"The name"s Winter," my American said, holding out a blotched and surprisingly large hand. Hearing his accent against the pastor"s, I realized how exaggeratedly southern Mr Winter"s was.
We climbed up the bank. The mission, a complex of wooden buildings set in a circle, stood on a slope, at the end of a large clearing still spiky with tree stumps which suggested devastation rather than development. Large rocks, such as one had seen on the river, were embedded in the earth. In two or three places tree roots were burning: flameless, with thick white smoke.
The Americans appeared to be having an effect on one another. Mr Winter, no longer so solicitous about his parcels, was drawling on steadily and indistinctly as though getting rid of the talk he had bottled up for the last two days. The pastor"s manner became heartier and his accent more pungent. He invited us to dinner and said he wished he could do more for us.
"If my wife wasn"t sick," he said, "we would have welcomed you in our home."
Abruptly Mr Winter"s droning ceased. When the pastor, explaining, spoke casually of yellow fever, Mr Winter looked around as if for his polythene sacks. His face went surly again, and he said he didn"t like using other people"s rations.
We were to share a room in a rough unfinished wooden house that still smelled acridly of new tropical cedar. The pastor strung up my hammock. It gave me a little pleasure to find that for all his polythene sacks Mr Winter had no hammock. He had a pallia.s.se and the only thing on which he could spread this was a low work-bench which was a foot or so shorter than himself. Stowing away his sacks, self-reliant once more, he dismissed the pastor"s regrets, and it was like an urgent dismissal of the pastor.
I wanted to go for a swim before the sun set. The pastor said the water was too cold for the saw-toothed perai, and in guarantee of this offered to walk down to the river with me. I was interested by the huge rocks in the ground. They were neatly runnelled, as though turned out from a mould a the effects of water, I supposed a and these runnels were set in similar but vaster excisions which indicated a previous grandeur and wildness. I asked the pastor about the age of the rocks. He said that the Adventists had dispensed with the "rigmarole of geologists"; the world was six thousand years old. The water was brown-black; and it was terrifying at dusk, in the forest silence, to dive into this liquid blackness. You didn"t see the blackness. You felt your eyes were closed; you were in a void.
Lights burned here and there in the houses at the foot of the black forest wall. The burning tree stumps glowed; their crackles carried. Our unfinished room was in darkness. Mr Winter had made his bed a it looked the size of a crib a and tented it with his mosquito net. He was having some coffee and sandwiches by the light of his electric torch. I took a sip of whisky, went over to the house of one of the Negro teachers a bookcases with religious books and schoolbooks, the family (including grandmother) eating silently at an oilcloth-covered table a and borrowed a lantern. Remembering my whisky breath, I asked the teacher whether smoking was forbidden. Grandmother looked at me. The teacher said the pastor was tolerant, but wondered whether I wouldn"t like to take this opportunity to stop. I promised to try, and hurried away with the lantern.
"Why, thenk you," Mr Winter said. He was sitting on the edge of his bed, in complete darkness, fiddling with a transistor radio.
The pastor"s house, painted and grand from the outside, with a low white wooden fence, was pioneer-rough inside. It smelled comfortingly of fresh paint: comfortingly, because Mr Winter had mumbled about the contagiousness of yellow fever. The pastor"s family a pretty daughter, freckle-faced blond boys, and even little Deborah Sue, who brought out her doll, her doll"s pram and her teddy bear a was what, from books, films and American tourists, one expected an American family to be. Only their vegetarianism was unexpected. We had a nut meal out of a tin, biscuits, soursop; and we drank milk.
"You haven"t given me enough," the younger boy said, when the nut was being served.
"Hey," said the pastor rallyingly, "you are supposed not to like this stuff, remember?"
The pastor told me the mission had been started twenty-five years before at the foot of Mount Roraima on the Venezuelan side of the border. When the authorities, under Roman Catholic pressure, asked them to leave, they came over the border to British Guiana, and the Amerindians followed.
We were in the region of the world"s greatest waterfalls a the highest, in Venezuela, was some 3,000 feet a and the pastor thought I might like to go to the Utshi falls. At seven hundred feet Utshi was unimportant, no higher than Kaieteur, but it was only six hours away.
