Knowing a Deeper Shade: V.S.Naipaul ... An AppreciationAuthor(s): RACHEL MANLEYSource: Caribbean Quarterly, Vol. 48, No. 2/3, V.S. NAIPAUL: NOBEL LAUREATE FORLITERATURE, 2001 CALL AND RESPONSE (June-September 2002), pp. 12-13Published by: University of the West Indies and Caribbean QuarterlyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40654260 .

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12

Knowing a Deeper Shade V.S.Naipaul... An Appreciation

by

RACHEL MANLEY

When I was nineteen I was assigned A House For Mr. by V.S. Nalpaul as required reading on my university curriculum in the English Department of the University of the West Indies. I had only ever read Shakespeare, the Romantics, the Austen books, -

Wuthering Heights ... though I knew every nuance of Jamaica's Blue Mountains by heart, I was only taught the voices of the Lake District and the Yorkshire Moors.

And then I read A House For Mr. Biswas. Although I was from Jamaica, not Naipaul's island, the Republic Of Trinidad and Tobago, I knew the people in Mr. Biswas' World, I knew the characters on Miguel Street. I knew the small-fisted clutch of social meanness British Colonial snobbery engenders in us. I knew the despair of lost cultures that hunker down in secret and the vanity of trying to compete in a world that will never belong to us. I knew the interminable hours and parts that attended the mechanic as he sought to stop the tappets from knocking, to make a smoother ride, a better car, by assembling and reassembling the second hand and third hand, mashed-up and obsolete transport that was his karma.

I knew the vanity of thinking, the futility of serious conversation, the narrow- ness of verandahs and the inaccessibility of horizons. I felt the fragility of hope and the imitative instinct of insecurity, the self-treachery of religion, and so I understood Biswas having flabby calves.

When I heard over the years that Naipaul was not always universally accepted as a prophet or poet or master painter in his own land, or in the lands of the Caribbean, I knew that he had done his job. If the scale weighs too heavy or the mirror ages, we do not always forgive. We do not easily forgive the language that reflects, for that is the coin of privilege. Whilst all the time seeking some nebulous idea of self worth through political independence, we still would rather be patronized and humoured like small children, lauded for the cuteness of our primitivism instead of chastened for a lack of perspective. Naipaul never did this.

He handed us a mirror and invited us to look.

When Paul Theroux, after years of sycophantic pandering, was finally snubbed by his reluctant mentor who had had enough, he snarled at his rejection in a tell-all book. I read an extract, and Naipaul made me brim with pride. Not just because writers are better writers if they don't bother to be "nice people", but because once again I saw the

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13

West Indian tall and strong, cussedly refusing compromise or patronage, just an angry poet of life doing what those fine traits of honesty, anger and poetry, do best.

And once again I discovered through V. S. Naipaul and who he was, a deeper shade of who I am myself.

And I am not surprised to see that the Swedish Academy has recognized V.S. Naipaul for the giant that he is before we as a region have recognized ourselves.

War is at My Black Skin*

by

JOHN MAXWELL

It is wholly appropriate that Sir Vidia Naipaul should have been awarded this year's Nobel prize for literature. Sir Vidia, a most eloquent and gifted writer, has been a fountain of joy for those who believe that the end of history has sanctified capitalism and the Mid-atlantic way of life.

Naipaul has been at pains for four decades, to explain away the White Man's Burden. He has made it his mission to explain to the Anglo Saxon world the painful deficiencies of the lesser breeds, so granting absolution to those who may have felt guilt about mistreating the masses of humanity without laws.

My only meeting with Naipaul was 42 years ago, around the time of Jamaica's independence, when he was writing the Middle Passage. I helped shepherd him around Kingston, and, unwisely as it turns out, was responsible for inviting him to a party in Trafalgar Park. There a furious argument broke out between two of my friends. Parbosingh the painter, and Basil Keane the dentist. This row was later immortalized in The Middle Passage, as one example of the Congolese Behaviour that Naipaul found so acutely distressing.

The use of the term Congolese behaviour was a giveaway. It was not only a deliberate insult to Jamaicans, but to the Congolese, whose prime minister Patrice Lumumba, had recently been murdered by the Belgians on behalf of the Americans. It was the kind of express malice which is Naipaul' s signature in his dealings with his ex-compatriots in the post-colonial world.

Naipaul is, as far as I am concerned a lifeless robot with a second hand soul.

♦Reproduced with permission of the author from "Common Sense" The Sunday Observer, Jamaica, 28-10-01, p.9

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