Part two of an essay that starts here.
In part one of this essay, I quoted a passage from Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas where he invokes Caribbean city streets inhabited “by people so broken, so listless, it would have required the devotion of a lifetime to restore them.” Such devotion was inconceivable to Naipaul. The life of Fr. Rick Frechette brings home the limits of the novelist’s imagination.
Fr. Frechette, who grew up in Connecticut, went to Haiti as a young priest in the 1980s. He had no allies and spoke no Creole when he arrived but still managed to establish a Nos Petit Freres et Soeurs orphanage within a couple of years. (See here for more on NPFS.) He went back to America to go to medical school in the 90s since it had become clear to him how much Haitian children needed doctors. He now oversees a network of hospitals and clinics that serve patients from Port au Prince’s hardcore neighborhoods. Fr. Frechette isn’t the only rooted, soulful healer on earth, but he belongs here next to Naipaul because he’s a writer too. Frechette’s Haiti: The God of Tough Places, the Lord of Burnt Men is a modern Catholic (and Caribbean) classic. His more recent dispatches from Port au Prince are no less worthy.
His reportage, though, might be enhanced by more back story. This old profile of him has its uses. The author, Matt Labash, accompanied Frechette on his rounds—in hospitals and in the city at large—ten days after the massive 2010 earthquake and a day or two after Frechette’s mother died in CT. (Frechette flew back to be with her as she passed on, before turning around quickly to get back to his brothers and sisters in Haiti.)
It was a particularly grueling time in Port au Prince where (per Frechette) “it is always a disaster.” Labash tried to bring home the city’s miseries, even daring a serio-comic equivalency (that fell flat): “a place where mothers think that landing their child in an orphanage—where it’ll have shelter and three squares each day—is the equivalent of getting a scholarship to Groton.” (That preppie fail, btw, underscores how Naipaul made his bones. The ex-scholarship boy never got too far away from subjects of his Caribbean comedies. He found his wit not in the Oxbridge/Groton vertex but in spaces—and repartee—between old familiars at the base of the society he’d left behind.)[1] But maybe Labash gets a pass since he was out to keep up with Fr. Frechette—a rueful lifer who relies on humor to stay afloat. Frechette doesn’t stand on his dignity (as we’ve seen), though he tends to leave laughs out of his missives from Haiti.
Those letters are often meant to raise money and the more devotional among Frechette’s devoted readers might be put off by his sardonic side. Labash was ok with it which allowed him to pass on one mildly profane tale about how Frechette was overmastered in the aftermath of the earthquake. The priest’s stomach started acting up he watched thousands of dead Haitians being picked up off streets by back hoes and bucket-loaders—“the machines crunched the bodies against walls in order to scoop them up.” Fr. Frechette called out for cigarettes…
His Haitian right-hand and all-around fixer, Raphael—whom Frechette regards as something close to a brother—couldn’t find them. Frechette, now desperately gagging, was yelling, “Give me a f—ing cigarette!!!” A journalist, taking in the scene, sidled up to him. “I heard somebody say, ‘I’m an ABC affiliate, and I’m wondering, are you Father Frechette?’ I said, ‘Do I sound like a priest?’ I wasn’t going to be caught using foul language.” By the time the cigarettes were found, he says, it was too late. “I was empty of everything.”
Labash’s own running on empty version of Frechette’s life and times hewed a little too closely to rules of hard-boiled journalism. He lauded the priest, yet underplayed his achievements. The title of Labash’s piece, “Love Among the Ruins,” hinted at an in-bred resistance to public goodness. Love has been Frechette’s message to Haiti’s grassroots for more than a generation but he hasn’t been content to teach in broken down surrounds. This 2014 video about local institutions he’s helped build in Port au Prince suggests he’s been a sort of demiurge.
One of the thousand or so viewers who watched the video on YouTube anticipated the new American brutalism about “shithole” countries. He dismissed what he’d seen: “are the humans there being taught how to provide for themselves? are they being taught how to read, write, and speak proper english so they can study more sciences??” (A Haitian talked back gently to this Einstein: “Haitians don’t speak English. But yes they help them build businesses and schools.”)
Labash—a Never Trump conservative—would’ve bashed that English First fool whose use of the term “humans” was probably meant to carry an ironic, racist charge. But Labash’s politics skew right too. And Frechette’s way in the world may have always been left of his comfort zone. The priest’s projects link selflessness with largescale public interventions. Contra rightist wisdom that humane endeavor is best kept private. Yet those of us who believe in social living shouldn’t complain too much about Labash’s imperfect tribute to Frechette, which appeared in the now defunct conservative journal, The Weekly Standard. That profile and Standard look good compared to leftist mags. None (besides First of the Month) have ever reported on Frechette’s mission.
II
Not that he’s gone unnoticed by mainline media. Just last month, a reporter in the Miami Herald leaned on Frechette to sum up an atrocity perpetrated in the Port au Prince neighborhood of La Saline by a death squad organized by officials in Haiti’s current government.
