Asian Indians in Saint Domingue: An Early Indo-Caribbean Population

While researching the presence of indigenous peoples of the Americas in Saint Domingue, in an attempt to come to some kind of historical understanding of the relationship between "Amerindian" peoples and Haiti, one comes across numerous references to Asian Indians in the sources. Although their numbers must have been even tinier than those of free and enslaved indigenous peoples in the French colony, attempting to enumerate and study their presence in Saint Domingue highlights the global dimensions of French Empire in the 18th century. Moreover, the "East Indian" slaves and free people of color also push back the origins of the Indo-Caribbean, placing them deeper into the historical panorama of the region. This post will attempt a brief look at this minority of the captive population to see what it reveals about the nature of Saint Domingue, its heterogeneous enslaved population, and the global networks in the crown jewel of 18th century French colonialism.

Some of the best evidence for East Indian captives in Saint Domingue are newspaper advertisements for goods from ships arriving from India. Like the above, le Confiant, appearing in Affiches Americaines, East Indian slaves were probably small in number and part of a mixed cargo of various textiles, teas and goods from the East. In this case, about 40 "beaux" blacks are part of the goods for sale. It is possible some of the French ships coming from India stopped in the Mascarenes, Mozambique or Madagascar to pick up slaves or resupply before crossing the Atlantic. However, the easiest explanation is that the 40 captives on the Confiant were from India, presumably purchased in or near the French comtpoirs on the Indian coast. Indians were also sold or kidnapped from territories under English East India Company rule and put on French or Dutch ships.

First, one must begin with the origins of East Indian slaves. There is evidence that the Portuguese were already selling slaves from Goa and other regions of the subcontinent as early as the 16th century. Europeans were also bringing African or Asian slaves to serve in cities like Portuguese Goa, while also purchasing local Indians who were either sold by their families during times of famine or crisis or kidnapped by greedy local merchants. Relatively early on, Asian captives found their way to Europe and, likely, the Americas. Indeed, according to the work of Forbes, Asian Indian captives were present in Seville, Lisbon and other parts of the Iberian peninsula, alongside West African, North African, indigenous peoples from the Americas and Canary Islanders. The Dutch were also engaged in the slave trade in the East Indies, importing a large number of slaves from the coasts of India to the Cape Colony.

Runaway slave ad for a Creole Indian barber named Aly. It's very possible that Aly was not of East Indian origin, but his occupation and name may be more likely references to Asian Indians. Some Asian Indian slaves were Muslims, like the Lascars. If Aly was his chosen name then he may have been a Lascar. The fact that he is identified as being born in the colony demonstrates Asian Indian captives lived long enough to reproduce.

  

By the time the French were engaging in Indian slave trading in the 18th century, captives were purchased or kidnapped (probably both) from Bengal, Coromandel, Malabar, and sold to ships at the various French comptoirs on the coast. A few of their captives came from other parts of the subcontinent, like Goa. According to various sources, 18th century Bengal suffered from slave trading, but Malabar and Coromandel were also active ports. Bengal was particularly associated with the sale of children, often exported on Dutch and French ships. Megan Vaughan's work on Mauritius tells us Indian slaves were Lascars, Topas, Malabar, Bengali, Talinga, but there were likely other groups represented. While the French East Indian Company was primarily interested in purchasing Indian textiles and other goods, which were also sold in Africa (for more slaves) and in France and its colonies, Indian peoples were up for sale. The total numbers of Indian slaves carried on French ships was surely quite small, as the captives must have usually been part of a mixed cargo consisting of various commodities. For a reliable estimate on the estimated number of Indian captives brought by the French to their colonies in the Mascarenes, between 1670-1810, historian Richard B. Allen suggests 21,000. Not counted in that estimate is the number of free Indian artisans and sailors who went to Mauritius voluntarily, as Indian artisans were prized a a cheaper source of labor in the than European "skilled labor." By the time of the Haitian Revolution, the French slave trade in India was interrupted by war with Britain that ended large-scale slave trading from that region. Therefore, it is likely that most Indians in Saint Domingue had arrived by the early 1790s.

Runaway slave ad for Charlot, a "natif des grandes Indes." Charlot's origins in India and status as a carpenter further suggest a connection of Asian Indian captives with trades or "skilled occupations" in Saint Domingue and other French colonies.

Of course, 21,000 is a tiny number compared to the much larger quantities of captives from Africa (Mozambique, East Africa, Madagascar, and, to a lesser extent, West Africa) in the Mascarenes. Yet a significant minority of the total slave population in Mauritius and Reunion were Indians. Considering the vast distances separating Saint Domingue and India, and the intra-imperial networks connecting the Mascarenes and French slave trading networks in nearby Mozambique, the total number of East Indian captives who made it to the French Caribbean was probably a small fraction of the estimated total of 21,000. This is backed up by various advertisements in Saint Domingue newspapers of the arrival of ships from India and runaway slave advertisements for Indian maroons from Mauritius and Reunion. Most of the Indians who came on ships directly from India were part of mixed a mixed cargo with small numbers of slaves, ranging in number from as low as 16 to 40. The only possible exception to this is the case of La Cibele, identified by Richard B. Allen as a slave ship that arrived in Saint Domingue in 1778. Reaching Saint Domingue from the coasts of India, with 258 men, 49 women, 57 boys and 22 girls for sale, it must have been a particularly long and hellish voyage.  One cannot help but wonder if this ship actually picked up slaves from India then stopped to resupply in the Mascarenes before acquiring more from Mozambique or East Africa. Either way, it seems to the only example of a French slave that may have carried hundreds of Indians to Saint Domingue in a single voyage.

Sometimes, runaway slave ads specifically mention places in India that make it clear said maroon was from the East Indies, like Zamor.

 

Other sources from within Saint Domingue also suggest the East Indian presence was quite small. According to Moreau de Saint-Méry's encyclopedic tome on the colony, the "Oriental Indians" were fewer than the "Western" Indians. He also used a Creole-sounding word to designate them, zingre. Their racial mixtures with Africans in the colony, "qui sont aussi infiniment rares dans la colonie," suggests not only a small population but one that, perhaps, rarely intermarried with the African majority of the enslaved population.  In addition, David Geggus's exhaustive research on plantation inventories in Saint Domingue also point to a very small "Indien" presence, less than 1% of the total captive population. In his definition of Indian were included "Amerindians" and East Indians, and Saint-Méry has already indicated that the former outnumbered the latter. Another scholar, McClellan, estimated about 500 Indians were in Saint Domingue by the late 18th century, although this could have been mostly "Amerindian" people. Unfortunately, it does not take into account the numbers of "Indians" in Saint Domingue at various moments in the late 1600s and early 1700s, which, if one counts descendants who were "reclassified" as free people of color, makes 500 probably an underestimate. 

 

Michel, a "Mulatto Indian" from what is now Mauritius, is a perfect example of the ways in which slaves from French Indian ocean colonies were sometimes transported to the Caribbean.

 

Thus, in consideration of the above sources, this blog will suggest the total number of East Indians in Saint Domingue was likely in the hundreds, perhaps no more than 500 or 600, across the 18th century. With the exception of La Cibele in 1778, when several hundred arrived, most were likely arriving in the colony as parts of the mixed cargo of ships from India. Some may have been sold or transferred from the Mascarenes on other vessels. This small-scale trade, perhaps most consistent in the period of 1770-1793, leads one to think the total numbers of East Indians must have been low. Of course, some may have arrived on ships that also acquired slaves at Mozambique or the Swahili Coast. To what extent were Asian captives from the Mascarenes part of that traffic is unknown, but likely minimal compared to the thousands of "Mozambiques" who appear in Saint Domingue during the later decades of the 18th century. Nonetheless, all the above suggests Indians were a minuscule part of the total slave population, vastly outnumbered by hundreds of thousands of West, Central, and, increasingly, East Africans.

Etienne is identified as a black Indian creole of what is now Reunion. Clearly, at least a few East Indian slaves from the Mascarenes were sold in Saint-Domingue or brought there by the French. Some, like Etienne, were singled out for speaking French.

Now that it is established that the East Indian presence was very minimal, and probably more concentrated in Saint Domingue than other French colonies in the Antilles (perhaps the greatest concentration of East Indians in the Caribbean during the 18th century?), which the runaway slave ads seem to suggest, what can one say of their presence in the colony? Since written sources alluding to them are rare, one can look to conditions of Indian enslavement in the Masacarenes for possible hints. In the Mascarene colonies, Indians were often stereotyped as more obedient and intelligent than their Malagasy and African counterparts. And it is true that Indian slaves were often employed in trades that slaves from Madagascar and Mozambique were less likely to perform. However, the stereotypes of slaves, as provided by French planters and colonial authorities, were not always based in reality. One must also account for the differences in "national" or ethnic stereotypes that various plantation societies developed about the same groups of people. Those caveats aside, it is likely that French stereotypes in Saint Domingue of "blacks" and "Indians" from the subcontinent were similar to those of their planter counterparts in the Mascarenes, or at least influenced by them. Further, if the association of Indian captives with domestic labor, added to the fact that many were children or young adults, was true for Saint Domingue as well, then Indians in Saint Domingue probably served similar functions as domestic slaves in the towns and plantation homes. Moreover, Indian captives may have also worked as sailors and in urban trades in Le Cap and other towns of Saint Domingue. Perhaps many worked as barbers, servants, cooks, fishermen, bakers, blacksmiths and assistants, if runaway slave ads are reliable indications. A few were listed as speaking French or had traveled to France, suggesting that some would have been valued as fluent speakers of the dominant language and perhaps well traveled across the French Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds.

 

Francois, identified as an Indian from the Coromandel coast, was clearly from the subcontinent.

 

 

Unfortunately, it is difficult to say what, if any, were the relations between these and African or Creole slaves of the colony. If free, they were, in theory, entitled to the rights of whites, like those of "Amerindian" descent. Free Indians may have been quite similar to free people of African descent, but evidence from Mauritius suggests at least a partial separation of the free people of color population in Port-Louis (Camp des Malabars was an "Indian" quarter, though Indians also lived in the free black African quarter and vice versa). But scholars also point out the porous nature of borders between Indian, Malagasy and Africans in Mauritius. While some of the Indians retained their sense of identity and continued to wear clothes affiliated with their regional origins, many probably shaped or joined the burgeoning "Creole" culture of the enslaved and free "black" population of the island. For Saint Domingue, where the Indian population was far smaller, there is no evidence of a "Camp des Malabars" and they might have merged into the general slave and free people of color categories rather quickly. Those who were free may have become slaveholders themselves, if "Indien" owners identified in runaway ads were indeed Asian.

 

Jean-Louis, of the "Malabar nation" in India, is associated with a ship captain coming from Mozambique. This illustrates how French slaving in the Indian Ocean sometimes brought captives from different parts of Africa, Madagascar, and India to Saint Domingue.

