
, has for heroine Marcy Connors, an American night-club singer, a brunette, ‘slim, with dark tresses piled high on her head … a picture of true, patrician beauty’. All this in a magazine for women, ‘created and printed right here in Trinidad’.

Certain concessions have been made. There is a black woman on the cover; but lighting has given her a copperish colour. In the advertisement for Valor Stoves –
My Mummy Has a Lovely Valor –
there are two black children with, however, ‘good’ (not negroid) hair. The advertisement for Texgas –
How do you manage to look so cool … cooking? Why tell him? Little secrets like these only give busy housewives a captivating air of mystery! Why spoil the illusion? But we know she uses TexGAS –
is more revealing. The copy is given point by a drawing of what is meant to be a happy West Indian family – Daddy laughing, baby waving from Daddy’s shoulder, Mummy stirring, smiling – but pains have been taken, in drawing and colouring and dress, to suggest a white American family slightly tanned, perhaps by those ‘long summer holidays’, mentioned in the copy for Avon Moisturized Skin Care, which ‘expose your skin to harsh treatment from the sun and wind’.

When James Pope-Hennessy was in Trinidad just before the war he thought the sight of Negro girls singing
‘Loch Lomond’
‘sickening’. And for a long time in Trinidad there has been a campaign against poems about daffodils – daffodils in particular: Wordsworth’s poem appears to be the only poem most Trinidadians have read – because daffodils are not flowers Trinidad schoolchildren know. I cannot myself see why anyone should deny himself the pleasures of any literature or song. Absurdity would enter only if the girls singing
‘Loch Lomond’
pretended to be Scottish. Trinidadians know this; those who wish to wear the kilt do so only in Scotland. To the Trinidadian mind, however, no absurdity attaches to the pretence of being American in Trinidad; and while much energy has been spent in the campaign against Wordsworth, no one has spoken out against the fantasy which Trinidadians live out every day of their lives.

They can never completely identify themselves with what they read in magazines or see in films. Then frustration can only deepen for their minds are closed to everything else. Reality is always separate from the ideal; but in Trinidad this fantasy is a form of masochism and is infinitely more cheating than the fantasy which makes the poor delight in films about rich or makes the English singer use an American accent. It is the difference between the Emily Post Institute advice on dating, published in the
Trinidad Guardian
(‘The man must call for his date at her house’), and the calypso by Sparrow:

The Negro in the New World was, until recently, unwilling to look at his past. It seemed to him natural that he should be in the West Indies, that he should speak French or English or Dutch, dress in the European manner or in adaptation of it, and share the European’s religion and food. Travel-writers who didn’t know better spoke of him as a ‘native’, and he accepted this: ‘This is my island in the sun,’ Mr Harry Belafonte sings, ‘where my people have toiled since time begun.’ Africa was forgotten. What was more astonishing, it had been, from the early days of slavery and long before the European scramble for Africa, a reminder of shame, when one might have expected that in secret legends it would have been a mythical land of freedom and bliss. But that was the vision of Blake, not of the Negroes in the New World, apart from a few like the rebellious soldier Dagga in Trinidad in 1834, whose intention was to walk east until he got back to Africa. In 1860, twenty-six years after the abolition of slavery, Trollope wrote:

This was the greatest damage done to the Negro by slavery. It taught him self-contempt. It set him the ideals of white civilization and made him despise every other. Deprived as a slave of Christianity, education and family, he set himself after emancipation to acquire these things; and every step on the road to whiteness deepened the anomaly of his position and increased his vulnerability. ‘He burns to be a scholar,’ Trollope observed, with an unusual insensitivity, ‘puzzles himself with fine words, addicts himself to religion for the sake of appearances, and delights in aping the little graces of civilization.’ Everything in the white world had to be learned from scratch, and at every stage the Negro exposed himself to the cruelty of the civilization which had overpowered him and which he was mastering. ‘These people marry now,’ a white lady said to Trollope in Jamaica. ‘In the tone of her voice,’ he comments, ‘I thought I could catch an idea that she conceived them in doing so to be trenching on the privileges of their superiors.’

Yet to the West Indian there has never been any anomaly.