The Middle Passage Part 3

They were discussing this in a Port of Spain taxi one morning.

'She have too much vice in she old tail, if you ask me,' the fat woman beside me said. 'G.o.d! What she must be does look like in the morning? I ain't fifty, and it does frighten me like h.e.l.l to see my face when I get up.'

'When that man I have started getting fresh,' the woman in front said, 'I does be mad to give him a clout. Is only backside for him, you hear. And I breathing deep and pretending I sleeping sound sound.'

'You right, child. A neighbour was telling me that this Grenadian only want to go away to study. He go away, doing this studying, and she stay home, feeding those chickens. You see she in the Guardian, feeding chickens?'

From the Trinidad Guardian: FAs.h.i.+ON SHOW.

The management of the Starlite Drive-In and Pollyanna, a new children's dress shop, put on a delightful children's fas.h.i.+on parade at the cinema on Sunday afternoon before the first show. Apart from the very lovely frocks, and they were adorable, the little models, boys and girls, one little youngster not quite 2, were positively amazing, perfectly self-possessed, and poised. The array of garments ranged from bathing suits 'Balon', a Brigitte Bardot type, but certainly B.B. could not have done fuller justice to her suit than did Christine Cozier and Renata Lopez; not to mention Master Barry Went in his Marlon Brando bikini ... Among the most appreciative audience were Mrs Isaac Akow and her grands, Mr and Mrs A. d.i.c.kson, Mr and Mrs Dennis Crooks and their kids, Mr and Mrs Frank de Freitas and their family.

Trinidad considers itself, and is acknowledged by the other West Indian territories to be, modern. It has night clubs, restaurants, air-conditioned bars, supermarkets, soda fountains, drive-in cinemas and a drive-in bank. But modernity in Trinidad means a little more. It means a constant alertness, a willingness to change, a readiness to accept anything which films, magazines and comic strips appear to indicate as American. Beauty queens and fas.h.i.+on parades are modern. Modernity might also lie in a name like Lois a p.r.o.nounced Loys in Trinidad a which came to the island in the 1940s through Lois Lane, the heroine of the American Superman comic strip. Simple radio is not modern. Commercial radio is: when I was a boy not to know the latest commercial jingle was to be primitive.

To be modern is to ignore local products and to use those advertised in American magazines. The excellent coffee which is grown in Trinidad is used only by the very poor and a few middle-cla.s.s English expatriates. Everyone else drinks Nescafe or Maxwell House or Chase and Sanborn, which is more expensive but is advertised in the magazines and therefore acceptable. The elegant and comfortable morris chairs, made from local wood by local craftsmen, are not modern and have disappeared except from the houses of the poor. Imported tubular steel furniture, plastic-straw chairs from Hong Kong and spindly cast-iron chairs have taken their place.

In an article in the Caribbean Quarterly, a journal of the University College of the West Indies, Dr Alfred P. Thorne studies the economic consequences of this 'apparent psychological trait'. 'Large numbers of middle- and upper-cla.s.s islanders,' he writes, 'avoid regular consumption of many local roots or ground provisions, and prefer imported items of corresponding food value (and usually higher cost).' He suggests that political leaders and the new elite should set an example, which would be more effective than 'fervent imprecations and exhortations'.

Is there any good reason why, in the prestige system, sweet potatoes and the like should not be among the foods of the middle and upper income cla.s.ses of the communities? Do not elegant English barons and earls, and, indeed, even most gracious royal princesses share common 'Irish' potatoes with English dock labourers? Not even the 'c.o.c.kneys' renaming these humble roots as 'spuds' have diverted the aristocratic consumer.

It is an old West Indian problem. Trollope complained about it in Jamaica in 1859: But it is to be remarked all through the island that the people are fond of English dishes, and that they despise, or affect to despise, their own productions. They will give you ox-tail soup when turtle would be much cheaper. Roast beef and beefsteaks are found at almost every meal. An immense deal of beer is consumed. When yams, avocado pears, the mountain cabbage, plantains, and twenty other delicious vegetables may be had for the gathering, people will insist on eating bad English potatoes; and the desire for English pickles is quite a pa.s.sion.

Charles Kingsley, who ten years later spent a winter in Trinidad, tells the story in At Last of a German who, because Trinidad produced sugar, vanilla and cocoa, decided to make chocolate in Trinidad. He did, and his price was a quarter that of the imported. 'But the fair creoles would not buy it. It could not be good; it could not be the real article, unless it had crossed the Atlantic twice to and from that centre of fas.h.i.+on, Paris.' One of the complaints of tourists in Jamaica is that they cannot get Jamaican food. And once in a small intellectuals' club in Port of Spain I asked for guava jelly: they had only greengage jam.

Modernity in Trinidad, then, turns out to be the extreme susceptibility of people who are unsure of themselves and, having no taste or style of their own, are eager for instruction. In England and America there are magazines for such groups; in Trinidad instruction is now provided by advertising agencies, which have been welcomed by the people not only for this reason but also because the advertising agency is itself a modern thing.

