5 - Writing About Blackness

Summary

In the decade following the sixties Naipaul's writings show a change in focus. Until that point the historical descriptions and cultural critiques of colonized (or ex-colonized) contexts had been conducted in terms of a colonizer–colonized counterpoint (active–passive, authentic–parodic etc.); and this was paradoxically reflective, as I have said, of the writer 's black-and-white colonial psyche. Inevitably, all the writings so far had, despite carefully deployed distanciation techniques and the affectation of objective narrative, some autobiographical investment. The writing of historical and cultural contexts was always also an exposition on the writer 's roots – intertwined within the Caribbean context, extended to the migratory placement in England, and stretched back ultimately to the peculiarities of the Hindu Trinidadian community and its Indian origins (a discussion of Naipaul's Indian writings comes later in this study). The writings of the seventies gradually exorcize the obvious autobiographical investment in Naipaul's creative and critical preoccupations. The cultural critique and historical descriptions which had also been a charting of the self are gradually dislocated from their obvious territory (the Caribbean, England, India), and extended to a more cosmopolitan arena. The Caribbean island that appears in Guerrillas (1975) is scarcely recognizable as the Caribbean islands Naipaul had written about before. The expatriate Hindu Trinidadian consciousness which was manifest in most of the earlier books is carefully removed: instead the island of Guerrillas is seen through the expatriate perspective of Roche (an activist in South Africa, who had suffered at the hands of the apartheid regime), the naive English adventuress Jane, the Black Power activist Jimmy Ahmad, the black politician and power-broker Meredith, and the white expatriate settler Harry. Centre-stage in this novel is the politics of the Black Power movement associated with Michael X in Trinidad, about which Naipaul had written a substantial essay (an account of the actual events which inspired Guerrillas) entitled ‘Michael X and the Black Power Killings in Trinidad’. The latter was published in a collection of essays entitled ‘The Return of Eva Perón’ with ‘The Killings in Trinidad’ (1980). Interestingly the other essays in this collection, written primarily between 1972 and 1975 (as the author states in the preface), attest to the more cosmopolitan arena Naipaul was reaching towards at this stage.