Sylvia Wynter

The Hills of Hebron (Drumbeat Novel)

Marion

They bowed their heads. The instinct for survival was as strong in them as in their slave ancestors. Some weight of memory in their blood carried the ghosts of dark millions who had perished, coffined in the holds of ships, so that some could live to breed more slaves; and they, after their freedom had been won, survived the rootless years. They survived the loss of gods and devils that were their own, of familiar trees and hills and huts and spears and cooking pots, of their own land in which to see some image of themselves. And their descendants, the New Believers, survived the exodus from Cockpit Centre, the passage through the wilderness and up to the hills of Hebron, where Prophet Moses had promised them those things that had been lost in their trespass across the seas, across the centuries.

For the New Believers the jar belonged to a precise past of facts and dates and figures of which they were totally ignorant. And even if they had been able to read, in the history books they would have found themselves only in the blank spaces between the lines, in the dashes, the pauses between commas, semicolons, colons, in the microcosmic shadow world between full stops. Between the interstices of every date on which a deed was done, they haunted the pages, imprisoned in mute anonymity, the done-tos who had made possible the deed.

They had a respect for madness. It was a private nirvana a man could reach when he was pushed beyond the limits of human endurance, when his spirit was so troubled that his body became a temple of dreams. It was the refuge of those who could not bear the betrayal implied by death; and yet was the absolute triumph of a man over the exigencies of life.

These expatriates were, for the most part, retired army officers and civil servants, ex-judges and police commission-ers, with their wives and families. They had served in different colonial territories for the greater part of their lives, and found themselves out of place whenever they returned to England.

By now accustomed to a more spacious well-being, they could no longer contorm to the cramped life in the mother country.

They chose, instead, to enshrine her memory in their hearts and worship from afar. They were, with a few exceptions, kind and decent men and women with a strong sense of duty and a habit of loyalty. They treated their blacks' with a determined benevolence, and were, in many instances, very helpful to ambitious young natives who wanted to further their education.

But they had been brought up to believe that God and the British Empire were in some way synonymous, that their imperial destiny was a Christian eand righteous one; and could never admit to themselves that their colonial possessions had been acquired not through the Divine Will, but because of their country's might and cunning. When they found themselves absolute rulers over vast numbers of alien peoples they felt compelled to rationalize their overlordship. The most satistying assumption was that the natives peoples were an inferior race. To reinforce this belief, they lived their lives shut away from any real contact with the people whom they ruled.

Whenever doubts assailed them, they repeated slogans - the natives were backward, mentally degenerate, naive chil-dren, incapable of ruling themselves, savages, primitives, etc.

- and these slogans were like charms which they used to ward off an encroaching reality. As the years passed, the roots which they had brought with them from their own country withered away. They put down no new ones. Without spiritual resources, they became caricatures of themselves.

Yes, the strike. That is our first weapon, the only weapon that we have to hand, a powerful one. The weapon of our labour. Now, answer me this, without your labour what would happen to the fat green bunches of banana?'

There was a silence. The people looked at one another, not quite getting his meaning. Then suddenly a young man, who was perched on the side of a hand-cart. called out:

He had just finished reading Moby Dick, and under the spell of its power wanted to create an image of himself and of his people that would be epic. For it was through his reading that Isaac first became shamefully conscious of being black. With the exception of Othello and Daggoo, the harpooner in Moby Dick, the black characters whom he had come upon in his reading seemed to him a miserable and despicable lot. They were people who scarcely existed in their own right, a muted background against which the good or evil, the tolerance or intolerance, the gentleness or cruelty of real people could be shown. They were always pitied and patronized, the done-tos and never the doers, the slaves and never the masters, the conquered, never the conquerors. And, by the aesthetic norms accepted and established in these books, their thick' lips, "woolly' hair and 'coal-black' skin were equated with everything evil and base, everything that was the negation of light, of beauty. Black was for the night and for darkness, the colour of the devil and of despair.

These missionaries carried the Cross before. them, but behind them came ships and soldiers and guns. They could have taken what they wanted by force. But they knew that all empires won by force are wrested away again, in the fullness of time, by others stronger than themselves. So they dreamed instead of an empire of land and souls that was legal, annexed by consent, governed by consent. And the piece of paper with the marks of the chiefs and the red seal was the tangible ratification of their dream of empire, the bridge between the shadow of their faith and the substance of wealth and power to come!

They had no real feeling of bitterness or of violence. Unlike their illiterate would-be followers, they were spiritually and emotionally emasculated. In exploring the symbols of power that their rulers had trapped in books, they had become enmeshed in their complexities, had fallen victims to a servitude more absolute than the one imposed by guns, whips, chains, and hunger.

They spoke glibly of freedom and democracy, but were incapable of understanding their meaning. They came from the generations of slaves on whose toiling backs the noble slogans of democracy had been conceived. And they were ready to die defending concepts which could have no meaning for them.

Politics for them meant an unending series of meetings, where, standing on raised platforms under street-lamps, they would move the multitude of black faces with the force of their eloquence. And this anonymous black mass would surge like a hurricane through the island, would drive the English rulers into the sea; whilst they, calm and smiling, would don the robes of office abandoned by their former masters, would echo firmly their platitudes and half-truths and compromises and subtle distortions, would make themselves counterparts of the men whom ostensibly they had overthrown. For them politics was a game with a set of rules codified by their adversaries.

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