Besides the evidence of a limited residential separation of the racial "castes" in Mauritius's Port-Louis, there is evidence in France itself of Indian slaves suing for their freedom on the basis of non-African origin. There may have been, by the late 18th century, a sense among some Indians and Europeans that enslavement was only to be associated with those bearing the "indelible stain" of African ancestry.  This was the case with "Amerindian" peoples, who were supposed to be given the rights of whites and be exempt from racial prejudice. Therefore, Indians, despite their dark skin, were not to be associated with Africans and should be emancipated or enjoy the rights of whites. This development is tied to the growth of racial ideology \ might have appealed to Indians living in the Mascarenes and Saint Domingue as grounds for their freedom and claims to the rights and privileges of the white population. Increasingly discriminatory laws against free people of color in Saint Domingue may have also pressured those of "Indien" origin to distinguish themselves from African-descended people. It certainly led to some free people of color in Saint Domingue claiming Indian descent in response to discriminatory laws. Of course, the remaining question is to what extent were Indians, of the occidental and oriental types, actually receiving the rights and privileges of whites? Those who were "unmixed" with Africans may have had an easier time attaining the aforementioned privileges, but free people of color who claimed "Indien" origin (in this case, almost always "Amerindian") were refused patents recognizing that heritage. What were things actually like for people of East Indian origin remains to be seen. If the example of Mauritius gives any indication, some may have been able to become landowners like other free people of color. 

Some of the runaway slaves who found their way to Saint Domingue embodied all the vast influences, cultures, and imperial rivalries of the Indian Ocean. This example, of a black cook and baker, a "Creole of Goa," is mentioned as someone who not only speaks French, Portuguese, and English, but nearly all the languages of Africa's eastern littoral. This means this "Creole of Goa" may have been of African origin, and probably spoke Swahili. A perfect example of the complex inter-imperial slave trade networks that connected India and Africa via Portuguese and French trade in the Indian Ocean.

So, what became of Asian Indians in Saint Domingue during and after the Haitian Revolution? Runaway slave ads before and during the early 1790s attest to their presence. One would think most merged into the general population, and were given the same rights as other citizens. In fact, the case of Benjamin Fruneau, according to Madiou, who came to Haiti after independence, indicates Haiti's willingness to grant citizenship rights to people of Indian descent included Asians. But during the course of the Haitian revolution, some East Indian captives from Saint Domingue were brought to the US by their fleeing French owners. Runaway slave advertisements from Virginia in the 1790s reference an East Indian who may have been trying to return to Saint Domingue. The case of Crispin, who was in brought to Philadelphia in 1791, answers some of our questions. Crispin, on the run in Virginia, was allegedly waiting for passage to Saint Domingue, where, in 1794, slavery was abolished. That he wished to return to the island indicates his wish to live as an emancipated person, and put his hopes in a free Saint Domingue.

Twenty Dollars Reward. Run away from his Master in the City of Philadelphia, on Saturday the 15th of November last, a kind of Mulatto East-India Boy named CRISPIN, about 16 years old, 5 feet 4 inches high, slender built; he has been in the city for about 3 years speaks French and broken English; has straight black hair, which he sometimes ties; well made and walks upright; had on when he went away an almost new black hat, new short Jacket, and a pair of French fashioned trousers with feet to them, made of grey coating with plated buttons, white shirt, French neck handkerchief, and an almost new pair of shoes tied with ribbon, and wears sometime a National Cockade. There is reason to believe he has been brought into the state by a Frenchman, and is at present somewhere in or about Williamsburg or Norfolk waiting for a passage to St. Domingo. Whoever will secure the said boy in jail of this state so that his Master may get him again, shall have the above reward of twenty Dollars paid by the Printer of this Paper, with reasonable charges.--Norfolk, Dec. 9, 1794.

In some rare cases, East Indian captives owned by the French were brought to the US. In Norfolk, Virginia, a Frenchman posted an ad for his runaway "East India mulatto" boy, Crispin, who is identified as waiting for a passage to St. Domingo. 

 

 

 As for other East Indians from Saint Domingue, the case of African American John Pierre Burr's mother demonstrates the East Indian/Saint Domingue presence in Philadelphia's free black population. Burr's sister would later join the Haitian emigration movement in the 1820s, perhaps remembering their mother's Saint Domingue roots. Jack Forbes also mentioned, in passing, a family of East Indian and white origin from Saint Domingue living in South Carolina in 1817. Thus, 'mixed-race' Saint Domingue and Haitian families of Indian origin were found among the Saint Domingue diaspora in the US, and may have returned to Haiti during the 1820s and other periods. Similar families almost surely existed in post-1804 Haiti, but tracking them after the colonial period is difficult. Considering their small numbers and younger profile, one would assume they rather quickly merged into the general population. Those who were free before the Haitian Revolution may have married into similar families, and perhaps would have been met by Benjamin Fruneau in France and Haiti. While Madiou's account of Fruneau's origins suggest he heard about Haiti while living in Europe, it is possible he was already familiar with Saint Domingue as an important French colony where Asian Indians were present. This is pure speculation, but possible, given the circulation of people and goods between the two corners of the French colonial world. 

 

An advertisement for more goods for sale brought by La Parfait-Union. Included among its merchandise were 16 "beaux" Negroes, one of whom was a cook. This is another example of the fact that French ships coming from India included slaves in the cargo, albeit at much lower numbers than those coming directly from Africa. 

Since there are limitations to the sources used here, and a reliance on argument by analogy with regards to the Mascarenes, this post barely scratches the surface of a topic germane to the history of Indo-Caribbean peoples. While focusing on the territory with no known association with Indian immigration in the 19th and 20th centuries, baring a few exemptions (Dadlani from Jamaica, Fruneau from Mauritius/France), this post attempted to uncover and, in a limited way, analyze the presence of Indian slaves in the most important plantation colony of the 18th century.  While East Indians were in the Americas in the 16th century, and appear in various colonies and territories of the Caribbean-region during the colonial period, this blog post attempted to highlight those of Saint Domingue, postulating a perhaps greater number of them in this particular colony. The presence of East Indian slaves in the Caribbean may also yield insights into the nature of indentured Indian worker programs in the 19th and 20th centuries, demonstrating the long association of Indian people with coercive labor in parts of the Indian Ocean World and the Caribbean. Their presence also points to the interlocking nature of French colonialism and trade in the 18th century. For instance, French ships carried Indian textiles (and captives) for consumers in France and Africa (for additional slaves), and Indian textiles were key to clothing enslaved subjects in the Caribbean. The presence of actual Indian slaves in Saint Domingue adds another dimension to this, with intercontinental trade, migration, and coercive labor systems joining together European encroachment and hegemony in the two Indies.

Bibliography

Allen, Richard Blair. European Slave Trading in the Indian Ocean, 1500-1850. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2014. 

 

----"Suppressing a Nefarious Traffic: Britain and the Abolition of Slave Trading in India and the Western Indian Ocean, 1770-1830." The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, 66, no. 4 (2009): 873-94. Accessed November 1, 2020. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40467545.

 

Carter, Marina. 'Slavery and Unfree Labour in the Indian Ocean,' History Compass, 4:5 (2006): 800–813.

 

Filliot, Jean-Michel. La Traite Des Esclaves Vers Les Mascareignes Au XVIIIe Siècle. Paris: ORSTOM, 1974.

Garrigus, John D. Before Haiti: Race and Citizenship in French Saint-Domingue. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.

 

Geggus, David. "The Naming Of Haiti." NWIG: New West Indian Guide / Nieuwe West-Indische Gids 71, no. 1/2 (1997): 43-68. Accessed November 4, 2020. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41849817.

 

Hooper, Jane & David Eltis."The Indian Ocean in Transatlantic Slavery." Slavery & Abolition, 34 no. 3 (2013): 353-375.

Major, Andrea. Slavery, Abolitionism and Empire in India, 1772-1843. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2012.

McClellan, James E. (James Edward). Colonialism and Science: Saint Domingue in the Old Regime. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. 

Moreau de Saint-Méry, Méderic Louis Élie. Description topographique, physique, civile, politique et historique de la partie françoise de l'isle Saint-Domingue. 3 vols. Philadelphia:  1797.

Shell, Robert Carl-Heinz. Children of Bondage: A Social History of the Slave Society At the Cape of Good Hope, 1652-1838. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1994.

Vaughan, Megan. Creating the Creole Island: Slavery in Eighteenth-century Mauritius. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005. 

 

---. "Slavery and Colonial Identity in Eighteenth-Century Mauritius." Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 8 (1998): 189-214. Accessed November 4, 2020. doi:10.2307/3679294.

Rambling Essay on Naipaul's Mimic Men

Below is an awkward essay I wrote on Naipaul's Mimic Men. I think I lost a sense of direction while writing this (while trying to bring in a little bit of Glissant and some other writings from the literature course), but anything Naipaul is interesting, so I hope this isn't too horrible.

V.S. Naipaul’s The Mimic Men allows for thought-provoking contemplation of Glissant’s Poetics of Relation and Guha’s “The migrant’s Time.” As a novelist of Caribbean origins, Naipaul’s upbringing in a racially and culturally mixed Trinidadian society invites analysis from fellow-Caribbean author Glissant’s concepts. In addition, Guha’s article on the migrant experience is relevant to the protagonist of the novel, Ralph Singh, who experiences exile or the migrant life in London. However, both Glissantian Poetics of Relation and Guha’s Migrant’s Time miss the universalistic implications of Naipaul’s oeuvre. A close reading of The Mimic Men therefore challenges the reader to think beyond the experiences of exile or migration while providing an example to think critically through rhizomatic approaches to identity from Glissant. This essay will begin with Guha’s heterogeneous temporalities and migration, applying it critically to Naipaul before examining Glissant’s Poetics of Relation in the context of Ralph Singh, a deracinated Indo-Caribbean migrant (or exile) living in a Kensington hotel. The significance of mimicry in this context will shed light on relationality as a contradictory tactic against totalitarian roots.

Guha’s notion of migrant’s time brings to the forefront the temporal and spatial configuration of a migrant. The temporal and spatial ousting, or feeling of adrift is central (Guha 156). According to Guha, “There is no way for those who live in a community to make themselves intelligible to each other except by temporalizing their experience of being together” (156). The importance of temporality in shaping community or sense of belonging is central to Ralph Singh, narrator and author of the fictive memoir which constitutes The Mimic Men. By shifting chronologically in his memoir, Singh temporalizes his experience of childhood in Isabella, the fictionalized Trinidad of Naipaul’s youth, as well as imbuing his university student days in England and experience as a politician in his island homeland with spatio-temporal attributes that resist linearity. Accordingly, for Singh, it never occurred to him “that the writing of this book might have become an end in itself, that the recording of a life might become an extension of that life" (Naipaul 293). The end of writing his memoir in such a manner that resists linearity while functioning as an additional part of his life, speaks volumes to the heterogeneous temporalities embedded in the structure of the novel. The multiple temporalities of the novel also functions to show the inability of Singh to connect or relate with those around him. For example, during his youth in Isabella, he often dreams of an imagined Indo-Aryan ancestry in Asia which, though only a few generations removed, cannot be found in the disorder of the Caribbean colonial society that developed from slavery (146). Imagining an Aryan past allows for Singh to claim some kinship or relation to a distant past, which also disconnects him from the rest of Isabella. Thus, because of a lack of similar spatio-temporal overlap with other people of Isabella, Singh experiences a mismatch in the black and white world of the colonial Caribbean.

