The mimic men - V. S. Naipaul [123]
At this meeting a massive, contradictory but satisfying case was made against me. My private life – my methodical making of money, the racial exclusiveness of my development at Crippleville, my marriage to Sandra, my relationship with Wendy, my escapade with Stella – all this was used to heighten the picture of my public imposture. I had sold out on the nationalization issue; it was my playboy attitude to distress. At the same time my steady advocacy of nationalization, of benefit mainly to Asiatics, had been an attempt to create racial divisions to ensure my own continued power. My attitude to distress had always been equivocal. I had joined the movement, had helped to create it, only to destroy what it stood for. I had even tried to gain control of the police and had secretly recommended that it should remain under British control. It was a massive charge, as I say. In the hysteria of a public meeting it must have been overwhelming. It could not be answered reasonably, and from a position of weakness, because it contained too many points of truth. It could be answered only with a challenge, and from a position of strength.
But no one was interested in my answer. In a month I had thrown away my power. In a month I had been discredited. The newspapers were free, but no one spoke up for me. No restriction of any sort had been placed on me, but no one came to the Roman house and I never left it. We had created drama, an awareness of strength and vulnerability; we had created an unwillingness to offend. My mother came to see me, and my sisters and their children. We splashed about in the swimming-pool. Strange this privacy that had been granted me, whose misdemeanours filled the newspapers. I read them every morning like any other private citizen. I soon ceased to react to the sight of my name; it was no longer something I could attach to myself. I followed the fortunes of others. I read the announcement of Wendy’s engagement in Montreal to someone with a French name. A photograph, affectionately captioned. The medium-visioned, the surviving!
I had written to Browne. He had not replied; and now, reading the newspapers, I felt I had not paid sufficient attention to his silences. He had not been at the public meeting which condemned me. It presently came out that he had not been asked; there were vague suggestions that we were too close. Then I saw that my return to Isabella was not only unnecessary, it was even more irresponsible than my departure had been.
I had already seen Browne, as black folk-leader, incapable of breaking out of that sterile fate, in competition with the faceless men we had made. Whether I had returned or not, that competition would have continued, and at that level. In our movement power was to be redefined, and its true possessors revealed. I was out of the running, for all the newspaper space I occupied. But by returning, by putting myself at the passive centre of events, by being the dandy, the picturesque Asiatic, I gave direction of a sort to the struggle. My presence made the struggle more plausible, made it more than one of personalities. It dictated the terms in which that struggle, irrelevant to myself, was to be fought out; it suggested the way in which faceless men, by creating disorder, might demonstrate their power. And the foreign press, always conventionally sympathetic to proclamations of distress, was approving! What could I do? I had my police guard. I stayed in the Roman house.
For the calamity that came – there is no other word for open racial conflict in a small territory – I must bear much of the responsibility. It was a responsibility that began with that moment of return to the slave island, that moment of morning stillness; it continued to the moment of my final departure. Do not think, the acceptance of guilt being easier than action and in some ways more satisfying, that I seek simply to heap guilt on myself. The faceless men, who out of disorder of this