Reviewed:
The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V.S. Naipaul by Patrick French
Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell
A Writer’s People: Ways of Looking and Feeling by V.S. Naipaul
Part One: “Ego and Circumstance”
Part Two: “About the Author”
Part Three: “A Life of Extraordinary Callousness”
Part Five: “Africa Has No Future”
Part Six: “Indians Defecate Everywhere”
Part Seven: “Autonomy, Complexity, Effort, And Reward”
Part Four: “I Went Out And Achieved Anyway”
My first experience with postcolonial literature was in the ninth grade, when, on the first day of class, my teacher assigned Kamala Markandaya’s Nectar in a Sieve. My teacher was a joyless woman who taught this joyless book as if it were the catechism, with tests on meaningless minutiae in place of recitation, and a universal Western guilt instead of a Catholic one: “REPENT,” she and the book seemed to say, though personally I was in no way responsible for the misery of either of them.
I was in no way responsible because Nectar in a Sieve depicts what is more or less a closed and foreign universe. All of it must be true in some way, and yet the themes were as alien and irrelevant to me as a fourth-grader’s sci-fi fan-fic. The novel is set on a farm – a village – in deep rural India. The setting is probably pre-independence: but I do not know for sure, and very much doubt that it mattered to the writer or her characters. The “hero,” Rukmani, enters an arranged marriage at age 12. She reproduces. A tannery comes to town. Rukmani mounts a one-woman campaign against the tannery. Her campaign fails. One of her children dies. All of this I am paraphrasing from a synopsis. The closing images are the few that I actually do remember: Rukmani, moved to Brontë-esque desperation and isolation, moves to the city and collapses in a state of fatalistic optimism, feeling the same sort of irrational righteousness that my teacher did when she shut the book.
Poverty, traditionalism, hardship, “the ache of modernism,” a one-man revolution, random death, a schizoid acceptance of “fate” while railing against the inevitable: I could just as easily be writing about Things Fall Apart, another book which failed to make itself matter to me. Okonkwo dies: who cares? He was nothing, and the kind of battles he fought were on behalf of a way of life where he could continue to be nothing.
Nectar in a Sieve, Things Fall Apart: these were funereal works that depict a sort of hellish idyll, read for the purpose of seeing how bad things were, and how much worse they got when the White man arrived. This is what postcolonialism meant to me, until I encountered V.S. Naipaul. One facet of Naipaul’s particular genius – peculiar to his “wounded” persona – has been to humanize these characters who live meaningless lives; unlike Okonkwo or Rukmani, they want to make something of themselves, to attain some degree of success – if not status as an outlier – and like Seepersad, it is in their struggles, however futile, that they hint at potential, pass on potential, and become meaningful.
The “wounded” Naipaul recognizes that powerlessness is only as painful insofar as one is aware of it, and these characters are very smart with respect to how powerful they are. No brainless villeins are they: Naipaul’s people speak with vivacity, with humor, with self-awareness; like their creator, they curate and mediate the unacceptable status quo with both levity and outrage, and they are capable of narrating their own stories. Okonkwo and Rukmani need Chinua Achebe and Kamala Markandaya, third-person omniscient narrators, to write on their behalves; the first-person presence behind Miguel Street can speak for himself.
These characters, however pathetic their aspirations and however stunted their minds and bodies, speak the universal language of mankind: making money. While Rukmani and Okonkwo barely barter, the Naipauline hero is typically conscious of his economic plight and intensely desirous of improving it. Here is one such instance of entrepreneurship, on the first page of A House for Mr Biswas, presaged in an earlier story about the same commodity: “‘Potatoes,’ she said. ‘We can start selling potatoes. The price around here is eight cents a pound. If we buy at five and sell at seven…’”
Here the monologue and the plan trail off into the same silence and inaction and nothingness for which the characters are destined. But a reader today should not miss the prescience nor the humor of this kind of writing. Nectar in a Sieve was published in 1954, Things Fall Apart in 1959, and A House for Mr Biswas in 1961, yet it sounds so many years ahead of them. Not only are the characters capitalist, but globally so; they wish to migrate. In Miguel Street, where the narrator does leave Trinidad, and even in Mr Biswas, there are prophesies of globalization: Naipaul saw the growing commonality and significance of global movement, even when the immigrant population of Britain stood at 25,000, Africa was just beginning to decolonize, and it was three decades before anybody knew what a “sweatshop” was, four decades before Thomas L. Friedman declared, Okonkwo-like, that the world was flat. Economics doesn’t conquer principle; economics is principle.
