A Way in the World (6 page)

It was as though, with the colonial past, all the colonial
landscape was being trampled over and undone; as though, with that past, the very idea of regulation had been rejected; as though, after the sacrament of the square, the energy of revolt had become a thing on its own, eating away at the land.

IN THE
square, at the beginning, all those years before, in the glamour of the lights—and where the beauty of the paved walks and the fountain would have been an aspect of the richness of the world that was about to be inherited—the speakers on the Victorian bandstand had talked of history and suffering and the great conspiracy of the rulers, and had suggested that redemption had at last come.

It came for many. But that promise of redemption was so large that some people would have felt defrauded by what had followed. These people would have continued to find virtue in the original mood of rejection; and over the years they would have grafted on to that mood the passions of more extreme and more marginal and more publicized black causes from other places. So disaffection grew, feeding on an idea of an impossible racial righteousness; and there was always the threat of an insurrection within the insurrection.

One year there was a serious revolt. The government survived, and afterwards the last big open space of the eighteenth-century Spanish city was blocked up. What had been the Calle Marina, the Marine Street, the wide square that ran the length of what had been the sea front, was offered as a market-place to the mutinous, dreadlocked people of the hills and the shanty town to the east. To enable them to compete with the established merchants of the city, the big square was built up with little wooden shacks, and there the shanty folk sold or offered for sale the simple leather and metal goods they made.

This led to the further isolation of the city centre, the
place we used to call “town” (and where, newly arrived in the city, I had gone walking one quiet Sunday afternoon with my father, so quiet that we had walked in the street, and I had seen our undisturbed reflection in the store windows). Shopping plazas and malls were established in the new settlements west and east of Port of Spain. There was no need to go to the centre; and sometimes now, when I went back to Trinidad for a few days, I never went to the city at all.

People continued to live on their nerves. They did so even during the oil boom, when it seemed that money, given away every day in doles to everyone who claimed it, had come like a reward for their passions, their loyalty to their sacrament. When the Depression came, and times became harder than people remembered, the mood of rejection and righteousness was there again as a balm. But now there was a twist that the first speakers in the square would not have dreamed of.

There began to appear, in Port of Spain and country towns, black men and women dressed like Arabs, the men in long white gowns and with white skullcaps, the women with black veils, men and women noticeable in the street, self-consciously righteous and apart.

These people were Mohammedans of a new kind. They were not Mohammedans by inheritance, like some of the Indians of the island: people like Leonard Side of Parry’s Funeral Parlour and Nazaralli Baksh, the tailor of St. Vincent Street from fifty years before. Nor were they like the Black Muslims of the United States. These people gave the impression of being in direct contact with the Arab world. Here and there in the city centre, in what in colonial days had been a fashionable area, important property had been bought by these Arab-style Muslims. These buildings had their windows and verandahs blanked out, and they displayed green and white boards with Arabic lettering.

They had occupied open public land in Mucurapo, near St. James, and built a little settlement and a mosque. This
was not far from the cemetery of Mucurapo, with the very old and tall royal palms, and not far from the little house on the half-lot where, up to twenty years or so before, Leonard Side had lived with his mother. During the war the land had been occupied by the Americans. They had built enormous brick warehouses on it, like hangars. One such building had become the USO building, the entertainment centre for the Americans, very bright and glamorous to us, on the other side of the guarded fence. The land had been reclaimed from the shallows of the Gulf of Paria before the war: land built up on pebble-less and very soft black mud exposed at low tide. I remembered the reclamation taking place, the dredged-up black mud of the Gulf drying out in cracked grey cakes. (And long before that, and for hundreds of years, all this area, St. James, Mucurapo, Conquerabia, Conquerabo, had been Cumucurapo, an aboriginal Indian place.)

