BOOKS

New Map of Hell

By RONALD BRYDEN

Ttus side of Auschwitz, we can no longer shudder at the statistics of the Middle Passage. Historians of slavery estimate that, in the two centuries when we ruled the Trade, prob- ably no more than twenty million persons traversed that second leg of the triangular ship- Ping-route which fetched Bibles to Benin, sugar and rum from the Indies, and human labour froth the waist of Africa to the New World. The 6 per cent. reckoned to have perished on voyage did so mainly of natural causes—scurvy, typhus or cholera—and were not burned in pits, merely cast to the blue Atlantic (it was only after the trade was outlawed in 1807 that whole cargoes would be jettisoned at sight of a war- snip). True, the men and women shackled Prostrate in those holds were also kept naked, With their heads shaven; but only for reasons of heat and sanitation. On arrival, they were auctioned intact; no skins, so far as we know, were sold for lampshades. Anyway, it all ended 125 years ago. The details have passed Into the history books and can no longer shock us. For that, we must visit the Caribbean.

the do Vic was one of the genteel excursions of .i,'e later torian intellectuals. Both Froude and ki;1311013e travelled through the islands, and -`4ngsley spent a winter in Trinidad—though not, dunfortunately, Carlyle or Tennyson, who led the in efence of Governor Eyre of Jamaica for hang- tlsg hungry rioters in 1865. In later generations. hang- the romance of voodoo, calypso, decaying man- A;ins and green, volcanic scenery has drawn L'e,e Waugh, James Pope-Hennessy and Patrick ,, eIgh Fermor to the necklace of sunken, coral- `‘.1;osted peaks which once joined Florida to G"ezttela. In 1960, on a grant from the Trinidad oovernment, another intellectual—graduate of thxfurd. New Statesman reviewer and one of English—followed e most brilliant young novelists writing in Nri?fish—followed in their footsteps. But V. S. nriatPaol did so with two differences. He travelled F, a rusting Spanish steamer, the Francisco bautoadilla, employed in conveying immigrants in 4ndell„es of 700 from the slums of Port-of-Spain h, Kingston to those of Brixton and Birming- ICI. Also, he was going home : returning for he first time in ten years to the islands where ees.was born, to 'which a century earlier his an- i'°1.8 had been transported from India. e04° his novels, Mr. Naipaul has given us a ei,.,T°Politan exile's view of his homeland: ervIrlsed, ironic, affectionate but detached. A man Ilis the world, he produced in A House for Mr. Incrias, as Colin MacInnes said, the first West Ind," novel to belong not merely to the West pe;ss, but to world literature. In The Middle have he tells for the first time what the islands striki,ineant to him personally. His argument. is are ti'g but straightforward: the West Indies Place ell. Mediwvals imagined the inferno as a circle of static, passive torment : in Dante's

s there is neither marriage nor giving in ---________

(I)e...ru int)LE . tsch, 25s.) PASSAGE. By V. S. Naipaul.

marriage. Mr. Naipaul's conception is more modern. In 'that satanic sea,' as he describes it, everything continues—commerce, usury, social life, courtship and wedlock—removed, however, from any possibility of beauty, value, tenderness or hope. Only the final agony which tortured Paolo and Francesca has been spared, the recollection of lost happiness. The West Indies, says Mr. Naipaul, can measure their degrada-. tion only by report or fantasy of unattainable ways of life elsewhere. Part of their damnation is the burial of all memory the other side of the Middle Passage.

'Nothing was created in the West Indies,' says Mr. Naipaul; no arts, no civilisation. no heroes, not even a revolution.

Such skills were not required by a society which produced nothing, never had to prove its worth. and was never called upon to be efficient. . . . There were only the planta- tations, prosperity, decline, neglect : the size of the islands called for nothing else.

From the beginning the Caribbean was an annex, a subsidiary. It was meant to produce raw materials for Europe—sugar, coffee, cocoa, cot- ton, spice. The production of rawness required no talents or standards, only the cheapest pos- sible labour force. Such labour scarcely required supervision. No European of taste or capacity ever went out to manage the estates; only failures, younger sons, scallawags and remittance men. 'A rodge in England will hardly make a cheater heare,' wrote a seventeenth-century traveller to Barbados, 'a whore if hansume makes a wife for sume rich planter.' Shortly before Mr. Naipaul's return to Trinidad, a fleeing English criminal had spent some months swim- ming to the top of white Port-of-Spain society. becoming a popular diner-out with the best families. 'I'm a second-rater,' said a successful American businessman on the. same island. 'But this is a third-rate place and I'm doing well. Why should I leave?'

