The Naipaul dilemma

Day 29: I have found myself at yet another juncture. The news of VS Naipaul’s death added to the emotional upheaval of the past month. By the time I sat to write this column, I found myself moving from the sadness of the loss of a great mind to anger at the man. But that anger wasn’t just. It was a projection.

It must be noted that I have, on more than one occasion, written favourably of Naipaul’s work in my columns. His books have been fixtures on my shelves since my undergraduate days. I remember once keeping some of my family members up until 2 am, during those undergraduate years, arguing heatedly as to why Naipaul was right to dismiss Trinidad. I was alone needless to say, unpatriotic and annoyed, but in the spirit of war I stood my ground. Such are the follies of youth, when the world is black and white and we refuse to see the grey areas until experience shows us the way. I was just stepping into my twenties and the road ahead was long. It has brought me to yet another juncture.

I reached out to three friends whom I felt may have been able to provide some perspective on the question at hand: how do I reconcile the man and the work? One friend asked: But is that necessary? How is that the public’s business?

I am led to push through my emotions in the wake of Naipaul’s death. Why do I feel like a hypocrite for admiring the work of a man whose nature I would have despised given his abusive tendencies? I believe that such people do not deserve the success that they achieve. But I ask, is this for me to judge?

In my rational state, I have always found Naipaul’s writing to be honest even when one classmate, doing her postgraduate research on Naipaul abandoned the programme because she couldn’t bear to immerse herself in the work for "he was such a despicable man." The authorised biography by Patrick French lays bare the complexity of the man, a series of highs and lows that took the reader (well at least in my case) on a roller-coaster of emotions that made me put aside the book for a few days before I could continue reading. The emotional and physical abuse of his female interests were disturbing. His wife becomes a peripheral, suffering individual in his narcissistic world. The antagonistic behaviours towards fellow writers and tantrums thrown for simple matters make us stand back and look on with some disgust. Luckily as a student I had not been exposed to his personal life and so, well into my early thirties I read with the eye of someone who was more interested in his ideas than the person behind the book. But it is rare that the man and his work are separate and it can very well be said that it is this duality of being that shapes Naipaul’s works.

Naipaul’s ambivalence towards Trinidad is exactly what makes him Trinidadian. The power of the work is that he brings us face to face with the reality that many of us keep under wraps for the sake of an image. Our society does not encourage such open conversation. Emotions are meant to be hidden or side-stepped. Naipaul’s work pushes through those feelings. Most profound is the feeling of fear when he describes himself waking up scared that he had returned permanently to Trinidad. It is the fear of dying here with ambitions unfulfilled (many artists, writers etc can identify with this) because the island itself does not support creative work. Yet patriotism is an image we wish to portray and our unease is silenced although we wish sometimes to scream it out. As acerbic as they may be in some instances, one cannot but read the overall body of Naipaul’s work and appreciate even in his biases, a vibrant honesty.

I keep my eye on – after days of wrestling with the anger from my personal experience and my overriding concern with being fair to the work – what makes his writing of enduring quality. It is that, in it, I cannot deny the courage and willingness to confront his truths. His work no doubt has been a way to find his own place within the world. This is the writer threading out his own story to find his centre in works like India: An Area of Darkness, The Middle Passage, A Way in the World. Like each one of us, he possesses human failings but as a writer, in his endeavour to locate his own truth he has also provided windows through which we can look in on ourselves.

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"The Naipaul dilemma"

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