“Everything of value about me is in my books…I am the sum of my books,” said VS Naipaul in his 2001 Nobel lecture. The prose writing of this Trinidad-born, British citizen has included novels, travel writing, essays, autobiography, history, and fusion forms. Provocative, analytical and exploratory, his writing uses beautifully crafted language to convey sometimes complex ideas in simple words.
He has written about revolution and guerillas, madmen and corrupt politicians, the poor and the oppressed, “interpreting the rages so deeply rooted in our societies,” noted the Nobel Prize website.
When he won the 2001 Nobel prize for literature, the academy praised him for liberating himself from colonial victimhood through the power of personal choice, will and intellect, qualities very evident in his life and in the achievements of his writing since 1957.
But today, in this era of cellphones, short attention spans and social media, how many people in T&T (except for literature students) read the works of VS Naipaul? Or, indeed, read much at all? And has Naipaulian writing had any impact on T&T’s new generation of writers?
Such questions surfaced on October 29 during an artists’ session at the Chaguanas Borough Corporation, part of the Seepersad and Sons literary conference on the works of Seepersad Naipaul and his sons Vidiadhar and Shivadhar. It was organised by The Friends of Mr Biswas, the UWI Department of Literary, Cultural and Communication Studies and The National Archives.
Speaking were two writers, Raymond Ramcharitar and Sharon Millar; and one painter, Shastri Maharaj.
Raymond Ramcharitar:
‘I never knew who Naipaul was’
Often, we don’t even know our own culture, or its achievers. We aren’t taught about them. Raymond Ramcharitar, a writer, poet and cultural critic, shared that: “I grew up, the first 17 years of life, a mile from the Lion House. I went to Presentation College Chaguanas...and I never knew who Naipaul was.”
Ramcharitar has published a book of fiction, The Island Quintet (2009), whose five stories explore inter-racial sexual relations, among other themes. In a 2011 Independent review, David Dabydeen described the book as “a crafted rage” whose prose “simmers, then erupts into outrageously satirical commentary on island life, then calms down again.”
It was shortlisted for the 2010 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book for the Caribbean & Canada. Ramcharitar’s most recent work is a book-length autobiographical poem called Here (2013).
He said: “(In Presentation College, Chaguanas) we were not taught English literature. It took my going to work in Port-of-Spain in the creole world to discover Naipaul; and I found that they took Naipaul very seriously...The point is, we live very close to this history, but we don’t know it, and not only do we not know the history, we don’t know the present.
“There are fellas I went to school with, who probably own this place now—they are very wealthy...and they’ve never read a book.”
“This is a very Naipaulian situation—where people who are highly accomplished, highly educated, very rich, who grow up within a three-mile radius of here, know absolutely nothing about VS Naipaul.”
Ramcharitar said that VS Naipaul’s influence on him was more “atmospheric” than direct, and that he was more influenced by St Lucian poet Derek Walcott, American novelist Thomas Pynchon, and the creative writing courses of TT writer Wayne Brown. But the elegance of writing, the detached perspective and the humour of Shiva Naipaul’s travel book North of South stayed with him, he said.
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Sharon Millar:
‘Our lives are important, too.”
Next up was Sharon Millar, author of The Whale House (2015), a collection of short stories about which NY-based Caribbean fiction writer Tiphanie Yanique commented: “...language crackles and no ethnicity, gender, economic status or race is off limits...There is a sweet and bitter magic here that Millar performs via the bodies of the characters. Women have turmeric eyes, men are too beautiful to die, children dance the cocoa and unborn babies are born as baby sharks.”
Millar has won the 2013 Commonwealth Short Story Prize and the 2012 Small Axe Short Fiction Award. She is a part time lecturer at The University of the West Indies, where she teaches prose fiction.
She read from one of her short stories—Buying Horses—which she said was very influenced by VS Naipaul’s 1975 novel Guerrillas.
