The Middle Passage

The Middle Passage

V. S. Naipaul

Language: English

Pages: 158

ISBN: B01N550QNY

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


In 1960 the government of Trinidad invited V. S. Naipaul to revisit his native country and record his impressions. In this classic of modern travel writing he has created a deft and remarkably prescient portrait of Trinidad and four adjacent Caribbean societies–countries haunted by the legacies of slavery and colonialism and so thoroughly defined by the norms of Empire that they can scarcely believe that the Empire is ending.

In The Middle Passage, Naipaul watches a Trinidadian movie audience greeting Humphrey Bogart’s appearance with cries of “That is man!” He ventures into a Trinidad slum so insalubrious that the locals call it the Gaza Strip. He follows a racially charged election campaign in British Guiana (now Guyana) and marvels at the Gallic pretension of Martinique society, which maintains the fiction that its roads are extensions of France’s routes nationales. And throughout he relates the ghastly episodes of the region’s colonial past and shows how they continue to inform its language, politics, and values. The result is a work of novelistic vividness and dazzling perspicacity that displays Naipaul at the peak of his powers.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

carried no marks of difference, nothing to confirm that we were in Brazil. The savannah was as flat and bright and bare, the sky was as high, and the ground was as hard as on the other bank. The road stretched between bristling tussocks of coarse brown-green grass: two parallel white tracks separated by a strip of low, chassis-brushed vegetation. And as we penetrated deeper into Brazil I felt as a fact, what the maps had already told me, that the savannah was really Brazilian and the British

flat surface, so rare in the city, had been put to extensive use; it was covered with enormous election slogans in white paint. After we had had a beer in a dingy bar that smelled of dog-dirt – all the bars, I later discovered, smelled of dog-dirt – Hewson’s assistant left me, and I decided to call on the Brazilian engineer and his civil servant wife whom I had met in Lethem. They lived in a small white house in a street crammed with small white houses. Like all the houses in that street, and

which, already gathered, ought to have gone towards an ordered and overdue social revolution was dissipated in racial rivalry, factional strife and simple fear, creating the confusion which is today more dangerous to Guiana than the alleged plot of 1953. It is the waste, the futility which is depressing. For when one thinks of Guiana one thinks of a country whose inadequate resources are strained in every way, a country whose geography imposes on it an administration and a programme of public

did it take me to get my second wind? ‘It took you two hours, did it? That’s the way I woulda done it. Just foo-lin’ along for those two hours. Say, what was the water like up there? White or black? I sure have had enough of this black water. With all this washing that’s been going on, the whole river’s polluted for sure.’ He gave me a little of his news. He had rowed some distance up the river and found a white-water stream. So he had at last had a proper bathe. ‘Say, do you know this yellow

World in 1492, Columbus’s companion Pinzôn, deserting, took the Pinta off on his own to look for gold in an unknown sea. And there, in the treachery of the Portuguese king, in Pinzôn’s courage, treachery and greed, are all the elements of the European adventure in this part of the New World. There is a myth, derived from the Southern states of America, of the gracious culture of the slave society. In the West Indian islands slavery and the latifundia created only grossness, men who ate ‘like

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