The Writer and the World (76 page)

The political part of his speech repeated what had been said by others. The poetical part at the end, about the “springtime of hope,” was less a speech, less a matter of poetry and language, than a scenario for a short documentary about multi-racial, many-landscaped America. So that at the climax of the great occasion, as at the center of so many of the speeches, there was nothing. It was as if, in summation, the sentimentality, about religion and Americanism, had betrayed only an intellectual vacancy; as if the computer language of the convention had revealed the imaginative poverty of these political lives. It was “as if”—in spite of the invocations and benedictions (the last benediction to be spoken by Dr. Criswell)—“as if inspiration had ceased, as if no vast hope, no religion, no song of joy, no wisdom, no analogy, existed any more.”

The words are by Emerson; they were written about England.
English Traits
, published in 1856, was about Emerson’s two visits to England, in 1833 and 1847, when he felt that English power, awesome and supreme as it still was, was on the turn, and that English intellectual life was being choked by the great consciousness of power and money and rightness. “They exert every variety of talent on a lower ground,” Emerson wrote, “and may be said to live and act in a submind.” Something like this I felt in the glitter of Dallas. Power was the theme of the convention, and this power seemed too easy—national power, personal power, the power of the New Right. Like Emerson in England, I seemed in the convention hall of Dallas “to walk on a marble floor, where nothing will grow.”

I
WENT TO
G
RENADA
seventeen days after the American invasion, and three or four days after the airport had been opened again to civilian traffic. The real fighting had stopped long before. The seven hundred or so Cubans on the island had been rounded up and repatriated, with their forty-two dead. The PRA, the 1,200-strong People’s Revolutionary Army, the army of the Grenadian revolution, had disintegrated. The main body had surrendered; the remnants were being tracked down.

The American Psy-Ops people—Psychological Operations, a branch of the Special Warfare Centre, itself a section of the Special Operations Command—Psy-Ops had already (as their colonel was to say two days later) “transitioned into civil affairs.” They were now preparing posters. One of these posters, roughly printed in black and white in five different typefaces, was like something from a western film.
Former PRA Members Your corrupt Leaders have surrendered, knowing resistance is USELESS …

The airport was noisy with helicopters of a sinister black colour. All around there were armed marines in heavy combat clothes; trucks and jeeps in camouflage paint, some with machine-guns; tents and camouflage netting. A humourous hand had drawn a rough black line through the Cubana airline logo over a door of the terminal building, and had scrawled below the logo:
2nd Battalion 82nd Airborne.

After the Grenadian immigration formalities there was—in this legally ambiguous situation—a check by U.S. Marines, who—already—had a printed list of names. Then a few steps away, at the customs counter, there was civilian authority again—and the tall black Grenadian customs man was wearing a shirt of the palest blue patterned faintly with the name GUCCI.

A few hundred yards from the airport it was as if some television footage was being re-staged: at the side of the road, wet after rain, marines with guns were walking a spread-out file of five or six black men, stripped down to underpants. One of the men wore Rastafarian “dreadlocks.”
Matted hair, nudity and a wild appearance were parts of the Rastafarian style; but now, in captivity, this man looked especially degraded. The men were PRA suspects. They had almost certainly been informed on by Grenadians: to nearly all Grenadians the revolution and the Revolutionary Army had become hateful. The prisoners—but legally they were only people “detained”—were being walked to the airport. From there one of the black helicopters would take them over the forested hills of the island to the main American encampment on the south-western coast. A detention centre had been set up there, for the interrogation and screening of suspected persons. American correspondents, ferreting away for their daily or twice-daily stories, had just discovered this centre. Or, as it was to be called during press briefings, “this facility.”

The road over the hills was narrow and winding, with many blind corners. At least two of the big Cuban trucks that the Americans had taken over had crashed. Ferns and the big fronds of the wild banana grew in sprays out of the volcanic cliff faces. The red poinsettia, the Christmas flower of these parts, was in bloom, and the common hibiscus; and the Bleeding Heart vine, a weed, had laid drifts of pink blossom on hedges and electric poles.

The houses were small, on stilts or low concrete pillars, and with pitched corrugated-iron roofs. The older houses were of wood, and some were in the French Caribbean style, with fretted gables and fanlights and jalousies. What looked like bush around the houses were patches of cultivation: cocoa, with the purple pods growing directly out of the black trunks and branches of the small trees; grapefruit, avocado and mango; the big-leaved breadfruit and tropical chestnut; plantain and banana, nutmeg. There were no big estates. This was a Caribbean peasant countryside.

In scattered houses along the road, and in jeeps and trucks in dirt lanes off the road, there were marines, taking their ease but watchful. At a junction there was a roadblock.

Lennox, the taxi-driver, said, “I was wondering. I did hear they was stopping and searching today.” He spoke calmly; he had learned to live with big events.

The marine didn’t wave us down. He dropped to a half-crouch and pushed his clenched left fist at our car. Theatre. And it seemed that all the children of the little village were standing by to watch. One marine was
black, one was Chinese, one looked Hispanic. Questions were asked while luggage was searched and the car was searched. A transistor radio on the roadside was turned on very loud, until a marine asked a boy to turn it down.

And it was only when we were on our way again that I made a whole of the dislocating experience, and understood that the radio had been turned on by the boy, that music had soon given way to Spanish speech, and that it was my reaction to the Spanish language that was being assessed by the Hispanic-looking marine who had asked trivial, disconnected questions. Psy-Ops, Special Warfare. All these search procedures had been well rehearsed. In Grenada the Americans were still looking for Cubans.

The road began to go down through the wet, ferny, forest reserve area to the west coast. Emblems of the revolution—a red disc on a white field—appeared on walls and fences. Near the capital, St. George’s, the slogan boards of the revolution became more numerous. They had not been defaced. Some of the slogans were about “production.” In the peasant setting it seemed a very big word, a strange word. It could never have had its proclaimed meaning; it must always have stood for the power of those who ruled.

In Grenada—eighty-five square miles, 110,000 people—the revolution was as much an imposition—as theatrical and out of scale—as the American military presence it had called up.

M
OST
G
RENADIANS
were glad when the New Jewel Movement took power in a coup in March 1979. The island had been ruled for too long by Eric Gairy. Gairy, a man of simple origins, had organized a big strike in 1951. Starting in this way, as a redeemer of the black poor, he soon won political power, and held on to it. In power he became stylish. He had money; he was elegant; he wore white suits; it was said that even white women fell for him. The poor country folk in the little houses of Grenada understood. They felt that Gairy’s triumphs were a black man’s triumphs and therefore also their own, and they loved him; they voted him into office again and again. It was Gairy who took Grenada to independence.

But over the years Gairy—like some other small-island Caribbean folk leaders of his type—had developed into a feared and somewhat
eccentric Negro shepherd-king. At international gatherings he talked about UFO’s; at home there was a large gang that dealt with opponents. In the post-colonial Caribbean Gairy increasingly became an embarrassment, hateful to the children of the very people to whom he had once given hope.

The New Jewel Movement, founded in 1972, represented the first educated generation in Grenada. Its leader was a handsome young man who had completed his education in England. The overthrow of Gairy by this movement of the young and educated was doubly popular. And the New Jewel Movement used this popularity to offer Grenada—without elections, ever—the revolution. It was a full socialist revolution. Cuba became Grenada’s ally; imperialism became Grenada’s enemy.

The slogan-writers of the party called the revolution the “revo” or “de revo.”

People’s speech, phonetic spelling—the party used it to make the more difficult parts of its doctrine and practice acceptable: to make the many rallies and “solidarity” marches appear more folksy; and to make all the imported apparatus of socialist rule and patronage—the organizing committee of the party, the political bureau, the central committee, the many “mass” organizations, the army and the militia—to make all of this appear carnival-like and Grenadian and black, “de revo.”

