THE SEER AND THE SURGEON

Tehelka - The People's Paper

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

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.

The novels he has written about the Indian community settled in the Caribbean, mostly in Trinidad and Guyana, drawing on the stories of his father’s and mother’s families are also mercilessly perceptive. Though outwardly they are comic novels – the most notable being A House for Mr Biswas – they are chronicles of a dysfunctional, uprooted community, ravaged to its very soul by the transplantation that colonialism has imposed on it.

In Edward Said’s view, if indeed it can be called a ‘view’ — very little is seen — Naipaul says what the ex-colonial masters want him to say. The ex-colonial masters are dead and so, arguably, are the colonial attitudes of the master to the colonised. To not see that Britain, for instance, has forged a new and freshly nuanced relationship with the people of the subcontinent, is to subscribe to an ideological myth, which insults both the progress of the subcontinent and the cultural gifts of the British. Did Edward Said support the Palestinian cause ‘because Muslims want him to’?

The charge is patently false and can only be made by someone who can’t or hasn’t bothered to read. It may be cheeky to say that about someone who was a professor at an American university, but the evidence of the books is compelling.

Naipaul’s novels of the Caribbean Indian community are an implicit indictment of the cruelty of colonialism and its greedy transplantation of peasant communities, sold into indenture across the globe. They are as damning, despite and through their comic form, of the communities in which they are set, as the works of Dickens are of the social hypocrisy and cruelty of Victorian England. Only with Dickens, there is an indication that a moral awakening and a will to reform may produce happiness. In Naipaul’s work the prevalent sense is that there is, in these communities, nowhere to go.

In a sense Edward Said’s negative opinion is expected if one understands its provenance. Said’s scholarly reputation was built on the critical condemnation of the works and lives of the writers, adventurers and scholars who translated the works of the Orient into European languages. His contention is that these ‘Orientalists’ assisted the exploitative enterprise of colonialism by denigrating the societies whose work, historical and religious texts they collected, explored and translated. Said’s supporters and acolytes claim that he has uniquely explored and exposed the political dimensions of this academic work. Whether such a claim is justified or not, whether Said is another fellow traveller on the anti-colonial impulse and sentiment that has become an ideological current in western universities, is not the subject of this essay. Said may be heroic in his attack on Zionism and deserve the support of the world for it. About Naipaul’s vision he is belittling, insulting and wrong.

Naipaul’s single work of history, though historical tracts and considerations run through all his books, is The Loss of El Dorado, a history of Trinidad and the European conquest of the Caribbean. It is the most spirited and savage attack on the early European voyages of discovery and the colonial exploit which exterminated the native Caribbean population and waded through their blood to set up the plantations worked by imported slaves. It is, as Naipaul tells it, a history of unparalleled greed, cupidity, cruelty and barbarism.

His subsequent historical chapters, scattered in his other ‘novels’ and covering the colonial enterprise in the Caribbean and South America, detailing the humbug and lies of Walter Raleigh and Francisco Miranda are exposures and not flattery. One can be sure that they would not be chosen by Miranda and Raleigh as their favoured bedside reading. The mud doesn’t stick.

Naipaul’s biographer designate, Patrick French, recently asked me what I knew of one Michael X. He wanted first hand the political atmosphere that gave rise to the subject of Naipaul’s long essay/book The Killings in Trinidad. He had heard that I had been in England during the years of his rise to notoriety and may even have met him or associated with him.

I told him what I knew of the man and the phenomenon that bred him. As an Indian with Marxist leanings in my twenties, I lived and interacted in London with a set of other bed-sit dwellers, mostly Indians, who were writers, painters, poets, dope-dealers and idlers of all description. We felt ourselves, for reasons arising from our alienness, our poverty, arrogance and stubbornness, on the margins of British social life. Those of us who had jobs were, in our working existences, integrated into the fringe immigrant economic activity of the capital. If we had Oxbridge degrees we taught in schools. If we were itinerant musicians we cleaned upper class ladies’ houses for agency wages and tips. We painted houses, walked dogs and washed up in canteen kitchens.

There was a ferment of Black Power at the time. The West Indian population who lived in close proximity to us bed-sit dwellers was alive with the idea of a potential political awakening. The last years of the sixties were deceptively heady days. A generation that had just come to earning maturity, inspired by the Beatles and Bob Dylan, alienated from the misuse of power in the Vietnam war, saw itself as being destined to transform the world. (Much as the misguided Islamic jihadis of today may project the possibilities of their religious revolution). Resistance to the Vietnam war had at that time given a huge boost to the black movement in the usa.

In Britain the black ‘leaders’, mimicking the rhetoric of the us, began to preach. My friends and I followed their lecture circuits. The rhetoric said “when the time comes we have to organise.” We thought the time had come but nobody was offering us an organisation to join.

