Look into the eyes
Shiva Naipaul
'Move, lemme get me share They beating Grenadians down in the Square Lemme pelt a lash, lemme get a share They beating Grenadians down Woodford Square...
Way back in the early Sixties, Grenad- ians were making news in Trinidad. The problem at the time — about which the calypsonian (Lord Blakie) was singing was illegal immigration. We in Trinidad felt that our small and overcrowded island was being overrun. Ugly rumours started to spread about the behaviour and personal habits of these unfortunate people. We began to fear the subversion of our entire cultural heritage and trembled at the changes being wrought in the character of our slum areas. Some of the methods used to identify the intruders could be a little cavalier. According to Lord Blakie, a suspect might be asked to say 'hog'. If he said 'hag' no mercy was shown. 'It was,' Blakie sang, 'straight in the police van'. I know how easy it would be to criticise the naiveté of the Trinidadian police. Pause, however, before you do so. Twenty years later, echoes of a similar approach to the task of identification can be detected among the island's liberators. 'You look in- to their eyes, sir,' a staff-sergeant of the Marines told a Sunday Times 'front line' reporter, 'and see if they are hostile to the United States. You can see it, sir.' Life sure can get tough. Yessir!
Trinidad, a large island by Eastern Carib- bean standards and a comparatively rich one (we have oil), has always attracted im- migrants from the smaller, impoverished islands to the north. Grenada, being nearest, has traditionally been the major source of this influx. Like all immigrants, the Grenadians were despised. They did, though, have their triumphs. Trinidad's most famous calypsonian, the Mighty Spar- row, was born in Grenada — but it is an aspect of his past which he has never stress- ed and which Trinidadians prefer to ignore. We considered ourselves immeasurably superior to those benighted 'small islanders' who, skulking ashore off leaky inter-island schooners, kept on surfacing among us in search of menial jobs and the more cosmopolitan excitements afforded by our wealth and our much larger multi-racial population. Generally — despite the periodic bouts of ineffectual persecution they were tolerated; objects of an in- dulgent, harmless contempt. The Govern- ment, with one eye on the racial politics of the island, saw in these negro immigrants a useful reservoir of anti-Indian votes. Our middle classes saw a useful reservoir of domestic servants. The Grenadian, simple anxious to please, insecure, was considered ideal for this kind of work, altogether more suitable than the indigenous, indolent equivalent. Nowadays (so I am told) Guyanese, fleeing their bleak, South American homeland, have displaced the Grenadians.
In the immediate aftermath of the break- up of the West Indian Federation in 1961 (a Jamaican-inspired debacle), Trinidad's relations with Grenada took a new and curious twist. The idea was bruited that, together with Tobago, the three islands should form what was called a unitary state. As ever, politics being politics, this was sug- gested with one eye on the racial structure of Trinidadian politics., It was, even so, an arresting proposition, one not to be casual- ly dismissed. Nevertheless, it was doomed never to get beyond the stage of hazy theorising because, with the disintegration of the Federation and the heady scent of disparate autonomies pervading the Carib- bean chaos, the times were no longer pro- pitious. For, in each of the units of the dead Federation, petty baronies were already taking shape. These were in no mood lightly to surrender the opportunities that might soon be theirs. The British had lost their taste for Empire and were in an inde- cent haste to cut and run. All the barons had to do was affect a seemly patience. Decentralisation might be a fashionable political cry. In the Caribbean, that collec- tion of 'haggard primadonnas' (so General de Gaulle once described the islands), bankrupt relicts of the sugar boom of the 18th century, decentralisation was a foreshadowing of disaster. As is well known, those who will not hang together shall be hanged separately. Grenada's political fortunes have evolved since then along not entirely incoherent lines. What has happened on the island over the last two decades could, with equal facility and depressingly similar results, have occurred in any of half a dozen Carib- bean states. It has in fact been threatening to happen in several of them. Think of Jamaica, under the rule of Michael Manley, declining into a passable semblance of civil war. Or of the Guyana of Forbes Burnham, long surrendered to a caricature of the democratic process, of fake Third World_ militancy and of political murder. Or of Trinidad, whose army mutinied under the influence of Black Power ideologues. Or of the Bahamas, wallowing in the corruptions of the narcotics trade. Or of Anguilla: which broke away from its 'unifan statehood with St Kitts and Nevis and onlY narrowly escaped falling under the domina" tion of certain exotic 'business' interests. Or, even, of Dominica (whose Prime Minister, Eugenia Charles, has played such a conspicuous role in recent events) where lawlessness in the guise of Rastafarianism overran extensive tracts of that wild and mountainous island - the setting for Jean Rhys's memorable novel, Wide Sargasso Sea.
