The Mimic Men: A Novel

by V. S. Naipaul

  Understand Browne’s irrational, panicky behaviour, the disappearance of his frivolity, his angry descents among us and the people, and together with the assertion of his personal dignity his proclamation now not of distress alleviated but of distress just discovered, and greater than before. He had settled in the role of folk-leader. He did not have the courage to go beyond that; he had come to terms with the bitterness and self-disgust his role must have brought him. His speeches altered, though to the public their substance remained the same. Whereas before he had spoken of distress as though speaking only to the distressed, now he seemed to be addressing the guilty as well. He shrieked at them, he lamented, he tried to terrify. His defiance became as shameful as the thing he preached against. He was, I saw, in competition with his inferiors. But it paid off. It made him into a figure of a kind; it won him paragraphs in weeklies of international circulation. The outsiders who would have been chilled by his earlier appeals to dignity and stoicism, because such appeals would have excluded them, were now flattered by the more recognizable anguish he proclaimed and were willing to recognize him as a leader at last. Even if there had been the will to go forward from the emptiness of his position, this recognition would have weakened it.

  Our correspondence continued, that oblique irrelevant exchange which yet, as I can now see, revealed so much; and it was from this correspondence that I began to feel that more and more he would have liked to step down from the role that imprisoned him, as once his house next to the Kremlin barber shop had imprisoned him. In his letters he took me back to the past, back to London, back to the writing of his unfinished novel, back to Isabella Imperial and the days of my father’s agitation, back to the child who had been dressed and powdered and, to the delight of his parents and envy of his schoolfellows, had sung that so successful coon song. From these letters I could gather not only his contempt for our colleagues who were no longer made sharp by their personal bitterness; not only his contempt for the endless stream of mendicants who appealed to him in the name of their common race and their common past; I began to feel that I was entering a fantasy which was like my own. Here was more than longing for the past we had destroyed, of erratic magazines with statements of policy, of occasional pamphlets, of quick ideas worked out in bars. Here was a longing for different landscapes, a different world, where a child’s first memory of school was of taking an apple to the teacher and where, in essays at least, days were spent on temperate farms. Here was a longing, like my own, for freedom and what we considered the truth of our personalities. In fantasy, perhaps, this truth was one of the things success ought to have brought; the disappointments of fantasy are not the less real. So we each to the other explained our actions or inaction – what else, I see, was the purpose of my own ponderous essay on Pompey – while we continued to be political colleagues, each supporting the other.

  It was in the third year of our government that there occurred the incident which made Isabella notorious; and yet it did not lessen our reputation outside for stability and good sense. It was the tasteless idea of the Cercle Sportif to celebrate Browne’s birthday with a fancy-dress ball, and it was the tasteless idea of some people to turn up as African tribesmen with spears and little beards. Word got to Browne before the evening was over – a waiter at the Cercle had thought it his duty – and on the following morning instant deportation orders had been served on everyone at the party who could be deported. A number of expatriate civil servants were caught in this way.

  For two or three days Browne raved, in public meetings, in the Council, on the radio. He seemed to have gone off his head. He was like a man anxious to stir up a racial uprising. The newspapers at last objected. One ran a cartoon showing our airport lounge with three doors: Arrivals, Departures, Deportures. Browne instantly calmed down. He issued a reasonable statement about his and the government’s attitudes to racial clubs. There was no objection to them, he said, provided they were not maintained in any open or hidden way by public funds; there was no objection to the Cercle Sportif as such because it was no longer a place where ‘decisions concerning the deepest interests of our country are taken over whisky-and-soda’. His outburst had embarrassed many of us. But it did him no harm. It strengthened his position and won him a good deal of sympathetic foreign press comment; his subsequent statement about racial clubs was considered statesmanlike by outsiders and ‘diplomatic’ by his supporters. Poor Browne! Into what a position had he manoeuvred himself? Did he still know what he thought about anything?

