The childhood of the leader, the rebel who learned to love black, no longer makes sense; the emphasis is wrong. Certain facts about his mother are too important to the narrator for him to leave out. But the facts have been scattered about the picaresque narrative: a pain greater than the one stated is being concealed. When the facts are put together, the childhood of the leader can be interpreted in quite another way.
Malik’s father was a Portuguese shopkeeper who later left Trinidad to do business on the island of St. Kitts. His mother was an uneducated black woman from Barbados. In Trinidad, and especially in the tight lower-middle-class Negro community of Belmont in Port of Spain, she was a stranger, with different manners and a different accent. If she didn’t speak the local French patois it was because she didn’t know it. She was a stranger with a “red bastard,” and she was never allowed to forget it by the black taxi driver with whom she lived. (He used to tell her that all she had got from the Portuguese man was a big cunt and a red bastard. This is not in the autobiography; it was part of Malik’s statement at his trial.)
The mother was disgraced by the son; the son, growing up in Port of Spain, going to St. Mary’s College (a major school, but not so “exclusive”: the fees were just over three pounds a term), his home life known to all, was disgraced by the mother. She was uneducated, drunken, vicious; they tormented one another. He fled from her whenever he could, going off into the hills with his friends. Once he got all her clothes together and burned them. But she pursued him everywhere with her public scenes, even after he had been expelled from the college, even after he had grown up. He could escape only by leaving Trinidad, by becoming a seaman; at one time he thought of going to live in Guyana. In the end he went to England; but she followed him even there, getting off the boat train at Waterloo in a red bathrobe.
In 1965, when his London fame was beginning, and when in his own eyes he had made good, Malik began a letter to his mother.
London, April Ist, 1965
Dear Mamma,
My hand is shaking and my head hurts, I want to tell you a few things, for I am not afraid anymore. I am a negro, you told me I was different, its not true, I tried to be. I was ashamed not of being a negro but of you. I would like first to tell you what made me write this last year. I was at home and Steve rang me, he asked me if I knew what happened to you, Well you were arrested. At sixty odd years of age for running a Brothel, this I could of tried to understand, I would of blamed anybody for this, the white man, my father, myself, but when you gave your name as de Freitas because as you said you wanted to protect your own name, that was the end. Its x months since that day and I have only just recovered enough to say something about it. I don’t hate you, that is impossible to do, I would like to think that was a thoughtless action but I said all the other horrible things you did were thoughtless too, you have humiliated me once too often, you usually give a lot of thought to things before you do them remember in Trinidad when you were still living with your husband and you threw boiling water on him in bed, you thought that one out didn’t you, you must off …
She had got into bed with the man, and when he was asleep she had got out; she had heated the water beforehand. The incident doesn’t appear in the autobiography. Everything else does; but in the padded-out, picaresque narrative, the passion and the pain vanish, simplified, and vitally altered, to give a smoother account of the boyhood of the leader.
This letter is the truest thing Malik ever wrote, and the most moving. It explains so much: the change of name from de Freitas to X, the assumption of so many personalities, the anxiety to please. A real torment was buried in the clowning of the racial entertainer. Black Power gave order and logic to the life; it provided Malik with a complete system. He couldn’t write a book; but it was better for him to say, as he does in the preliminary note to his autobiography, that the book was ghosted because black English is different from white English.
A LONDON journalist who had some hand in the making of Malik says, “Michael took the press for a ride, and vice versa. And out of it grew a monster.” The monster already existed; but there is something in the judgement. Malik was made in England. England gave him friends, a knowledge of elegance, a newspaper fame which was like regard, and money. England always gave him money; no one, for so many good black causes, needed money so badly. It occurred to him, for instance, late in 1966, when his wife was in arrears with her mortgage payments and receiving solicitor’s letters, that West Indians needed adequate representation in the courts. He interested people in this cause. The London Oz of February 1967 announced the West Indian legal need, and in heavy letters at the top of the page prescribed the remedy: “‘Defence’ needs money. Send to Michael Abdul Malik, Leith Mansions, Grantully Road, W9.”
England made many things easy for Malik. But England in the end undid him. Malik exaggerated the importance of his newspaper fame. He exaggerated the importance of the fringe groups which seemed to have made room for him. He was an entertainer, a play-actor; but he wasn’t the only one. He failed to understand that section of the middle class that knows only that it is secure, has no views, only reflexes and scattered irritations, and sometimes indulges in play: the people who keep up with “revolution” as with the theatre, the revolutionaries who visit centres of revolution, but with return air tickets, the people for whom Malik’s kind of Black Power was an exotic but safe brothel. Malik thought he shared the security of his supporters. One day, half doodling (“No Money”), half jotting down memoranda (“Letter from Lawyer”), he wrote: “My inheritance is London—all of it.”
His fame didn’t last long. It began in 1965, and came to an end in 1967, when he went to jail for an offence under the 1965 Race Relations Act. It was in July 1965 that Colin McGlashan, in a major article in the Observer, told of the existence in England of a militant black organization, the Racial Adjustment Action Society (RAAS), with a membership of more than forty-five thousand, that had been created “in near-secrecy” by Michael de Freitas. “Some immigrants,” McGlashan reported, “already talk of Michael X.” It was a good story: “… revolutionary fervour … near-national organization … formidable professionalism … underground technique … system of cells … financed from donations and Mr. de Freitas’s own money … organizers, in the best revolutionary tradition, accept a pittance … a shy, gentle and highly intelligent man … the authentic voice of black bitterness … Says a friend: ‘It is a crime against humanity that people like Michael happen …’”
It was a good story, and if it was a string of newspaper clichés it was only because what was being presented to McGlashan, as a good story, was a string of newspaper clichés. From his autobiography, published three years later, it seems that at the time of the McGlashan article Malik was perhaps more concerned with a beautiful white widow, whom he calls Carmen. Carmen was thirty, “with a lovely, supple body,” and rich. Once she opened her handbag and gave Malik “a bundle of £10 notes”; another time she wrote him a cheque for £500. He took all that she gave—“I have no doubt that the ponce element produced in the black man by the ghetto was with me that night”—but it was all for the cause, the Racial Adjustment Action Society. Still, he suffered: “My speeches became more and more bitter.” And there was Nancy, another white woman, who was his steady. Carmen had to go. “With the departure of Carmen, RAAS had no more income.” And in four pages, which also cover the story of Carmen, the membership of RAAS drops from sixty-five thousand “on paper” to two thousand “hard core.”
Malik loved his publicity. He cut out and filed every reference to himself in the British press, however slight, however critical (the Daily Telegraph must have been his favourite paper). He filed two copies of McGlashan’s article; and when he brought out his RAAS brochure—which was really a brochure about Michael X, complete with press notices (no other name was mentioned)—he used two separate quotes from McGlashan, together with quotes from the Daily Mirror, the Daily Telegraph, the Sunday Times, Peace News, and the New York Tim
es (“Students, intellectuals, moderates and radicals are all being wooed. Some have already been won over”).
RAAS was of course a joke. The initials spell out an obscenity which is Jamaican (and not Trinidadian) and is nothing more than a corruption of “arse.” A crude joke, and in the autobiography it is grotesquely extended. “In the first place RAAS is a West Indian word for a menstrual blood cloth. It has some symbolic significance in view of the way the black man has been drained of his life blood for so long. In the second place there is the similar African word ras (from the Arabic ra’s—head) meaning Ruler or Leader.” A “satirical” joke; but it could only have been made by a man who felt that he could, when the time came, withdraw from his Negro role.
Malik’s Negro was, in fact, a grotesque: not American, not West Indian, but an American caricatured by a red man from Trinidad for a British audience. West Indians are not black Americans. American blacks are an excluded minority. West Indians come from countries with black majorities and black administrations; they have a kind of political tradition. Boscoe Holder, a black Trinidad dancer who was in London at the time, says, “When I heard about this X guy I thought, ‘There goes one of our con men.’ And I wished him well, because he was in England and because they told me he was Trinidadian.” It was the West Indian attitude: the jester was recognized and accepted as a jester, but was otherwise kept at a distance. Occasionally Malik’s publicity excited a student or a writer or a politician. In 1965, after the McGlashan article, the leader of the Trinidad opposition—mainly an Indian party—thought of asking Malik down to Trinidad to help with the elections.
But Malik never held these people. And in London he didn’t really need them. A West Indian Malik had recently met—and who was eventually to act as his political deputy—was a young Trinidadian called Stanley Abbott, like Malik a college boy who had dropped out, and like Malik a red man with Spanish or Portuguese antecedents (Abbott sometimes called himself De Piva). Abbott had come to England at the age of nineteen in 1956, and was very quickly adrift in London, a lost soul adding and adding to a police record: wilful damage in 1956, breaking and entering in 1958, Borstal and supervision between 1958 and 1962, assault in 1964.
And already the West Indian closest to Malik was Steve Yeates, black but in other respects a man like Malik himself, a dropout from Malik’s own Belmont district in Port of Spain: Steve Yeates, soon to be given the Black Muslim name of Muhammed Akbar, who had been expelled from St. Mary’s College, Malik’s old school, for getting a fourteen-year-old girl from a Carmelite reform school pregnant; Steve Yeates who, later, at the age of sixteen, while he was a student at another college, had been charged with nine others for the gang-rape of a girl in the Girl Guides hut in Belmont; who, acquitted but disgraced, had been sent by his family to England, where he had joined the RAF, but had then got into trouble of some sort and gone absent without leave; who had been badly wounded in the back during a fight and carried the scar.
The absence of responsible West Indian support ought to have told against Malik. But he turned it to his advantage; American Black Power had provided him with a complete system. If educated West Indians wanted nothing to do with Malik, it was only because the black bourgeoisie and intelligentsia, “a tiny minority within a minority,” had cut themselves off from “the man in the ghetto.” In Malik’s system, the Negro who had not dropped out, who was educated, had a skill or a profession, was not quite a Negro; there was no need for anyone to come to terms with him. The real Negro was more elemental. He lived in a place called “the ghetto,” which was awful but had its enviable gaieties; and in the ghetto the Negro lived close to crime. He was a ponce or a drug peddler; he begged and stole; he was that attractive Negro; and now this Negro was very angry. The real Negro, as it turned out, was someone like Malik; and only Malik could be his spokesman.
Malik’s revolutionary Negro was in many ways the familiar crap-shooting spook. But it was a construct for a provincial market, and Malik’s instinct about the kind of Negro the British newspapers wanted or would tolerate was sound. In the Guardian for August 9, 1971, Jill Tweedie made the limits of British tolerance plain.
Tweedie did two Negroes for her page that day. One was Annie P. Barden, a “school counsellor” at an all-black elementary school in Washington, D.C. Tweedie gave her a rough time. Annie Barden wanted to talk about her work; Tweedie wanted to hear about race and drugs and black militancy. They showed films about drugs, Annie Barden said; they “talked through” things like slavery and the position of blacks in the South; she hadn’t sensed any militancy in her pupils (some of whom were four, and none older than thirteen). But what about Malcolm X and Martin Luther King? How had Annie Barden herself become aware of race prejudice? Had things really changed? How many Americans regarded the black as a human being? The majority? Half? Were there any jobs for her pupils? The professions mightn’t be closed to blacks, but wasn’t it more difficult for them? At the suggestion, now amounting to insistence, that she was a Negro and her teaching job therefore a waste of time, Annie Barden offered her interviewer tea. “She is evidently embarrassed,” Tweedie noted, “by the whole question.”
