Audio By Vocalize
In 2001, the panel of the Albert Nobel Committee announced Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul as winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. The announcement touched off a storm. Many accused the Nobel Committee of endorsing the seemingly contemptuous attitude the controversial author seemed to harbour for his country of origin, Trinidad and Tobago, as seen in his work.
V.S Naipaul, who went to University of Oxford in 1950 on a Trinidad government scholarship and later became a British citizen, once told an Indian newspaper he did not consider himself Indian because, according to him, “they do not understand literature there.”
So, when the announcement came, even Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka, whom Naipaul had earlier dismissed after Soyinka won the Nobel Prize in 1986, recalled Naipaul’s infamous remark that the Swedish Academy was “pissing on literature from a great height.” So, why was much of the literary world so opposed to V.S Naipaul’s coronation as a Nobel laureate? In much of his work, he casts what the reader may perceive as broken societies.
In Miguel Street, he casts the education system in the world of his setting as a place steeped in uncertainty and guesswork. One of his characters, Elias, sits a national examination in one part of the country and when he fails, he tries to sit the same in another part of the country. He likens passing an exam to taking part in a lottery from various corners of a country and when Elias finally passes, he attacks those who come to break the good news.
Miguel Street also takes a dim view of literature in the postcolony. Black Wordsworth, who strikes the reader as a black mimic version of English poet William Wordsworth, famed for his poetry on nature and ordinary rural life, is cast as a wannabe writer whose ambition is to become the greatest poet in the world. Perhaps based on the fact that many poets of the Romantic era in Europe had a partiality for nature, Black Wordsworth spends much of his time watching bees, in the vain hope that this would give him inspiration to become the best poet in the world. In the end, however, he confesses that he was not a poet in the first place. Miguel Street also has other disjointed characters, such as Man-man, who wakes up and starts writing the word “school”, and writes the last letter “l” when he sees children coming from school. There is also Popo, who is forever trying to do something “without a name”.
Perhaps it is in the area of race relations where V.S Naipaul rattles much of the literary world. In A House for Mr Biswas, the main character portrays his society’s attachment to myths and beliefs as both comic and imprisoning, suggesting a people trapped between inherited superstition and the uncertainties of colonial modernity. The race relations view is also seen in The Suffrage of Elvira. I once read a short story by V.S Naipaul, ‘The Baker’s Story’, where an Indian baker struggles to attract customers until he employs a Chinese shopkeeper and suddenly the business flourishes. The story is narrated by the baker himself as he explains how he became a runaway success. Of course, a casual reading may give the reader the impression that there is no hope for the race of the baker.
True, many people like works of literature that follow the old structure of a short story, first expounded by Edgar Allan Poe, the American writer, poet and critic credited with formalising the modern short story, where a conflict is introduced, heightened and later a resolution artistically developed. Thematically, however, in my view, the greatest works are those that confront societies and direct the searchlight to nooks and crevices that no one dares think about. Indeed, just like political leaders get offended when the media trots out skeletons in their PR-fortified closets, I think great literature provokes the entire world by breaking taboos of silence and shattering the bubbles of what we all like to cast as normal lives.
So, when V.S. Naipaul shows a postcolonial society as fractured, perhaps he is urging us to look beyond the world of his setting to the roots of such societies. Today, most African and other postcolonial societies are a theatre of the absurd, to say the least. This is not because we have no mental faculties to craft functional societies, but because the vicissitudes of history have left us as fragments of the many events that have brought us here.
The missionaries gave us an education, so we can speak English and have Western-styled careers, yet we still pour libations and observe other cultural rites we inherited from those who came before us. Today, much of postcolonial Africa professes the Christian faith and embraces the one-man-one-wife doctrine, yet the institution of marriage is still the subject of horror stories as seen in the media every day. Of course patriarchy played a big part in the artificial matrimonial harmony of our great grandparents’ era, but the point I am making is that reconciling the doctrines of a Western-styled religion with the customary imperatives we inherited before contact with the West has left us as fragments of many, often conflicting socio-cultural ways.
This is well portrayed in such works as George Lamming’s In the Castle of My Skin, which captures the comedic yet poignant tension between the villagers’ longstanding informal domestic arrangements and the rather performative pressure to adopt formal Christian weddings to signify “progress”. You also see it in Eliza, in Peter Abrahams’s Mine Boy. Eliza is your typical educated woman in apartheid South Africa whose heart seems drawn to Xuma, a mere mine boy, but she cannot let that love grow because her “social status” does not allow her to date an uneducated African man.
So, in my view, the absurdities in postcolonial world are not just a reflection of what the authors think about their people or the people they write about. Just like a psychotherapist would advise you to face the shadows that you would rather sweep under the carpet in order to heal, great literature illuminates our deepest wounds, our darkest fears and pricks the bubbles we place in the realm of taboos so that we can see them, bring them to the surface and heal them. Vilifying works that do that oh-so-divine work is, in my view, the perfect case of killing the messenger.
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By Henry Munene