2 - The Interloper in Travel Writing

Summary

While Naipaul was in Trinidad in 1959, Eric Williams, soon to be the First Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago, invited him for lunch and asked him to write a book on the Caribbean (French 2008, p. 207). Naipaul accepted the offer looking for new material for his writings. In retrospect, Naipaul said that his social experiences in Trinidad had lent the material for his first four books. But he had exhausted his memories and imagination. This was an important juncture in his writing because he realised that England had failed to provide him any solace or comfort while he no longer saw Trinidad as home. He was an oddity in British society; though he tried to enter the society, he felt constantly pushed away as an immigrant. Naipaul felt personally betrayed by the Notting Hill riots of 1958 and the 1962 Immigrants Act and the suggested trip around the Caribbean provided a new way forward. It was a challenge because he had never travelled with a view to write about his experience. He had seen his travel to England as a necessity and not fit for any account. His travel back to Trinidad in 1956 was long overdue since he had not returned on his father’s death in 1953. In Naipaul’s mind, travelling and travelling for writing were two distinct activities.

Further, travel writing had its own history and tradition within which it operated. Race, gender and class affinities were strongly built into the tradition of English travel writing. In the nineteenth-century, English travellers journeyed through British colonies within a certain secure travel circuit and, in general, wrote in favour of the colonial rule. Fawzia Mustafa and Rob Nixon argue that Naipaul unapologetically wrote as a Victorian traveller. I argue that Naipaul did not have the supporting structures of colonialism in place and thus, could not write as a Victorian traveller. Further, he was deeply aware of this. The nineteenth-century English traveller was an authoritative figure. Most colonial texts presented the colonised as people lacking subjectivity. They were subjects to be written about with a focus on their clothes, looks, manners and low professions. They were things to be gazed at but could not be interacted with because of their lack of language (the onus of learning the language of the traveller lay with the travellee/local).