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V.S. Naipaul wins 2001 Nobel Prize for Literature
My most memorable university experience was studying with Trinidadian-born author V.S. Naipaul at Wesleyan University in academic year 1978-79. During that year, the Jonestown melee happened, and Iran fell to Ayatollah Khomeini. In extraordinary classroom seminars, Naipaul provided his students with an unfamiliar viewpoint on these events. He focused on the danger of a government like Guyana's that would allow such a cult to set up shop in the jungle. He saw the rise of an Islamic state as perilous far beyond the imaginings of the Carter administration. He headed straight for Iran when he left Wesleyan in the spring of '79, sensing a subject that would absorb him for years to come.
Very quickly at Wesleyan, Naipaul's somewhat hardened views rubbed liberal-minded students like myself the wrong way. (I've since met many who dismiss his work as blindsided by bitterness, misanthropic, etc.) But Naipaul's insights about writing and the world have stayed with me. I came to feel that his iconoclasm was not "conservative" or "reactionary," as some of my classmates thought. It transcended simple dualisms. It was personal, informed by deep observation, study, and to use one of his favorite words, meditation. Back when my experience of Africa was only the joyous release of Ghanaian traditional drumming, Naipaul focused my mind on the evil of Mobutu in the Congo, and Kenyata in Kenya. He railed at the New York Times's squeamishness in condemning African tyrants.
Today I am riveted by Adam Hochshield's King Leopold's Ghost and Michela Wrong's In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz--contemporary books on the Congo's horrific history. But an essential insight of these books--that Mobutu was a nihilistic monster, a self-serving snake charmer who mimicked an earlier snake charmer, Belgium's King Leopold--is plain as day in Naipaul's 1975 essay, "A New King for the Congo," and in his 1978 novel, A Bend in the River. Three American governments would still receive Mobutu as a dignified state leader, and fund his barbarism before the clear truth Naipaul laid out in 1975 would be accepted by the world.
Since September 11, I have pulled Naipaul's two Islamic books-- Among the Believers (1981) and Beyond Belief (1998) off the shelf. Seventeen years apart, they explore the world of "converted" Muslims in Iran, India, Pakistan, Malaysia, and Indonesia. Literary qualities aside, the fact that Naipaul has remained focused on this movement and these countries over these years now seems strikingly prescient. It makes one wish that someone like him had been working for the CIA and the state department all this time, instead of people who seem to have had little capacity to comprehend the power, and potential danger, of a worldwide religious movement fueled by poverty and disenfranchisement.
This morning's news that V.S. Naipaul has won the Nobel Prize for Literature brought back a memory from 1978. That fall, as Naipaul arrived Wesleyan, he was tormented by calls from in-the-know literary types who kept whispering in his ear, "This is it. This is your year!" Of course, it wasn't. And for 22 subsequent years, it wasn't. Knowing Naipaul's distaste for psychological torture, I suspect that he has long since given up caring. But now it comes.
Congratulations, Sir Vidia! This is your year.
Contributed by: Banning Eyre
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