MUCH HAS been written on the causes of extremism and the rise of so-called “preachers of hate”. Many commentators have properly considered recent warfare and social exclusion as key contributors to the spread of this poison. But three recent works lead me to think that we need to look much farther back than that. It is, perhaps, when the decent but passive majority consistently and historically fails to act that the extremists find a vacuum in which to propagate their cause.
A source for this can be found in Maya Angelou’s recently reprinted Collected Autobiographies. In her piece “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings”, she isolates her early childhood, when she imagined: “I was really white and . . . a cruel fairy stepmother . . . had turned me into a too big Negro girl, with nappy black hair, broad feet and a space between her teeth that would hold a number-two pencil.”
In her adulthood, she would become acclaimed for her campaigns against that sort of inherited racial insecurity, which can only give succour to the iniquity of extremism.
The recently released film Heading South (which was directed by Laurent Cantet and received the Cinema for Peace Award at the Venice Film Festival) presents graphic images of the life and death of a Haitian man. As white, European, American tourists lead a pampered life in the luxurious beach hotels of Haiti, the indigenous population are treated with contempt, their lives not even worth the protection the law.
Charlotte Rampling plays one of three rich white women visiting the country in the 1970s, who embark on a series of sexual relationships with local young men. One boy in particular becomes an object of their frustrated fantasies. Inevitably, he is murdered by a gang of local criminals. Commenting on the boy’s death, Rampling expresses her concern for her own safety to a local policeman, who replies: “Tourists never get killed.” The film is an uncomfortable examination of race and colonialism and disturbingly depicts a local population more concerned with preparing Tequila Sunrises for tourists than looking after their own people for whom they barely contain their contempt.
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In later life, Maya Angelou would press the notorious black activist Malcolm X for answers. He, to her discomfort, advised extremism — “Integration is a trick. A trick to lull the black man to sleep. We must separate ourselves from the white man and his white religion. It is an hypocrisy practised by Christian hypocrites,” he told her, she recalls in The Heart of a Woman.
Angelou recognised that Malcolm X’s extremism was a dangerous and destructive course, but one cannot help but wonder whether it was, at least in part, a result of years of passive inactivity by the majority. It is, the extremist who will always gain decisive influence when decent people fail to act.
Mayou’s recollections of the speeches of Martin Luther King are evocative of the man’s charisma and unifying influence. In A Song Flung Up to Heaven, she recalls the effect of hearing him. “We listeners bonded resolutely, because King showed us how we were all related to one another and that we shared the same demons and the same divines.”
Perhaps the final words should, somewhat ironically, be left to the last letter of Malcolm X to Angelou: “You communicate because you have plenty of (soul) and you always keep your feet firmly rooted on the ground . . . You are a beautiful writer and a beautiful woman.”
Two disparate works, but with much to say on the consequences of passivity.
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The Collected Autobiographies of Maya Angelou, Virago, £20
Heading South — on general release