“Wear your national dress!” But we West Indians, we Barbadians, did not have a national dress. Someone, with a Trinidadian sense of humour, suggested, “What about a grass skirt? Or a hot shirt, like in Carnival!”
When I was in second year at Trinity College at the University of Toronto, we West Indians suffered an inferior spirit, a disadvantaged image on those days when the University and the city and the country were celebrating events of national culture and importance. Dominion Day, as Canada Day was called. Formal black-tie dances in college. And the independence anniversaries of African — and even West Indian — countries, when the resplendence and the touch of superiority in the gait and the carriage of the robe, as it is flung over the shoulders, brings back images of other men of power who threw their robes over their shoulders to re-emphasize that power — the Roman senators! — the new African “senators” swaggered across the front campus, across the Trinity quadrangle, as they had swaggered in their rendition of High Life, a dance that brings out as much artistry and cultural richness as it brings out raw sexuality in the vibrating of thighs and hips and hopes.
We would have to import, or have our mothers send for us, through parcel post, a hot shirt, with the face of a tenor pan in a steel band orchestra. But this proved impossible. And we reverted to improvisation. Not improvisation because we had nothing to demonstrate our creativity on. We grabbed. We stole. We abrogated. We appropriated an African garb to go along with our Africanness. Africa became, in Canada, a noble image, a non-despised image different from the times when we hailed for Tarzan in the Hollywood narratives about black men dressed in grass skirts. And for years, for generations, we thought that the grass skirt was, indeed, the national dress of Africans. When this cloud cleared from our consciousness, and we saw the glitter and the embroidery in the robes worn by “real Africans,” and noticed how disdainfully they regarded us West Indians, as they tossed their dark-red, gold-trimmed robes worn like togas over their shoulders, we could do nothing but try to imitate them. We began to wear Kente cloth. I am told, years later, that the robes we gloried in, and wore with manufactured dignity, were the raiment of the poorer Africans. The kind of clothes that a labouring man would wear. Communist irony.
Chinua Achebe is seen by me in this context. It was more than an interview that I wanted from him in 1964, more than a programme to be sold to CBC Anthology, more than a way of introducing this African novelist who was taking the world by storm, with Things Fall Apart, at a time when most of the countries and philosophies in the world were, indeed, falling apart. It was the recognition of a great novelist, a “brother” who had made his name, and who was accepted as a model on whom I could pin my own writing. I was jealous that he had written the novel I had in mind to write, first. Meaning quite simply that there were circulating in my thoughts, clouds of ideas, not defined, not really understood by me, and he had pulled it off first.
In these early days as a CBC freelance radio broadcaster, I functioned as an investigative reporter, tracking down leads as a detective tracks down suspects. I read the three daily newspapers, every day: the Globe and Mail, the Telegram, and the Toronto Star; and I continued this practice in Harlem, with the Amsterdam News, the New York Times, and the New York Daily News. And I supplemented this “research” with reading Harper’s, Look, The Atlantic Monthly, and Ramparts. I.F. Stone’s newsletter came into my hands, through an American friend who worked for the Financial Post in Toronto. It is likely also, that through one of these sources, in addition to a word from Fred, that I knew that Chinua Achebe was on a Guggenheim Fellowship for Writing, and would be spending his residency in New York, in a men’s residence of Columbia University. Harlem is, geographically, a part of Columbia University, “just around the corner in the next block,” Fred said.
Chinua Achebe was not enthusiastic about giving me an interview. He did not know who I was. My first novel, The Survivors of the Crossing, had not survived from the critics in Britain, to establish me on his level. But I was persistent and he agreed to a five-minute interview. That was all I needed. To get my foot in the door, so to speak, and once there, I knew I would get the fifteen minutes I needed. And naturally, I had read Things Fall Apart.
