Shikasta

There was a fight this afternoon among two young men of different tribes. Its cause was frustration.

The white farmer had then lectured the two on their warlike spirit, their primitive ways. It was backward and primitive to fight, he had said. The white people were here to save the unfortunately backward blacks from this belligerence, by their civilised and civilising example.

The older man was sitting upright, the firelight moving on his face, which was showing relish and enjoyment. He was entertaining them: his family had been the traditional storytellers of his subtribe. The younger men, listening, were laughing.

The older man was surveying the white culture from below, the sharp slave's-eye view.

He was enumerating the white farms and the white men who owned them.

This was about five years after the end of World War I, which had been presented to these black people as one fought to preserve the decencies of civilisation. There were half a dozen farmers in the area who had fought on the other side in that war, who also presented their part in it as a defence of the fundamental decencies.

"On the farm across the ridge, the man with one arm..."

"Yes, yes, that is so, he has only one arm."

"And on the farm across the river, the man with one leg..."

"Yes, only one leg, one leg."

"And on the road into the station, the man who has a metal plate to hold his intestines in."

"Yes, what a thing, that a man must keep in his intestines with a piece of iron."

"And on the farm where they are mining for gold, the man who has a metal piece in his skull."

"Ah, yes, it is true, his brains would spill everywhere without it."

"And on the farm where the two rivers meet, the farmer has only one eye."

"True, true, only one eye."

"And on the farm here, this farm, which is not our land, but his land, the farmer also has only one leg."

"Ah, ah, a terrible thing, so many of them, and all wounded."

"And on the farm..."

Special benefits had been offered to ex-soldiers who would emigrate and take over this land. And so it was that to the eyes of the black people, the white people were an army of cripples. Like an army of locusts, who, after a few hours on the ground, show themselves legless, wingless, dozens of them, unable to take off again, when the main armies leave. Locusts, eating everything, covering everything, swarming everywhere...

"The locusts have eaten our food..."

"Aie, aie, they have eaten our food."

"The locusts blacken our fields."

"They blacken our fields with their eating mouths."

"The armies of the locusts come, they come, they come from the north, and our lives are eaten to the ground..."

As a chant popular in the compounds had it.

And again and again during that evening, these people dissolved into fits of laughter, putting together the white cripples of the area, the solemn lecture by the crippled farmer, and the picture of their two healthy young men, fighting briefly in the dust. They laughed and they laughed, staggering with laughter, rolling with laughter, howling with laughter...

Meanwhile, on that same evening, up on the hill where the farmer's house was, the man with only one leg was preparing to go to bed. His leg had been cut off halfway up the thigh. He was alive at all only because of this wound: his entire company had been wiped out in a great battle two weeks after he had suffered the good fortune of having his leg crushed because a shell burst near him. Of course he had often wondered if he might not have done better to die with his company. He had been extremely ill, and had nearly lost his reason. Previously he had been a man who lived in his body, danced, played football and cricket, gone shooting with the local farmers, walked, and ridden. This active man had had to face life with one leg. He managed well. When he got up in the morning, he tightened his mouth to an expression familiar to his family, one of patient determination. He manoeuvred himself to the edge of the bed, lifted the stump into the air, and fitted over it one, two, up to ten stump socks, according to the amount of weight he was carrying. He fitted the heavy wood and metal bucket over his stump, and pulled himself up by the edge of a table. Standing, he buckled the straps around his waist and over his shoulder.

His day could begin. He walked. He rode. He went down mine shafts. He sat up through nights to watch the temperature in tobacco barns. He stumped around fields, along drains, contour ridges, balanced and staggered his way across fields tumbling with great newly ploughed clods. He gave out rations, standing for hours by the sacks and bins of grains.

He was a man fighting poverty. The way he saw it.

At night, he dragged the metal and wood limb off him and collapsed back into bed, shutting his eyes, breathing deeply. "My God," he would mutter. "My God, well, that's done, for today."

And he would drift off to sleep, listening to the drums from the compound.

"They are dancing down there, I expect," he was thinking. "Dancing. They dance at the drop of a hat. Got a gift. Music. A gift. Threshing beans today, they make a dance of it, they dance their work, and they make up a song to go with it."

ILLUSTRATIONS: The Shikastan Situation

[This Report by Johor seems to us a useful addition to the Illustrations. Archivists.]

Some areas of the Northwest fringes are still comparatively unaffected by technology, and there people live (as I transmit this) not very differently from the way they have done for centuries. A village in an area of extreme poverty has been set apart from others because every year there is held the Festival of the Child. This has always attracted local visitors, and during this era of tourism, tourists. The village has never had an i

The Church is the centre of the occasion, but all the village is decorated: shops, the bar, the central square. And also the homes of the villagers, who have never relinquished their own rights in the matter.

Since the last report by Agent 9, there is a new development. On the night before the main event there are fireworks and dancing in the square and the streets leading away from the square. The tourists are always in time for this - to them - most interesting part of the festival, contrasting sharply, in their good clothes and the avidity that is their mark, with the local people, who observe their rich guests with good humour not unmixed with irony.

This night of dancing and drinking is conducted by the secular authorities but the priests keep it within their grasp by appearing at sundown on the steps of the church, with emitters of sweet smoke, and songs of a solemn kind. Nearly everyone is up all night, dancing and singing, but at the first sign of daylight, they are supposed to be in their places in the church, in abasement and in fawning postures, to be threatened and admonished by the priests.

The church "services" continue all morning, the people taking each other's place in batches, for the building is too small to hold them all at once.

Exactly at midday a troupe of priests, all decked out in every variety of finery and ornament, unlocks a door at the back of the church and brings out the Child. This is a gaudy statue without pretensions to realism, with staring eyes, highly coloured hair and skin, and smothered in laces and stuffs of all kinds. This figure is placed in a small litter covered with flowers and greenery and carried out of the building by a team of children chosen by the priests. It is carried three times around the square (which is no more than a small dusty space that has a few trees around it) by the children who are dressed no less fancifully than the image, while they, the villagers and the priests, chant and sing. The statue is put on an elevated place in the porch of the church, guarded by priests, and the singing continues all afternoon until sunset.