The Writer and the World Read Free Page A

courtiers arbitrarily dismantled the apparatus of the colonial state—the life of the bush meanwhile going on as it always had—and replaced it with nothing other than his personal authority. It was totalitarianism sanctified by a bogus Africanism. Together, it had stifled the nascent intellectual life of Zaire: the growth, for instance, of the bright students at the university, who can talk of Stendhal and Fanon, whose enthusiasm “deserves a better-equipped country,” but who, with only a government job in sight, already are “Mobutists to a man.”
    T HESE unsettled men with peasant or tribal backgrounds are always there in Naipaul’s essays. These are people swallowed up by a cruel history—like the extinct native Indians of the Caribbean and South America Naipaul often remembers—or thwarted by the ideologies of revolution and racial or cultural identity.
    It is easier to examine the ideologies now: they are what newly educated and privileged men in post-colonial nations took from their former imperial masters even while turning away from them—the ill-adapted borrowings, which, once glossed over in the heady days of post-colonialnationalism and Third Worldism, now preoccupy a new generation of scholars and academics, long after they locked whole societies in a fruitless cycle of false expectations, disappointment, rage and despair.
    The individuals these ideologies work upon are usually absent from academic and journalistic accounts of African and Asian countries. But in Naipaul’s essays, they stand very clearly, in the midst of the chaos and pain of their underdeveloped societies, and “awakening to ideas, history, a knowledge of injustice and a sense of their own dignity.” You can place them at the beginning or middle of the journey Naipaul himself has made: the slow climb from destitution; the makeover in the new world; the long glance back at one’s ancestral societies; the illusion-free awakening to the larger world—all the self-discoveries of uprooted men that are the cumulative work of generations but in Naipaul’s case have been telescoped, through the rigours of writing and travel, into just one lifetime.
    Naipaul’s own multi-layered experience—the many deprivations of Trinidad, the painful wretchedness of India, the “rawness of his nerves” as an outsider in England—is ever present in these essays. It pre-empts in them the abstractions of politics and economics; keeps away the fleeting shallow passions of the journalistic report or overview, accounts for their rare fusing of personal and social enquiries, and suffuses them, despite the occasional severity of tone and judgement, with a profound compassion.
    They consistently uphold a belief in modern civilization, and all that it offers to peoples around the world: the dignity of individuality, of self-knowledge, so many different private and professional fulfilments. But this faith in the redemptive power of modernity is balanced by a sense of wonder about the past. Naipaul’s regard for vanished or threatened ways of being—for the “completeness” of La Rioja, the remote Spanish-built half-Indian city in Argentina, for the mysteries of animist religion in the Ivory Coast, for the “logical life” of the African bush—gives a melancholy undertow to the vigorous humanism of his essays.
    This is the melancholy that shadows Ralph Singh, the failed postcolonial politician and aspiring imperial historian in Naipaul’s novel
The Mimic Men
(1968), as he surveys, from a suburban hotel in England, his life and times, and finds himself overwhelmed by the “great upheaval” he wishes to write about: by “the great explorations, the overthrow in three continents of established social organizations, the unnatural bringingtogether of peoples who could achieve fulfilment only within the security of their own societies and the landscapes hymned by their ancestors.”
    Ralph Singh wants to elaborate upon his vision of the history that has