The Caribbean in the Islario General

 

Although not immediately useful for our primary interests, we found the maps of the insular Caribbean in Alonso de Santa Cruz's Islario general de todas las islas del mundo fascinating. We are primarily interested in indigenous toponyms in the Greater Antilles, for which the map of of Hispaniola is perhaps the most detailed or useful.

Parang

A lovely video on a beautiful Trinidadian musical tradition. Happy Christmas.

A History of Modern Trinidad

In our current phase of renewed interest in the history and literature of Trinidad & Tobago, we have revisited Bridget Brereton's A History of Modern Trinidad, 1783-1962. A relatively straightforward history of about two pivotal centuries in the history of the island, Brereton covers the major points or historical ventures. The establishment of British colonial rule, slavery and the slave trade, emancipation, indentured Indian labor, labor protests and political agitation in the 1930s, the coming of independence and PNM rule under Eric Williams all receive attention. Trinidad's rapid development from the 1780s onward and its role as a frontier colony with a population drawn from all corners of the world contribute to our understanding of the Caribbean's transformational role in world history. It also helps us in our quest to understand how one tiny Caribbean island was able to produce a plethora of writers or intellectuals with a global impact.

Despite the book's title, early chapters do cover the Spanish colonial period. So, the reader learns that Trinidad was a remote, underpopulated colony from about 1592 until the 1780s, when Spanish authorities opened the colony to settlement from the French colonies and plantation development. The indigenous population was decimated but remained the main labor force of Spanish-owned estates on the island until the 1780s. By 1765, Trinidad's Christian indigenous population only numbered 1277 out of a total population of 2503. Spanish inability to develop the colony led to offers of settlement to French or other European Catholics and liberalized trade. Free land grants to settlers plus incentives for those to bring African slaves transformed the population of the island to the point where French settlers outnumbered Spanish residents by 1784. According to Brereton, sugar became the most important export of the colony in the 1790s. In addition to French planters from Grenada or other Antillean colonies, British traders became a significant factor in Port of Spain's rise as an entrepot in British trade with South America. As Trinidad shifted to a plantation colony, the population of Indian and Spanish-Indian (indigenous) descent lost land, migrated to the mainland, and, though retaining a presence in St. Joseph and the village of Arima, were displaced and replaced by an increasingly large enslaved population.  Refugees from Saint-Domingue, Martinique and Guadeloupe also contributed to the shift in the island's population as French and "patois" became the most widely spoken languages. 

The British takeover of the island beginning 1797 intensified slavery and the plantation economy. British governors denied political rights to free coloureds while the smuggling of slaves into Trinidad from other parts of the Caribbean continued. Demobilized West India Regiments soldiers plus African-American former slaves were settled in the island. Then emancipation and  the early termination of apprenticeship led to labor shortages for the plantation economy. Indian laborers and investments in modernizing sugar production kept the large estates afloat while smallholder farmers focused on cocoa or subsistence farming. Like her study of Trinidadian race relations from 1870-1900, the rest of the 19th century saw additional migration from Portuguese and West Indian sources that similarly changed the demographics of the island. Like the previous linguistic shift from Spanish to French and Creole, West Indian migration from other British territories led to English gradually becoming the language of the majority.

The 20th century introduced even more radical changes and developments. Trinidad in the 20th century experienced World War I through West Indian regiments stationed in locations like Egypt. The end of indenturedship from India, combined with labor protests, racial pride and activism (Marcus Garvey's influence on the TWA, for example) challenged the colonial state and exclusion of the majority of voting rights. Captain Cipriano, the subject of an early work by C.L.R. James, fought for constitutional reform in the 1920s which led to voting rights for more of the population. The impact of Garveyism, socialism, and Pan-Africanism continued to impact the TWA, thereby reaching the working masses, dockworker. The next decade, the 1930s, witnessed labor riots associated with Uriah Butler, oil workers, sugar workers, unionization campaigns. A further surge in racial solidarity and nationalism also arose in response to the Italian invasion of Ethiopia. Then, a wave of US influence during World War II shaped Port of Spain and popular culture, which indelibly left a mark on a young Naipaul. By 1946, universal suffrage was established for elections. With independence in the 1960s, the PNM and DLP political parties were established, each one, to Brereton, revolving around their respective racial groups (Black for the former, Indian for the latter). 