Guerillas is a tense, devastating novel about power, colonial damage, delusion and murder, inspired by the biggest news story in Trinidad in 1972—the hacking and burial alive of (white) British model Gale Benson, on the orders of (black) Trinidad activist, Michael de Freitas (aka Abdul Malik/Michael X) in an Arima commune.
“I remember the day Abdul Malik was hanged—I was about nine or ten,” recalled Millar.
“Guerillas affected me quite profoundly,” she said: “I wanted to tell the story from a slightly different point of view.”
She said her own story let her tackle some of the themes in Guerillas—for instance, what happens when foreigners, who don’t understand our culture, come here? How can this be a very dangerous thing?
She admitted she found Guerillas a difficult, even bleak book to read, filled with images of fire and barren landscapes; her own story, Buying Horses, is more personal, more hopeful, and told from the point of view of the groom who’d bring manure to Abdul Malik’s house. But she said her work could not exist without the previous work of Vidia and Shiva Naipaul, she respected the elegance of their writing which had set a high standard.
She also admired the way that, in different ways, the Naipauls took T&T people and culture seriously enough to write about them. In audience questions after the presentation, she commented: “I’m still seeing young people here writing about being on a train in England...Our lives are important here too...They (the younger generation in T&T) need to claim that,but it is an uphill struggle.”
Shastri Maharaj: ‘It’s not the curry duck; it’s the flavour.’
The third speaker was visual artist Shastri Maharaj, who spoke as he showed slides of his art. Panoramic open landscapes of fields with deep saffron colours, populated by a few sentinel-like, impressionistic Indian figures, dominated some pieces, conveying a mixed sense of Indian nostalgia, sweeping infinity, as well as the crushing isolation typical of early indentured Indians who settled in Caroni’s flatlands. Other pieces moved more towards a minimalist graphic symbolism, as he exaggerated and simplified Indian country houses into squares with long, long stilts—because in Trinidad, he joked, “everybody wants to live upstairs!”
At the Naipaul session, he said: “When I was about 16 or 17, I read VS Naipaul, and he blew me out of the water. I found him to be really raw, quite cynical...(I thought) wow! He’s a black sheep like me!...I grew up in Fyzabad, which was very Indian...My mother was a Maharaj and my father was a Maharaj, and I became a thoroughbred Indian, a son of the soil, a coolie, who one day hopefully, would realise that, you know, you’re not really a coolie, you’re a spirit, you’re a human being.”
He said he responded to the Naipauls, who, like all artists, were in a process of search and development, to connect with heritage and their past, and to remove “layers of ignorance”. In exploring an Indian sensibility, he said he was drawn to the Naipauls’ intuitive approach of dealing with what they knew.
“What is close to Indian is religion,” he said: “It’s ironic that I don’t really believe I am a Hindu, so I don’t really deal with Hinduism, but it is so natural to enjoy sada roti, and talkari, and to hear some Ravi Shankar music, or some tassa, because I can’t get that out of my system. So I will summon the muse. Like the writers—they summoned the muse.”
He said he has evolved his own iconography of Indian heritage to document, comment and communicate through his art, and quipped: “What is important is not the curry duck; it’s the flavour!”—conveying his interest in capturing the essence of a subject or idea through simple, stripped-down forms, like a kind of visual code.
Maharaj recalled that even in the 70s, in San Fernando, you couldn’t go to the Yacht Club if you were Indian—that was “serious white people’s territory.” Commenting on situations like that, he said, is commenting on colonial powers—like the existence of big sugar houses on the one hand, and the bleakness and stark emptiness of the workers’ environment, on the other.
He talked of the value of the nanny, the tantie, the bowgie—the strong matriarch figure in Indian culture, who holds everything together despite the problems. This symbol appears in his art.
A previous three-month, soul-searching trip he’d taken to India eventually led him full circle: “I spent three months in India searching for ‘Indianness’—then realised I could do that right here.”
