Jacqueline Brice-Finch V. S. NAIPAUL'S DYSTOPIC VISION IN GUERILLAS Y. S, Naipaul’s fictive study of the aggressive West Indian male’s return home appears in bis seventh novel, Guerrillas (1975). Jimmy Ahmed, the protago- nist, has a radically different background from the author's other returning West Indian male, Ralph Singh of The Mimic Men (1969), a second generation West Indian East Indian of a middle-class family. Ahmed is a half-Chinese, half- black bastard who grew up poor in the back of his father’s ramshackle grocery store. Whereas Singh remains passive in his encounters with people, Ahmed shows violent behavior, especially towards women. Beginning with his fantasy, as a young man, about the actual gang rape of a white girl on his native island (which Naipaul fails to name, but which resembles his birthplace, Trinidad), Ahmed shows a lingering fascination with the girl’s reaction to a gesture of kindness from one of her assailants afterwards. He appears to act out the crime as an adult when he is charged in England with rape and indecent assault, He will retreat to his fantasy again during the last scene of the novel, involving Ahmed with another rape victim in whom he had seen possibilities. Although Ahmed’s background and behavior differ from Singh’s, they both share a schoolboy’s longing to belong to one race and attempt to deny their multicultural heritage. Just as Singh had westernized his last name, Kripalsingh, Ahmed’s childhood name had been Jimmy Leung. Ahmed also shared Singh’s fascination with his paternal Indian ancestry by delving into Chinese history. However, unlike Singh, as an adult Ahmed exploits his exotic background to secure support for his pscudo-revolutionary activities in England and on the island, Naipaul bases the character of Jimmy Ahmed on the figure of Michact de Freitas (alias Abdul Malik and Michael X), a Trinidadian black militant about whom Naipaul wrote two articles for the Sunday Times in 1974, later expand- ing them into a chapter entitled “Michael X and the Black Power Killings in Trinidad” in his book The Return of Eva Peron (1974). However, Gloria Lyn notes that the documentary on Malik “stresses the criminal mind and actions of Malik, while the novel is more concerned to show the making of Malik, and stresses the personal tragedy of Jimmy as a victim” (132). And K. I. Madhusudana Rao goes so far as to claim that Guerrillas transforms the origi- nal story into “a modem fable of power and disillusion” (92). All the main characters act in a subversive manner, pitting themselves against a hostile world which only allows them to function covertly: Jimmy Ahmed plays at being a revolutionary; Peter Roche is a previously tortured South African writer who now acts like a missionary; and Jane, Roche’s English publisher and mistress, casts herself as a temptress to distract Ahmed (she is the one in whom he sees his rapist’s possibilities). With his title, Naipaul has dubbed not just the princi- 33pals but ali the characters of this novel as guerrillas, defined in Ahmed’s per- sonal writing thus: “When everybody wants to fight there’s nothing to fight for. Everybody wants to fight his own little war, everybody is a guerrilla” (82). Everyone on this Caribbean island, we might almost say Naipaul's modern man in general, is fighting for an accommodation that negates self through the characters’ elaborate playacting. The dimensions of this playacting come to assume apocalyptic proportions. Since Jimmy is the central protagonist (although the most lethal, primitive “guerrilla” is Jimmy's subjugated lover Bryant), Jimmy's playacting has the most serious repercussions on his island. While abroad he had become a black leader courted by English liberals. He eventually married an Englishwoman and had children. Though Naipaul merely sketches the details concerning his life in England (Ahmed seems to abandon his family there), the sojourn abroad. does have great impact on the exile’s return. In autobiographical writing in which he refers to himself in the third person, Jimmy acknowledges with bitter- ness his role-playing in England and its consequences when he says: _..-in England too they tried to destroy him, talking of rape and assault, he became too famous for them to stomach, they thought he was just a stud, that's how they wanted to keep him, send him back to rot. (59) While the tone of Jimmy’s writing is paranoiac, even hysterical, and there- fore seemingly an untrustworthy account, Naipaul does not offer another view- point of Jimmy’s life abroad until half-way through the novel, While trying to set up an on-island interview, Meredith Herbert, one of Ahmed’s childhood schoolmates, recalls doing an interview for BBC while both men were in En- gland, “a little three minuter with this black rebel” (136), In scathing language, Meredith depicts him as “a little Pekingese black . . . [who] walked up and down yapping away,” behaving like “one of those tops you wind up” (136). The broadcaster is even more alarmed by Jimmy in his role as a community leader on the island. He warns Jane and Roche that their associate is a violent man, a top spinning out of control. Meredith expounds on Ahmed: “L regard him as one of the most dangerous men in this place. .. . Anybody can use that man and create chaos in this place. He can be programmed. He's the most suggestible man I know. ... There’s a kind of dynamic about his condition that has to work itself out. In England it ended with the rape and indecent assault, The same dynamic will take him to the end here.” (137) Yet, Meredith’s premonition is ignored. In fact, Jane seems bored by the comments of this returned exile who has become decidedly “suburban” (130) im his personal ife as well as in his polities. Only very slightly is the author's 34jab at the European whites’ dismissal of the metropolitan black in favor of the radical in this scene; however, by the novel's end this same group will be wholly dependent on the former type for their very lives, Meredith confirms that Ahmed is still a mimic man. Even so, the latter has returned with false “European credentials” that generate an equally sham power Position on the island, Having set a political course for himself, buttressed by frightening the natives into fearing him and the whites into supporting him, Ahmed loses his ability to separate real life from fantasy. Unlike Ralph Singh of The Mimic Men who acknowledged his posturing up to the end of the novel, Jimmy, upon returning home, forgets that he is playacting. ‘The novel opens at a peasant commune, called Thrushcross Grange, which is supported by the island’s business community, particularly Sablich’s, an enter- prise established two centuries before from the Tigging of slave-trade profits. Naipaul’s irony is vitriolic here: the sham humanism of the false firm will as much as anything else in the book lead to its apocalyptic calamities. Peopled by slum boys who have no expertise in farming but need a place to eat and sleep, the commune is a dismal failure. In spite of the pathetic yield of deformed and stunted crops amid parched plots of land, the leader of the commune, none other than Ahmed, acts as if his venture into agriculture is a success. The atmo- sphere assumes a nightmarish quality when his pretense is condoned by visi- ors to the place. After he greets Roche, assigned by Sablich’s to offer technical assistance to Ahmed, and Jane, newly arrived from England, he takes them ona tour of what he terms cash crops which turn out to be the worthless vegetables. These two foreigners refrain from commenting not only on the true state of the commune but also on the veiled intimidation by the slum boys, one of whom, the low-lifer Bryant, demands and receives money from Jane. Later, in the second and third sections of the chapter, the omniscient narrator reveals the insidiousness of the courtship which develops between Jane and Ahmed. Although openly Roche’s mistress, Jane sets out immediately to en- snare Jimmy. The narrator remarks that Jane had already begun to feel that Jimmy’s initial coldness had onty been a form of anxiety ... and that gradually he had unwound, had become more and more a man anxious to make an impression, to display himself. (15) The first foreshadowing hint that the association will be unhealthy for these characters occurs as Jane asks Ahmed about England. The three converse as follows: She said, “You must miss England?” She saw him hesitate: it was as though she had asked him a trap question. Roche said, with that weary tone that had once set her looking for deeper meanings in his words, “England is in the eye of the storm. It’s part 35