Brereton's short history of modern Trinidad adds remarkable contextual information for understanding Trinidadian writers such as C.L.R. James and V.S. Naipaul. The general overview helps explain how and why the PNM and DLP split along largely racial lines took place as a result of the generally urban, Afro-Trinidadian character of labor protests and parties that developed in the 1920s and 1930s. Whether or not Brereton's characterization of the PNM as a creation of a group of mostly black middle-class professionals who rallied round dominant personality of Eric Williams is a fair assessment is another debate, but that's certainly the impression one gains from the biased perspective of Naipaul. Nevertheless, the momentous two centuries in the history of Trinidad witnessed the island's rapid development from underpopulated Spanish colony with a large "Amerindian" population to a vital British colony in the West Indies with a population drawn from all over the world. 

Race Relations in Colonial Trinidad

We have been thinking about Trinidad & Tobago quite often these days. Endeavoring to understand the historical background of Trinidadian society as described in the various works of novelists such as C.L.R. James, Edgar Mittelholzer, and V.S. Naipaul has sparked our interest again. Brereton's study, Race Relations in Colonial Trinidad, 1870-1900 provides a great introduction through its focus on race relations in the diverse Trinidad of the period. Trinidad, after all, was shaped not only by Indian indentured laborers but also by its resident Anglophone West Indians from other British colonies who, together with the population of free colored origin, French Creoles, liberated Africans, Portuguese, Venezuelan migrants, native Afro-Trinidadians, Chinese, and colonial officials, transformed Trinidadian society during the pivotal final decades of the 19th century. The central message of Brereton's study seems to be that the ethnic divisions, plus distinctions of class, color, and religion, were maintained as Trinidad's economy transitioned in the post-emancipation era. This helps explain the reasons why a Naipaul could see himself as a product of an internally divided colonial society lacking cohesion as its disparate parts enjoyed different relations with colonial authority and the dominant, elite culture. It also facilitates in understanding the class/caste structure of Trinidad explored in Mittelholzer's A Morning at the Office.

Brereton begins with an examination of 19th century Trinidad before 1870, covering the free colored population, emancipation, new village settlements of formerly enslaved people, and Indian indenture immigration from 1845 onwards. In the second half of the 19th century, new infrastructure appeared with railways in the 1870s and 1880s, additional roads and settlements, Port of Spain's urban expansion, and cocoa cultivation originally produced by small farmers before French Creoles dominated the industry. Some manufacturing and an incipient urban working class appeared, mostly in Port of Spain. Unlike sugar, most of the cocoa industry was locally owned but the Trinidadian economy lacked adequate diversification of exports. As a crown colony until 1924, most governors sided with sugar planter interests and did little about the harmful system of indirect taxation via import duties on basic foodstuffs, kerosene, clothes, and agricultural tools, which had a harmful impact on the masses. Reformers wanted government officials on the council to be elected by the population, but French Creoles and the governors resisted and continued to dominate government policy in the interests of the white planters. According to Brereton, French Creoles formed a closed group dominating import-export, cocoa, municipal government posts, the medical professional, and journalism.

For non-white, non-elite groups, things were, of course, quite different. Education was, despite schools established in all wards, rather limited for the lower classes. At best, they only received a limited education that would make them better workers while fees and exclusion of illegitimate children barred many Indians and poor black children from admission. Indeed, it was difficult for even middle-class Afro-Trinidadians to receive a secondary education, although a few, often of Barbadian origins, managed to receive scholarships into elite schools. Our C.L.R. James appears to be an example of this fortunate group. Others can be found in families of mixed-race French Creole origin, such as the Romains and Philips. Culturally similar to white French Creoles and benefitting from their education and connections, some even rose to high posts in government, with Michel Maxwell Philip becoming mayor of Port of Spain in 1867. This group's combativeness against discrimination in government may have brought them together with the small black middle class.

Former slaves and their descendants, to a smaller degree, also entered a middle class or middling status as skilled artisans, teachers, journalists, editors, lawyers, doctors, civil servants, and clerks. Again, helping elucidate the origins of C.L.R. James, primary school teachers were the nucleus of the black middle class and schoolteachers were highly regarded. Take the example of J.J. Thomas, a black teacher in second-half of 19th century. Thomas was the son of ex-slaves, received his early education at a a ward school, taught, entered civil service in 1867, wrote his Creole Grammar in 1869 and went on to master patois, French, Spanish, Latin and Greek. His famous Froudacity was an excellent reply to Froude's racist tract on the West Indies and a defense of the right for black West Indians to self-government. Even the father of George Padmore, H.A. Nurse, or Henry Sylvester Williams, attest to the intellectual and political achievements of Trinidad's black middle class. One could also add their literary achievements in intellectual journals and political activism, although some distanced themselves from the lower-classes and their musical or spiritual practices. 