There was a time when Trinidad had no agencies and the nearest we got to copy-writing was Limacol's 'The Freshness of a Breeze in a Bottle' and Mr Fernandes's 'If you don't drink rum that is your business; if you do drink rum that is our business.' For the rest we made do with each store's list of bargains and the usual toothpaste sagas about bad breath. This has now changed. It has been said that a country can be judged by its advertis.e.m.e.nts, and a glance at Trinidad advertising is revealing. A man with a black eye-patch is used to advertise, not Hathaway s.h.i.+rts, but an alcoholic drink. Bermudez biscuits are described as a 'Family of Fine Crackers', with the 'Mopsy' biscuit for 'the young in heart', which is as puzzling as the slogan for Trinidad Grapefruit Juice: 'The Smile of Good Health a in a Tin'. 'Crix' (of the Bermudez family) is 'a meal in itself '. One examines the copy for the point; and it seems that this is to persuade Trinidadians that Bermudez biscuits are really 'crackers', American things which Americans in films and the comic strips eat. Old Oak Rum was introduced with a Showdown Test. (It might have been a ten-second showdown test, but I may be confusing it with other tests.) In this Showdown Test a number of laughing, well-dressed Trinidadians, carefully chosen for race, stood at a bar. None was clamorously black. A genuinely black man was used for the garage-hand in the 'I'm going well, I'm going Sh.e.l.l' advertis.e.m.e.nt; black faces are normally used only in advertis.e.m.e.nts for things like bicycles and stout.

This is the work of expatriate advertising agents, and Trinidad is grateful and humble. At a time when the whole concept of modern advertising is under fire elsewhere, Trinidad offers a haven: it is officially recognized that Trinidadians are without the skill to run advertising agencies. And, indeed, without outside a.s.sistance commercial radio might not have been so easily established. At a quarter past seven in the morning, in those early days, Doug Hatton was there with his Shopping Highlights, a programme of music and 'information'. Sometimes, he telephoned people to ask whether they knew the name of the 'number' he was playing; if they did they got a prize, provided by some firm willing to contribute to the public merriment. At eight Hatton went off the air, to make way for a little local news, a little more information and the death announcements. But at half past eight Hatton's a.s.sociate Hal Morrow came on, with Morrow's Merry-Go-Round, a programme of information and music. This lasted until nine, and for the rest of the day there would be no more of Hatton and Morrow until they came on in the evening with a quiz, perhaps, a talent show, records and more information. They retired, Hatton and Morrow, somewhat prematurely; but Trinidad has never ceased to honour them: simple people of whose work the wider world shall never know, who turned their backs on metropolitan success and renown and devoted their energies to the service of a colonial people.

So Trinidad, though deserted by much of the talent it produces, has always been fortunate in attracting people of adventurous spirit.

'I'm a second-rater,' a successful American businessman said to an Englishman, who told it to me. 'But this is a third-rate place and I'm doing well. Why should I leave?'

With this emphasis on America, English things are regarded as old-fas.h.i.+oned and provincial. One of the more pleasing aspects of Trinidad modernity is that it is possible to eat well and from a number of national cuisines. I found myself one day in an English restaurant. Trollope's remarks about the potato still apply; and the restaurant, which was an 'and chips' place, attracted depressed expatriates and some of the English-minded Trinidad elite. The waiters were dressed up. My joylessness was matched by the waiter's until I asked what there was for a sweet. He looked embarra.s.sed; and when at last he said, 'Bread and b.u.t.ter pudding,' his voice half-broke in a laugh, disclaiming all responsibility for such an absurdity.

So Trinidad gives the impression of a booming, vigorous, even frenzied little island. Helped by a series of fires, the main streets of central Port of Spain have been rebuilt, and the Salvatori building stands for all that is modern. Elsewhere the flat-facaded stone-walled houses remain: dwelling-houses turned into stores to meet the needs of an expanding city. Traffic crawls in the choked streets; parking is a problem. In the stores the quality of unbranded goods is not high, the prices extravagant; the mark-up is fifty or a hundred per cent, and on some goods, like j.a.panese knick-knacks, as much as three hundred per cent: Trinidadians will not buy what they think is cheap. In December 1959, after the civil servants had received another of their pay rises, Port of Spain was sold out of refrigerators. In betting shops you can bet on that day's English races. And there are numerous race meetings in Trinidad itself; when I was a boy there were only three a year. Horse-racing, one of the island's few entertainments, has always been popular and now, with more money circulating, gambling has become universal. It is respectable; it is almost an industry; and I was told that as a result not a few civil servants are in the hands of moneylenders.

We went to the races, leaving Port of Spain by the dual-carriageway Wrightson Road that runs between the town and the reclaimed area of Docksite, the former American army base. We pa.s.sed the Technical College, still being built a a few years later than British Guiana's, but a promise of the future; we pa.s.sed the modernistic headquarters of the Seamen and Waterfront Workers Trade Union, the new Fire Brigade headquarters. Then we drove along the Beetham Highway, the new road built over reclaimed swampland to relieve the overburdened Eastern Main Road. To our right lay the city rubbish dump, misty with smoke of rubbish burning in the open. On our left was Shanty Town, directly outside the city, extending right across and up the hills: oddly beautiful, each shack with its angular black shadow on the reddish hill, so that one would have liked to sketch the scene into a rough wet canvas. Corbeaux patrolled the highway. These black vultures are never far away in Trinidad; they perch on the graceful branches of coconut trees on the beaches; and when on the highway, as we saw, one of the city's innumerable pariah dogs is run over, the corbeaux pounce and pick the starved body clean, flapping heavily away from time to time to avoid the traffic. Scarlet ibises flew with an awkward grace over the mangrove to our right. And at regular intervals on the highway English-style traffic signs urged motorists to keep to the left except when overtaking.

