The Writer and the World: Essays

by V. S. Naipaul

  On January 1, 1972, the commune could be said to include two visitors, who were living in a rented house on the other side of the road. One was a Boston Negro in his late thirties who wore a gold earring and had given himself the Muslim name Hakim Jamal. The other was Gale Ann Benson, a twenty-seven-year-old middle-class English divorcée who had been living with Jamal for about a year.

  Jamal was an American Black Power man. A few months before, when he was being taken around London by Gale Benson, he had described himself to the Guardian as “excruciatingly handsome, tantalizingly brown, fiercely articulate.” That was his style. From Trinidad he wrote to a white associate in the United States: “Money is a white people thing—the thing they protect. The heaviest thing they have to carry.” And Jamal was anxious to lighten the load: he was full of schemes for black uplift that needed white money; one such scheme had brought him down to the West Indies. He was in some ways like Malik. But Malik did black agriculture and black communes, and Jamal did black schools and black publishing; and the two men did not clash. Malik claimed that he was the best-known black man in the world; and Jamal appeared to agree. Jamal’s own claim was that he himself was God. And Gale Benson outdid them both: she believed that Jamal was God.

  This was Benson’s distinction in the commune, her private cult of Jamal. Not her whiteness; there were other white people around, since for people like Malik there was no point in being black and angry unless occasionally there were white people to witness. Benson wore African-style clothes and had renamed herself Halé Kimga. This wasn’t a Muslim or an African name, but an anagram of Gale and Hakim; and it suggests that in her madness there was an element of middle-class play.

  Some weeks later Malik’s wife told a reporter of the Trinidad Evening News that Benson was “a very mysterious person.” She must have used the word ironically, because she went on: “She was sort of a fake … She will give a fake name and maintain her fake position.” A thirty-year-old black woman, a secondary-school teacher, said of Benson, “She was pretty. Different. Simple. Money oozing out of the clothes.” White, secure, yet in her quiet middle-class way out-blacking them all: Benson could not have been indifferent to the effect she created. The absurd cult, the absurd name, the absurd clothes—everything that is remembered of Benson in Trinidad suggests the great uneducated vanity of the middle-class dropout.

  But to be a fake among fakes: in the melodramatic atmosphere of the commune that was dangerous. She was alien, impenetrable. It was felt that she was an agent; there was talk of an especially secret branch of British Intelligence called MIo. Her execution, on January 2, 1972, was sudden and swift. She was held by the neck and stabbed and stabbed. At that moment all the lunacy and play fell from her; she knew who she was then, and wanted to live. Perhaps the motive for the killing lay only in that: the surprise, a secure life ending in an extended moment of terror. She fought back; the cuts on her hands and arms would show how strongly she fought back. She had to be stabbed nine times. It was an especially deep wound at the base of the neck that stilled her; and then she was buried in her African-style clothes. She was not yet completely dead: dirt from her burial hole would work its way into her intestines.

  IN TRINIDAD at this time there was a young Indian fortune-teller, Lalsingh Harribance, whose uncanny and daring public prophecies were making news. The Bomb, a popular local weekly, carried an article about Harribance; and Malik, who had written for The Bomb, found out from the editor where Harribance lived.

  Harribance lived in the south of the island, in the oil-field town of Fyzabad, a winding two-hour drive from Port of Spain. Malik went down with some members of his commune in two cars. That was Malik’s travelling style in Trinidad—the “retinue,” the large American hired cars, the chauffeur. Rawle Maximin, a partner in the car-hire firm that Malik patronized, and a boyhood friend of Malik’s, went with them. They got to Fyzabad late in the evening and were told that Harribance was at home but was seeing nobody. A seer’s privilege. They decided to wait.

  Rawle Maximin says they waited in the cars until morning. “And just when I was thinking ‘You mean they not even sending out a little coffee or something?’ Harribance sent out a woman with some coffee. And Michael got to see Harribance. And Harribance said to Michael, ‘You will not stay in Trinidad. You will go to Jamaica. And then you will be the ruler of the Negroes in the United States.’ But then he said to Michael as we were leaving, ‘I want to see you again.’ But Michael never saw Harribance again.”

  Harribance, as it happened, very shortly afterwards joined the brain drain to the United States. An American woman married him; and the story in Trinidad is that Harribance is now at an American university helping with ESP research.

  Patrick Chokolingo, the editor of The Bomb, has something to add to Maximin’s story of the visit to Harribance. “There was a pointed question to Harribance about hanging. I have this story from Harribance’s cousin. Malik wanted to find out at all costs whether he would die by hanging. The answer was that he would not die by hanging.”

  Many stories come up after an event. But it is possible that this prophecy—the promise of immunity and of further great success—explains something of what was to follow.

  In an inside page of the Trinidad Guardian of February 13,1972, there was a small, odd item: DIVERS FAIL TO FIND BODY. Steve Yeates—Muhammed Akbar, Supreme Captain of the Fruit of Islam, Lieutenant Colonel of Malik’s Black Liberation Army, the foreman of the Malik commune, Malik’s bodyguard and familiar—had drowned.

  He had drowned three days before at Sans Souci, which is known to all beach-going Trinidadians as one of the most dangerous bays on the rocky north-eastern coast. Around a small central shelf, which is reasonably calm, the current has gouged out deep holes in the sea floor; even a few feet from the shore, in waist-high water, it is not easy to keep one’s footing; every breaking wave takes the bather out and to the west, to a litter of rocks, a long reef, and high, crashing waves. Bodies are seldom recovered from Sans Souci. Once they are swept beyond the reef, local fishermen say, they are eaten by the giant fish known as the grouper. There are safer bays before Sans Souci, at Balandra and at Mission; but it was at Sans Souci that the Malik party of eleven had stopped to bathe. Two of the girls had quickly got into trouble. Yeates had saved one, and had disappeared trying to save the other. A fishing boat had later gone out and rescued the second girl; but the body of Yeates hadn’t been recovered.

  What was odd about the item in the Guardian was that it was presented as a statement by Malik, two days after the event. Patrick Chokolingo, editor of The Bomb, didn’t like the story. “I thought it was funny—the way it was presented—because to me anybody associated with Malik was news, and this drowning deserved bigger treatment. I rang a few people and the police, and a police officer did mention to me that they suspected Malik had drowned Yeates—but this was very much an off-the-cuff statement. You can imagine my surprise when the following day Malik turned up in my office and he said he wanted me to do a story on Steve Yeates, a hero, who tried to save an Indian girl—Malik again, trying to squeeze some race out of it. Off the cuff I blurted out, ‘But, Michael, the police say you kill the man.’ And he said, ‘I don’t care about what the police say.’”

  This was on Tuesday, February 15. At 11:25 on Saturday night the Arima fire station heard that the Malik house in Arima was on fire. For a one-storey house with concrete floors and walls and a corrugated-iron roof, the fire was unexpectedly fierce. But the annexe at the back, separated from the main house by a concrete patio, wasn’t touched; and everything that was stored in the annexe was intact: the African art objects that Malik had brought from England and on which he placed a value of £60,000 and the £400 piano, which was said to be a gift from John Lennon. A mysterious fire: no member of the commune was present, and Malik and all his family had flown out earlier in the day to Guyana.

  That was a journey of some style. The travelling companion of the Malik family was a Guyanese Negro called McDav
idson, fat and smooth-skinned, a sharp dresser, one of the ambitious nondescripts thrown up by the new politics of the region. McDavidson’s wife was a minor minister in the Trinidad government, and his nephew was Junior Minister for Youth Affairs in the Guyana government. Malik had paid for McDavidson’s ticket; McDavidson had spoken on the telephone to the office of the Guyana Prime Minister; and the Malik party, on their arrival in Guyana, was welcomed by the Junior Minister for Youth Affairs and driven away in two cars. Such a reception no doubt led to early press reports that Malik had gone to Guyana as a guest of the government to attend the second-anniversary celebrations of Guyana’s “Cooperative Republic,” and that on Saturday evening he was among the dinner guests of Mr. Burnham, the Guyana Prime Minister. These reports were quickly denied. What is true is that on Sunday Malik addressed some members of the Youth Socialist Movement, the “youth wing” of Mr. Burnham’s political party.