For our interests in understanding the Indian population of Trinidad during the late 19th century, Brereton's study is of great utility. Indentured Indian labor was indispensable for the revival of Trinidad's sugar sector, but Indians also purchased crown land and gradually established themselves as landowners. Both white and black Trinidadians looked down on Indians from a Western/Christian perspective. Indians, according to Brereton, likewise disliked black Trinidadians, viewing them as "impure" So, geographical and occupational separation plus mutual contempt separated Trinidadians of African and Indian origin. These divisions appear to be the foundation for V.S. Naipaul's "shocking" experience of entering into Creole Trinidadian urban life during his youth in the 1930s. The complexity of Black-Indian relations in colonial Trinidad warrants much further investigation, but one cannot help being astonished by the heterogeneity of the Trinidadian population which had only become predominantly English-speaking among its black population by the late 1800s. Adding another element in South Asian indentured workers and their communities only contributed more to the overflowing pot of ethnic and social diversity that did not end well once conflict over resources between black and Indian groups grew in the 1880s and beyond.

With such an internally variegated subject colonial population, it is no surprise that the struggle for political offices to black Trinidadians or the right to elect representatives faced an uphill battle that, unsurprisingly, led to the type of independent political parties based on ethnicity or sheer opportunism and greed, brilliantly satirized by Naipaul's The Suffrage of Elvira. The Trinidadian society described by James in Minty Alley or the early novels of Naipaul belongs to a period after that encompassed in this study. Nevertheless, the developments in Trinidadian society between 1870 and 1900 appear to have established the framework for social and racial relations for the generations of the pre-WWII and postwar Trinidadian writers we know and love: James, Selvon, Naipaul. 

The Housing Lark

Sam Selvon's brief novel The Housing Lark combines his typical comic sensibilities with a serious storyline about the struggle of West Indian migrants to find adequate housing in the racist London of the 1960s. Thematically, the story seems to combine the cynicism and disappointment of the later Moses novels with the humorous and episodic structure of Selvon's Trinidad novels or his famous work, The Lonely Londoners. Written in dialect and comprised of a ballad-like structure which heavily uses Trinidadian vernacular, calypso, and West Indian culture, history, and migrant experience, the novel's happy ending and promise of solidarity among West Indians in London hints at the rise of a "West Indian" identity among Caribbean migrants in the UK. Through their common experience of racialization, discrimination, and cultural differences with the English, one sees a powerful forging of a shared identity through "excursions," rum, Trinidadian and West Indian cuisine, chasing after "birds," and the central role of women in actually seeing to it that the "housing lark" succeeds. 

It's a novel for dreamers and reflects the sexist culture of the West Indian male characters like Battersby and Syl, but it's undeniably entertaining, witty, and hopeful. Who could resist laughing after reading the tale of Nobby and his English landlord giving him puppies he does not want? Or the ambiguous Syl, an Indian Trinidadian, who tries to pass as an East Indian to secure housing from a discriminatory landlord? After all, through the dream of Harry Banjo and the pragmatism of Jean, Matilda and Teena, they will find a house of their own. Thus, they will achieve a degree of security, space, and belonging in the "Mother Country" which rejects them. Sure, one can find elements of the pessimism of Selvon's later sequels to The Lonely Londoners, but there is a lot of optimism in this entertaining and immersive tale of 1960s Caribbean London. One wonders what transpired between the mid-1960s and the 1970s to cause Selvon's shift in tone and eventual relocation to Canada...

Mr. Biswas Is Home

The news of Naipaul's death has me in a strange place, emotionally. A good part of a year of my life was dedicated to exploring his literary works, as well as the novels and short stories of his younger brother, Shiva. Unlike other fans of his work, I prefer the earlier comic fiction of the Caribbean, and Naipaul more so than the usual writer successfully brought the reader into a different time, place, and world. Naipaul, and his brother Shiva, brought countless hours of joy and reflection for a year of my life, and for that, enriched my understanding of myself and the world around me. Nothing could have been a greater gift, and I shall always remember the commitment to the life of intellect, the desire to escape from the periphery, that motivated this great writer. Rest in peace. 