People were nervous of this settlement, which appeared to be ever growing, to have money, and to obey its own laws. There was a school in the settlement. The group were keen on schooling; when you saw them at the end of the morning doing their shopping in the markets of certain country areas, they—adults, men and women—were like children after school, with textbooks and exercise books in their hands. But the books were in Arabic, and their schools were said to be Koranic schools. This idea of learning was distasteful to many local people; and, added to the Arab clothes they wore, further set the group apart. The mosque they had built was not like the usual local Indian mosque, a rectangular concrete structure with domes on top, and painted green and white. This was taller, more angular, and more flashily coloured. Local people didn’t know where the style had come from. I thought it might have been from North Africa; but I wasn’t sure.

Late one afternoon, after they had said their prayers at this mosque—all this is as it was later reported—about a
hundred of the men of the sect went with guns and explosives to St. Vincent Street. They assaulted Police Headquarters and set off a big explosion near the armoury. A number of policemen died in this first assault. Later or at the same time an assault was made on the Red House, obliquely opposite. The parliament was sitting. Shots were fired; people were hit. And then, as so often happened during slave revolts in these islands, the rebels appeared not to know what to do: all energy and exaltation had been gathered up and consumed in the drama of the attack, the surprise, the drawing of the first blood, the humiliation of the people in authority. For six days or so the rebels besieged the Red House and held the ministers of the government and everyone in the building hostage.

The Red House and St. Vincent Street smelled of death. Some fifteen people had died in the late-afternoon assault, it was said; and a number of the bodies had begun to rot. There were stories that some of the bodies had been put in the Red House vault, near the entrance to which I had for some weeks had my table while I wrote out copies of birth and death certificates. How true the stories were I don’t know. But when the rebels had surrendered, and the siege was over, and the local papers carried photographs (taken from far away) of people leaving the Red House with handkerchiefs to their noses, I remembered the smell of the fish glue in which I had worked; and thought of the dimly lit, airless, oddly quiet vault, full of paper, where I had been told all the records of the British colony were stored, all the records, that is, since 1797, records of surveys and property transactions and then the records, starting later, of births and deaths, together with a copy of everything that had been printed in the colony.

I was told that the smell of death lingered for days in that area where, thirty-five years or so before, the fathers and grandfathers of some of the rebels (many were very young, boys in their teens) might have once partaken of the sacrament of Woodford Square.

I had never thought of St. Vincent Street—so calm and quiet in my first memory of it—as a place where men might fight so desperately. But all scenes of human habitation are touched by violence of this kind. Nearly every town has been besieged and fought over and has known this kind of blood. And as soon as I thought back, even to my own nerves at the time of my first return from England, I saw that there was an immense chain of events. You could start with the sacrament of the square and work back: to the black madmen on the benches, the Indian destitutes, the plantations, the wilderness, the aboriginal settlements, the discovery. And you could move forward from that exaltation and that mood of rejection to the nihilism of the moment.

As soon as the siege began there was no effective government. It took a little while for this to be understood; and then the effect on black communities—local and immigrant, in the capital and all those contiguous settlements at the foot of the Northern Range, north of the mainly Indian countryside, which remained quiet, untouched by the frenzy to the north—the effect on these communities was extraordinary. They were like people who had been granted a moment of pure freedom. They formed looting gangs. It was of this—of the inflamed, unrecognizable faces of the looters, the glittering eyes—as much as of the siege at the Red House that people spoke when I went back. For six days or so whole communities had lived with the idea of the end of things, a world without logic, and they had been lifted out of themselves. At least twenty-nine people died during this looting.

For many years I had accepted that the city I had known as a child no longer existed and what was there now belonged to others. Nazaralli Baksh, who had made the clothes I had gone away in, had ceased for some time to be a name in St. Vincent Street. But to see the destruction around where his shop had been was to be reminded of him more than ever. Across the road, the Victorian Gothic Police Headquarters—
he used to make uniforms for them—had been blasted in at one side. The grey outer wall, where it still stood, was blackened; smoke had poured out of the pointed arches. It was unsettling to see what had been city—regulated, serviced, protected, full of wonder and the possibility of adventure—turn to vacancy, simple ground. The commercial streets of the centre had been levelled. You could see down to what might have been thought buried forever: the thick-walled eighteenth-century Spanish foundations of some buildings. You could see the low gable marks of early, small buildings against higher walls. You could look down, in fact, at more than Spanish foundations: you could look down at red Amerindian soil.

