The Middle Passage (6 page)

When one arrives for the first time at a city, and especially if one arrives at night, the people in the streets have, just for that moment, a special quality: they are adepts in a ritual the traveller doesn’t know; they are moving from one mystery to another. But driving now through Port of Spain, seeing the groups lounging at corners, around flambeau-lit stalls and coconut carts, I missed this thrill, and was distressed, not so much by the familiarity, as by the feeling of continuation. The years I had spent abroad fell away and I could not be sure which was the reality in my life: the first eighteen years in Trinidad or the later years in England. I had never wanted to stay in Trinidad. When I was in the fourth form I wrote a vow on the endpaper of my Kennedy’s
Revised Latin Primer
to leave within five years. I left after six; and for many years afterwards in England, falling asleep in bedsitters with the electric fire on, I had been awakened by the nightmare that I was back in tropical Trinidad.

I had never examined this fear of Trinidad. I had never wished to. In my novels I had only expressed this fear; and it is only now, at the moment of writing, that I am able to attempt to examine it. I knew Trinidad to be unimportant, uncreative, cynical. The only professions were those of law and medicine, because there was no need for any other; and the most successful people were commission agents, bank managers and members of the distributive trades. Power was recognized, but dignity was allowed to no one. Every person of eminence was held to be crooked and contemptible. We lived in a society which denied itself heroes.

It was a place where the stories were never stories of success but of failure: brilliant men, scholarship winners, who had died young, gone mad, or taken to drink; cricketers of promise whose careers had been ruined by disagreements with the authorities.

It was also a place where a recurring word of abuse was ‘conceited’, an expression of the resentment felt of anyone who possessed unusual skills. Such skills were not required by a society which produced nothing, never had to prove its worth, and was never called upon to be efficient. And such people had to be cut down to size or, to use the Trinidad expression, be made to ‘boil down’. Generosity – the admiration of equal for equal – was therefore unknown; it was a quality I knew only from books and found only in England.

For talent, a futility, the Trinidadian substituted intrigue; and in the exercise of this, in small things as well as large, he became a master. Admiration he did have: for boys who did well at school, such academic success, separate from everyday life, giving self-respect to the community as a whole without threatening it in any way; for scholarship winners until they became conceited; for racehorses. And for cricketers.

Cricket has always been more than a game in Trinidad. In a society which demanded no skills and offered no rewards to merit, cricket was the only activity which permitted a man to grow to his full stature and to be measured against international standards. Alone on a field, beyond obscuring intrigue, the cricketer’s true worth could be seen by all. His race, education, wealth did not matter. We had no scientists, engineers, explorers, soldiers or poets. The cricketer was our only hero-figure. And that is why cricket is played in the West Indies with such panache; that is why, for a long time to come, the West Indians will not be able to play as a team. The individual performance was what mattered. That was what we went to applaud; and unless the cricketer had heroic qualities we did not want to see him, however valuable he might be. And that was why, of those stories of failure, that of the ruined cricketer was the most terrible. In Trinidad lore he was a recurring figure; he appears in the Trinidad play,
Moon on a Rainbow Shawl
, by Errol John.

Though we knew that something was wrong with our society, we made no attempt to assess it. Trinidad was too unimportant and we could never be convinced of the value of reading the history of a place which was, as everyone said, only a dot on the map of the world. Our interest was all in the world outside, the remoter the better; Australia was more important than Venezuela, which we could see on a clear day. Our own past was buried and no one cared to dig it up. This gave us a strange time-sense. The England of 1914 was the England of yesterday; the Trinidad of 1914 belonged to the dark ages.

There was an occasional racial protest, but that aroused no deep feelings, for it represented only a small part of the truth. Everyone was an individual, fighting for his place in the community. Yet there was no community. We were of various races, religions, sets and cliques; and we had somehow found ourselves on the same small island. Nothing bound us together except this common residence. There was no nationalist feeling; there could be none. There was no profound anti-imperialist feeling; indeed, it was only our Britishness, our belonging to the British Empire, which gave us any identity. So protests could only be individual, isolated, unheeded.

It was only towards the end of the war that stories of limited success began to be known, stories of men who had served with distinction in the R.A.F., of men who had become lecturers in English and American universities, of singers who had won recognition abroad. These people had all escaped. ‘Conceited’ at home, they had won distinction abroad; and as theirs was not the despised local eminence Trinidad accepted them with a ready generosity and exaggerated their worth.

The threat of failure, the need to escape: this was the prompting of the society I knew.

From the
Trinidad Guardian
:

No one was deeply interested in the emigrants on the
Francisco Bobadilla.
There was more concern about the number of immigrants in Trinidad. The population had jumped from 560,000 in 1946 to 825,000 in 1960. Immigrants had come from England, America, Canada and Australia as well as the other West Indian islands. Two new white suburbs had been established, but Trinidad directed all its annoyance against West Indian immigrants, and Grenadians in particular. Grenada, immemorially, has been as funny a word in Trinidad as Wigan is in England; and the occasional expulsion of Grenadians and other small islanders is a subject for calypso.