Facing Reality

Facing Reality is the one essay by C.L.R. James that I have been meaning to read for the last year. Well, I finally completed it within the last week or so. Here are some of my rambling thoughts on this most anarchist of James's theoretical works. First, I must admit that I have long been sympathetic to forms of anarchism and direct democracy. James, Boggs, and Castoriadis develop a critique of the dominant Communist and Trotskyist parties as well as the Western liberal welfare state model. 

Indeed, to them, "Fascism, Corporate State, One-Party State, Welfare State, Totalitarianism, all of these are ways in which rationalism attempts to adapt itself to the modern community." Building on their insights from State Capitalism and World Revolution, James argues for the self-movement of the workers as the path toward socialism. Like The Invading Socialist Society, autonomous and self-directed action initiated by the working-class against union bureaucracy, the state, and employers is the beginning of socialism. 

Since the work was published after the Hungarian Revolution and in the midst of the Cold War, the analysis is centered on workers in the advanced economies of the US, Britain, France, and the USSR. Clearly, the influence of self-directed workers in Detroit's  auto industry influenced James, Boggs, and Castoriadis, pushing them away from vanguardist socialist parties of the Leninist mould. Indeed, like James's view of popular democracy in ancient Athens, the working masses, when trusted to act of their own volition, shake the world and challenge technocratic elites, the political forms of rationalism, and offer the only solution to the dilemma of state capitalism and nuclear annihilation. 

However, if James et al. were correct, why did things turn out so differently in the advanced industrial nations? The shifting spatial and social relations within the factory and global economy suggest that the authors were guilty of a romanticized and unrealistic perspective on the attainability of workers councils. I remain sympathetic and find their views of events in Hungary or wildcat strikes in the US fruitful for study, but when large industrial workplaces are less common in the US, how can the self-directed workers establish workers councils and seize the means of production? How can the libertarian socialism espoused here, opposed to vanguards, remain relevant to 2018? Even if it proved to be somewhat prophetic about social change in the 1960s and in terms of Solidarity in Poland?

Despite its limitations, Facing Reality is one of the more intriguing theoretical works of James. It shows, as scholars like Matthew Quest have argued, how James's Marxism was influenced by anarchism (libertarian socialism?) and a rejection of central aspects of Leninism. Furthermore, it persuasively suggests the capacities for the masses are far more developed than we realize. Instead of a fear of the crowd, James and company argue that the masses know their interests and can act in it, for a more egalitarian society. The professional bureaucrats and technocratic elites block this aspiration among the working-class, hence the critiques of rationalism and a call for philosophy to become proletarian. Indeed, this central insight to the role of the division of labor and knowledge in a society is one I find powerful. If we want a more egalitarian society, then every cook must be able to and allowed to govern. Perhaps unrealistic, but it remains a powerful idea.

Dancing Cheek to Cheek (in Trinidad)

One of the many pleasures of old calypso is catching references to other songs and melodies. Roaring Lion's "Cheek to Cheek" is clearly based on the US standard, but expertly adapted to calypso settings.

Modern Politics

Modern Politics, a series of lectures given by C.L.R. James in 1960 (in Trinidad, land of his birth), is a fascinating overview of Western political thought and C.L.R. James explaining his view of the world. While his Marxism is a definite part of the lectures, it's profoundly interesting for how James views the legacy of direct democracy from the Greek city-state (as well as Aristotle and Socrates) and the influence of Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, and Marx in paving the way for a a solution to the problem of modernity (as he saw it in the 1960s). His belief in the dialectic and the power of the masses and revolution to create change also explains more persuasively why James held such a high opinion of popular culture and art meant for mass consumption by writers and artists. Such a perspective on literature, art, aesthetics, and the culture industry is welcome after reading Adorno's writings on US culture industry and jazz. His commentary on fascism, the Social Democratic Parties, Stalinism, and issues of race and gender are fascinating, particularly in the ways in which James does not speak directly to the countries of the world undergoing decolonization (Cuba and Ghana do appear frequently, however, as does the specter of the Cold War and imperialism from both blocs). One wonders to what extent the relationship between James and Williams shaped how much James felt comfortable saying overtly about labor and colonialism within the West Indies...

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.

