The Mimic Men

"We pretended to be real, to be learning, to be preparing ourselves for life, we mimic men of the New World, one unknown corner of it, with all its reminders of the corruption that came so quickly to the new."

Harsh and somewhat unfair characterization of the Caribbean from Naipaul, although there was and is an undeniable mimicry of Europe and North America among some West Indians of Naipaul's generation. The Mimic Men seems like Naipaul's harsher way to distance himself from Trinidad and the postcolonial government through Ralph Singh as a deracinated Indian, uprooted from his ancient Hindu past by the sea, shipwrecked in the Caribbean or London. I think Patrick French's biography is right to emphasize Naipaul's personal life as shaping novels like The Mimic Men or A Bend in the River, which clearly draw from the author's personal frustrations and identity crisis as an "East Indian of the West Indies."

Moreover, one sees here, in The Mimic Men, the shift in Naipaul's writing from the comic satire of his previous Trinidad novels. There are a few good jokes interspersed here (sheet paper pronounced by a Maltese in London, Eden being so black out of spite that Spite becomes his nickname at school), but The Mimic Men represents a shift to sexually frustrated, anxious, protagonists of displaced Indian descent. Like Saleem, Ralph Singh is an East Indian shipwrecked in the Caribbean island of Isabella, modelled on Naipaul's origins in Trinidad. Much like the trees carried away by ocean and river currents which arrive on Isabella's beaches, Ralph Singh is displaced and caught as an 'intermediate' Asiatic in a slave island of blacks and whites. Like other people of the 'transplantation,' Singh is a mimic men in many ways, becoming what others see of him and, like the decolonized world, operating through borrowed expressions, ideas, and civilizations. 

The problem with Naipaul is one of imposing the center's view of the periphery, the Caribbean. Instead of seeing the region as transplantations and focusing on his displacement from his Indian roots, Naipaul does not engage the Caribbean as a region of History, not solely European colonies for profit. Naipaul should have spent more time reading J.J. Thomas instead of Froude, more time understanding the Haitian Revolution instead of falling into the trap of racial theory and obsession with the Metropole. Much like his Middle Passage, a travelogue whose casual racism was too much for me to complete it, The Mimic Men shares a similarly dismal view of the early postcolonial Caribbean. 

While there were certainly deep contradictions and a problem of 'mimicry' in the West Indies, and an issue of racial divisions which plagued Trinidad & Tobago, Naipaul's perspective as a postcolonial Mandarin who could not return for good to Trinidad, but accepts a sort of stasis in a London hotel through the fictional character of Ralph Singh, is quite disturbing and ignores how the societies of the Caribbean were only copies of the allegedly superior West. I could rant endlessly about this novel and its complexities, its memoir structure, how it moves back and forth chronologically or even its universal implications of mimicry and identity (Sandra, perhaps one of the most interesting female characters in Naipaul's corpus, or the university students at the School in London, for example, all are 'playing' in their own ways that mirror or differ from that of the 'half-societies' of the West Indies), but I shall leave that for future posts.

On another disturbing note, the colonial politicians (Browne, Singh, etc.) and the experiments at satisfying distress while ensnared in mimicry, actually reminded me of Idi Amin Dada. The Mimic Men was written in Uganda, where Naipaul met Theroux, and actually contains a reference to colonial politicians 'turning' the tables and having whites serve them, in a troubling portent of Idi Amin's photographs of whites carrying him. These kinds of token symbolic decolonisation did not work for the fictional Caribbean island of Isabella. They most definitely did little for Uganda under Idi Amin, who took power a few years after The Mimic Men was published.

Note: The Kindle Edition is full of grammatical or formatting errors, which made this a harder read than necessary. Fortunately, those formatting or editing mistakes for the Kindle edition were not as numerous as they could have been.

Some Favorite Quotes

"The career of the colonial politician is short and ends brutally. We lack order. Above all, we lack power. We mistake words and the acclamation of words for power; as soon as our bluff is called we are lost."

"Flight to the greater disorder, the final emptiness: London and the home counties."

"They talk of the pessimism of the young as they talk of atheism and revolt: it is something to be grown out of."

"I no longer seek to find beauty in the lives of the mean and the oppressed. Hate oppression; fear the oppressed."

"How right our Aryan ancestors were to create gods. We seek sex, and are left with two private bodies on a stained bed. The larger erotic dream, the god, has eluded us. It is so whenever, moving out of ourselves, we look for extensions of ourselves. It is with cities as it is with sex. We seek the physical city and find only a conglomeration of private cells. In the city as nowhere else, we are reminded that we are individuals, units. Yet the idea of the city remains, it is the god of the city that we pursue in vain."

"He was like me: he needed the guidance of other men's eyes."

"In London I had no guide. There was no one to link my present with my past, no one to note my consistencies or inconsistencies."

"We become what we see of ourselves in the eyes of others."

"For there is no such thing as history nowadays; there are only manifestos and antiquarian research."

"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."

"Those student associations! Playing at being students, playing at being questioning and iconoclastic, playing at being young and licensed, playing at being in preparation for the world! The dishonesty of the young!"

"To be born on an island like Isabella, an obscure  New World transplantation, second-hand and barbarous, was to be born to disorder."

"We came out into the Indian areas, the flat lands where rice and sugarcane grew. My father spoke of the voyage, so recent but already in our strange hemisphere so remote, which the fathers and indeed some of the people we saw had made from another continent, to complete our own little bastard world."

"But in our slogans, we assumed the role of metropolitan party-givers. We did so easily; at Isabella Imperial, we were natural impersonators."

"Eden was something of a buffoon. He was the blackest boy in the school and for some time was known as Spite because some boys said he was black for spite."