Everything in Malik’s commune existed; nothing belonged to him. It was like a return, in maturity, to that time of his childhood in Belmont when he had stolen a bicycle and had been arrested. He hadn’t stolen an ordinary bicycle. He had stolen a distinctive racing cycle that belonged to a well-known racing cyclist, St. Louis; and then, claiming the cycle as his own, a gift from his uncle, he had cycled about Belmont, where St. Louis lived.
Trinidad was Malik’s manor. Trinidad has a population of just over a million. Much of this population lives in the northwest of the island between the Northern Range and the flat sugar belt, in an urban or a semi-urban sprawl, seemingly unplanned and grabbing, that begins five miles west of Port of Spain and ends about sixteen miles east of the city. Agricultural land is steadily invaded; the hillsides are scratched higher and higher with houses and squatters’ shacks and show more brown every year; open spaces, both within the city and outside it, are filled in. The built-up areas choke; the highways are clogged with motorcars; the railway system has been abandoned. Black carrion corbeaux guard the entrance to Port of Spain; and over much of the eastern end of the city, where green hills have been quarried by illegal immigrants from the other islands into dusty red shanty towns, there now hangs the reek of the city’s new rubbish dump, burning in the mangrove that once sheltered the scarlet ibis.
It is a “consumer” squalor. It is not supported by agriculture, which declines, or by industry, which, where it exists, is rudimentary, protected and inflationary. It is supported by what the visitor seldom sees: oil, drilled for in the sea to the north and the southeast, and inland in the south, in forest reserves that are like a country within a country.
Trinidad’s urban northwest is a great parasitic suburb, through which money is yet magically cycled. Much of the population is superfluous, and they know it. Unemployment is high but labor is perennially short. The physical squalor, the sense of a land being pillaged rather than built up, generates great tensions; cynicism is like a disease. Race is an irrelevance; but the situation is well suited to the hysteria and evasions of racial politics. And racial politics—preaching oppression and easy redemption, offering only the theory of the enemy, white, brown, yellow, black—have brought the society close to collapse.
Malik, an operator acting always in the racial cause, found in Trinidad his perfect camouflage. He created nothing; but he converted race into money (it didn’t matter whose) and success; and that was what many hoped to do. A young “Black Panther”—connected with a heavily subsidized ninety-acre agricultural cooperative, unproductive because unworked—said admiringly of Malik, even after Malik had fallen: “He was prime minister of himself and his little group. He was like a little country by himself.” In his year in Trinidad Malik penetrated the society at many points. It was known what he was, but among the cynical and parasitic new men of Trinidad that was like respectability.
He might have risen higher. But then, toward the end of the year, his life took a new twist. Hakim Jamal and Gale Benson arrived from Guyana: Benson, the twenty-seven-year-old English divorcee, in her self-created role as white-woman slave to Jamal’s black master, Jamal himself more or less living off a German and anxious about money and his hustling projects. Jamal’s line was black schools for the very young and black publishing. He had abandoned his family in California; and he and Benson had been together for about a year, an itinerant hustling team, traveling about the United States in a Volkswagen minibus. They had just been to England to promote Jamal’s autobiography; and there they had arranged to come down to Guyana to do a little black business in publishing. Jamal had hoped to take the Guyana government into partnership. But after a month in Guyana he was asked to leave.
Jamal, true American, traveled with his hustler’s paraphernalia: life-size printed photographs of himself, brochures of his nonexistent Malcolm X Montessori school, and copies of his autobiography. He used the book to introduce himself at Rawle Maximin’s garage. He gave Maximin a copy and Maximin told him that Michael X was in Trinidad. “And it was as though I had told him there was a million dollars under that chair there.” Later Maximin drove Jamal from the Port of Spain Hilton to Arima. “He asked how far I had got in the book. I said not very far. He took the book and as we were driving he started reading it out. And when he start reading, like he don’t want to stop. He spent that night by Michael. In the morning I went to the Hilton and moved down Gale to Arima.”