On the way back from the pastor"s I stopped at the Negro teacher"s. He had a Chinese boy with him, one of my neighbours in the unfinished house. Neither of them liked the idea of the walk to Utshi. They spoke of snakes, tigers and wild hogs. Wild hogs hunted in packs and the only way to escape was to race up a tree, and the straight branchless trees of the forest weren"t easy to climb. I remembered a vivid story by a Guianese writer in which a boy had been attacked by wild hogs and eaten from the feet up, eaten so swiftly that he didn"t collapse and appeared only to be growing shorter.
Earlier that day, in the Kamarang dispensary, I had asked Dr Talbot about conditions at Paruima. "City life," he said disapprovingly.
"With juke boxes playing only hymns," I said. Agrippa had laughed, but Dr Talbot said, "No llames bocazas al cocodrilo hasta que cruzes el rio. Don"t call the crocodile big-mouth until you cross the river." But I wasn"t far wrong, for I was awakened in the morning by the raucous hymn-singing of the Chinese boy in the next room. So it went on all day: people humming only hymns, and the Chinese boy bursting into loud devotional song at all moments.
After so much talk about contagious diseases I woke up feeling slightly unwell, aching all over, besides, from my night-long struggle with the hammock. Mr Winter had also spent an uncomfortable night in his tented crib, trying to sleep with his knees drawn up.
"Why, good morning," he said miserably, sitting on the edge of his bed in his underclothes. "How a did a you a make a out a in a your a hammock?" He spoke so slowly that I strained for the words, always expecting the next one to be very important. "I remember," he went on, "the first time I slept in a hammock."
I stopped tying my shoelaces and listened.
"It was-"
I waited.
"-pretty difficult."
I didn"t feel easier when the Chinese boy said he too had had yellow fever, or when Palmer came over from the village and said Dr Talbot wasn"t very well. Mr Winter and I drew closer together. I became as fanatical a water-boiler as he, and even this was not wholly rea.s.suring, for we had to use the mission kettle and the communal mission range. I abandoned my good resolutions and throughout the day took prophylactic sips of whisky. Mr Winter didn"t accept my whisky; instead, he took certain pills and secretly and constantly drank hot coffee. "I sure do like a cup of coffee," he said, when he was on his tenth or twelfth cup.
In the mission they were preparing for the Sat.u.r.day sabbath, cooking and baking in advance. The mission store was full of Amerindians, among them the boatmen, waiting to be paid and to spend their pay. Downstairs, among the mammoth banana bunches that grew in this part of the world, a man was strumming the guitar. He was a Spanish-speaking Amerindian from Santa Helena in Venezuela. We talked a little and then he followed me wherever I went, speaking only when spoken to and at other times simply enjoying our silent communion.
Mr Winter had spent the morning collecting samples of earth, which he had laid out on squares of white paper on the narrow carpenter"s work-shelf in our room. This, I learned, was the purpose of his visit. "This soil is mighty interesting," he said, his voice touched with what was almost glee. "Mighty interesting."
When, for want of a chair, I was lying in my hammock in the afternoon, the Negro woman from the adjoining room called out to me to look at the monkeys in the trees at the edge of the clearing. And there, indeed, they were, squeaking and jumping about. "They always come out at this time," the woman said. She wasn"t Guianese; she came from one of the islands; her husband was studying to be a minister. After I had confessed I was not a Christian, we talked about religion. She had once met a Hindu and had noted the great difference between Hindu views and Adventist views: the Adventists, for example, believed that the world was made in six literal days. They didn"t use tea or coffee because these drinks contained caffeine. Someone on the mission had tried using "Postum", saying it had no caffeine, but the pastor had put a stop to that. She boiled some water for me, and I also asked for a little sugar. Then, remembering what she had said about the sickness at the mission ("You got to be careful. Only those who mix have been ill" a a remark which had unexpected racial undertones) I didn"t use the sugar, though I played with it to suggest that I had used a little. Instead, I opened my tin of condensed milk.
Later that afternoon I took a dip in the river. Mr Winter came down, in shorts, with his bucket, and threw water over himself. Some Amerindian women were washing clothes on one of the river rocks. I thought them picturesque, but they left Mr Winter more worried than ever. He said he thought the whole river was polluted. We walked back gloomily through the darkness to our room. There was no escape from Paruima except by the mission launch, and that was leaving in four days. For dinner I had processed cheese and a cup of coffee, the boiling water provided by Mr Winter. The Chinese boy was singing hymns loudly. Our lantern had no oil, and when I went over to the Negro teacher"s to get some, I found the whole family singing hymns. Lightless lantern in hand, I waited on the steps, watching the night fall over the clearing, the tree stumps glowing, gaining colour, the pastor"s house brilliant with light.
