Mimic Men

Jan 30, 2013 Editorial

There are at last some stirrings from officialdom for writing to be taught ‘from within’ rather than just as a device to torture young souls imprisoned in ‘classrooms’. We hope the instructors will heed the advice proffered three decades ago by George Lamming, the great West Indian novelist. “The work of art, be it theatre, music, novel or poem is not seen primarily by the artist as a call to revolution or a call to anything else, nor as a celebration of victory. Artistic expression can do those things and in particular situations may regard or must regard this function as a priority.”
With what is playing out in the political arena in Guyana, the instructors could do no worse than commend to their charges that quintessential description of the West Indian politician in VS Naipaul’s “The Mimic Men”. Only satire and irony can still describe our reality. The speaker in the book is a disgraced politician Ralph Singh living in exile and writing his memoirs. With the break-up of the African-Indian party of which Singh was joint leader, the underdeveloped country was on the brink of racial strife before Singh’s expulsion. The book explores the dangers of opportunistic political alliances, including African-Indian political alliance.
“Politicians are people who truly make something out of nothing. They have few concrete gifts to offer. They are not engineers or artists or makers. They are manipulators; they offer themselves as manipulators. Having no gifts to offer they seldom know what they seek. They might say they seek power. But their definition of power is vague and unreliable. Is power the chauffeured limousine with fine white linen on the seats, the men from Special Branch outside their gates, the skilled and deferential servants?
“But this is only indulgence, which might be purchased by anyone at any time in a first class hotel. Is it the power to bully or humiliate or take revenge? But this is the briefest sort of power; it goes as quickly as it comes; and the true politician is by nature a man who wishes to play the game all his life. The politician is more than a man with a cause, even when this cause is no more than self-advancement .He is driven by some little hurt, some little incompleteness. He is seeking to exercise some skill which even to him is never as concrete as the skill of an engineer; of the true nature of this skill he is not aware until he begins to exercise it.
“How often we find those who after years of struggle and manipulation come close to the position they crave, sometimes even achieving it, and then are failures. They do not deserve pity, for among the aspirants to power they are complete men; it will be found that they have sought and found fulfilment elsewhere; it takes a world war to rescue a Churchill from political failure. Whereas the true politician finds his skill and his completeness only in success. His gifts suddenly come to him. He who in other days was mean, intemperate and infirm now reveals unsuspected qualities of generosity, moderation and swift brutality. Power alone proves the politician; it is ingenuous to express surprise at an unexpected failure or an unexpected flowering.”
Later Singh ruminates somewhat more philosophically on the deeper, insidious damage that the “Mimic Men” politicians have done to their societies: essentially consigning the latter to perpetual stagnation and disorder.
“I had never thought of obedience as a problem. Now it seemed to me the miracle of society. Given our situation, anarchy was endless, unless we acted right away. But on power and the consolidation of passing power we wasted our energies, until the bigger truth came: that in a society like ours, fragmented, inorganic, no link between man and the landscape, a society not held together by common interests, there was no true internal source of power, and that no power was real which did not come from the outside. Such was the controlled chaos we had, with such enthusiasm, brought upon ourselves.

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