SUNDAY 9 SEPTEMBER, 2018 – UWI TODAY
9
ul: Created in theWest Indies
Y M A H A R A J
delight at the idea of his dog leaving symmetrical piles
of droppings on the stools in the Café at the corner of
Alberto Street where we regularly stopped for sweet
drinks. And of course we were convinced that Man
Man really must have been Mr. Assee, whose endless
chalked sentences on the pavement of Damien Road
we were careful to circumvent when we took the
short cut from the Avenue to Roxy Roundabout. It
never occurred to us that we also might have been the
subjects of Naipaul’s satire: Mrs. Cobham’s daughter,
hedged in by all the elaborate protocols of blackmiddle
class respectability, but longing to play out a grand
passion before the cinema audiences she could not be a
part of. The suitor, somebody’s well behaved boy child
masquerading as a Black Panther under his Afro and
knitted beret, reading short stories on the blue couch
when he really wanted to do something else.
Naipaul’s later writing would no doubt have taught
Cobham-Sander to see herself and her childhood
environment with such clarity but when he began
taking those few steps back and back from the
immediacy of the broad contours of lives lived in a
place with few divisions between private and public
spaces, hackles began to rise. This happened, for
example, when his ways of looking at persons were not
the kind of looks the particular reader who perceived
him/herself in a book’s characters or setting desired or
when Naipaul perhaps gave one image in a situation
that required an album if not a montage of disparate
images or when his one image was condemned for
not being in sync with the reader’s. With each book
after
Miguel Street
that problem became more intense
and when Naipaul finally began representing persons
beyond the boundaries of Trinidad and Tobago, the
ire began creeping increasingly across a global range.
The Middle Passage
brought the first repercussions
and it was followed shortly thereafter by even more
violent reactions to
An Area of Darkness
– his first
book on India.
Subsequent books on India led to a somewhat
toned down reaction because of Naipaul’s approval
for some of the developments in the modernization
of India via greater technological advances. After the
Nobel Prize was awarded to him, the Indian books
were even printed as a single Trilogy, intended now
to be read as one.
But a similar turn-around cannot be said to
have occurred in the Caribbean, where umbrage
has been taken about all other areas of Naipaul’s
writing, his books on conversion to Islam in non-
Arabian territories as well as those on Africa. In fact,
it is not uncommon to see essays with titles like “The
Caribbean through European Eyes: V.S. Naipaul’s
The
Middle Passage
.”
That is until 2007, when a certain level of
acceptance was evident in each of the articles first
published immediately after his visit in the journal
Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal
and then in
book form in 2011 with the title
Created in the West
Indies: Caribbean Perspectives on V. S. Naipaul
which
tried to indicate acceptance that the person Naipaul
was, owed a great deal to his Caribbean upbringing as
did the views of the people who had a unique insight
into so much of what he had written because of their
shared upbringing. The book was in short nothing less
than a discovery with Naipaul of how “ways of looking
[can] …alter the configuration of the world” and how
we read books about it (2).
Four years after the publication of
Created in
the West Indies,
another conference that sought to
re-emphasise V.S. Naipaul’s Caribbeanness and the
familial context of his life and work titled “Seepersad
and Sons: Naipaulian Creative Synergies,” was held,
this time under the watchful eye of the NGO, Friends
of Mr. Biswas, that has been established by Professor
Kenneth Ramchand to promote Naipaulian creative
genius among young and aspiring writers of Trinidad
and Tobago. The book from that conference will be
published by Peepal Tree Press shortly. This book
too reveals new ways of looking at Naipaul and
anticipates a long-lived legacy of doing so into the
distant future. Some pictorial memories are shared
here as we remember how this realization sank in as
we mourned the dilapidation of the Lion House and
the need for a quick intervention to prevent further
deterioration, the loss of the Luis Street house as well
as the real life counterpart of the Shorthills house,
joined V.S. Naipaul’s and his father, Seepersad’s, grief
at the ephemerality of life in the erasure of the father’s
childhood dwelling places and finally celebrated the
preservation of the house on Nepal Street in St. James,
Trinidad.
No doubt in the years to come, many will continue
to try to understand how ways of looking and feeling
create the people of the Caribbean – Naipaul’s people
– and out of that understanding viable futures will
emerge. Naipaul is gone and all those to whom his
works bring insight are grateful that he has lived and
mourn his passing but in the sure knowledge that his
works will continue to deliver as they have done and
perhaps evenmoreso now than in the 1950s when they
first began appearing.
Dr. Vijay Maharaj is a lecturer in the
Department of Literary, Cultural and
Communication Studies of the Faculty of
Humanities and Education, UWI St. Augustine.