By eight, in the lantern"s glim, we had settled down, I in my hammock, Mr Winter in his crib, and we talked about the walk to Utshi, which I was starting on Sunday, after the Sat.u.r.day sabbath. I had spoken to Palmer about the wild hogs. He said he had once run into a herd; the Guianese with him had fled in terror and damaged themselves trying to scale unscaleable trees, while he, who hadn"t heard the horror stories, had taken out his camera and photographed the herd as it ran past on either side of him: his mother lived in the home counties and liked to receive photographs of tropical forest and wild life.
"I sure wish I was coming with you," Mr Winter said, at intervals. "Sure wish I was. But I"m too old. I would keep you back. I always fool around for the first hour or two. Let everybody else go ahead. I just go foo-lin" around till I get my second wind. Say, do you know what"s good for energy on these walks? Parched corn. In Ecuador I always carried around some of that parched corn. Fool around. Eat a handful of parched corn. Fool around. Eat another handful of parched corn. Until I got my second wind. That was how I did it in Ecuador. I would keep you back, though. Sure wish I was coming. Seems a pity to come so far and not see those falls. Say, would you do me a favour? Could you send me a photograph of those falls?"
Sat.u.r.day at the mission did feel like Sunday, with everyone in his sabbath clothes and very little going on. The Chinese boy remained in his room and sang l.u.s.tily. Mr Winter offered me some ham for breakfast, and it was at last my turn to decline. He wanted to know why. I explained my semi-vegetarian upbringing, and he said that he himself didn"t drink for religious reasons.
"We sure have made life complicated," he said. "You think they"d mind if I cooked some of this ham on their range? These people sure do mind if you do things they don"t approve of."
"I believe they do," I said. "And when I think of all my smoking-"
"And all my coffee." His mouth opened slightly and a smile of pure mischief spread over his cracked face. "But I sure do like a cup of coffee. Want some now?"
Afterwards we walked over to the village and to our relief found Dr Talbot drawing teeth. His own teeth were off and he was in excellent spirits; he had only had a cold. Most of the Amerindians were at Sabbath School. Many of the men were in serge trousers and one or two wore suits. In an unfinished, still skeletal wooden house two youths were playing Sparrow calypsos on a gramophone.
At the mission in the evening the pastor"s sister put on an open-air show of colour slides and the Amerindians came over from the village, white figures strung along the forest road and mission grounds, everyone with his electric torch, so that when dusk turned to night the procession became one of bobbing lights. The early slides were of Holland. The audience gasped to see houses choked together, and there were exclamations of incredulity and pity when the pastor"s sister explained through an interpreter, proud retailer of marvels, that the tiny front garden was all the land most Dutch people had. Then came slides of Paruima itself. The audience laughed at every scene or face they knew. When the Negro teachers appeared on the screen, their features indistinct, the Amerindians played their torches on the faces as if to light them up. The intent was derisory, and disquieting.
The walk to Utshi was made awkward only by the mud and by the single logs over gullies that were sometimes rocky and steep. The Amerindian boys with me ran lightly over the logs; I straddled them. Wild life was regrettably scarce. We saw only the tracks of wild hogs, and Lucio and Nicolas, grinning, made noises to attract them. "Snake!" Lucio cried once, when I had seen nothing. He cut a sapling, trimmed it, used it to beat the snake three or four times, without malice, and then threw the snake out of the way. The track was at times visible only to the boys and towards the end led over a chaos of fallen tree trunks. We heard the falls, had a glimpse of them through the tops of the tall trees and then, abruptly, we were out of the forest and in the open: Nature, already grand, grown grander, the falls set in the middle of a vast curving stone wall, a single, small tree at the top, fine spray over everything, the gra.s.s thick and springy and waist-deep, the spray billowing out of the booming gorge like smoke. Lucio went down to the rapids, and when I saw him again he was in blue bathing trunks, climbing up the side of the rocky gorge, getting as close as he could to the falls. At its upper levels the gorge, though k.n.o.bbed and torred, was covered with gra.s.s and looked as lush as pasture land. Nicolas went down after Lucio. They gave scale to the boulders of the scree and the sheer stone wall.
