V. Naipaul - The Mimic Men

I write, I know, from both sides. I cannot do otherwise. My mother’s father was no doubt an undignified figure, an object of easy satire. But at least at the end, within the framework of our old order, benevolence and service were imposed on him. And he was never as totally ridiculous as the men we put in his place: men without talent or achievement save the reputed one of controlling certain sections of the population, unproductive, uncreative men who pushed themselves into prominence by an excess of that bitterness which every untalented clerk secretes. Their bitterness responded to our appeal. And in this response we saw the success of our appeal, and its truth!

Yet how could we see, when we ourselves were part of the pattern? The others we could observe. We could see them in their new suits even on the hottest days. We could see the foolish stern faces they prepared for the public to hide their pleasure at their new eminence. We could see them coming out of restaurants with their ‘secretaries’. We could see them shirtsleeved — their coats prominent on hangers — as they were driven in government cars marked with the letter M, on which they had insisted, to proclaim their status as Ministers. The car, the shirtsleeves, the coat on the hanger: the fashion spread rapidly down the motorized section of our civil service and might be considered the sartorial fashion of our revolution. At sports meetings they went to the very front row of the stands, and over the months we could see the flesh swelling on the back of their necks, from the good living and the lack of exercise. And always about them, policemen in growing numbers.

They were easily frightened men, these colleagues of ours. They feared the countryside, they feared the dark, they grew to fear the very people on whose suffrage they depended. People who have achieved the trappings of power for no reason they can see are afraid of losing those trappings. They are insecure because they see too many like themselves. Out of shabbiness, then, we created drama. At least my mother’s father, never requiring a vote, never required protection. At least he knew the solidity of his own position and understood how he had got there.

Courage, I have said. It takes courage to destroy, for confidence in one’s ability to survive is required. About survival in those early days I never thought. I never saw it as an issue. When I did see it, it was too late. Because by that time I had ceased to care.

IT has happened in twenty places, twenty countries, islands, colonies, territories — these words with which we play, thinking they are interchangeable and that the use of a particular one alters the truth. I cannot see our predicament as unique. The newspapers even today spell out situations which, changing faces and landscapes, I can think myself into. They talk of the pace of postwar political change. It is not the pace of creation. Nor is it the pace of destruction, as some think. Both these things require time. The pace of events, as I see it, is no more than the pace of a chaos on which strict limits have been imposed. I speak of course of territories like Isabella, set adrift yet not altogether abandoned, where this controlled chaos approximates in the end, after the heady speeches and token deportations, to a continuing order. The chaos lies all within.

I will not linger on the details of our movement. I cannot speak of the movement as a phenomenon generated by my personality. I can scarcely speak of it in personal terms. The politician deals in abstractions, even when he deals with himself. He is a man lifted out of himself and separate from his personality, which he might acknowledge from time to time. I let Crippleville run itself; I gave up the study of Latin. I applied myself to The Socialist and our party organization. It was the sort of administrative work for which I was born. But — in spite of what has gone before — I will be less than fair to myself if I do not say that my labours were sweetened by the knowledge that I had become a public figure and an attractive one. It was the personality Browne had seen: the rich man with a certain name who had put himself on the side of the poor, who appeared to have turned his back on the making of money and on his former associates, who appeared to have been suddenly given a glimpse of the truth: I was now aware of his attractiveness. So in unlikely circumstances the London dandy was resurrected. I knew the affection and kindly mockery he aroused, and it was pleasant in those early days just to be this self. I had known nothing like it.

Create the scenes then. Imagine Browne, the leader, in his shabby journalist’s suit, energetic, enthusiastic, frequently breaking into the local dialect, for purposes of comedy or abuse. Beside him set myself, as elegant in dress as in speech: I knew my role. Imagine the public meetings in squares, in halls. Imagine the tours along dusty country roads in the late afternoon and at night, the headlights illuminating the walls of sugarcane on either side. Imagine the developing organization in the Roman house, the willing black hands of clerks from business houses and our civil service. Imagine the lengthening reports of our speeches in the Inquirer. Imagine that other mark of success: the policemen in heavy serge shorts, becoming less aggressive and more protective as their numbers grew. Their amiability was pathetic: it was like the amiability of the gangster who finds himself in polite society. Add an enlivening detail: the yellow light on shining black faces, an old crazed woman somewhere in the crowd proclaiming her own message of doom, and here and there the flambeaux on stalls which now, because they are part of the people, one and entire, the police will not move on or break up.

Add the smell of Negro sweat as, to applause, we make our way through our followers, shining eyes in shining faces, to the platform, they so squat and powerfully built, we so tall and slender. In this smell of heated sweat, once rejected, I tried to find virtue, the virtue of the poor, the labouring, the oppressed. Such is the vulgarity that mobs generate, in themselves and in their manipulators. The virtue I found in that acrid smell was the virtue of the protecting, the massed and heedless. It was Browne’s privilege to be less sentimental. ‘The old bouquet d’Afrique,’ he would mutter. And sometimes, when we were on the platform: ‘Did you get the old booky?’

It was genuine, this sentiment, part of his ambivalence. But it was also, increasingly, an attempt to reassure me, to tell me, in the shorthand of speech we had evolved for use in public, that we were as one. For other scenes have to be created, other details added: casual estate labourers, picturesque Asiatics, not willing to share distress, lounging about a country road at dusk, unaroused, polite only because of my name. Someone in our party struggles with a microphone or a pressure lamp. The impassive shopkeeper in his dark shop sells sugar or flour to a young girl, who is indifferent to our mission; as afterwards he sells us beer. Then comes the drive back through the still land: weak lights in silent houses. The mud and deep ruts surprise us. We are aware of the remoteness of the safe town and those facilities we have taken for granted. We sympathize silently with the picturesque people we have left behind. In this sympathy we feel confirmed in our mission and our cause. Time was all that we needed, to bind all in distress.

Fill the Roman house with people once again. Suppress all rowdiness and strenuous gaiety. But do not destroy the coldness that is the fate of houses which have been mentally abandoned by their builders before they are complete. Until they are warmed by new tenants these houses are never like places to live in. Remember the cold kitchen and the terrazzo of empty rooms where a lost girl, pure of body, walked about, thinking of other landscapes. Fill these rooms now with a new and more appropriate feminine atmosphere. It is the atmosphere of dedication and mutual loyalty, in which speech is soft, statements, however inexact, are never violently contradicted, and even drink, served by loyal women to deserving men, is taken sacramentally.