Saturday, August 11, 2018

Reflections and Memoires on the death of Nobel Laureate Sir Vidia Naipaul

Flashback: Trinidad Author Dr Kris Rampersad in Tete a Tete with Nobel Laureate Sir Vidya Naipaul
(August 17, 1932 to August 11, 2018)
Condolences to those in the literary world, mourning the passing of Trinidad-born British writer, Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, though I would not hazard a guess at how his soul may receive that notion of anyone mourning him as it transitions on to its next calling. Having left in his wake - pun intended - a reputation as the writer people love to hate, particularly many who have not read him and, not the least, many in the land of his birth, Trinidad and Tobago,  Sir Vidia died just a few days short of his 85th birthday on August 11, 2018.

Dr Kris Rampersad hosting Evening Epic in the Year of Derek
Walcott greet President Max Richards with the Nobel Laureate.
I have never felt the need to rise in defense of Naipaul, as it is the nature of the literary mind to invite dissension and criticism to provoke so as to stimulate and expand critical thinking and curiosity about the world around us and I have urged my students to treat his work as such. These few thoughts on his passing are not so much a literary reflection, as some personal musings.
 It remains one of my treasured memories of receiving what might be termed some rare praise or compliment from the literary laureate during his visit to Trinidad and Tobago just about a decade ago. 
I approached him to introduce myself while he was sitting alone after the tea break for the conference: "Let me introduce myself. I am Kris Rampersad." 
Dr Kris Rampersad in tete-a-tete with Nobel Laureate
Sir Vidia Naipaul on a visit to in 2007 from LiTTscapes
 featured in Beyond Survival by Jai Parasram 
He surprised me when his eyes lit up with knowledge and even before I had finished he promptly said, "Yes, Yes. You wrote that book. You discovered so much about my father that I did not know." Of course I was surprised that he knew my name before I had even finished pronouncing it, and that he would acknowledge that so guilelessly as it is widely reported how sparsely he is in acknowledging any human complicity. As he motioned to the empty chair next to him, he invited discussion about his father, one of the subjects of my research on our literary history which included the works of Seepersad Naipaul, a journalist and short story writer to whom Naipaul's writing ambition and subsequent successes that he lived to witness was wish fulfilment. I would myself begin my journalism career at the newspaper where Naipaul's father worked as a journalist and with which Naipaul himself treats in his most impactful work, the modern epic, A House for Mr Biswas.
At UNESCO sharing an evening in literary tribute
with writers of the world 
Naipaul was of course referring to my first book, Finding A Place, derived from my doctoral desertation, that traced the literary consciousness and the experience  of migration by a group who came with little knowledge of English and little else but a vibrant culture and heritage and within a century produced, among other things,  a writer acclaimed as "Lord of the English Language". Within the hundred-year period under study, it mapped the literary heritage and history as well as from the embryonic stage, the coming of age of not only literature but the nation. By that process, it was also journalistic history as well as available writings were in magazines and newspapers and newsletters of the time.  While the intention was a work of literary criticism, because of the dearth  it turned into a work of literary heritage and history and in many ways is the precursor to my more recent book, LiTTscapes and its now related and offspring activities: LiTTours, LiTTributes, LiTTea and LiTTevents aimed at stimulating literary consciousness and developing a literate environment.
I recall the painful days sifting through dusty old newspapers, church and family records papers, letters and documents, eyes watering and nose running from the dusts, not knowing the impact that may have been having on my health. I believe Naipaul's "praise" and the modicum of admiration - if one may call it that - that I recognised in his voice was a complicit understanding of the challenges we face to go behind the regurgitated colonial literature and records and documentation to unearth history in a more unadulterated form, and to lay bare truths that have most shifting uncomforatably because they hit too close to home. 
I had during that research had occasion to write to him for permission to delve into his archives which he had sold to the University of Tulsa, a story I broke in the local newpaper as a journalist, before moving on to advance that research, dabble in academia. I became privy to some memorable insights into the delibreate genius that went into his construction of some of his creative works.  
I had also shared another forum with Sir Naipaul, when I was invited as a guest of the Government of India to its first Pravasi Bharatiya Divas of 2003 in New Delhi in celebration of 'non-resident Indians' of the Diaspora where Laureates Naipaul and Amartya Sen were guests of honour.
Meeting with Narendra Modi then Minister of Gujarat
now PM of India , first Pravasi Bharatiya Divas 2003
Later I would be the guest of Narendra Modi, the current Prime Minister of Indian and then Chief Minister of the State of Gujarat who was embroiled in one of the most testing periods in his political career who had agreed to the meeting to accommodate my inqusistioning of India's complex socio-political tapestry.   
Two years earlier, I was pulling hairs to drum up a national Tribute to Naipaul when he was named Nobel Laureate, and working to secure and restore his family home as a literary centre as well as promote plans for the then spanking new National Library to be renamed in his honour (which has gone the way of all things heritage in these parts - to dust!) 
The international media would quote me on the award of Naipaul's laureate "as a writer trying to escape his past" and republish two of my larger reflective pieces on his works  some 30 books, several short stories and countless articles (Listing of Naipauls' writing are in the bibliographies of both Finding a Place and LiTTscapes - Landscapes of Fiction along with their comprehensive detailing of other writings on and about Trinidad and Tobago.
It is conicidental that Naipaul's passing comes as I try to redirect my energies, reviewing my piles of research, writings, articles published and unpublished that have remained unattended to as I tried to cull an environment that is appreciative of the enoromous creativity our islands have spawned, which environment instead is much more content to heap derision and scorn on its better selves. 
HRH Prince Charles glances at Dr Kris Rampersad as she
captures his interactions with participants in the
Commnwealth People's Forum in Kampala, Uganda 
I did not work as closely with Naipaul as the five year period of collaboration with our other Nobel Laureate of Literature, Derek Walcott (who, incidentally would refer to and show immense curiosity in Naipaul as "that other guy" and has not been too flattering in some of his public pronouncements See tribute to Walcott here) but I have had front row seats to the society, the circumstances, the mentality that would have spawned and propelled him along the way - a place that makes every effort to make, in no small measure, all endeavour stillborn.   
I would not say "Rest In Peace" to Naipaul as it is inconceivable that an active mind as his would rest as it sheds a worn out body and moves on, leaving himself to the world, as only a writer can. As I have presented in comparative studies to students of literature, in perusing their Nobel Lectures and other works, his epitaph is clear, for he has said frustratingly over and over again, and in his Nobel Lecture too for those trying to define or analyse him  "I am the sum of my books": 
  ...Everything of value about me is in my books. I will go further now. I will say I am the sum of my books. Each book, intuitively sensed and, in the case of fiction, intuitively worked out, stands on what has gone before, and grows out of it."  -- Sir Vidia Naipaul, Nobel Lecture, 2001

