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The subtitle of this article is not calculated to provoke; it is merely descriptive of the central theme of the book in question, and was suggested, in fact, by a friend, to whom I acknowledge my gratitude. The title could equally have been: An erotic journey in the heart of darkness, or, Half lives and Half-breeds, or The erotic epiphany of Willie Chandran! Let me say right away that I do not regard this novel as "the slightest book Naipaul has ever written and unquestionably the weirdest" (Paul Theroux). It is, in fact, a fine novel, after volumes of obviously unedited, long-winded prose delving into the mind of a solitary Brahmin in the back of beyond in some Islamic /third world country or other. It is not at all "unquestionably the weirdest" by any means. Theroux, of all people, should have been more perceptive to the erotic nuances of inter-racial sex. The fact that Sir Vidia can write about sex at all is amazing, almost at the end of a lifetime's oeuvre of prose that hardly gave a hint of Eros or love. It was Rushdie who noted the one thing that was lacking in The Enigma of Arrival - love! To begin at the beginning: Chandran Willie is a half-caste, born of an untouchable mother and a Brahmin father. The first part of the book is a kind of parody of a Somerset Maugham short story. To me this short fragment is the least satisfactory part of the book, its shadowy character belying the fact that Naipaul's narrative in India lacks life. The familiar Naipaul strains are already present, however subtle: "But when the Muslims conquered the land we all became poor. The people we served could no longer support us. Things became worse when the British came. There was law, but the population increased." And then the ambivalent pleasure of embracing an untouchable woman: "Her very dark top lip slipped slowly - with the wetness of a snail, I thought - over her big white teeth. For the first time I saw that she used powder. There was a thin white bloom on her cheeks and forehead; it made the black skin matt, and you could see where the powder ended and the shiny skin showed again. I was repelled, ashamed, moved." The union resulted, nevertheless in the birth of two children. The second part of the book picks up pace, though still retaining the flavour of Naipaul's rather unhappy student years in England. Naipaul himself has mentioned depression and suicidal tendencies. This part deals with a number of difficult sexual encounters and again, the old strain, difficulty with the intimate, ambivalence and revulsion to smell and dirt, surface soon enough: "He saw her on Saturday in Percy's room at the college. She was a big girl in a tight skirt that showed off her hips. She filled the small room with her perfume. At her counter, Willie thought, she would have access to all the perfumes in Debenhams, and she had been lavish. Willie had never known perfume like that, that mingled smell of excrement and sweat and deep, piercing, many-sided sweetness from no simple source." There are characters who are namesakes or the likes of other figures of the time, like Marcus Garvey or the landlord racketeer, Rachman - none of them flattering. The third part of the book is a straight narrative, as described by Willie to his sister, the form again parodying Maugham, of Willie's eighteen years in an African country which has been a Portuguese colony, somewhat like Mozambique. This is the liveliest part of the book, rising at the end, to a personal epiphany for Willie Chandran, who found himself in this African country as he followed Ana into it. There is easy racial acceptance here for Willie: "Most of the shops we used were Portuguese. One or two were Indian. I was nervous of going into them at first. I didn't want to get that look from the shop people that would remind me of home and bad things. But there was never anything like that, no flicker of racial recognition from the family inside. There, too, they accepted the new person I had become in Ana's country. They seemed not to know that I was once something else. There, too, they kept their heads down and did what they had to do. So that for me, as for the overseers, though in different ways, the place offered an extra little liberation." And again, "I found now that there was no special reaction to me. It was curiously deflating. I was expecting some recognition of my extraordinariness and there was nothing." Ana had African blood and a family estate in the country: Those were the days of my intensest lovemaking with Ana. I loved her - in that room that had been her grand-father's and her mother's, with a view of the nervous branching and the fine leaves of the rain tree - for the luck and liberation she had brought me, the undoing of fear, the granting to me of full manhood. I loved, as always, the seriousness of her face at those moments. There was a little curl to her hair just as it sprang out of her temples. In that curl I saw her African ancestry, and loved her for that too. And one day I realized that for all of the past week I had not thought about my fear of losing language and expression, the fear almost of losing the gift of speech. The descriptions of the local, colonial, expatriate community, many of them bearing Portuguese names, is, indeed, the strength of the book. It is a life of colonial ease, with servants and sex available at little cost. Willie's fear of the bush and "half-made" societies is, nonetheless, real: "I often thought back to the terror of my first day - that picture of the road and the Africans walking was always with me - and wondered that the land had been tamed in this way, that such a reasonable life could be extracted from such an unpromising landscape, that blood, in some way, had been squeezed out of stone." But the Africans' natural affinity for dance and the availability of easy sex offer Willie a whole new world of personal experience and liberation: "We drank beer. The feeling of shame went. I looked at the dancers in blue light, and their dim reflections in the mysterious space of the wall-high dark mirror. I had