Rising Over Ruins (Part 3/3)

by Amanda T. McIntyre

I started off my writing career with a feminist, Pan-Africanist framework. The core of my portfolio as a writer, artist and activist have these politics. Naipaul would have most likely found me insufferable. He would not have acknowledged any debt of care. Why then should I extend to him any gentle considerations? However when I think about my students I understand that, while Naipaul was this way, I have a different responsibility.

I know that it is possible to hold two contrary ideas at the same time. It is possible to be very angry at a person and to also see the good in them. It is possible to exit an abusive relationship and in a dispensation of healing, see that the person who meted out the violence was much more than that relationship. The facts are, his novels are ideologically flawed but they are also well written. This does not absolve him. He certainly can’t become a better person now. After letting this idea percolate, I began writing again, not out of my feelings but instead out of the things I knew for certain, on personal and academic levels.

All I have to remember of those days in the ‘Lion House’ is a wooden chest in which I now keep notes. In 2002 I got my first full time teaching position in a school that was located in the building across the street. One day I read to my students the story of “Man Man” who, after seeing god in a vision, believed that he was the new messiah and even organized his own crucifixion. The children were so excited when I told them the name of the author and they pointed out the landmark to me. It was as if they thought they were introducing me to the place, though I had sealed the sensory details of it into my personal vault of culture. I left the area after my marriage in 2007 and returned as a divorcee last August. I have observed in the last months the present unkempt condition of the exterior of the building. On the lower end of the Main Road in Chaguanas, it appears after a knot of bars and food carts. The window at the side is hanging on one hinge and weeds are growing around the lions and other molded figures. It is a strange architecture that unfaithfully refers to the style of palaces in India. The material with which it was built becomes increasingly fragile over time. It can easily be swept away by a storm and who knows how it was affected by the August 2018 earthquake.

When Naipaul received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1998, there was a great amount of State and public interest in the site but this has, like the window, almost completely fallen away. Falling away too are the hinges of memory. The light around the stories my aunt’s godfather told me about the spirits there, grows dim as I get older. Literature is a great house with unquiet ghosts.

Naipaul is one of these undead occupants of our cultural space. He is not at peaceful rest. He will haunt us.

He was an exceptional writer but he also left many people hurt, angry, disappointed and disillusioned. A legitimate range of emotions remain, that have nothing to do with whether or not persons appreciate critically acclaimed West Indian Literature. His candour with language and clarity around the crafting of prose fiction seem to be the only redemptions for his lack of regard for people in real life. This was evidenced by the negative reactions to him before and after death.

Even with the recollected images of my time in the ‘Lion House’ as a child, I was also deeply wounded by the reality of his legacy, and this interrupted the process of grief. Even now I struggle with whether he is really deserving of these kind words. There is no question however, concerning the emotional release that I deserve and claim.

Of course, there is no time limit for laundering feelings. We sort our memories, wash, air, fold and put them away accordingly.

He was a combination of genius and disgust. Yet, regardless of how we came to it or what we choose to do with it, we still have this inheritance. We can rightfully voice our pain, but this will not change the fact that, even in his denial, he was still from here.

V. S. Naipaul’s work became what he felt he did not have in Trinidad and Tobago:  a derelict monument that housed, and was in itself, Culture.Now, at his death, the crippling construction he left behind marks the literary landscape. It is the sigh of a troubled history that rises over these ruins.