Even before arriving in England, the indeterminateness of Singh’s ethnic community in Isabella is central to his feeling of being shipwrecked. Once in London, he feels, “Shipwreck: I have used this word before. With my island background, it was the word that always came to me. And this was what I felt I had encountered again in the great city: this feeling of being adrift, a cell of perception, little more that might be altered, if only fleetingly, by any encounter” (32). This sense of being adrift, beginning in the island of his birth, illustrates the spatio-temporal disconnect between Singh and those he was socialized with in Isabella.  However, this feeling of disconnect lingers in England, the colonial metropole. Guha wrote of a mismatch of the migrant’s everydayness and that of their host community (Guha 158). Singh’s experience as a student and later exile appears to affirm that experience. However, Singh also experiences a sense of freedom in London, where “There was no one to link my present with my past, no one to note my consistencies or inconsistencies. It was up to me to choose my character, and I chose the character that was easiest and most attractive. I was the dandy, the extravagant colonial, indifferent to scholarship" (Naipaul 24). Despite this relative freedom from his past experience as a colonial subject in Isabella, he chooses to perpetuate the limited expression and stereotypical roles assigned to the colonized subject. His experience of “assimilation” is one of mimetic play, assimilating into what the metropole made open to subjects as a colonial dandy. Singh’s inexorable drift and attempt to assimilate mark him as alien, per Guha (Guha 159). Naipaul’s protagonist is unable to connect with those around him in Isabella, despite a shared mimetic relationship with regards to the colonial metropole, nor is he able to find connection in London, where the illusion of connection and the individual cells of urban life create disorder (Naipaul 22). Significantly, intimacy, particularly sexual relationships and Singh’s marriage, do not allow him to express deeper kinship or transcend the individual (22).

Perhaps most intriguing to Guha, Singh’s experience of youth of and politics in creole Isabella is one of disorder and half-societies, imitating ideas and slogans of England in a context of inapplicability. Guha saw creole societies as spaces of creative overcoming of translation (Guha 159). For Singh, however, the ‘creole’ space of Isabella represented racial, ethnic, political, and social disorder. Disorder, wrought by colonialism, slavery and mimicry of the metropole, leads to Singh declaring the following:

A man, I suppose, fights only when he hopes, when he has a vision of order, when he feels strongly there is some connection between the earth on which he walks and himself. But there was my vision of a disorder which it was beyond any one man to put right. There was my sense of wrongness, beginning with the stillness of that morning of return when I looked out on the slave island and tried to pretend it was mine. There was my sense of intrusion which deepened as I felt my power to be more and more a matter of words. So defiantly, in my mind, I asserted my character as intruder, the picturesque Asiatic born for other landscapes. (Naipaul 248)

In other words, the creole character of Isabella made Singh feel alienated and castaway, but also removed from his Indian roots. Mixed-race characters also cause a similar feeling for Singh, who sees them as contributing to the disorderly nature of a colonial society in which ties to the landscape are inorganic, even for descendants of indigenous Caribs absorbed by intermarriage (146). Thus, creole nature of society in Isabella is inextricably woven into Singh’s search for order, only to find disorder in the colony and seat of Empire. Furthermore, this serves to illustrate the complexity of migrant’s time for those of double Diasporas, as descendants of Indian indentured laborers in the Caribbean who later move to England. The uprootedness and heterogeneous temporalities of such communities speaks to a larger problem of identity that can be experienced by non-migrants as well.

However, Glissant’s concept of poetics of relation may be more useful for reconsidering rootedness, movement, and identity for double or triple Diasporas, such as Singh. For Glissant, relations are to be found in a rhizome-like sense of rootedness, or one without totalitarian roots. In other words, each and every identity is extended through a relationship with the Other, acting as a kind of anticonformism (Glissant 11). According to Glissant, “Thus the particular resists a generalizing universal and soon begets specific and local senses of identity, in concentric circles (provinces then nations)” (14). Glissantian reconceptualization of identity and rootedness is inherently flexible, creating room for Indo-Caribbean identity within the spectrum of Caribbean cultures. In addition, relation is made up of shared knowledge, which undoubtedly reflects the shared experiences of people of a variety of racial or ethnic backgrounds in Isabella. In The Mimic Men, such a perspective is not on the table, although the shared knowledge of Singh and his classmates at the Imperial School, including his black political partner, Browne, indicate a relationality based on colonialism. This, in turn, demonstrates Glissant’s argument on the totalitarian root of colonialism, which in turn shaped the totalitarian drive for a single root in postcolonial nationalism (14). The limitations of such a totalitarian root appear in Singh’s experience, particularly with regards to the continued dependence on England reducing the meaning of independence to playacting (Naipaul 227).

Singh does not experience Isabella through a rhizomatic approach, despite his birth there, and as an alienated colonial subject, whose education inculcates the importance of England, does not identify with the landscape or people of the island. Indeed, he marvels at the cohesion of Isabella:
I had never thought of obedience as a problem. Now it seemed to me the miracle of society. Given our situation, anarchy was endless, unless we acted right away. But on power and the consolidation of passing power we wasted our energies, until the bigger truth came: that in a society like ours, fragmented, inorganic, no link between man and the landscape, a society not held together by common interests, there was no true internal source of power, and that no power was real which did not come from the outside. Such was the controlled chaos we had, with such enthusiasm, brought upon ourselves. (246)

Colonialism is the force that held it together, creating a controlled chaos in which Singh believed himself to be adrift. Attempting to fill the vacuum left by decolonization with a totalitarian root of nationalism only exacerbated the contradictions of a society in which politicians appropriated concepts and slogans of the metropole without thought. Socialism, or nationalization, for instance, characterize the misplaced mimicry of kinship to England that does not rethink the implications of non-Caribbean ideas in a Caribbean reality. Thus, the socialism of Singh and Browne disappears after the first issue of their paper (223). For Singh, "The career of the colonial politician is short and ends brutally. We lack order. Above all, we lack power. We mistake words and the acclamation of words for power; as soon as our bluff is called we are lost” (10).

Intriguingly, Glissant’s concept of internal exile is perhaps most relevant to the experience of Singh. Glissant defines it as occurring to individuals living where solutions concerning the relationship of community to its surroundings are not consented to by the community as a whole (Glissant 19). For The Mimic Men, Singh’s experiences internal exile within Isabella because of the entrenched racial divisions that separate the population from determining its relationship to the island as a whole. Divided by generation, race, and class, Singh cannot identify with Isabella but becomes an exile from his home. As a child, the family home was to be kept separate from the intrusion of school and community, which gradually infiltrates his experience without his or his family’s consent through exposure to the interiority of life for other racial groups, particularly working-class black Browne and French Creole Deschampsneufs. By not opening himself to a rhizome-like understanding of relation, Singh is unable to escape the internal exile of his youth or career as a politician, eventually choosing permanent exile in a Kensington hotel. As mentioned previously, the heterogeneous temporalities put forth by Guha help to illuminate why Singh’s struggles to assimilate or find kinship in London. An internal alienation and exile also explains why Singh encounters similarly exiled Londoners who are playing with social identities, political affiliations, or rebelliousness, such as university students playing at being iconoclasts (Naipaul 50). Playacting of meaning does not confer kinship, or lasting kinship, for neither Singh nor the white characters he encounters in London.

On the universal features of rootedness, however, Glissantian poetics of relation elucidate the struggle against a totalitarian root as well as the struggle of internal exile. Moreover, a rhizomatic understanding of rootedness and belonging also presents to us the mimicry at work in English society, such as the aforementioned university students. Indeed, while birth “on an island like Isabella, an obscure New World transplantation, second-hand and barbarous, was to be born to disorder", London was not a refuge (141). In fact, Singh finds himself dreaming of landscapes he knew before after settling in London, the very “escape to what I had so recently sought to escape from" (36). In London he is not a Londoner, nor in Isabella does he belong. Mimetic expressions of identity do not allow for an escape from this conundrum. Similarly, numerous white characters, including English-born residents, are adrift metaphorically or socially. The other residents of the hotel in which Singh decides to take permanent residence are described as follows:

But we who belong here are neither maimed nor very old. Three-quarters of the men here are of my age; they have responsible jobs to which they go off in their motorcars every morning. We are people who for one reason or another have withdrawn, from our respective countries, from the city where we find ourselves, from our families. We have withdrawn from unnecessary responsibility and attachment. We have simplified our lives. I cannot believe that our establishment is unique. It comforts me to think that in this city alone there must be hundreds and thousands like ourselves (296).

Singh’s co-residents, in a building designed for temporary living, find solace and belonging in a space defined by transience. They have chosen to simplify their lives and remove themselves from their nationalities, cities, and families, deliberately choosing non-relation with established or conventional forms of belonging. The residents of the hotel, through a shared space that allows for individual expression, have some semblance of rootedness, despite the transitory nature of the space they occupy. A rhizomatic construct of identity aids in understanding the broadly shared experience of alienation and mimicry in social roles that occurs in a colonial setting or the center of Empire.

In summation, Guha’s Migrant’s Time and Glissant’s Poetics of Relation pave the path for deeper interpretation of The Mimic Men while suffering their own limitations. The experience of Singh, both internal exile in Isabella and exile in London, challenges Guha’s conceptions by looking at individual displacement from local vantage points or afar. Glissantian concepts such as internal exile assist in interpreting Singh’s displacement in the land of his birth, while perhaps speaking to the general conditions of life in the city which, despite the conglomeration of people, prove illusory for kinship. Mimetic expressions of being and belonging allow for one to perform the roles forced upon on, or to temporarily endeavor to create or define meaning, albeit of an illusory nature for Singh. Utilizing the figure of rhizome roots rather than a singular root permits the identification with a multiplicity of origins or ties, pertinent to creolization and a “disorderly” society such as Isabella. Undoubtedly, inclusion of white characters in the novel contributes to thinking about migration and movement broadly, including forms of rootedness and rootlessness among Singh’s housemates in the hotel. Mimicry of social conventions, roles, or family do not create authentic forms of being for Singh, even when in relation to other forms, because it helps prevent one from expressing an authentic individualized self, albeit one that still requires relationality and flux.

