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« on: May 06, 2007, 08:15:02 AM »
Ramchand: Naipaul a man misunderstood
Ruth Osman
Sunday, May 6th 2007
VS Naipaul, the writer and the man, has been misunderstood by the society that was once his home. This was one of the main points of Prof Kenneth Ramchand's lecture, "The Writer and the Man: Criticising VS Naipaul",
"None of you may agree with me. But I'll still be right," Ramchand told his audience.
The event, part of the University of the West Indies, St Augustine Campus', year-long celebration of the Nobel laureate, was held at the Learning Resource Centre, UWI, St Augustine, on Thursday.
In a lecture filled with humorous anecdotes and stories about his personal reaction to Naipaul's writing, Ramchand analysed our perception of the famous writer. He said that some people seemed to be more concerned with Naipaul himself, than with what he wrote:
"The defining characteristic of this ... criticism is that they are more concerned with the man they think the author is, than with the written work."
Admitting that there was something about Naipaul's work that makes the reader take things personally, Ramchand stressed the importance of judging his work on its own merit.
"I often wonder whether we are afraid to experience the work of writers like VS Naipaul who look at the world more uncompromisingly than we do," he said.
Ramchand also shed light on what he says is one of Naipaul's most quoted and misunderstood statements: "History is built around achievement and creation. And nothing was created in the West Indies."
According to Ramchand, if the statement was viewed in the context of the two preceding paragraphs, one would realise that Naipaul was speaking of our colonial past.
Naipaul, he said, was bemoaning the fact that our colonial masters had left us with nothing: no great institutions, no monuments or museums. The statement had nothing to do with the folk art and the culture of the newly emancipated people.
He also commented on the writer's recent interactive session with students at the Lakshmi Hindu Girls' School, saying that it was not well conceived:
"You have a whole bunch of children coming to see and hear a great man and you say that you want to be interactive. Don't be interactive. Bow down. Let him read a story ... and let them ask him things about it. And everybody would have lived happily ever after," he said.
And does Ramchand have any criticism of Naipaul's work? Being careful to note that it did not in any way lessen his respect for the writer, the professor said that Naipaul's earlier works, where he wrote "in a cloud of unknowing", affected him as a reader more strongly than his later works, where he seemed to know exactly where he was going.
"When you read the early works, all kinds of things are going on in your head that, perhaps, he (Naipaul) didn't even know," he said.
The lecture ended with a question-and-answer session. And in response to a question about Naipaul's self-imposed exile from Trinidad, Ramchand said:
"I don't care what he says ... I don't think he ever abandoned Trinidad. Trinidad haunts every page of his writing."
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