For her other Negro, a man, Tweedie had a lot more time, and space. He was an American Black Muslim and he was in England to “promote” his autobiography. It wasn’t clear what he did for a living. He had started a Malcolm X Montessori school in California, but he didn’t teach at the school because he hated white people—“No SS man could invest the word ‘Jew’ with any more contempt,” Tweedie noted—and he didn’t want his hate to rub off on two-year-olds. “If you’re going to kill, it must mean something. You should kill people because they are evil, not because they are white … They call me a nigger but I’ve invented my own kind of nigger. My nigger is me, excruciatingly handsome, tantalizingly brown, fiercely articulate.” Tweedie was taken: “This black man is a handsome man, a brigand with a gold ring in his ear … tall and spare and stoned on agro, sometimes overt, sometimes spread over with honeyed words about as sweet to receive as a punch in the kidneys. With a woman the agro comes masked, translated into sexual terms …”
“Personally,” Tweedie concluded, “I find Miss Barden’s passivity far more depressing than Hakim Jamal’s anger, and far less hopeful for the future.” Hakim Jamal—that was the name of the brigand with the gold earring. The autobiography he had come to England to sell was a conformist and very late addition to the Negro autobiographies of the 1960s: poverty and self-hate, drugs, Islam, reform, celebrities, sex, hate. His claim that he was God had won him an “odd spot” appearance on the World at One radio programme. But he apparently hadn’t told Tweedie that he was God. And if he didn’t teach at his Malcolm X school it was because it had lasted one year, with one teacher, had closed down fifteen months before, and existed now only in the brochures he carried around with him. As for Annie Barden, she no doubt went back to her elementary school in Washington, counseling a thousand pupils.
Malik’s instinct, in the late 1960s (the Tweedie article appeared in 1971), about the kind of Negro that was wanted was sound. But the role was a consuming one. The black rebel, even if he wanted to, couldn’t do a job; he couldn’t appear to be declining into “passivity”; anything like repose could extinguish his reputation. No one expected him to act out his threats, but the poor black was required ceaselessly to perform.
In July 1967 Malik—filling in for the more internationally known Stokely Carmichael—went to Reading and spoke to a mixed group of about seventy. “If ever you see a white man laying a hand on your black woman, kill him immediately.” It was quite harmless, just the usual cabaret. But Malik was charged under the Race Relations Act. At his trial he told the recorder to sit down and “cool it”; he had the Koran wiped with warm water before he swore on it; and he was allowed to perform Islamic “ablutions” before giving evidence. He was sent to jail for a year. All the newspaper reports of his trial were cut out and filed for him. But the carnival was abruptly over.
; IN APRIL 1965, at the start of his great fame, he had written to his mother: “I am not afraid anymore.” All the torment of his early life had been submerged in his role as the racial entertainer. Now his bluff had been called. His Black Power was no power in England, his newspaper fame offered no security. His ghosted autobiography, From Michael de Freitas to Michael X, came out while he was in jail and was poorly reviewed. The publicity declined. His release eight months later, though noted by television, was scarcely an event. A carnival element persisted: outside the prison gates there was a welcoming Negro who, refining on the X business, had given himself the name of Freddie Y. But Malik had changed.
He planned a second volume of autobiography. The title he first thought of was My Years with RAAS—the old Malik, the old joke. But as his mind darkened he changed that to Requiem for an Illusion. What was the illusion? England? His idea of his place in England? His career as the X?
From a long (at least fifty pages) and primitive novel he later began to write about himself, it is clear that he had begun to secrete a resentment, soon settling into hatred, not of white people or English people, but of the English middle class he had got to know: the people with money or connections who patronized him in both senses of the word, who were secure, who could fix anything, who held Negroes in contempt but were fascinated by him. In his novel, which is a childlike grafting of fantasy to fact (he is himself, with his own name), he has this middle-class English fascination turn to awe, perhaps even to love, and then, unexpectedly, to physical alarm. The setting isn’t London, but Guyana. Malik has made himself a hero in that country, a great orator, and there are people in the streets who shout for him to be king.
The Writer and the World: Essays Page 21