The room was tiny. The room was hot. There was no air conditioning. New York in the summer, and living in a room the size of a prison cell, comes down in its representation, to a black face in shining pearls of sweat. Chinua Achebe was sitting on the bed. He looked like a black Buddha. He was not smiling. I do not think he even shook my hand. His irritation was obvious. I think he hated me. I think he considered me to be an intrusion. But I was a freelance broadcaster and my “subjects” did not have to like me. So long as his answers were clear, and spoken into the mike, I was satisfied.
He was wearing an ordinary white short-sleeved shirt. I had expected him to be dressed in an African robe. I think that this disappointment was the beginning of my own dislike for him.
The Nagra was heavier that afternoon. I had walked the two blocks from the subway. Now in his room, I sat in a low chair, a kind of easy chair, and with the Nagra on the floor that has no carpet, just the durable, tough floorboards made of oak, I turned the power on and fiddled with a few buttons. I did not engage him in frivolous chatter, as people do when they are fixing something mechanical, such as finding a station on the radio, or a football game on the television, on a weekend, filling up the interval of searching with small talk. I had felt from the beginning that Mr. Chinua Achebe was not a man for small talk. I continued to turn knobs and switches. Achebe continued to sit on the bed. The interval for small talk became tense. Achebe remained like Buddha on the coverlet. I managed to get the twelve-inch tape on. But I could not remember which stitch made the tape turn. And of course, I did not remember how to make the Nagra record. The humidity in the room made me begin to sweat. Chinua Achebe was furious in his silence. Imperturbable. Like a black sculpture made from a block of salt … like a sculpture of black salt.
If only I could get the tape to revolve, to give the impression that something was being recorded, I could then ask him my questions, and hope that since he could not see the face of the tape recorder, then he could not know that nothing was being recorded.
And then it happened. I turned the knob in its vertical position, and the recalcitrant tape moved; and I asked him about symbolism in the novel; about the meaning of “things falling apart”; was he thinking of the whole of Africa; and not only Nigeria; the role of the gods of the ancestors; and did the modern Nigeria suffer from a lack of religious deification of gods? And then it was over. And Chinua Achebe remained sphinx-like. He did not even say goodbye or thank me for the interview.
I returned to the CBC studio in the Rockefeller building on Sixth Avenue, faced with preparing a programme with no word recorded. I decided to prepare the programme from my notes, from my memory of the novel, from my impressions of the author. Reading the biographical notes, I was alarmed to read that “Chinua Achebe is director of outside broadcasts for Radio Nigeria.”
I was now angry. Embarassed. Mortified. And hateful of this African. He had known all along that I was fumbling with the Nagra. For, as a broadcaster himself, and the director of “outside broadcasts,” he would have been accustomed to using a Nagra. The technicians and machines in colonial Nigeria are not dissimilar to those used in Canada, or in Barbados, at the time. This was in l964, in New York, in a student’s room at Columbia University.
In 1992, I was writer-in-residence at Guelph University, in Canada. The office I was assigned to use was the office of Professor G.D. Killam, an authority on African and Commonwealth Literature. Chinua Achebe was his favourite author. Professor Killam’s wife had died suddenly of cancer, and he had retired his position on the staff of the Department of English. And he informed the chairman of the department that I could take any book left behind in his office. I had a field day: I chose the best books for myself, and gave some to my students who showed an interest in African literature and in Commo
nwealth literature.
It was a Friday. Deep in the winter. Snow covered the quarter mile walk from my office to my lodgings, on the campus; and it was too far to the Faculty Club; and too cold to walk home, to an empty apartment, of two bedrooms, with a fireplace and a maid; so I remained in the office, and looked through the books I had not selected for my use. And then I found that in all this time, more than four months coming to this office, four days a week, my curiosity was not great enough to cause me to open this door. The door of a clothes cupboard.
