adminLovemore Ranga Mataire The Reader
VINCENT Naipaul is a pioneer in the post-colonial literature of the Caribbean particularly in Trinidad. He grapples with issues of alienation, loss of identity and longing for a sense of belonging in an environment that depicts black people and the offspring of Indian indentured labourers as belonging to the lower crest of the evolutionary ladder.
It is, therefore, not surprising that in most of Naipauls’s novels, his characters are obsessed with the idea of escaping the dreary intolerable environment of the Caribbean which has reduced them into intellectual zombies and mere certified slaves of Western cultural imperialism.
But it must be acknowledged that “A House for Biswas” is as much more than a depiction of the post-colonial epoch of the Caribbean but is also a direct result of history.
A change came over the West Indian scene in the 1930s as a result of much political agitation and some violence and the British Colonial Office announced in 1944, a policy leading towards self-government for the West Indies, the abolition of the Crown Colony Administration and the adoption everywhere of adult suffrage.
Thus the Trinidad of the 1940s is a society emerging from a repressive past, a past of slavery, colonialism and degradation.
The themes in “A House for Mr Biswas” are essentially drawn from the social and racial or political environment of the West Indies in a state of transition from colonial to dominion status, and they tend to reflect the problems arising from this transitional phase.
Most of Naipaul’s novels deal with the problem of social adjustment within a society only now becoming conscious of itself.
The prospect of nationhood and independence spurred the desire for self-definition and an independent cultural life but this is contrary to what the reader encounters in the novel.
Alienation entrenches itself at different levels as most inhabitants imitate the American way of doing things.
It is the Americans who set the example and standard just as in “A House for Mr Biswas” the children start addressing their parents as “mummy” and “daddy” because it is fashionable.
Those who fail to do so are jeered at as in Anand’s example.
Morgan, the pyrotechnist, in Miguel Street who craves for recognition by America and England as great. He says: “By this time so next year, I go have the king of England and the king of America paying me millions to make fireworks for them?”
Living in a fantasy world is an act of submission to an unreal identity. Becoming a trickster like Anand in “A House for Mr Biswas” are the unsubmissive reactions. However, this reaction does not proffer any better sense of identity except that of an exile or “free” man. One gets the sense that Anand the exile, who has no place to go, deny hope to the colonial.
The search for a home or a house is supposed to offer some redemption of freedom and a source of belonging to the former colonised as in the case of Biswas whose lifetime spent as a fantasy man, an escapist seems to be settled as he heroically finds a home and in turn acquires some form of identity.
But his celebration is nothing but cosmetic in that in reality he does not own the house as it is mortgaged.
In a way the reader is confronted with the fact that romantic fantasy is escapism in its most sterile form divorcing the characters from reality.
It is apparent that Naipaul has a pessimistic view of mimicry in the post-colonial condition and sees it as permanently disabling.
The image of dependence and otherness dominates the whole text.
The colonial mimicry is thus the mimicry of the “original”, the “true” that exists at the source of power.
In this kind of society people have no hope of realising their dreams. Naipaul depicts the flight from reality in the neurosis which afflicts the everyday lives of ordinary Trinidadians, and in the psychic make-up of the Indian personal- ity.
The education that Trinidadians receive also enhances alienation in that it is a manifestation of the negative aspects of colonialism.
The success associated with education is in reality success according to the terms established by the coloniser, for by the time the colonial subject has gone through the colonial education system, he has already internalised the values of the so-called mother country.
Education is paradoxical in that while it is the source of hope for escaping the trap of poverty, one can only acquire it by rejecting one’s culture and traditions and in turn becoming a true colonial.
It is important to highlight that alienation has its roots in history.
While Naipaul aptly captures the post-colonial situation in the Caribbean, readers will be disappointed by the fact that he doesn’t seem to see anything productive coming out of the Carib- bean.
He sees himself as the only individual who meaningfully escapes to England while everyone else is just a pale shadow of what they wish to be but never become.
Online Reporter