Postcolonial hell: a survey

Cross Currents, Spring, 2003 by Peter Heinegg

The Writer and the World: Essays

By V. S. Naipaul, New York: Alfred A. Knopf 2002, $30.00 (cloth)

MONTY PYTHON FANS will recall the scene from The Life of Brian where a band of moronic terrorists from the "People's Front of Judea" gather in a dingy hovel to plot their next strike against the Roman occupying forces (it's, not accidentally, 33 A.D.). Trying to stir his feckless brethren to action, the ringleader, "Reg" (John Cleese) roars out, "What have the Romans ever done for us?" This rabble-rousing rhetorical question is first met by silence; but then one by one the Pseudo-sicarii timidly venture a series of answers: "Aqueducts?" "Sanitation?" "Roads?" "Irrigation?" "Medicine?" "Education?" "Public order?" "Peace?" "Oh, all right," Reg snorts in exasperation. "but what else have the Romans done for us?" The point, obviously, is that these "revolutionaries" are both stupid and dishonest. All things considered-at least for the sake of this extended joke-the Roman Empire was a GOOD THING. Sure, the Romans were often brutally cruel, but how else could they have contained the volatile "natives," ever prone to religious and political mayhem?

Reading V. S. Naipaul's The Writer and the World (Naipaul happens to be an Oxfordian, like Cleese & Co.), a hefty collection of twenty essays that spans vast stretches of the planet over a period of thirty years (1962-92) and focuses on various public figures in postcolonial India, Africa, the "African Diaspora," Argentina, and the Caribbean, one often feels Monty-Pythonesque bursts of impatience: "Good Lord, what a bloody mess these people have made of things! You call this progress?" Not that Naipaul, who was born in Trinidad and has a home in rural England, feels nostalgia for any colonial empire; nor does he naively glorify the First World and western civilization. (The only glimpses his book provides of either come in three slight accounts of visits to America and one on Jacques Soustelle, the shady ethnologist-politician who was Governor-General of Algeria under De Gaulle-and almost everything he has to say about them is negative.) But he's practically obsessed with hypocritical, wrongheaded Third-World revolutionaries. Many of Naipaul's interlocutors would sound as farcical as Monty Python caricatures, if he didn't also record the voices of their victims and didn't show us all the murder, chaos, oppression, and dismal impoverishment surrounding them. Naipaul seems to do most of his traveling alone; and he rarely meets anyone who shares his keen-eyed, unsparing, monumental pessimism. Of his first visit to India in 1962 he writes, "despair lies more with the observer than the people." If there's one recurrent emotion in this book, it's despair.

In his fine introduction, Naipaul's editor, Pankaj Misisra, observes: "It is hard to think of a writer more fundamentally exilic, carrying so many clashing fading worlds within him."

Of course, the number of major writers who have lived at least part of their lives in exile is legion: from Ovid to Dante to Swift (exiled to his own accidental birthplace) to Conrad, Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Gertrude Stein, I. J. and I. B. Singer, Solzhenitsyn, et al.; and there's no exile without some loss and bitterness. But Naipaul outdoes most of his fellow exiles in unrelenting bleakness. At the same time, he is so meticulously factual, so understated, and un-self-promoting that there seems no way to dismiss this long travelogue (and the many non-fiction volumes that have preceded it, such as Beyond belief or India: A Million Mutinies Now) as mere rancorous personal screeds.

The worst place of all for Naipaul, perhaps--certainly the most maddening one--is his ancestral homeland, India. The sight of thousands of beatniks, American, Australian, and whatever, flocking to a country ravaged by hunger, illiteracy, caste violence, corruption, etc., (which prompts the glossy Indian Hotelkeeper and Traveller to purr: "To some of the materially affluent but psychologically sick and spiritually rudderless foreigners from far-flung corners of the world, India's saints and sadhus provide irresistible magnets of attraction") all but unhinges Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad. "The absurdity of India," he declares, "can be total. It appears to ridicule analysis. It takes the onlooker beyond anger and despair to neutrality." He labels its spirituality "pathetic."

But then what to make of the horrible and politically meaningless "Black Power Killings in Trinidad" (1972), sparked by "Michael X" (Michael de Freitas, a seaman, pimp, drug-dealer, utopian visionary, and barely literate author)? What of the lost souls (nearly everyone, according to Naipaul) in Anguilla, "a tiny colony set adrift, part of the jetsam of an empire, a near-primitive people suddenly returned to a free state, their renewed or continuing exploitation"? Anguillans, Naipaul bitingly remarks, "are not well-educated. Instead, they have skills, like boat-building and religion.... .Few Anguillans act without divine guidance." Then there's the case of Mauritius (in a piece reprinted from The Overcrowded Barracoon): once uninhabited and the home of the dodo; it's now crammed with 1,000 people per square mile and no more dodos. Its people are enslaved to the sugar-cane monoculture; its palm trees are blighted by the rhinoceros beetle. It's ruled by gangs and a crackpot government that blames all the island' s problems on "the malignant white god." Its most reliable industry is prostitution, into which countless Mauritian women are forced in order to survive.