Sunrise with Seamonsters (11 page)

Ten years ago there were three literary magazines in Indonesia; now there is one,
Horison. Horison,
published in a country of a hundred and twenty million people, has a circulation of five thousand. It loses money; the editor says its funding "is a secret". That means the CIA's Department of Literary Appreciation. As in much of Southeast Asia, there are two cultures, one devouring the scrappy newspapers, bathetic feature films and pop concerts; the other going to traditional dances, thrilling to gong-orchestras and staying up all night to watch shadow-plays. And these cultures may not be all that separate, for they certainly meet when
The Ramayana
is presented as a comic book.

It is understandable, then, that the lecturer travelling through Indonesia will have the feeling he is pestering his audience most of the time, practising a form of cultural imperialism which, like urging the Balinese soloist to sing a national anthem, is not just a waste of time but may eventually diminish a more satisfying art form. If no one writes novels, it is possible that no novels are needed; and it is probably true that
Love Story
is closer to a traditional Javanese tale than, say,
Emma
or
Portrait of a Lady.
After a while I no longer found it odd that Professor E's ludicrous judgement that the novel is dead should find
such approval in the non-writing republic, and I felt like a wet blanket for insisting on the contrary.

But this is not the whole story. The student of O'Neill, the admirers of Mario Puzo, Camus, Margaret Mitchell and that talented short-story writer on his prison island in the Banda Sea have to be reckoned with. Thinking back on them I recall a strange sight I witnessed in Djakarta: a naked boy, burned black by the sun, with wild eyes, clutching a post which was stuck in the middle of a wide canal. Some people washed in the canal and others pissed, and on both sides there was heavy traffic, cars, tri-shaws, men on bicycles. But the boy clung motionlessly to his perch, and I doubt that anyone saw him.

It is the privilege of early youth to live in advance of its days in all the beautiful continuity of hope which knows no pauses and no introspection.

Joseph Conrad,
The Shadow-Line

We weren't supposed to get rain during the dry season in Malawi, but it was pelting down that October morning in 1965 when two men drove up to my school compound in a Jeep and demanded to see me. I had just left the school, having finished an early class, and was wobbling through the rain on my bike to collect the mail. The Jeep pulled up beside me on the muddy road and the door swung open. The man in the driver's seat said, "Get in, Paul. We've got some bad news for you." He said it somewhat mechanically, as if he had rehearsed it, the way people do when they learn in advance they have to deliver bad news.

"You're being deported," he said.

Any other Peace Corps schoolteacher might have become indignant and asked, "What for?" But I did not speak. I dropped my bike into a puddle and climbed into the Jeep. At my house I packed a small suitcase, and at the bank I changed all my money into traveler's checks. I boarded a plane four hours later—this may be something of a record, I believe—for Salisbury, Rhodesia, with an escort.

The little plane nosed its way shuddering through the downdrafts, passing lamb-wisps of cloud; soon we were in sunlight, cruising over a sea of clouds. I could think of four reasons for my deportation ... four different reasons.

There was Heinz. He had phoned me in January and asked me to have lunch with him. He represented a new German magazine, he said, and had just come to Malawi from Rhodesia where the editors of the left-wing
Central African Examiner
(then banned by the Smith regime) were saying complimentary things about me.

I should explain that the previous year there had been an attempted
coup d'état
in Malawi. I knew several of the men involved as well as many sympathizers. One sympathizer was Mr David Rubadiri, a former
headmaster of my bush school and later a delegate to the United Nations. At the time of the attempted coup the level of debate was not high. I remember seeing "Elvis for Prime Minister" chalked on the blackboard of my classroom the morning after the Prime Minister, Dr Banda, sacked his entire cabinet and threatened them with prison (Malawi had been independent for two months). I knew I could do better than plump for Elvis, so I began writing anonymous pieces about Malawi politics for the
Examiner.
Sporadic violence followed the abortive
coup-.
Dr. Banda's Young Pioneers beat up some people and killed others who were suspected of being in league with the rebel cabinet ministers. They clubbed villagers into joining Dr Banda's party, and they shouted "stoogie" and "Capricorni" at anyone who expressed doubt about Dr Banda or concern for the death of democracy. My articles were reasonably well-informed, and I wished to God that my name could appear on them. But that candor would have meant my immediate expulsion from the country.