One of the demagogues who arose as a black leader was a light-skinned Trinidadian called Michael X whose credentials as the leader of the British blacks (‘King of the Queen’s niggers’ as one visiting black American radical put it) were being announced by journalists in the national press.

By this time I was trying to prove my own credentials as a candidate member of an immigrant organisation, of West Indians mixed in with a minority of Indian and Pakistani members, called the British Black Panther Movement. The name and inspiration had been adopted from America to excite and inspire radical youth to join. Nevertheless the organisation seemed perfectly level-headed and dedicated to political agitation to solve the problems facing immigrant populations and communities in Britain. The older members of the movement knew Michael well and had indeed broken away from the North London ‘outfit’ he controlled called The Black House. Some of these older members still interacted with Michael X who was born Michael de Freitas. He came as a seaman to London and was soon enrolled as a thug and enforcer in the pay of a notorious slum landlord called Rachmann. De Freitas was employed to threaten and evict tenants of Rachmann’s tenements who fell into rent arrears.
Bullying people must have been hard work. Michael de Freitas transformed himself into Michael Abdul Malik when the idea of black Islam came to Britain from across the Atlantic and later into Michael X when that mock identity seemed to be the most terrifying and lucrative.

The name changes, the supposed political evolution —the discarding of colonially imposed Christianity, the disowning of the ‘slave name’ of European origin — were duly reported in the British press. The rhetoric was yielding results. John Lennon contributed money to the Black House and the subsequent publicity brought donations from other pop stars and from the rebellious heirs of prosperous business families. Michael X and his project, which amounted to no more than ‘abuse whitey’, terrified whitey and whitey paid to assuage the guilt that X laid on him. X became rich enough to immigrate to Trinidad with three or four followers when his support fell off in Britain. Gail Benson, a young white woman left her respectable husband and home to follow him and his fellow traveller, a man who called himself Jamal, to the ‘commune’ in Trinidad which was to be the hub of world revolution. X and Jamal murdered their young white follower and buried her in the grounds of their house. The Trinidadian police found out and X was hunted down eventually in the remote wastes of Guyana, betrayed by the tribal people from whom he had to beg for food. He was brought back to Trinidad, renounced his X-ness and went back to being plain Michael de Freitas. Lawyers from Britain, still believing that they were acting on behalf of a revolutionary, rushed to form committees and went to Trinidad to defend him but the Trinidadian court convicted and sentenced Michael. The appeals were unsuccessful. He was hanged.

Naipaul examined, researched and wrote the story, first as an essay and then using the same theme and inspiration to transform the material into Guerrillas, a novel. Each in its own form explains the tragedy of a man encouraged by a fantasy of our times to create his own fantastic identity, and delusion of leadership and power – none of which Michael de Freitas possessed. He was no-one, he led no-one and his power only lasted for the moment in which his white donors felt guilty for being who they were in a world in which blacks were seen as emerging from oppression. The fantasy led Michael to murder, to flight, capture and the rope.

Naipaul, from Trinidad himself, identified the hoax, the proclivity to self-deception and the genesis of the encouragement from the whites, themselves self-deluded, that led to it. He didn’t see in the story the progress and counter-revolutionary containment of a radical or a martyr, but the tragedy of a weak man who played the part of a phantom to fulfil the fantasies of millionaire white radicals. X was a creature of their shallow and guilty conscience, an attempt by Britain to keep up with America which had produced a vibrant black movement and Malcolm X. Michael was an unashamed mimic – of the name, of the stance, of the tough talk of the ‘no compromise with whitey’. Whitey lapped it up. And de Freitas who harboured the secret of his part-white ancestry, played along till the end.

At the heart of Naipaul’s account of these happenings is not a ‘dislike’ for the man who wanted so badly to be the leader of the ‘negroes’ (as Walcott would have it), but a perception of the tragic muddle and self-delusion which, goaded on by meaningless rhetoric, led to pointless murder.

I am not ashamed now to admit that I was, albeit sceptically, a contributor to the idea that the tiny immigrant population of Britain could and would seek its own political power. Or to admit that at the time I saw Michael X as a hustling by-product of a genuine movement, a thief among the revolutionaries. It was Naipaul who saw before any of us that Michael X’s stance was nothing but a fashionable form of begging disguised as historical blackmail. And that the movement of immigrants could either integrate as it has with the main body of British politics or, again as it has, throw up new and more institutionalised ways of begging from the state.

This documentary account and the Guerrillas are Naipaul’s only forays into tackling a phenomenon that has distorted the discourse of the last few decades: the rhetoric of race. At the centre of this discourse, or at its beginning, are the historical phenomena of slavery and colonial conquest. The discourse is initiated in America by the articulated resistance of the Civil Rights Movement and the collective demand of American blacks for voting rights, material progress and social and political equality.
In Britain the racial idea was initiated during the adjustment of immigrant communities to living and working in Britain and becoming British in sometimes easy and sometimes difficult ways. It remains a movement which generates fear and leads logically to the investigation of ‘culture’, of schemes of values and has given rise in Britain to the ideas of ‘multiculture’.

