The Writer and the World: Essays

by V. S. Naipaul

  The man from the Miami Herald wanted to know about the Psy-Ops poster with a photograph of the commander of the People’s Revolutionary Army. “It shows him naked, sitting only in a bath towel, with a marine behind him. Don’t you think that’s demeaning?”

  The colonel said, making a new point with every sentence: “He had what was available when we got there. Maybe they were checking his clothes. Maybe he was taking a shower or something. He chose not to have the sheet over his shoulders. It showed he wasn’t injured. The soldier was there in the picture to show that he was in captivity.”

  It was a full reply. But the American correspondents’ main interest was the Special Warfare Centre. It was apparently new to them. They wanted to know where it was based, and what it did, and how it was organized.

  “Who is the commander?”

  “Brigadier-General Promotable Lutz. L-u-t-z.”

  Dutifully, like first-year university students who want to take down everything, the correspondents scribbled. Then someone had a doubt.

  “Promotable. Is that his name?”

  “It means that in a few days he will be a Major-General.” The colonel smiled. “Sorry about that piece of army jargon.”

  So perhaps, properly punctuated, the commander was Brigadier (General, promotable) Lutz.

  The main briefing of the morning was in St. George’s itself, in a small, old-style residential house on one of the cross-streets on the hill above the harbour. It was an old West Indian city street, socially mixed. Master and slave had once lived side by side; and slum—verandah-less wooden shacks, close together—could still be only a yard or house-lot away from gentility. The house (with a tablet of local modern sculpture at the entrance, and a local canvas in the hall) had been adapted to the modest Grenadian needs of the University of the West Indies, and had now been re-adapted as a press centre. Handwritten notices pinned above doors said, “Telex,” “Conference Room.” On a green board in one room were chalked the casualty tables. KIA, WIA, Killed in Action, Wounded in Action: U.S., 18 and 113; Cuban, 42 and 57; Grenadian, 21 and 280.

  The conference was held in the lecture theatre built against the back wall of the house. There was little new to talk about. Most of the questions were about the detention facility and the casualty figures. There was a dispute about the number of the dead: checks with the local mortuaries had given higher figures. Some of the correspondents became aggressive. The military spokesmen, one black, one white, remained cool. From time to time the black spokesman said, “Do you want me to take that?” Or, “All right, I’ll take that.” “Take” was apparently a technical word: it meant to check up on.

  University library staff stood and watched from the windows of the original house. The windows opened directly on to the lecture theatre stage; and the watchers were like figures on a balcony in an Elizabethan theatre, or like West Indian middle-class folk looking on from a respectable distance at a back-yard squabble.

  The dispute about the number of the dead was really a dispute about army misinformation, part of the continuing dispute in Grenada between the American military and the American press. Professional pride was engaged on both sides. The awful fact of death was like another story, and Grenada itself just a background.

  The bad blood between the correspondents and the military came to a climax two days later, when the correspondent of a famous American newspaper, behaving at a night-time marine roadblock as he might have behaved at a morning briefing, found himself handcuffed and made to sit on the ground.

  THE IMPORTANT detainees were in the civilian prison in St. George’s. The lesser folk—suspected members of the People’s Revolutionary Army—were in the detention facility at Point Salines, a few winding miles to the south-west, past bays and scrubland.

  This was where the big Cuban-built airport was. It had become the centre of the main American camp, the complete military settlement—with air-conditioned hospital tents of a new design—that the Rapid Deployment Force had set up with the help of its computerized inventory (and could take away again in eighteen hours).

  To arrive there after the forests and hills and twisting roads of the rest of Grenada was like coming out into the open, and into another kind of country: a despoiled flatness of concrete and scarred earth, with the two-mile Cuban runway making a broad level stripe to the horizon. There was much heavy Cuban equipment about. Barbed wire ran beside the runway. The unfinished concrete hangars were among the biggest buildings in Grenada; and, three weeks after the invasion, Americans and local men were still filling and stacking sandbags outside the hangars. Garbage trucks were busy. Above, as always, the helicopters clattered.

  The detention area, some distance away from the runway, and near a burning rubbish dump (even the rubbish looked new), was ringed by coils of barbed wire and guarded by marines. The PVC-covered cells, eight feet square (as we had been told), were like tall boxes. They were set flat on the ground, in rows. The effect was one of desolation. But the American correspondents’ talk of mongoose cages seemed exaggerated.

  Some of the detainees were to be released that afternoon. That was what we had come to see. We had to wait. From time to time it rained. An army lorry with a local crew came and dumped fresh rubbish on the burning rubbish dump. In the compound a marine (possibly a woman—a victory for another kind of American cause) trained a machine gun on the area where the released detainees were to be mustered.

  An old civilian car appeared. The marines at the barrier levelled their guns. The car stopped, parked carefully. A black family group got out: a self-effacing man, a shapeless, subdued girl in trousers, and a thinner, blacker girl in bright colours and with white-and-red plastic earrings, the colour and the material effective against her black skin.

