|
|
|
THE
SEER AND THE SURGEON
India, Africa, Islam, the Carribbean and immigrant societies have been the
abiding subjects of Naipaul’s work. In part two, Farrukh Dhondy
deals with Africa and the Carribbean, and detailing the violent life of
Michael X, he illustrates how VS Naipaul eschews all ideologies
in his writing
 |
Naipaul’s
The Loss of El Dorado is the most spirited and savage attack on
the early European voyages of discovery and the conquest of the
Carribbean. It is, as Naipaul tells it, a history of unparalleled
greed, cruelty and barbarism |
Derek Walcott, poet and Nobel laureate from the Caribbean, famously said
that VS Naipaul ‘doesn’t like negroes’. It isn’t
a particularly perceptive or profound remark and begs several questions,
not the least of which is ‘were Negroes placed on God’s earth
for the likes of VS Naipaul to like?’
More damning is the late Edward Said’s ‘judgement’ that
VS Naipaul “is a writer who tells western power what it wants to hear
about its former colonies.”
Walcott is a poet whose verse and plays are for the most part set in the
marooned societies of the Caribbean. His project has been to give these
societies a voice. He does, though perhaps not as powerfully, universally
or successfully as Bob Marley. Walcott’s international reputation,
at least among the readers of literary publications grew when he was awarded
the ‘Genius’ prize – a large sum of money dispensed by
generous Americans to deserving people. His achievement, very distinct from
that of his co-Caribbean writer Naipaul, caught the imagination of the American
referees of the award by being celebratory about the small societies of
the West Indies. His large work Omeros has been acclaimed as an epic which
projects life in the contemporary Caribbean in a modern heroic form.
In that sense Walcott is the perfect candidate and literary standard-bearer
for the political mood of the post-sixties decades during which the black
population of America began the movement for its civil rights and its long,
assertive march through the institutions of the us. The Caribbean too had
its black power movement and the slogans of political revolt – Black
is Beautiful, Back to Africa – initiated a politico-cultural movement
to adjust the self-image of black populations all over the world. Through
Black Studies the black populations asserted their distinctions. The academies
saw it as rediscovering their own histories. Whether these studies contributed
any history of value I cannot judge, but they certainly set out to make
their own definitions of the past, to ‘decolonise’ their understanding
and this very endeavour supposedly contributed to their sense of dignity,
power and strength in the world.
Derek Walcott’s poems undoubtedly made an impact amongst the intellectual
population that supported such a movement for black awareness and assertion.
The same cannot be said of VS Naipaul. His work does the opposite of myth-making.
The novels and the books of travel and discovery do nothing to flatter the
populations of which they speak. Seeing is all. The object and not the ideology
is in focus. Naipaul doesn’t lack the inclusive sympathy that assists
a writer to see his character whole, but he is wholly innocent of the urge
to go with the current of populist or popular feeling. His first book on
his journey round the Caribbean, Middle Passage, does nothing to bolster
or support the self-image of the emergent ‘nations’ of the Caribbean.
The book rises from his travels in the sixties when the movement for independence
from British colonial rule is scattering the Caribbean into tiny unviable
nation-state islands. Naipaul sees them as fragmented societies that cannot
sustain life as it is evolving in the modern world. They have cars and phones
but they are culturally and intellectually starved societies. Their history,
he suspects, has made them violent and cruel places.
|
October 09, 2004
|
| Page 1 2 3 4 5 |
|
|
|
