22 July 1999, 815 words
It seems to me that the colonial mind has always more characterised our elites than ordinary Trinidadians. After all, it is those persons who came from the elite who were more apt to ape the manners of the master. It was the elites who could afford the goods made in the metropole, even if locally-made furniture or chocolate, say, were better. Insofar as the average person reflected similar attitudes, they were only imitating the local elite, not the colonial rulers. And that happens in all societies, including those that never went through the dominations of slavery, indentureship and colonialism.
So, when I read The Middle Passage for the first time last year, it was a shock to discover that V.S. Naipaul apparently held a similar view. And I was somewhat appalled that I had so many misconceptions about what he'd written in that infamous 1962 essay on Trinidad. (But I was totally appalled that I had gotten those misconceptions from the writings of people who ought to have known better.)
On my own reading, I found that Naipaul really targets the ruling classes in his essay. "The white community was never an upper class in the sense that it possessed a superior speech or taste or attainments; it was envied only for its money and its access to pleasure," he writes. Contrast this with what he says about calypso: "It is only in the calypso that the Trinidadian touches reality. The calypso is a purely local form...The pure calypso, the best calypso, is incomprehensible to the outsider."
All through the essay, Naipaul boofs Trinidadians for not being themselves, but praises us for those qualities he sees as essentially Trinidadian. "Everything that makes the Trinidadian an unreliable, exploitable citizen makes him a quick, civilized person whose values are always human ones..." And, contrary to what I have always read from Naipaul's critics, he excuses the average Trinidadian for their flaws: "Change must come from the top. Capital punishment and corporal punishment, incitements to brutality, must be abolished...and perhaps, gradually, there will be a lessening of the need now felt by everyone down the line to display his authority by aggression."
It is this difference in focus that explains the apparent contradictions between Naipaul's perspective and the region's other best writer, Derek Walcott. "Break a vase and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than the love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole," he writes in The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory, his Nobel prize speech. Where Naipaul writes that "the Negro in the New World was, until recently, unwilling to look at his past", Walcott writes "the stripped man is driven back to that self-astonishing, elemental force, his mind." Where Naipaul describes Trinidad as "unimportant, uncreative, cynical", Walcott describes "an island blest by obscurity, cherishing our insignificance."
Without wishing to oversimplify either man's perspective, I think it is fair to say that the difference essentially lies in Walcott considering the ordinary person and his everyday concerns, whereas Naipaul focuses on the elites and their sociopolitical responsibilities.
My own opinion about who the real colonials are does not come from history, which is full of lies, but from my observation of individuals from the old Creole elite, and of our language. The linguistic issue is the more interesting one. The ordinary person, making casual conversation, will make few or no mistakes in grammar or pronunciation. That is, they will speak our dialect perfectly, according to the dialect's rules (and bear in mind that the Queen's English is only a London dialect with no advantage in expressiveness or complexity over our own).
It is only when people are trying to speak "correctly", as in radio call-in shows, that they make many errors. But this is true of all cultures. The linguist William Labov has tabulated the percentage of grammatical sentences in a variety of social classes and settings. He found that the great majority of sentences were grammatical, with higher percentages of grammatical sentences in working-class speech than in middle-class speech. Labov also found that the highest percentage of grammatical errors occurred in academic conferences.
So when Walcott as poet writes, "Deprived of their original language, the captured and indentured tribes create their own, accreting and secreting fragments of an old, an epic vocabulary, from Asia and from Africa, but to an ancestral, an ecstatic rhythm in the blood that cannot be subdued by slavery or indenture", he is also scientifically accurate. Language is innate, but its vocabulary and its syntax is determined by the environment. Thus, as long as Trinidadians speak in that familiar sing-song, we retain our sensibility. It is those people you will hear preaching in accents that belong to cultures from the Atlantic or the Indian Oceans who are the true colonials - strange fish out of water in our Caribbean Sea.
Copyright ©1999 Kevin Baldeosingh