No Pain Like This Body

Harold Sonny Ladoo's No Pain Like This Body quite different from Yesterdays. Although both novels share a raw, earthy, and unsentimental portrait of the lives of Indian peasants on a fictionalized Trinidad, local dialect for the dialogue of the uneducated, poor characters, and a bleak future, No Pain Like This Body features children as central to the plot, especially in their worldview, one in which jumbies, jables, lougawou, God, and death can be flexible to meet their shifting fears, hopes, and comprehension. Furthermore, the plot is not as straightforward, and the early chapters are dedicated to describing the experience of Rama, Panday, Sunaree, Balraj and their Ma after the abusive father beats his children and chases them into the rain on a tempestuous night on Carib Island. So, Ladoo's book is a slice of life in these downtrodden characters with some dark humor at the wake for Rama, yet one in which there's no escape from the black, heartless sky. Incredibly dark read but worthwhile for a different approach by an Indo-Trinidadian writer on their community.

The wake chapter actually brought to mind Roumain's magnum opus, believe it or not. Yet, I have never encountered any peasant family or community in other Caribbean literatures in which despair is so perfectly captured by the locale, family, village, and writing. Sure, urban settings in some other Caribbean writings have come close, but nothing quite like this. The other writer who came to mind is Arundhati Roy, particularly Rahel and Estha in The God of Small Things. One wonders if Roy ever read Ladoo. Perhaps she took an interest in the Indian diaspora of the Caribbean while writing her excellent novel?

An Island Is A World

“Foster looked about him, a strange emotion in his heart. He was one of them, and yet he couldn’t feel the way they did, nor share in the kinship they knew. They were going back home. They had a home. It was far away, but they hadn’t forgotten. When they had come to Trinidad they kept some of India hidden in their hearts. They had tried to live in Trinidad as they had lived in India, with their own customs and religion, shutting out the influences of the west. They had built their temples and taught their children the language of the motherland. They had something to return to, they had a country.”

Selvon's second novel, An Island is a World, actually helps explain his first and third novels, particularly his time in London as an influence on The Lonely Londoners. Ramchand's excellent introduction to the novel explains how autobiographical this novel is, so Selvon's relationship with his brother, his service in World War II, and experiences with West Indians in the "Mother Country" shed light on Selvon's personal experiences influencing his fiction. Telling the story of Foster and his brother, Rufus, the novel moves back and forth between the connected families and shifts in setting from Trinidad to London and America, while expressing a certain malaise, as Naipaul said, about the state of the West Indies in the 1950s, colonialism, and the Federation. Per usual, one respects and adores the interracial friendships and relationships, and a deep identification with the island of Trinidad in Selvon's work. Much like Selvon, Foster, though descending from indentured Indians, identifies with Trinidad and its Creole multiracial makeup, and along the way this process of Foster (Selvon) to make sense out of life, experiencing racial prejudice in England, and find a way to make it through the monotony or routine of life in London and Trinidad. 

Foster, Rufus, Father and Foster's best friend, Andrews, share similar views on Trinidadian society, the political and social problems, the seemingly inevitable dissolution of Federation, and the rather low status accorded to the West Indies by visiting sailors or seamen from the US and England. Much like Adrian in I Hear Thunder, despite Selvon's undeniable expression of faith in Trinidad as a nation capable of encompassing all of its inhabitants, one can sense the author's lingering fears about the political corruption or lack of meaning in life beyond pleasure, although there is some optimism in this work. In this constant shifting of identity and gradual acceptance of the island as a full world, Selvon also brings to mind fiction by the Naipaul brothers. Indeed, Fireflies came to mind more than once given both novel's tragicomedy aspects, depiction of Trinidad, dysfunctional relationships, and the struggle over its "smallness" or alleged insignificance. Like the Naipaul brothers, Selvon excels writing, with a keen eye for humor, intricate family or personal ties in apparently dysfunctional families, an excellent example from this novel being Johnny's constant state of drunken stupor but finding solace in his grandson, despite attempts to hide his feelings for the child. 

In comparison to other Selvon novels, this one is a little lacking in the level of humor one comes to expect. Moreover, there are clunky sentences or missing pronouns here and there, though the combination of Trinidadian vernacular, occasional moments of comedic relief from rather depressing scenarios in which the characters find themselves, and excessive philosophizing on religion and being prove interesting for those who care to delve deeper into Trinidadian history, politics, or colonialism. Furthermore, as an early Selvon novel and part of the flourishing postwar Anglophone Caribbean literature, the novel was prescient on the failure of Federation and a careful nationalist text with a beaming example of the colonial politician, Andrews. 

The Chip-Chip Gatherers

"The sugarcane alone flourished in that intractable environment: a bright, burning green offensive to the eye seeking escape from its limiting and limitless horizons."

Shiva Naipaul's The Chip-Chip Gatherers, set in Trinidad, is a difficult read to assess. While retaining aspects of the comic sensibilities and stronger female characters of Fireflies, in this novel, the existential crisis of the "chip-chip gatherers," the Trinidadian people, particularly women condemned to an early death by the strictures of sex and class in the Settlement, makes for a much darker tone with appropriately dark humor. Telling the story of two families, Shiva Naipaul's scathing social commentary is more condescending here, especially to the countryside of Trinidad and its aspirants to power or wealth, such as Egbert Ramsaran or Mrs. Bholai. There is even sexual angst, a disturbing experience on the part of Egbert's son with a prostitute in Port of Spain, and a general meaninglessness of life on the island that one can find in the works of Shiva's older brother. Indeed, the rise and fall of Egbert, from illiterate poverty in the countryside to his last days in decay despite his material wealth reveals some of the innate absurdity of class relations in Trinidadian society of this era. 

In short, The Chip-Chip Gatherers struck me as cruel and a more emotionally taxing read without much of the humor in the masterpiece in tragicomedy, Fireflies. Both novels share dysfunctional families, marriages, horrible conditions for women, and the problem of class and race (including douglas in this second novel), but "The Chip-Chip Gatherers is more aligned with, in my opinion, V.S. Naipaul's post-Biswas writings in its detachment and often excessive cruelty. However, as in the case of Mrs. Lutchman, for Sita, the young illegitimate child of Sushila, a young rebel also torn apart by the ravages of time and strict gender roles, one can see Shiva Naipaul's appreciation of and respect for the plight of women in Trinidadian society. Sita, Rani, Mrs. Bholai, Basdai, Phula, Sushila, and other women in this novel have, despite their shortcomings and personal defects, ranging from pride or vanity to shame and passive resignation, a far more sympathetic and nuanced portrayal in the pen of Shiva than most of the women in V.S. Naipaul's fiction. Indeed, perhaps this sympathy can be seen quite well in the overall less pessimistic Trinidad novels of Shiva versus those of Vidia, where there is, in some Sisyphean sense, purpose in these seemingly insignificant lives, if the novel's final paragraph on the rotting tree and the village chip-chip gatherers is read between the lines.  

Beyond the Dragon's Mouth: Stories and Pieces

"I understood. Sufficient unto any man the handicap of being straightforwardly Indian or straightforwardly West Indian. But to contrive somehow how to combine the two was a challenge to reason. An Indian from the West Indies! I was guilty of a compound sin."

Shiva Naipaul's Beyond the Dragon's Mouth: Stories and Pieces consists of short stories and travel writings, taking the reader from Naipaul's native Trinidad to Puerto Rico, Grenada, Suriname, Seychelles, England, Portugal, India, Iran, Morocco, and Jamaica. While I found his travel writing to be, shall we say, less racist or offensive than VS Naipaul, both share a similar worldview ("My day trip between Islam and Christianity, Africa and Europe, had gone sour on me"). Shiva's perceptive observations on the "Bush Negroes" of Suriname was interesting (they're not Africa in South America, but have become something new altogether), as was his critical but, in my view, accurate statements on the problems of Rastafarianism as a faith and ideology. His fiction, however, is where he shines. The characteristically Naipaul sense of humor, mixed with some condescension, characterizes his short stories in this collection. By far, Naipaul's talent with comedy is most apparent throughout all of the stories, especially "Mr Sookhoo and the Carol Singers" and "The Beauty Contest," two stories set in Trinidad featuring lovable yet amusing characters. 

Mighty Dougla

 

Excellent and topical calypso number by Mighty Dougla on race and ethnic differences in Trinidad. As a reader with a growing interest in Trinidad, this song encapsulates some of the ethnic, racial, and political divides in Trinidad, some excellently satirized in Naipaul's The Suffrage of Elvira.

Shiva Naipaul's Fireflies

"Having from early on, confused religion with magic, they had come to hold the majority of religions in a superstitious dread, genuinely afraid of the vengeance rival gods might let fall on the clan should they be offended."

Shiva Naipaul, younger brother of V.S. Naipaul, wrote an epic comedy which possibly surpasses A House for Mr. Biswas. An alternative title could have been A House for Mrs. Lutchman given the shared style, themes, and content, but Shiva Naipaul's Mrs. Lutchman is a far more compelling female character than anyone in his brother's work. The hilarious Hindu clan, the Khojas, the gradual dissolution of the patriarchal nucleus binding the family together, the various marriages and dispossessions Mrs. Lutchman experiences, and last, but certainly not least, the hilarity which ensues in what is truly a tragic set of circumstances for the protagonist manage to make for a successful novel. Shiva Naipaul's Khoja family not only entertains, but imports many lessons on family, social change, religion, culture, and the shifts in Trinidadian life. Like fireflies caught in a jar by the brother Khoja, the sisters and Vimla gradually escape, but Mrs. Lutchman loses the most with the loss of her independence, husband, and son.  

When it comes to compelling female characters, Shiva Naipaul's Mrs. Lutchman is a more likable, nuanced character than most of V.S. Naipaul's fictional women. Both share similar comic sensibilities, but one wonders if Shiva's more sympathetic female protagonist is the result of his father dying when Shiva was rather young, whereas their father lived long enough to see Vidia reach adulthood and shape his work? We know Mr. Biswas is based on their father, but maybe Shiva looked more to their mother as a model for Fireflies, which could explain a more nuanced, female protagonist for what Christopher Hitchens described as a masterpiece in tragicomedy. Regardless of his inspiration, Fireflies is one of those rare reads which transport one to another time, place, and culture during a period of rapid change. Timeless, humorous, informative, and, in its own way, potentially feminist, if one looks to the Khoja sisters and the next generation. 

A Brighter Sun

"He used to say that all this business about colour and nationality was balls, that as long as a man was happy that was all that mattered."

Selvon's first novel, A Brighter Sun, \tells the story of Tiger, the protagonist in Turn Again Tiger, the entertaining sequel which continues his story. Married off to Urmilla at age 16, Tiger struggles to understand manhood, or, better yet, adulthood and his place in an expanding world. Going to Port of Spain for the first time, becoming a father, working with the Americans on the Churchill-Roosevelt Road, learning to read, and gaining a deeper, nuanced understanding of knowledge, politics, and race, Tiger's vision of himself and his role as a man brightens as the sun. Of course, aspects of Trinidadian adult masculinity are certainly disturbing, such as Tiger and Joe beating their wives, but the community of Barataria and the various "characters" who populate Tiger's world illustrate nuance along race, class, gender, or political affiliations. 