Moses Migrating

Sam Selvon's hilarious Moses Migrating, the last of the trilogy that began with Lonely Londoners, takes us back to Moses's roots in Trinidad. The comparison here is to Naipaul's The Mimic Men, in which a man from an island modeled on Trinidad, is similarly trapped between "homes" and mimicry. Here, however, Selvon playfully uses Carnival and mas as an extension of the critique of mimicry among West Indians. Moses, so obsessed with defending Brit'n, even in the face of racist immigration laws and Enoch Powell, plays Britannia for Carnival. Along the way, we learn more about the origins of Moses and Bob, his former white Friday from Moses Ascending, who may have more in common with Moses than he ever knew. Through the metaphor of playing mas, Lovelace's The Dragon Can't Dance is also an important Trinidadian reference, albeit one in which the Indo-Caribbean population of the island is more than just background to the plot, as we see in Moses Migrating. 

As one may expect in a novel based on dislocation and Carnival, up is down, white is black, and a changing Trinidad, appearing different to locals and tourists, reveal the problematic space in which people like Moses can inhabit, trapped as he is between colonial deference to the Mother Country and a world in constant movement, particularly the rise of Black Power, his own aging, and rootlessness. He barely recognizes Trinidad, had rarely left Port of Spain, thinks he is in love with a younger woman living with the same Tanty who raised him, but never finds the room for authenticity or honesty. Even his relationship with Galahad, a friend from the Lonely Londoner days, is not an authentic friendship as each lies or distrusts the other. Yet, with his characteristic wit, Selvon's balanced use of humor and satire allow for entertaining reading, despite the disappointing and pathetic end. In that sense, Moses could perhaps accompany the Indo-Caribbean narrator of The Mimic Men, Ralph Singh, in that London hotel with fellow transients. As Doris reminds him, his entire life is playing mas.

Naipaul at Dhaka

VS Naipaul discusses his life and being a writer in this precious segment from the Dhaka Lit Fest 2016. Naipaul's point about anxiety and the desire to become that lovely thing, a writer, hits home. Lady Naipaul's story about the manuscript for A House for Mr. Biswas being left on the kitchen table while Vidia went on vacation adds a nice personal touch. One would also love to hear more about Augustus, Naipaul's adored cat.

Moses Ascending

Sam Selvon's Moses Ascending is not what one expects from a sequel of sorts to Lonely Londoners. Like Pressure, a film Selvon co-wrote, the novel addresses Black Power and race and gender in a 1970s London setting. Unlike the film, however, this novel, save Brenda, a young woman born in London and devoted to the Party, Selvon's novel does not try to understand the appeal of Black Power to Black Britons born in the Mother Country. To his credit, Selvon's carnivalesque commentary on race and gender includes Indian and Pakistani immigrants (including trafficking in illegal immigrants) along with some Selvonian wit for great laughs, but it was much more difficult to relate to the characters here, not to mention Moses's unsuccessful attempts at finding some peace, whether as a writer, friend, or lover, or community. 

Interestingly, the rather temporal nature of the setting (Moses's building is slated to be demolished at some point in the future) may foreshadow Moses's return to Trinidad in the final part of the trilogy. Indeed, at multiple occasions throughout the novel, Moses longs for sweet memories of Trinidad, for the trees of his home, and will have to make some changes at some point once the Shepherd's Bush home is destroyed and he can no longer profit as a landlord (in this world, a black man in London cannot live like a 'lord' for too long). The black nationalism, subverted Caliban-Friday relationship with Bob (also a 'migrant'), and challenging times of white racism, growing xenophobia, as well as some of the rather problematic assumptions and biases of Selvon regarding black nationalism or the role of literature in social struggle provide interesting themes, but not in the engaging or direct sense of Moses's first adventure.

A Morning at the Office

Edgar Mittelholzer's social realist novel set in a Port of Spain office in a Trinidad on the cusp of social change offers some useful insights on Trinidadian society and the author's own views on race, class, gender, sexuality, identity, and the human condition. Incorporating himself into A Morning at the Office and "telescopic objectivity," Mittelholzer's novel uses an inventive narrative framework to tie the racially diverse employees of the company into broader trends in Trinidadian society, not to mention objects that trigger memories and futures for the characters while reaffirming the objectification of individuals by their racial, gender, sexual, and class positions. Furthermore, Mittelholzer positions himself in opposition to some of the burgeoning forms of "faddist" nationalism that was evolving in Trinidad and the rest of the British West Indies at the time. Instead of valorizing Caribbean folklore or traditions from the plantation and African past, Arthur, a character presumably representing Mittelholzer as much as Mortimer Barnett, argues for an essentially Western orientation of the West Indian, a sentiment often expressed in his With a Carib Eye. 

