18 - 24 October 2001
Issue No.556
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 18 - 24 October 2001 Issue No.556 |
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Nobel questions
Egyptian and Arab intellectuals reacted with mingled dismay and uneasiness at the announcement of this year's Nobel Prize for Literature. Arguably the most prestigious international literary award, this year's Nobel went to the "British" novelist V S Naipaul "for having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories." In its statement the Swedish Academy went on to describe him as a "literary circumnavigator, only ever really at home in himself, in his inimitable voice."
Born in 1932 to a Hindu family, Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul is a double exile (first from East Africa and then from Trinidad). The son of a journalist, he was educated in Port of Spain and then at University College, Oxford. Like other Caribbeans of his generation, Naipaul experienced a sense of alienation on arriving to England. These experiences of displacement and emigration continue to inform his writings including his latest novel Half a Life.
Knighted in 1990, Sir Vidia has been dubbed "the greatest living writer of English prose." As early as 1962 Evelyn Waugh welcomed his The Middle Passage by stating that "Mr Naipaul is an 'East' Indian Trinidadian with an exquisite mastery of the English language which should put to shame his British contemporaries." In 1971, he was one of the first writers to win the Booker Prize for his novel In A Free State. Such praise is not unanimous, however. Naipaul's harshest critic might very well be the poet Derek Walcott. Walcott, himself a Nobel laureate in 1992, has expressed a widespread West Indian hostility towards Naipaul and even went so far so as to parody him in a poem as "V S Nightfall" and referred to him as "our finest writer of the English sentence" whose beautiful prose is "scarred by scrofula," not least in his "repulsion towards Negroes." Naipaul's one time obsessively close relationship with Paul Theroux has considerably soured prompting the latter to attack his former mentor sharply in Sir Vidia's Shadow where he is portrayed as extremely rude and snobbish.
Among the works singled out for particular praise by the Swedish Academy is Naipaul's 1987 novel, The Enigma of Arrival in which he had created an "unrelenting image of the placid collapse of the old colonial ruling culture and the demise of European neighbourhoods," the statement said. Yet many critics also consider his 1961 novel, A House for Mr Biswas to be his masterpiece. Set in Trinidad in the 1930s-50s its protagonist the Indian immigrant Biswas, is modelled on the writer's own father.
V S Naipaul's travel books have also received wide acclaim. These include The Middle Passage (1962) on the Caribbean, as well as three books on India: An Area of Darkness in 1964 and later India: A Wounded Civilisation in 1977 and India: A Million Mutinies Now in 1990.
Unlike other post-colonial writers, Naipaul harbours a deeply engrained disdain for the societies and cultures of the third world which he strongly believes are not well adapted to the modern world. He has been particularly derided in the Muslim world for his infamous assault on Islam and Islamic fundamentalism in two of his books: Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey first published in 1981 and Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions among the Converted Peoples. in 1998. Edward Said has criticised the latter as an "intellectual catastrophe of the first order" which revealed a dislike of Islam as "the worst disaster that happened to India." According to Said "Beyond Belief is based on nothing more than this rather idiotic and insulting theory ... that most Muslims are converts and must suffer the same fate wherever they are... Muslims who are not Arabs are inauthentic converts, doomed to this wretched false destiny." In Among the Believers Naipaul argued vehemently that modern life had shaken up "static or retarded" Islamic societies. Islam's central flaw was at "its origins...to the political issues it raised it offered no political or practical solution. It offered only the faith... This political Islam was rage, anarchy," he wrote.
The 11 September terrorist attacks and the subsequent ongoing American war in Afghanistan have led Arab and Muslim intellectuals to revisit the clash of civilisation paradigm; the Islam versus the West debate has been prevalent. The war in Afghanistan, despite the denials of Western statesmen, has been construed by many as a war against Islam. This backdrop prompted reactions of questioning uneasiness by writers like Al- Ahram literary critic Sanaa Selaiha who responded to the prize by declaring "he attacked Islam and so won this year's Nobel Prize." Indeed why Naipaul, why such a staunchly anti- Muslim, seems to be the unanswerable question. Why this year when he has been bypassed so many times before by the Swedish academy is a question posed by the culture editors of Al-Hayat and every other relevant publication in the region.
Naipaul -- typically -- does not nuance his views; he declared just last week at a reading in London that "[Islam] has had a calamitous effect on converted peoples," pointing in particular to Pakistan. "To be converted you have to destroy your past, destroy your history. You have to stamp on it, you have to say 'my ancestral culture does not exist, it doesn't matter'." He also described the "abolition of the self demanded by Muslims" as worse than "the similar colonial abolition of identity."
Nor are Islam and religious faith the only targets of his wrath. Last year, he anathematised British Prime Minister Tony Blair as a "pirate" at the head of "a socialist revolution" calling him a man who was "destroying the idea of civilisation in this country" and had created "a plebeian culture." In an interview with the Literary Review he has culled even more sacred cows: E M Forster was an odious fraud and his A Passage to India "false;" Wole Soyinka is "a marvellously establishment figure, actually," Dickens a self-parodist and Joyce unreadable.
Meanwhile, Al-Hilal is planning to reissue its 1993 translation of A Bend in the River.
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