Them Belly Full, But They Hungry

ONCE, WHEN I WAS coming home from school on a bus filled with black people, someone turned up the radio music and everybody on the bus began to stomp their feet in time. The bus rattled, the bridge we were crossing seemed to shake, and far below on the roof of a factory a huge flock of pigeons that somehow sensed the apocalyptic moment bestirred itself and rustled off in fright. Just then the song had a rawness and currency that it has since lost in the thousands of times it has been replayed, years later, at white people's parties, and on that afternoon it threatened to crash everything in the city to the ground. By the time the bus reached Druid Hill Avenue, however, the song was over, and all was still.

In the same way, some of the white characters in Guerillas, a novel about imperialism and a Caribbean island, fear the music that wells up from the shantytowns in the capital city. Even in the privileged section of town high above the slums, the thousands of radios and speakers crashing out reggae music far below can be heard. The reggae, these whites sense, is the martial anthem of the trapped lower class, and as it drowns their elevated residences, so will the poor someday extinguish their dominion.

Peter Roche, a white British capitalist, has been on this island long enough to see that the facile distinctions between blacks and whites and easy judgments about imperialism and shamytowns are false ones. When you use such terms, he cautions a white arrival, you begin to think only in "comic strips," without saying anything. Gross appearances are much too deceiving, he suggests, as the truth lies in the welter of relations and facts belied by appearances.

In the meticulously-naturalistic chunks of narrative within which Naipaul describes this island, Roche's message is borne out. The only way to capture this world is to record the numberless pink hazes, scorched and wrinkled hills, red blankets of bauxite dust, and even the stained bedsheets--all changing from moment to moment. And by tirelessly splashing his colors upon human beings, too, Naipaul smears identities in a way that drives home the ambiguity of this place. A British white woman has a color not at all like that "of local white people"; when Peter Roche grins, his pleasant demeanor is destroyed by the black roots of his molars; and the "red of aggression" that appears in a slum child's eyes is easily confused with the "red of weeping." Naipaul is constantly turning things inside out--people's clothes, their bodies, their thought--until what is apparent is shown to be merely the comic strip veneer.

After merciless stripping-away, the people who were once easily identified as rebels or imperialists are lost. Jimmy Ahmed, the ostensible leader of the black guerrillas, has the mongrel hue of Oriental-black parentage, and his thoughts are a hopeless Freudian melange of perverse lusts and aristocratic tendencies. The revolutionary persona is one that whites fear and Jimmy clings to; "He is carrying the burden of all the suffering people in the world," he writes of himself. But Jimmy's true concerns are homosexual encounters with poor boys, miscegenation and sodomy with upper-class women, and a book he is writing. When revolution is apparently on the threshold, Jimmy is ineffective.

Roche is no better as the imperialist. He once bombed power plants as a member of the resistance in South Africa and now works for a British firm that originated from a slaveholding interest. Roche's big job is to subsidize Jimmy Ahmed's revolutionary "commune," in the corporate effort to head off more violent threats of revolution. He is confused about his role, as he lives with the rich whites, works for them, but also works indirectly to hasten their downfall.

The near-revolution is equally ill-defined. The reggae music that throbs with such intimidation from the city stops, and the rioting begins. If whites perceived a direct threat in that music, that threat is not fulfilled. This "revolution" is merely turmoil in which everybody is at once a guerrilla and a leader. And its only direct effect is the death of a woman who never figured in imperialism or revolution, but who is transformed, or "chewed up," as the whites say, first into the "rotten meat" of miscegenation, then the "bloody meat" of retribution. But if revolutionaries are depraved charlatans, imperialists are incompetent almoners, and revolutions are fitful little altercations, what is Naipaul saying about legitimate struggles for independence from imperialistic, capitalist nations? His focus on the personal problems of his actors--his obsession with Roche's attitude toward authority and Jimmy's sexuality--might be misconstrued as a reactionary response to the larger issues, and an effort to obscure his vision in tiny problems.

Naipaul phrases these questions himself in a passage about Roche, who wrote a book about the South African struggle. "You describe individual things very clearly," a commentator says of Roche's book, but it lacks a general point of view on "the most monstrous kind of white aggression against black people." Roche explains clumsily that he became "very confused" while writing, "swamped by all the people I had to write about, and all the little events which I thought important." He was unable to deal with the larger issues. In the Caribbean crisis, Roche has responded in the same way, dismissing simple conceptions of the imperialist and the poor black victim as "cartoon strips." The largest generalization he is willing to make is that when a professional black man's belly begins to bulge out over his waistband, he has been lost to the ruling class. In place of the cartoon strips of large identifiable oppressors and victims, Roche creates a "fragile" world of vague definitions, where no change is best.

Naipaul's vision is different from Roche's because it does not legitimize imperialism or attempt to uphold this fragile mess of relations. By the end of the novel Roche's hopeless and fragile position has made him an unwitting accomplice in the murder of his mistress, and his revolutionary opponent is simply a personal opponent. Just because he reduces his paragons of imperialist and guerrilla to such an individualistic level, Naipaul does not dismiss the issue of imperialism. Imperialism has much more subtle effects, Naipaul indicates, than building slums and mansions and creating racist distinctions. Imperialism twists social relations, turns rebels into sexual perverts and capitalists into unsuspecting in-stigators of revolution. The simple black and white definitions are not adequate for the scorched and ambiguous flora and fauna of this island--they do not explain the random murders and the failure of revolution. Instead, Naipaul explains these failures by the fact that imperialism has claimed with it even Jimmy Ahmed, who dreams of the approval of upper-class white women and of personal advancement. The reggae music that floats up to the rich part of the city from the slums is no organized statement or even the prelude to revolutionary violence. It is only the mumbling of people, being chewed up.