We had music while we drove, from the two radio stations. With their songs, commercials, constant weather reports (as though this was at any moment liable to spectacular change) and news 'every hour on the hour', they suggested that we were in an exciting, luxurious metropolis which was supported by a vast, rich hinterland. Soon this hinterland appeared: occasional horse-carts, small houses, people working in small vegetable gardens. We with our car-radio on the highway were in one world; they were in another.

An approaching car blinked its lights.

'Police,' my friend said. 'Speed trap.'

Every car that met us gave the warning. And soon, sure enough, we pa.s.sed a disconsolate, ostentatiously plain-clothed policeman sitting on the verge looking at something in his hand.

Country people, mainly Indians brilliantly dressed, were walking towards the races. We turned off the main road and found the way blocked as far as we could see with cars, new, of many colours, s.h.i.+ning in the sun. This was nothing like the Trinidad I knew.

When Charles Kingsley went to the Port of Spain races in 1870 he came upon a dying horse surrounded by a group of coloured men whom he advised 'in vain' to cover the horse with a blanket, 'for the poor thing had fallen from sunstroke '. Kingsley did not go to the races to bet a it was the first time he had been to a race-ground for thirty years a and he does not speak of gambling. He speaks of a run-down French merry-go-round ('a huge piece of fool's tackle'), people sitting on the gra.s.s ('live flower-beds'), and the 'most hideous' smell of new rum. He had gone to the races, he says, 'to wander en mufti among the crowd'. He was greatly taken by their racial variety, and the engraving which accompanies the chapter shows a group of Trinidadians a Negroes, Indians and Chinese a at the races. The Negro man and the Negro boy are wearing straw hats, loose collarless s.h.i.+rts and three-quarter-length trousers, a tropical abridgement of eighteenth-century European garb which has been revived in night clubs as a folk costume. A Negro woman is wearing a turban and many well-starched skirts such as Anthony Trollope, getting off the West Indian steamer at the island of St Thomas late in 1858, saw on the flower-seller on the quayside; these skirts 'gave to her upright figure', he said, 'that look of easily compressible bulk which, let Punch do what it will, has grown so sightly to our eyes'. The Indian men are in turbans, Indian jackets, and dhotis, and carry the quarterstaff; the Indian woman wears the long skirt of the United Provinces and the orhni. The Chinese are in Chinese peasant clothes; the man has a pigtail and carries an open umbrella.

No dying horses surrounded by helpless jabbering men will be found on a Trinidad race-ground today. No pigtails; no calypso folk costumes; and turbans are rare. Dress is uniform, national tastes emerging only in colours. The three groups in the Kingsley engraving stand in three isolated cultures. Today these cultures, coming together, have been modified. One, the Chinese, has almost disappeared; and the standards of all approximate to the standards of those who are absent in the engraving: the Europeans.

Outside the Royal Victoria Inst.i.tute in Port of Spain an anchor, still in good condition, stands embedded in concrete, and a sign says this might be the anchor Columbus lost during his rough pa.s.sage into the Gulf of Paria. So much, one might say, for the history of Trinidad for nearly three hundred years after its discovery. The Spaniards were more interested in the profitable territories of South America, and the island was never seriously settled. The abundance today of Amerindian names speaks of this absence of early colonization: Tacarigua, Tunapuna, Guayaguayare, Mayaro, Arima, Naparima. In Trinidad you do not find the Scarborough and Plymouth of Tobago, the Hampstead and Highgate of Jamaica, the Windsor Forest and Hampton Court of the British Guiana coastland.

There was a little excitement in 1595. The Spanish governor, Berrio, was using the island as a base for his search for El Dorado. Raleigh came; used the pitch from the Pitch Lake to caulk his s.h.i.+ps, p.r.o.nouncing it better than the pitch from Norway; tasted the small oysters that grew in flinty cl.u.s.ters on the mangrove roots, liked them; and since 'to leave a garrison at my back, interested in the same enterprise, I should have savoured very much of the a.s.se', he sacked the small Spanish settlement and took Berrio off with him as a guide up the Orinoco River.

It was 1783, when the islands had a population of 700 whites, Negroes and coloureds and 2,000 Amerindians, that immigration began on any scale. The immigrants came from the French West Indian islands, royalists fleeing the revolution and the slave rebellion in Haiti. The island became Spanish only in name, and even after the British conquest in 1797 retained its French character, of which Trollope so strongly disapproved in 1859.

As Trinidad is an English colony, one's first idea is that the people speak English; and one's second idea, when that other one as to the English has fallen to the ground, is that they should speak Spanish, seeing that the name of the place is Spanish. But the fact is that they all speak French ... As this was a conquered colony, the people of the island are not allowed to have so potent a voice in their own management. But one does see clearly enough, that as they are French in language and habits, and Roman Catholic in religion, they would make an even worse hash of it than the Jamaicans do in Jamaica.

In spite of the black legend of Spain in the New World, the Spanish slave code was the least inhumane. Doubtless for this reason it was seldom followed. For some time after the British conquest the island continued to be administered under Spanish law, and the first British governor, Picton, scrupulously followed the Spanish code. (He even used a little torture, which the code permitted; and this ruined his reputation in England.) It was easier under the Spanish code for a slave to buy his freedom, and in 1821 there were 14,000 free coloured in Trinidad. Estates were small: in 1796 there were 36,000 acres cultivated, divided between 450 estates. The latifundia never had a chance to be established. And in 1834 slavery was abolished. So that in Trinidad society never hardened around the inst.i.tution of slavery as it had done in the other West Indian islands; there was no memory of bitterly suppressed revolts.

