V. Naipaul - Guerrillas

“You mean racial problems?”

“Yes, racial problems, and all the things that go with it. I mean not carrying that burden, not wasting one’s time and one’s life carrying that burden. I thought there was work I could do here. Work.”

“I see you gesturing with your hands. I suppose by work you mean constructive work.”

“It’s a human need. I suppose one realizes that late.”

“Creativity. An escape into creativity.”

“If you want to put it like that.”

“But some people will find it odd, Peter, people who know your background — and now you tell us of your need for creative work — that you should look for this with a firm like the one you chose.”

“Sablich’s.”

“You’ve mentioned the name.”

“It wasn’t what I chose. I would say it was what offered itself. And I liked what they offered. I didn’t know much about them when I took the job.”

“But you know now.”

“It doesn’t alter my attitude. I know they have a past here, and that people think about them in a certain way. But I also know they have done a lot to change. The fact that they should want to employ me is a sign of that change, I think.”

“Some people might say public relations.”

“There is that. I always knew that. But isn’t that enough? I was more concerned with the work they offered, and what they offered seemed pretty fair to me. In a situation like that I believe one can only go by people’s professed intentions and attitudes. If you start probing too much and you look for absolute purity, you can end up doing nothing at all.”

“I can see how some of our attitudes can irritate you, Peter. And we’re all guilty. We have a special attitude to people who take up our cause. It is unfair, but we tend to look up to them.”

“But I didn’t think I had to keep to a straiter path than anybody else. I’m not on display. I don’t know why people here should think that.”

Roche’s temper had suddenly risen. He was sweating; his shirt was wet. He turned away from the microphone and said, “The air here is absolutely foul.”

“The air conditioning doesn’t seem to be working efficiently,” Meredith said. He too was sweating. He looked about him, perfunctorily, and then he spoke to the microphone again.

“Peter, you say you came here for the opportunity of doing creative work, unhampered by other pressures. And you’ve done quite a lot. But in the public mind you have become associated with the idea of the agricultural commune. You know, back to the land, the revolution based on land. I don’t believe it’s a secret that it hasn’t been a success. Are you very disappointed?”

“It would have been nice if it had worked.”

“Did you think it would work?”

“I had my doubts. I thought it was antihistorical. All over the world people are leaving the land to go to the cities. And they know what they want. They want more excitement, more lights. They want to be richer. They also want to be brighter. They don’t want to feel they’re missing out. And most of them are missing out, of course.”

“You didn’t think the process could be reversed here?”

“Not after I’d been here. You can’t just go back to the land as a gesture. You can’t pretend. The land is a way of life.”

“And perhaps also a way of work. Not a way of dropping out. But I believe you’ve used the key word, Peter: pretend.”

“Only very rich people in very rich countries drop out. You can’t drop out if you’re poor.”

“But that’s our trouble here. You’ve probably observed it. We are too vulnerable to other people’s ideas. We don’t have too many of our own. But, Peter, you say the idea of the agricultural commune in a society like ours is antihistorical. And yet you helped.”

“It was what they said they wanted.”

“Your theory of professed intentions.”

“If the choice had been mine I would have chosen some other project. Something in the city.”

“And yet for this antihistorical project, which you didn’t think would succeed, all kinds of people and organizations were pressured, to put it no higher.”

“We wanted to involve everybody. Or as many people as possible.”

“You certainly succeeded.”

“That way it seemed the thing might just work. And we received a lot of government encouragement. A lot of help.”

“The government too believes in professed intentions.”

“We were all misled. Perhaps we were all hoping against hope.”

“And perhaps, hoping against hope, we misled others. Where do you think the error started?”

“I suppose you can say it started here. In the society you have here. It isn’t organized for work or for individual self-respect.”

“We won’t quarrel about that. But you don’t think the leadership might have had something to do with it as well?”

“You mean Jimmy Ahmed.”

“Tell us about him, Peter, now that you’ve mentioned him. It’s a strange thing to say, but you know him better than most people here.”

“I found him attractive, a leader. He seemed to be able to get things done. And he had a following.”

“I know. I went to school with Jimmy. He was Jimmy Leung then. I’ve told you this before. And to me Jimmy’s always been something of a problem. I was in London when he suddenly emerged as the black leader. In fact, I was one of the first people to interview him. He was living in a big house in Wimbledon, and I thought he was quite well looked after. Even then he had powerful friends. But, you know, when Jimmy talked about this country, I couldn’t recognize it. Some of the things he said I found quite humiliating. I’ve told you about the banana-skin game he said he played at school. You would drop the banana skin and if it fell one way you were going to marry a fair-skinned person, and if it fell the other way you were going to marry a yellow person with freckles. You can imagine how the women columnists took that up.”

“I think you’re making too much of a small thing.”

“But sometimes small things can tell us more than professed intentions. I never played that game at school. I don’t know anyone who played that game. It sounds to me more like a Chinese game. But the people in England took it seriously.”

“I wonder. But I don’t know much about that. I didn’t know Jimmy in England. I met him here. I’d only vaguely heard about him before I came here.”

“We’re a dependent people, Peter. We need other people’s approval. And when people come to us with reputations made abroad we tend to look up to them. It’s something you yourself have been complaining about. But I have another problem here. You know the position of black people in England. You know the difficulties, the campaigns of hate. Yet some of us get taken up by certain people and are made famous. Then we are sent back here as leaders.”

“You think there’s a conspiracy? People aren’t that interested.”

“That’s what I mean. People aren’t interested. They are ignorant, they don’t care. But certain people get taken up. It is this element that is my problem, this element in a place like England that takes up some of us. Is it guilt? A touch of the tarbrush, as they say over there — black blood? Or is it something else? Some other kind of relationship. Services rendered, mutual services.”

“I think you worry too much about those people.”

“You think I do?”

Since he had smiled to speak his sentence for voice level, Meredith had been serious, unflustered, his expression neutral in spite of the sweat and the heat that had inflamed his eyes. Now, for the first time, he had spoken angrily. But Roche didn’t believe in the anger. He thought it forced, self-regarding, a lawyer’s courtroom anger; it astonished, disappointed him, and it left him calm.