A Way in the World by Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul Page A

first sighting of the untouched aboriginal island.
    Centuries on, we needed our visitors to give us someidea of where and what we were. We couldn’t have done it ourselves. We needed foreign witness. But disregard came with this witness. And that was like a second setting of history on its head. Because in this traveller’s view—this distant view of people eating bananas and wearing squeaky shoes, this view of a smallness that a cruise passenger could take in in a morning or a day—we, who had come in a variety of ways from many continents, were made to stand in for the aborigines and were held responsible for the nullity which had been created long before we had been transported to it.
    AND THEN in 1937 a young English writer called Foster Morris came and wrote
The Shadowed Livery
, which was another kind of book. There was a big oilfield workers’ strike in Trinidad that year. I don’t know whether Foster Morris knew about local conditions before he came. But the strike and its personalities were at the heart of his book.
    Oil had been discovered early in the century; and much of the south of the island (where Columbus had seen the beautiful Valencia-like aboriginal gardens) had been turned into an oil reserve. Most of the oilfield workers in Trinidad were Africans from the small island of Grenada to the north. Local people, East Indians or Africans, could have been used; but the radicals said (and I suppose they were right) that the authorities didn’t want to disturb the local labour market and preferred to have an isolated labour force in the oilfields.
    Local people told stories about the poverty and ignorance of the Grenadians. A story I heard as a child (without fully understanding it, not knowing at that time who or what Grenadians were) was that they lived off ground provisions, which they cooked in a “pitch-oil” tin. Ground provisions were tubers—yams, eddoes, cassava, sweet potatoes. The “pitch-oil tins” were originally the tins in which vegetable oil was imported. Normally in Trinidad those tins were usedafterwards for storing “pitch-oil,” which was the word we used for kerosene. So the story about the Grenadians boiling whole pitch-oil tins of ground provisions was not only a story about the grossness of their taste, the sheer bulk of the rubbishy food they could put away, but also a story about their poverty. They were too poor to buy proper enamel or black-iron Birmingham-made pots, like the rest of us; they cooked in tins that the rest of us used for pitch-oil.
    (I heard this story about the Grenadians from a quarrelsome aunt—and in my memory the aunt, as she told this story, in her usual shrieking voice, was using a woven coconut-leaf fan to get a Birmingham black-iron coalpot going on the concrete back steps of a small house in Woodbrook in Port of Spain. For two or three years many segments of our extended family, refugees from the countryside, were living squashed together in that Woodbrook lot, where there was as yet no proper sewerage. Some years later this aunt migrated to Canada. There, liberated from crowd and poverty and general wretchedness, she became an alert, generous, elegant woman—but nothing of that human possibility is contained in my memory of the shrieking woman fanning her coalpot on the back steps.)
    This story about the Grenadians and the pitch-oil tins I heard during the war, some years after they had made a name for themselves in the strike of 1937. So in the years before 1937, when they would have been even less regarded, things would have been very hard for them. And then, from among them, in all their isolation and backwardness, a leader appeared.
    The leader was a small bearded man with a long name, Tubal Uriah Buzz Butler. He was a preacher, and there was something in his passion or derangement that took the oilfield workers to a pitch of frenzy. He attracted other people as well. Many radicals, people who described themselves as socialists or communists,