In Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger’s 1951 masterful novel, the rebellious teenage hero, Holden Caulfield, muses: “What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him on the phone whenever you felt like it.”
Whenever in my late teens and early 20s I read a book by V.S. Naipaul, who died at 85 last Saturday, I never wished he were a friend of mine, but I did wish to call him on the phone — to tell him, yes, he could string words together and make them sing, but that he was a jerk. And, no, I could not, reading his work, separate the art from the artist. Edward Said, the Palestinian American literary critic and public intellectual, was too polite — unlike insolent columnists — to call Naipaul a jerk, but he did dismiss him as a “purveyor of stereotypes [who was imbued with] disgust for the world that produced him”.
Books, and the ideas that books impart from between their covers, have the power to engage us either with a deeper, truer understanding of our world or, conversely, to debase us by promoting the deification of, say, a supremacist paradigm prevalent in it. Naipaul wrote books that decidedly belong to the latter category. Thus, whenever I read them — or brought myself to read as a reviewer — my feelings alternated between revulsion and pity — pity I think is the right word here — for a man who took self-hate, as well as hate for the ‘other’, to such lunatic extremes.
To this Trinidad-born, ethnically Indian writer, from an impoverished working class background (his grandparents were labourers, part of the Indian diaspora settled in the Caribbean, which renders him a Third World native), Islam is a cruel religion; the destitution that characterises developing countries is self-inflicted; and corruption in Africa is integral to its people’s archetype. “There probably has been no imperialism like that of Islam and the Arabs,” he wrote. To him, Trinidad, his homeland, is a “society which produced nothing, never had to prove its worth, and was never called upon to be efficient”.
And Africa? Forget about it. Left to themselves, he observed, Africans will “return to the bush”, where they belong. Moreover, “Africans need to be kicked”, he once remarked, “because that’s the only thing they understand.” Paul Theroux, the American novelist and travel writer, in his book Sir Vidia’s Shadow (1997), a memoir of his encounters with Naipaul in Uganda, while the young American served there as a Peace Corps Volunteer, wrote of the Trinidadian’s imperiousness and — inexplicably, given the fact that Naipaul was himself clearly a man of colour — the mockery he showed for every African he dealt with, whom he would call “Mr. Woggy”. Theroux described Naipaul as essentially a petty man, “tantrum-prone with race on the brains”.
Nobel Prize winner Derek Walcott wrote of Naipaul’s attitude towards blacks as being a “physical and historical abhorrence that, like every prejudice, disfigures the observer”. Even India, his ancestors’ patrimony, was not spared. When in 1979, we read in a BBC news report, he was asked by the novelist Elizabeth Hardwick why Indian women wore a red dot on their forehead, referring to the ‘bindi’, Naipaul responded: “To say their head is empty.” The man, effectively, was subverting the assertion by James Baldwin, the African-American author of the iconic book, The Fire Next Time (1963), about the role a writer should play in society. “The responsibility of the writer”, wrote Baldwin simply, “is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.”
And Naipaul was “disfigured” indeed. Said, in many of his reflections on the man, found it hard, as he said, to “believe” that any rational person would attack entire cultures with such impressive ease and on such a massive scale. The animus Naipaul evinced towards Islam, in his Islamophobic book, The Believers (1981) was so extreme that a New York Times reviewer observed that “it bore such an antipathy to the religion that a book taking such a comparable view of Christianity or Judaism would’ve been hard put to find a publisher in America”.
True, as it is often claimed, a writer has no power over his or her book once it’s out in the world, but we, readers, have a say in the matter — whether to endorse the toxic ideas in it and, through our endorsement, allow the insinuation of these ideas, even if subliminally, into our social life, much in the manner that poison is secreted in the blood.
In 2001, Nipaul was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. But then, let’s face it: In 2016, the clueless Swedish Academy awarded the same prize to Bob Dylan, another odious character. So there you have it.
Fawaz Turki is a journalist, lecturer and author based in Washington. He is the author of The Disinherited: Journal of a Palestinian Exile.