The apparatus was absurd. But the power was real. And for the four and a half years of its rule the party kept Grenada under “heavy manners.” The words, Jamaican street slang, were adopted by the revolution, and became part of its stock of serious jokey words. “Manners,” “respect” for the revolution and its leaders, were required from everyone. There could therefore be no elections, no opposition newspaper: the people’s will was as simple as that. “To manners” became a revolutionary verb. To “manners” a “counter” was to teach a counterrevolutionary a lesson: to harass him, to dismiss him from a job, to imprison him without charge or trial. Hundreds were imprisoned at one time or the other. Trials were a form of “bourgeois legality.” The “revo” needed only people’s law, “heavy manners”; and the very words could turn the loss of law into just a subject for calypso. To impose manners,
an army was created—and that meant employment of a sort with the party.

Cuba provided the arms for the army. And it was Cuba that—to the alarm of both the United States and other Caribbean territories—began to build the big two-mile airport at Point Salines.

At least two hundred “internationalist” workers, socialists, were brought in to help administer the revolution. Half of them were from Europe and America, half from other West Indian territories. Strangers to Grenada, exigent guests at the other man’s revolutionary feast, these visitors were anxious for the socialist mimicry to be as complete, as pure, as possible. Hence, in the Grenada of the revolution, the obsession with forms, organization, structures, committees. Grenada even had a Writers’ Federation. Almost at the end of the revolution a West Indian visitor from the United States spotted an omission. In Grenada, he said, he had found no House of Culture; socialist countries had houses of culture. So in Grenada they began to work on a House of Culture.

As the mimicry was perfected, so the excitement grew among the faithful in many countries; and the Grenadian revolution had a good press abroad. Little Grenada, agricultural, backward and black, had not only had the revolution; it had also had an eruption of all the correct socialist forms. The mimicry was like proof of the naturalness and rightness of the cause.

Then the revolution went sour. Its success in the socialist world had been too great, too sudden. There was some dissension at the top, in the central committee, some call for the sharing of power. There was a feeling that the leader had became too taken with his foreign fame, his visits abroad; and that the revolution at home had begun to drift.

The leader prevaricated. He agreed that he was being petit bourgeois in some ways, but he really didn’t want to step down. He had made the revolution after all; the people were loyal to him. So, finally, the “manners” that had been applied to hundreds of others were applied to the leader himself. He was placed under house arrest by some of his colleagues on the central committee.

The people didn’t like it. After a week a crowd stormed the house and the leader was released. There was confusion; a civil war was in the offing. The leader and his supporters went to the army post at Fort George (at that time named Fort Rupert, after the leader’s father) and talked over the soldiers there. The Revolutionary Military Council,
rulers of Grenada since the crisis, sent armoured cars to the fort. There was firing; the unarmed crowd stampeded and an unknown number of people were killed—anything from seventeen to one hundred; and the leader and five former ministers were executed. A twenty-four-hour curfew was placed on the island, and for almost a week the people of Grenada lived in terror of the People’s Revolutionary Army. Then the Americans invaded, and manners heavier than Grenada had known were applied to everybody.

The Americans found no revolution. That had vanished in the preceding week of terror. The Americans, serving their own cause, invading Grenada according to a plan prepared at least two years before, found themselves welcomed as liberators. The invaded island, more full of noises than Caliban’s island, was full of informers; the detention facility at Point Salines was quickly peopled.

T
HE
W
EST
I
NDIAN
sugar colonies were richer than the American colonies in the eighteenth century. The ships that came to take the slave-grown sugar to Europe sometimes brought bricks and clay roof tiles as ballast. These tiles and bricks give an eighteenth-century feel to corners of old St. George’s, a little town built on the steep slope of the horseshoe–shaped hill that encloses the inner harbour.

At harbour level was the main street of this toy-town: fire brigade, cigarette factory, airline office, restaurant, main post office. At the top of the hill—easily seen, taken in in one roving look—were the official buildings that had been touched by the recent drama. On the south-western promonory was the green-roofed fort where the leader and others had been shot. Across the bay was the red-roofed house where the leader had been held under house arrest. Not far from that was the civilian prison where members of the Revolutionary Military Council and other former members of the central committee were now held.