The relationship among these three during November and December 1971 cannot now be known. Jamal used to claim, especially with those white people whom he knew the claim would excite, that he was God; and as God he was Benson’s master. But in the Malik commune at Arima, Jamal recognized a more successful outfit and saw its great potential; and Jamal almost immediately decided that Malik was his master. He settled in right away, in the house obliquely opposite, which he rented; and soon he was writing a hectoring half-farewell note to a white friend in California, saying that he was through with white people and was for the first time among friends.
Money was short—at the end of November Jamal deposited 500 Trinidad dollars, £104, in a Canadian bank in Port of Spain, and a month later was down to 94 dollars, £19—but ideas came thick and fast. Jamal’s black schools and black publishing merged with Malik’s black agriculture into a stupendous black cause. On 10 December Malik wrote to a correspondent in the United States: “We are now producing reams of literature.” Much of this—copy for the commune—was knocked off by Jamal on the typewriter. Malik was no writer; to Jamal, an American, salesman's prose came naturally. Jamal needed a harbor; Malik depended on other men’s ideas. Their talents and roles were complementary; they did not clash.
And it is possible that Gale Benson now became more of an outsider than she had been. She wore African-style clothes that were extravagant even in Trinidad; she had given herself the name of Halé Kimga, an anagram of Gale and Hakim; she went on begging errands for her master. But her cult was of Jamal alone. She didn’t appear to be serving the general cause; and she had a way of putting people off. Rawle Maximin found her “very serious.” When he offered to show her local nightclub dances, she said, “I haven’t come here for that.” When she met Lourenço, the Portuguese owner of the stud farm Malik had “incorporated” into his commune, she spoke to him in Spanish; and Lourenço didn’t care for that.
At the same time there was some displeasure in the United States. Jamal, serving Malik and the commune, had been neglecting some of his old associates; and Benson was blamed. It was felt that she possessed him too completely. In December, three weeks before Benson was stabbed to death, an American, writing critically of Benson to some friends in Guyana (and the letter got to Jamal in Trinidad), drew a distinction between Halé Kimga, the devotee, and “Gailann the secretary.” And that points to something else: Benson’s Englishness in spite of her African clothes, and the middle-class manner that seemed at variance with her slave role. “She was sort of a fake”: this was what Malik’s wife said later.
Jamal served Malik. But it is possible that he also took him over and gave him a new idea of his role in Trinidad. Jamal dealt in the vehement racial passions of the United States and was obsessed with white people. He didn’t understand a place like Trinidad; he didn’t understand Malik’s position in black and independent Trinidad as “prime minister of himself and his little group.” He saw it in American terms, as the triumph of a “nigger.” And so he celebrated it in an eight-page article about Malik (part of the commune literature) which was intended for younger readers—Jamal’s first love was black Montessori schools.
He is always giving. You feel bad that there are people who misunderstand him. He teaches, not just by talking, he shows you, for example; he grows orchards [sic]. In his front yard, hanging from his trees there are orchards, dainty flowers that need intense care, but they [yield and deleted] blossom. He grows vegetables for his table and also feeds those passersby who need food. . . . His chicken farm that feeds thousand
s of Trinidadians meat. His cows that give milk for babies and for our own health. Then too, there is the stable of horses, thoroughbreds. As he shows them to you, he lectures, but the lecture is real because as he talks about a certain horse, there is the horse. When he speaks of milking cows, you are at the farm, seeing the cows being milked . . . . You are almost worthy of hearing this man, seeing this man, talking with this man. A man, that England would try to destroy, because they know that somehow this slave, this captured African, had the power of UNDERSTANDING—and what’s worse—he understands the slave—he loves the slave—and Brother Michael Abdul Malik, has the nerve, the gall—to be black. Even in a time when he could be anything he wants to be, rich, famous, fashionable, safe—it seems Brother Malik is already too busy being happy as a NIGGER.
A caricature of a caricature; but Jamal, turning Malik into an American, infecting Malik, in the security of Trinidad, with the American-type racial vehemence Malik had so far only parodied, was creating a monster. “Nigger,” success as a kind of racial revenge: these are among the themes of the novel Malik was writing about himself in a cheap lined quarto writing pad, solid unparagraphed pages in pencil or ballpoint, the writing small, very little crossed out, the number of words noted at the top of each page. At least fifty pages were written, and some of them survived the events they seem so curiously to foreshadow.