  She was pure venom, the black girl, one of the real “biting ants” of the slums. She said, talking to us and yet acknowledging none of us, “Dey wire us up. Wire up de road. Wire up de beaches. Everyt’ing wire up now.”

  Her brother was inside. She had been allowed in once, to see him; she didn’t know whether he was to be released that afternoon. But he was: she saw him in the group lining up outside the huts, and she forgot us.

  From a distance, the jeans and shirts and straw hats (and the small American flag that one of the detainees held in his hand) gave a carnival air to the men about to be released. But closer to—when the buses briefly stopped outside the camp area, and we were permitted to look in and talk to the men—the faces were disturbing: the faces of men of the Revolutionary Army, still in a group, still acting one for the other: no longer just the rough faces of the street, but the faces of simple men who, in the smallness of Grenada, had known power. I was not American. The eye that held mine still transmitted power and conviction.

  Gairy had ruled with the help of the Mongoose Gang, the Green Beasts. The New Jewel Movement had ruled with the help of its army. For a small island Grenada was amazingly varied, in racial types, accents, manners, levels of education. And perhaps the murderous, secret-society politics of Grenada had been made in part by the geography of the small island, by the constriction of the hills and forests and small villages, where people couldn’t easily grow and where the past was close. Gairy had been more than a labour leader: he had tapped the African religious feeling of his supporters. And perhaps in that curious name, Jewel (Joint Effort for Welfare, Education and Liberation), there was some Grenadian counter-magic against the Green Beasts. What was common to both movements in this black Hansel-and-Gretel world was the vision offered—by Gairy to a primitive people, by Jewel to a people slightly more educated—of sudden racial redemption.

  GEORGE LOUISON, a founding member of Jewel, had been a minister in the People’s Revolutionary Government and a member of the central committee until things began to break up. He had often been criticized in the central committee for being petit bourgeois; and right at the end he had been imprisoned by the Revolutionary Military Council for trying to get the people to make trouble. After the invasion he had be
en detained for a day by the Americans at Point Salines. Then, unexpectedly, the Americans had come for him again. This time—he regarded it as pure psychological harassment—they had kept him only eight hours. It was after this release that we met.

  He was a man of thirty-two, a man from the country, pure black, not big. He was the son of a builder and he was by profession a teacher. He lived on the west coast, in a village that came after a stretch of land that looked uncultivated. His house was in a rocky lane that led off the main coast road and up a valley, beside a racing river. The valley was dark, hidden from the late afternoon sun. The concrete house, though ambitious in the setting, was simple, with an outside staircase to the top floor.

  Night fell, all at once. The electricity failed; we talked in the plain downstairs front room by candlelight.

  There was no stylishness about Louison. He had preserved the earnestness and simplicity of his background. The name of Louison was known in the area: his father’s uncle went to a secondary school in 1900, and was one of the first black men in Grenada to receive a proper education. Louison’s father was born in 1918. Starting as a village carpenter and mason, he had taken a correspondence course and become a trained builder. With this urge to self-improvement, Louison’s father took an interest in the Negro causes of the time. He liked the back-to-Africa views of Marcus Garvey; there was a picture of Garvey in the house.

  But didn’t Garvey defraud black people of the money they had given to the cause? Wasn’t that a blow to Louison’s father?

  Louison said, “Here in this village people think it was a manipulation by anti-Garvey elements plus the U.S. government. And Garvey represented more than the race question. He represented the anti-colonial fight.”

  After Garvey, there was the Grenadian politician, Marryshow, who preached the idea of a West Indian Federation. “Marryshow ended a pauper,” Louison said. And there was Grantly Adams of the Barbados Labour Party.

  “Later my father ran a small shop right on this spot, where this house is. It was an area for discussion. In the late 50s he made an attempt to start adult education in the village.” This was the time of Gairy. Louison’s father supported Gairy in the beginning, but broke with him in 1960. “Gairy’s main base was among the agricultural labourers, and he never did anything to lift the standard. Gairy never attempted to understand the process of societal development.”

  “Would your father have thought like that?”

  Louison didn’t answer directly. He said, “By 1969–70 I would have come to that conclusion.”

  By that time, at the age of eighteen, George Louison was deep in politics. He had started young, with youth work, “politics in humanitarian forms.” Then the Black Power movement of 1970 claimed him and the rest of his generation. He didn’t go abroad to study; he remained a simple teacher; he didn’t think of marrying. “To this day I am not married. Many people in the New Jewel Movement were like me. For us it became almost a mission in the early 70s.” Black Power was more than its name. “Black Power in terms of the race question lasted two years in Grenada. There was a small but dramatic event in early 1973. We were going to send people to the Sixth Pan-African Congress. A month before the Congress took place we heard that Gairy was going.” Gairy’s point was that he, Gairy, was black, and that he had already created Black Power in Grenada. And that in a way was true. “That made us realize that Black Power wasn’t a question of blackness. It was a question of politics and overall ideas.”

  And all the time, the process of self-improvement continuing, Louison and his colleagues in the New Jewel Movement were studying. Study, the idea of study, was important to these earnest young men and their studies appeared to have been mainly political. “Up to two months ago we would study collectively. The widest range of things. Initially we studied pretty widely, but in the past six or seven years we studied mainly socialist material.”

