April 13, 1980

From the Third World

By JANE KRAMER

THE RETURN OF EVA PERON With "The Killings in Trinidad." By V. S. Naipaul.

his is V. S. Naipaul's 16th book, and I should probably say, straight off, that it has become impossible to write about a new Naipaul book without the kind of anxious homage that kills enthusiasm. Naipaul is a writer of genius, but this, it seems to me, has had very little to do with his odd literary celebrity of the past few years. The writer who built, word by word, the dense and extraordinary Trinidad of Mr. Biswas (in the novel "A House for Mr. Biswas," 1961) was considered a genre taste. The writer who stripped that Trinidad down to the image of a bogus messiah of Black Revolution (in the novel "Guerrillas," 1975) had become our scourge for truth, a Solzhenitsyn of the third world. The persona "V. S. Naipaul" turned out to be a projection, complicated by our own guilt and condescension and cowardice.

By now, we embrace Naipaul as a kind of prophet without God, one of those doomsday misogynists who used to wander through Russian novels, raving and shaking their staffs at the gentry in their country houses--someone whose vision of moral fault has marked him with a crazed and arrogant and somehow blessed purity. We shudder at his voice, and give him supper, but he is clearly not one of our sane and measured selves. A convenience, certainly. We turn appreciating Naipaul, even reading Naipaul, into a kind of exemption from his fury. No wonder he forgives no one--not when he is praised so often as that Indian writer who, being "one of them," can expose the depravities of "his" world in ways that we white Westerners, with our colonial past and our complacent present, could presumably never get away with. It is as if his foreignness, his status as "one of them," gives him a license to see, as if our hypocrisies translate into his ethnic privilege.

Naipaul's exile is not really a matter of displacement or dispossession. It has to do with a bitter, almost fanatic clarity, with great pain on the edge of fatal pride. There is not much point in reading the Naipaul of the past 10 years if we seize on an ex-colonial's weakness for the "idea" of English civilization and reduce the moral landscape of his books to a map of our own attitudes and narrow politics. "Guerrillas," to my mind, is a lesser novel than "In a Free State" (1971), and it is important to be able to say this without feeling like an apologist for black psychopaths posturing as freedom fighters.

Naipaul's journalism is always a cartoon for the finished canvas of his fiction, a drafting of outlines and impressions that will eventually reappear, transformed but faithful in detail, in a novel or story. He wastes nothing. He piles on little facts of landscape, chance encounters, economic readings as if to store them. Two of the pieces in this book of journalism from the 1970's already have become novels. But while "A New King for the Congo: Mobutu and the Nihilism of Africa" is mainly back-drop and exploration for the story of Salim, the Indian merchant in "A Bend in the River," "Michael X and the Black Power Killings in Trinidad" tells its own story. It is a narrative of the life and times of one Michael de Freitas (or Michael Malik or Michael X, as mood and circumstance demanded), a half-black Trinidadian who started out as a pimp and pusher and all-around underworld factotum. He hustled the Black Power mania of the 60's to yield up amorous English benefactresses and rock celebrities like John Lennon, ended up staging the gruesome murders of two disciples, and reappeared as Jimmy Ahmed in "Guerrillas," a novel of such extensive dislike for the victims of its own narrative that it nearly dissipates into "snuff"-film allegory. "The Return of Eva Perón"--not one but several pieces written over five years for The New York Review of Books and including a digression on Uruguay and a portrait of Jorge Luis Borges--is still waiting, as it were, for its novel. And the coda to this collection is an appreciation of Joseph Conrad, modern literature's original exile and Naipaul's obvious mentor.

Naipaul is a masterly reporter, a witness, and not simply because he brings a novelist's eye and phrasing or a moralist's vision to journalistic material, but because, in curious ways, he is freed from his own demons by reporting. He seems more comfortable (if the word applies) in work that by definition consigns him to the periphery of events and lives, that mandates his looking on, his looking in, that gives a neutral context to what has come to be an almost implosive mix of passivity and outrage in his perceptions. Distance, the reporter's cliché and stock in trade, is Naipaul's protection, his cover, a state of mind and social space to share with others. There is no way to suffer any truly agonizing particularity as a reporter without feeling ridiculous and sounding worse.