Selvon, as mentioned elsewhere on this blog, is an expert at humor, the highlight of this novel being Sookdeo, the old Indian village drunk, selling his half-blind donkey that does not "look" well to another man. The vernacular dialogue also shines through this novel, which contains more than enough local colors, sites, and characterization of the countryside, village, and town. Joe Martin, Tiger's best friend in Turn Again Tiger, as well as Tall Boy, the Chinese shopkeeper, have their own backstories, too. Joe's origins in the barrackyards of George Street, for instance, or Rita and Urmilla's friendship which transcends the creole/coolie divide, remind one of Minty Alley by C.L.R. James. Like James, Selvon knows and empathizes deeply with the popular classes of Trinidad during the war, a time of tremendous change as Yankee bases hired local labor at higher wages than the sugar estates and government positions (rum and coca cola!). 

For any and everyone interested in Selvon or Trinidad & Tobago, A Brighter Sun is more than a worthwhile introduction. Although many events happen and Tiger's still unsure what exactly makes a man, the jokes aside will keep the reader enthralled by this rapidly changing world. Indeed, Tiger's growing interest in politics and the class and racial divisions, hint at greater change to come with keen attention to the facade of populist local officials in the legislative council who, despite their appeals to racial kinship, offer nothing but broken promises. Somewhat reminiscent of Naipaul's Suffrage of Elvira or the colonial politician in The Wine of Astonishment by Lovelace. 

Turn Again Tiger

Standing on the hill gave him a feeling of power. He hated the cane. Cane had been the destiny of his father, and his father's father. Cane had brought them all from the banks of the Ganges as indentured laborers to toil in the burning sun. And even when those days were over, most of them stayed shackled to the estates."

Samuel Selvon's Turn Again Tiger is an enjoyable work with great humor, continuing the tale of Tiger, a creolized Trinidadian of Indian descent. Tiger, comfortable in Barataria, agrees to help his father run a new sugarcane estate in the valley, in a small, forgotten corner of Trinidad called Five Rivers. Given false information on the job, Tiger agrees to help his father and moves to this new village, trying to figure out how to be a man along the way. 

According to Naipaul's review of the novel, Turn Again Tiger appears to be a sequel to an earlier work by Selvon, which probably explains his origins in the canefields, his relationship with Sookdeo, the man who taught him how to read, as well as Tiger's fraught relationship with the estate (and by extension, white people, the race all Trinidadians see as God). In his review of the novel, Naipaul seemingly characterizes the novel as a typical or formulaic "Race, Sex, and Caribbean" anti-colonial text, which has some veracity. 

While the central white character to the novel, Doreen, who inspires so much of Tiger's internal turmoil and frustration, is not given the complexity or depth of other characters in this novel (the entire village becomes a character, except the white overseer, Robinson, who, as a symbol of the plantation and colonialism does not mingle with the masses but controls from behind the scenes), one could ask why should the two white characters be centered in a narrative about a multiracial, poor community? Or, on another note of importance, why does this novel include powerful collective women's voices, but reaffirms patriarchal cultural norms and power relations in Five Rivers?

In another way, this novel could be compared in intriguing ways to Mr. Naipaul's Guerrillas or The Mimic Men, which all feature interracial relationships between West Indian men and white women. In Selvon's narrative, the white female body becomes, in a way strangely reminiscent of Jimmy Ahmed's sexual conquests or the fascinating character in Salih's illustrious novel, a way in which the colonized male subject reverts the established order. Naipaul, unlike Selvon, however, includes these white women characters' inner desires and political contradictions in the aforementioned novels. Strangely, much like Ralph Singh or Jimmy Ahmed, Tiger seems to share similar sexual frustrations related to the colonized West Indian, but Naipaul was more dismissive of this aspect of Selvon's novel.

I Hear Thunder

'"Hello mister white man,' Birdie said.

'Say hello Mr Randolph,' Randolph said.

'Hello Mr Randolph white man,' Birdie said."

Samuel Selvon's I Hear Thunder is a spectacular (and short) novel about life in Trinidad in the 1960s. Told with a great sense of humor and third person narration, the island itself, Port of Spain, and Carnival nearly become characters. The protagonist, Adrian, a Trinidadian male of Indian descent, unhappy with the loose morals and apparent meaningless of party life, is treading a tightrope between the two extremes as his old schoolmate, Mark, returns to the island with a white wife. Class, race, color, sex, migration, and gender are just a few of the themes explored in this deceptively simple novel. The Carnival itself exemplifies this contradiction, and along the way Selvon's detailed depiction of the various races and classes of Trinidad enthrall the reader.

If Selvon and Naipaul had been able to collaborate on Trinidadian short fiction, I suspect it would have been amazing, with Selvon's deeper affection balancing the condescension of Naipaul. Both writers are products of the Indo-Caribbean community, with Selvon resembling Adrian in I Hear Thunder, and they share a similar sense of humor and depth for the island's social landscape and history. Alas, one can dream though?

Thoughts on A House for Mr. Biswas

Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas is a deliciously humorous and sometimes absurd epic novel from the cradle to the grave of Mohun Biswas, a colonial Trinidadian of Indian descent, lower socioeconomic status but of Brahmin roots according to Hindu traditions from a distant Indian homeland. Mr. Biswas, as he is referred to throughout the long novel, though coming from a poor family, marries into a wealthier family also of Brahmin backgrounds in India, and thus begins the majority of the novel: the tale of Mr. Biswas struggling to free himself from the confines of the Hanuman House and other family homes dominated by the family of his wife, Shama. Thus, the novel provides an interesting look at Indian Trinidad and identity in colonial Trinidad, with all of its ugliness, contradictions, and beauty. This can be seen in the conflict between Indian Hindu traditions and English, Christian, and ‘modern’ Western life, percolating the lives of Mr. Biswas and the Tulsi clan in terms of religion, caste, race, gender relations (should women be educated, or, should husbands be able to beat their wives, or even, should girls be married off by their parents?), and the potential future of Hindu and Indian identities in a colonial Caribbean context. As the novel reveals throughout its pages, despite the Indian-centred narrative and apparent segregation of country Indian-descendants on the sugar plantations and rice-growing regions of the island, Chinese, “Negro,” Creole, and European identities converge, especially in the capital, Port of Spain, with likely ramifications for how Naipaul’s Trinidadian background impacted his perception of race, class, colonialism, caste, Hinduism, and the West.

First, however, as a novel about a house, as the title suggests, or home, and the tale ends after Mr. Biswas attains his dream of having his own house, where, he can establish his independence and make a mark on the earth, Naipaul’s epic is a universal tale of the search for identity, belonging, adult autonomy, and, as mentioned previously, leaving something for the future, to indicate one lived and was not, as Naipaul suggests in A Bend in the River, simply allowing oneself to become nothing in the world. This sentiment is exactly captured in the concluding paragraph of the prologue, which, prior to the novel’s early beginning on the birth and youth of Mr. Biswas, establishes that he does indeed succeed in obtaining his own house in Port of Spain, a house he was cheated into buying by a coloured solicitor’s clerk (Mr. Biswas’s funny naiveté would get him into trouble again in the novel, particularly regarding an attorney and his lackey in the Chase, where he ran a small store in the country town for the Tulsis because he could not stand living in the Hanuman House, or the “monkey house” as he referred to it, Hanuman being the monkey god from the Ramayana). His successful attainment of his home, especially in light of numerous feeble attempts in the past (in the Green Vale, he hires a Negro carpenter to build him a home near the plantation run by Seth, who had married into the Tulsi family through Padma, the sister of Mrs. Tulsi, the matriarch of the family and widow of Mr. Tulsi, the Hindu pundit and deceased patriarch who, for some reason, left India decades ago for Trinidad and established his family there) and natural and unnatural events causing the demise (the house in the Green Vale was destroyed by rain of proportions similar to God’s flooding of the world in the Old Testament while his home in Shorthills, not too far from the subsequent Tulsi house after the family moves from Arwacas and the Hanuman House, is destroyed by fire, seemingly of Biblical proportions), are part and parcel of the life of a hero, an adventurer who, from a sign-painter, manager of an estate, shopkeeper, journalist, and civil servant, succeeds in rebuilding and restarting his life over and over despite the trap of Shama’s family and four children. Thus, when he, at the novel’s end, dies knowing his family has its own home and his daughter (for one places one’s hopes in their children in old age), Savi, who makes more money than he did as a journalist and civil servant, can look after the family, he left his mark on the world accommodated, independent (of the Tulsi family, at least), and remembered.

Naipaul’s preference for British, Western ways and civilization and the origins of that perspective become clearer in this novel, too. Published in the early 1960s, as Trinidad & Tobago and the rest of the British West Indies became independent states, Naipaul had already studied in Britain and likely saw himself as English rather than Trinidadian, a country of “monkeys” he once derided several years later as unable to comprehend his work. However, this early masterpiece brands him as a Caribbean literary figure and giant, despite his adopted British homeland and Anglophile behaviour and rhetoric. Nevertheless, this novel’s depiction of black and African-descended Trinidadians is disturbing and suggestive of deep segregation and racist views held by Indian-descended Trinidadians, or at least within the Tulsi family and their associates. Ms. Blackie is the name for a black maidservant of Mrs. Tulsi, and her words and behaviour indicate black inferiority (she complains in the novel about black laziness, black backwardness, etc.) and black servility for the upper class, upper caste Tulsi family. In addition, during World War II, Negroes are mentioned as thugs who demanded money from Mr. Biswas on his late night walks, which, arguably, is not racist, but, when added to the general depiction of black Trinidadians, is not very flattering. Shama also offends a black woman in the novel during that first week she met Mr. Biswas, who was hired to paint the Tulsi store in Arwacas, by offering her black colored cloth, presumably to match her skin color, sparking a fit from the black woman who demands an apology. This, while indicative of colorism and perhaps self-hatred on the black customer’s part regarding her skin, also conveys Indian colorism and condescension toward “Negro” compatriots. In fact, when a Negro is mentioned at all in a positive way, such as the Negro who won first place in the exhibition exam (Anand, Mr. Biswas’s son, won third place in the entire island), he is also presented as oversexualized and eager to downplay his intelligence to maintain his stories of sexual encounters with older women to his peers. This, once again, is not inherently racist, but the narrator’s surprise at the fact that a Negro won can easily be perceived as such.

