Mr. Biswas Is Home

The news of Naipaul's death has me in a strange place, emotionally. A good part of a year of my life was dedicated to exploring his literary works, as well as the novels and short stories of his younger brother, Shiva. Unlike other fans of his work, I prefer the earlier comic fiction of the Caribbean, and Naipaul more so than the usual writer successfully brought the reader into a different time, place, and world. Naipaul, and his brother Shiva, brought countless hours of joy and reflection for a year of my life, and for that, enriched my understanding of myself and the world around me. Nothing could have been a greater gift, and I shall always remember the commitment to the life of intellect, the desire to escape from the periphery, that motivated this great writer. Rest in peace. 

Rambling Essay on Naipaul's Mimic Men

Below is an awkward essay I wrote on Naipaul's Mimic Men. I think I lost a sense of direction while writing this (while trying to bring in a little bit of Glissant and some other writings from the literature course), but anything Naipaul is interesting, so I hope this isn't too horrible.

V.S. Naipaul’s The Mimic Men allows for thought-provoking contemplation of Glissant’s Poetics of Relation and Guha’s “The migrant’s Time.” As a novelist of Caribbean origins, Naipaul’s upbringing in a racially and culturally mixed Trinidadian society invites analysis from fellow-Caribbean author Glissant’s concepts. In addition, Guha’s article on the migrant experience is relevant to the protagonist of the novel, Ralph Singh, who experiences exile or the migrant life in London. However, both Glissantian Poetics of Relation and Guha’s Migrant’s Time miss the universalistic implications of Naipaul’s oeuvre. A close reading of The Mimic Men therefore challenges the reader to think beyond the experiences of exile or migration while providing an example to think critically through rhizomatic approaches to identity from Glissant. This essay will begin with Guha’s heterogeneous temporalities and migration, applying it critically to Naipaul before examining Glissant’s Poetics of Relation in the context of Ralph Singh, a deracinated Indo-Caribbean migrant (or exile) living in a Kensington hotel. The significance of mimicry in this context will shed light on relationality as a contradictory tactic against totalitarian roots.

Guha’s notion of migrant’s time brings to the forefront the temporal and spatial configuration of a migrant. The temporal and spatial ousting, or feeling of adrift is central (Guha 156). According to Guha, “There is no way for those who live in a community to make themselves intelligible to each other except by temporalizing their experience of being together” (156). The importance of temporality in shaping community or sense of belonging is central to Ralph Singh, narrator and author of the fictive memoir which constitutes The Mimic Men. By shifting chronologically in his memoir, Singh temporalizes his experience of childhood in Isabella, the fictionalized Trinidad of Naipaul’s youth, as well as imbuing his university student days in England and experience as a politician in his island homeland with spatio-temporal attributes that resist linearity. Accordingly, for Singh, it never occurred to him “that the writing of this book might have become an end in itself, that the recording of a life might become an extension of that life" (Naipaul 293). The end of writing his memoir in such a manner that resists linearity while functioning as an additional part of his life, speaks volumes to the heterogeneous temporalities embedded in the structure of the novel. The multiple temporalities of the novel also functions to show the inability of Singh to connect or relate with those around him. For example, during his youth in Isabella, he often dreams of an imagined Indo-Aryan ancestry in Asia which, though only a few generations removed, cannot be found in the disorder of the Caribbean colonial society that developed from slavery (146). Imagining an Aryan past allows for Singh to claim some kinship or relation to a distant past, which also disconnects him from the rest of Isabella. Thus, because of a lack of similar spatio-temporal overlap with other people of Isabella, Singh experiences a mismatch in the black and white world of the colonial Caribbean.

Even before arriving in England, the indeterminateness of Singh’s ethnic community in Isabella is central to his feeling of being shipwrecked. Once in London, he feels, “Shipwreck: I have used this word before. With my island background, it was the word that always came to me. And this was what I felt I had encountered again in the great city: this feeling of being adrift, a cell of perception, little more that might be altered, if only fleetingly, by any encounter” (32). This sense of being adrift, beginning in the island of his birth, illustrates the spatio-temporal disconnect between Singh and those he was socialized with in Isabella.  However, this feeling of disconnect lingers in England, the colonial metropole. Guha wrote of a mismatch of the migrant’s everydayness and that of their host community (Guha 158). Singh’s experience as a student and later exile appears to affirm that experience. However, Singh also experiences a sense of freedom in London, where “There was no one to link my present with my past, no one to note my consistencies or inconsistencies. It was up to me to choose my character, and I chose the character that was easiest and most attractive. I was the dandy, the extravagant colonial, indifferent to scholarship" (Naipaul 24). Despite this relative freedom from his past experience as a colonial subject in Isabella, he chooses to perpetuate the limited expression and stereotypical roles assigned to the colonized subject. His experience of “assimilation” is one of mimetic play, assimilating into what the metropole made open to subjects as a colonial dandy. Singh’s inexorable drift and attempt to assimilate mark him as alien, per Guha (Guha 159). Naipaul’s protagonist is unable to connect with those around him in Isabella, despite a shared mimetic relationship with regards to the colonial metropole, nor is he able to find connection in London, where the illusion of connection and the individual cells of urban life create disorder (Naipaul 22). Significantly, intimacy, particularly sexual relationships and Singh’s marriage, do not allow him to express deeper kinship or transcend the individual (22).

Perhaps most intriguing to Guha, Singh’s experience of youth of and politics in creole Isabella is one of disorder and half-societies, imitating ideas and slogans of England in a context of inapplicability. Guha saw creole societies as spaces of creative overcoming of translation (Guha 159). For Singh, however, the ‘creole’ space of Isabella represented racial, ethnic, political, and social disorder. Disorder, wrought by colonialism, slavery and mimicry of the metropole, leads to Singh declaring the following:

A man, I suppose, fights only when he hopes, when he has a vision of order, when he feels strongly there is some connection between the earth on which he walks and himself. But there was my vision of a disorder which it was beyond any one man to put right. There was my sense of wrongness, beginning with the stillness of that morning of return when I looked out on the slave island and tried to pretend it was mine. There was my sense of intrusion which deepened as I felt my power to be more and more a matter of words. So defiantly, in my mind, I asserted my character as intruder, the picturesque Asiatic born for other landscapes. (Naipaul 248)

In other words, the creole character of Isabella made Singh feel alienated and castaway, but also removed from his Indian roots. Mixed-race characters also cause a similar feeling for Singh, who sees them as contributing to the disorderly nature of a colonial society in which ties to the landscape are inorganic, even for descendants of indigenous Caribs absorbed by intermarriage (146). Thus, creole nature of society in Isabella is inextricably woven into Singh’s search for order, only to find disorder in the colony and seat of Empire. Furthermore, this serves to illustrate the complexity of migrant’s time for those of double Diasporas, as descendants of Indian indentured laborers in the Caribbean who later move to England. The uprootedness and heterogeneous temporalities of such communities speaks to a larger problem of identity that can be experienced by non-migrants as well.