Writing those last furious novels, Naipaul has been profoundly alone with his characters. They seem to strip the protective cover of his authorship. The clarity of the encounter seems to leave him helplessly exposed. The pruderies and taboos that bedevil the heroes of his early novels turn, here, into a kind of avid sexual contempt--a disgust really--that bedevils him. In the end he suffers more than anyone, and this is the odd power of novels such as "A Bend in the River" and "Guerrillas." But the pieces in this book-- the legwork that precedes the novels--are more like the famous essays on India ("An Area of Darkness," 1965, and "India: A Wounded Civilization," 1977) or the earlier autobiographical writings about the Caribbean ("The Middle Passage," 1963). They have the same kind of bitter confidence. It is as if Naipaul, in his reporter's stance, has found a calming, tempering piece of the periphery, a legitimacy to distance, a perspective that finally connects him to his subject without extraordinary cost to himself.

These pieces, then, ground his assumptions about the "dumb nihilism" of third worlds that are really shadow worlds, worlds that could disappear into the bush or ocean or savannah without a trace of an explanatory idea of themselves to leave behind. They serve the novels that follow them by confirming to Naipaul that Michael X's fake revolutionary commune and Mobutu's silly "presidential domains" and Eva Perón's lurid embalmed immortality are the same place. And Naipaul concludes from them that there is no redemption in that place, no sustaining illusion, no dimension called experience or truth, no illumination, and so no tragedy, and no criminality, in the sense we mean it, either--only a few mad men and women whose special facility in manipulating the cruelty of others sets them apart as leaders. They survive, these "half-made societies," in a kind of predestined and persistent doom. They are without history, without relation to land and landscape, and without that special "idea" to give them weight or meaning. They are, as Naipaul says, quoting Conrad, "without memories, regrets and hopes."

Naipaul is hard on Trinidad. People who know Trinidad well say that it was never quite the wasteland of consumer poverty Naipaul describes in "The Killings in Trinidad." But Trinidad is his island, black by government, half-Indian by population, and it floats like a private symbol between his people's history in India and the English schoolbooks that were once his only link to that history. It is logical that Naipaul should have left Trinidad, should have settled in England, his source of history. For Naipaul, England's imperial sweep--unlike Belgium's in the Congo, or Spain's in South America-- is illuminated by the idea of civilization that its colonists and soldiers and planters and administrators supposedly held. He is no different in this than a lot of other Indian intellectuals in flight from native traditions that look embarrassing and irrational to an Oxbridge eye. His Idea is a new god, a radiant, nearly mystical notion, and the people who have it are a kind of elect, a caste apart.

The story of Michael X begins in England. It was white, upper-middle-class, "radical" England that had taken the black idiom of American civil rights campaigns and played with it, teased it into London jargon and then turned it over to people like Michael X as incantatory mumbo-jumbo about "racial redemption" to use on islands such as Trinidad, where the power was already black. In Trinidad, Black Revolution was an empty, messianic notion, but Michael X wanted badly to be somebody's messiah. It was the free ride of the 60's, from Oakland to Katmandu. The cult as con, the headman as hustler. The fact that Michael X was ignorant and inarticulate and possibly psychotic, that he was prone more to sullen demagoguery than rousing street talk, discouraged neither the English newspapers whose radical chic of the moment was black revolutionaries, nor the English hostesses whose sexual chic was black lovers.

Michael X might never have murdered anyone had he stayed in London pimping and pushing dope and abusing his white women and working on his "novel"--the Negro performing, as Naipaul puts it, for his alien audience. But in Trinidad--with a commune of dulled-out Caribbean boys, some black American thugs on the run from stateside policemen, and the occasional revolution groupie, the genteel English girl with the safety and privilege of another world behind her and no appetite for picking up the pieces of anybody's revolution, no idea at all of the human cost of bogus causes--in Trinidad Michael X was one black in a black country. And there was no market for his act. No one but goons and dropouts and adolescent boys were going to feed Michael X the rhetoric about his own incandescent power that had become his food. It did not take long--less than a year--to turn him to extortion and murder. His mad talk about enemies- to-the-cause sought its objective correlatives in booming, oil-rich Trinidad, and, not finding any, he had to create them and then kill them before they could prove their crushing insignificance.

This is the process Naipaul documents, the process that begins with a Michael and ends, in places less prosperous than Trinidad, with a new slavery: "It is. . .a deep corruption: a wish to be granted a dispensation from the pains of development, an almost religious conviction that oppression can be turned into an asset, race into money. While the dream of redemption lasts, Negroes will continue to exist only that someone might be their leader. Redemption requires a redeemer; and a redeemer, in these circumstances, cannot but end like the Emperor Jones: contemptuous of the people he leads, and no less a victim, seeking an illusory personal emancipation."

Michael X was hanged in Port of Spain in 1975. A back-to-the-land messiah who ended up planting nothing more than the hacked bodies of the white woman and the black boy who were his victims.