After the abolition of slavery Spanish law was replaced by English law. This established the basic rights of the individual; and because the island, as a conquered crown colony, was ruled directly from London, where the government was under steady pressure from anti-slavery societies, the planter group could be controlled. It is hard in Trinidad today to find reminders of slavery; in British Guiana, Surinam, Martinique, Jamaica, the past cannot be avoided. In 1870 Kingsley thought that the Trinidad Negro lived better than the working-man in England. Froude, in 1887, 'seeing always the boundless happiness of the black race', could only warn that 'the powers which envy human beings too perfect felicity may find ways one day of disturbing the West Indian Negro.'

Throughout the century immigration continued. As early as 1806 attempts had been made to get Chinese labourers, the government no doubt antic.i.p.ating emanc.i.p.ation and being unwilling to increase the Negro population. French labourers were imported from Le Havre, Portuguese from Madeira. After the abolition of slavery the Negroes refused to work on the estates, and the resulting labour shortage was solved by the importation of indentured labour from Madeira, China and India. The Indians proved to be the most suitable; and, with a few breaks, Indian immigration continued until 1917. In all, 134,000 Indians came to Trinidad; most of them were from the provinces of Bihar, Agra and Oudh.*

So Trinidad was and remains a materialist immigrant society, continually growing and changing, never settling into any pattern, always retaining the atmosphere of the camp; unique in the West Indies in the absence of a history of enduring brutality, in the absence of a history; yet not an expanding society but a colonial society, ruled autocratically if benevolently, with the further limitations of its small size and remoteness. All this has combined to give it its special character, its ebullience and irresponsibility. And more: a tolerance which is more than tolerance: an indifference to virtue as well as to vice. The Land of the Calypso is not a copywriter's phrase. It is one side of the truth, and it was this gaiety, so inexplicable to the tourist who sees the shacks of Shanty town and the corbeaux patrolling the modern highway, and inexplicable to me who had remembered it as the land of failures, which now, on my return, a.s.saulted me.

From the Trinidad Guardian: Residents of Fisher Avenue, St Ann's, must have wondered who on earth their new neighbours in No. 1a were on Sat.u.r.day night, as the strains of Choy Aming's tape recorded music shattered the suburban peace. Little did they know that four gay bachelors a men-about-town a Jimmy Spiers, Nick Proudfoot, David Renwick and Peter Galesloot had moved in and were having a house warming. Batting Scotch and a.s.sorted chasers were Malcolm Martin, Eddie de Freitas, Pat Diaz, Maureen Poon Tip, Joan Rawle, Gillian Geoffroy, Joan Spiers and others. You should have seen the floor the next morning.

Port of Spain is the noisiest city in the world. Yet it is forbidden to talk. 'Let the talkies do the talking,' the signs used to say in the old London Theatre of my childhood. And now the radios and the rediffusion sets do the talking, the singing, the jingling; the steel bands do the booming and the banging; and the bands, live or tape-recorded, and the gramophones and record-players. In restaurants the hands are there to free people of the need to talk. Stunned, temples throbbing, you champ and chew, concentrating on the working of your jaw muscles. In a private home as soon as anyone starts to talk the radio is turned on. It must be loud, loud. If there are more than three, dancing will begin. Sweat-sweat-dance-dance-sweat. Loud, loud, louder. If the radio isn't powerful enough, a pa.s.sing steel band will be invited in. Jump-jump-sweat-sweat-jump. In every house a radio or rediffusion set is on. In the street people conduct conversations at a range of twenty yards or more; and even when they are close to you their voices have a vibrating tuning-fork edge. You will realize this only after you have left Trinidad: the voices in British Guiana will sound unnaturally low, and for the first day or so whenever anyone talks to you you will lean forward conspiratorially, for what is being whispered is, you feel, very secret. In the meantime dance, dance, shout above the shuffle. If you are silent the noise will rise to a roar about you. You cannot shout loud enough. Your words seem to be issuing from behind you. You have been here only an hour, but you feel as exhausted as though you had spent a day in some Italian scooter-h.e.l.l. Your head is bursting. It is only eleven; the party is just warming up. You are being rude, but you must go.

You drive up the new Lady Young Road, and the diminis.h.i.+ng noise makes it seem cooler. You get to the top and look out at the city glittering below you, amber and exploding blue on black, the s.h.i.+ps in the harbour in the background, the orange flames issuing from the oil derricks far out in the Gulf of Paria. For a moment it is silent. Then, above the crickets, whose stridulation you hadn't noticed, you begin to hear the city: the dogs, the steel bands.

You wait until the radio stations have closed down for the night a but rediffusion sets, for which there is a flat rental, are never turned off: they remain open, to await the funnelling of the morning noise a and then you wind down into the city again, drowning in the din. All through the night the dogs will go on, in a thousand inextricably snarled barking relays, rising and falling, from street to street and back again, from one end of the city to another. And you will wonder how you stood it for eighteen years, and whether it was always like this.