Of course, not every black or African-descended character is a thief, thug, alcoholic, ashamed to be black fool. But the references by the narrator to Shama’s discomfort regarding people of other religions and races, the fact that the Indian community especially looked down upon all interracial marriage with African-descended women (such as Bhandat, Biswas’s wealthy uncle, Ajodha’s, brother, with a Creole woman, or even both of Bhandat’s sons, who informally have a family with non-Indian, non-Hindu Spanish-Negro women and other races). This, however, is hardly surprising, considering that the Hindu Indians also despise intermarriage with those tainted by Islam, to paraphrase the narrator’s description of Muslim Indians, but also highly suggestive of the sometimes tense or, more often than not in the novel, the non-existent relationships between people of different races. Even white women are not spared, as illustrated when, for a second, Owad’s Tulsi sisters feared he came back from studying medicine with a white woman on the ship. Chinese Trinidadians, whites, and essentially all non-Indian people are absent from the world of most of the characters, except in Port of Spain or in terms of authority, where black policemen could harass and ask for bribes from Indians in the rural countryside, or white colonial authorities and Western literature, course curriculum, and Christianity infiltrate the Hindu worldview of Indo-Trinidadians. Moreover, in Port of Spain, a cosmopolitan port city, all residents have to interact with whites, blacks, mixed-race, Chinese, and Indians in the workplace, the city’s streets, restaurants, and squares, such as Mr. Biswas’s encounter with a black man working as a hunter for a solicitor, his prey consisting of illiterate people in need of birth, marriage, and death certificates in what was probably Marine Square, occupied by homeless and deprived individuals. And besides, before Mr. Biswas realizes that the coloured solicitor’s clerk cheated him for thousands on a poorly built house, he was comfortable drinking and eating with the man, as well as his work as a journalist, particularly as a seeker of destitutes for a special column for the Sentinel, requiring him to work amidst and interview people of all class and race backgrounds.

Naipaul’s anti-communist, anti-socialist views can also be surmised through his treatment of Owad’s ‘fad’ of pro-Soviet Union, pro-Communist fervor upon return to Trinidad after the Second World War. On return, Owad’s naïve praise for the Soviet Union and the glories of Russia, Russian literature’s Gogol, advanced Soviet rice-agriculture with aeroplanes shooting the rice into the earth, and each man earning his keep by working (and there’s always work) betray a youthful optimism after witnessing WWII on European soil. His brief obsession spreads among his family however, and Anand learns to quote and mimic the sayings of his uncle, Owad, at school while the rest of the family begins to expect an anti-capitalist revolution that, of course, never comes. In due time, Owad moves on and drops his Communist ideal for reality in the capitalist, post-war, American-influenced Trinidad where capitalism continues to reign, political parties emerge (Sheckar, Owad’s wealthy brother who operates a number of cinemas, leads a party that opposes the government welfare department that employs Mr. Biswas, which is eventually sacked, but not because of Sheckar’s party, which pledged in island elections to make everyone rich in Trinidad), and, as usual, one can assume that the narrator and the novel’s characters, like Naipaul, prefer Western, liberal capitalism and see it as the natural order of life, even though Mr. Biswas’s family experiences poverty and go into extreme debt just to have a house and survive. Mr. Biswas, however, probably like Naipaul, seems to accept this as a natural part of life, and during his failed attempt at being a shopkeer, rues the fact that he did not engage in the sale of beef as many Hindu merchants, abandoning their religious commands, did for the new god of profit.

As for religion and modernity, Naipaul’s bias in favour of British, Western civilization, becomes clear. When Mr. Biswas joins the Aryans, a group of Hindu reformers opposed to idolatrous habits of Hinduism, lack of education for women and forced marriages, and open to the ideals of Western civilization, it is hard not to imagine Naipaul himself being or perhaps, someone he knew, was part of such an organization of ‘modern’ Hindus. Likewise, Mr. Biswas’s disdain for Hindu pundit’s blessings of homes and other reverent, typical Hindu prayers and behaviour, often directed against his Tulsi relatives, seems to indicate a certain degree of secularism and condescension toward “superstitious” Hinduism. However, in his youth, while under training by Pundit Jairam to become a future pundit himself, his failure on that road may have prejudiced him against the faith of his ancestors, in spite of his Brahmin caste, or, rather, because his caste did not save him from poverty in colonial Trinidad. He also, at times, mocks Mrs. Tulsi for sending her sons to a Roman Catholic school, and belittles their, at times, lack of proper Hindu faith, but seems to be not interested in Christianity or any religion himself save for frightening, harrowing experiences where he, for instance, asks his son to repeat the name Rama repeatedly during the torrential downpour at the Green Vale. But perhaps, due to his indigestion, which made him, for life, dependent on a stomach powder, and his love for Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, colonial curriculum from his missionary school days, and, more broadly, English literature and the European world beyond the tropical yet dull, unchanging shores of Trinidad, Mr. Biswas retained his love for Western ways and the English, culminating in his writing aspirations, his journalism, and his children speaking only English (though they understand Hindi, they communicate in English, etc. and learn to, like other Tulsi family children housed in large numbers at Hanuman House and in Shorthills, learn to exchange their mediocre curry lunches for cheese sandwiches at school). Even more indicative of a life of Western modernity that Mr. Biswas aspires to and longs for as a marker of a successful, worthwhile life and goal, is a “proper” house with ‘modern’ amenities of the Western world. Until then, all of his life is spent in huts, wooden homes little more than huts, and, even the Hanuman House, only offering some basic modern Western life essentials, such as electricity, an indoor bathroom with plumbing, and proper floors, windows, etc. The irony is, however, had he, like his brothers, illiterate sugar estate workers, stayed on, living in huts and working on a farm, he, like some of the rising Indian elite, could have went into land and agriculture, eventually building up the capital to build his own mansion…Oh well, Mr. Biswas tried in his own way, and try he did in multiple life trajectories.

Overall, Naipaul’s novel, though over 600 pages and exhausting at times, is a humorous tale of one Indian Trinidadian man and his sometimes ludicrous, sometimes hilarious Hindu family surviving under British rule. Never in the novel does one sense that the characters resent British imperialism or ever have true, close relations with African-descended Trinidadians, which, unfortunately, likely was part of Naipaul’s insular Indian community background in Trinidad. Regardless of nascent political views and Naipaul’s later generalizations about postcolonial India, Africa and the Caribbean, the novel’s endearing and its humour allows one to continue reading despite the many tragedies and road stops in the life of Mr. Biswas. For example, when his wife uncovers his numerous incomplete Escape stories, where he endeavors to rewrite his life as one escaping from his wife and children, he had foolishly given his wife the responsibility of filing his papers, including his Escape stories, leading to an amusing situation wherein Shama refers to him, herself, and their children by the nicknames he gave them in the stories. Naturally, many amusing moments abound in this wondrous life story, such as his letter to a doctor who callously checked the corpse and registered the death of Bipti, his mother, or his numerous fights, shout-outs, and nicknames for Mrs. Tulsi, Seth, and the gods, her sons, Sheckar and Owad, or Mr. Biswas’s ignorance and tragic circumstances. Finally, it is nice to read a great Caribbean epic of Dickensian proportions, too, of one of Trinidad’s literary sons, giants, really.

Naipaul's A Bend in the River

John O'Neill's Mobutu, Lord of Zaire

V.S. Naipaul's A Bend in the River, though well-written, makes me cringe. Some of the overt, obvious racism and disdain for black people that one can detect in the thoughts and dialogue of the narrator, Salim, or other characters of Indian and European descent, is quite disgusting. And knowing some of the racist and sexist things uttered by the arrogant Naipaul, I cannot help but think some of these racist attitudes are personally believed and shared by the author. As a product of Trinidad's Indian community (although being the Anglophile that he is, Naipaul would probably not like to be referred to as a Caribbean writer), racist views toward black people may have been part of his upbringing and influenced his perceptions of Africa, which, to be honest, are quite abhorrent and disturbing. I cannot say because I have yet to read his nonfiction text on Africa and African religion, but his reference to Central African "fetishes" and an undynamic, timeless, primitive Africa sound like something from the late 19th century rather than 1979, when A Bend in the River was published! Nevertheless, it is a well-written text with, perhaps to some readers, excessive description and narration and not much action. And I am sure (I hope) that some of the racist sentiments and afro-pessimism in the text is purely literary, and not meant to be taken literally, although a lot of it would likely be accurate for how Indian traders from the eastern coast would have perceived Africa and blacks in general.

Set in what is like Kisangani in the troubled Congo under Mobutu, Salim, an Indian Muslim from the eastern coast of Africa, flees from the regularity and dull life of his community and takes over the business previously established by a co-ethnic, Nazruddin. Full of descriptions of the ravaged colonial town and the life of an African Indian in terms of relations with locals and European businessmen and workers, it is obvious that Naipaul does not think much of the entire continent of 'black' Africa after independence. He (through Salim's voice) generalizes the entire fate of post-independent African states based on the horrors of Mobutu's Zaire, but attributes it primarily to a fault of Africa and Africans. Considering the book is based on Heart of Darkness (themes and imagery are similar in both novels, with the central place of the Congo river, the steamer, African faces like masks, and assumptions of Black and African intellectual and cultural inferiority and the discovery of life in the midst of savagery on the humanity of the non-local, such as Salim or Kurtz), it is no surprise that Congo, in the heart of the "Dark Continent," becomes the poster child for African inferiority, incapacity to rule along modern, westernized lines, and the reversal of European progress, identity, and civilization. Africa for Salim, is the ultimate "Other" of Europe, which, he believes, gives him (and other Indian Ocean peoples, such as Arabs, Indians, and Persians) their sense of history and identity rather than their own worldview, which is based solely on living to the next day, never aware of themselves in the broad scheme of things or history. Inevitably, Africa, the "Dark Continent" of bush and river, black backwardness and European-derived modernity, an unfortunate paradox Salim comments on throughout the novel, regresses and Salim flees the town at the bend in the river for his life. In addition, Salim, shows his biased view of Africa and African history by writing out the African component of life on the east coast, omitting the Swahili and African antecedents to coastal society, as well as over-attributing to Arabs in the late pre-colonial period the expansion of trade caravans and towns in Central Africa. To Salim, Africa is nothing but bush and savagery indebted to Arab and European slaving, trade, and colonialism, which, unfortunately reflects predominant views of the African continent today.

As a novel pertaining to the effects of a megalomaniac dictator on the people, including foreign merchants and Europeans who stayed after independence, the novel works very well in encapsulating how everyone, regardless of status, becomes enthralled and, at times, susceptible to appreciation or awe of the never-named Big Man, Mobutu. From descriptions of his leopard-skin cap to the staff with a "fetish" figure to his cult of the Madonna for his African hotel-maid mother, Naipaul makes it quite clear how Mobutu's nefarious dictatorship seeped into the lives of everyone, from "superstitious" tribal Africans in the bush to European and Asian retailers and professionals in Kisangani. However, "tribalism" keeps tearing the Congo apart, despite Mobutu's miraculous blend of tradition and modernity, conservatism and revolution, military might and political theater, causing the uprising led by the Liberation Army that precipitates the collapse of order (and not for the first time since independence) in the town at the bend of the river. But from a historical and Africanist perspective, the novel reeks of outdated racism and recycled themes from Heart of Darkness and Western beliefs in African innate barbarism. Tayreb Salih's Season of Migration to the North, blogged about here, does a better job as a complementary, anti-racist Heart of Darkness, but Naipaul, seemingly an apologist for European colonialism in "black Africa," has no problem perpetuating centuries-old stereotypes and racist myths, as one can see in his generalization of Africa from the political crisis in the Congo. Nevertheless, his choice of an Indian narrator shows another racist lens through which Africa is and can be viewed, from the Arab and Indian perspective, which, fortunately shatters the illusions about Arab-African unity or an Islamic "brotherhood" transcending racism and colorism within the Arab and non-African Muslim world.