In some ways, the story of Michael reads like a preamble to the saga of the Congolese soldier, Joseph Mobutu, who now rules over Zaire as Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu Wa Za Banga, paterfamilias of a black Freudian nightmare. But Mobutu's family happens to be real, big as Texas and Alaska, rich in diamonds and copper, secured by the armamentarium and Disneyland technology of Western powers scrambling for a new hegemony in the dark continent. And Mobutu, the father-chief-king of this never-never land of guns and jungle, has apparently gotten to be king of a couple of enormous bank accounts in Zurich, too. He is an African wizard, with his tribal staff and cap, conjuring up world heavy-weight flights in Kinshasha, villages for foreign guests that fill the new Zaire like motel complexes, and all the "perishable civilization" of those colonial spoilers who came once, and fled, and have come again with their old goods and nothing of their culture.

Mobutu has a jungle and a great river at his disposal. He can find correlatives to his omnipotence in paddle steamers and copper mines, in roads and depots, in the detritus of a Europe that vanished at Independence, taking the African "past" of its history books with it. But Mobutu has written his own history now. He has fitted his people with the blinders of "African authenticity"--which, in this new nation with neither precedent nor passion as a nation, can mean anything Mobutu claims. Kingship in a republic. Paternity to a collection of hostile tribes. Borrowed or usurped technology. It is only a mark of his showmanship that "the borrowed ideas--about colonialism and alienation, the consumer society and the decline of the West--are made to serve the African cult of authenticity; and the dream of an ancestral past restored is allied to a dream of a future of magical power." He rules by these confusions of authenticity, by the patent medicine of his power on what Naipaul calls the African wound.

The ground, for Mobutu, was always there. Africa--"the dream of a past. . .when the dead ancestors watched and protected." But "authenticity" is new, and it is our word. We are ready to cede authenticity to the African despot, to someone who is obviously beyond the pale of our best values. "The Return of Eva Perón" is about the West playing fast and loose and tragically with those values, with its own authenticity, to create the Peróns and the colonels and the brutal machismo of pillagers posing as pioneers.

Argentina is the most complex of Naipaul's landscapes. It is an overlay of so many illusions, so much rhetoric, such bad faith and conspiracy against itself. It is a "sudden, artificial society," a society imposed almost overnight on the desolate pampas so that another wheat-and-cattle colony could be placed at Europe's disposal. Its population was quite literally imported like machinery: a Spanish and Italian proletariat came ready- made to provide the goods of the good life for a new estancia aristocracy. And then came Buenos Aires, because the country needed a capital. The original Buenos Aires was copied, house by monument, from dead European models. There was neither the esthetic energy not the imagination nor even the confidence to let the city take its own form. Qualities like energy and imagination are never in very great supply when people exist mainly to consume the civilization of others, the civilization they have left behind. There was, finally, nothing "Argentine" to express itself in Buenos Aires except slums.

Naipaul likes to say that for immigrating Indians--the Begali and Gujerati traders who spread into Africa and settled in the Caribbean a hundred years ago--history was something that began when the boat landed or when the family built it first duka in some East African clearing, its first compound in Port of Spain. Not so for his Argentines. For Argentina's colonists, history ends with settlement. There are only the myths of the present--Juan Perón's myth of mystical Indian blood in his transplanted Europeans, Eva Perón's myth of a nation of raggle-taggle warriors, the Sacred Poor. Or there is History. Ancestors long dead. Roots long severed. Mimicked traditions as tentative and fragile as a child in old clothes from an attic trunk. Borges aging into wispy dreams of remote English ancestors, clinging to the threads of some validating past, some civilization that is his to sustain him in his own dying.

Again, it is the missing idea that haunts Naipaul, the palpable absence that gives everything he describes a kind of negative illumination and leaves nothing real except a savage frustration, finding its release in blood and torture and sexual humiliation, in the castrating fury of the impotent. Argentina's rulers and vigilantes are like Salim in "A Bend in the River," spitting between the legs of the woman who has shamed him. Their woman is an idea that that eludes them. And rather than look for her, they shame one another with the "brothel-victim" charms of an Eva Perón, the madam turned saint of an incompleted country, taking out her pay in abjection and sentiment, her bright red lips feeding on their lost souls. Men without progenitors, without issue.

So we have another book of Naipaul's "journalism," written with obsession and eloquence. A topography of the void.

Jane Kramer is a writer for The New Yorker and the author of several books, most recently "The Last Cowboy." Her new book, "Unsettling Europe," will be published in May.

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