However, Glissant’s concept of poetics of relation may be more useful for reconsidering rootedness, movement, and identity for double or triple Diasporas, such as Singh. For Glissant, relations are to be found in a rhizome-like sense of rootedness, or one without totalitarian roots. In other words, each and every identity is extended through a relationship with the Other, acting as a kind of anticonformism (Glissant 11). According to Glissant, “Thus the particular resists a generalizing universal and soon begets specific and local senses of identity, in concentric circles (provinces then nations)” (14). Glissantian reconceptualization of identity and rootedness is inherently flexible, creating room for Indo-Caribbean identity within the spectrum of Caribbean cultures. In addition, relation is made up of shared knowledge, which undoubtedly reflects the shared experiences of people of a variety of racial or ethnic backgrounds in Isabella. In The Mimic Men, such a perspective is not on the table, although the shared knowledge of Singh and his classmates at the Imperial School, including his black political partner, Browne, indicate a relationality based on colonialism. This, in turn, demonstrates Glissant’s argument on the totalitarian root of colonialism, which in turn shaped the totalitarian drive for a single root in postcolonial nationalism (14). The limitations of such a totalitarian root appear in Singh’s experience, particularly with regards to the continued dependence on England reducing the meaning of independence to playacting (Naipaul 227).

Singh does not experience Isabella through a rhizomatic approach, despite his birth there, and as an alienated colonial subject, whose education inculcates the importance of England, does not identify with the landscape or people of the island. Indeed, he marvels at the cohesion of Isabella:
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. (246)

Colonialism is the force that held it together, creating a controlled chaos in which Singh believed himself to be adrift. Attempting to fill the vacuum left by decolonization with a totalitarian root of nationalism only exacerbated the contradictions of a society in which politicians appropriated concepts and slogans of the metropole without thought. Socialism, or nationalization, for instance, characterize the misplaced mimicry of kinship to England that does not rethink the implications of non-Caribbean ideas in a Caribbean reality. Thus, the socialism of Singh and Browne disappears after the first issue of their paper (223). For Singh, "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” (10).

Intriguingly, Glissant’s concept of internal exile is perhaps most relevant to the experience of Singh. Glissant defines it as occurring to individuals living where solutions concerning the relationship of community to its surroundings are not consented to by the community as a whole (Glissant 19). For The Mimic Men, Singh’s experiences internal exile within Isabella because of the entrenched racial divisions that separate the population from determining its relationship to the island as a whole. Divided by generation, race, and class, Singh cannot identify with Isabella but becomes an exile from his home. As a child, the family home was to be kept separate from the intrusion of school and community, which gradually infiltrates his experience without his or his family’s consent through exposure to the interiority of life for other racial groups, particularly working-class black Browne and French Creole Deschampsneufs. By not opening himself to a rhizome-like understanding of relation, Singh is unable to escape the internal exile of his youth or career as a politician, eventually choosing permanent exile in a Kensington hotel. As mentioned previously, the heterogeneous temporalities put forth by Guha help to illuminate why Singh’s struggles to assimilate or find kinship in London. An internal alienation and exile also explains why Singh encounters similarly exiled Londoners who are playing with social identities, political affiliations, or rebelliousness, such as university students playing at being iconoclasts (Naipaul 50). Playacting of meaning does not confer kinship, or lasting kinship, for neither Singh nor the white characters he encounters in London.

On the universal features of rootedness, however, Glissantian poetics of relation elucidate the struggle against a totalitarian root as well as the struggle of internal exile. Moreover, a rhizomatic understanding of rootedness and belonging also presents to us the mimicry at work in English society, such as the aforementioned university students. Indeed, while birth “on an island like Isabella, an obscure New World transplantation, second-hand and barbarous, was to be born to disorder", London was not a refuge (141). In fact, Singh finds himself dreaming of landscapes he knew before after settling in London, the very “escape to what I had so recently sought to escape from" (36). In London he is not a Londoner, nor in Isabella does he belong. Mimetic expressions of identity do not allow for an escape from this conundrum. Similarly, numerous white characters, including English-born residents, are adrift metaphorically or socially. The other residents of the hotel in which Singh decides to take permanent residence are described as follows:

But we who belong here are neither maimed nor very old. Three-quarters of the men here are of my age; they have responsible jobs to which they go off in their motorcars every morning. We are people who for one reason or another have withdrawn, from our respective countries, from the city where we find ourselves, from our families. We have withdrawn from unnecessary responsibility and attachment. We have simplified our lives. I cannot believe that our establishment is unique. It comforts me to think that in this city alone there must be hundreds and thousands like ourselves (296).

Singh’s co-residents, in a building designed for temporary living, find solace and belonging in a space defined by transience. They have chosen to simplify their lives and remove themselves from their nationalities, cities, and families, deliberately choosing non-relation with established or conventional forms of belonging. The residents of the hotel, through a shared space that allows for individual expression, have some semblance of rootedness, despite the transitory nature of the space they occupy. A rhizomatic construct of identity aids in understanding the broadly shared experience of alienation and mimicry in social roles that occurs in a colonial setting or the center of Empire.

In summation, Guha’s Migrant’s Time and Glissant’s Poetics of Relation pave the path for deeper interpretation of The Mimic Men while suffering their own limitations. The experience of Singh, both internal exile in Isabella and exile in London, challenges Guha’s conceptions by looking at individual displacement from local vantage points or afar. Glissantian concepts such as internal exile assist in interpreting Singh’s displacement in the land of his birth, while perhaps speaking to the general conditions of life in the city which, despite the conglomeration of people, prove illusory for kinship. Mimetic expressions of being and belonging allow for one to perform the roles forced upon on, or to temporarily endeavor to create or define meaning, albeit of an illusory nature for Singh. Utilizing the figure of rhizome roots rather than a singular root permits the identification with a multiplicity of origins or ties, pertinent to creolization and a “disorderly” society such as Isabella. Undoubtedly, inclusion of white characters in the novel contributes to thinking about migration and movement broadly, including forms of rootedness and rootlessness among Singh’s housemates in the hotel. Mimicry of social conventions, roles, or family do not create authentic forms of being for Singh, even when in relation to other forms, because it helps prevent one from expressing an authentic individualized self, albeit one that still requires relationality and flux.

Naipaul at Dhaka

VS Naipaul discusses his life and being a writer in this precious segment from the Dhaka Lit Fest 2016. Naipaul's point about anxiety and the desire to become that lovely thing, a writer, hits home. Lady Naipaul's story about the manuscript for A House for Mr. Biswas being left on the kitchen table while Vidia went on vacation adds a nice personal touch. One would also love to hear more about Augustus, Naipaul's adored cat.

Kureishi's Last Word

"Literature was a killing field; no decent person ever picked up a pen." 