Heinz ate a big lunch and encouraged me to do the same, and when we were finished he explained his mission. People in Germany, he said, were so ignorant about Africa. They still believed it was a savage place, and all they knew were the few facts that appeared in the German newspapers. His magazine planned to dispel this ignorance by having correspondents send monthly letters and reports giving detailed information about matters that never reached the press.

What he wanted was what, in the art of journalism, is known as "a thumb-sucker"—a background piece. He said I would be paid an honorarium (it was more than my Peace Corps salary) for my work.

He said that Germany and the world were quite progressive these days. His parting words were, "Sings are different now. We do not sink like our fazers sot."

I agreed, and that evening wrote my first article for him. A few weeks later he wrote:

"Many thank for No. 1! Some interesting facts: How could ex-ministers make a trip through the north without being captured? I heard, just in the north, there are about 200,000 people not supporting B, not obeying to governmental orders or instructions?

"What about C, is he still in the country, what is he doing?

"Could you please give a short analysis on the inner-political situation now; it seems there has changed something after Dr B's successful trip to Europe.

"Alles gut und recht viele Grüsse."

I became a keen correspondent. I wrote reports on sewage disposal; I wrote one on overcrowding in townships and several on the raid in February of a border post by the ex-ministers' guerrilla soldiers. Dr Banda, the Prime Minister, was always good copy; after the border raid, he said, referring to the leader of the guerrillas: "I want him brought back alive. If not alive, then
any other way!
"

One month I had other things to do. I wrote nothing. But my honorarium arrived at my bank. Another month passed; I couldn't think of anything to say about Malawi. Again I was paid. I felt guilty about this and so put an article together from pieces I had read in the local newspaper. The reply to that article did not come from Heinz:

"Thank you very much for your Report No. 10. This time it did not yield much information for the editorial staff, as the subject you treated was already known to us for some time, the African and international press, which we carefully analyze, having already dealt with it in detail. I would therefore deem it expedient if you confined your reports and continued informing us on the background of the development in this country. To be sure, it is possible that for some time nothing happens at all in Malawi, but then you naturally need not send us a report. I would, however, ask you to remember that we already know everything divulged by the Malawian, Rhodesian, Zambian and Tanzanian newspapers as we get them by airmail.

"Hoping that you will understand this and comply with our wishes, I remain—"

... it is possible that for some time nothing happens at all in Malawi,
the gentleman said. But so much was happening! I can't remember ever having been so busy.

I was at a new school and was an English teacher. We had no books at thé school that we could use for English lessons. The textbooks were very few, and what books we did have were an embarrassment. Why was it that there, in Central Africa, we had so many copies of a dramatized version of
Snow White
? We had a roomful of grammars from Kansas, many Enid Blytons and a chewed-up set of the Waverley novels that had been sent to us by the English-Speaking Union in London. We had a multitude of books from the USIS (
Machines That Made America, Yankee From Olympus,
and many of the
From Log Cabin to White House
variety), but we had nothing really suitable for African children learning English. In a year the students' English had not improved. Sentences such as "I wish to confabulate with you" and "I was oscillating with my girl friend" were common.

To remedy the situation—this was about the same time as Heinz contacted me—I decided to write my own English textbook, a chapter a week. Each lesson was composed of a reading passage with a Malawi background, a dialogue adapted from the passage, an exercise in sound discrimination (the students confused
I
and
r, m
and
n,
and
s
and
sh)
and the correction of a common Malawi error in English ("I foot to school,"
"I hear the flowers smelling," "I was caught by a cold"). As the months passed the books became more ambitious and eventually I collaborated on some sections with a man who was a trained linguistician. He said he thought the book could be published.

