SUNDAY 21ST FEBRUARY, 2016 – UWI TODAY
15
The
N A I PA U L S
through the long lens of Time
NEW PERSPECTIVES
I meant to call this address
coming home to ourselves and to the
place or places that make and sustain us, since that is one of the
dramas we see played out in the writings of the three Naipauls.
Given the condition of our society, that is a journey all of us need
to make.
The talk would have been a defence of the Arts and
Humanities in these materialistic times when all value is economic
value, when the aimof education is to push children to come first in
examinations, and when Universities all over the world have been
driven to the treason of selling out to the marketplace.
The Arts and the Humanities have a major role to play in
the humanizing of society, and in stimulating persons to feel the
immensity and beauty of the Universe of which they are a part,
to believe in life’s possibilities, and to see happiness as the prime
goal of life.
An education that gives scope to the self-expression and self-
discovery facilitated by the Arts and Humanities may be our best
hope to arrest our society’s unfeeling drift into crime and violence,
and the unholy self-slaughter of crimes against the person.
To summarize, our society desperately needs to rediscover the
promise of the arts of the imagination.This Conference is timely. It
explores themes and issues that are important to how we relate to
ourselves, to one another, and to the world. These themes include:
ethnic relations; sex and sexuality; gender issues; family relations;
religion; race and politics; immigration; and globalization.
Arising out of these themes are two key motifs. The first is
the three writers’ lifelong struggles through their writing to come
home to themselves: to come to some kind of understanding of
who they are, to acknowledge their different selves, and to explore
how their different selves might relate to their social identities and
to their being.
The second motif running through my overview is a sense
of a continuous striving against self-inflicted dislocation and
placelessness. Seepersad’s sons can be seen in their works to be
in the throes of rejecting any ‘home’ that is connected with the
political agendas of a specific nation. At the same time, they are
re-defining ‘home’ as a commodity that you can hold in your head
regardless of geography or political nation, and sometimes against
your will. The question is important: what and where is home and
can one belong to more than one country? More extremely, can
home be any country but the country of your birth and growing up?
In addition, four major observations need to be made about
this conference:
i.
The Conference brings together three writers from Trinidad
and Tobago, each of whom has made a contribution to
the literature of the island and the wider region. These are
Trinidadian writers.
ii. The three writers originate from an ethnic group that found
itself placed among other ethnic groups and the ghosts and
relics of the first peoples in the landscape. But I want to make
it clear: their works help us to understand the development
of Trinidad and Tobago as a fusion society where the mixing
of multiple heritages has caused much stress but has released
incredible energy and creativity. Likemost of our other artists,
the Naipaul writers offer insights into the seepages between
the cultures of different ethnic groups in the island that helped
to make the fusion society.
Seepersad knew all of this but did not know he knew it.
He was not afraid of contamination by the Western works
of philosophy and literature that formed part of a colonial
education; he saw no mimicry in taking an interest in fiction
and seeking to learn from accounts of the lives of leading
men and women from India; he looked around him at the
community out of which he came and saw institutions dying,
and people changing, and wrote what he saw. They were all
part of him. His short stories are not the idyllic evocation
of “the Indian community” that VS tends to suggest. These
stories are of a piece with the social and cultural criticism of
his journalism.
His journalismwas multi-cultural, that is to say Trinidadian.
It covered pan-making and pan-tuning, the calypso, survivors
of slavery, time-expired indentures, rice-growing, remarkable
persons, local politics and political intrigue cultural and
religious commonalities and differences, Ramlila, and Sonny
Ramadhin. His accounts of politics in the Indian community
are the stuff that could have made an earlier version of VS’s
The Suffrage of Elvira
.