But the real emphasis in A Morning at the Office concerns the multiple layers of social stratification in Trinidad and its "caste-like" system of subjugation. Of course, the order so adeptly described and satirized here (not to mention in the works of V.S. Naipaul or the tragicomic moments in Shiva Naipaul's work) is in flux because of growing anti-colonial sentiment, the labor movement, and black and Indian social mobility, but it is seen through the eyes of Portuguese, Spanish, English, black working-class, coloured middle-classes and gendered perspectives in the office of a company that is tied to larger themes of economics and labor in late colonial Trinidad. Each character broadly represents their social groups and the various nuances of the racial categories thrust upon them. And each character is haunted by something they cannot, for reasons of respectability, status, or happiness, attain. Each character likewise must confront their own class and racial biases in the office, with the top positions always given to whites while mixed-race members of the professional and political strata continue to look down on Indians and blacks who in turn have their own nuances (such as the wealthy creolized family of Miss Bisnauth versus the poor Jagabir who is never allowed to forget his origins on the sugar cane estates). 

For Horace Xavier, the poor black office boy hopelessly in love with the mixed-race Miss Hinckson from a respectable and influential family, his ambitious plans for the future, intelligence, and large-scale changes in Trinidadian society in the 1940s and 1950s will only propel him while the others must make sense of their different predicaments that block the road to happiness. For some, it is a question of interracial romance or forbidden love that is unacceptable to their families or society. In the case of others, it is thwarted hopes of success in writing, children, social climbing, or, as in the case of some English living in Trinidad, returning to Europe due to racism against the local population or a feeling of disdain and disgust at how white skin rewards mediocrity in a colonial context. Mittelholzer, with great humor and compassion, explores the minds of each of these characters during a few hours at the office and as much as the racialized class system appears rigid, the assertion of Horace, the career steps of Jagabir, or the promise of West Indian literature as exemplified in Barnett foreshadow the changes in Trinidadian social relations to come. 

With a Carib Eye

Edgar Mittelholzer's With a Carib Eye was published in 1958, a fateful year in the British West Indies, but also only 4 years before V.S. Naipaul's The Middle Passage: Impressions of Five Societies - British, French and Dutch in the West Indies and South America. While Naipaul's text is more ambitious and travels beyond the confines of the British colonies of the Caribbean, there are some rather fascinating parallels in how both Mittelholzer and Naipaul approach their region as "natives." Naipaul, coming from the Indian community of Trinidad, for example, does not depict Indo-Trinidadians as entirely creolized as Mittelholzer's text seeks to do. 

Both, however, linger on the Western character of Caribbean society, but for Mittelholzer there is no problem with "mimicry" of British or European cultures and norms. Thus, in a very surprising way, Naipaul's actually "right" in a sense that in the West Indies, the tragedy of the black man is to be recast in so many European moulds, but Mittelholzer accepts this as proof that the West Indies is "modern" and not primitive. One sees their ideological and biases play out in Naipaul's praise for calypso as a Trinidadian art form while Mittelholzer looks down on calypso, preferring to praise the accomplishments of West Indian artists, poets, and writers hampered only by economic conditions. 

This continues in their differing approaches to "modern" as defined in Trinidad, where Naipaul criticizes the notion that modernity in Trinidad's middle and upper classes equals consumption of overpriced Northern products while excellent Trinidadian coffee or furniture is cast aside and equated with the poor. One suspects that Mittelholzer is framing his travelogue in the tradition of J.J. Thomas's Froudacity (both are quick to distance themselves from Haiti and its alleged voodoo, not to mention Mittelholzer's eagerness to identify Barbados as an extension of England or brush aside the African and local influences in Saint Lucia's Creole-speaking population)) just as Naipaul embraces Froude and Trollope as a foundation for his self-distancing from the lack of wholly original or "new" societies legitimately rooted among the people. 