One day during a session of the Malawi Parliament my collaborator showed me a page from
Hansard,
the parliamentary report. He said, "We're finished."

Dr Banda had given a long speech in Parliament attacking the teaching of English in Malawi. He used his secretaries as examples of the result of bad teaching.

"These girls do not know English," he said. "If you ask them what a gerund is they wouldn't be able to tell you." The same went for subordinating conjunctions, adjectival phrases, semicolons, and the rest. Malawians needed grammar very badly, said Dr Banda. "These girls do not know how to use a comma properly!" The trouble was with the teaching: teachers in Malawi didn't know the first thing about English grammar. No one knew what an adverb was anymore! No one cared. "Hear, hear," and "Shouts of 'Shame'", and "Loud Applause" were scattered parenthetically through the official record of Dr Banda's speech.

My collaborator was worried. There was no grammar in our book: we had deliberately omitted it and concentrated on verb patterns and sentence structures. In his speech, Dr Banda had referred to this as "the nonsensical linguistic approach". But prior to the speech my collaborator, who was an inspector of schools, had arranged for an interview with Dr Banda to tell him about our English book, which was the first of its kind in Malawi.

It was too late to put in sections on grammar. With some apprehension my collaborator went through with the interview, and it was, predictably, a disaster. Dr Banda leafed through the typescript and said, "Where is the grammar? I want my people to know grammar! There is no grammar in this book! They must know what a clause is, what a phrase is..."

But I had less and less time to work on the book. For one thing, the German magazine was occupying my thoughts, even if I wasn't doing much writing for it. I had also recently struck up a correspondence with my old friend Mr Rubadiri, who said that he was disenchanted with the United Nations and very angry with Dr Banda for his casual arrests and his disorderly Young Pioneers. And I had started a newspaper.

I got the idea for the newspaper when a second piece I wrote for the Germans was returned to me with a note saying that they had read it before in the international press. The newspaper was modestly titled
The Migraine
; generally I printed the articles of mine that were rejected by the Germans, and the Peace Corps office helped to mimeograph it. Three or four other volunteers were on the editorial staff; we had an excellent
cartoonist and a number of good writers. Copies were sent free to all the Peace Corps volunteers in the country.

The July issue of
The Migraine
coincided with a migraine of my own. I received word that Mr Rubadiri had just denounced Dr Banda in New York, that he had resigned his post at the UN, and that he was leaving to take up a new job in Uganda. His denunciation was rather incautiously timed. Mr Rubadiri's mother was still in Malawi and so were most of his personal effects, a large car and an enormous library of books. Shortly after Mr Rubadiri arrived in Uganda I got a note from him asking me if I could find it in my heart to help his mother flee the country, and also would I mind driving his car to Uganda with his set of best china, a dinner service for twelve?

Mr Rubadiri's mother was a tough old bird. The Young Pioneers had threatened to set her house on fire and beat her up for what her son had said about "The Messiah", as Dr Banda was called. Mr Rubadiri had implied that Dr Banda was a betrayer of the revolution and a lackey of the Portuguese; Dr Banda called Rubadiri a stooge. Mrs Rubadiri said the Young Pioneers didn't scare her a bit and that she planned to write down all their names and get even with them when her son was back in power.

Before she left the country, Mrs Rubadiri sold me the car for a token few pounds and my name was entered as Present Owner in the car's logbook. She was in such a hurry—and who could blame her?—there was no time to get a new logbook; my name appeared under that of David Rubadiri, now considered to be a political criminal. In addition to the car I got a crate containing the dinner service. I told Mrs Rubadiri that her son could expect me in Uganda toward the end of August.

I needed a vacation. I couldn't think of anything to write for the Germans, and my bank account was swollen with unearned cash: there was quite literally no place to spend it in Malawi, and having done nothing to earn most of it I didn't feel right about spending it;
The Migraine
was not very popular ("Too negative," said one Peace Corps official); and the business about the grammar in the textbook was getting me down.