Later, beside the Utshi River, they half-built a leaf hut. They did this only at my insistence (it was getting late, but they were after all costing me three dollars a day each). I went swimming naked in the river, having undressed before them. They, more modestly, dressed and undressed away from me. Then we ate. They took all that I offered, without delight or displeasure, without comment; and then they took out their ca.s.sava bread and opened tins of sardines and made what they clearly regarded as a real meal. They showed more interest in my whisky bottle. "Is that rum, sir?" "No." "Whisky?" "No. It"s something I use for insect bites." Lucio pa.s.sed his tongue over his top lip.
Around the fire, the river noise at our backs, we talked. Lucio was seventeen; he wanted to learn French. I gave him a few words and he spoke them with a good accent. But general conversation wasn"t easy. It seemed they had a limited conception of time: they could grasp the immediate but could neither look far back nor look ahead. If what I had heard at Kamarang was true, it is only alcohol a and alcohol to which he is unaccustomed a that stimulates the Amerindian"s time sense. Lucio could tell me little of himself or of his family, except that his father was dead.
"How did he die?" And I instantly regretted the question, because I knew the answer and didn"t want to hear it.
"Kanaima kill him," Lucio said, and threw a stick on the fire.
He didn"t think of the future. Of course he would like to get married, but he didn"t want an Amerindian girl, and who else would marry him? "Indian girls not good. They don"t know anything."
The missionary must first teach self-contempt. It is the basis of the faith of the heathen convert. And in these West Indian territories, where the spiritual problem is largely that of self-contempt, Christianity must be regarded as part of the colonial conditioning. It was the religion of the slave-owners and at first an exclusive racial faith. It bestowed righteousness on its possessors. It enabled the Dutch in Guiana to divide their population into Christians and Negroes: the Berbice slave rebellion of 1762 was a war between Christians and rebels. The captured rebels were tried for "Christian murder", and it is instructive to read of the death of Atta, the rebel chief: Five of them were afterwards burnt with small fire, or rather, roasted, and continually nipped with pincers; and another stood on the wood-heap and died at once. After this the fire was slowly lighted around Atta so that his agonies should last longer; through which it happened then, that notwithstanding they kindled the fire at eleven o"clock; he still remained alive half-an-hour later. It was a matter of surprise that they all let themselves be burnt, broken on the wheel, hanged, etc., without shrieking or moaning. The only thing that Atta said was to the Governor, frequently calling out in his negro language, "My G.o.d, what have I done? The Governor is right. I suffer what I have deserved. I thank him!" This was the end of that renowned monster whose blood-thirstiness and cruelty brought about the death of so many Christians and the almost irreparable destruction of this Colony.
Even while I was in Georgetown reading this account by Hartsinck of the Berbice slave-rebellion, Christians in British Guiana were protesting at the government"s plan to take over control of aided schools. Christianity was in danger in British Guiana. Ma.s.s meetings of the descendants of Atta"s rebels were held; a missionary wrote to Time magazine. So quickly have the postures been adopted, the cries of the jehad; so quickly has recent history been forgotten. And this history remains important. Although since emanc.i.p.ation Christianity has a.s.serted itself and has in many ways rescued the colonial society from utter corruption, it has not lost its racial a.s.sociations, its a.s.sociation with power and prestige and progress. The ministers of G.o.d, like the senior administrators of the civil service, were expected to be white; it is only of late that the white collars of church and civil service have begun to set off a certain nigrescence. The striving towards the now accommodating faith of an unaccommodating race has inevitably created deep psychological disturbances. It has confirmed the colonial in his role as imitator, the traveller who never arrives. "Indian girls not good. They don"t know anything." In his att.i.tude to his people, Lucio spoke not only for the Amerindian convert but also for the East Indian. As for the descendants of Atta"s rebels, it is the cardinal article of their faith.
I was glad I had insisted about the hut, for it began to rain during the night: a pleasant noise on the sheltering leaves. "Excuse me, sir," I heard Lucio say. "Can Nicolas and I move our hammocks here?" They had been sleeping in the open; and it was astonishing to see them in pyjamas as in the morning to find them pulling out toothbrushes and tubes of Colgate.