There had been blood here before. Where the shacks of immigrants now scaffolded the hillsides there had once been aboriginal people. The eighteenth-century Spanish city had been laid out on a wilderness the Spaniards had themselves created two centuries before, when they had taken over the aboriginal settlement of Cumucurapo. The Spaniards, always legalistic, nearly always had a notary on hand to “give faith” to what he witnessed. “
Doy fe,”
the notary would write: “I give faith,” “I give witness.” And there was a notary who recorded the names of the Amerindian chiefs of Cumucurapo who had surrendered their land to the Spaniards; the notary said that they had done so willingly, and that the people had “rejoiced.” The names of these chiefs were confirmed by an extraordinary accident. A short while later an English marauder came raiding. The Spaniards, who had so recently taken “true possession,” were themselves now put to flight; and, in the jail of the new Spanish settlement beyond the hills, five of the dispossessed chiefs were found, with the very names the notary had recorded, the last aboriginal rulers of the land, held together on one chain, scalded with hot bacon fat, and broken by other punishments.

SOME WRITING
ideas go cold on you when you try to work them out on the page. Other ideas you simply play with in your mind, and don’t do more about, perhaps because you know you won’t get far. Most of these unattempted ideas fade; but one or two can stay with you. This is an account of an idea that has stayed.

The first impulse came to me in the first or second week of 1961, when I was in the Guiana Highlands, an Amerindian no man’s land on the frontiers of Venezuela, Brazil and what is now called Guyana.

I hadn’t been to South America before, had never travelled in wilderness. I had never, in fact, done any kind of serious travelling; and the writing wish that came to me was less an idea for a story than an excitement about where I was.

Once for nearly a whole day I was in a small boat on a highland river, moving upstream through tall, cool woodland. The river here was the merest tributary of a tributary. It was shallow, widening out sometimes over a cluttered rocky bed, with occasional deep pools where fallen trees or branches made perfect reflections, together with big fissured boulders. These boulders, grey, scoured clean, were sometimes so neatly cracked apart—like some kind of enormous
petrified fruit—that they became things of beauty in themselves. The river water was reddish (from rotting leaves and tree-bark), transparent in sunlight, and clean enough to drink.

Brightly coloured birds followed our boat. We had a man with a gun with us, an Amerindian. He fired at the birds, for sport. After every shot he looked down at the boat, at no one in particular, and gave a nervous laugh. The birds didn’t take fright; they stayed with us; you could hear their wings flapping steadily on.

Once or twice during the day we stopped at an Amerindian village. At these village sites the river bank was higher, with a ramp or path zigzagging down to where the village dugouts were tied up. The people were pale, with black hair. Animated among themselves, exchanging food and goods and news, they managed at the next moment to be distant with the rest of us: holding themselves with an extraordinary stillness on their tree-shaded bank, and looking down without expression at the boat.

That was the setting. I would have liked to do something with it, but every piece of invention that came to me seemed to falsify what I had felt as a traveller.

Six or seven years later, when I was writing another kind of book, I did some detailed reading about the area. I went back to the earliest records, concentrating on the period between 1590 and 1620. Among the Spanish documents were accounts of the formal foundation of Spanish towns in Amerindian wilderness, reports of expeditions (most of them ending in death or despair), petitions of colonists to the king (read by the king or an official perhaps a full year later): curiously informal and fresh, these old Spanish cries from the other end of the world, the complaints and deceptions of hungry, quarrelsome, self-righteous, stoical people.