V.S. Naipaul, Acclaimed Bigot

بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم

I was prompted to start this post after reading a comment someone posted in response to a story about "Rising Islamist Movements in Turkey":

"Islam is in its origins an Arab religion. Everyone not an Arab who is a Muslim is a convert. Islam is not simply a matter of conscience or private belief. It makes imperial demands. A convert's worldview alters. His holy places are in Arab lands; his sacred language is Arabic. His idea of history alters. He rejects his own; he becomes, whether he likes it or not, a part of the Arab story...
The disturbance for societies is immense, and even after a thousand years can remain unresolved; the turning away has to be done again and again. People develop fantasies about who and what they are; and in the Islam of the converted countries there is an element of neurosis and nihilism. These countries can be easily set on the boil."

Sir V.S Naipaul, Nobel Prize winner

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/23/turkey-rising-islamist-mo_n_332250.html&cp

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"Little negro children running up and down the street, causing me distress"
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Wrapped in the laurels of a Nobel Prize, bigotry is less hideous a companion, I suppose. And let there be no ambiguity about it - V.S. Naipaul is, simply put: a bigot. The fact that he was given the Nobel Prize for literature in 2001 cannot change that.

I intend ultimately to discuss Naipaul's writing here. With this mind, anecdotal accounts of the man's personal racist disposition are perhaps not supremely relevant; they do, however, help us catch a glimpse of the mentality which shapes his writing.


Consider this, for example:

Of the bindi that adorns the forehead of married Indian women, Naipaul once said, “The dot means: My head is empty.” Naipaul's vitriol for Africa and Africans is spectacular. “This place is full of buggers”; “Do you hear those bitches and their bongos?” Mel Gussow notes, “About the influx of Jamaicans into England, he suggested in an article that one way to decrease immigration would be to increase the importation of bananas. His much quoted line was: ‘a Banana a day will keep the Jamaican away.’” Naipaul has managed to package condescension as objectivity.

Remember that last sentence.

Also:

Naipaul's anti-black sentiments stare out of his novels. Sample his deductions about slavery: 'I asked for a cup of coffee . . . It was a tiny old man who served me. And I thought, not for the first time, that in colonial days the hotel boys had been chosen for their small size, and the ease with which they could be manhandled. That was no doubt why the region had provided so many slaves in the old days: slave peoples are physically wretched, half-men in everything except in their capacity to breed the next generation' (from A Bend in the River, 1979).

The excerpt below is from a review of Paul Theroux's memoir recounting his (now ended) friendship with Naipaul, Sir Vidia's Shadow:

At almost every meeting between Theroux and Naipaul, whether in Uganda in the '60s, where they first meet, or in the '70s and '80s in Great Britain, where Theroux becomes famous, Naipaul complains: Servants "should be kicked" to keep them in line, a pregnant woman is "one of the ugliest sights on earth" and nearly everyone except for Theroux is an "inferior," or "infie." Unfortunately, all this bile makes "Sir Vidia's Shadow" a tiresome book.

Additionally:

“Africans need to be kicked – that’s the only thing they understand,” he said in Uganda. “Whip them” was also a frequent Naipaul rejoinder.
...
Is it West Indian waggishness when he speaks of “negroes at [Princess Diana’s] shrines, weeping openly”, or “little negro children running up and down the street [in London], causing me distress”. Or consider his reaction to the news that the cricketer Viv Richards and his Indian wife have had a baby: “How could she have a child by that nigger?” Or this comment on the Nobel prize (1988): “Of course I won’t get it – they’ll give it to some nigger or other.” To Naipaul, West Indians are “slaves” and Indians have a “slave mentality”. The word trips off his tongue.

A person so fluent in these racist clichés and postures would presumably have little hesitation saying something like:

"I don't count the African readership and I don't think one should. Africa is a land of bush, again, not a very literary land."

So what are we to make of all this? Edward Said sums things up well:

Naipaul, in Said's opinion, was "considered a master novelist [in the West] and an important witness to the disintegration and hypocrisy of the Third World, [yet] in the post-colonial world he's a marked man as a purveyor of stereotypes and disgust for the world that produced him."