  In 1973 and 1974, just before and after independence, there were bitter fights with Gairy’s men. In 1973 the leader of the Movement was dreadfully wounded—in the museum there was his bloodied shirt; and in early 1974 the leader’s father was killed. The New Jewel Movement changed. “In 1973 we were a populist movement. By late 1974 we decided it was vital for us to have a definite idea.” And it was at this time that they made the break with the “humanitarian politics” of the past. Study had led them to socialism; and thereafter socialism circumscribed their study. “We wanted to by-pass the tremendous evils of capitalist development. We recognized we had to look at many countries. Cuba, for obvious reasons—twenty years in that process. We also looked to Yemen, Laos.”

  “Aren’t those places quite different from Grenada?”

  “We wanted to look at places outside the framework of capitalist development and imperialist hand-outs. We also had to look at countries that had an experience of colonialism.”

  Louison couldn’t fully explain how they had made this big, final jump—he presented it as a fact, something obvious. But his political development was reasonably clear. For all the century, in that village, there had been Louisons who had been worked on in various ways by the idea of black redemption. Simple people had made that idea of redemption a simple idea; the simple idea had created men like Gairy, who kept people down in order always to present himself as their saviour. Socialism absorbed the racial idea, purified it, did away with the corruptions inherent in it. Socialism, doing away with the racial issue, left men free to be men. And all that socialism required was study and faithful practice, the giving to Grenada of the correct forms.

  But socialism, like other faiths, had its purists and fanatics. “As somebody said, the revolution has blown up in our faces. We destroyed the revolution ourselves.” The men in the central committee who, for the sake of revolutionary purity, had pressed for collective leadership and had put the leader under house arrest and had sent the army against the masses—those men were “mad.” “The course they were following was idealist, voluntarist, had no scientific grounding and no grounding with the people.”

  “Voluntarist? Doing things wilfully?”

  “By voluntarist I mean self-serving.”

  Even after the disaster, the socialism he had studied gave Louison the words to explain everything. His house had been looted. People had turned against the revolution, but he still grieved for the revolution. “I’m in a state of deep, deep re-thinking.” But politically he could remain only where his study had taken him. He couldn’t go back to “humanitarian politics,” the racial simplicities of Grenada without socialism. He couldn’t forget the world vision he had been granted; he couldn’t make himself small again.

  BIG REVOLUTION, SMALL COUNTRY—that was the name of a Cuban film about the Grenadian revolution. But for the four and a half years of their rule the People’s Revolutionary Government did little.

  They built the big airport at Point Salines with Cuban help. They established an army, a militia. They constantly fought counterrevolution, discovering at one stage a gang of twenty-six. They extended patronage to their supporters through various new, unproductive state organizations. They called in two hundred foreign internationalist workers. They painted slogans. That was where the money went—on forms, party bureaucracy, security, show, the display of power.

  The life of the island was distorted; people lived in dread of “manners.” But at the very top, in the central committee—as was revealed after the invasion, when the minutes of their meetings became available—there was ineptitude and confusion.

  Little was done for agriculture in an agricultural island, though there were slogan-boards about “production,” and though there was much idle land in Grenada, confiscated by the Gairy régime and then more or less abandoned. Doctrine got in the way of action: to encourage the most efficient farmers would be to encourage class ideas in the countryside, and the ultimate goal was co-operative farming. Socialist doctrine was at odds with the nature of the people in other ways. Deprived youth, for instance, didn’t really want to work on the l
and, though they were happy to plant marijuana. And there was the problem—as raised at one central committee meeting in carefully classless language—of the “non-nice type youth, the grassroots youth,” with whom nothing at all could be done.

  Big new words were found for old attitudes: Grenadian workers, it was discovered, were riddled with “economism”—they just wanted money, and saw no “conceptual link” between that and work. There was at times in the meetings of the central committee the atmosphere of the classroom: linguistic skill, a new way with words, seeming to be an end in itself.

  Attendance at “mass” rallies dropped off. In the central committee the same issues were discussed again and again, and little seemed to change. Once it even happened that certain important slogans were not painted; the excuse given was that there was no paint. Central committee members were often tired at meetings, unprepared; at one meeting some members actually fell asleep. There were sessions of criticism and self-criticism; this socialist rite seemed to give much pleasure.

  They had created the apparatus of a revolution, but they didn’t know what to do with it. Socialism should have come with the apparatus, but it hadn’t. They began to feel that the apparatus was at fault. So—further distorting the life of the community—they called in more socialist specialists from Russia and Cuba; and quite late, almost at the end, they thought they would get more teachers from the advanced-socialist countries to help with their own party organization.

  They accused one another of being petit bourgeois. They developed another doubt; and this—muffled, coming out in scattered phrases at different times—was like a re-awakening of old racial anxiety. Perhaps, after all, there was an incompatibility between the people of Grenada and the high ideals of socialism. Perhaps the real socialists, the people from the great world outside, thought of them as “jokers.”