When I was a boy the people of Port of Spain used to dress up and walk around the Savannah on a Sunday afternoon. Those who had cars drove around in them slowly. It was a ritual parade which established the positions of the partic.i.p.ants. It was also a pleasant walk. To the south lay the fine buildings of the wealthy and the Queen's Park Hotel, to us the last word in luxury and modernity. To the north were the botanical gardens and the grounds of Government House. And to the west lay Maraval Road.

Maraval Road is one of the architectural wonders of the world. It is a long road with few houses: it used to be the street of the very wealthy. At the north it begins with a Scottish baronial castle. Then comes Whitehall, an odd Moorish-Corsican building; before it was turned into government offices a the name Whitehall, however, came first a it was hung with tapestries depicting shepherds and shepherdesses, and had papier-mache logs in dummy fireplaces. Beyond Whitehall there is a palace with much wrought-iron decoration; it has a strong oriental flavour but is said to be copied from a French chateau. Then there is a monumental ochre-and-rust Spanish Colonial mansion. And the street ends with the blue-and-red P.W.D. Italianate of Queen's Royal College, whose clock has Big Ben chimes.

This was the taste of the old Trinidad: individual, anarchic, not arising out of the place a in spite of the fireplaces every office in Whitehall needs two or three fans a but created out of memories. There were no local standards. In the refinements of behaviour, as in architecture, everything was left to the caprices of the individual. In the immigrant society, memories growing dim, there was no guiding taste. As you rose you evolved your own standards, and they were usually those of modernity.

There was no guiding taste because there was no taste. In Trinidad education was not one of the things money could buy; it was something money freed you from. Education was strictly for the poor. The white boy left school at an early age, 'counting on his fingers', as the Trinidadian likes to say; but this was a measure of his privilege. He went to work in a bank, in Cable and Wireless or in a large business firm; and for many Trinidadians to be a bank clerk or a salesman was therefore the peak of ambition. Those of the white community who eccentrically desired an education nearly always left the island. The white community was never an upper cla.s.s in the sense that it possessed a superior speech or taste or attainments; it was envied only for its money and its access to pleasure. Kingsley, in spite of all his affection for his white hosts in Trinidad, observed: 'French civilization, signifies practically, certainly in the New World, little save ballet-girls, billiard-tables and thin boots: English civilization, little save horse-racing and cricket.' Seventy years later James Pope-Hennessy repeated and extended the observation. 'Educated people of African origin would speak to him of subjects about which he was accustomed to talk in his own country: about books, music or religion. English persons on the other hand spoke mainly of tennis-scores, the country-club, whisky or precedence or oil.' Education was strictly for the poor; and the poor were invariably black.

With the opening up of the colonial society the white community finds itself at a disadvantage, and the att.i.tude to education has changed. It is now seen as not discreditable, possibly even useful, and the white community has decided to expose itself to it. A new boarding-school, which appears to be whitish in intention, has been opened. While I was there the princ.i.p.al, brought down from England to direct this Custer's last stand, was issuing unrealistic statements about building character. Unrealistic because too late: the taste of the society has hardened.

The cultures represented by the buildings in Maraval Road and the figures in the Kingsley engraving have not coalesced to form this taste. They have all been abandoned under the pressure of every persuasive method: second-rate newspapers, radio services and films.

It might have been expected that journalism would provide an outlet for the talent that could not find expression elsewhere. But local talent, like the local eminence, was automatically condemned. Experts were continually imported, the English Hattons and Morrows; and journalism in Trinidad remained under-valued and underpaid, never ranking as high as motor-car-selling. The newspapers relied to a great extent on s.p.a.ce-filling syndicated American and English columns, comic strips, the film gossip of Louella Parsons and beauty hints about the preservation of peaches-and-cream complexions.

Again and again one comes back to the main, degrading fact of the colonial society; it never required efficiency, it never required quality, and these things, because unrequired, became undesirable.

The radio came later, and it was worse. America sent Hatton and Morrow. Britain sent Rediffusion. A generation has now been brought up to believe that radio, modern radio, means a song followed by a jingle, soap-operas five and fifteen minutes long, continually broken for commercials, so that in a five-minute morning serial like The Shadow ... of ... Delilah!, to which I found all Trinidad thrilling, two minutes, by my reckoning, were given over to advertising. This type of commercial radio, with its huckstering geniality, has imposed its values so successfully that there was widespread enthusiasm when Trinidad, not content with one such radio service, acquired two.

Newspapers and radio were, however, only the ancilliaries of the cinema, whose influence is incalculable. The Trinidad audience actively partic.i.p.ates in the action on the screen. 'Where do you come from?' Lauren Bacall is asked in To Have and Have Not. 'Port of Spain, Trinidad,' she replies, and the audience shouts delightedly, 'You lie! You lie!' So the audience continually shouts advice and comments; it grunts at every blow in a fight; it roars with delight when the once-spurned hero returns wealthy and impeccably dressed (this is important) to revenge himself on his past tormentor; it grows derisive when the hero finally rejects and perhaps slaps the Hollywood 'bad' woman (of the Leave Her to Heaven type). It responds, in short, to every stock situation of the American cinema.