Said further remarks:

Naipaul's account of the Islamic, Latin American, African, Indian and Caribbean worlds totally ignores a massive infusion of critical scholarship about those regions in favor of the tritest, cheapest and the easiest of colonial mythologies about wogs and darkies, myths that even Lord Cromer and Forster's Turtons and Burtons would have been embarrassed to trade in outside their private clubs…

In his writings about Islam especially, Naipaul indeed reveals himself as a "purveyor of stereotypes" par excellence.

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Ignorance, Bias and Misrepresentation
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In the early 1980s Naipaul published Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey, which details a series of travels he undertook in the 'Muslim world'. If we look at the writing in this book, we begin to see how his intellectual pathologies play out. This passage about his time in Iran provides a perfect case study.

The first problem with Naipaul is hardly pathological: he is just generally ignorant about the topic he decided to write a book about. This is true for Islam, Muslim history, and even current events in the 'Muslim world'. Without a touch of self-consciousness, he writes:

I hadn't followed Iranian affairs closely; but it seemed to me, going only by the graffiti of Iranians abroad, that religion had come late to Iranian protest. It was only when the revolution had started that I understood that it had a religious leader, who had been in exile for many years. The Ayatollah Khomeini, I felt, had been revealed slowly. As the revolution developed, his sanctity and authority appeared to grow and at the end were seen to have been absolute all along.

How he feels so confident making pronouncements about the dialectic between religion and politics in the Iranian revolution "going only by the graffiti of Iranians abroad" defies comprehension.

(But really, when you think about it, a nearly identical method of analysis was dominant in our media's coverage of the recent post-election protests in Iran; namely, "going only by the [electronic] graffiti of Iranians [or anyone on Twitter] abroad".)

Naipaul's lack of basic knowledge about Islam shines through in the account of his visit to Qom, an important center of religious scholarship in Iran:

There were 14,000 theological students in Qom, they told me. (And yet, arriving at the worst time of the day, we had found the streets empty.) The shortest period of study was six years.

"Six years!"

The director smiled at my exclamation. "Six is nothing. Fifteen, twenty, thirty years some people can study for."

What did they study in all that time? This wasn't a place of research and new learning. They were men of faith. What was there in the subject that called for so much study? Well, there was Arabic itself; there was grammar in all its branches; there was logic and rhetoric; there was jurisprudence, Islamic jurisprudence being one course of study and the principles of jurisprudence being another; there was Islamic philosophy; there were the Islamic sciences -- biographies and genealogies of the Prophet and his close companions, as well as "correlations" and traditions.

I had expected something more casual, more personal: the teacher a holy man, the student a disciple. I hadn't expected this organization of learning or this hint of classical methods.

Naipaul seems to assume that anything Islamic can be analogized to something from his own cultural experience. He is surprised, therefore, that traditional Islamic scholarship doesn't fit within the guru-disciple paradigm, or that a tradition which excelled in philosophy, astronomy and medicine - and heavily shaped modern science as we know it - might have a "hint of classical methods". Elsewhere he writes:

I had seen other medicine men in Tehran and had thought of them as Iranian equivalents of the homeopathic medicine men of India. But the names these Iranians were invoking as medical authorities -- as Behzad told me, after listening to their sales talk to a peasant group -- were Avicenna, Galen, and "Hippocrat."

Drawing now from his western historical subconscious, Naipaul comes up with this absurd equivocation:

Islam, almost from the start, had been an imperialism as well as a religion, with an early history remarkably like a speeded -- up version of the history of Rome, developing from city state to peninsular overlord to empire, with corresponding stresses at every stage.

It's as if the man is literally incapable of thinking in terms beyond his own cultural lexicon.

Naipaul is at least honest about his limited perspective:

Because with one corner of my mind I approached Iran through classical history and felt awe for its antiquity: the conqueror of Egypt, the rival of Greece, undefeated by Rome; and with another corner of my mind I approached it through India, where, at least in the northwest, the idea of Persia is still an idea of the highest civilization -- as much as France used to be for the rest of Europe -- in its language, its poetry, its carpets, its food.