Dr Kris Rampersad in cultural heritage
safeguarding actions with communities in Peru
Finding A Place is now out of print (or so I have been led to believe). I am now trying to redo in illustrated multimedia form, resource permitting. The blurb reads:
  
"Kris Rampersad's book takes an intimate look at the blossoming of Trinidad s literary consciousness. Through the eyes and the words of the writers, she maps their contribution to Indo Trinidadian literature from those evolutionary years in 1850, to its flowering in the 1950s. It also represents a close look at the exciting oral culture of these people as depicted by their music, dance and storytelling, and examines the biographies of the main figures who contributed to social, cultural, economic and political development throughout this period. While the main focus of the work is on language and literary development, other aspects of Trinidad's development are also explored cross-culturation, politics, race relations, social mobility and women's issues in relation to their influence and impact on the writings. Further, the raw material of Finding A Place (12 little-known and rare publications between 1850 and 1950) introduce a new set of data through which the evolution of Trinidad and Tobago can be examined by others.

I began this piece with a sense of how inapplicable the words 'rest in peace' may be to Naipaul, so I'll say instead Fare-Thee-Well Sir Vidia, you are finally free of the mental, emotional and mortal anguish.
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http://kris-rampersad.blogspot.com/2017/08/creating-revolution-through-knowledge.html


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