Nearly all the films shown, apart from those in the first-run cinemas, are American and old. Favourites are shown again and again: Casablanca, with Humphrey Bogart; Till the Clouds Roll By; the Errol Flynn, John Wayne, James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson and Richard Widmark films; vintage Westerns like Dodge City and Jesse James; and every film Bogart made. Films are reputed for their fights. The Spoilers is advertised as having the longest fight ever (Randolph Scott and John Wayne, I believe). The Brothers was one of the few British films to win favour; it had a good fight and was helped not a little by the scene in which Maxwell Reed prepares to beat Patricia Roc with a length of rope ('You must be beaten'): the humiliation of women being important to the Trinidad audience. And there are serials a Dare-devils of the Red Circle, Batman, Spy-catcher-which are shown in children's programmes in the countries of their origin but in Trinidad are one of the staples of adult entertainment. They are never shown serially but all at once; they are advertised for their length, the number of reels being often stated: and the late-comer asks, 'How much reels gone?' When I was there The Shadow, a serial of the forties, was revived; the new generation was being urged to 'thrill to it like your old man did'.

In its stars the Trinidad audience looks for a special quality of style. John Garfield had this style; so did Bogart. When Bogart, without turning, coolly rebuked a pawing Lauren Bacall, 'You're breathin' down mah neck,' Trinidad adopted him as its own. 'That is man!' the audience cried. Admiring shrieks of 'Aye-aye-aye!' greeted Garfield's statement in Dust Be My Destiny: 'What am I gonna do? What I always do. Run.' 'From now on I am like John Garfield in Dust Be My Destiny,' a prisoner once said in court, and made the front page of the evening paper. Dan Duryea became a favourite after his role in Scarlet Street. Richard Widmark, eating an apple and shooting people down in The Street With No Name, had style; his chilling dry laugh was another endearing a.s.set. For the Trinidadian an actor has style when he is seen to fulfil certain aspirations of the audience: the virility of Bogart, the man-on-the-run romanticism of Garfield, the p.i.m.p.i.shness and menace of Duryea, the ice-cold sadism of Widmark.

After thirty years of active partic.i.p.ation in this sort of cinema, the Trinidadian, whether he sits in the pit or the house or the balcony, can respond only to the Hollywood formula. Nothing beyond the formula is understood, even when it comes from America; and nothing from outside America is worth considering. British films, until they took on an American gloss, played to empty houses. It was my French master who urged me to go to see Brief Encounter; and there were two of us in the cinema, he in the balcony, I in the pit. As Trinidad was British, cinemas were compelled to show a certain footage of British film; and they compiled with the regulations by showing four British films in one day, Brief Encounter and I Know where I'm Going in the afternoon, say, and The Overlanders and Henry V in the evening.

This att.i.tude to British films is understandable. I had enjoyed Our Man in Havana in London. Seeing it again in Trinidad, I was less enchanted. I saw how English and narcissistic it was, how provincial, and how meaningless to the audience were the English jokes about Englishness. The audience was silent through all the comedy and came to life only during the drama. There were even approving shouts during the game of draughts played with miniature bottles of liquor, each piece being drunk when taken: this, for the Trinidadian, was style.

A Board of Censors, which knows about the French, bans French films. Italian, Russian, Swedish and j.a.panese films are unknown. Indian films of Hollywood badness can be seen; but Satyajit Ray's Bengali trilogy cannot find an exhibitor. Nigerians, I believe, are addicted to Indian films as well as to those from Hollywood. The West Indian, revealingly, is less catholic; and in Trinidad the large and enthusiastic audiences for Indian films are, barring an occasional eccentric, entirely Indian.

If curiosity is a characteristic of the cosmopolitan, the cosmopolitanism on which Trinidad prides itself is fraudulent. In the immigrant colonial society, with no standards of its own, subjected for years to the second-rate in newspapers, radio and cinema, minds are rigidly closed; and Trinidadians of all races and cla.s.ses are remaking themselves in the image of the Hollywood B-man. This is the full meaning of modernity in Trinidad.

From the Trinidad Guardian: CHILDREN ENCHANT AUDIENCE WITH DANCE.

By Jean Minshall This is not a review of 'Dance Time 1960' which was presented at Queen's Hall on Thursday night for the first time. It is the only way in which I can show my appreciation and that of the capacity audience that was there a for an enchanted evening of purely delightful entertainment.

Which was the outstanding number? Each and every one a they were all perfect.

Could anything be lovelier than the 'Ballet of the Enchanted Dolls' with well over 100 of the junior pupils taking part a the fairy dolls, the fluffy little yellow ducklings, the fat little black and white pandas, the golden brown teddy bears, the smart tin soldiers, the little French dolls and raggedy Anns.

Could you imagine anything more delightful than the pair of pet.i.te and adorable j.a.panese dolls, the twirling tops, or Topsy, Mopsy and Dinah with their banjos, all of them dancing with such obvious delight a their costumes each and every one so carefully designed and executed?

Came the 'Wedding of the Painted Doll' and no Hollywood's 'Broadway Melody' ever staged it better!

The dainty bridesmaids pirouetting in their rainbow hued ruffled tutues. Red Riding Hood and Buster Brown, and the Halsema twins as the bride and groom a how can I describe them a without repeating myself again and again?