The problem, though, is that he feels so comfortable marinating in his cultural afterbirth that he ends up projecting his own preconceptions and biases onto the world he had set out to "discover". Consider this remark:

Avicenna! To me only a name, someone from the European Middle Ages: it had never occurred to me that he was a Persian.

To Naipaul, this realization pointed not, say, to the fact that he might be ignorant of Islamic history. No, not at all; it simply meant that the fact about Avicenna "had never occurred to [him]". This lack of reflectiveness is almost solipsistic.

Subjectivity and cultural bias are certainly things we all are prone to, but Naipaul's great crime is that he takes his own stilted impressions and presents them to us as pedestrian fact.

Edward Said devotes a chapter of his book Reflections on Exile and Other Essays to Among the Believers. He writes (p. 113) of the provincialism behind Naipaul's pretenses to objectivity:

What he sees he sees because it happens before him and, more important, because it confirms what, except for an occasionally eye-catching detail, he already knows. He does not learn: they prove.

The further one ventures into Naipaul's work, the more unclear it is how much - if at all - his understanding of Islam has changed since the time he was a child in Trinidad:

Its doctrine, or what I thought was its doctrine, didn't attract me. It didn't seem worth inquiring into; and over the years, in spite of travel, I had added little to the knowledge gathered in my Trinidad childhood.

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With a profound poverty of knowledge about Islamic scholarship and history already on display, it hardly surprised me to read such a thoroughly meaningless assessment as this:

To Kurdistan, following the Phantoms, went Ayatollah Khalkhalli, as close to power as he had boasted only ten days before in Qom. In no time, moving swiftly from place to place in the August heat, he had sentenced forty-five people to death. He had studied for thirty-five years and was never at a loss for an Islamic judgment. When in one Kurdish town the family of a prisoner complained that three of the prisoner's teeth had been removed and his eyes gouged out, Khalkhalli ordered a similar punishment for the torturer. Three of the man's teeth were torn out on the spot. The aggrieved family then relented, pardoned the offender, and let him keep his eyes.

It was Islamic justice, swift, personal, satisfying; it met the simple needs of the faithful.

"Islamic justice", he tells us, is little more than a convoluted iteration of "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth"; it is pure primitive vengeance embellished by a "hint of classical methods". Violent, emotional and lacking objectivity ("swift, personal, satisfying"), this "justice" is well suited for the unsophisticated needs of unsophisticated people: those he patronizingly calls "the faithful".

V.S. Naipaul has learned to play the 'white man' better than The White Man himself.

But, of course, one can never truly achieve this status viz. Islam without the required condescension toward Muslim women:

Another evening, on another program, an Iranian woman came on with her head covered to tell us that Islam protected women and gave them dignity.

(The true absurdity here lies not in Naipaul's juxtaposition, but rather in the surprising superficiality and cheapness of it.)

As shown in the quote above, Naipaul excels at repackaging invective polemic as mundane observation. Filtered through the writer's imagination, for instance, the account of a calligrapher at work becomes a flurry of sideswipes at Islam:

In a room across the wide corridor a calligrapher was at work, writing out a Koran. He was in his forties, in trousers and shirt, and he was sitting at a sloping desk. His hand was steady, unfree, without swash or elegance; but he was pleased to let us watch him plod on, dipping his broad-ribbed pen in the black ink. His face bore the marks of old stress; but he was at peace now, doing his newfound scribe's work in his safe, modern cell.

This sort of editorialism masquerading as description is the most dangerous thing about his writing.

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Death, Rubbish and Sand
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Intentionally or not, Naipaul's account of Iran makes healthy use of a rhetorical ploy common in the more fraught western descriptions of nonwhite Others: a preoccupation with dirt and the unclean.