Inside it, were boxes and large envelopes. On one large parcel was the name Chinua Achebe. Beneath it was the address of Guelph University. A line was drawn through this address. And an address in Nigeria written in. The Canadian postage, stamped in red ink by a machine, was still on the brown box. It had been someone’s intention to send the parcel back to Nigeria. But, from the stamp on the parcel, that was more than eight years ago from this cold Friday afternoon, when the decision to “forward” the box to Nigeria was made.
Out of the blue, a man named James King called me to ask me if I knew how he could get in touch with George Lamming, the Barbadian author of the classic In the Castle of My Skin. “I am writing a biography on Margaret Laurence,” he said, “and I have come across the name of George Lamming, quite often, as a lover of Margaret Laurence, and I want to check it out. I understand he lives in a hotel, in Barbados.” I gave this stranger the name of the hotel, in Bathsheba, St. Joseph, where George himself had told me one Sunday afternoon, as we were on our third Mount Gay and soda water, that “if you look straight across this water, straight, you can see Africa!” We were sitting in the easy chairs in Enid Maxwell’s Place, which served the best brunch in the whole of Barbados, frequented by Canadian “tourisses.”
And the moment I gave the biographer the information he sought, I forgot about him and about George and about Margaret Laurence.
Mordecai Richler hit the airwaves and the literary pages of the National Post, the Globe and Mail and the Toronto Star, to say nothing of Books in Canada, and Quill & Quire, and all the CBC programmes that contended with literature, for his novel, Barney’s Version, a very smartly written novel with an autobiographical hint. It had people talking. One of these was Constance Rooke, at the time vice-president of Academics at Guelph University; and it was Connie who subsequently reviewed the book on a CBC radio programme and predicted that it would win the 1997 Giller Prize, which it did.
Barney’s Version was being launched in a fancy and well-stocked locale on Spadina Avenue and Richmond Street, on a lovely afternoon, when the heart was full of love and the birds were singing, and Mordecai was fresh from his triumph as writer-in-residence at Massey College.
The biography of Margaret Laurence had just been published, to much chagrin and threats of lawsuits and consternation from members of Margaret Laurence’s family. In it, James King had mentioned his visit to Barbados, to Enid Maxwell’s Place, where he tried to interview George Lamming, who told him that Margaret Laurence was “crazy.” I felt that George, whether or not he had had an affair with Margaret Laurence, had not behaved gentlemanly in that personal opinion of her alleged predilection for love affairs. The biographer said that George denied any relationship at all, in the bluntest of terms. But what caught my eye was James King’s suggestion that Margaret Laurence had followed George back to London, and would track him down in his favourite pubs, and even attended a party given by Mordecai Richler, at his London home.
Well, Mordecai, who had convinced the master of Massey College to stock single malt in the small bar in the Junior Fellows’ Lounge, who had advised one of the beginning writers in his charge as writer-in-residence that he had absolutely no talent, who had developed a reputation for toughness, just like some of his non-fiction opinion pieces, Mordecai was there to bear witness to the “biographical facts” in James King’s biography of Margaret Laurence.
I asked Mordecai if there was any truth in the story that Margaret Laurence attended one of his parties. Mordecai flatly denied that this was so. The other thing of interest in James King’s speculation about Margaret Laurence’s sexuality, her multi-partnered life, and separation from her husband, was that Margaret Laurence then went after “an African diplomat” stationed in London. James King says that Margaret Laurence confided to “Nadine the wonderful experience she had had in ‘a brief but extremely sanity-saving encounter with one of the nicest men I have ever met — he is, (oddly enough) an ambassador for an African country (which shall remain nameless, but it isn’t Ghana or Somalia!)’”
Imagine my surprise in 1992 to have fallen upon a file neglected in a drawer in Professor Killam’s office, a file containing an exchange of letters between Chinua Achebe and Margaret Laurence! Was Chinua Achebe the “African diplomat” for whom Margaret had “fled behind” leaving her husband in Vancouver?
I am not suggesting, of course, that this is the case; that this is fact. I am merely giving the second dimension to this narrative.