In the country it was quieter except when a loudspeaker van, volume raised to a fiendish pitch, ran slowly about the roads advertising an Indian film. I often went to the country, and not only for the silence. It seemed to me that I was seeing the landscape for the first time. I had hated the sun and the unchanging seasons. I had believed that the foliage had no variety and could never understand how the word 'tropical' held romance for so many. Now I was taken by the common coconut tree, the cliche of the Caribbean. I discovered, what every child in Trinidad knows, that if you stand under the tree and look up, the tapering chrome ribs of the branches are like the spokes of a perfectly circular wheel. I had forgotten the largeness of the leaves and the variety of their shapes: the digitated breadfruit leaf, the heart-shaped wild tannia, the curving razor-shaped banana frond which sunlight rendered almost transparent. To ride past a coconut plantation was to see a rapidly changing criss-cross of slender curved trunks, greyish-white in a green gloom.

I had never liked the sugarcane fields. Flat, treeless and hot, they stood for everything I had hated about the tropics and the West Indies. 'Cane is Bitter' is the t.i.tle of a story by Samuel Selvon and might well be the epigraph of a history of the Caribbean. It is a brutal plant, tall and gra.s.s-like, with rough, razor-edged blades. I knew it was the basis of the economy, but I preferred trees and shade. Now, in the uneven land of Central and South Trinidad, I saw that even sugar cane could be beautiful. On the plains just before crop-time, you drive through it, walls of gra.s.s on either side; but in rolling country you can look down on a hillside covered with tall sugar-cane in arrow: steel-blue plumes dancing above a grey-green carpet, grey-green because each long blade curves back on itself, revealing its paler underside.

The cocoa woods were another thing. They were like the woods of fairy tales, dark and shadowed and cool. The cocoa-pods, hanging by thick short stems, were like wax fruit in brilliant green and yellow and red and crimson and purple. Once, on a late afternoon drive to Tamana, I found the fields flooded. Out of the flat yellow water, which gurgled in the darkness, the black trunks of the stunted trees rose.

After every journey I returned to Port of Spain past Shanty Town, the mangrove swamp, the orange mist of the burning rubbish dump, the goats, the expectant corbeaux, all against a sunset that reddened the gla.s.sy water of the Gulf.

Everyone has to learn to see the West Indies tropics for himself. The landscape has never been recorded, and to go to the Trinidad Art Society Exhibition is to see how little local painters help. The expatriates contribute a few watercolours, the Trinidadians a lot of local colour. 'Tropical Fruit' is the t.i.tle of one painting, a t.i.tle which would have had some meaning in the Temperate Zone. Another, startlingly, is 'Native Hut'. There are the usual picturesque native characters and native customs, the vision that of the tourist, at whom most of these native paintings seem to be aimed. The beach scenes are done with colours straight out of the tube, with no effort to capture the depth of sky, the brilliancy of light, the insubstantiality of colour in the tropics. The more gifted painters have ceased to record the landscape: the patterns of the leaves are too beguiling. In art, as in almost everything else, Trinidad has in one step moved from primitivism to modernism.

Many years ago, in Jamaica, Mrs Edna Manley had to judge some local drawings and paintings. Not one, she reported, portrayed a Jamaican face. 'Even worse, there was one little study or sketch of a Jamaican market scene, and believe it or not, the market women under their scarlet bandanas had yellow hair, pink faces, and even blue eyes.' It would appear at first that this has changed, for in Trinidad even the advertis.e.m.e.nts are now in blackface. But the impulse that prompted the Jamaican artist to give yellow hair and pink faces to people he knew to be irremediably black still exists and is, if anything, stronger.

It was the blackface advertis.e.m.e.nts that disturbed me. I suppose I was too used to seeing white people winning new confidence after using Colgate's and keeping that schoolgirl complexion with Palmolive. The trouble was, paradoxically, that the advertis.e.m.e.nts were not in blackface but only in blackish face. The people undergoing the Showdown Test for Old Oak rum were not really black; their features were not noticeably un-European and lighting made them scarcely distinguishable from white. The only truly black person was the garage-hand in the Sh.e.l.l advertis.e.m.e.nt. Who, then, were these people of the middle cla.s.s, for whom these advertis.e.m.e.nts were meant, who would be offended by the black image of themselves?

They sat around in night clubs and applauded at the end of a 'number', just like Americans in films, particularly those old musicals where the heroine burst into song in the restaurant and looked surprised and embarra.s.sed when the clapping started. They had drive-in cinemas. They had barbecues a a custom of the Caribs, and a word from the Caribs, returning with changes to the Caribbean. Their houses, decorations, amus.e.m.e.nts and food were copied from American magazines. This was the Hollywood B-world. With one difference.

A new magazine appeared in Trinidad while I was there. It was called West Indian Home and Family and was described as 'the West Indian magazine for women ... your magazine, created and printed right here in Trinidad'. Already in the first issue 'family problems are answered by a qualified psychologist'. Trinidad has two psychiatrists, I believe; and from internal evidence, both problems and psychologist in this magazine comes from America in the form of a syndicated column. 'Dreams are interpreted by Stephen Norris, who has been writing on the fascinating subject for over 20 years.' This column is a little harder to place. 'I dreamed,' Mrs. J. H. writes, 'that my husband and I were in Egypt, fighting off attacking Arabs ...' The romantic serial, Latin Love Song, has for heroine Marcy Connors, an American night-club singer, a brunette, 'slim, with dark tresses piled high on her head ... a picture of true, patrician beauty'. All this in a magazine for women, 'created and printed right here in Trinidad'.

