A Way in the World by Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul Page B

attached themselves to him. Thestrike he and the trade unions called came close to being an insurrection. A policeman was burned alive in the oilfield area. The government began to recruit and arm volunteers. The atmosphere would have been like that of 1805 or 1831, when there was talk of a slave revolt. And then, as happened in the slave days, passion died down, and people returned to being themselves.
    This was the subject of Foster Morris’s book. He wrote about Tubal Uriah Butler and the people around him. He wrote of them with the utmost seriousness. He gave them families, backgrounds; he treated what they said without irony. Nothing like this had been written about local people before. He wrote of them as though they were English people—as though they had that kind of social depth and solidity and rootedness.
    It was well-intentioned, but it was wrong. Some of the people he wrote admiringly about, like certain lawyers and teachers, were even embarrassed by Foster Morris’s misplaced social tributes. What was missing from Foster Morris’s view was what we all lived with: the sense of the absurd, the idea of comedy, which hid from us our true position. The social depth he gave to ordinary people didn’t make sense. That idea of a background—and what it contained: order and values and the possibility of striving: perfectibility—made sense only when people were more truly responsible for themselves. We weren’t responsible in that way. Much had been taken out of our hands. We didn’t have backgrounds. We didn’t have a past. For most of us the past stopped with out grandparents; beyond that was a blank. If you could look down at us from the sky you would see us living in our little houses between the sea and the bush; and that was a kind of truth about us, who had been transported to that place. We were just there, floating.
    Foster Morris, with all his wish to applaud us, didn’t understand the nature of our deprivation. He saw us as versionsof English people and simplified us. He couldn’t understand, for instance, that though Tubal Uriah Buzz Butler was a kind of messiah, though in the high moments of the strike educated people like lawyers attributed to him almost miraculous powers, and felt that where he led no harm could come, these very people felt at the same time, in their bones, that he was a crazed and uneducated African preacher, a Grenadian, a small-islander, an eater of ground provisions boiled in a pitch-oil tin.
    It was that idea of the absurd, never far away, that preserved us. It was the other side of the anger and the passion that had made the crowd burn the black policeman Charlie King alive. Foster Morris didn’t appear to understand that Charlie King wasn’t hated in Trinidad; that he was to become, in fact, in calypso and folk memory, a special sacrificial figure, as famous as Uriah Butler himself, and almost as honoured, and that the place on the road where he was burned was to be known as Charlie King Corner: a little joke about a sanctified place.
    In 1937 I was five years old. So all this knowledge of the oilfield strike came to me later, when there was the war to worry about, when the Americans were in Trinidad, and the place was full of money; and the Butler affair (at least in the mind of a child) was receding fast.
    All through the war Butler was interned. There was a little excitement when he was released; but only a little. The man who had gone in as a revolutionary came out as a clown, a preacher with a grey beard, a fly whisk, a fondness for suits. He was an embarrassment to the lawyers and others who had drawn strength from him in the great days of 1937. He had brought on a new kind of politics; but he had himself become an anachronism. There was a new constitution; there were elections. Butler re-started his party—it had the absurd name of the British Empire Workers and Citizens Home Rule Party—and he won a seat in the new legislature; but therewere more important