The setting is Guyana. A well-appointed house, Malik’s, is being described: modern furniture imported from England, fitted carpets, radio phonograph, records, “a gigantic bookshelf Shakepeare [sic] Shaw Marx Lenin Trotsky Confucius Hugo.” The narrator takes up “Salammbo that masterpiece of Flaubert’s” and finds it dust-free. “I discover that he not only have the books but actually reads and understands them I was absolutly bowld, litteraly. I took a seat, and gazed upon this marvel, Mike.”
The narrator is a thirty-year-old Englishwoman, Lena Boyd-Richardson. She has been four years in Guyana, doing a bogus job created for her in the firm of Clarkson’s by Sir Harold, a friend of her father’s; and she is “really of the opinion these natives are all shifless good for Nothings.” Her house is not far from Michael Malik’s, and she often sees “Mike leaning against the Coconut tree like some statue on a Pedestal, some god, and his little subjects, his little people, Paying Homage to him.” He is in the habit of greeting her in pidgin: “Like it gwine rain today, mam”; but they do not meet until, for some reason (the early pages are lost), she visits the house. And then “to top it all he was even talking with a slight Cockney accent to stupify me the more.” He plays some jazz for her on the phonograph, and the “Thihikosky 1812”; and then the time comes for her to bid “goodbye to this Amazing man with the Promise to call again.” So the first chapter ends.
Chapter Two is titled “Run in with Fate.” Lena doesn’t call again; but she drives past Mike’s house every day and begins to note “his eyes sometime Mocking and laughing.” She notes his light complexion and wonders about his idling, his shabby clothes, his “weird double Life.” “And then again I find myself closing up my doors at night . . . the truth I am [afraid deleted] scared I am mortally afraid of this man of this Mike the grinning ape, and I can’t help liking him, something about him drawing you to him, I wonder how he would look without that Big Beard.”
The run-in with fate follows. Lena, driving through the town one day, nearly runs over a young girl. The girl is Jenny, Mike’s eldest daughter, and Lena offers to take her home. Jenny is uneasy, “scared of what daddy will do if he finds out”; but allows herself to be driven home. “And there was Mike leaning against the tree as usual with his little retinue around him.” Terror. “Mike’s voice boomed ‘Jenny come here.’” Jenny screams and doesn’t move; she is “shaking too much to say anything sensible.” “Was it fear?” Lena wonders. “And if so Fear of what?” Mike’s wife, pregnant, runs up “at a fantastic speed despite her large Stomach.” Mike himself doesn’t leave the coconut tree; but “His Retinue Pulled slightly away from where they were but still not out of earshot.” Jenny is led by her younger sister to Mike. Lena—curiously choosing this moment to observe “what a great Bond there was” between Jenny and her father—explains that nothing has happened. Mike kisses Jenny, who sobs and says, “They didn’t touch me, daddy.” He walks off toward the house, but the girl still sobs.
“It took me Just one minute to see why the child kept insisting ‘They didn’t touch me,’ Just a minute to see why she was so scared, and what of. For her father came walking out of the front door as Calm as Ever with a shot gun Under his Arm and Box of shells stuffing some down in his Pocket.” Mike’s wife is about to faint, but Lena catches her; and when Mike comes to her, “she then made a most amazing Transformation, recaptured her poise and said to her husband, ‘Be Carefull darling, and think first All the time.’ For someone who did not know the happenings before they could never imagine what this man was going to do. There was that look of finality about him.” Jenny pleads; Lena—“I too was like if I was dumb”—is silent; the wife faints. And Mike walks down the road to the corner.