On the way back we came upon an old Amerindian bowed down under an enormous load in his warishi carrier. Frustratingly, the packing cases were Heineken beer cartons; and the whole load was topped with a brand-new panama hat. Quite half an hour later we met the rest of his family crossing a rocky riverbed: two very old women and two girls, all barefooted, all carrying loads. One of the women held a rum bottle containing a white liquid labelled "The Mixture". The forest appeared to be full of Amerindians that morning. A little later, at a cool shallow stream that ran over rocks as large and flat as paving stones, we found the guitar-player from Santa Helena resting with his family and dog on the high dry rocks beside the bank. They were going back to Santa Helena: the walk would take a week. They had built a fire on one rock, and the guitar-player, who wore a knife-chain, shoes and socks, was using his knife to make a sort of warishi for his two cardboard suitcases. He asked for a cigarette. Then, suddenly in the Amerindian way, he left, the dog tremulously following through the shallow but swift stream and frantically wagging his tail when after two failures he managed to climb up to the other bank.
Nearing Paruima, we came out of the forest into a clearing, where a low crumbling mud hut was set in a small cultivation of giant plantain trees and clumps of giant sugarcane. A family was sitting in the sun in the yellow dirty yard. The young girl and the women, in dirty sack-like cotton dresses, fled to the darkness of the hut. Two tiny pink rubber dolls were left on the ground among bits of chewed sugarcane. The man, relaxed in the dirt, was eating sugarcane: he bit, chewed, sucked, swallowed, spat out. We exchanged greetings and walked on. When the hut was about fifty yards behind, Lucio said, "Would you wait for me here?" They had been invited to a meal. We walked back. The boys took off their warishis and sat down on low benches in the yard. The women put a grater on the ground, a straw mat on the grater, and ca.s.sava bread on the mat. They brought out various enamel pots: one with vegetables in an oily stew, one with dasheen, one with black-eye peas. Lucio and Nicolas used pieces of ca.s.sava bread as dippers and ate from the pots. Then from another pot and with great contentment they drank a thick white liquid. Their hosts looked on approvingly, the man laughing and chattering in the yard, the women standing silent in the hut. I was given bananas and sugarcane.*
"Why, h.e.l.lo there!" Mr Winter called, as I came up the hillside. And he was at once full of questions. What about the wild hogs? The logs over the gullies? (The Chinese boy had spoken of these logs and I believe had frightened Mr Winter as much as he had frightened me.) Were the boys all right? Did they ever leave me behind? Was I tired when I got there? How long did it take me to get my second wind?
"It took you two hours, did it? That"s the way I woulda done it. Just foo-lin" along for those two hours. Say, what was the water like up there? White or black? I sure have had enough of this black water. With all this washing that"s been going on, the whole river"s polluted for sure." He gave me a little of his news. He had rowed some distance up the river and found a white-water stream. So he had at last had a proper bathe. "Say, do you know this yellow fever they"ve been going on about? I don"t think it"s yellow fever at all. It"s hepat.i.tis."
I didn"t know the word.
"You"re lucky. I once knew a man who had hepat.i.tis. They"ve had twelve cases. And that"s enough for a fair-sized town. I know it"s bad not eating their food and things like that. But if I ask you to my home in the U-nited States a and I would love to have you a and if I had hepat.i.tis, I wouldn"t ask you to my home. I would take you out to a restaurant or something." The pastor"s dinner invitation still rankled. "Do you know," he added conspiratorially, "I boil the water even in my hotel in Georgetown? Boil it and put it in the fridge. To cool."
In the next room the Negro teacher and the Chinese boy were talking about boiled eggs. Food seemed to be on everybody"s mind.
When I got out of my hammock in the morning Mr Winter was dressed and packed. His mosquito net had been taken down and was doubtless in one of his polythene sacks. We had coffee; and, waiting for the launch, we talked about the water problem and the sanitation problem.
"They"re gonna have one h.e.l.l of a sanitation problem. Right now that latrine smells and has so many flies. I don"t know what it"s going to be like when they get those twenty-five boys they"ve been talking about. Twenty-five boys in full spate. Boy, they"re gonna have a problem."
By eleven o"clock there was no sign of the launch. We made more coffee. Sipping it, tasting the black river water, we spoke of the deliciousness of pure, tasteless water. I offered the pawpaw the pastor had given me from one of his own trees.
"No, thenk you! Never touch soft fruit."
