Caribbean Eyes

Travel writing in English has historically been seen as a genre in which British travellers visit and write about colonized places. This chapter, by contrast, reads a number of works in which Caribbean travellers describe their experiences in Africa. It examines Lamming’s Pleasures of Exile, V.S. Naipaul’s writings on Zaire and the Ivory Coast, Shiva Naipaul’s North of South, and Maryse Condé’s La Vie sans fards in detail. In these works, the writers revisit and revise the British tradition. Travel writing was a genre through which Caribbean writers thought through and articulated the position of the Caribbean within the new postcolonial world.

Introduction

V.S. Naipaul is one of the most internationally acclaimed twentieth-century writers from the Caribbean region. Yet it is usually assumed that he was neither much influenced by the Caribbean literary and intellectual tradition, nor very influential upon it. This chapter argues that these assumptions are wrong. It situates Naipaul’s life and work within the political, social, and intellectual history of the twentieth-century Caribbean. Naipaul’s work formed part of a larger historical debate about the sociology of slavery in the Caribbean, the specificity of Caribbean colonial experience, and the influence of that historical past on Caribbean life, culture, and politics after independence. The chapter closes with a reading of Naipaul’s late, retrospective book about Trinidad, A Way in the World.

The Loss of El Dorado and ‘Colonial’ Historiography

This chapter is about historical writing in the West Indies, from the 1960s onwards. Historical writing about the colonial past was a key place in which Caribbean writers in this era analysed the social and cultural impact of that history and looked forward to a decolonized future. Naipaul’s Loss of El Dorado is a fascinating but neglected text in this conversation, and is a key text in the development of his historical and social thought. This chapter positions Naipaul’s work within a history of West Indian historical writing, and historiographical debate, looking in detail at the work of C.L.R. James, Elsa Goveia, Eric Williams, Derek Walcott, and David Scott.

Conclusion

Starting from a reading of his late travel book A Turn in the South, this chapter describes how, late in life, Naipaul came to understand his own specific historical vantage point, as a writer with a colonial upbringing, who had lived to see independence. Meditating on the legacy of Booker T. Washington, Naipaul reflects on ‘the prisons of the spirit men create for themselves and for others – so overpowering, so much part of the way things appear to have to be, and then, abruptly, with a little shift, so insubstantial’. My reading of A Turn in the South leads to a discussion of Naipaul’s position within Caribbean history, and literary history. I outline the ways in which Naipaul’s work, on the one hand, now seems outdated, and how, on the other hand and in other ways, his work may still be important today.

A House for Mr Biswas and the Theory of the West Indian Novel

This chapter is about the novel form in the West Indies in the 1960s. The novel, in this period, was a key site in which debates about decolonization, originality, and cultural sovereignty took place. Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas was central to this debate. It responds to a history of West Indian novels and novel theory, and became an influential text in novels, criticism, and social theory in the region. Work by George Lamming, Kamau Brathwaite, and Sylvia Wynter is discussed in detail. By tracing the changing reception of A House for Mr Biswas in the Caribbean through the 1960s, we can also trace changing ideas and priorities in Caribbean social thought.