  In Arima the road that led to Malik’s burned-out house had been barred off by light aluminium rails and patrolled by Negro and Indian policemen with automatic rifles (new to Trinidad, and called, because of the perforated barrel, “see-through guns”). The fire commissioner suspected arson; the police were concerned about hidden arms.

  At three o’clock on Tuesday afternoon the Trinidad police, searching the grounds of the house in Arima where Malik and his commune did agriculture, discovered a six-foot grave below a recently planted bed of lettuce, in the feathery shade of a flamboyant tree and beside a hedge of peach-coloured hibiscus. The grave was estimated to be seven to ten days old, and the body in blue jeans and a green jersey found in a sprawling position at the bottom was horribly decomposed, its sex not immediately apparent to the policemen or the professional grave diggers who had been called in, the face distorted and half-melted away around bared teeth, one of which was capped in gold. The blue jeans were lowered: white underpants. Not a woman. A man, Negro or Negroid, five feet nine inches tall, whose head had been almost severed from his body.

  But not Steve Yeates, whose death by drowning Malik had reported to the press just a week before. Steve’s denture had no gold, his father said when he went with the police to the Port of Spain mortuary. Steve’s hair was different; there was no need for his father to look for the large scar on the back, the relic of a fight Steve had had in England. Not Steve Yeates, an anonymous woman caller told The Bomb the next day: the body was that of another “brother” in the “organization.” “The man died last week Monday night, and the whole thing was accidental. They did not go to kill him. Just beat him up … He died foolishly as he won’t abide by the rules of the organization.”

  And that was not far wrong. The body was identified the day after as that of a twenty-five-year-old Port of Spain man, Joseph Skerritt, a man once charged with rape (like Steve Yeates himself) but otherwise quite undistinguished: the failure of his respectable lower-middle-class family, one of thousands of the city’s half-educated young men, unemployed and superfluous, drifting through their twenties, idling in streets scrawled with empty slogans: BLACK IS IN, BASIC BLACK. Joe Skerritt had last been seen alive a fortnight before on February 7. On that day Malik, with his retinue, had called at the Skerritt house in Port of Spain and taken Joe away to Arima.

  Malik’s house was the only one on the western side of the approach lane. To the north of the house, beyond a boundary line of young coconut trees and the high wire-mesh fence, there was a piece of wasteland, ending after two hundred feet or so in a narrow tree-hung ravine, its water slow and shallow and not fresh. On the southern bank of this ravine, two days after the discovery of the body of Joe Skerritt, a second grave was found. This grave was shallower, about four feet, and the smell was soon high. A blue dress with a flowered pattern, red panties, a twisted, decomposing body: Gale Benson.

  She had been stabbed to death on January 2. And here, on the ravine bank, she had lain for more than seven weeks. And no one had missed her, not even the two English people who were visiting the commune at the time. But they no doubt had other things on their minds. Simmonds, the woman, well-nourished, with big, widely spaced top teeth, told The Bomb that during her six weeks at the commune she had had “total involvement” with Steve Yeates: Muhammed Akbar, Supreme Captain of the Fruit of Islam, who on December 31 (before the public holiday on January 1) had gone to Cooblal’s Hardware and bought a six-inch corner file.

  And Jamal—Benson’s master—what had Hakim Jamal done? Simmonds remembered that one morning in January, after they had all dined together the previous evening, Jamal had said that he and Benson had had a quarrel and Benson had gone away. And that was that. Eighteen days later Jamal left the Malik commune to return to the United States. He didn’t leave alone. He left with the “co-worker” he had summoned down from the United States in mid-December, a man who had remained in the background, and of whom little was remembered: an American Negro known in the commune by the African-sounding name of Kidhogo or Kidogo.