Before proceeding it is probably worth considering this strange passage about Naipaul from a very strange 2007 article in The Sunday Times:

The small Indian community from which he came invented a past for themselves, an imaginary India of great and impossible glories. His mother succumbed to this myth. In one particularly telling essay in this book, Naipaul writes of her diary of a visit to her ancestral country. She visits relations and is given a cup of tea. One woman wipes the side of the cup with the palm of her hand and another brings her sugar and stirs it into the tea with her finger. That single and, to her, disgusting gesture destroys his mother's Indian fantasy, and the diary simply stops.

“The land of myth,” he writes, “of a perfection that at one time had seemed vanished and unreachable, had robbed her of words.”

Though hungry for a past, Naipaul never fell for this myth, and his mordant observations of the shortcomings of India have earned him yet more enemies. There was one prissy, middle-class Indian myth that, because of the Hindu emphasis on purity, India was a particularly clean place. By looking and seeing, Naipaul destroyed that absurdity. India was, to him, a mess. And, if there is one thing he hates more than anything else, it is mess.

These sort of trite revelations about the Third World being "a mess" go a long way, I think, to explain Naipaul's popularity in certain western circles. (The author of the Sunday Times article, for instance, seems disturbingly delighted at the idea of some "prissy" Indian "absurdity" being "destroyed" by Naipaul, the noble warrior-truth teller, who by "looking and seeing", exposes India as the "mess" it is. That'll teach those uppity natives.) They also raise serious questions about his responsibility as a writer. Said remarks:

Two things need to be said about the small band whose standard bearer Naipaul has become, all of whom share the same characteristics. One is that in presenting themselves as members of courageous minorities in the Third World, they are in fact not interested at all in the Third World - which they never address - but in the metropolitan intellectuals whose twists and turns have gone on despite the Third World, and whose approval they seem quite desperate to have. Naipaul writes for Irving Howe and Joan Didion, not for Eqbal Ahmad or Dennis Brutus or C.L.R. James who, after noting his early promise, went on to excoriate Naipaul for the scandal of his "Islamic journey," Among the Believers.

He continues:

Second, and more important, what is seen as crucially informative and telling about their work - their accounts of the Indian darkness or the Arab predicament - is precisely what is weakest about it: with reference to the actualities it is ignorant, illiterate, and cliché-ridden.

(Should it be any surprise, then, to hear the likes of David Brooks singing Naipaul's praises? Or Daniel Pipes?)


Returning to Among the Believers:

Naipaul spares no opportunity to tell us how much dust and grime there is in Iran, again:

The road was dug-up and dusty; the car was very dusty. It was hot; the exhausts of passing cars and trucks made it hotter.

And again:

South Tehran was still an Eastern city, more populous and cramped, more bazaar -- like, full of people who had moved in from the countryside; and the crowd in the dusty, littered yard of the bus station was like a country crowd.

And again:

Somebody in a grimy little office told Behzad that there was a bus for Qom in half an hour.

And again:

Behzad looked for a telephone, found coins, telephoned, got no reply. The August heat had built up; the air was full of dust.

And again:

In this dusty pavement medical stock was a reminder of the Arab glory of a thousand years before, when the Arab faith mingled with Persia, India, and the remnant of the classical world it had overrun, and Moslem civilization was the central civilization of the West.

And again, in perhaps his magnum opus of telling us Iran is dusty:

The colors of the city were as dusty and pale as they had appeared from the air. Dust blew about the road, coated the trees, dimmed the colors of cars. Bricks and plaster were the color of dust; unfinished buildings looked abandoned and crumbling; and walls, like abstracts of the time, were scribbled over in the Persian script and stenciled with portraits of Khomeini.

And again:

The pavements were broken. Many shop signs were broken or had lost some of their raised letters. Dust and grime were so general, and on illuminated signs looked so much like the effect of smoke, that buildings that had been burned out in old fires did not immediately catch the eye.

And again:

Low brick buildings were the color of dust; walls looked unfinished; bright interiors seemed as impermanent as their paint.

And yet again:

We went out into the light and dust, past the souvenir shops again, with the brown cakes and the tablets of Arabian clay, and were permitted to sit in the empty cafe opposite the KHOMEINI IS OUR LEADER slogan.