Hanif Kureishi's postmodern novel, ostensibly based on Patrick French's biography of V.S. Naipaul, is a worthwhile read for all devotees of Naipaul. However, those expecting Mamoon and his biographer, Harry, to overwhelmingly resemble their "real-life" inspiration, will be a little disappointed. What is fascinating about Kureishi's novel is how he suspends judgment, focusing on the thin line between fact and fiction, not to mention fact and reality (yes, that's a thing, not just a reference to a time I mispoke at a dinner). As a work full of humor and numerous references to allegedly factual occurrences in Naipaul's life, especially regarding his infamous relationship with women in his life and his troubling position as a brown colonial often perceived as adopting racist positions, Kureishi's prose is surprisingly dull and almost uninspired, but the novel's successful for revealing how, like that famous Naipaul quotation indicates, fiction never lies. Perhaps a film adaptation should be attempted for Kureishi's novel, which strikes me as an excellent idea given that Kureishi's fiction writing always struck me as better fit for film, much like The Buddha of Suburbia movie. 

Letters Between a Father and Son

V.S. Naipaul's Letters Between A Father and Son is the most humanising and intimate portrait of Naipaul one could possibly read. Theroux's book and French's biography reveal much of the monstruous and ugly side of Naipaul's character and life, such as racism, sexism, and the way he treated his first wife. A necessary balance requires reading the correspondence between a young Naipaul at Oxford and his father. Older sister Kamla, studying in India, is also a strong presence as father, son, and daughter encourage each other, try to stay afloat financially, and make a way in the world. One sees how strong Naipaul's father's influence was on his fiction, especially in inculcating literary awareness and ambition. Perhaps the greatest tribute a son could ever make for his father is the magnificent A House for Mr. Biswas. Unfortunately, after three years of trying to make sense of burgeoning adulthood and adapting to England, Naipaul loses his father and the reader has, by that time, entered into the daily tribulations of the family. 

The striking thing about young Naipaul, at least the Naipaul he chose to express to his father and sister, is how astonishingly from a very young age, he was already exhibiting signs of arrogance, misogyny, disdain for America, ambition, and loathing of Trinidad. He writes about the need to best the English at their own language, casually uses the 'N-word' when hearing about a relation's dalliance with a dougla, and even feels comfortable asserting his superiority to Jane Austen while still an undergraduate! His arrogance allows him to even tell Selvon what a novelist does while writing to his father that Selvon and Mittelholzer were horrible writers! Already, even before leaving Oxford, young Vidia was trying to avoid the fate for those who allow themselves to become nothing, even urging his father, mother, and sisters to avoid too much reliance on some of their Capildeo kin. As a writer who has seamlessly weaved so much of his personal life into his fiction, from Mr. Biswas to Half a Life, the letters contained here are invaluable for revealing the thin line between fact and fiction. 

The Middle Passage

After over a year since I first tried to finish Naipaul's The Middle Passage, I can confidently say this is my favorite of his travel writing. Much of the humor and social commentary in his description of the various Caribbean societies he visits is part of his satirical short stories and novels, for example. The "racial distribution" of jobs in Trinidad, for instance, is brilliantly satirized in his story about the black Grenadian baker pretending to be Chinese to have customers. Similarly, the dark themes about the Caribbean (slave past, centuries of oppression and violence) and the tragedy of the African in the New World (to be recast in so many images of the European powers). Indeed, much of Naipaul's ruminations on race and colonialism are better explored in some of his novels, particularly The Mimic Men, but it's intriguing to see where he was headed in his nonfiction writing before his later literary endeavors. Anyway, to give credit where it's due, Naipaul does understand the problem of race and the phenomenon of black skins in white masks for the West Indies, and there is less of the rampant Negrophobia than I remembered from a year ago. That said, I prefer his younger brother's travel writings on the West Indies over his, though both share a like-minded view on the matter. 

The "meat" of Naipaul's writing here, despite covering Guyana, Trinidad, Suriname, Martinique, Antigua, and Jamaica, is really the actual voyage (the titular middle passage) from Europe (coincidentally, picking up emigrants for Britain along the way, completing the cycle of uprooting), his time in Trinidad, and lengthy descriptions of Guyana, the Jagans, and its particular racial and political problems. His sojourn in Suriname is actually a tad less nuanced than that of Shiva Naipaul, and lacks Shiva's nuance in his descriptions of the "Bush Negroes," too.  On describing his native Trinidad, naturally, Naipaul is on top form, hinting at several of the ideas percolating in his mind for Mimic Men and future nonfiction on Trinidad. Unfortunately, Naipaul does not visit any Spanish-speaking Caribbean destinations, unlike Shiva Naipaul, who visited Puerto Rico, so it is far from a 'complete' portrait of the Caribbean during a moment of great change. But anyone interested in the British West Indies during this pivotal moment on the path to independence should read this. 

Derek Walcott's Laventille

 It huddled there

steel tinkling its blue painted metal air,

tempered in violence, like Rio's favelas,

with snaking, perilous streets whose edges fell as

its Episcopal turkey-buzzards fall

from its miraculous hilltop

shrine,

down the impossible drop

to Belmont, Woodbrook, Maraval, St. Clair

that shine

like peddlers' tin trinkets in the sun.

From a harsh

shower, its gutters growled and gargled wash 

past the Youth Centre, past the water catchment,

a rigid children's carousel of cement;

we climbed where lank electric

lines and tension cables linked its raw brick

hovels like a complex feud,

where the inheritors of the middle passage stewed,

five to a room, still clamped below their hatch,

breeding like felonies,

whose lives revolve round prison, graveyars, church.

Below bent breadfruit trees

in the flat, coloured city, class

escalated into structures still,

merchant, middleman, magistrate, knight. To go downhill

from here was to ascend.

The middle passage never guessed its end.

This is the height of poverty

for the desperate and black;

climbing, we could look back

with widening memory

on the hot, corrugated-iron sea

whose horrors we all

shared. The salt blood knew it well,

you, me, Samuel's daughter, Samuel,

and those ancestors clamped below its grate.

And climbing steeply past the wild

gutters, it shrilled

in the blood, for those who suffered, who were killed, 

and who survive.

What other gift was there to give

as the godparents of his unnamed child?

Yet outside the brown annex of the church, the

stifling odour of bay rum and talc, the particular,

neat sweetness of the crowd distressed

that sense. The black, fawning verger, 

his bow tie akimbo, grinning, the clown-gloved

fashionable wear of those I deeply loved

once, made me look on with hopelessness and rage

at their new, apish habits, their excess

and fear, the possessed, the self-possessed;

their perfume shrivelled to a childhood fear

of Sabbath graveyards, christenings, marriages,

that muggy, steaming, self-assuring air

of tropical Sabbath afternoons. And in

the church, eyes prickling with rage,

the children rescued from original sin

by their Godfather since the middle passage,

the supercilious brown curate, who intones,

healing the guilt in these rachitic bones,

twisting my love within me like a knife:

"across the troubled waters of this life..."

