HomeOld_PostsAn Africa-centred critique of Miguel Street: Part One

An Africa-centred critique of Miguel Street: Part One

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ONE of the new Advanced Level Literature set-books in Paper Five is VS Naipaul’s Miguel Street.
We can never do justice to this anthology of short stories unless we enter the solo-world of the author.
And this applies even to our understanding of his other works.
For that reason this week I wish to take you through the background of the author so you can understand where his fatalism and cynicism come from.
Naipaul was born Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul in Chaguanas, Trinidad on August 17 1932.
Although his parents descended from Hindu immigrants from Northern India, Naipaul’s inability to form spiritual connections with his heritage, be it Trinidadian, Indian, or even British, dominates his thoughts in all his works.
He, like Marechera uses his own life for material, writing of his exodus from Trinidad to England where he got a BA at Oxford.
Marechera believes that a writer is like a vampire flying by the night, drinking his own blood; that is to say using his own life as material for his writings.
For Naipaul, writing has really been his only career, and the large number of ‘successful’ novels under his name proves him to be a prolific writer with vast creative potential although regrettably he fails to live up to the expectations of his people.
While the Western world celebrates Naipaul as a ‘world-class novelist’, Africans and indeed his fellow Indians would find very little to celebrate in almost all his works.
If the West celebrates individualism and bohemianism, Africans have a different scale for judging their artists.
As Chinua Achebe says, an African writer is held accountable to his people; not to his wild imagination alone.
He says: “The worst thing that can happen to any people (the West Indians included) is the loss of their dignity and self-respect.
“The writer’s duty is to help them regain it by showing them in human terms what happened to them, what they lost.
“There is a saying in Ibo that a man who can’t tell where the rain began to beat him cannot know where he dried his body.
“The writer can tell the people where the rain began to beat them.
“After all, the novelist’s duty is not to beat this morning’s headline in topicality; it is to explore in depth the human condition.
“In Africa he cannot perform this task unless he has a proper sense of history.”
Unfortunately Naipaul comes across as the opposite of this fundamental expectation.
He has succeeded in beating the morning’s headline as a Western media hero, but he hardly touches the soul of his people except for the wrong reason.
His views have drawn accusations of racism and homophobia and he has found himself at the centre of a literary feud.
One Maya Jaggi describes one of Naipaul’s novels as ‘clumsy, unbelievable, badly written, wilful and weird’.
Theroux (1998), Naipaul’s one-time friend and mentor describes him as ‘snobbish, miserly, unforgiving and blunt to the point of brutality’.
Naipaul’s reputation, as a novelist and travel writer, has always been split.
For John Thieme, editor of the Journal of Commonwealth Literature, he is a “remarkable forerunner of displacement and migrancy as the late 20th century predicament.”
Resident in Britain since 1950, he has won all the major literary prizes — including the Booker in 1971 — and was knighted in 1990.
He scooped the first David Cohen British literature prize for a lifetime’s achievement in 1993, beating such contenders as William Golding, Ted Hughes and Iris Murdoch.
Only the Nobel has eluded him.
When one is lauded with so many prizes for laughing at his own people, then one begins to wonder what he is being praised for.
According to Edward Said, Professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University, while Naipaul, in the West, is, “considered a master novelist and an important witness to the disintegration and hypocrisy of the Third World, in the postcolonial world he’s a marked man as a purveyor of stereotypes and disgust for the world that produced him — though that doesn’t exclude people thinking he’s a gifted writer.”
Naipaul’s satiric humour is a dominant tool he uses to mock his people.
He has always sought to position himself as a lone, stateless observer, devoid of ideology or affiliation, peers or rivals — a truth-teller without illusion.
As Said says, “He’s thought of as a witness against the postcolonial world because he’s one of ‘them’; that there’s an intimacy with which he can tell the truth about their pretensions, lies, delusions, ideologies, follies.”
Yet how convincing are these claims?
And how far does the writer’s vision transcend the prejudices of the man?
Alastair Niven, a judge of the David Cohen prize, sees Naipaul as, “a man of great fastidiousness, who finds life quite painful and distasteful, and of great charm when he wishes to display it.”
Yet he is also given to contemptuous rage.
Yet anger must have direction.
It must be logical and rational.
Anger must spell out its teaser and must target those that invoke it.
Naipaul’s is none of the above.
It lacks sense of purpose and in its wantonness it punishes those who must be protected by it and rewards those that should be punished by it.
Such is Naipaul’s misguided creative energy.
Such is his anger.
It is blind anger and the analysis of short stories in Miguel Street will demonstrate our appreciation of creative potential that has lost its centre.

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