A Way in the World Read Online Free PDF Page B

was the last comment I was expecting. I had offered her a piece of writing, and was expecting her to judge it in a higher way. And though what she had said wasn’t true, I grew to feel after some weeks there was something wrong with the writing. What was the basis of the writer’s attitude? What other world did he know, what other experience did he bring to his way of looking? How could a writer write about this world, if it was the only world he knew? I never formulated the questions like that; the doubts were just with me.
    IT WAS some time, six years, before I worked through those doubts. I was in England then, and the first true book that came to me was the one prompted by my discovery of Port of Spain before the war, my delight in the city. To me then it was like going back to the very beginning of things, the Sunday walk down St. Vincent Street with my father, the visit to Nazaralli Baksh’s tailor shop: things barely remembered, things released only by the act of writing.
    After that writing I went back to Trinidad for a fewweeks. I went by steamer. The clock was put back every other day; the weather slowly turned. One evening on deck a breeze started up. I braced myself for the chill, but the wind that played about my head and face was warm. I felt when I arrived, and went visiting, and found people becoming less dark than they seemed on the streets, that an age—a vanished adolescence, a forced maturity, England, a book—separated me from the people in the Registrar-General’s Department. But for them only six years had passed. Dingier walls; a more crowded office; more tables. Blair had gone, but so many of the others were still there: Belbenoit, the long-limbed boy (or man) from St. James with the lady’s bicycle, the typist who hadn’t liked what I had written. They were friendly. But there was something new.
    I had heard on the steamer that a new kind of politics had come to Trinidad. There were regular meetings in Woodford Square, across the road from the Red House, which the Spaniards had laid out in the 1780s as the main city square, and which the British had later embellished; where the destitute Indians, refugees from the plantations, had slept until they had died out; and where later the black madmen had come to camp. In that square now there were lectures about local history and slavery. People were being told about themselves, and black feeling was high. This was the politics that had claimed Blair.
    I went to a meeting one night. The square, its scale already altered for me, looked different again now, with the electric lights, the speakers and the microphones on the old bandstand (which I had found so beautiful the first time I had seen it, and now saw as the Victorian or Edwardian bandstand of an English city park); and the dark, scattered, unreadable crowd. The big trees threw distorting shadows and looked bigger than in daylight. Some people stood at the very edge of the square, against the railings; there were some white people and Indians among them.
    The men on the bandstand spoke of old suffering and current local politics. They spoke like people uncovering a conspiracy. They were at one with their audience. They made jokes easily; and laughter, or a kind of contented humming, came easily to the crowd. The people who spoke were not all black or African, but the occasion was an African one; there could be no doubt of that. (I didn’t see Blair on the bandstand. He was never an orator or front-of-house man; he didn’t have the manner.)
    I knew few of the speakers; I couldn’t pick up the references and the jokes. It was like entering a cinema long after the picture had started, but I felt that what was said didn’t matter. The occasion itself was what mattered: the gathering, the drama, the mood: the discovery (and celebration) by many of the black people in the square, educated and uneducated, of a shared emotion. Of aspects of that emotion I had had many intimations long ago, before I