Certain concessions have been made. There is a black woman on the cover; but lighting has given her a copperish colour. In the advertis.e.m.e.nt for Valor Stoves a My Mummy Has a Lovely Valor a there are two black children with, however, 'good' (not negroid) hair. The advertis.e.m.e.nt for Texgas a How do you manage to look so cool ... cooking? Why tell him? Little secrets like these only give busy housewives a captivating air of mystery! Why spoil the illusion? But we know she uses TexGAS a is more revealing. The copy is given point by a drawing of what is meant to be a happy West Indian family a Daddy laughing, baby waving from Daddy's shoulder, Mummy stirring, smiling a but pains have been taken, in drawing and colouring and dress, to suggest a white American family slightly tanned, perhaps by those 'long summer holidays', mentioned in the copy for Avon Moisturized Skin Care, which 'expose your skin to harsh treatment from the sun and wind'.

When James Pope-Hennessy was in Trinidad just before the war he thought the sight of Negro girls singing 'Loch Lomond' 'sickening'. And for a long time in Trinidad there has been a campaign against poems about daffodils a daffodils in particular: Wordsworth's poem appears to be the only poem most Trinidadians have read a because daffodils are not flowers Trinidad schoolchildren know. I cannot myself see why anyone should deny himself the pleasures of any literature or song. Absurdity would enter only if the girls singing 'Loch Lomond' pretended to be Scottish. Trinidadians know this; those who wish to wear the kilt do so only in Scotland. To the Trinidadian mind, however, no absurdity attaches to the pretence of being American in Trinidad; and while much energy has been spent in the campaign against Wordsworth, no one has spoken out against the fantasy which Trinidadians live out every day of their lives.

They can never completely identify themselves with what they read in magazines or see in films. Then frustration can only deepen for their minds are closed to everything else. Reality is always separate from the ideal; but in Trinidad this fantasy is a form of masochism and is infinitely more cheating than the fantasy which makes the poor delight in films about rich or makes the English singer use an American accent. It is the difference between the Emily Post Inst.i.tute advice on dating, published in the Trinidad Guardian ('The man must call for his date at her house'), and the calypso by Sparrow: Tell your sister to come down, boy.

I have something here for she.

Tell she is Mr Benwood d.i.c.k,

The man from Sangre Grande.

She know me well. I give she already.

Mm. She must remember me. Go on, go on.

Tell she Mr Benwood come.

The Negro in the New World was, until recently, unwilling to look at his past. It seemed to him natural that he should be in the West Indies, that he should speak French or English or Dutch, dress in the European manner or in adaptation of it, and share the European's religion and food. Travel-writers who didn't know better spoke of him as a 'native', and he accepted this: 'This is my island in the sun,' Mr Harry Belafonte sings, 'where my people have toiled since time begun.' Africa was forgotten. What was more astonis.h.i.+ng, it had been, from the early days of slavery and long before the European scramble for Africa, a reminder of shame, when one might have expected that in secret legends it would have been a mythical land of freedom and bliss. But that was the vision of Blake, not of the Negroes in the New World, apart from a few like the rebellious soldier Dagga in Trinidad in 1834, whose intention was to walk east until he got back to Africa. In 1860, twenty-six years after the abolition of slavery, Trollope wrote: But how strange is the race of creole Negroes a of Negroes, that is, born out of Africa! They have no country of their own, yet they have not hitherto any country of their adoption. They have no language of their own, nor have they as yet any language of their adoption; for they speak their broken English as uneducated foreigners always speak a foreign language. They have no idea of country, and no pride of race. They have no religion of their own, and can hardly as yet be said to have, as a people, a religion by adoption. The West Indian Negro knows nothing of Africa except that it is a term of reproach. If African immigrants are put to work on the same estate with him, he will not eat with them, or drink with them, or walk with them. He will hardly work beside them, and regards himself as a creature immeasurably the superior of the newcomer.

This was the greatest damage done to the Negro by slavery. It taught him self-contempt. It set him the ideals of white civilization and made him despise every other. Deprived as a slave of Christianity, education and family, he set himself after emanc.i.p.ation to acquire these things; and every step on the road to whiteness deepened the anomaly of his position and increased his vulnerability. 'He burns to be a scholar,' Trollope observed, with an unusual insensitivity, 'puzzles himself with fine words, addicts himself to religion for the sake of appearances, and delights in aping the little graces of civilization.' Everything in the white world had to be learned from scratch, and at every stage the Negro exposed himself to the cruelty of the civilization which had overpowered him and which he was mastering. 'These people marry now,' a white lady said to Trollope in Jamaica. 'In the tone of her voice,' he comments, 'I thought I could catch an idea that she conceived them in doing so to be trenching on the privileges of their superiors.'

Yet to the West Indian there has never been any anomaly.

It is necessary [writes Dr Hugh Springer in a recent Caribbean Quarterly] to see ourselves in perspective as far as we can, and to recognize that ours is not a separate civilization, but a part of that great branch of civilization that is called Western civilization. At any rate this is where we begin our national life. Our culture is rooted in Western Culture and our values, in the main, are the values of the Christian-h.e.l.lenic tradition. What are the characteristics of that tradition? They can be summed up in three words a virtue, knowledge and faith a the Greek ideals of virtue and knowledge and the Christian faith.

This, with its unintentional irony, its ignoring of the squalid history of the region, is a good Empire Day exhortation; not surprisingly, for this willingness to forget and ignore is part of the West Indian fantasy. Surely the words of Trollope and the white lady of Jamaica can give the West Indian a better perspective on his situation.