The involvement of the Negro with the white world is one of the limitations of West Indian writing, as it is the destruction of American Negro writing. The American Negro’s subject is his blackness. This cannot be the basis of any serious literature, and it has happened again and again that once the American Negro has made his statement, his profitable protest, he has nothing to say. With two or three exceptions, the West Indian writer has so far avoided the American Negro type of protest writing, but his aims have been equally propagandist: to win acceptance for his group.
‘Comedy,’ Graham Greene says, ‘needs a strong framework of social convention with which the author sympathizes but does not share.’ By this definition the West Indian writer is incapable of comedy; and, as we have seen, he is not interested in it. Mr Greene’s statement can be extended. A literature can grow only out of a strong framework of social convention. And the only convention the West Indian knows is his involvement with the white world. This deprives his work of universal appeal. The situation is too special. The reader is excluded; he is invited to witness; he cannot participate. It is easier to enter any strong framework of social convention, however alien. It is easier to enter the tribal world of an African writer like Camara Laye.
No writer can be blamed for reflecting his society. If the West Indian writer is to be blamed, it is because, by accepting and promoting the unimpressive race-and-colour values of his group, he has not only failed to diagnose the sickness of his society but has aggravated it.
It is only in the calypso that the Trinidadian touches reality. The calypso is a purely local form. No song composed outside Trinidad is a calypso. The calypso deals with local incidents, local attitudes, and it does so in a local language. The pure calypso, the best calypso, is incomprehensible to the outsider. Wit and verbal conceits are fundamental; without them no song, however good the music, however well sung, can be judged a calypso. A hundred foolish travel-writers (reproducing the doggerel sung ‘especially’ for them) and a hundred ‘calypsonians’ in all parts of the world have debased the form, which is now generally dismissed abroad as nothing more than a catchy tune with a primitive jingle in broken English. The knowing refusal of travel-writers nowadays to be taken in is as foolish as their previous indiscrimination, neither reaction being based on a knowledge of genuine calypso.
For this bastardization Trinidadians are as much to blame as anyone. Just as they take pleasure in their American modernity, so they take pleasure in living up to the ideals of the tourist brochure. They know that they are presented to the world as the land of calypso and steel band. They are determined that the world shall not be disappointed; and their talent for self-caricature is profound. The Americans expect native costumes and native dances; Trinidad will discover both.
Few words are used more frequently in Trinidad than ‘culture’. Culture is spoken of as something quite separate from day-to-day existence, separate from advertisements, films and comic strips. It is like a special native dish, something like a callalloo. Culture is a dance – not the dance that people do when more than three of them get together – but the one put on in native costume on a stage. Culture is music – not the music played by well-known bands and nowadays in the modern way, tape-recorded – but the steel band. Culture is song – not the commercial jingle which, as much as the calypso, has become the folksong of Trinidad, nor the popular American songs which are heard from morning till night – not these, but the calypso. Culture is, in short, a night-club turn. And nothing pleases Trinidadians so much as to see their culture being applauded by white American tourists in night-clubs.
From the Trinidad Guardian:
LIMBO FOR WI FILM LIKELY
By George Alleyne
Guardian Shipping Reporter
Mr Lourenço Ricciardi, Italian film director, and Mrs Ricciardi, photographer, flew into Trinidad on Tuesday to look for talent and possible locations for a movie that the Baltea Film Company of Rome plans making in the West Indies. Within hours they were taken by friendly Mr Oliver Burke, secretary of the Tourist Board, to the new Miramar Club, South Quay, Port of Spain, where they saw the Limbo being performed by Lord Chinapoo, one-time Limbo ‘king’, and his troupe.
‘Wonderful,’ cried Ricciardi. ‘I will consider incorporating the limbo in the film. Nothing is decided though,’ he said yesterday.
The Ricciardis are on the last leg of an exploratory tour of the Caribbean.
They have been so far on their trip to Cuba, Jamaica, St Thomas, Puerto Rico, Martinique, St Lucia, Grenada and Barbados.
This talk of culture is comparatively new. It was a concept of some politicians in the forties, and caught on largely because it answered the vague, little-understood dissatisfaction some people were beginning to feel with their lives of fantasy. The promotion of a local culture was the only form of nationalism that could arise in a population divided into mutually exclusive cliques based on race, colour, shade, religion, money. Under pressure any Trinidadian group could break up into its component parts; there was no more pathetic demonstration of this than during the London race riots of 1958. White, coloured, Portuguese, Indian, Chinese thought that no rioters would attack them; there were Negroes who thought that only Jamaican Negroes would be attacked; some students and professional men thought that only lower-class Negroes would be attacked; and among respectable West Indians generally, white, brown and black, there was a feeling that the ‘black fellers’ had what was coming to them, and that the English people had been ‘provoked’. At a time when West Indians should have drawn together, many were anxious to contract out; Mrs Mackay’s son Angus, it will be remembered, used to tell people that he was Brazilian.