Which of us cares to walk 

even if God wished

those retching waters where our souls were fished

for this new world? Afterwards, we talk

in whispers, close to death

among these stones planted on alien earth.

Afterwards,

the ceremony, the careful photograph

moved out of range before the patient tombs,

we dare a laugh, 

ritual, desperate words,

born like these children from habitual wombs,

from lives fixed in the unalterable groove

of grinding poverty. I stand out on a balcony

and watch the sun pave its flat, golden path

across the roofs, the aerials, cranes, the tops

of fruit trees crawling downward to the city.

Something inside is laid wide like a wound,

some open passage that has cleft the brain,

some deep, amnesiac blow. We left

somewhere a life we never found,

customs and gods that are not born again,

some crib, some grille of light

clanged shut on us in bondage, and withheld

us from that world below us and beyond,

and in its swaddling cerements we're still bound.

Lord Invader's Old Time Cat-O'-Nine

Catchy calypso! Naipaul sang this song to Paul Theroux in Africa, described in Theroux's Sir Vidia's Shadow: A Friendship Across Five Continents.

Magic Seeds

"In spite of all the killings, the movement was becoming more and more a matter of these abstract words."

Naipaul's sequel to Half a Life, Magic Seeds, his most recent work of fiction, is underwhelming compared to the interesting plot and earlier life of the protagonist, Willie Chandran. In this sequel, Willie decides to follow his sister's advice and joins the guerrillas in the Indian countryside, drifting for several more years until being imprisoned as a political prisoner, his early 1950s "postcolonial literature" saving his hide as Roger, still in London, is able to get Willie released. Back in London, Willie continues to drift. This is essentially the entirety of the story, with the "meat" set in India amongst a dangerous group of "revolutionaries" who are not aligned with the Kandapalli's group, which his sister Sarojini, had meant for Willie to join. 

The only character from the prequel who actually succeeds in meeting his goals is Marcus, the West African who finally achieves success by having a white grandchild, while Roger is on the path to perdition and Willie reaches a typical Naipaulian conclusion: "It is wrong to have an ideal view of the world." Similar themes abound: the disconnect between the Indian guerrillas and the peasants they exploit in the name of revolution, the unreality of human connection, intimate or otherwise, decay in the postcolonial areas, decline in London (council estate houses, the alleged dependency they breed, according to Roger), a general state of unraveling, of unreality.

Since Naipaul has previously explored guerrillas in a novel with the same name, based on the Black Power movement in the West Indies, this novel, which focuses on a more explicitly Marxist-Leninist group of revolutionaries, brings to mind some critiques of Sendero Luminoso. The revolutionaries Willie joins in the Indian countryside cling to the fiction of fighting for the peasants, for a revolution inspired by Marx, Lenin, and Mao, but the reality of the peasants and their different aspirations contradict them at every turn. 

In the end, the guerrillas become another exploitative force, taking advantage of the countryside's populace without meeting any success. How can one ever launch a successful revolution when one's forces are killing and exploiting the very group one claims to fight for? It is this contradiction, the elusive goal or "unreality" of revolution which plagues the Indian movement Willie joins. In typical Naipaul fashion, Africa is, though acknowledged as a site of colonialism, is portrayed as better off than India because the Africans "know who they are" while India remembers its ancient past yet lost meaning. Both are "wounded civilizations" nonetheless.   

Half a Life

"At home his life had been ruled by his mixed inheritance. It spoilt everything. Even the love he felt for his mother, which should have been pure, was full of the pain he felt for her circumstances."

Naipaul's Half a Life is really fixated on those half-and-half peoples, both in terms of caste and race. Willie Chandran, the protagonist, is born to a brahmin of the priestly caste who shames his family, all int he name of sacrifice like the Mahatma, by marrying a "backward" (Untouchable), from his college. Willie, named for the famous English writer, William Somerset Maugham, is trapped by this mixed-caste background, eventually fabricating his own identity as a college student in 1950s London. Befriending a "brown" Jamaican student, Willie participates in the multicultural bohemian Notting Hill parties, literary gatherings with an interesting cast of characters via his English friend, Roger, and experiences a changing London where the Notting Hill riots break out before his book, a collection of short stories, receives negative reviews in the press. 

One fan of his work, Ana, a mixed-race woman from Mozambique, which is never explicitly stated in the text, a second-rank Portuguese in the colonial setting, becomes close with Willie, who finds comfort with her. He later asks to return to Africa with her, spending 18 years helping manage her estate , seeing African prostitutes in the capital, finding pure satisfaction through an affair with a married "mixed-race" woman, and eventually realizing he was following in his father's path, a path of nondecision, not proclaiming and living life but trying to live someone else's life. These themes of disillusion, mimicry, and an near obsession over the "real" and the place of those caught between worlds, are hardly new to Naipaul's work, but the India of Willie and his  parents provides a new setting for Naipaulian worlds. The ease in which Willie enters the world of Ana and the second-rank Portuguese of Mozambique, mostly second-rank because of their partial African ancestry, and the historical colonial links between Portuguese Goa and the colony, illustrate this tension of the intermediary, the "mixed-race" caught between the fictional worlds of black and white, Brahmin and Untouchable.

One wishes Sarojini's character, the sister, and Marcus the West African were present in more of the book, but the most surprising thing about this novel is how it recycles older themes and settings but is still something different. There is a rich sense of humor in this tale, particularly in the London setting, and the numerous fake or lying characters, including the protagonist. In a sense, Half a Life is very similar to The Mimic Men: both feature uprooted characters of Indian origins who go off to a changing London, experience sexual frustration (although Willie finds the satisfaction that Ralph never discovers), commentary on the colonial peoples (Caribbean, Africa, and India), and the facades all peoples use to masque themselves (racial, colonial, political, sexual), to hide who they truly are. Half a Life, in that regard, is hardly a new or radical step in Naipaul's fiction, yet provides a surprisingly different take on Africa, still bearing Conradian aspects (the darkness, difficult tropical climate, the reversion of the colonial structures to the "bush") but finding commonality between India and Africa. 

A Way in the World

"Lebrun's political resolution was very far from this sensationalism. It enabled him, not to embrace the period of slavery, but to acknowledge it without pain, and, presenting it in his own way, to make a claim for its universality, and even its precedence."

V.S. Naipaul's A Way in the World is a marriage of sorts between The Enigma of Arrival and In a Free State. The autobiographical narrator reflecting on his writing and Trinidad is juxtaposed with a pan-Caribbean vision of Trinidad's presence in much larger historical developments through a story suite. Columbus, C.L.R. James, Raleigh, Francisco Miranda, Venezuela, Trinidad & Tobago, an unnamed East African country resembling Uganda, and other locales are connected through this rather ambitious project, unfortunately marketed as a novel in the US. 

Like the best of The Enigma of Arrival, Naipaul's autobiographical narrator's experiences in a rapidly changing Trinidad he no longer recognizes, combined with a strange pan-Caribbean perspective, connecting with yet dissociating himself with a C.L.R. James-inspired radical, Lebrun, Miranda's constant reinvention, a fellow West Indian from Guadeloupe living in Francophone West Africa, and a co-worker in the civil service before Naipaul left Trinidad for Oxford in 1950. In one unexpected admission, the Naipaul-like narrator even admits to the influence of George Lamming and other Caribbean peoples on his writing! So, perhaps Derek Walcott was wrong to suggest Naipaul completely turned his back on the "Negroid" creative genius of the Caribbean?

But, I digress. A Way in the World is a Naipaul work I will return to in the future. The use of Amerindian symbolism, autobiographical aspects, and Naipaul's intriguing self-distancing from a larger Caribbean "radical" collective identity or movement are fascinating, but the work was dragged down by the lengthy Miranda episode on the "Gulf of Desolation" between early English Trinidad and Venezuela. Surprisingly clear and unafraid to juxtapose brutality of slavery, indentured labor, and the South American independence struggles, Naipaul somehow loses his way. The final chapter continues a circular or cyclic theme of identity or movement, but seemed only relevant to the previous chapters in the text as an unsubtle critique of black nationalism, what Naipaul seems to suggest is a "racial sacrament" of black nationalism or racial politics. 

So, as an overall read, A Way in the World contains some compelling narratives, but begins to lose its way in the penultimate and final chapters. The characterization of the fictionalized C.L.R. James character is likewise intriguing, but fundamentally misrepresents James/Lebrun to fit Naipaul's worldview. One can, to a certain extent, understand Naipaul's desire to avoid becoming part of a larger group or collective, to be able to reinvent oneself through identity or writing, but the Naipaul perspective cannot be divorced from incorrect or misleading views on race and anti-colonial politics. 

The Enigma of Arrival

Naipaul on grounds of Wiltshire home, 1978 (Source)

"I had given myself a past, and a romance of the past. One of the loose ends in my mind had vanished; a little chasm filled. And though something like Haitian anarchy seemed to threaten my little island, and though physically I no longer belonged to the place, yet the romance by which I had attached it to the rest of the world continued to be possessed by me as much as the imaginative worlds of my other, fictional books."

Naipaul's The Enigma of Arrival is an autobiographical tome on the cycle of life, migration, and change. Set in the English countryside, while the narrator, representing Naipaul, is renting a cottage, walking, and writing, the text comments on the seasons, the gradual changes or decline of the manor, life and social relations in England, and explorations of the narrator's journey, a process of returns or flights, both literal and metaphorical. 

The novel reminds one of The Enigma of the Return  by Dany Laferrière in that both feature a shared fixation on movement to and from the Caribbean. While Trinidad is only of many areas in which Naipaul returns to in his fiction, here his childhood and "second childhood" in his Wiltshire cottage leave room for thought on Naipaul's shifting identity, self-perception as an international or "metropolitan" writer, and the Trinidad which has become more imaginary than real for him. Just as his time in the countryside, appreciating the history and natural splendor of the area, eventually comes to an end, Naipaul's journey continues in interesting ways as we are introduced to the infirm landlord, the Phillipses, who manage, the gardener, and other characters in the book progress, age, die. 

There is no such thing as an immutable world, and the decay of the landlord's estate in England is mirrored by the shocking changes in Naipaul's Trinidad, where the old Indian villages of the countryside have disappeared while Caribbean immigrants, shantytowns, an oil boom, independence, and racial politics transform Naipaul. The enigma of arrival, indeed! Whether traveling to New York and England for the first time, ruminating on his experiences in other Caribbean locales, or describing his image of Africa and India, the mysteries of the world evolve, and the greatest of mysteries, humanity, changes with generations. Naipaul's return to Trinidad for his younger sister's cremation rituals, provides an excellent conclusion to this theme. 

One of the more intriguing aspects of this novel is the image of Trinidad and the Caribbean, a region in which Naipaul begins to understand its greater role in world history just as he loses it due to no longer being part of the changed Trinidad. When first leaving it in 1950 for Oxford, he describes in great detail seeing the island from the sky for the first time, seeing it as much more than a small colonial outpost where his half-education through abstraction was something to escape. He even feels some connection with an Afro-Trinidadian man on the plane, and an African-American en route to Europe on the ship from New York. His colonial roots, his uprooting from India and the Caribbean, connects him with the African-American on the ship who refuses to be placed in Naipaul's quarters to avoid being ghettoized or segregated based on race. One sees from incidents like these, a shared desire on Naipaul's part to escape being pigeonholed or segregated because of his race, in his desire to become a metropolitan writer. 

Yet, one also detects some regional kinship with the Trinidadian, with the travels in Belize, his stops in Puerto Rico, Jamaica, Barbados, and Anguilla. By connecting the history of Trinidad to the early European conquest of the region, the French fleeing the Haitian and French Revolutions to Trinidad in the 19th century. Here, one finds a troubling view of the Haitian Revolution as an example of black revolt or revolution rooted in anger and turning away from the world, not trying to improve it. He compares this complex, 19th century event with Black Power in Trinidad, two distinct historical events, yet sees it all as part of the general 'plantation colony' heritage of the Caribbean. Its an interesting perspective, but not exactly historically accurate, though one sees where Naipaul is going with that assertion. The Trinidad of his youth, the one he returns to by the novel's end, is no longer for him. Much like Ralph Singh in The Mimic Men or other characters in Naipaul's fiction, the narrator is uprooted from his Asiatic or Hindu origins as well as the Caribbean, while England is also a site of change or rootlessness in its own ways, as exemplified by the gradual decay of the manor.

There is much more to be said about this work, which I shall return to in future posts about the author. A stronger comparative work on its commonalities with "The Enigma of the Return" for instance, would be fascinating reading for how both authors approach their respective origins, or the Caribbean. Impressively, it manages to, while delving into great detail about the estates, the colors, shapes, seasonal variety, and inhabitants of the English countryside, connect history, colonialism, identity, travel, and blur the lines between fact and fiction. The description of the Hindu rituals, pundit cousin, and death of Sati are quite moving, too. 

Favorite Quotes

"That final trip to the pub served no cause except that of life; yet he made it appear an act of heroism; poetical." (48)

"These ideas of a world in decay, a world subject to constant change, and of the shortness of human life, made many things bearable." (23)

"I had thought that because of my insecure past--peasant India, colonial Trinidad, my own family circumstances, the colonial smallness that didn't consort with the grandeur of my ambition, my uprooting of myself for a writing career, my coming to England with so little, and the very little I still had to fall back on--I had thought that because of this I had been given an especially tender or raw sense of an unaccommodating world" (92).