This means that Naipaul, himself a second-generation Trinidadian, is the first important writer to make postcolonialism relevant not only to the West, but relevant universally. The venom of his detractors, like Edward Said’s allegation that he dehumanized his subject matter by approaching it with a Western eye, now seems misdirected and absurd; the trajectory of history, though as erratic as his own forward progress, has vindicated him. There is now a certain reciprocity, a profitable, symbiotic commerce and exchange of ideas; postcolonialism matters to the West, the West matters to postcolonialism.
Miguel Street can thus be rendered in the first person; while that Mr Biswas is in the third person, Naipaul the narrator, shows his youthful empathy for the postcolonial plight as he draws a full, loving, and human portrait of Mr Biswas, whose life parallels Seepersad’s. Mr Biswas’ capital ambitions, like taking his five and turning it into seven, are modest: he wishes only to own his own house, whose solitude and privacy he will use to construct a deeper sense of self, the edifices of his fiction. Naipaul is fictionalizing the sad drama of his father’s failures, captured in correspondence: “I am beginning to think I could have been a writer,” wrote Pa to Vidia; a year later, in mourning for Seepersad – dead at 47 – Vidia contends that had his father had “one-twentieth” the opportunity that an equally gifted Oxonian scion, he could have been a great novelist, instead of a Chris Langan amongst the colorful slums.
In 1961, Biswas wants only a house to call his own; in 1979, the aspirations of Salim, who narrates Naipaul’s later masterpiece A Bend in the River, are not so small-scale. Salim comes from a culture of traders on the Swahili coast: “True Africa was at our backs,” he says. His existence and heritage have been cosmopolitan in a way that most places are these days, and yet he feels insular because he is not wealthy, with little opportunity for Naipauline or Gladwellian advancement, no chance of becoming an outlier. With his coastal society and his old way of life crumbling around him, Salim – again, unlike Okonkwo and Rukmani – realizes it’s time to find “a new life” elsewhere, so he drives deep into the heart of Africa, to a country that’s transparently Zaire, a city transparently Kisangani – to run a shop. Nazruddin, a richer acquaintance, has “sold him the shop cheap”; now Salim wishes to take his shop “from two to six,” a more ambitious profiteering, but still a Biswas-like transaction.
The Naipauline worldview at this time is captured with characteristic elegance and force in the opening of A Bend in the River: “The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.” The line has a Gladwellian memorability, but the unsparing directness and veiled complexity are all Naipaul; it deserves a bit of close analysis. “The world is what it is” is Salim’s surrendering to the unalterability of circumstances; he is not able to change the world himself, but he can exert some control over his own destiny. “Men who are nothing” are those who cannot: Rukmani, Okonkwo, and now Mr Biswas lumped in with them. Mr Biswas, in 1961 a defiant hero, has no place in the world in 1979; the “wounded” Naipaul is no longer.
What happened? Capitalism has crept into more or less everywhere; capitalism forces the postcolonial people to wrestle with it. Moral judgments are, in some way, moot, because this encroachment is inexorable – “the world is what it is.” But Naipaul realizes that this is at once good – for without globalization, these people would surely be nothing – and bad – for, like Okonkwo, they wouldn’t know it. Naipaul has captured the essence of what makes good postcolonial literature: he is on the side of capitalism, of stability, mobility, plurality, and advancement; but he knows – or used to know – what anguish it causes to hold these ideals and not be able to realize them. Salim takes his shop from two beyond six to twenty. The “Big Man” consolidates power. The shop drops to fifteen. Salim travels out of Africa for the first time; when he returns, he finds the shop nationalized, back to zero. He flees for London via steamer, and the book ends; perhaps with the help of his emigre friends and fiancee he can carve out a new life for himself. “But this is madness. There can’t be a new life at the end of this.” Powerlessness is only as painful insofar as one is aware of it; “the world is what it is.”