Of course, both Mittelholzer and Naipaul offer problematic views of the Caribbean culturally and historically, but how the two intersect and depart from each other and relate to their respective 19th century ideological forebears provide some interesting contrast on how two well-known writers of Trinidad and Guyana approached region, race, culture, and their sense of themselves in the world. A fine synthesis of Naipaul and Mittelholzer is likely to lead to a more holistic view of the West Indies and its people, one in which creolization and even, God forbid, African influences, are not incompatible with Caribbean modernity and the development of national cultures. Perhaps one could even suggest that time has sided with such a perspective as scholarship and Caribbean literatures point to a much needed nuance of complicated concepts such as  modernization, creolization, colonialism, and racial identity.  

Letters Between a Father and Son

V.S. Naipaul's Letters Between A Father and Son is the most humanising and intimate portrait of Naipaul one could possibly read. Theroux's book and French's biography reveal much of the monstruous and ugly side of Naipaul's character and life, such as racism, sexism, and the way he treated his first wife. A necessary balance requires reading the correspondence between a young Naipaul at Oxford and his father. Older sister Kamla, studying in India, is also a strong presence as father, son, and daughter encourage each other, try to stay afloat financially, and make a way in the world. One sees how strong Naipaul's father's influence was on his fiction, especially in inculcating literary awareness and ambition. Perhaps the greatest tribute a son could ever make for his father is the magnificent A House for Mr. Biswas. Unfortunately, after three years of trying to make sense of burgeoning adulthood and adapting to England, Naipaul loses his father and the reader has, by that time, entered into the daily tribulations of the family. 

The striking thing about young Naipaul, at least the Naipaul he chose to express to his father and sister, is how astonishingly from a very young age, he was already exhibiting signs of arrogance, misogyny, disdain for America, ambition, and loathing of Trinidad. He writes about the need to best the English at their own language, casually uses the 'N-word' when hearing about a relation's dalliance with a dougla, and even feels comfortable asserting his superiority to Jane Austen while still an undergraduate! His arrogance allows him to even tell Selvon what a novelist does while writing to his father that Selvon and Mittelholzer were horrible writers! Already, even before leaving Oxford, young Vidia was trying to avoid the fate for those who allow themselves to become nothing, even urging his father, mother, and sisters to avoid too much reliance on some of their Capildeo kin. As a writer who has seamlessly weaved so much of his personal life into his fiction, from Mr. Biswas to Half a Life, the letters contained here are invaluable for revealing the thin line between fact and fiction. 

The Middle Passage

After over a year since I first tried to finish Naipaul's The Middle Passage, I can confidently say this is my favorite of his travel writing. Much of the humor and social commentary in his description of the various Caribbean societies he visits is part of his satirical short stories and novels, for example. The "racial distribution" of jobs in Trinidad, for instance, is brilliantly satirized in his story about the black Grenadian baker pretending to be Chinese to have customers. Similarly, the dark themes about the Caribbean (slave past, centuries of oppression and violence) and the tragedy of the African in the New World (to be recast in so many images of the European powers). Indeed, much of Naipaul's ruminations on race and colonialism are better explored in some of his novels, particularly The Mimic Men, but it's intriguing to see where he was headed in his nonfiction writing before his later literary endeavors. Anyway, to give credit where it's due, Naipaul does understand the problem of race and the phenomenon of black skins in white masks for the West Indies, and there is less of the rampant Negrophobia than I remembered from a year ago. That said, I prefer his younger brother's travel writings on the West Indies over his, though both share a like-minded view on the matter. 

The "meat" of Naipaul's writing here, despite covering Guyana, Trinidad, Suriname, Martinique, Antigua, and Jamaica, is really the actual voyage (the titular middle passage) from Europe (coincidentally, picking up emigrants for Britain along the way, completing the cycle of uprooting), his time in Trinidad, and lengthy descriptions of Guyana, the Jagans, and its particular racial and political problems. His sojourn in Suriname is actually a tad less nuanced than that of Shiva Naipaul, and lacks Shiva's nuance in his descriptions of the "Bush Negroes," too.  On describing his native Trinidad, naturally, Naipaul is on top form, hinting at several of the ideas percolating in his mind for Mimic Men and future nonfiction on Trinidad. Unfortunately, Naipaul does not visit any Spanish-speaking Caribbean destinations, unlike Shiva Naipaul, who visited Puerto Rico, so it is far from a 'complete' portrait of the Caribbean during a moment of great change. But anyone interested in the British West Indies during this pivotal moment on the path to independence should read this. 

Digging Up the Mountains: Stories By Neil Bissoondath

"He saw the earth, as from space, streams of people in continuous motion, circling the sphere in search of the next stop which, they always knew, would prove temporary in the end."