  There was a sequel. About a month later there began to circulate an anonymous satirical tale called The Niger and the Seine. It was in English but so closely modelled on Candide it read like a translation from the French. Slavery has just been abolished, and the daughter of a French creole family comes home one day and announces that she is going to marry a Negro. Her worthy statement about her motives is cut short by her father, who embraces her. He not only agrees to the marriage but promises to do what he can to rehabilitate the Negro and the Negro’s family. He will send his son-in-law to Paris and pay for his education. All this is done and soon there is established on the island a Negro family of some substance. Their descendants continue the practice of inter-racial marriage. So too do the descendants of the French family: their load of guilt is heavy and their liberalism is tenacious. In time both families undergo some degree of racial alteration. It happens, then, that one day the daughter of the Negro family, now indistinguishable from white, comes home and announces that she wishes to marry the heir of the French family, now totally black. Her father refuses; the air is blue with racial abuse. The girl kills herself. The liberal cycle is over; it has served its purpose; it will not be repeated.

  The Niger and the Seine was a polished piece of work, fine, witty, piercing, almost unbearable in its cruelty. Nothing as outspoken had been written about Isabella since Froude’s visit. It brought to the discussion of racial attitudes a brutality that had been tacitly outlawed on our island. Out of violation there had grown a certain balance and order. Now, with the fancy-dress ball, Browne’s outburst, and this satirical pamphlet, it became clear that this order was breaking down. And of course it was the intruders, those who stood between the mutual and complete comprehension of master and slave, who were to suffer.

  5

  SO we brought drama of a sort to the island. I will claim this as one of our achievements. Drama, however much we fear it, sharpens our perception of the world, gives us some sense of ourselves, makes us actors, gives point and sometimes glory to each day. It alters a drab landscape. So it frequently happens – what many have discovered – that in conditions of chaos, which would appear hostile to any human development, the human personality is in fact more varied and extended. And this is creation indeed! It might be that I write subjectively, from the order of this suburban hotel set in the roar of this industrial city – once of such magical light – whose busyness does not conceal the fact of its death, revealed whenever an interior is entered and that busyness resolves itself into its component parts. Who comes here? A Grenadier. What does he want? A pot of beer.

  The drama we created did buoy me up. It abolished for me the tedium I had known in childhood and associated with the landscape: those hot, still Sunday afternoons when my father wandered vacantly about our old wooden house and bare yard in his vest and pants and sometimes applied himself to cleaning, meticulously, his bicycle for the drudgery of the week ahead. And I will record the private game I played from the beginning. It was the game of naming. I would begin a speech: ‘I have just come from a meeting at the corner of Wellington and Cocoye Streets.…’ Dull streets of concrete-and-tin houses; but it gave me pleasure to name them, as it gave me pleasure to name documents and statements after the villages or towns where they had been first outlined. So I went on, naming, naming; and, later, I required everything – every government building, every road, every agricultural schen.e – to be labelled. It suggested drama, activity. It reinforced reality. It reinforced that
sense of ownership which overcame me whenever I returned to the island after a trip abroad: do not think I was exempt from that feeling. Drama buoyed me up in my activity, and there was drama in that naming. Administration had been unobtrusive before. Now we, the chief actors, however powerless, however finally futile, were public figures, remarked on wherever we went. There was drama in that power game, from which I had withdrawn. There was one level at which divisions and alignments were public property; there was another level at which it was possible to pretend that they didn’t exist. Drama walked with us; it was not displeasing. I will claim it as an achievement, though the consequences for me were far from pleasant.

