No less a scholar than the PNM's Mariano Browne, in an op-ed in one of the newspapers a few weeks ago, made a peevish reference to VS Naipaul's novel, The Mimic Men, published 40-something years ago, eloquently illustrating Pound's dictum that literature is news that stays news. The novel incised the malaise of the recently decolonised world, and its prognosis remains relevant in the present, still evoking much animus.
The Mimic Men's central theme is that new-world colonised societies-whose citizens were transplanted from old civilisations to a cultural void-acquired civilisation and culture by slavishly copying (mimicking) the coloniser. In fact the coloniser counted on it as a necessary strategy of colonial policy. It was outlined in Macaulay's Minute on Indian Education of 1824, to engineer "a class (Indian) in blood and colour, but English in taste, opinions, morals and in intellect."
We can retrospectively label this as Mephistophelean, or accept that the intentions and logic were sound, given the time. But what was not ambiguous was the racial environment of colonialism, for which the coloniser cannot be easily exonerated. The acculturation took place in circumstances that generated a racial sickness, making the non-white people (who would become the new leaders), despise themselves, yearn to be someone else (someone white) and project their self-hatred on their newly independent subjects.
Naipaul's novel captured the dilemma of this stratum of privileged men (in Ralph and Browne) who found themselves on top of their societies at the critical moment, charged with leading the societies to freedom. They were victims of the colonial racial programming, their own considerable flaws, their sordid pasts, and turned out to be golems, desiring the coloniser's possessions and power, only to wield them ineptly and destructively.
As Naipaul put it: "The commonest type of political desire is the desire for eviction and succession. But the order to which the colonial politician succeeds is not his order. It is something he is compelled to destroy." The politician himself is "driven by some little hurt, some little incompleteness."
The dear father of our nation, Eric "Kill Bill" Williams, was a perfect illustration of this, and his self-hatred also manifested in the blossoming of anti-humanity in Trinidad, during his reign, which persists till the present, made manifest in the treatment of the defenceless, the poor and the weak.
The evidence of the legacy of mimicry is everywhere, yet the offence some people still take at the expression "mimic men" (and now, "mimic woman") is remarkable since through the book Naipaul is doing what writers and thinkers are supposed to do: speaking directly to the leaders of his generation. Of course they didn't hear-their heads were and remain wedged too firmly up their nationalist assemblies.
Here and now, among the offended are those we elect to lead and pay to teach us (politicians and UWI people). You understand that the average PNM pweng would only hear "mimic man" and fly to the conclusion that somebody bad-talking de fadder of de nay-shan. But even among the literate classes, a monumental and wilful ignorance and hypocrisy accompany the animus: that is the knowledge that Naipaul was not the only, or even the first, to have diagnosed mimicry. (The reason many "Caribbean" or "nationalist" academics despise Naipaul for making obvious observations is a digression I'll not take today.)
The mimic man phenomenon was recognised even before Froude and Trollope sneered at it. In the late 19th century, JJ Thomas wrote of three types of scoundrels in Trinidad: the "bambilou" (a kind of "ape or chameleon" who imitated the manners of the British), the coward and the egomaniac.
In his Social Stratification in Trinidad, A Preliminary Analysis (1953), LE Brathwaite described the black middle class as "compulsive conformist" whose life revolved around defying and desiring the British and Britishness. In A Morning at the Office, his novel of 1950s Trinidad, Edgar Mittelholzer illustrated the dynamic in action.
Outside of Trinidad Frantz Fanon, Albert Memmi and Paolo Freire, writing before Naipaul about the psychology of the colonised, noted that in a sense the colonised had no choice to become the coloniser, since this was the only model they had to follow. Nonetheless, Trinidad seemed particularly susceptible to the malaise. And we in Trinidad are doubly lucky since, thanks to the PNM regime of 2001-2010, we had a chance to see mimic men in thought and action.
What was the aim to achieve "First World status" by 2020 if not trying to become the coloniser? Other manifestations of the syndrome abound: universities awarding thousands of degrees to illiterates; noble institutions which in praxis are cardboard cutouts (the EMA, the police service); much talk of morality and patriotism amidst daily murder and mass migration.
But the phenomenon of mimicry didn't end with the novel. Naipaul's more low-key political novel, Guerillas (1975), is a kind of spiritual sequel to the Mimic Men which examines the consequences of the Mimic Men's successful installation as orthodoxy. Rather than to the general postcolonial condition, Guerillas spoke directly to Trinidad's advanced racial malevolence, embodied in the person of Michael X (in the novel, Jimmy Ahmed).
The national landscape in Guerillas is simplified into The Ridge, where the elite and politicians live; and the city and its slums, where the seething black masses live. The society is sinking into riots, corruption, crime and despair-in other words, a recreation of Trinidad in the 1970s, and today, since these two groups are the only that matter.
The most chillingly prophetic aspect of the tableau comes from the mouth of a character: "after Israel it was the turn of Africa. No matter what anybody say." For an elaboration of this sentiment, I encourage readers to read Jamaican academic's Carolyn Cooper's op-ed in the New York Times of August 5 ("Who is Jamaica"). That's a good vision of the alternative future, given our present.