But he took one of the Amerindian"s bananas. We ate slowly, without speaking. The banana didn"t help thirst or the craving for fresh water.
"You know," he said after some time, "you know a I sure don"t like to mention it now a but you know those cans of Trinidad orange juice? Those large cans with the black-and-orange label? I sure would like to have one now. The next time I come on one of these trips I"m gonna stock up with those cans. They"re heavy, but they"re really worth it."
It was while I was negotiating for one of the mission"s over-large, over-ripe coconuts that the launch was announced. We ran down to the river, got into the open launch, and sat. There were delays. The sun was hot, the water dazzling and there was no breeze.
"I suppose," Mr Winter said a and now I admired him for his control a "I suppose now they"ll go on to the village and fool around there a little."
So indeed they did, and after a while we joined them. There we saw the reason for the delay: a new single-engined aeroplane on the landing field across the river from the village. It belonged to the mission and had just arrived, piloted by an American in green trousers and a green shirt, with the Portuguese pilot from Kamarang Mouth as pa.s.senger. It was now half past one and extremely hot. I spoke to Palmer about crops, but without enthusiasm. Even if we started right away it was now too late for us to get to Kamarang Mouth that day. We could travel on the river only by daylight and would have to spend the night at the Amerindian village half-way down. Then the pastor suggested that we should go back to Kamarang Mouth on the plane.
Half an hour later, after a view of the perverse windings and loops of the Kamarang over which we would have spent a day, the Portuguese and American talking all the way of planes and routes just as other men talk of cars and bypa.s.ses, we were at Kamarang Mouth.
I loaded an Amerindian boy with my bags and almost ran to Seggar"s refrigerator. I had two beers, the first quickly, the second slowly. Feeling the cold wet bottle in my hand, I luxuriated in the heat. For the first time for days tobacco had a taste. I inhaled deeply and swallowed and gazed down the Mazaruni to where Roraima was hidden by haze. When I went over to the rest house I found Mr Winter lying on his back across the bed, his feet dangling, his hat unhinged without being off, a fulfilled, beatific expression on his face. He raised a languid hand and pointed to the table.
On it I saw a tin of Trinidad orange juice.
"There it is," he said. "Left some for you."
I didn"t tell him about the beer. But the orange juice he had left scarcely came to an inch in a tumbler.
"Oh, by the way," he said, when I had emptied the tin, "drink as much of that as you can. Drink it all. I"ve had my share."
An hour or so later, when calm had returned to both of us and we were preparing once more to leave a a Dakota was coming in unexpectedly and would take us that very afternoon to the coast a Mr Winter said, "That orange juice sure was good." A smile broke and spread slowly over his face. "Drunk more than my fair share." He started to laugh. "Drunk more than half. Nearly drunk out the whole can. Did you get much?"
I showed him how much.
"Gee, I sure am sorry about that." But he was smiling. "It just looks like I drunk more than my fair share." I confessed about my beer.
"It sure did taste good. Boy! I am sure looking forward to getting back to Georgetown. I"ve got two bottles in the fridge. Boiled. Keeping in the fridge for one whole week. Two bottles. As soon as I get back I"m gonna drink an awful lot of water."
"No beer?"
"Never touch alcohol. But I sure love water."
* For the Hollywood-style stories of Ben Hart and other Rupununi characters the reader is recommended to consult Michael Swan"s The Marches of El Dorado.
* "The aforesaid Indians having brought the expedition to a close, sixty or seventy of them, armed with bow-and-arrow, returned to Dageraat to report to the Governor, saying that they had scoured the forests throughout, finding eleven Negroes whom they had killed, in proof of which they produced a little stick with as many nicks cut in it, and asking for some reward. The Governor gave their captains, six in number, each a piece of salamfore, two jugs of rum, some mirrors and other gee-gaws as a present, with which, being quite satisfied, they returned upcountry." The Story of the Slave Rebellion in Berbice a 1762, by J.J. Hartsinck (Amsterdam, 1770). Translated by Walter E. Roth. Published in the Journal of the British Guiana Museum and Zoo, September 1960.
Likewise, though with less success, Moskito Indians from Central America were used to hunt down Maroon slaves in Jamaica in the 1730s.
* In the 1961 elections Dr Jagan won 20 seats, Mr Burnham 11, the United Force four. Some months later there were Negro riots, and after that an American-supported strike. Many people were killed. Dr Jagan was finally defeated by a system of proportional representation.