Like most ideas in history, its percolation down through a pyramid of interpretations causes it to be distorted and exploited. But it is still a powerful idea. It initiates curiosity about ‘other cultures’ and, beyond the phase of shared cuisines, Pashmina shawls and explained religious festivals, it literally creates the reputations of writers who set out to satisfy that curiosity or exploit it. Novels of slavery, with the pathos of historical atrocity at their heart, are written and published. The uprooted communities of the world, people who have moved from one part of the planet to the other either forcibly or voluntarily in search of work perhaps, begin to tabulate their discontents and search for their ‘roots’. Green-card-holding Americans write about their divided selves while munching hamburgers. Whole genres of prose and poetry in sympathy with this post-colonial enterprise are published and studied. The critical approach to them is constrained, or at the least restrained, by an injunction to political correctness.

VS Naipaul is one writer who has stood aloof from this movement while living through it. He may even claim that he never lived through it, that it existed but passed him by. But the people who have made this myth their raison d’etre or their livelihood haven’t. Yet Naipaul’s is perhaps the truest, non-apologetic and politically unconcerned work. He has observed the societies that interest the modern reader. He has made writing about the displacement of our times his life’s work.

In an interview he once said that what attracted him first to Africa was the idea of discovering a culture that he imagined, never having been there, would be somehow closer to the earth. His various travels through Africa resulted in several long essays and two seminal novels: In a Free State and A Bend in the River. Both novels contemplate the lives of startlingly original, though unquirky and real, characters suffering the consequences of civil conflict. The first book, ‘researched’ through a sojourn in central Africa and the Congo foreshadows the political changes, the wars, the rise of dictatorships and the perpetration of genocide in the tragic continent. A Bend in the River tells the story of a clutch of displaced people, an Asian colonial central character, white adventurers — academic, sexual and militarily mercenary — and Africans, challenged by shifting tribal and political upheavals.

Both novels are unsentimental and both are terrifyingly real. If Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness was the seminal fiction of colonised and enslaved Africa in the Nineteenth century, Naipaul’s novels are the essential chronicles of the barbarism of decolonising Africa in the Twentieth. His vision of Africa is devastating only because the tragedy of Africa is such. The novels are uncluttered with any attempt to apologise for or to historicise the ugliness with theories of colonialism. Greed, delusion and cruelty are not the characteristics of any one race.

Those who write about VS Naipaul as a ‘fine prose writer’, an unnecessary compliment which has followed him through his career, may be well-intentioned, but they miss the point. The power of Naipaul’s prose is not in the poise of the sentence but in the cumulative insights into human behaviour, contemporary history and into the writings and products of time.

Asked to pick out two characteristics of his work, characteristics that other contemporary writers do not possess to the same depth or with the same sweep, I would say that all of Naipaul’s work is informed by a sense of history; and that it never exhibits commitment to the causes and casuistries of our time.

At the end of In a Free State, the narrator captures the scene in a restaurant hut in the Egyptian desert. The performers of a touring Chinese circus have arrived there in minibuses and after their meal have lined up the waiters who have served them to give each of them a present in an envelope:

“The ragged waiters stood stiffly, with serious averted faces, like soldiers being decorated, then all the Chinese rose and, chattering, laughing softly, shuffled out of the echoing hut with their relaxed, slightly splayed gait….

“The waiter, his face still tense with pleasure, showed the medal on his dirty striped jibbah. It had been turned out from a mould that had lost its sharpness; but the ill- defined face was no doubt Chinese and no doubt that of the leader. In the envelope were pretty coloured postcards of Chinese peonies.

“Peonies, China! So many empires had come here. Not far from where we were was the colossus on whose shin the Emperor Hadrian had caused to be carved verses in praise of himself, to commemorate his visit. On the other bank, not far from the Winter Palace, was a stone with a rougher Roman inscription marking the southern limit of the Empire, defining an area of retreat. Now another remote empire was announcing itself. A medal, a postcard; and all that was asked in return was anger and a sense of injustice.

“Perhaps that had been the only pure time, at the beginning when the ancient artist, knowing no other land, had learned to look at his own and had seen it
as complete…”

Infused with a sense of history, Naipaul’s work reflects the world he has so restlessly traversed. He has seen it everywhere as incomplete. The ‘committed’ writer doesn’t see the incompleteness. He idealises its end. He or she reproduces the world as that commitment. Only history can prove that the commitment is a deviation or a folly. Only historical prescience can condemn that commitment as a passing phase, a further incompleteness and restore to the task of writing the monocultural values of a shared humanity.