Interviews with Sir Vidia

As the nation is repeatedly told about a mythical 2020 plan it appears that all is being done to glorify everything but the intellectuals and free thinkers in our society. The nation experiences no problem remembering sporting heroes new or old, entertainers, or fawning over businessmen but not the nation’s only Nobel Prize winner, Sir Vidia Naipaul. The ignoring of Sir VS Naipaul from the refusal of the State to recognise him with the naming of the national library to the virtual blackout in the mass media reflects society’s lack of appreciation for the intellectual. This Trinidadian position contrasts sharply with that of the United Kingdom and India where the utterances of Sir VS Naipaul are lapped up by fellow intellectuals and the mass media. The birthplace of Naipaul however sadly remains in the dark of the intellectual area of Naipaul.

In attempt to remedy this the Tim Adams’ “A home for Mr Naipaul” (The Observer, September 12, 2004) is reproduced in part  below for the many fans of Sir VS Naipaul in Trinidad and Tobago. Adams opens by reminding the reader that “The journey for him here has been a long one. It began in Trinidad 72 years ago. It took in his scholarship to Oxford, his discovery of his family’s original place on the earth in India, his 27 books that dwell, often, on displacement and exile. What does he think of now, I ask him, when he thinks of home? “He smiles and his eyes are completely lost. ‘I was talking about this to my wife, Nadira, some days ago,’ he says. ‘From time to time — and this is probably true of all people — there is a sentence that comes into my head, and the sentence is, It’s time for me to go back home now. For me, it does not mean anything. But it is there all the same.’ He
chuckles and shifts a little in his chair. When he moves, he winces slightly with his bad back, which has laid him up for the best part of a year. ‘Home is, I suppose just a child’s idea. A house at night, and a lamp in the house. A place to feel safe.’

“Naipaul’s writing has always been circling around that sense. His novels and his memoirs are anxious for fixed points — the father, the village, the house — without ever quite settling on them. Though he has lived out here in Wiltshire for 28 years, he has not lost his sense of estrangement. ‘I always knew who I was and where I had come from. I was not looking for a home in other people’s lands,’ he says. The place where he feels most comfortable is in his books. “His latest, a novel, Magic Seeds, is the bleakly comic story of Willie Chandran who responds to the anxiety of his own displacement by trying to find ‘his war’. Chandran also featured in Naipaul’s last novel, Half a Life, in which he migrated from India to England to southern Africa, mostly in search of a sex life. Now he returns to India and joins with a Maoist revolutionary group, lives in the jungle, wondering all the while what on earth he is up to.

“Naipaul does not see the book particularly as a sequel. ‘This thing was quite a separate idea,’ he says. ‘I went to India and met some people who had been involved in this guerrilla business, middle-class people who were rather vain and foolish. There was no revolutionary grandeur to it. Nothing. And I put the whole thing out of my head. And then, as is often the case, I found a way of using that material as it should be used.’ “The sentences of Magic Seeds are full of all Naipaul’s exact and cumulative brilliance. ‘My wish is to fix a scene with a very bright picture and to move along like that,’ he says of his method, ‘very bright pictures. People can never remember long descriptions. Just one or two images. But you have to choose them very carefully. That has always come naturally to me, of course.’ “Naipaul says he has always travelled with one question in his head: will this be interesting in 20 years’ time? His inquiry on the rise of Islamic states, Among the Believers, in 1981, has proved, in this respect, particularly prophetic. Most of the world still has not confronted its implications, he believes.

‘The blowing up of the towers: people could deal with it as an act of terror, but the idea of religious war is too frightening for people to manage. The word used is jihad. We like to translate it as holy war, but really it is religious war.’ “Naipaul has always been clear about the iniquities of the world. ‘Hate oppression,’ he says, ‘but fear the oppressed.’ The thing he sees in the current terrorism is the exulting in other people’s death. ‘We are told the people who killed the children in Russia were smiling. The liberal voices were ready to explain the reasons for their actions. But this has no good side. It is as bad as it appears.’ “What does he think the proper response of the West should be? ‘Well, clearly Iraq is not the place to have gone. But religious war is so threatening to the rest of us that it cannot be avoided. It will have to be fought... there are certain countries which foment it, and they probably should be destroyed, actually.’  Saudi Arabia? ‘I would like to think so, yes.’ Iran? ‘I think Iran has to be dealt with, too.’” (NEXT WEEK: Part 2 of the Naipaul interviews)