From my reading of these letters, Margaret Laurence is the more doting of the two: there is more affection in her words than in his; and there is, in both, a guardedness, as if they were both speaking, through an interpreter, of their hearts.
And now for the third dimension of this story. In 2002, George Lamming was in Toronto to give the Dr. Cheddi Jagan Annual Lecture, at York University. George and I went up in an elevator with Professor Frank Birbalsingh, and I took this opportunity to ask George if he had seen James King’s biography on Margaret Laurence, and how did he get along with the biographer who visited him at Enid Maxwell’s place in Bathsheba. No, he hadn’t, George said, scornfully. He was adamant.
He was so disgusted by the biographer asking him questions about Margaret Laurence that he “cut the interview off, got up from the table, and left!” James King did not have an interview that would have resulted in the statement George made in the book. James King’s version of this aborted interview can be found on pages 418 and 419 of his book, The Life of Margaret Laurence: ML’s affair with George Lamming:
When I met with George Lamming in Barbados in June 1996, he told me he had met ML at a party given by Binky Marks, the proprietor of The Co-Op Bookstore on Pender Street, in Vancouver; he thought they had perhaps seen one another one further time. Their conversations had been political in nature, centring on their mutual interest in Ghana, which he had visited. He did not recall that their relationship had ever become intimate, but when I asked him to deny statements by ML to the contrary, he refused to do so on the grounds that it was not his ‘style’ to comment on such matters. I pressed him on this point several times, since, I pointed out, it should be relatively easy — despite his “style” — to state something that had not occurred, had indeed not occurred. He refused to make any further statement. ML alleged to many women friends that she had slept with Lamming; shortly before she died, she mentioned her affair with Lamming to her daughter and named him as her lover.
What are we to make of this? Observe the moral: never sleep with a woman who is a writer. But there is a more distressing conclusion that can be made: why was Margaret Laurence so obsessed with placing Lamming in this light? And how great was the arrogance of James King to give more literary — is this literary? — significance to the mundane act of a man going to bed with a woman, inflating the act precisely because the man and the woman were writers of some reputation? Does it make the woman a better — or a worse — writer? Does the voodoo of the kind of “sex” Lamming is said to have indulged in with Margaret Laurence tantalize her mind, and her biographer’s, to put such stress on a liaison that no one else seemed to have thought twice about?
The most important aspect of the episode of Margaret Laurence and George Lamming wrapped in a love affair that he denied ever having had, is its profound inability to stir us to interest and sexual arousal.
Chinua Achebe was being driven from his home in Lagos, Nigeria, by his son, on his way to a speaking engagement in America, when the car
crashed, leaving Chinua Achebe in a wheelchair. The news hit me like a sledgehammer. And ever since that sad afternoon, when the accident was related to me by my friend Jan Carew, who had met Chinua Achebe in Nigeria, I have lived with the horribleness of my enmity, unrequited through the voicelessness of distance; and now it is too late to ask for forgiveness, and for redemption. I am in that wheelchair with Chinua Achebe.
And then there was Martin Luther King, Jr. He chose to spend the fifteen minutes I had asked his assistants for, had implored them for, and they had promised me that Dr. King would give me the five minutes, that he won’t be a minute. Dr. King spent the fifteen minutes promised to me in conversation with the female staff. One of them was the young woman who had almost had a nervous breakdown when she realized that the man in the dark blue suit sitting beside her, that morning, was none other than Malcolm X.
But Dr. King was smooth. He left without mentioning my request. I thought of Malcolm X’s words, “pork-chop-eating nigrah!” It was an awful thing to do. But I would have scored unchallengeable points by returning to Toronto, in quick succession, after the interview of Malcolm X, with one with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.! I would become what a columnist of the Toronto Star, Leonard Braithwaite, called, “an untouchable of Toronto.” I never did understand what Mr. Braithwaite meant by that; whether it meant that no one could touch me, or no one wanted to touch me.
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