never seen Africans dance. With the kind of estate life I had been living there hadn't been the occasion. Immediately these girls began to dance they were touched by a kind of grace. The gestures were not extravagant; they could be very small. When a girl danced she incorporated everything into her dance - her conversation with her partner, a word spoken over her shoulder to a friend, a laugh. This was more than pleasure; it was as though some deeper spirit was coming out in the dance. This spirit was locked up in every girl, whatever her appearance; and it was possible to feel that it was part of something much larger. Of course, with my background, I had thought a lot about Africans in a political way. In the warehouse I began to have an idea that there was something in the African heart that was shut away from the rest of us, and beyond politics." And then the encounter with a young African girl: "Without her stiff clothes the girl was really very small. But she was firm and hard; she would have done much physical work as a child. Ana was not like that; Ana was bony and frail. I felt the girl's breasts; they were small and only slightly less hard than the rest of her. Alvaro would have liked those breasts; it was possible to imagine the stiff young nipple sticking up below a cheap village cotton dress. But the nipples of this little girl were broad and spongy at the tip: she had already had a child or children. I couldn't feel any longing for her. Even if I did , all the old ghosts were already with me, the ghosts of home, the ghosts of London eleven or twelve years before, the awful prostitute in Soho, the big hips of June on the mattress on the floor in the slum house in Notting Hill, all the shame and incompetence. I didn't think that anything was going to happen to me with the poor little girl below me on the cheap, army-reject mattress. So far the girl's eyes had been blank. But then, just at the moment when I was about to fail, an extraordinary look of command and aggression and need filled those eyes, her body became all tension, and I was squeezed by her strong hands and legs. In a split-second - like the split-second of decision when I looked down a gun-sight - I thought, 'This is what Alvaro lives for,' and I revived." Willie now attains a kind of predatory sexual drive that has learnt to be assertive: "The long drive had been a strain. Graca's need matched my own. That was new to me. Everything I had known before - the furtiveness of London, the awful provincial prostitute, the paid black girls of the places of pleasure here, who had yet satisfied me for so long, and for whom for almost a year I had felt such gratitude, and poor Ana, still in my mind the trusting girl who had sat on the settee in my college room in London and allowed herself to be kissed, Ana still so gentle and generous - over the next half-hour everything fell away, and I thought how terrible it would have been if, as could so easily have happened, I had died without knowing this depth of satisfaction, this other person that I had just discovered within myself. It was worth any price, any consequence." Willie finally learns Percy Cato's secret: ".. I remembered some words of Percy Cato's in London, and for the first time had my own sense of the brutality of the sexual life. I was deep in that brutality now with Graca. Sexual pictures of her played in my head when I was not with her. With her guidance, since she was the more experienced, our love-making had taken forms that had astonished, worried, and then delighted me. Graca would say, 'The nuns wouldn't approve of this.' Or she would say, 'I suppose if I went to confession tomorrow I would have to say, "Father, I've been immodest." And it was hard to forget what she had taught, to unlearn the opening up of new senses; it waa hard to go back to the sexual simplicities of earlier days. And I thought, as I often did on such occasions, the puerility of my father's desires. The months passed. Even after two years I felt myself in this life of sensations. At the same time now some half-feeling of the inanity of my life grew within me, and with it there came the beginning of respect for the religious outlawing of sexual extremes." Willie's epiphany, however, has taken him only a limited distance: "Ana said to me one day, 'People are talking about you and Graca. You know that, don't you?' I said, 'It's true.' She said, 'you can't talk to me like this, Willie.' I said, 'I wish you could be in the room when we make love. Then you would understand.'" This is almost the end of the book, leaving us with the realization that Willie has achieved a degree of liberation from personal inhibition but has a long way to go before he attains a more mature state of wisdom. In the new erotic African paradise, the snake's disturbing presence is evoked a couple of times (a rather contrived, symbolism of Christian provenance) not normally characteristic of Naipaul's fiction. It is quite a readable book. Presumably the Nobel Committee had access to it before awarding the prize. Certainly it is a welcome relief from anti-Islamic forays of the recent Naipaul - a return to fiction, but not a radical departure from the traditional in terms of literary form. Sir Vidia would do himself a service by refraining from making denigrating, impromptu, flippant one-line remarks about Islamic history or the reading ability of Indians. Celebrity status may do more harm than good, as Salman Rushdie has had to learn at great cost! Rushdie, however, has never suffered from a Brahaminic fear of pollution, confidently celebrating the intermingling of races and cultures! I am convinced that Sir Vidia has it in him the capacity to exorcise the many ghosts that continue to haunt him, just as Willie Chandran succeeded in dealing with some deep, insidious ones, towards a libidinal liberation of sorts. Naipaul the writer can produce even greater fiction that would portray a fundamental decolonization of the mind, if the knighthood and the Nobel do not lead to the disaster of membership of Saint George's Society! Copyright: Rasik Shah / 2001 _________________ |