"Yet I was also ashamed that, with all my aspirations, and all that I had put into this adventure, this was all that people saw in me---so far from the way I thought of myself, so far from what I wanted for myself. And it was shame, too, that made me keep my eyes closed while they were in the cabin" (126).

"Two hundred years on, another Haiti was preparing, I thought: a wish to destroy a world judged corrupt and too full of pain, to turn one's back on it, rather than to improve it" (161).

"The story had become more personal: my journey, the writer's journey, the writer defined by his writing discoveries, his ways of seeing, rather than by his personal adventures, writer and man separate at the beginning of the journey and coming together again in a second life just before the end" (344).

"Men need history; it helps them to have an idea of who they are. But history, like sanctity, can reside in the heart; it is enough that there is something there" (353).

A House for Mr. Biswas at Jaipur

Enjoy a provoking discussion of Naipaul's A House for Mr. Biswas at a book festival in Jaipur, India. Hanif Kureishi and Paul Theroux talk about Naipaul's epic masterpiece while Naipaul is sitting in the audience, which is a little strange, as Kureishi points out. I have also ranted about Naipaul's masterpiece on this blog. Like many of his Trinidad books, there is a rich sense of humor and perhaps even affection, if you delve deeper through the satire or condescension. 

In a Free State

"He will never in a hundred years understand how ordinary the world was for me, with nothing good in it, nothing to see except sugarcane and the pitch road, and how from small I know I had no life."

V.S. Naipaul's In a Free State won the Booker in 1971, and consists of 5 different stories, the longest being a novella. Bringing together the metropole (London, Washington) with recently decolonized countries (India, Egypt, Trinidad, Uganda), the prize-winning book explores the contours of freedom, in both a personal sense as an immigrant, a settler in Africa, and a traveler who sounds suspiciously like Naipaul himself in the prologue and epilogue, both centered on Egypt. All stories share movement as a theme, whether occurring through planes, automobiles, cruisers, trains, or ships in the Mediterranean, Egyptian desert, London, 

The most interesting of the stories was the first, a short story about Santosh, a domestic from Bombay, who accompanies his boss to Washington and enters into his own 'free state' as he moves away from tradition forms surprising relationships with a hubshi woman, an African-American woman. Despite the stereotypes and low opinion Indians held of blacks, even those of the servant class who were comfortable sleeping in the pavement of Bombay's streets, Santosh, in his own way, experiences his rupture from his Bombay roots through parallel developments with African-Americans in the US capital. Like the other tales in the book, Naipaul includes shrewd social commentary on the absence of real or authentic experiences, how everybody lies. For its fascinating take on Indian class and the Indians uprooted, so to speak, this stands out as one of the more interesting short stories penned by Naipaul. One wonders if this tale possibly influenced Aravind Adiga's White Tiger, which shares a similar interest or influence from African-American literature.

The other fascinating story was "Tell Me Who to Kill," which is recounted in first person by an unnamed brother. Born in poverty in an island that sounds just like Naipaul's Trinidad, the narrator places his hopes into helping his younger brother, Dayo, pursue an education and become more than what their island represents, in London. In a surprising twist for Naipaul, this narrative actually alludes to racial discrimination and the harshness of life for West Indian immigrants in the 'Mother Country.' Written in a kind of dialect, one almost feels as if this story was written by a Samuel Selvon rather than Naipaul. However, like the rest of this book, the brother deceives himself and the free state of escape from the West Indies does not work out well for him, as he becomes reliant on his only friend, a white Frank, whose liberal impulse to protect the narrator carries the stench of condescension. 

The novella, "In a Free State," is also an intriguing read, but too similar to A Bend in the River. The novella, however, is centered on an English homosexual administrative official in a country that sounds eerily similar to Uganda, which is in a state of political unrest due to timeless "tribal" conflict. Told through a third person narrator, "In a Free State" moves chronologically and physically from the 'English-Indian' capital to the Collectorate in the South, across valleys, along rivers, and the dark forests. Much like A Bend in the River, a Conradian image of Africa is pervasive, as well as the old mimicry of England or European ways in the former English colony (English hairstyles, resorts, towns, and buildings that resemble England). 

Depending on how one reads Conrad, Heart of Darkness can be either a pro-colonialist or anti-imperialist text, and much like his literary forebear, Naipaul falls somewhere in between, as someone who highlights the casual racism of the Europeans while never truly including an African character who is not more than stereotypes. Naipaul also hints at the protagonist character in A Bend in the River by attributing much of the cities and maintenance of businesses to the Indian community, a community in danger of deportations. Like the other stories, again one finds characters who are in a 'free state' of deception and fabrication, the Europeans lying to themselves about why they are in Africa in the first place and their role. Lots of postcolonial theory here, for those interested in Naipaul's take.

As for the prologue and epilogue, they are tied in thematically with the rest of the text. The prologue shares with "In a Free State" a similar critique of deportations, from Egypt sending the Greeks of Alexandria packing to Uganda expelling Indians. The future failure of Egyptian soldiers, of peasant origins, in the Sinai against Israel, also pertains to the Israeli military men training African soldiers in the novella. In both cases, the Africans (Ugandans, Egyptians) were hopeless when it came to matching the Israelis military, and one can see how the foreigners in both stories (Italians, Lebanese, Germans, Chinese) come to Africa with their own interests, economic or political. The Chinese 'circus,' impressing Egyptians in a hut, with their 'Red' dogma or the Lebanese merchants plotting how to enrich themselves in Egypt, for example, depict a postcolonial world in which deception is truly international. The 'desert children' outside the rest-house in Luxor are another 'circus,' performers for the Italian tourists who enjoy watching the 'sand animals.'

Overall, an interesting story suite here, but lacking the humor of his strictly Caribbean fiction or depth of A Bend in the River. Naipaul's masque of Africa is better illustrated in that subsequent work than what we have here, although he manages to impressively weave together the lives of so many distinct groups of people, across borders. For all fans of his fiction after A House for Mr. Biswas, this is essential reading. 

A Flag on the Island

"They don't pay primary school teachers a lot in Trinidad, but they allow them to beat their pupils as much as they want."

Naipaul's A Flag on the Island, a collection of short stories and a novella, is one of those transitional works of his 1960s output. Most of the book consists of short stories, usually set in Trinidad, with rich satire, dialect, and a keen sense of humor that permeates his early novels. There also exists intertextuality with the universe of The Mystic Masseur and Miguel Street, indicating that some of these stories were first written in the 1950s and one or two were initially written for the linked stories from Miguel Street. A few short stories take place in London, and deal with class or universal matters of the human condition, with the narrator presumably being Naipaul himself, if not someone just like him.