* Just one week later Mrs Jagan was attacked while she was alone at home.
* These facts, and the quotation, are taken from an article, "The Village Movement", by Allan Young. Mr Young has dealt with the matter more fully in his book, The Approaches to Local Self Government in British Guiana.
* From William Morris: Hark the rolling of the thunder: Lo the sun and lo thereunder Riseth wrath and hope and wonder.
* "Whilst there is no proof that the sugarcane is indigenous in America, it nevertheless can be found in the remotest Amerindian settlements, and of types never now seen on the plantations. These canes probably developed from cuttings obtained from the early settlers." Vincent Roth: "Amerindian Influence on Settlers". Columbus took cane-cuttings to the West Indies on his second voyage.
4. SURINAM.
a The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine. How different are the words home, Christ, ale, master, on his lips and mine! I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit. His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words. My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language.
James Joyce: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man IN 1669 a citizen of the island of Barbados (166 square miles) wrote in a letter of "a place much cried up of late, taken from the Dutch, called New York". The contempt was justified, for even fifty years later Barbados was exporting to England nearly as much as all the American colonies put together. What had happened was that in 1667, by the treaty of Breda, the Dutch had surrendered New York to the British and taken Surinam in exchange. The Dutch thought then they had got the better bargain, and think so still, because, as Dutch school children are taught, the British have lost New York while the Dutch still have Surinam.
Surinam, former Dutch Guiana, lies next door to British Guiana on the north-eastern coast of South America; and although the Corentyne, British Guiana"s easternmost region, and Nickerie, Surinam"s westernmost, have much more in common with one another than with their respective capitals, to fly in one hour from Georgetown to Paramaribo is more unsettling than to fly from London to Amsterdam. For suddenly Holland, almost unknown in Trinidad and British Guiana except as the exporter of beer and powdered milk, becomes important, far more important than England is to Trinidad or British Guiana. It isn"t only the surprise at hearing Negroes and East Indians, to all appearances just like those of British Guiana and Trinidad, speaking Dutch; nor seeing, in a West Indian setting, the Ingang and Uitgang and Niet Rooken and Verboden Toegang signs one had before seen only in Holland; nor the sedate Dutch buildings of the administration in Dr J. C. de Mirandastraat. The talk everywhere is of "Hol-lond" and "Omsterdom". In Surinam Holland is Europe; Holland is the centre of the world. Even America recedes. "The first thing you"ve got to get out of your head," an American official said to me, "is that you"re in Latin America. Why, no shutters even went up over the windows at election time. The most that happened was that some members of the opposition who lost left the country. And they went to Holland." Notwithstanding that since 1955 Surinam has been virtually independent, an equal partner in the Netherlands kingdom with the Netherlands Antilles, New Guinea and Holland itself, Surinam feels only like a tropical, tulip-less extension of Holland; some Surinamers call it Holland"s twelfth province.
Nearly every educated person has been to Holland, and the affection for Holland is genuine. There is none of the racial resentment which the British West Indian brings back from England. The atmosphere is relaxing. With Negroes, East Indians, Dutch, Chinese and Javanese, Surinam has a population more mixed than that of British Guiana and Trinidad. Yet it does not have the racial problems of these territories, though there is inevitably a growing rivalry between the Negroes and the East Indians, the two largest groups. With Dutch realism the Surinamers have avoided racial collision not by ignoring group differences but by openly acknowledging them. The political parties are racial, but the government is a coalition of these parties. Every group is therefore committed to the development of the country. The Dutch complain of Negro hostility, but the complaints, like the demonstrations of hostility, are muted; and in spite of all that has happened in Indonesia and Holland relations between the Dutch and Javanese are cordial.
With no inflammatory political issues, no acute racial problem, and with the Dutch Government contributing two-thirds of the money (one-third gift, one-third loan) for the development of the country, nationalism would seem an unlikely and perverse growth. But a nationalism has arisen which is unsettling the established order, proving that the objection to colonialism in the West Indies is not only economic or political or, as many believe, simply racial. Colonialism distorts the ident.i.ty of the subject people, and the Negro in particular is bewildered and irritable. Racial equality and a.s.similation are attractive but only underline the loss, since to accept a.s.similation is in a way to accept a permanent inferiority. Nationalism in Surinam, feeding on no racial or economic resentments, is the profoundest anti-colonial movement in the West Indies. It is an idealist movement, and a rather sad one, for it shows how imprisoning for the West Indian his colonial culture is. Europe, the Surinam Nationalist says, is to be rejected as the sole source of enlightenment; Africa and Asia are to be brought in as well. But Europe is in the Nationalist"s bones and he feels that Africa and Asia are contemptible and ridiculous. The Dutch language is to be rejected a since "my soul frets in the shadow of his language" a and its place taken by a what? A limited local dialect which used to be called talkie-talkie.