Neil Bissoondath's short story collection, Digging Up the Mountains, features the praise of his uncle, V.S. Naipaul, and Bissoondath, like Shiva Naipaul, is trapped in that wider shadow. Unlike them, Bissoondath, who choses Canada over Britain, has some commonalities with Ladoo and Selvon, but combined with a similar worldview of his uncles on colonialism and independence. Many of the short stories featured in this collection are quite short and appear to be character sketches or material with light humor, but none come close to the satirical masterpieces of his uncle's short fiction. And, excluding the detailed portrait of a confined Japanese woman, the best tales here feature Trinidad and Trinidadians in Toronto, perhaps because it's the world the young Bissoondath knew so well at the time. A touch of authenticity in the dialogue and vernacular of some of the Trinidadian characters goes so well, and he almost reaches the lofty heights of Vidia and Shiva in terms of Trinidadian social satire and post-colonial traumas. I will have to read his future Caribbean-inspired novels. 

Stories Recommended

1. "Dancing": Narrated by a lower-class black Trinidadian women, one gets a feel for the Trinidadian vernacular that I have come to love in Selvon and early Naipaul. Rich and perhaps politically incorrect take on West Indian migrants in Toronto, but makes for hilarious reading. One may find a kernel of truth in this tale, but, unfortunately, being who he is, Bissoondath seems to mock the very idea of racism or prejudice against Caribbean people in Canada. 

2. "Digging Up the Mountains": Trinidadian setting, political commentary, somewhat typical yet intriguing dark tale of the 'Global South.'

3. "The Revolutionary": Hilarious portrait of  West Indian radical. I am quite sure I strongly disagree with Bissoondath on politics and multiculturalism, but sometimes he nails it. This piece is one example. Reminiscent of Naipaul's "Guerrillas" and some of Shiva Naipaul's commentary on the colonial left.

4. "The Cage": Narrated by a Japanese woman bound by freedom and tradition. Surprisingly comes off as a fully fleshed character, and somewhat reminiscent of V.S. Naipaul's "One Out of Many," but with more plausible female characters. 

5. "Insecurity": Amusing tale on the worried self-made rich Indo-Trinidadian who finds out that financial security and flight to the north isn't quite what you think.

My Love, My Love: or The Peasant Girl

Rosa Guy's My Love, My Love: or The Peasant Girl is an interesting read compared to the Trinidadian-American's other Haiti-inspired novel. Taking the story of The Little Mermaid and its tragic ending, Guy brings the reader to the "Jewel of the Antilles" in a tale exploring Haiti's color, class, and ecological devastation. Guy purposely describes this story as a fable in the title, and that's quite clear based on her changing the characteristics of Vodou and class in Haitian society (and it's many allegedly dichotomous features: urban versus rural, black versus mulatto, humanity versus nature) to offer a disturbing but powerful statement on color, Haitian social and economic decline, and last, but certainly not least, its relevance to the rest of the black world. In some key respects, this novel also bears many commonalities with other sympathetic black writers of Haiti, actually bringing to mind the peasant characters of Roumain's masterpiece, the tortured life of Coralie in Paulette Poujol Oriol's novel, and General Sun of Alexis. As a fable with magical realism, betrayal, intense natural beauty, a touch of the exotic via 'Vaudun,' and an assertion of racial pride, Guy deserves accolades for this Haitian-inspired work. Nonetheless, by adapting a folktale to a complex society like Haiti, and focusing on a sixteen-year-old woman consumed by passion for a 'grand homme' mulatto, in a world where the two never can intersect for long, it pales in comparison to Guy's other Haiti-inspired novel, a tale that is actually far more engaged in African-American women's anti-imperialism and solidarity with Haitian plight and saw the commonalities in their experiences. Since US-based black women and their relationship with Haiti attracts less attention than US African-American males in relation to Haiti (is this part of the patriarchal tendencies of previous forms of black nationalism?), Guy stands out for me and her Comedians-inspired novel is the superior tale.

Si Yo Pudiera

The parang music of Trinidad is a tradition with which I am largely unfamiliar. But this, I love. It's reminiscent of Venezuelan music and guitar-driven music of the Hispanic Caribbean. In fact, it is somewhat reminiscent of the jibaro music of Puerto Rican Ramito and similar artists, which I also adore.