The last story in the text, "A Flag on the Island," is of a very different vein. Stylistically and thematically, the novella is more aligned with The Mimic Men and subsequent Naipaul novels. There are problems of mimicry and the colonial West Indian, postcolonial themes, an obsession with the smallness of the island, of Trinidad's apparent nonexistence, as well as sexual frustration. The main character of the novella, Frankie, is an American who served at the US base in Trinidad during the War. Taking advantage of his position, he profited from selling excess supplies and materials at the base, and is driven by this desire to buy or purchase fellowship from the poor 'natives.' In the end, all of his help is largely misguided.

The short novel is actually quite rich in satire, too. The fake or inauthentic Trinidad promoted by the tourism industry is a consistent theme, tying in quite well with other postcolonial themes of mimicry. One character in particular, Mr. Blackwhite (yes, that's his name), is a colonial writer who, at first, writes in the style of Jane Austen, and then writes interracial romances and stories with local color, supported or funded by the foundations and corporations. Here, I suspect, Naipaul is delineating the contradictions of West Indian identity and literature, as Mr. Blackwhite struggles to define himself and his writing. The foundation whites who fund Blackwhite want more of the same, but Blackwhite rebels against this with the idea of writing a narrative about ordinary, perfectly human blacks falling in love. Well, since that goes against what the white-controlled publishing world wants, Blackwhite loses their favor. 

Naipaul's comic genius really shines through these stories, providing excellent entertainment regardless of one's feelings on his dark novella. By far,"The Baker's Story" is the most amusing. Narrated in local vernacular by a Grenadian raised in Trinidad, it tells the story of how the poor black Grenadian, through hard work and taking advantage of the racial/class schema of occupations, becomes one of the wealthy businessmen with several bakery establishments, all operated through Chinese employers. The reason? Well, black Trinidadians won't buy food from blacks, and associate bakeries and groceries with the Chinese or whites. So, using a mixed-race Chinese boy, 'Yung Man' begins to prosper, marries a Chinese woman, and escapes poverty, in spite of his low education. While written in a hilarious manner, this short story speaks to the many racial divisions and stereotypes Trinidadians of all races and colors confine themselves in. If one only has the chance to read a single story from A Flag on the Island, this one is it.

Mr. Stone and the Knights Companion

"All action, all creation was a betrayal of feeling and truth."

Naipaul's Mr. Stone and the Knights Companion is a strange little novel. No characters of color, old age, search for meaning, possible Hindu symbolism (Shiva), and London. The novel's themes are consistent with some of Naipaul's earlier work, and perhaps part of his attempt to not be pigeonholed as a West Indian or Caribbean writer, even though all his early work draws on Trinidad and the Caribbean. The protagonist, an aging Mr. Stone who is about to retire, struggles to find meaning in his life, fights to have something pure or stand the test of time. In this regard, Mr. Stone is not too different from other protagonists of Naipaul's novels. 

For those seeking an amusing and short read, give this one a chance. There is a rich and almost condescending humor throughout the text, as well as social commentary on marriage, family, the 'changes' of London as more immigrant communities of color establish themselves, as well a deceptively thin overview of one man's attempt to establish himself in a world, beyond the seasons or routine.

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."

Guerrillas

"Everybody wants to fight his own little war, everybody is a guerrilla."

V.S. Naipaul's Guerrillas is his literary attempt to encapsulate what occurred with the rise of Black Power in the West Indian context. Writing on the subject in his nonfiction, much of Guerrillas is consistent thematically with his other writings on the subject. Here, from one of his essays on Black Power and the killings in Trinidad, is a brief commentary on Black Power: 

Black Power as rage, drama, and style, as revolutionary jargon, offers something to everybody: to the unemployed, the idealistic, the dropout, the Communist, the politically frustrated, the anarchist, the angry student returning home from humiliations abroad, the racialist, the old fashioned black preacher who has for years said that after Israel it was to be the turn of Africa. Black Power means Cuba and China; it also means clearing the Chinese and the Jews and the tourists out of Jamaica. It is identity and it is also miscegenation. It is drinking holy water, eating pork and dancing; it is going back to Abyssinia. There has been no movement like it in the Caribbean since the French Revolution.

With this framework in mind, Naipaul's Guerrillas dissects Black Power into psychological, sexual, political, racial, and economic terms. I disagree with much of his characterization of 'Black Power,' yet find his depiction of white liberals as even more scathing in this unnamed Caribbean location. Roche, a white South African jailed by the regime for his bombings of a powerstation and railway, and Jane, an English woman full of lies and half-truths, come to this island as the gangs (or guerrillas) are threatening the government and status quo. 

However, as Naipaul's essay indicates, the motives and goals of Black Power varied consistently and meant numerous things. Jimmy Ahmed, the Black Power 'leader,' back in the Caribbean after accusations of rape in London, is half-Chinese, was never fully accepted by the Chinese shopkeepers of the island, and exploits his power to abuse slum boys and rape. Much like the riots and dissolution of his agricultural commune, supported by the government and a company, Sablich, Jimmy Ahmed reveals himself to be a sexually frustrated, confused individual whose final actions in the novel leave one breathless. Much like the incomplete sexual climax, this novel ends similarly.

What dragged down the quality of this novel, which, is not too far from Bend in the River, (a novel I hated profusely for its image of Africa and the Congo), is the lack of a first-person narrator. The sort of deracinated Indian figure Patrick French describes as Naipaul's first-person narrator in novels like Bend At the River would have improved the prose, dialogue, and pace of the text. One feels little for any of the main characters (Jimmy Ahmed, Jane, Peter Roche). While surprisingly very critical of certain forms of neocolonialism (US bauxite mining companies and influence, for example), the novel also continues Naipaul's casual derision for the Caribbean as a dependent region with little ideas of its own. 

To its credit, Naipaul manages to describe in great detail an island that could be multiple places in the Caribbean in the 1970s. His vivid descriptions of colors, plants, the bush, social and physical segregation in the capital, and the insistent beat of reggae speak to his personal experience and travels in the region. The frustrations of the local elite, the black and brown poor, internalized racial and class prejudices, and the good intentions of white 'liberals' like Jane and Roche are all depicted as part of the problem in this complex tale of sexual frustration, personal failures, acceptance, and pain. Kudos to Naipaul for managing to keep his narrative together and weave together themes of race, Black Power, apartheid South Africa, and white liberals together. 

The Mystic Masseur: Ruined by Omission

The Mystic Masseur film adaptation omits some of the best aspects of Naipaul's humorous novel. The film completely omits Ganesh's father from the narrative, which in turn removes the whole context of culture/colonialism as Ganesh studies in college at Port of Spain. Moreover, the relationship between Ganesh and Leela is portrayed for more favorably than in the novel, where Leela is more shy, the courting lasts considerably longer, and there is domestic violence that is acceptable for Ganesh to 'control' his wife. I also despised the changes to Ganesh's Auntie, the Great Belcher (in the film she only occasionally hiccups, removing some of the absurd humor of an old woman constantly belching).