Nationalism was impossible in Trinidad. In the colonial society every man had to be for himself; every man had to grasp whatever dignity and power he was allowed; he owed no loyalty to the island and scarcely any of his group. To understand this is to understand the squalor of the politics that came to Trinidad in 1946 when, after no popular agitation, universal adult suffrage was declared. The privilege took the population by surprise. Old attitudes persisted: the government was something removed, the local eminence was despised. The new politics were reserved for the enterprising, who had seen the prodigious commercial possibilities. There were no parties, only individuals. Corruption, not unexpected, aroused only amusement and even mild approval: Trinidad has always admired the ‘sharp character’ who, like the sixteenth-century picaroon of Spanish literature, survives and triumphs by his wits in a place where it is felt that all eminence is arrived at by crookedness.
When in 1870 Kingsley visited San Fernando, a ‘gay and growing little town’, he was distressed only by the Negro houses, which were ‘mostly patched together out of the most heterogeneous and wretched scraps of wood’.
On inquiry I found that the materials were, in most cases, stolen; that when a Negro wanted to build a house, instead of buying the materials, he pilfered a board here, a stick there, a nail somewhere else … regardless of the serious injury which he caused to working buildings; and when he had gathered a sufficient pile, hidden safely away behind his neighbour’s house, the new hut rose as if by magic … But I was told too, frankly enough, by the very gentleman who complained, that this habit was simply an heirloom from the bad days of slavery, when the pilfering of the slaves from other estates was connived at by their own masters, on the ground that if A’s Negroes robbed B, B’s Negroes robbed C, and so all round the alphabet; one more evil instance of the demoralizing effect of a state of things which, wrong in itself, was sure to be the parent of a hundred other wrongs.
The picaroon delight in trickery persists. These are constant ‘leakages’ of examination papers; in 1960 the Cambridge School Certificate biology paper was known throughout the island days before the examination. Slavery, the mixed population, the absence of national pride and the closed colonial system have to a remarkable degree re-created the attitudes of the Spanish picaroon world. This was an ugly world, a jungle, where the
picaroon hero starved unless he stole, was beaten almost to death when found out, and had therefore to get in his blows first whenever possible; where the weak were humiliated; where the powerful never appeared and were beyond reach; where no one was allowed any dignity and everyone had to impose himself; an uncreative society, where war was the only profession.
So in Trinidad you must always walk careful of your dignity, and you must impose yourself whether you are in a store or a bank, whether you are crossing the road or driving a car. The treatment of the sick poor in drug-stores is notorious. In a bank it is always better to be served by an expatriate; he may know that your account is negligible, but he will be civil. On the highway no one will dip his lights for you; you must blind in return, and learn the Trinidad highway game of driving into the blinding lights, to make your opponent swerve.
Throughout the picaroon society violence and brutality are accepted. Twenty years ago an extremely popular calypso urged the reintroduction of corporal punishment:
The old-time Cat-o’nine!
Lash them hard! And they bound to change their mind.
Send them Carrera [prison island] with licks like fire,
And they bound to surrender.
In 1960 the Grenadian illegal immigrant who was hounded by the police was a subject for calypso; and the brutality of the police was applauded:
If you see how they holding the scamps and them,
Friends, you bound to bawl.
Some of them can read and spell,
But they can’t pronounce at all.
The police telling them, ‘Say pig, you stupid man,’
And as they say hag, is licks in the police van.
Sentimentality and brutality go together. The man who, during an emotional mother-and-son scene in a B-film, turns to you and says hoarsely, ‘A mother is a helluva thing, you know, boy. You only have one,’ is the same man who, watching Belsen camp scenes, will roar with derisive laughter.
To bring political organization to the picaroon society, with its taste for corruption and violence and its lack of respect for the person, has its dangers. Such a society cannot immediately become responsible; but it can be re-educated only through responsibility. Change must come from the top. Capital punishment and corporal punishment, incitements to brutality, must be abolished. The civil service must be rejuvenated. In the colonial days the civil servant, his way blocked by the expatriate who was sometimes his inferior and occasionally corrupt as well, expended all his creative energies on petty picaroon intrigue and worked off his aggression on the public. His duties were those of a clerk; he was never required to be efficient; he never had to make a decision. Pitch-forked now into the ministerial system, turned from clerical or at best executive grade officer into administrative, the average civil servant is out of his depth. Contempt for the public lingers on, as well as the tradition of responsibility-dodging. The public, obliged to beg favours, continues to hold authority in dread and contempt. What is true of the civil service is true of most of the business houses.
The need to be efficient will change some of these attitudes. An efficient civil service is in some ways a considerate civil service. The assistant in a drugstore, if required to be efficient, will see that her position is not simply one of authority over the poor who are sick; the policeman will see that he is more than a licensed bully; and perhaps, gradually, there will be a lessening of the need now felt by everyone all down the line to display his authority by aggression.
From the Trinidad Guardian:
SAM COOKE TO GIVE FREE SHOW
Sam Cooke, one of America’s leading vocalists and his Summertime show, will put on a free performance for any one of Trinidad’s Orphan homes at the conclusion of the Trinidad leg of his tour upcoming November 9 and November 10.