This repetition serves two functions. The first is to drive home the point that Islam is old, static and dead. Naipaul says this implicitly:

In this dusty pavement medical stock was a reminder of the Arab glory of a thousand years before, ...

And outright:

The glories of this religion were in the remote past; it had generated nothing like a Renaissance.

(Note the use of had rather than has.)

The second function is to tell us that the people of Iran, or Muslims, are dirt(y). This latter objective is pursued more explicitly by Naipaul. He begins with the co-location of dirt, garbage, and "a country crowd":

South Tehran was still an Eastern city, more populous and cramped, more bazaar -- like, full of people who had moved in from the countryside; and the crowd in the dusty, littered yard of the bus station was like a country crowd.

Before long - as if through osmosis - people actually become bits of trash:

Two saplings had been planted on the platform. One was barked and dead; the other was half dead. Between them lay an old, sunburned, ill-looking woman in black, an inexplicable bit of human debris an hour away from Tehran. Scraps of newspaper from the stall blew about in the sand, and caught against the trunks of the trees.

Death, rubbish and sand.

And again we see Iranians as trash, but what's even worse, they are peripheral trash:

So the Turkomans were men of Central Asia who were once feared. How they fitted into Persian history I didn't know; and their past of war and banditry seemed far from these depressed campers at the shrine. Small, sunburned, ragged, they were like debris at the edge of a civilization that had itself for a long time been on the edge of the world.

The description of lower class/rural Iranians is where Naipaul's colonial sensibilities and caste consciousness seem to congeal into a twisted lump of disdain. He makes them seem more like raisins than people. They are described as "old, sunburned, ill-looking", "small, sunburned, ragged", "depressed campers", "turbanned, sunburned", "sunburned peasants", "inexplicable bits of human debris" and so on until the dehumanization is complete and we start to see them how Naipaul sees them: Third World flotsam and jetsam, scorched by the sun and scattered in the dirt.

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An Intellectual Catastrophe of the First Order
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Two late, great scholars and critical voices - Edward Said and Eqbal Ahmad -have each shared their thoughts on Naipaul. They can probably conclude this piece far better than I.

Edward Said on Among the Believers (p. 116 of Reflections on Exile and Other Essays):

The characters barely come alive. The descriptions are lackadaisical, painfully slow, repetitious. The landscapes are half-hearted at best. How can one learn about "Islam" from him? Without the languages, he talks to the odd characters who happen by. He makes them directly representative of "Islam," covering his ignorance with no appreciable respect for history.

In an interview from Eqbal Ahmad, Confronting Empire: Interviews with David Bersamian (p. 110-11), Ahmad recalls meeting Naipaul:

he asked me what I thought of his book Among the Believers and I said I disliked it. He said, "Why?" I said, "Because you are not interested in reality. Books like these are not fiction. I read books like these for reality."

After Naipaul expresses confusion at this reply, Ahmad recalls how he outlined to Naipaul his irredeemable error: depicting the Pakistani government under Zia ul-Haq as "an Islamic state... as if this government represented that country and was supported by its people", while failing to mention that "the regime was being opposed at great risk to themselves by hundreds of thousands of people, including almost all the known poets, writers, and artists of Pakistan". He continued (to Naipaul):

"Nearly 30,000 or 40,000 went into prisons, and you don't make one mention of it. You describe that regime as Islamic. The least you could have done was to say that this was a contested space. This Islam that you are presenting is not the final Islam of Muslims. It is contested by a large number, most probably a majority, of the Muslim people of Pakistan."

Naipaul "disliked hearing that".

Ahmad finishes the account by remarking to the interviewer:

This is not writing. He should stop writing. He should be selling sausages.

At the end of a review of Naipaul's second book about the 'Muslim world', Beyond Belief: Excursions Among the Converted Peoples, Said writes:

Somewhere along the way Naipaul, in my opinion, himself suffered a serious intellectual accident. His obsession with Islam caused him somehow to stop thinking, to become instead a kind of mental suicide compelled to repeat the same formula over and over. This is what I would call an intellectual catastrophe of the first order.'

Indeed.

And how unfortunate it is that Said and Ahmad are no longer with us.

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