As Achebe remarked toward Heart of Darkness, Naipaul's work describes a people and a vast continent, and the demeaning, racist discourse of the novel has power that will, unfortunately, help perpetuate inaccurate, dehumanizing perceptions of Africa. As with Conrad's work, A Bend at the River should not be censored nor should its literary prowess be denied, but it is inherently political and has wide influence beyond literary circles, complicating and indicating Naipaul's role in the circulation of the "West is best" trope all too common these days. Naipaul, who did construct a readable, fascinating text and beautiful prose with an unusual narrator for lens of Afro-pessimism instead of the usual white American or European, ultimately ends the novel (and his personally-held opinions, I am sure) of African incapability of efficient, well-run, functioning modern states with viable, flourishing cultures and innovation, the marks of humanity. Regardless, literature should never concede to political instrumentalism, so Naipaul, entitled to have his own racist, ahistorical opinion lacking consideration of neocolonialism and other components of Congolese failure, is free to write what he wishes.

What follows below are interesting quotations and notes on the text, including plot and the dismal view of the African continent held by Naipaul:

“Africa was my home, had been the home of my family for centuries. But we came from the east coast, and that made the difference. The coast was not truly African. It was an Arab-Indian-Persian-Portuguese place, and we who lived there were really people of the Indian Ocean. True Africa was at our back. Many miles of scrub or desert separated us from the up-country people; we looked east to the lands which we traded—Arabia, India, Persia. These were also the lands of our ancestors. But we could no longer say that we were Arabians or Indians or Persians; when we compared ourselves with these people, we felt like people of Africa.”

“My family was Muslim. But we were a special group. We were distinct from the Arabs and other Muslims of the coast; in our customs and attitudes we were closer to the Hindus of north-western India, from which we originally come. When we had come no one could tell me. We were not that kind of people. We simply lived; we did what was expected of us, what we had seen the previous generation do. We never asked why; we never recorded. We felt in our bones that we were a very old people; but we seemed to have no means of gauging the passing of time. Neither my father nor grandfather could put dates to their stories. Not because they had forgotten or were confused; the past was simply the past.”

“I remember hearing from my grandfather that he had once shipped a boatful of slaves as a cargo of rubber.”

(18) “Of that whole period of upheaval in Africa—the expulsion of the Arabs, the expansion of Europe, the parcelling out of the continent—that is the only family story I have. That was the sort of people we were. All that I know of our history and the history of the Indian Ocean I have got from books written by Europeans. If I say that our Arabs in their time were great adventurers and writers; that our sailors gave the Mediterranean the lateen sail that made the discovery of the Americas possible; that an Indian pilot led Vasco da Gama from East Africa to Calicut; that the very word cheque was first used by our Persian merchants; if I say these things it is because I have got them from European books. They formed no part of our knowledge or pride. Without Europeans, I feel, all our past would have been washed away, like the scuff-marks of fishermen on the beach outside our town.”

“Once the Arabs had ruled here; then the Europeans had come; now the Europeans were about to go away. But little had changed in the manners or minds of men. The fishermen’s boats on that beach were still painted with large eyes on the bows for good luck; and the fishermen could get very angry, even murderous, if some visitor tried to photograph them—tried to rob them of their souls. People lived as they had always done; there was no break between past and present. All that had happened in the past was washed away; there was always only the present. It was as though, as a result of some disturbance in the heavens, the early morning light was always receding into the darkness, and men lived in a perpetual dawn.”

(19) “In my family’s compounds there were two slave families, and they had been there for at least three generations. The last thing they wanted to hear was that they had to go. Officially these people were only servants. But they wanted it known—to other Africans, and to poor Arabs and Indians—that they were really slaves. It wasn’t that they were proud of slavery as a condition; what they were fierce about was their special connection with a family of repute. They could be very rough with people they considered smaller fry than the family.”

(22) “If the insecurity I felt about our position on the coast was due to my temperament, then little occurred to calm me down. Events in this part of Africa began to move fast. To the north there was a bloody rebellion of an up-country tribe which the British seemed unable to put down; and there were explosions of disobedience and rage in other places as well. Even hypochondriacs sometimes have real illnesses, and I don’t think it was my nervousness alone that made me feel that the whole political system we had known was coming to an end, and that what was going to replace it wasn’t going to be pleasant. I feared the lies—black men assuming the lies of white men.”

“If it was Europe that gave us on the coast some idea of our history, it was Europe, I feel, that also introduced us to the lie. Those of us who had been in that part of Africa before the Europeans had never lied about ourselves. Not because we were moral. We didn’t lie because we never assessed ourselves and didn’t think there was anything for us to lie about; we were people who simply did what we did. But the Europeans could do one thing and say something quite different; and they could act in this way because they had an idea of what they owed to their civilization. It was their great advantage over us. The Europeans wanted gold and slaves, like everybody else; but at the same time they wanted statues put up to themselves as people who had done good things for the slaves. Being an intelligent and energetic people, and at the peak of their powers, they could express both sides of their civilization; and they got both the slaves and the statues.”

(26) “Many years before, following some fancy of his own, Nazruddin had cut down on his business on the coast and begun to move inland. The colonial boundaries of Africa gave an international flavour to his operations. But Nazruddin was doing no more than follow the old Arab trading routes to the interior; and he had fetched up in the centre of the continent, at the bend in the great river.”

“That was as far as the Arabs had got in the last century. There they had met Europe, advancing from the other direction. For Europe it was one little probe. For the Arabs of central Africa it was their all; the Arabian energy that had pushed them into Africa had died down at its source, and their power was like the light of a star that travels on after the star itself has become dead. Arab power had vanished; at the bend in the river there had grown up a European, and not an Arab, town. And it was from that town that Nazruddin, reappearing among us from time to time, brought back his exotic manners and tastes and his tales of commercial success.

(29) Nazruddin: “Do you know Uganda? A lovely country. Cool, three to four thousand feet up, and people say it’s like Scotland, with the hills. The British have given the place the finest administration you could ask for. Very simple, very efficient. Wonderful roads. And the Bantu people there are pretty bright.”

(30) “Business never dies in Africa; it is only interrupted.” Nazruddin to Salim

(31) “We had cars and we lived in proper houses—I had bought a flat over an empty warehouse for almost nothing. But if we had worn skins and lived in thatched huts it wouldn’t have been too inappropriate. The shops were empty; water was a problem; electricity was erratic; and petrol was often short.”

(32) “So almost as soon as it had been put up—no doubt with speeches about a further sixty years of service—the steamer monument had been knocked down. With all the other colonial statues and monuments. Pedestals had been defaced, protective railings flattened, floodlights smashed and left to rust. Ruins had been left as ruins; no attempt had been made to tidy up. The names of all the main streets had been changed. Rough boards carried the new, roughly lettered names. No one used the new names, because no one particularly cared about them. The wish had only been to get rid of the old, to wipe out the memory of the intruder. It was unnerving, the depth of that African rage, the wish to destroy, regardless of the consequences.”

(49-50) Salim speaking to Ferdinand before thinking the following: “They! When we wanted to speak politically, when we wanted to abuse or praise politically, we said ‘the Americans’, ‘the Europeans’, ‘the white people’, ‘the Belgians’. When we wanted to speak of the doers and makers and the inventors, we all—whatever our race—said ‘they’. We separated these men from their groups and countries and in this way attached them to ourselves. ‘They’re making cars that will run on water.’ ‘They’re making television sets as small as a matchbox’. The ‘they’ we spoke of in this way were very far away, so far away as to be hardly white. They were impartial, up in the clouds, like good gods. We weaited for their blessings, and showed off those blessings—as I had shown off my cheap binoculars and my fancy camera to Ferdinand—as though we had been responsible for them.”

(53) “Ferdinand could only tell me that the world outside Africa was going down and Africa was rising. When I asked in what way the world outside was going down, he couldn’t say. And when I pushed him past the stage where he could repeat bits of what he had heard at the lycee, I found that the ideas of the school discussion had in his mind become jumbled and simplified. Ideas of the past were confused with ideas of the present. In his lycee blazer, Ferdinand saw himself as evolved and important, as in the colonial days. At the same time he saw himself as a new man of Africa, and important for that reason. Out of this staggering idea of his own importance, he had reduced Africa to himself; and the future of Africa was nothing more than the job he might do later on.”

(58) Hamitic Hypothesis reference and to the Tutsi of Bujumbura later on

“During the course of the term there had come to the lycee some boys from the warrior tribes to the east. They were an immensely tall people; and, as Metty told me with awe, they were used to being carried around on litters by their slaves, who were of a small, squatter race. For these tall men of the forest there had always been European admiration. Ever since I could remember there had been articles about them in the magazines—these Africans who cared nothing about planting or trade and looked down, almost as much as Europeans, on other Africans. This European admiration still existed; articles and photographs continued to appear in magazines, in spite of the changes that had come to Africa. In fact, there were now Africans who felt as the Europeans did, and saw the warrior people as the highest kind of African.”

“I knew other things about the forest kingdom, though. I knew that the slave people were in revolt and were being butchered back into submission. But Africa was big. The bush muffled the sound of murder, and the muddy rivers and lakes washed the blood away.”

(59) “I began to understand how simple and uncomplicated the world was for me. For people like myself and Mahesh, and the uneducated Greeks and Italians in our town, the world was really quite a simple place. We could understand it, and if too many obstacles weren’t put in our way we could master it. It didn’t matter that we were far away from our civilization, far away from the doers and makers. It didn’t matter that we couldn’t make the things we liked to use, and as individuals were even without the technical skills of primitive people. In fact, the less educated we were, the more at peace we were, the more easily we were carried along by our civilization or civilizations.”

(63) “To talk of trouble was to pretend there were laws and regulations that everyone could acknowledge. Here there was nothing. There had been order once, but that order had had its own dishonesties and cruelties—that was why the town had been wrecked. We lived in that wreckage. Instead of regulations there were now only officials who could always prove you wrong, until you paid up. All that could be said to Ferdinand was: ‘Don’t harm me, boy, because I can do you greater harm.’”

(67) “I listened, and at the end he said with a smile, ‘Semper aliquid novi.’ He had used the lycee motto to make a joke. The words were old, he told me, two thousand years old, and referred to Africa. An ancient Roman writer had written that out of Africa there was ‘always something new’, semper aliquid novi. And when it came to masks and carvings, the words were still literally true. Every carving, every mask, served a specific religious purpose, and could only be made once. Copies were copies; there was no magical feeling or power in them; and in such copies Father Huismans was not interested. He looked in masks and carvings for a religious quality; without that quality the things were dead and without beauty.”