The novel also omits the Oxford-educated Indian Trinidadian Ganesh went to school with in Port of Spain. The screenwriter tried to merge that character with others from the novel, but then the whole context of the conflict within the Hindu Association and Trinidadian legislative elections loses some of its compelling aspects of narrative. On the other hand, the film captures the natural beauty of the Trinidadian landscape while including the general tone and thematic content of the novel. The scene depicting Ganesh and the other members of the Legislative Council dining at the Governor's Mansion is priceless! Despite its omissions, closely follow the book while perhaps exaggerating the anti-Indian bias and completely ruining Leela's character. 

In short, the film is a mess at times, runs too long while cutting out some of the better aspects of the book, and removes some of the most amusing or intriguing aspects of Naipaul's first novel. I disagree with Ebert's rating of 3 stars, but it is certainly worth watching for those interested in Trinidad, Naipaul, or colonialism. Ganesh's character certainly seems close to Naipaul himself, favoring Britain as the center of the universe and his notorious ambiguous or pro-colonial sentiment. 

The Suffrage of Elvira

''The people of Elvira, Dhaniram said, tightening his belt, 'have their little funny ways, but I could say one thing for them: you don't have to bribe them twice.''

V.S. Naipaul's second novel, The Suffrage of Elvira, is set in Elvira, a marginalized rural region of Trinidad with horrible roads. Taking place in the same universe as his previous novel, with Ganesh Ransumair already rising politically, Naipaul's humorous novel satirizes the changes in Elvira during elections for the Legislative Council. The community of Elvira includes Spanish people in Cordoba and a mix of Blacks, Hindus, and Muslims, and the main candidates running for office in the upcoming office have to forge alliances and bribe members of each different racial and religious group to ensure victory. The degree to which votes are bought by Harbans, the wealthy Hindu, and his committee (comprised of a mix of Hindus and Muslims), and how Elvira itself responds to the candidates along racial, religious, and material interests are the subject of humor and problematic social commentary. 

The Black teacher, Mr. Francis, the respected Hindu leader, Chittaranjan, and others question the need for democracy in this small corner of a small island in the British Empire. Mrs. Baksh, wife of the Muslim leader, as well as other members of Elvira, predict the loss of social harmony and peace between the community of different faiths and religions. Even the Indian community supporting Harbans eventually splinters before being united again by bribing the Muslim leadership, suggesting how farcical these early races were in postcolonial Trinidad. The residents, accepting bribery, gifts, and kickback deals, end up supporting Harbans for a landslide victory at the end of this shameful election (even the clerks at the ballot offices are bribed...). The campaign team of Harbans goes so far as to exploit fears of obeah, magic, and the Jehova's Witness missionaries (two white women) to ensure support for their candidate, without any discussion of the issues, anti-colonial goals, social programs.

Naipaul does not only criticize residents of this small, superstitious community for their "underdeveloped" understanding of democracy, but Harbans himself represents how dysfunctional electoral politics were in 1950s Trinidad. Instead of adequately representing his constituency after victory, Harbans only returns to Elvira once. He is dressed in a "proper" Port of Spain style, no longer communicates with his constituency, and refers to the community as a "bitch" (much like the black dog he kills when driving his car into Elvira during the beginning of the campaign). The type of Trinidadian politician represented by Harbans appears in Naipaul's first novel, The Mystic Masseur, and Lovelace's The Wine of Astonishment. Both authors share a disdainful perspective on the political class who serve free food, organize parades, and provide free rum, but once in the Legislative Council, become complacent and never challenge the social or economic conditions that leave their constituencies impoverished. 

In the case of Lovelace's excellent novel, it is freedom of religion for the Spiritual Baptists. In Elvira it is the need for better roads, with more general expectations of responsive government that immediately responds to the needs of the community (the fact that Harbans is asked excessively to visit the sick Jared indicates how the community of Elvira, despite its racial and religious antagonisms, does care for the collective). Unfortunately for Elvira, the promise of democracy under colonialism does not offer much, especially since all the candidates who run have to come from the upper classes to be able to afford the deposit fees to the government. Consequently, independence would seem a natural course to take, which eventually happens, but Naipaul avoids taking his criticism of the political system to that logical conclusion.

Indeed, Naipaul's scathing portrait of early democracy in Trinidad is fascinating for its omission of overt pro-independence sentiment. In fact, allusions to British culture and travels abroad are still valued by the community, such as Lorkhoor's obsession with speaking "standard" English or Nelly's obsession with going to London to escape the strict social expectations of Hindu womanhood (paralleled by the daughter-in-law of Dhaniram, abandoned by the latter's son and trapped in service to the family until running off to Port of Spain). The Black teacher, Mr. Francis, likewise shares pro-British attitudes like the local elite, going as far as denying the need for democracy in Elvira. 

Yet, in other ways, Naipaul does offer some criticism of colonialism. The anti-black prejudice of the Indian community, for example, is certainly a product of European colonialism in the Trinidadian case (not to exclude earlier color prejudice in Indian societies before colonialism). The conflict between Muslims and Hindus likewise subverts unity and assumes racial overtones, leading to the rather humorous exchange between Baksh and Chittaranjan, the highlight being the latter's ultimate insult to Islam being its Black members. The ghost of a Black baby haunts the old cocoa-house of the planter who once owned Elvira in the days of slavery, reminding residents of all racial groups of the history of slavery in their town. 

Despite its overall pessimistic tone and humor, Naipaul's novel does provide evidence of peaceful coexistence among the Christians, Hindus, and Muslims. Sure, Muslims and Hindus frown upon intermarriage, but the ways in which the three religions coexist and influence each other for Elvira is astounding. Hindus sing Christian hymns, every groups' fear of obeah and sorcery, non-Hindus seek healers from the Hindu tradition, and Muslims use the cross for burials. Before the intrusion of limited electoral democracy, there was a form of coexistence that brought people together. Mahadeo's budding friendship with Sebastian, the old Black man, or Sebastian and Haq, the Muslim, being close friends indicate how religious and racial divisions are transcended in a small community. The wake for Mr. Cuffee, exploited by Harbans politically, nonetheless brought together residents of all three faiths for consumption of rum, calypso, hymns, etc.

Overall, an amusing and fun read, Naipaul's second novel is lacking the deeper questions of colonialism or Britishness one finds in The Mystic Masseur. Arguably more complex by its specific subject matter of a political campaign in an entire community, the novel's numerous social classes provide ample fodder for humor and serious social commentary. Indeed, the story's multiracial community reminded me of Miguel Street, which is similarly rich in humor, an inventive combination of dialect and standard prose, and the multicultural world that brings people together. At the end of the novel, the narrator summarizes the aftermath of the election as one of some winners, some losers, with an uncertain future ahead. What better way to conclude a novel about democracy in a colonial society with a sort of moral ambiguity?