Immigrant Literature and Post-colonial Literature

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Immigrant Literature and Post-colonial Literature

• Li Baojie

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Immigrant literature

• V. S. Naipaul (1932-), Kazuo Ishiguro (1954-) and
  Salman Rushdie (1947-),

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Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul
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Nobel Prize Laureate

• Sir V. S. Naipaul receiving his Nobel Prize from
  His Majesty King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden at the
  Stockholm Concert Hall, 10 December 2001.

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• The Swedish Academy, in awarding Naipaul the
  prize, praises his works"for having united
  perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny
  in works that compel us to see the presence of
  suppressed histories."
• The Committee added, "Naipaul is a modern
  philosophe carrying on the tradition that started
  originally with Lettres persanes and Candide. In
  a vigilant style, which has been deservedly
  admired, he transforms rage into precision and
  allows events to speak with their own inherent
  irony."

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• The Committee also notes Naipaul's affinity with
  the Polish author of Heart of Darkness, Joseph
  Conrad
• Naipaul is Conrad's heir as the annalist of the
  destinies of empires in the moral sense what
  they do to human beings. His authority as a
  narrator is grounded in the memory of what others
  have forgotten, the history of the vanquished.

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Biography

• Born in Trinidad in 1932, the descendant of
  indentured labourers shipped from India, this
  dispossessed child of the Raj has come on a long
  and marvellous journey. His upbringing
  familiarised him with every sort of deprivation,
  material and cultural. A scholarship to Oxford
  brought him to England.

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Nobel Lecture

• Sir V. S. Naipaul delivers his Nobel Lecture in
  Börssalen at the Swedish Academy in Stockholm, 7
  December 2001.

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Two Worlds

• So as a child I had this sense of two worlds, the
  world outside that tall corrugated-iron gate, and
  the world at home - or, at any rate, the world of
  my grandmother's house. It was a remnant of our
  caste sense, the thing that excluded and shut
  out. In Trinidad, where as new arrivals we were a
  disadvantaged community, that excluding idea was
  a kind of protection it enabled us for the
  time being, and only for the time being to live
  in our own way and according to our own rules, to
  live in our own fading India. It made for an
  extraordinary self-centredness. We looked
  inwards we lived out our days the world outside
  existed in a kind of darkness we inquired about
  nothing.

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• But the habits of mind engendered by this shut-in
  and shutting-out life lingered for quite a while.
• Those stories gave me more than knowledge. They
  gave me a kind of solidity. They gave me
  something to stand on in the world. I cannot
  imagine what my mental picture would have been
  without those stories.

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• His fiction and especially his travel writing
  have been criticised for their allegedly
  unsympathetic portrayal of the Third World.
• Naipaul's writings dealt with the cultural
  confusion of the Third World and the problem of
  an outsider, a feature of his own experience as
  an Indian in the West Indies, a West Indian in
  England, and a nomadic intellectual in a
  postcolonial world.

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• The comic spirit is still present, though
  submerged in his later books beneath a darkening
  sense of tragedy. Naipaul has written about
  slavery, revolution, guerrillas, corrupt
  politicians, the poor and the oppressed,
  interpreting the rages so deeply rooted in our
  societies.

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Bend in the River (1979)

• Footloose, he began to travel for long periods in
  India and Africa. It was at a time of
  decolonisation, when so many people the whole
  world over had to reassess their identity.
  Naipaul saw for himself the resulting turmoil of
  emotions, that collision of self-serving myth and
  guilt which make up today's bewildered world and
  prevents people from coming to terms with who
  they really are, and to know how to treat one
  another. On these travels he was exploring
  nothing less than the meaning of culture and
  history (David Pryce-Jones, Naipaul is Truly a
  Nobel Man in a Free State).

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References

• Pryce-Jones, David. Naipaul is Truly a Nobel Man
  in a Free State. http//nobelprize.org/nobel_priz
  es/literature/laureates/2001/naipaul-bio.html