  Our energies went, then, on making public what already existed. We were busy. We opened schools which before would have opened their doors to children without much fanfare; we cut ribbons across brief stretches of country road; we opened laundries, shoe-shops and filling stations. We were photographed with visitors from American or German travel agencies, who said the correct things; we were photographed shaking hands with the representatives of a French motorcar firm who had come to assess the potential of a regional agency. We attached ourselves to all the activity of the island and to whatever, in a territory like ours, passed for industrialization or investment,

  An English firm began making biscuits. Someone else made toothpaste or brought down the machinery for filling tubes with toothpaste. I am not sure now what it was they did. We encouraged a local adventurer to tin local fruit. This was a failure. It hadn’t occurred to anyone concerned to find out whether local people wanted local fruit tinned; no one else did either. The same man went in later for tinning margarine and was a success. The margarine was imported, the tins were imported. Our effort was to operate a machine that turned the flattened tins into cylinders. We capped one end, filled the cylinder with the imported margarine, and capped the other end. I remember the process well. I opened the factory. Our margarine was slightly more expensive than imported tinned margarine, and had to be protected. I believe the factory employed five black ladies, whom we photographed looking grave and technical in white coats.

  Industrialization, in territories like ours, seems to be a process of filling imported tubes and tins with various imported substances. Whenever we went beyond this we were likely to get into trouble. There was, for instance, the plastics business, later the plastics scandal, to which my name was attached. A Czech came to me one day. He represented himself as a refugee from a giant Dutch firm and proposed that we should set him up as the head of a state-run plastics factory. He dazzled us with the possibilities of plastics; and I must confess I was attracted by his nationality. In time he produced some plastic combs and plastic bowls. They were a mottled brown or a mangy blue. But there was something irremediably wrong with his process. Everything he made literally stank. Crunch-time was coming – let this be remembered in the midst of all these adventures, all this activity and drama – and I have no doubt that the plastics affair would have been used to weaken me, if there had not occurred, at about the same time as the Czech was making his getaway, the great news about the bauxite contract.

  We had committed ourselves from the outset to renegotiating the bauxite contract. It was our only major resource, and its exploitation, in the late 1930s, was perhaps the only thing that had rescued our economy from total ruin and saved our island from revolution. But many people were not satisfied; there was a widespread feeling that the contract had been negotiated in anxiety and ignorance, and that we were not getting what we should. The Socialist created brilliant pictures of what could be done with increased royalties. The trouble about bauxite, though, is that nearly everybody in the world is a layman. The colonial politician who vows to renegotiate a bauxite contract is in the position of a physics teacher who promises to make an atom bomb for his fifth formers. We were in trouble before we began. We had no knowledge and didn’t know where we could get knowledge. London wasn’t helpful. We wanted an expert; we were willing to pay. But there was apparently no such person as a bauxite expert who was free and willing.

  I made official approaches to the companies. They replied with unofficial invitations to friendly barbecue parties beside swimming-pools. They were very friendly parties. The men had friendly rolls of flesh about their waist; they played with balls and dogs and occasionally dropped stern words to splashing children. Meat hissed over charcoal; laughing wives basted. In this atmosphere talk about bauxite seemed perverse, when it came from me, and threatening, when it came from them. A new arrival was greeted; a silent local housemaid appeared; someone laughed at a swimming dog. And I was being told that in South America bauxite, of excellent grade, lay below white sand, which had just to be hosed off; that in Jamaica the bauxite lay just below a couple of inches of stoneless earth; and that Australia was in fact a continent made entirely of bauxite. The bauxite of Isabella was difficult to mine and of indifferent grade. By making too much trouble we were gambling with our future; even as it was, there was little to stop all the companies leaving Isabella, and then the natives could play as long as they pleased with the red dust, as they had done before 1935. Besides, any degree of uncertainty about the future might lead to the abandonment of plans, well under way, for the establishment of an alumina plant. And that was an investment of some millions.

  The case was overstated. I was not alarmed. The Socialist continued to express its resentment, but it seemed that that was all we could do. How can you negotiate about something whose value you don’t know? To all our official approaches the companies replied with unofficial invitations. I believe some of the managers changed in my time, but the barbecue, family atmosphere remained the same and our conversations were the same. The companies didn’t want to be rude to us. We were a new country and so on, and they were in our life and part of it – the theme of their soft-sell advertisements in our newspapers – but their line was that there was nothing to discuss. And we couldn’t do a thing. There was no question of calling out the workers to support us. We had no control of that union. Besides, the companies’ workers were the best-paid in Isabella – there was a continuous scramble for jobs with them – and so far as things like housing and recreation facilities went, they were model employers. So there we were. Another message to be taken back to the people, another exercise in leadership.