Corly met me off the plane and welcomed me formally on behalf of the Surinam Information Office.
"You are a writer and a poet," he said.
"Not a poet."
"I knew at once it was you. I felt a sort of trembling."
Corly himself was a poet. He had just that day published a at his own expense and in a limited edition of four hundred copies a his second book of poems. He had a parcel of them in his office and promised to give me one as soon as we got to Paramaribo. With Corly at the airport was Theresia, a tall pretty girl of mixed race with beautiful hands and ankles. She, somewhat to my surprise, spoke little English; and as we drove in the moonlight along the straight, smooth American road (built during the war) Corly explained the language problem in Surinam and the general cultural struggle, about which the rest of the world knew nothing. Corly loved Holland, Dutch literature and the Dutch people and was in trouble with the Nationalists for writing in Dutch, and not in the local dialect, on themes that were not specifically of Surinam. Matters had not been made easier for him by the Dutch newspaper Elseviers, which had described his work as "an enriching of Dutch poetry".
It wasn"t late when we got to Paramaribo but the town seemed asleep. We found a pension a the Negro proprietress looked a little startled a and then went on to Corly"s office. On one desk I saw a miniature Surinam flag: five stars, black, brown, yellow, white and red, to represent the various races, linked by an elliptical black line, on a white field. I asked Theresia which star was hers. She pointed uncertainly to the brown star; and, indeed, in one of the handouts which Corly gave me I read: "In a way perhaps the brown star is the star too with a hidden meaning because its colour could represent also a successful experiment, the harmonious blending of many races into a people; the mainstay of the population of Surinam." At last Corly undid a brown paper parcel and pulled out his book. An uncomprehending glance showed that the criticisms of the Nationalists must have had some effect. Surinam was frequently mentioned in the poems. Corly also told me that he had invented a name for the ideal Surinam woman. It was "Surinette", and was the t.i.tle of one of the poems.
Meeting the Press. Perhaps because of his work, Corly believed in the value of publicity and wanted me to have my fair share of it in Surinam. He thought my arrival was news, important enough to make the morning papers; and after we had taken Theresia home he took me to a newspaper office in a quiet palm-lined street. The office stood, I believe, next to a bakery. We went through a side gate and along a pa.s.sage to a small brightly-lit room, where a tall pipe-smoking Dutchman in shirtsleeves, holding proofs and a red pencil, shook my hand with an air of surprise. Corly spoke; the Dutchman replied. We were too late. The paper had gone to press. And true enough, at the end of the cluttered room, beyond some bits of machinery, the paper was printing, a gate-like grill flapping back and forth, printing one side of a sheet at a time. So I didn"t make the morning papers.
It was unfortunate for the British West Indies that British imperialism coincided with a period of poor British architecture. Trollope was appalled by Kingston, but commented: "We have no right perhaps to expect good taste so far away from any school in which good taste is taught; and it may, perhaps, be said by some that we have sins enough of our own at home to induce us to be silent on this head." The Dutch colonies have been luckier in the Dutch; and though Paramaribo is not as handsome as Georgetown, it has a run-down provincial elegance, with its palm-lined streets and dusty side-walks, its close-set wooden houses and their verandaed top floors, its calm main square overlooked by official buildings, the hotel and the club.
In architecture as in so many things these West Indian territories have a mother country fixation, and a compare Rotterdam with any new British town a the results continue to be as disastrous for the British territories as they are happy for the Dutch. Federation Park in Port of Spain is an example of tastlessness which is almost like cynicism; so too are the buildings of the University College of the West Indies in Jamaica. Paramaribo, on the other hand, has half a dozen modern public buildings of which any European city might be proud. But these buildings suggesting the metropolis are incongruous in the heat and dust and afternoon stillness. For Paramaribo is provincial. Paramaribo is dull.