Shortly before my arrival there had been another police campaign, reportedly of exceptional rigour, against illegal immigrants. The attitudes to immigrants are the same the world over – the stories about West Indians in England (‘twenty-four to a room’) are exactly matched by the stories about Grenadians and others in Trinidad – and there was great public enthusiasm as Grenadians scattered in terror all over the island and went into hiding. (Many were harboured by employers who valued the cheapness of their labour. In the remote Ortoire district I was to come upon a nest of Vincentians gathering oysters from mangrove roots for a local entrepreneur.) The calypsonian called Lord Blakie sang:

Grenadians were altogether in the news. The latest Trinidad personality was a Grenadian of twenty-four who had married a Trinidad woman of eighty-four. Their photographs were often in the paper; cinema managers were trying to get them to make personal appearances; and a rumour, started perhaps by a government supporter, had it that the acting leader of the opposition had asked the Grenadian to stand as one of the party’s candidates at the next general election. In an interview with the
Sunday Guardian –
with photographs of the bride feeding her chickens, the groom acting as linesman in a football match – the Grenadian said he had four children in Grenada (thus giving the lie to one persistent rumour). He had left their mother because she, and her family, had wanted to ‘rush’ him into marriage.

They were discussing this in a Port of Spain taxi one morning.

‘She have too much vice in she old tail, if you ask me,’ the fat woman beside me said. ‘God! What she must be does look like in the morning? I ain’t fifty, and it does frighten me like hell to see my face when I get up.’

‘When that man I have started getting fresh,’ the woman in front said, ‘I does be mad to give him a clout. Is only backside for him, you hear. And I breathing deep and pretending I sleeping sound sound.’

‘You right, child. A neighbour was telling me that this Grenadian only want to go away to study. He go away, doing this studying, and she stay home, feeding those chickens. You see she in the Guardian, feeding chickens?’

From the
Trinidad Guardian
:

Trinidad considers itself, and is acknowledged by the other West Indian territories to be, modern. It has night clubs, restaurants, air-conditioned bars, supermarkets, soda fountains, drive-in cinemas and a drive-in bank. But modernity in Trinidad means a little more. It means a constant alertness, a willingness to change, a readiness to accept anything which films, magazines and comic strips appear to indicate as American. Beauty queens and fashion parades are modern. Modernity might also lie in a name like Lois – pronounced Loys in Trinidad – which came to the island in the 1940s through Lois Lane, the heroine of the American
Superman
comic strip. Simple radio is not modern. Commercial radio is: when I was a boy not to know the latest commercial jingle was to be primitive.

To be modern is to ignore local products and to use those advertised in American magazines. The excellent coffee which is grown in Trinidad is used only by the very poor and a few middle-class English expatriates. Everyone else drinks Nescafé or Maxwell House or Chase and Sanborn, which is more expensive but is advertised in the magazines and therefore acceptable. The elegant and comfortable morris chairs, made from local wood by local craftsmen, are not modern and have disappeared except from the houses of the poor. Imported tubular steel furniture, plastic-straw chairs from Hong Kong and spindly cast-iron chairs have taken their place.

In an article in the
Caribbean Quarterly, a
journal of the University College of the West Indies, Dr Alfred P. Thorne studies the economic consequences of this ‘apparent psychological trait’. ‘Large numbers of middle- and upper-class islanders,’ he writes, ‘avoid regular consumption of many local roots or ground provisions, and prefer imported items of corresponding food value (and usually higher cost).’ He suggests that political leaders and the new élite should set an example, which would be more effective than ‘fervent imprecations and exhortations’.

It is an old West Indian problem. Trollope complained about it in Jamaica in 1859:

Charles Kingsley, who ten years later spent a winter in Trinidad, tells the story in
At Last
of a German who, because Trinidad produced sugar, vanilla and cocoa, decided to make chocolate in Trinidad. He did, and his price was a quarter that of the imported. ‘But the fair creoles would not buy it. It could not be good; it could not be the real article, unless it had crossed the Atlantic twice to and from that centre of fashion, Paris.’ One of the complaints of tourists in Jamaica is that they cannot get Jamaican food. And once in a small intellectuals’ club in Port of Spain I asked for guava jelly: they had only greengage jam.

Modernity in Trinidad, then, turns out to be the extreme susceptibility of people who are unsure of themselves and, having no taste or style of their own, are eager for instruction. In England and America there are magazines for such groups; in Trinidad instruction is now provided by advertising agencies, which have been welcomed by the people not only for this reason but also because the advertising agency is itself a modern thing.