Yet Europeans provided the only values the West Indies could know. They boiled down not to a virtue or quality, but a colour—whiteness. In the island society where Mr. Naipaul and I grew up, the course of empire and civilisation was marked in white: white flannels, white dresses for church-going, the white jackets and pith-helmets worn by all clerks and policemen, the rings of whitewaSh, like elephantine bobby- socks, round the feet of the coconut palms out- side all public buildings. To be black was to be damned irretrievably, with no consolation but to pursue a life of fantasy-whiteness, of cricket royalism, peaches-and-cream cosmetics. Today the fantasy has become American, with films stars for idols and barbecues in every backyard. The faces in advertisements are coloured now, but only the palest sepia, under straight, glossy hair, as the model-family clusters smiling round its snowy refrigerator or gas-cooker. For, as Mr. Naipaul describes bitterly, the colour bar which, was once a white invention has filtered outwards into West Indian life, pervading and rotting it -- pale-brown patronising `high'-brown, high- brown despising dark, all shades hating and hated by the Indian minority, with its 'Aryan' features and airs of superiority, as they vie to acquire the niwurs of Wimbledon and White Plains.

The legacy of slavery was self-contempt. Nothing that originates in the West Indies can be honoured there, unless approved, as steel bands and calypsoes have been, by tourists and anthropologists. Restaurants serve chips, bread puddings and imported tinned fruits. Dramatic societies perform Ben Travers and Rattigan (Errol John's prizf-winning Moon on a Rainbow Shawl has been staged in New York and London, not yet in the Caribbean). Mr. Naipaul tells how for the first time, as a tourist, he realised the beauty of tropical landscape: the dance of steel- blue plumes on rolling sugar-cane, the jewel- colours of cocoa-pods in their wet woods, the art-nouveau colonnades of coconut groves criss- crossing the opalescent blaze of beaches and sea. At school in Trinidad he had been too busy memorising Wordsworth's 'Daffodils.'

In British Guiana, he found the wealthy middle classes busily demolishing their lacy old wooden houses, hung with lattices and balconies, to re- place them with cosmopolitan cubes of cement. In Surinam, Dutch-speaking mulatto business- men still mourned the loss of Indonesia. In Mar- tinique, over champagne and cognac, eyes moistened over the loyal welcome given Presi- dent de Gaulle on his last visit. The Jamaican intellectuals talked of Lawrence Durrell and their cars; in the slums a dead mule lay with a broom- stick playfully stuck in its anus. You can feel a despairing weariness come over the book, the chapters growing scrappier, as Mr. Naipaul nears the last of his horrors: a fantastically luxurious Jamaican beach-hotel, whose air-conditioned rooms (£.500 a month per person) exclude all sound of the sea, any whiff of West Indian reality. In Dante's Hell, Virgil's ciceronage was unpaid. The West Indies have made their aban- donment profitable with tourism.

Mr. Naipaul's journey is one to self-knowledge, ruthless and painful; he is too engaged and dis- pirited at the end to generalise his theme. But his book has an importance beyond the personal : it deals in microcosm with one of the modern world's major problems, so new and huge it has scarcely been formulated. Richard Hoggart scratched one corner of it in Uses of Literacy, Genet another in Les Negres. The centralisation of the world which began with Europe's con- quests has intensified with mass production and communications, reducing growing tracts of the earth to suburbia. So far discussion has centred on its symptoms--standardisation of clothing, kitchens, soft-drink advertising. None of this matters—there is nothing wrong with plastics, aluminium or Coca-Cola. What matters is that decisions, values, raison d'etre, are concentrated in fewer and fewer hands and places, while more and more people lead secondhand lives, of no independent meaning or purpose.

The self-contempt of slavery has become the self-depreciation of a global provincialism of the mind, as much in the Middle West and Home Counties as in Asia or Africa. Lives have no 'use,' but they can be wasted by depriving them of

their own goals. We arc wasting more and more, including our own, and it is too late for

nationalism or religion to reverse this. All we can hope for is the ultimate decentralisation, the rebellion of individual minds throughout the derelict, contingent areas of the earth. The brightest prospect for the West Indies and countries like them is the pitying, uncompromis- ing rejection of Mr. Naipaul.