The Globalization of Space by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-317-31830-9
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)

In Search of Diaspora

In the year before the publication of A Bend in the River, V.S. Naipaul’s younger brother, Shiva Naipaul, published North of South (1978), an account of his recently-completed travels in Kenya, Tanzania and Zambia. In the ‘Introduction’ he added to the U.S. edition and which is included in the Penguin edition, Shiva Naipaul quotes from the letter he wrote to his British publisher, explaining the reasons for making the journey and writing the book:

The book will arise, I hope, out of my own concerns – or, if you prefer, obsessions. What do terms like ‘liberation’, ‘revolution’, ‘socialism’ actually mean to the people – ie., the masses – who experience them?55

In reality, Shiva Naipaul already had the answers to these questions, as is evident from the dismissive and long-suffering accounts he gives of the meetings he arranges with journalists and activists in Dar es Salaam, and from many other comments that he makes about the politics of the places he visits. There are no encounters with ‘the masses’, and no doubt the phrase was used ironically in the first place, parodying the duplicitous earnestness of post-independence rhetoric. A more likely explanation is to be found later in the book when Shiva Naipaul describes how he went to report on the Ugandan Asian refugees quartered in the bleakness of Dartmoor in December 1972.56 He was so moved by what he saw there – ‘my security was shaken’57 – that he began to reflect on his Indian family in Trinidad and to see the diasporic connection with the people he had been interviewing. After introducing this memory, he debates his Indianness in Trinidad: he could not speak an Indian language, had not gone through any Hindu rites, knew nothing of the religion or caste, and as he looks back on himself, he concludes that when ‘I left Trinidad at eighteen I was nothing’.58 In his telling, it is that encounter in Dartmoor that prompts these thoughts, and most likely forms the explanation for visiting that other place, perhaps to investigate diasporic echoes of Trinidad. He concludes these reflections with a visit he makes to the home of a Gujerati merchant and his family in Mombasa:

‘You people who went out to the West Indies mixed up’, an old Gujerati merchant I met in Mombasa said to me. ‘Here we did not do that. We kept to ourselves. We held aloof.’ He spoke with pride. His family had been resident in Mombasa for over a hundred years but they had remained of India. Africa had wrought no discernible changes in them. So it is with most East African ‘Asians’. That had been their great strength; and their fatal weakness.59

The description of the family recalls the opening chapters of A Bend in the River, a closed and overcrowded Indian world, menaced by post-independence hostilities. Here Shiva Naipaul is tempted to figure that closedness as a strength his own upbringing denied him, even as he also sees it as something he had been saved from.

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