8
UWI TODAY
– SUNDAY 9 SEPTEMBER, 2018
LITERATURE
The title of this essay borrows
from the two main
books that inspire it, the first by V.S. Naipaul,
A
Writer’s People: Ways of Looking and Feeling: An Essay
in Five Parts
and the second,
Created in the West
Indies: Caribbean Perspectives of V.S. Naipaul
edited
by Professor Barbara Lalla and Dr. Jennifer Rahim,
the most recent book of criticism of Naipaul’s work
produced in the Caribbean after his last public visit
to Trinidad and Tobago in 2007.
The connections between the two books became
apparent at the time of his visit simply because I was
reading the first which had been released just prior
to the celebration of the Year of Sir V.S. Naipaul in
2007 at The UWI hosted by then campus Principal,
Dr. Bhoendradatt Tewarie, as part of a three-year
series of celebration of Caribbean Nobel Laureates,
on which the second book was based. For me, the
most outstanding connection between the two was the
sameness of personality in real life and text – including
what we had heard from a number of different sources
about the writer’s infamous irascibility.
Throughout his life, Naipaul’s depictions of himself
in his fiction and non-fiction give one the impression
that he immerses himself in every experience so fully
that he touches its very core. This was certainly an
impression that was heightened in the chances for
one and only close encounters that his visit presented,
albeit ones where he was usually on a stage and I
was either a member of the audience or even more
frequently a backstage gopher. But even given this
distance, one had the sense that he focused intently on
one thing/ question/ person at a time evenwhile he was
aware of his own place within any whole tableaux at any
point, even when that focus brought out the shortness
many have feared or loathed as in his response to
students during his visit. In the hopeful desire to share
something of his ability, I borrow his own words to
say that because of these encounters, I think “I got to
know [him] …well, though I never spoke to [him] …
and [he] … never spoke to me. I got to know [his] …
clothes and style and voice[s]” (
A Writer’s People
1).
This impression was indisputably heightened by
the tone, pace and atmosphere that Naipaul evoked in
AWriter’s People
which I was reading simultaneously
.
This is how the book begins
:
Up to about the age of six or seven I lived mainly
inmy grandmother’s house in a small country town in
Trinidad. Then we moved to the capital, Port of Spain,
to my grandmother’s house in the Woodbrook area. I
immediately fell in love with what I could see of the life
of the Woodbrook street, and its municipal order, the
early-morning washing of the gutters on both sides,
the daily gathering-up of rubbish into the blue city-
council horse carts. My grandmother’s house stood on
tallish concrete pillars. It had a front verandah hung
with ferns in open metal baskets … (1)
In clean spare lines, he draws for us his memory
AWriter’s People forV.S. Naip
B Y D R . V I J
of the child’s experience of the city and reminds us of
the extreme desire for order, shelter and beauty born
in infancy that every post-plantation Creole individual
and groupwould exhibit, evenwhen imagination could
not go beyond that offered by the plantation itself.This
desire lives still in the eagerness with which many
shades of Woodbrook, unfortunately minus the gutter
washing but still with their timely garbage trucks and
hanging ferns, continue to crop up daily across the
islands. The Merchant-Ivory adaptation of Naipaul’s
Mystic Masseur
certainly captured this in Ganesh’s
Port of Spain setting.
In setting his first collection of stories on the street
in front of his grandmother’s house in Woodbrook
and building an imaginary one for his narrator on it,
Naipaul admits that what he wrote:
… was a “flat” view of the street: in what I had
written I went right up close to it, as close as I had
been as a child, shutting out what lay outside. I knew
even then that there were other ways of looking; that
if, so to speak, I took a step or two or three back and
sawmore of the setting, it would require another kind
of writing. And if, in a greater complication, I wished
to explore who I was and who the people in the street
were (we were a small immigrant island, culturally and
racially varied), that would require yet another kind of
writing. It was to that complication that my writing, in
fact, tookme. I had lived all my writing life in England;
that had to be acknowledged, had to be part of my
world view. I had been a serious traveller; that had to
be acknowledged as well. I couldn’t pretend as a writer
I knew only one place. There were pressures to do that,
but for me such a world view would have been false.
All my life I have had to think about ways of
looking and how they alter the configuration of the
world. (2-3)
That first ‘flat’ book that we still love is of course
Miguel Street
now found in many translations.
As Rhonda Cobham-Sander reveals, like so many
of us still, although she had been taught to disdain local
writing, she and her siblings read it nonetheless and
her experience of this book was as follows:
I no longer remember whose copy of
Miguel Street
we found wedged between the blue cushions, but I
remember one suitor looking at the title and saying
with an air of self importance; “That’s Luis Street,
you know,” which was the street at the other end of
Woodbrook where he lived. We read Naipaul’s stories
out loud to each other. I remember laughing till I
cried at Man Man on the cross, urging the onlookers
to “stone me, brethren, stone me!” and screaming with