  In Trinidad now there were many rumours of fresh finds at the commune; one rumour was that a tinful of mixed penises had been found. But the ground had given up its dead. Six men were charged with the two murders. Five were Trinidadian; one was American. This wasn’t Jamal, but his co-worker Kidogo. Kidogo was one of the five charged with the murder of Benson. Kidogo was in hiding in the United States. Jamal gave interviews, and now he was as sober and anxious to survive as everybody else. He spoke of “the atmosphere of violence” at the commune; he said he was lucky to be alive; he said he would like to see Malik and ask him a few questions about Benson.

  So, in sobriety and self-absolution, the Malik commune ended. The ground had been dug up, the house burned out. All that remained were the two Malik dogs, bewildered, never barking or whining, restless, scampering about the grounds and the road, excited by the sound of every stopping car. But no car brought the people they were looking for.

  IN GUYANA, Malik was on the run. McDavidson, who had travelled with the Malik family from Trinidad and had, as uncle of the Junior Minister for Youth Affairs, arranged their reception in Guyana, shaved off Malik’s Black Power beard and trimmed his hair. Someone else went to get new clothes and a new pair of shoes; and Malik, in his new outfit, had booked in under another name—perhaps “Mr. T. Thompson”—at another hotel. Michael de Freitas, Michael X, Michael Abdul Malik, and now Mr. Thompson, Mr. Lindsay, Joseph George. So many names, so many personalities, so many ways of presenting himself to people: that was his great talent, but now, at the end, he was close to breakdown.

  He stayed for three days in the hotel, the curtains always closed in his room. He told the Indian chambermaid that he had malaria and couldn’t stand the sunlight. He ordered nothing from the bar or the kitchens. The chambermaid went out to buy him sandwiches and soft drinks, paper and two ballpoint pens. He had important messages for various people. He was only a “middleman,” he had told McDavidson; the really important man, the man with the “massive plan,” was coming down soon from the United States to meet him in Guyana. The chambermaid, taking in a flask of iced water, for which he had asked, saw him “writing letters.” But he wasn’t happy using the ballpoint pen; he would have preferred a tape recorder. In the darkened hotel room he became obsessed with the need for a tape recorder, and once he nearly telephoned his wife to bring him one. “I wanted,” he said later, “to record on tape all the things that had happened to me. I wanted to get it on record.” Words were important to him; he had lived by words. Words could give shape to an event, and words were never more important than they were now.

  In England there were people who had told him that he was a writer, even a poet; and often, in a marijuana haze (“I am high I love it”), he had tried to be a writer, writing out the marijuana mood in a page or two and coming to a halt. In these writings fact and fiction sometimes flowed together. With words he remade his past; words also gave him a pattern for the future. And, bizarrely, he had once written of an adventure that was like the one he was having in Guyana.

 
The narrator, who may be Malik himself, is on the run. With only twenty pounds in his pocket, he is taken in by someone called Frank and told he can stay for six months. That night the narrator sleeps and has no nightmares. Then the door opens. “My Friend My saviour Frank, with a [indistinct] breakfast and a Newspaper, all smiles. You in the paper today he says, and I panic again, they found me. I think [indistinct] more. Let me see! I say there was I not too bad a picture and a short story. One of Trinidad’s more famous sons returns home to finish writing his novel. In an Exclusive Interview at—and it goes on and on, I smile relieved the Journalists here have an Imagination like anywhere else—”Here the fragment ends.

  But in Guyana the nightmare did not break. The reports in the Guyana newspapers, which he was reading in the hotel, were getting worse. And two days after the discovery of the body of Gale Benson he left the hotel, took a taxi south to the bauxite town of Mackenzie (now called Linden, after the first name of Mr. Burnham, the Guyana Prime Minister), and then, in his new long-sleeved blue shirt and red-checked short trousers, with an airline bag containing some of his hotel writings (some he had left behind in the hotel room), some Guyana ten-dollar notes, biscuits, milk, sardines and other tinned food, and with a piece of cutlass, he headed for the interior, along the south-west trail.