A Writer People Love to Hate Memoires on death of Nobel Naipaul

Condolences to those in the literary world, mourning the passing of Trinidad-born British writer, Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, though I would not hazard a guess at how his soul may receive that notion of anyone mourning him as it transitions on to its next calling. Having left in his wake – pun intended – a reputation as the writer people love to hate, particularly many who have not read him and, not the least, many in the land of his birth, Trinidad and Tobago,  Sir Vidia died just a few days short of his 85th birthday on August 11, 2018.

I have never felt the need to rise in defense of Naipaul, as it is the nature of the literary mind to invite dissension and criticism to provoke so as to stimulate and expand critical thinking and curiosity about the world around us and I have urged my students to treat his work as such. These few thoughts on his passing are not so much a literary reflection, as some personal musings.

 It remains one of my treasured memories of receiving what might be termed some rare praise or compliment from the literary laureate during his visit to Trinidad and Tobago just about a decade ago. 

I approached him to introduce myself while he was sitting alone after the tea break for the conference: “Let me introduce myself. I am Kris Rampersad.” 

He surprised me when his eyes lit up with knowledge and even before I had finished he promptly said, “Yes, Yes. You wrote that book. You discovered so much about my father that I did not know.”

Of course I was surprised that he knew my name before I had even finished pronouncing it, and that he would acknowledge that so guilelessly as it is widely reported how sparsely he is in acknowledging any human complicity.

As he motioned to the empty chair next to him, he invited discussion about his father, one of the subjects of my research on our literary history which included the works of Seepersad Naipaul, a journalist and short story writer to whom Naipaul’s writing ambition and subsequent successes that he lived to witness was wish fulfilment.

I would myself begin my journalism career at the newspaper where Naipaul’s father worked as a journalist and with which Naipaul himself treats in his most impactful work, the modern epic, A House for Mr Biswas.

Naipaul was of course referring to my first book, Finding A Place, derived from my doctoral desertation, that traced the literary consciousness and the experience  of migration by a group who came with little knowledge of English and little else but a vibrant culture and heritage and within a century produced, among other things,  a writer acclaimed as “Lord of the English Language”. Within the hundred-year period under study, it mapped the literary heritage and history as well as from the embryonic stage, the coming of age of not only literature but the nation. By that process, it was also journalistic history as well as available writings were in magazines and newspapers and newsletters of the time.  While the intention was a work of literary criticism, because of the dearth  it turned into a work of literary heritage and history and in many ways is the precursor to my more recent book, LiTTscapes and its now related and offspring activities: LiTTours, LiTTributes, LiTTea and LiTTevents aimed at stimulating literary consciousness and developing a literate environment.

Dusty Documents

I recall the painful days sifting through dusty old newspapers, church and family records papers, letters and documents, eyes watering and nose running from the dusts, not knowing the impact that may have been having on my health. I believe Naipaul’s “praise” and the modicum of admiration – if one may call it that – that I recognised in his voice was a complicit understanding of the challenges we face to go behind the regurgitated colonial literature and records and documentation to unearth history in a more unadulterated form, and to lay bare truths that have most shifting uncomforatably because they hit too close to home. 

I had during that research had occasion to write to him for permission to delve into his archives which he had sold to the University of Tulsa, a story I broke in the local newpaper as a journalist, before moving on to advance that research, dabble in academia. I became privy to some memorable insights into the delibreate genius that went into his construction of some of his creative works.  

I had also shared another forum with Sir Naipaul, when I was invited as a guest of the Government of India to its first Pravasi Bharatiya Divas of 2003 in New Delhi in celebration of ‘non-resident Indians’ of the Diaspora where Laureates Naipaul and Amartya Sen were guests of honour.  Later I would be the guest of Narendra Modi, the current Prime Minister of Indian and then Chief Minister of the State of Gujarat who was embroiled in one of the most testing periods in his political career who had agreed to the meeting to accommodate my inqusistioning of India’s complex socio-political tapestry.   

Meeting with Narendra Modi then Minister of Gujarat   now PM of India , first Pravasi Bharatiya Divas 2003

It is conicidental that Naipaul’s passing comes as I try to redirect my energies, reviewing my piles of research, writings, articles published and unpublished that have remained unattended to as I tried to cull an environment that is appreciative of the enoromous creativity our islands have spawned, which environment instead is much more content to heap derision and scorn on its better selves. 

five year period of collaboration with our other Nobel Laureate of Literature, Derek Walcott (who, incidentally would refer to and show immense curiosity in Naipaul as “that other guy” and has not been too flattering in some of his public pronouncements See tribute to Walcott here) but I have had front row seats to the society, the circumstances, the mentality that would have spawned and propelled him along the way – a place that makes every effort to make, in no small measure, all endeavour stillborn.   

I would not say “Rest In Peace” to Naipaul as it is inconceivable that an active mind as his would rest as it sheds a worn out body and moves on, leaving himself to the world, as only a writer can. As I have presented in comparative studies to students of literature, in perusing their Nobel Lectures and other works, his epitaph is clear, for he has said frustratingly over and over again, and in his Nobel Lecture too for those trying to define or analyse him  “I am the sum of my books”: