The Writer and the World (24 page)

F
IFTY
years ago, writing at a moment when Spain seemed about to disintegrate, Ortega y Gasset saw that fragmented peoples come together only in order “to do something tomorrow.” In the islands this assurance about the future is missing. Millenarian excitement will not hold them together, even if they were all black; and some, like Trinidad and Guyana and British Honduras, are only half-black. The pursuit of black identity and the community of black distress is a dead end, frenzy for the sake of frenzy, the self-scourging of people who cannot see what they will have to do tomorrow.

In
We Wish to Be Looked Upon
, published last year by Teachers College Press, Vera Rubin and Marisa Zavalloni report on surveys of high-school students in Trinidad they conducted in 1957 and 1961, at a time of pre-independence, messianic optimism. (Eric Williams had come to power, suddenly and overwhelmingly, in 1956.) The students were asked to write at length about their “expectations, plans and hopes for the future.”

Without the calm of the white responses, the society might appear remote, fantastic and backward. But the white student doesn’t inhabit a world which is all that separate. Trinidad is small, served by two news-papers
and two radio stations and the same unsegregated schools. The intercourse between the races is easier than inquiring sociologists usually find; there is a substantial black and East Indian middle class that dominates the professions. When this is understood, the imprecision of black and East Indian fantasy—diplomacy, politics, peacemaking—can be seen to be more than innocence. It is part of the carnival lunacy of a lively, well-informed society which feels itself part of the great world, but understands at the same time that it is cut off from this world by reasons of geography, history, race.

T
HE SUB-TITLE
of Rubin and Zavalloni’s book is “A Study of the Aspirations of Youth in a Developing Society.” But the euphemism is misleading. This society has to be more precisely defined. Brazil is developing, India is developing. Trinidad is neither undeveloped nor developing. It is fully part of the advanced consumer society of the West; it recognizes high material standards. But it is less than provincial: there is no metropolis to which the man from the village or small town can take his gifts. Trinidad is simply small; it is dependent; and the people born in it—black, East Indian, white—sense themselves condemned, not necessarily as individuals, but as a community, to an inferiority of skill and achievement. In colonial days racial deprivation could be said to be important, and this remains, obviously, an important drive. But now it is only part of the story.

In the islands, in fact, black identity is a sentimental trap, obscuring the issues. What is needed is access to a society, larger in every sense, where people will be allowed to grow. For some territories this larger society may be Latin American. Colonial rule in the Caribbean defied geography and created unnatural administrative units; this is part of the problem. Trinidad, for instance, was detached from Venezuela. This is a geographical absurdity; it might be looked at again.

1970

A
CORNER
file is a three-sided file, triangular in section, and it is used in Trinidad for sharpening cutlasses. On December 31, 1971, in the country town of Arima, some eighteen miles from Port of Spain, Steve Yeates bought such a file, six inches long. Yeates, a thirty-three-year-old Negro, ex-RAF, was the bodyguard and companion of Michael de Freitas—also known as Michael X and Michael Abdul Malik. The file, bought from Cooblal’s Hardware, cost a Trinidad dollar, 20p. It was charged to the account of “Mr. Abdhul Mallic, Arima,” and Yeates signed the charge bill “Muhammed Akbar.” This was Yeates’s “Muslim” name. In the Malik setup in Arima—the “commune,” the “organization”—Yeates was Supreme Captain of the Fruit of Islam, as well as Lieutenant Colonel (and perhaps the only member) of Malik’s Black Liberation Army.

Malik’s “commune” was a residential house in a suburban development called Christina Gardens. The house, which Malik had been renting for eleven months, ever since his return from England, was set in a one-and-a-half-acre plot. On this land, with its mature garden and mature fruit trees, Malik and his commune did “agriculture.” Or so Malik reported to old associates in England and elsewhere.

Malik had spent fourteen years in England. He had gone there as Michael de Freitas, a Trinidad seaman, in 1957, when he was twenty-four. In Notting Hill, where he had settled, he had become a pimp, drug pusher and gambling-house operator; he had also worked as a strong-arm man for Rachman, the property racketeer, who specialized in slum properties, West Indian tenants and high rents. A religious-political “conversion” had followed, and Michael de Freitas had given himself the name
Michael X. He was an instant success with the press and the underground. He became Black Power “leader,” underground black “poet,” black “writer.” In 1967, when he was at the peak of his newspaper fame, he was convicted under the Race Relations Act for an anti-white speech he had made at Reading, and sent to jail for a year. In 1969, with the help of a rich white patron, he had established his first commune, the Black House, an “urban village” in Islington. This had failed. At the same time there was more trouble with the law. And in January 1971 Michael X—now with the Black Muslim name of Michael Abdul Malik—had fled to Trinidad.

