One More For the Road

Hooked on the arm of editor George Andreou, wrapped in a black jacket that made him appear even more diminutive than usual, author V.S. Naipaul put in a Cambridge appearance Friday evening to read from his new book “The Masque of Africa.” His voice had the quality of a well-preserved old recording, managing to find its way into every corner of the room while still remaining somehow beyond it. Following a brief discussion, an audience member inquired how one might rebuild post-apartheid South Africa given the presence of a super-cycle. Naipaul clearly did not understand the question, but his magisterial British accent reinforced his answer-in-triplicate: “I don’t know, but they have to. They have to. They have to.”

Edging on 80 years old, Naipaul is, at this point, a literary institution. Crowned with a Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001, his work—spanning 30 books and 50 years—has shifted over time increasingly into the realm of nonfiction. The “Masque of Africa,” his newest book, takes Naipaul into familiar territory, featuring provocative interviews and descriptions of “superstitious” belief systems based in places (in this case, West Africa) far from his reader base in Britain and America.” In fact, it is territory so familiar that at this point, one must wonder about the ambitions of an increasingly shaky Naipaul in taking off yet again to what he sees as the world’s darkest corners.

Naipaul made his name at the start of his career with “An Area of Darkness,” the disillusioned 1964 chronicle of his visit to India detailing the then-still-extant caste system, religious conflict, and bureaucracy he encountered. A pet target for reviewers keen to lambast him, the book is often cited as bitter evidence of the immigrant tendency to establish oneself in a new society by very pointedly denigrating one’s roots. But to me, at least, the collection of crisp sketches remains gripping. Although one must read critically, understanding the less-appealing aspects of the country remains necessary. “An Area of Darkness” was assigned reading at my father’s Bombay university at a time when Naxalite movements were sweeping the east and central regions of the country; today, Naxalism in India is experiencing a resurgence as villagers in conditions of stark poverty resort to violence against landlords when illiteracy, lack of access to legal process, and isolation from cities leave them without options. Both believers and those seeking economic equality, in other words, continue to face challenges.

If Naipaul’s early work was head-clearing, however, Naipaul didn’t build on it. “My theme is belief, not political or economic life; and yet at the bottom of the continent the political realities are so overwhelming that they have to be taken into account,” he introduced his new book—a promising start. Yet he never actually does get around to writing on how belief can coexist with the political. (The way “economic life” disappears in this sentence is also odd.) In “The Masque of Africa,” it’s the quaintness and brutality of primitive religion, the “malaria, witchcraft, and mangoes,” that draws him: “I had a romantic idea of the earth religions. I felt they took us back to the beginning, a philosophical big bang, and I cherished them for that reason.” He describes with relish the native consumption of the eboga plant intended to induce the trance-like state required for ancestral communication, the axe-split deer heads sitting at market, the guinea pig blood drunk under the supervision of a medicine man, the crocodiles in a moat fed live chickens.

Naipaul goes on to concede that paganism can also be a “dark abyss,” which, while providing meaning, can also condone savage acts. Upon seeing evidence of animal sacrifice in South Africa, he writes: “I thought it all awful, a great disappointment… I expected that a big struggle would have created bigger people, people whose magical practices might point the way ahead to something profounder.” The “profounder” way ahead for Naipaul, however, remains unnamed. It is not Christianity or Islam, which in previous books he has said assume fundamentalist tones when transplanted; areas in Africa adopting “foreign” religions—like northern Nigeria—receive his dismissal. But as one who has never practiced any other career than writing, Naipaul provides no alternative. For Naipaul, to be a writer and interviewer means to embody the “objective,” secular West, no matter the opinions that his books actually put forward. Indeed, this lack of experience is something of which he is proud; on the back flap of “Masques of Africa” and in every one of Naipaul’s books is printed the line: “After four years at University College, Oxford, he began to write, and since then has followed no profession.” At bottom, despite his fascination in this book with primitive religions, his preference for a content-free, “ objective” Western secularism may lead him to continue advocating a transition away from belief altogether.

In that sense, perhaps we must read Naipaul against himself. Naipaul’s fascination with the beliefs of the countries that he visits can also suggest a recognition that the worth of any culture lies not in its economic success but in the strength and variety of its beliefs, in the individual humans, and the groups and institutions they create. Sitting in Harvard Book Store and taking notes on Naipaul’s book, I could hear the journalist Robert Kaplan speaking on the “rise of India and China.” In its loving attention to the smallest details of belief, Naipaul’s book is itself a potent attack on the economically reductionist image of the “Asian tiger.”

On the surface, though, Naipaul’s elegiac prose confronts us with a blank face. Like Naipaul, we might travel to “exotic” distant countries (even if they are technically our roots); we might, like him, collect picturesque details of ancient traditions, remarking on how much better off these places would be if nothing Western—religion? capitalism?—had wormed its way in. The scattering of aesthetically pleasing anecdotes we’d collect might even fill a modestly sized book. But a few months later, settled in an armchair in Brattle Street Theatre, we’d find ourselves addressing an audience of Cantabridgians expecting insights on what to do next. What, then, would we have to say?

Jessica A. Sequeira ’11, a former Crimson associate editorial editor, is a social studies concentrator in Winthrop House.