The list is long and could be extended. Each unit of the mutilated whole is a waif; each is adrift and afraid, vulnerable to predators from within and without. Grenada's tragedy is simply that the pattern of events enacted there within the last week or two finally reached a sort of apocalyptic completeness. The failure is not only a local one. It shows up the shabbiness and emp- tiness of the colonial past; a colonial past tawdrily and cynically disowned by the Common Market present, whose visions of responsibility focus narrowly on atavistic images of 'kith and kin'; on the blood ties of the primal tribe.
For some years after the break-up of the Federation, Grenadians were in thrall to a handsome lunatic, Eric Gairy, a self- declared Rosicrucian who once lectured the UN on UFOs. His hired killers, recruited from the island's jails, terrorised opponents of the regime. Gairy being fiercely anti- Communist, his opponents naturally tend- ed to be left-wing. It was under his Patronage that a so-called Medical School was set up for American students who weren't good enough to gain admission to the universities back home. Another mes- sianic lunatic also showed interest in Grenada around this time — a preacher from Indiana called Jim Jones. Fortunately for Grenada, Jones was to discover a more spacious and secluded paradise in Guyana. Had Gairy survived, Grenada would have recreated on its soil a petty Duvalierism, If that had been its fate, everyone would have been reasonably content because Gairy would have been a menace to no one except his fellow Grenadians—just as Forbes Burn- ham in Guyana is a threat to no one except the Guyanese. Certainly, the deeply felt need to invade, to restore law and order and democracy and all other good things, would not have so afflicted Washington. What it has tolerated for generations in Haiti, it would also have tolerated for generations in Grenada. Political murder is not in itself objectionable to Ronald Reagan. He was, after all, prepared to go and be feted by the Marcos menage even after the killing of the Opposition leader at Manila airport. If Garry had managed to cling to power we would have been spared Reagan's all too muscular altruism.
That, alas, was not to be. Grenada, lur- ching into coup d'etat, was to take another fatal step along the post-colonial road. It was inevitable that Maurice Bishop and his associates in the New Jewel Movement, nurtured in the radical atmosphere of the late Sixties and early Seventies, should have espoused an amalgam of Black Power and Marxism; that Havana should have provid- ed their tutelary deities. One can argue that, even granted all this, Grenada's threat was still mainly to itself. Admittedly, the Duvalierist state had transformed itself overnight into a 'revolutionary' state; ad- mittedly, the Grenadian leaders were now issuing joint communiques with Moscow; admittedly, a rather larger airport was be- ing built. But the Caribbean operates at a high level of fantasy. The obsession with Carnival is only the most obvious symptom of this frailty. And, to save the day, there was the coup within the coup. Admittedly, a most distasteful business. Nevertheless, in General Austin, Grenada was not aquiring an even more 'hard-line' Marxist-Leninist. We really are in trouble when we start to believe in other people's fantasies. Grenada, through all the blood and mayhem, was merely reverting to a more recognisable image of itself: it was falling into the hands of a black dictator modelled on the Burnhamite pattern — a man of raw power, beyond the reach of ideology, devoted to compromise and survival.
Look into the eyes and you will see.
© Shiva Naipaul 1983
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