This is how Lena becomes involved with the family. After some missing pages we find Lena and Mike’s wife exchanging memories of England, and Lena hears of Mike’s courtship. Nothing, apparently, has happened; tension has been created for its own sake, to prove a point about Mike. Not the least illogical aspect of the scene—with a child screaming, a wife fainting—is the stress on Mike as family man; but Jamal, in his article about Malik for younger readers, had laid that on with a heavy American hand. A few more pages are missing here; but it is fairly clear that some kind of relationship has developed between Lena and Mike.
And then something extraordinary happens. There is a stumble in the narrative: the writer, without knowing it, suddenly loses his narrator, Lena. In a few connected lines the writer moves from the first-person narrative to third person and then back to first. But now it is Sir Harold, Lena’s father’s friend, appearing in Guyana, who is the narrator.
Sir Harold comes upon Mike addressing a street-corner meeting in pidgin. Mike’s speech is given at length; it is quite incoherent. People must work; but there is nothing wrong with being lazy; Mike himself is lazy and can be seen any day standing in the shade of his tree; he doesn’t like to work; but he has worked hard since he was fourteen, and he has worked in England; in England no one pays for the doctor and everything is free, but the taxes are high. The crowd, mixed African and Asian, receives this speech ecstatically. Then Mike, switching from pidgin, says to Sir Harold: “You come late Sir Harold, I am never at my best when I have my wife waiting.”
Lena, lost for some pages, now reappears. “‘What do you think about him’ she asked. I met him once before in England, I said, now I don’t know for he seems somehow different. We noticed a movement in the bushes to the side of the house ‘Dont Pay any attention to that’ she said ‘that Probably some of his Retinue, wherever he is you can be sure there will be some of them hanging around.’ I felt a Cold wind Pass through me, and decided to go inside.” Mike and his wife prepare to leave. “Jenny will not sleep if I am not at home,” Mike says. And Sir Harold continues: “I stood at the door and watched them walk down the Path about 30 seconds after I saw six dark figures slowly follow them ‘England was never like this’ I said to myself and turned inside.”
The pages are now disconnected: “We could not tear ourselves away from the Presence of this man”—“the fantastic following he had in the country”—Mike ill with malaria, contracted in Africa when he was young (“never less than two score People standing around the house with a look of anxiety about them”: which reads like a borrowed sentence)—Sir Harold offering a job with Clarkson’s—shouts in the street: “We go crown him king.”
An autobiography can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies: it reveals the writer totally. And Malik’s primitive novel is like a pattern book, a guide to later events. That scene of causeless tension at the house with the daughter, the wife, the retin
ue: just such a scene was witnessed at Arima by a black woman visitor on the Sunday before Joe Skerritt was murdered. “I can’t describe it. I spent just 10 minutes in that house that day. Michael was in the street flying kites. Jennifer wanted some Coke. Her mother said she had to ask her father.” That “look of finality” that made Lena Boyd-Richardson “like if I was dumb”: it was with “a satanic look,” according to Stanley Abbott, that Malik, cutlass in hand and about to murder Skerritt, ordered Abbott: “I am ready. Bring him.” The political speech in Guyana: even that was to take place, twelve days after the murder of Skerritt. The malaria: that was the excuse Malik gave when, on the run in Guyana, he stayed for three days in his hotel room without drawing the curtains. There remains the mystery of Lena Boyd-Richardson, repelled, fascinated, involved, and then abruptly disappearing as narrator.
So, during November and December 1971, Hakim Jamal and Michael Abdul Malik, in the security of the commune, produced their literature: Jamal, on the typewriter, offering the vision of a triumphant “nigger,” Malik dourly writing his novel in ballpoint and soft pencil, counting each word, awakening old disturbances, arriving at some new definition of himself.
The uneducated Belmont boy had become a man of culture. The London X had become a political hero at home. The man with the silent retinue was the man who in 1965 had told Colin McGlashan of the Observer, “It may sound melodramatic, but there are people who would die for me.” Such a success required witness, English witness; and people like Lena Boyd-Richardson and Sir Harold felt a cold wind of terror. “England was never like this”: Malik, as he wrote, filling the cheap pad, was discovering that he, like his bodyguard and familiar, Steve Yeates, carried the wound of England.
The Return of Eva Perón, With the Killings in Trinidad Page 6