  We were saved by Jamaica. They had more resources, a more experienced and energetic government, and more international contacts. They too had been exercised about their getting their bauxite, so easy to mine, renegotiated; and at last they seemed to be getting somewhere. We merely followed their example and advice. The barbecue parties stopped. Instead we were photographed with our aides in a conference room, amid blank blotters and carafes and tumblers. We all looked stern and businesslike. From their advertisements, no one was happier than the companies.

  It was a triumph. It was the peak of my political achievement. After this descent was to be rapid.

  The smaller the society the more complex the issues: the hostilities and alignments in a parliament of six hundred are more easy to follow than those in a parish council of twenty. To me even now there is only a sequence of events. Everyone’s motives remain unclear, and I doubt whether an impartial commission of inquiry will establish more than confusion, leading cloudily to a resolution of some sort. I am sure that motives and alliances shifted rapidly in the month after the renegotiating of the bauxite contract. Crunch-time was near; there was alarm and nervousness.

  Coinciding with the flight of the Czech whose plastic stank, coinciding with the jubilation and publicity over the new bauxite contract, there occurred a great and continuing disturbance throughout the Stockwell sugar estates, which our police force for almost a week was powerless to control.

  See how the first two events had me as their centre; see how jumpiness linked me to the third. It was a movement of Asiatics, so cool to the idea of sharing distress. It was the first serious challenge to order we had had to face, and we recognized it as a show of true stre
ngth. It was the crop season. Ripe canes stood in the fields waiting to be cut; the loss from arson was immense. See how quickly jumpiness turned to alarm; see how many interpretations could be put on this disturbance, which at first seemed so unmanageable. See how many ways of action suggested themselves to men who distrusted each other and saw their own power as nothing more than bluff. There was the desire to win over and control this suddenly displayed strength; there was the desire to destroy it. There was talk of exploitation and absentee landlords; at the same time, here and there in towns, there were demonstrations of counter-violence, totally racial in character.

  I was at the centre of events which I could not control. I was aware of feeling focusing on me. I was aware of every sort of rumour. Even those barbecue parties were being sinisterly interpreted: the delaying tactics of a man bribed, the delaying tactics of a man committed throughout his political career to the fortunes of his race. Easy to prove in a way, because The Socialist, against common sense, had continued to proclaim nationalization of the sugar estates as a desirable goal. It was part of my consistency, briefly my strength, and now the very thing to be used to destroy me.

  Yet out of all the confusion, against daily reports of ripe, burning canes and violence in the towns, this was the very cry that came out and was echoed from one end of the island to the other: nationalization. The estates had to be nationalized for the sake of unity, for the sake of that freedom from exploitation about which so much had been said. The estates had to be nationalized to balance the good fortune of the new bauxite contract. The estates had to be nationalized to prevent such threats to order in the future. I was at the centre; the task was mine. Browne spoke and was ambiguous: the task was mine. My supporters, and there were many, no doubt hoped for a miracle. Nationalization was as impossible as getting rid of the expatriate civil servants: so much London had made clear. A delegation to London was proposed. The expected reply came: there was nothing to discuss. But the cry did not die down on the island; I could not ignore it. Nationalization had become a word. It had no meaning. It held only Asiatic threat and Asiatic hope; to some it was a word of fulfilment and to others a word of revenge. Nationalization became less than a word: it became an emotive sound. The sugar-cane fields burned; two or three police stations in the country were overrun; in the towns shops and houses were looted. We were in the midst of a racial disturbance, but we spoke of it as nationalization. And to everything said by friend and enemy I was committed: to nationalization, to unity, to dignity, to the sharing of distress.