This was made known in a letter from the Sam Cooke Inc., New York, to Mr Valmond (Fatman) Jones, Secretary of the Sam Cooke Fan Club in Trinidad who are sponsors of the show.
The free show comes off on November 11, the day after Mr Cooke’s last local performance at San Fernando.
From the Trinidad Guardian:
SAM COOKE’S ‘AGENT’ FLIES TO MARTINIQUE
Valmond ‘Fatman’ Jones, secretary of the Sam Cooke Fan Club, flew unexpectedly to Martinique yesterday morning, 36 hours before his singing idol was booked to perform before a sell-out crowd at the Globe Cinema, Port-of-Spain.
Mr Jones, popular carnival masquerader, is the ‘impresario’ behind Sam Cooke’s advertised visit to Trinidad.
The American singer, according to arrangements made by Mr Jones, is expected to give two performances at the Globe Cinema, Port-of-Spain, tonight and two at the Empire cinema, San Fernando, tomorrow. He was due to arrive at Piarco Airport, according to correspondence, with a six-piece band on Monday. Up to last night, the singer and his musicians had not turned up.
It is understood that both shows at the Globe, 4.30 and 8.30 p.m., were completely sold out. Tickets for the San Fernando show were selling like ‘hot bread’, it was also reported.
Before he left, Mr Jones had disclosed that Cooke would give a charity show for orphans after concluding his four engagements.
A publicity agent in Port-of-Spain, who spent more than $1,000 to advertise the Sam Cooke shows in Trinidad, was surprised to hear of Mr Jones’ departure. He immediately stopped all further promotion of the shows.
A cocktail party to welcome Mr Cooke fixed for last night at the Bretton Hall Hotel, Port-of-Spain, did not come off. Several invited guests turned up, but were disappointed when they learned that Mr Cooke had not yet arrived.
Perhaps the most disappointed among the people who came to Bretton Hall expecting to see Mr Cooke was an American Naval Officer from the U.S. Base at Chaguaramas, who said he had deposited a ‘few hundred dollars’ with Mr Jones on the agreement that the singer would give a brief performance at the Base.
Three youths were talking about this affair one afternoon around a coconut-cart near the Savannah.
The Indian said, ‘I don’t see how anybody could vex with the man. That is brains.’
‘Is what my aunt say,’ one of the Negro boys said. ‘She ain’t feel she get rob. She feel she pay two dollars for the intelligence.’
She feel she pay two dollars for the intelligence. And at once analysis is made ridiculous. For here is a natural sophistication and tolerance which has been produced by the picaroon society. How could one wish it otherwise? To condemn the picaroon society out of hand is to ignore its important quality. And this is not its ability to beguile and enchant. For if such a society breeds cynicism, it also breeds tolerance, not the tolerance between castes and creeds and so on — which does not exist in Trinidad anyway – but something more profound: tolerance for every human activity and affection for every demonstration of wit and style.
There is no set way in Trinidad of doing anything. Every house can be a folly. There is no set way of dressing or cooking or entertaining. Everyone can live with whoever he can get wherever he can afford. Ostracism is meaningless; the sanctions of any clique can be ignored. It is in this way, and not in the way of the travel brochure, that the Trinidadian is a cosmopolitan. He is adaptable; he is cynical; having no rigid social conventions of his own, he is amused by the conventions of others. He is a natural anarchist, who has never been able to take the eminent at their own valuation. He is a natural eccentric, if by eccentricity is meant the expression of one’s own personality, unhampered by fear of ridicule or the discipline of a class. If the Trinidadian has no standards of morality he is without the greater corruption of sanctimoniousness, and can never make pleas for intolerance in the name of piety. He can never achieve the society-approved nastiness of the London landlord, say, who turns a dwelling-house into a boarding-house, charges exorbitant rents and is concerned lest his tenants live in sin. Everything that makes the Trinidadian an unreliable, exploitable citizen makes him a quick, civilized person whose values are always human ones, whose standards are only those of wit and s
tyle.
As the Trinidadian becomes a more reliable and efficient citizen, he will cease to be what he is. Already the gap between rich and poor – between the civil servant, the professional man, and the labourer – is widening. Class divisions are hardening and, in a land where no one can look back too far without finding a labourer or a crook, and sometimes a labourer who became a crook, members of the embryonic middle class are talking of their antecedents. Standards are being established by this class, and the fluidity of the society has diminished. With commercial radio and advertising agencies has also come all the apparatus of the modern society for joylessness, for the killing of the community spirit and the shutting up of people in their separate prisons of similar ambitions and tastes and selfishness: the class struggle, the political struggle, the race struggle.
When people speak of the race problem in Trinidad they do not mean the Negro–white problem. They mean the Negro–Indian rivalry. This will be denied by the whites, who will insist that the basic problem remains the contempt of their group for the non-white. Now that complaints about white prejudice are rarely heard, it is not uncommon to find whites scourging themselves for the prejudices of their group before black audiences. This they do by reporting outrageous statements made by members of their group and dissociating themselves from their sentiments.
The Middle Passage Page 8