(Reprinted from the October 12 issue of the Trinidad Express)
Pull quote: “He has been attacked again and again on ideological and personal grounds. He has been seen as a kind of spokesman for the Metropolis against Third World culture. He has been criticised for having said that nothing was ever created in the West Indies. He has been accused of anti-Negro prejudice and for saying that Africa has no future, although no one has written more feelingly about the disruption of African traditional life, the patronising attitude of their culture and values, and the ways in which Africans are strangers in their own cities.”

THE award of the Nobel Prize for Literature to V.S. Naipaul is testimony to the power and the glory of the writing of our region and due reward for over 40 years of a man’s dedication to the unrelenting demands of his craft and calling. He has continued to be naked to his enemies. He has never compromised his opinions and his feelings to satisfy local demands.

He has walked a long lonely road, avoiding the pain of living in these islands, but also denying himself the immediate pleasures of being here physically and enjoying the status of culture hero, the person looked up to and cherished by his society.

I had given up hoping. He was first nominated in 1972 when he had already written ten books including the classic West Indian novel: A House for Mr Biswas; the most original historical work on Trinidad - The Loss of El Dorado; The Mimic Men - a subtle fictional study of African-Indian politics and of the colonial mentality; an account of a visit to India, An Area of Darkness, by a Trinidadian of Indian origin, and the delightful stories and sketches in Miguel Street whose characters are a cross section of the population of multi-ethnic Trinidad. People have won the Nobel for less and for far less accomplished work.

Sometime in the 70s, Naipaul began worrying about the capacity of the novel to keep up with and interpret our rapidly changing world. This coincided with the fact that he was now building upon his experience of colonialism and post-imperial trauma in his native island and looking at that crises of identity and social construction in all the site of dying colonialism and fallen imperialism in the world.

He began travelling, producing three books about India that analyse some of the key problems in that sprawling miscellaneous country and exploring his affinities with the land of his ancestors. He also visited Islamic countries producing Among the Believers and Beyond Belief. Thank God for illiteracy, no Ayatollah realised that his critique was more devastating than that of Salman Rushdie on whose head a fatwah was pronounced.

But these two books are less about the religion of Islam than about imperialism and about the horror and terror waiting to be unleashed upon the world by fundamentalism and fanaticism of kind. As usual, this clear-sighted and thinking writer writes about catastrophe years before the explosions come.

Making an artistic response to his own perverse view that the novel was dead, Naipaul brought to travel writing a concern with ideas about the interpretations of the world as well as novelistic techniques that made the travel book a more searching medium than it is in the hands of less driven writers. In the Enigma of Arrival and A Way in the World, he went further, crossing and re-crossing the boundary lines between fiction and non-fiction, sometimes taking advantage of the confusion to make `fictional’ statements that readers swallow as if they were non-fiction and vice-versa.

He must have nominated for the Nobel almost every year after 1972. So confident was Newsweek magazine that he would win it in 1980 they put on the front cover as `The Master of the Novel’. He came close again in 1992 when the prize went to Derek Walcot. My opinion then was that if ever there was a time for a joint award for Literature, 1992 was the year because it would be some time before the Prize Committee would want to award it to someone in our region again. In 1993, he became the first recipient of the David Cohen British Literature Prize “to honour sustained achievement by a living writer”. But when the nineties ended, the Nobel seemed to be a lost prospect.

He has been attacked again and again on ideological and personal grounds. He has been seen as a kind of spokesman for the Metropolis against Third World culture. He has been criticised for having said that nothing was ever created in the West Indies. He has been accused of anti-Negro prejudice and for saying that Africa has no future, although no one has written more feelingly about the disruption of African traditional life, the patronising attitude of their culture and values, and the ways in which Africans are strangers in their own cities.

There is a substantial negative commentary on his presentation of women. Women are never central characters, and in Guerrillas, In A Free State and A Bend in the River, there seems to be a misogynist streak. But the attitude to women in Naipaul’s writing cannot be described simply as anti-feminist.

Here are some of the clues to think about before we make up our minds: the greatest animus is directed against White women of a conlonialist or liberal bent; the attitude to female sexuality is accompanied by hints of some kind of intellectual engagement with homosexuality; there is some political allegory floating around; and the attitude to the female is an acute expression of an attitude to the flesh.

All I can do here is state again that although it is possible to be critical of certain aspects of Mr Naipaul’s work, we should concentrate on the work, not the man. Who can read Biwas, Miguel Street, Finding the Centre, The Loss of El Dorado, The Enigma of Arrival, and Letters Between A Father and Son and tell me that the work is not Trinidadian? His experience of colonialism, mimicry and post-imperial destitution in Trinidad, and his stubborn desire to become a writer in an arid place, are the base and foundation of everything he has written. His comic sense was born out of his suffering the incongruities in our world.

Of his stature as a writer no one seems to have any doubt. But we should also notice that a man who keeps engaging critically with a people and a place is a man who suffers and cares no matter what he says outside of his writings. His vision is a pessimistic one, but a man who keeps on creating cannot be a man who does not believe in human possibilities.

His work is comic, provocative, and intellectually stimulating.

In an article entitled: `Partial Truths’, I suggested that because Naipaul is such a brilliant and persuasive writer he can overwhelm us into feeling he is telling the whole truth. But no one offers the whole truth and there are many omissions in the worlds he presents. If we hold on to this attitude, we will cherish Naipaul as someone who is constantly forcing us to question our values and beliefs, someone who is able to shatter our complacencies and make us abandon many of our half-truths. I find reading him a chastening and humbling experience.

On top of that, he makes me laugh.