He had an instinctive way of seeing the society and its cultures
and he encouraged Vidia to cultivate it. VS did it his way. In
his self-presentations he describes his growth as a writer as a
process running parallel with his discovery, through selective
travel to India, Africa, Europe andAmerica, of the sources of a
complex heritage that was present but dark in the islands of his
childhood. To the child, all that lay outside his grandmother’s
house was in darkness, and as a writer he made it his mission
to light up these areas for the sake of constructing his true
self: “When I became a writer, those areas of darkness around
me as a child became my subjects. The land; the aborigines;
the New World; the colony; the history; India: the Muslim
world, to which I felt myself related; Africa; and then England
where I was doing my writing.”
His island and region were ancient and global though he did
not know it at first. He came to discover through research
and what he called his travel “missions” the antiquity of his
civilization and the submarine globalism of the region of his
birth.
iii. The works of these three writers express dramatically the
complex and sometimes confused evolution of descendants
of Indians in Trinidad from the early 1900’s up to the early
years of the 21
st
century: we see diasporic figures clinging to
and losing touch with the realities of their original culture;
bruised souls responding to and being bewildered by the
changes taking place in the island and in the larger world
over the same period. Once again it was the patriarch who
first stumbled upon the theme of the enigma of arrival. In his
journalism he wrote about the plight of Indian castaways in
the city after the first journey; the hopes of many to board the
ship for the return; and their puzzled arrival at a place grown
unfamiliar. They wanted to get on the ship and come back.
In
Gurudeva and Other Indian Tales
the Presbyterianised
head master Sohun is used by the constructive Seepersad to
spell out the crisis of the descendants of Indians who cannot
be entirely Occidental nor entirely Oriental and who, Sohun
confidently affirms, will arrive at being distinctlyWest Indian.
iv. Much of the impetus of the Conference comes from a
phenomenon: the three writers, Seepersad, Vidia and Shiva
belong to a single family, the Naipaul family. The general
effect of the family relationships on the Naipaul writings bears
deep exploration. Family relationships are a felt presence
in
A House for Mr Biswas;
and in
The World Is What It Is
,
Patrick French observes that while VS was writing
A House
for Mr Biswas
, he tapped deliberately into family memories
and family sensibility: “Vidia kept in close touch with his
family, the letters feeding the book and Vidia’s own attitudes
feeding the letters his siblings sent him” (202). Is it too wild
to notice that the older brother in ‘Tell Me Who To Kill’ is
like a mother to his younger brother and to think that this
is an unconscious reflection of the kind of mothering in the
family and an ironic comment on the negligible role of males
in the caring of children?
Be that as it may, the close relationship between Seepersad
and Vidia in the Port of Spain years between 1938 and 1943, the
year when Seepersad self-published
Gurudeva and other Indian
Tales
was crucial in pointing Vidia to his vocation as writer; and
in the letters between Seepersad and Vidia in
Letters Between a
Father and Son
, father and son praise, encourage and stimulate
each other. It should be noticed for future exploration, however,
that for all the exchanges between father and son on writing and
getting published, it was over twenty years after his father’s death
that Vidia felt ready to push for publication of
Gurudeva and Other
Stories.
On October 22, 1953, the day of Seepersad’s cremation,
Kamla wrote to Vidia about getting Seepersad’s book out at once;
nearly nine months earlier (February 2, 1953) she had pleaded
with Vidia: “According to Ma and Satti, Pa’s greatest worry is that
he cannot get his stories published. Satti wrote saying that he sent
you one but you have done nothing about it so far. Now something
immediate regarding the publishing of his stories means life or
death for him and consequently life or death for us…” Although
Henry Swanzy, editor of Caribbean Voices and a British person
had praised Seepersad’s writing highly, Vidia held that Seepersad’s
stories would not go over well with British readers. It may well
be that Vidia’s fixation on getting his own first book published
and establishing his literary career did not leave much room for
helping anybody.
The following is part 1 of the remarks presented by
Professor Kenneth Ramchand
at the Opening Ceremony of the
Conference called
Seepersad and Sons: Naipaulian Creative Synergies
hosted by the
Friends of Mr Biswas.
The full text of his address is available at UWI Today online:
Professor Kenneth Ramchand