“That was strange, that a Christian priest should have had such regard for African beliefs, to which on the coast we had paid no attention. And yet, though Father Huismans knew so much about African religion and went to such trouble to collect his pieces, I never felt that he was concerned about Africans in any other way; he seemed indifferent to the state of the country. I envied him that indifference; and I thought, after I left him that day, that his Africa, of bush and river, was different from mine. His Africa was a wonderful place, full of new things.”

(69) “There would always have been a settlement at that bend in the river, he said. It was a natural meeting place. The tribes would have changed, power would have shifted, but men would always have returned there to meet and trade. The Arab town would have been only a little more substantial than the African settlements, and technologically not much more advanced. The Arabs, so far in the interior, would have had to build with the products of the forest; life in their town wouldn’t have been much more than a kind of forest life. The Arabs had only prepared the way for the mighty civilization of Europe.”

(76) “Who wanted philosophy or faith for the good times? We could all cope with the good times. It was for the bad that we had to be equipped. And here in Africa none of us were as well equipped as the Africans. The Africans had called up this war; they would suffer dreadfully, more than anybody else; but they could cope. Even the raggedest of them had their villages and tribes, things that were absolutely theirs. They could run away again to their secret worlds and become lost on those worlds, as they had done before. And even if terrible things happened to them they would die with the comfort of knowing that their ancestors were gazing down approvingly of them.”

(86) “The rage of the rebels was like a rage against metal, machinery, wires, everything that was not of the forest and Africa.”

(99) “They wore their uniforms the way Ferdinand had at one time worn his lycee blazer: they saw themselves both as the new men of Africa and the men of the new Africa. They made such play with the national flag and the portrait of the President—the two now always going together—that in the beginning I thought these new officers stood for a new, constructive pride. But they were simpler. The flag and the President’s portrait were only like their fetishes, the sources of their authority. They didn’t see, these young men, that there was anything to build in their country. As far as they were concerned, it was all there already. They had only to take. They believed that, by being what they were, they had earned the right to take; and the higher the officer, the greater the crookedness—if that word had any meaning.”

“With their guns and jeeps, these men were poachers of ivory and thieves of gold. Ivory, gold—add slaves, and it would have been like being back in oldest Africa. And these men would have dealt in slaves, if there was still a market. It was to the traders in the town that the army turned when they wished to clear their gold or, more especially, the ivory they had poached. Officials and governments right across the continent were engaged in this ivory trade which they themselves had declared illegal. It made smuggling easy; but I was nervous of getting involved, because a government that breaks its own laws can also easily break you. Your business associate today can be your jailer or worse tomorrow.”

(107-108) “And then we began to understand that what the President was attempting was so stupendous in his own eyes that even he would not have wanted to proclaim it. He was creating modern Africa. He was creating a miracle that would astound the rest of the world. He was by-passing real Africa, the difficult Africa of bush and villages, and creating something that would match anything that existed in other countries.”

(108) “The President had wished to show us a new Africa. And I saw Africa in a way I had never seen it before, saw the defeats and humiliations which until then I had regarded as just a fact of life. And I felt like that—full of tenderness for the Big Man, for the ragged villagers walking around the Domain, and the soldiers showing them the shabby sights—until some soldier played the fool with me or some official at the customs was difficult, and then I fell into the old way of feeling, the easier attitudes of the foreigners in the bars. Old Africa, which seemed to absorb everything, was simple; this place kept you tense. What a strain it was, picking your way through stupidity and aggressiveness and pride and hurt!”

(127) Cringe moments of intense racism: “And they were bright, those young men. I had remembered them as little tricksters, pertinacious but foolish, with only a kind of village cunning; and I had assumed that for them studying meant only cramming. Like other people in the town, I believed that degree courses had been scaled down or altered for Africans. It was possible; they did go in for certain subjects—international relations, political science, anthropology. But those young men had sharp minds and spoke wonderfully—and in French, not the patois. They had developed fast. Just a few years before Ferdinand had been incapable of grasping the idea of Africa. That wasn’t so now. The magazines about African affairs—even the semi-bogus, subsidized ones from Europe—and the newspapers—though censored—had spread new ideas, knowledge, new attitudes.”

(131) “So in my talks with Indar about Africa—the purpose of his outfit, the Domain, his anxieties about imported doctrines, the danger to Africa of its very newness, first ideas being caught most securely by new minds as sticky as adhesive tape—I felt that between us lay some dishonesty, or just an omission, some blank, around which we both had to walk carefully. That omission was our own past, the smashed life of our community. Indar had referred to that at our first meeting in the shop. He said that he had learned to trample on the past. In the beginning it had been like trampling on a garden; later it had become like walking on ground.”

“It was always reassuring to return to the town I knew, to get away from that Africa of words and ideas as it existed on the Domain (and from which, often, Africans were physically absent). But the Domain, and the glory and the social excitements of the life there, always called me back.”

(144-145) Indar on what Raymond said about the President: “’Raymond tells a story well. But a lot of what he says is true. What he says about the President and ideas is certainly true. The President uses them all and somehow makes them work together. He is the great African chief, and he is also the man of the people. He is the modernizer and he is also the African who has rediscovered his African soul. He’s conservative, revolutionary, everything. He’s going back to the old ways, and he’s also the man who’s going ahead, the man who’s going to make the country a world power by the year 2000. I don’t know whether he’s done it accidentally or someone’s been telling him what to do. But the mish-mash works because he keeps on changing, unlike the other guys. He is the soldier who decided to become an old-fashioned chief, and he’s the chief whose mother was a hotel maid. That makes him everything, and he plays up everything. There isn’t anyone in the country who hasn’t heard of that hotel-maid mother.”

(160) Indar explains his outfit: “My idea was this. Everything had conspired to push black Africa into every kind of tyranny. As a result Africa was full of refugees, first-generation intellectuals. Western governments didn’t want to know, and the old Africa hands were in no position to understand—they were still fighting ancient wars. If Africa had a future, it lay with those refugees. My idea was to remove them from the countries where they couldn’t operate and send them, if only for a little while, to those parts of the continent where they could. A continental interchange, to give the men themselves hope, to give Africa the better news about itself, and to make a start on the true African revolution.”

(167) “To Ferdinand the colonial past had vanished. The steamer had always been African, and first class on the steamer was what he could see now. Respectably dressed Africans, the older men in suits, the evolved men of an earlier generation; some women with families, everyone dressed up for the journey; one or two of the old ladies of such families, closer to the ways of the forest, already sitting on the floor of their cabins and preparing lunch, breaking the black hulls of smoked fish and smoked monkeys into enamel plates with coloured patterns, and releasing strong, salty smells.”

“Rustic manners, forest manners, in a setting not of the forest. But that was how, in our ancestral lands, we all began—the prayer mat on the sand, then the marble floor of a mosque; the rituals and taboos of nomads, which, transferred to the palace of a sultan or a maharaja, became the traditions of an aristocracy.”

(174) “But you couldn’t forget where you were. The photograph of the President was about three feet high. The official portraits of the President in African garb were getting bigger and bigger, the quality of the prints finer (they were said to be done in Europe). And once you knew about the meaning of the leopard skin and the symbolism of what was carved on the stick, you were affected; you couldn’t help it. We had all become his people; even here at the Tivoli we were reminded that we all in various ways depended on him.”

(198-199) “It was the opposite of the life of our family and community on the coast. That life was full of rules. Too many rules; it was a pre-packed kind of life. Here I had stripped myself of all the rules. During the rebellion—such a long time ago—I had also discovered that I had stripped myself of the support the rules gave. To think of it like that was to feel myself floating and lost. And I preferred not to think about it—it was too much like the panic you could at any time make yourself feel if you thought hard enough about the physical position of the town in the continent, and your own place in that town.”

(207) “I heard it said that Noimon had sold up only for the sake of his children’s education; it was also said that he had been pressured by his wife (Noimon was rumoured to have a second, half-African family). And then it began to be said that Noimon would regret his decision. Copper was copper, the boom was going to go on, and while the Big Man was in charge everything would keep on running smoothly. Besides, though Australia and Europe and North America were nice places to visit, life there wasn’t as rosy as some people thought—and Noimon, after a lifetime in Africa, was going to find that out pretty soon. We lived better where we were, with servants and swimming pools, luxuries that only millionaires had in those other places.”

(214) “The speech, so far, was like many others the President had made. The themes were not new: sacrifice and the bright future; the dignity of the woman of Africa; the need to strengthen the revolution, unpopular though it was with those black men in the towns who dreamed of waking up one day as white men; the need for Africans to be African, to go back without shame to their democratic and social ways, to rediscover the virtues of the diet and medicines of their grandfathers and not to go running like children after things in imported tins and bottles; the need for vigilance, work, and, above all, discipline.”

(237) “I was in Africa one day; I as in Europe the next morning. It was more than travelling fast. It was like being in two places at once. I woke up in London with little bits of Africa on me—like the airport tax ticket, given me by an official I knew, in the middle of another kind of crowd, in another kind of building, in another climate. Both places were real; both places were unreal. You could play off one against the other; and you had no feeling of having made a final decision, a great last journey. Which, in a way, was what this was for me, though I only had an excursion ticket, a visitor’s visa, and I had to go back within six weeks.”

“The Europe the aeroplane brought me to was not the Europe I had known all my life. When I was a child Europe ruled my world. It had defeated the Arabs in Africa and controlled the interior of the continent. It ruled the coast and all the countries of the Indian Ocean with which we traded; it supplied our goods. We knew who we were and where we had come from. But it was Europe that gave us the descriptive postage stamps that gave us ideas of what as picturesque about ourselves. It also gave us a new language.”

(244) Nazruddin: “I went to the man again. I said, “You sold me the theatre as a going concern.” He said, “Who are you?” I said, “My family have been traders and merchants in the Indian Ocean for centuries, under every kind of government. There is a reason why we have lasted so long. We bargain hard, but we stick to our bargain. All our contracts are oral, but we deliver what we promise. It isn’t because we are saints. It is because the whole thing breaks down otherwise.” He said, “You should go back to the Indian Ocean.”

(258) “Portraits, maxims, occasional statues of the African madonna—they continued all the way to the hotel. If I had come to the capital fresh from our town I would have felt choked. But after Europe, and after what I had seen of the country from the air, and still with my sense of the flimsiness of the capital, my attitudes was different, and I was surprised by it. There was to me an element of pathos in those maxims, portraits, and statues, in this wish of a man of the bush to make himself big, and setting about it in such a crude way. I even felt a little sympathy for the man who was making such a display of himself.”

(278) “Those faces of Africa! Those masks of childlike calm that had brought down the blows of the world, and of Africans as well, as now in the jail: I felt I had never seen them so clearly before. Indifferent to noise, indifferent to compassion or contempt, those faces were yet not vacant or passive or resigned.”