The agricultural commune in Christina Gardens was not Malik’s only “project” in Trinidad. He was simultaneously working on a “People’s Store.” Letterheads had been printed, and copy prepared for a brochure: “Empty shelves Shows the lack of Genorosity
[sic]
of the haves to the have nots … The wall of honour bears the name of our heroes and those that give … All praise is due to Allah the faults are ours.” The only thing that was missing was the store; but in a note on the scheme Malik had written: “Public Relations are the key-words to success.” During his time in England Malik had learned a few things; he had, more particularly, acquired a way with words. In Trinidad he was not just a man who had run away from a criminal charge in England. He was a Black Muslim refugee from “Babylon”: he was in revolt against “the industrialized complex.” Trinidad was far enough away; and so, in a country town, in the mature garden of a rented suburban house, Malik could say that he did agriculture, with his new commune.

On January 1, 1972, the commune could be said to include two visitors, who were living in a rented house on the other side of the road. One was a Boston Negro in his late thirties who wore a gold earring and had given himself the Muslim name Hakim Jamal. The other was Gale Ann Benson, a twenty-seven-year-old middle-class English divorcée who had been living with Jamal for about a year.

Jamal was an American Black Power man. A few months before, when he was being taken around London by Gale Benson, he had described himself to the
Guardian
as “excruciatingly handsome, tantalizingly brown, fiercely articulate.” That was his style. From Trinidad he wrote to a white associate in the United States: “Money is a white people thing—the thing they protect. The heaviest thing they have to carry.”
And Jamal was anxious to lighten the load: he was full of schemes for black uplift that needed white money; one such scheme had brought him down to the West Indies. He was in some ways like Malik. But Malik did black agriculture and black communes, and Jamal did black schools and black publishing; and the two men did not clash. Malik claimed that he was the best-known black man in the world; and Jamal appeared to agree. Jamal’s own claim was that he himself was God. And Gale Benson outdid them both: she believed that Jamal was God.

This was Benson’s distinction in the commune, her private cult of Jamal. Not her whiteness; there were other white people around, since for people like Malik there was no point in being black and angry unless occasionally there were white people to witness. Benson wore African-style clothes and had renamed herself Halé Kimga. This wasn’t a Muslim or an African name, but an anagram of Gale and Hakim; and it suggests that in her madness there was an element of middle-class play.

Some weeks later Malik’s wife told a reporter of the Trinidad
Evening News
that Benson was “a very mysterious person.” She must have used the word ironically, because she went on: “She was sort of a fake … She will give a fake name and maintain her fake position.” A thirty-year-old black woman, a secondary-school teacher, said of Benson, “She was pretty. Different. Simple. Money oozing out of the clothes.” White, secure, yet in her quiet middle-class way out-blacking them all: Benson could not have been indifferent to the effect she created. The absurd cult, the absurd name, the absurd clothes—everything that is remembered of Benson in Trinidad suggests the great uneducated vanity of the middle-class dropout.

But to be a fake among fakes: in the melodramatic atmosphere of the commune that was dangerous. She was alien, impenetrable. It was felt that she was an agent; there was talk of an especially secret branch of British Intelligence called MIo. Her execution, on January 2, 1972, was sudden and swift. She was held by the neck and stabbed and stabbed. At that moment all the lunacy and play fell from her; she knew who she was then, and wanted to live. Perhaps the motive for the killing lay only in that: the surprise, a secure life ending in an extended moment of terror. She fought back; the cuts on her hands and arms would show how strongly she fought back. She had to be stabbed nine times. It was an especially deep wound at the base of the neck that stilled her; and then
she was buried in her African-style clothes. She was not yet completely dead: dirt from her burial hole would work its way into her intestines.

I
N
T
RINIDAD
at this time there was a young Indian fortune-teller, Lalsingh Harribance, whose uncanny and daring public prophecies were making news.
The Bomb
, a popular local weekly, carried an article about Harribance; and Malik, who had written for
The Bomb
, found out from the editor where Harribance lived.

Harribance lived in the south of the island, in the oil-field town of Fyzabad, a winding two-hour drive from Port of Spain. Malik went down with some members of his commune in two cars. That was Malik’s travelling style in Trinidad—the “retinue,” the large American hired cars, the chauffeur. Rawle Maximin, a partner in the car-hire firm that Malik patronized, and a boyhood friend of Malik’s, went with them. They got to Fyzabad late in the evening and were told that Harribance was at home but was seeing nobody. A seer’s privilege. They decided to wait.

Rawle Maximin says they waited in the cars until morning. “And just when I was thinking ‘You mean they not even sending out a little coffee or something?’ Harribance sent out a woman with some coffee. And Michael got to see Harribance. And Harribance said to Michael, ‘You will not stay in Trinidad. You will go to Jamaica. And then you will be the ruler of the Negroes in the United States.’ But then he said to Michael as we were leaving, ‘I want to see you again.’ But Michael never saw Harribance again.”

Harribance, as it happened, very shortly afterwards joined the brain drain to the United States. An American woman married him; and the story in Trinidad is that Harribance is now at an American university helping with ESP research.