“I’ve been here 31 years and we’ve seen a lot of executed bodies,” said Father Richard Frechette, a Roman Catholic priest who was the first to collect body parts from inside La Saline in November. “But there is a big difference we are seeing with the violence now…”
“Before, those of us who are missionaries or humanitarian workers could have a dialogue. Now there are young people, 17, 18 and 20 years old…they really have no pity… The influence of social media, YouTube is multiplying the negative…”
The violence didn’t end with the November terror. Frechette says his charity is now burying about 150 people a month. While not all of them are residents of La Saline, which continues to experience violence, they are victims of violence nevertheless. His St. Luke Hospital in the capital has also seen an increase in the number of gunshot victims, treating 40 just in April.
“There are organizations pulling out of the work because it’s so difficult,” he said. “People who live in gated communities, they don’t know what’s happening down in the capital. It’s really like wartime…”
Still, he doesn’t believe the situation is hopeless.
“There are a lot of people who, if you give a good example, they will follow it,” the priest said. “For a lot of them, it’s not too late. It’s the leaders who are going beyond our limits now.”
Frechette is always looking for what he calls countersigns that might enable everyday Haitians to keep faith. When he tells his/their stories from the depths of poverty and disease, he’s down with them. (He himself has survived a serious medical trauma, having suffered a ruptured kidney after being thrown from a motorcycle on the streets of Port au Prince.) As physician or priest, he focuses first on practical restorative acts. Of course there are plenty of times when he can’t find a way forward. I’m reminded just now of his heartrending encounter with a young widow whom he found rolling and crying on the dirt floor of her shack, along with her six hungry children (one of whom clutched a dead kitten for comfort). There was nothing he could do in that moment, but the next day he came back with seven chicken dinners and tried again to comfort this broken family. Then, thanks to one of his long-time donors, he managed to get mother and children into a simple, clean dwelling and the kids into school. (“We go through money like water.”) Such stories gain weight in the telling, in part, because Frechette is all there as a witness even if he’s not exactly a New Journalist. Experiences of stressed Haitians coping with killer floods or the 2010 earthquake, cholera or kidnappings, street toughs or would-be sorcerers, dovetail with the ongoing tale of Frechette’s own moral education.
It’s his openness to surprise—and his readiness to convert shocks into flashes of spirit—that make his stories more like parables than journalism. His lessons-in-narrative tend to come back to the need for deliberation. He notes people often miss the meaning of “fools rush in where angels fear to tread.” The point is not to avoid places that scare us, but rather “it is advice as to how not to go there. Rushing in.” While his dispatches from Haiti are never less than urgent, he seems to have always been playing a long game. (That’s why he chose to go back to medical school when he was thirty-six years old.) Frechette knows you must keep cool if you’re going to be a truly good actor/care-giver.
Dailiness of life in Haiti requires a mix of long distance planning and blink-think. Frechette incarnates grace under pressure on the regular…
While driving though fires to reach sick people, we came upon a store that had been looted on the first floor and the looters were now on the second.
Some wicked person lit the first floor on fire, to burn the thieves to death on the second.
As we got there, the people on the second floor were getting scorched and choking on smoke, and started jumping out the only window they were able to break. This window was in front of me, and they jumped from the second floor and would rather break every bone in their legs than burn to death. They did.
Fr. Frechette’s humanity won’t let him disengage. He’s a delicate mechanism with broad shoulders:
A thief was running by with a big piece of plywood that he’d just looted.
It was a beautiful piece of wood that never held a nail.
I fought him for it, and I won. He called me a thief. I told him he had it wrong. I stole it from a thief.
I propped it two feet high on one end, and left the other end on the ground. It was suddenly a trampoline. A rough one.
But the rest of the jumpers didn’t break a bone.
Fr. Frechette knows that doing the right thing must be its own reward (on this earth).
But then I was berated by the crowd, for saving the lives of thieves.
(Most of these screamers had flat screen TV’s under their arms, they were hypocrites from the first floor looting.)
I found myself trying to find words to state the obvious to them: Stealing some clothes should not call for being burned at the stake.
Fr. Frechette tends not to lean on morality of crowds. Yet individual Haitians’ courage and kindness lead him on. He’s often shamed by their acts as he considers how to be real good.
Just recently he copped to his own less than Christian response to one of those Haitian exemplars who’d come into an emergency room with burns covering 60% of his body and a bullet wound. Frechette tried to save the man but since he knew his patient had been a “bandit” he did his doctoring with disdain in his heart. Until he found out how this bad guy had come to need treatment: “A warring gang had tied three women in a shack and set it on fire. He ran in bravely to rescue the women, and he succeeded in saving them.” That gang had repaid the rescuer with a bullet in the head.
To an abashed Frechette, the wounded bandit now seemed like the good thief on the cross beside Jesus. Frechette tries not to give up on people, even those who’ve made many wrong turns. Yet he doesn’t need Naipaul’s advice for the beamish about dangers posed by the oppressed to the oppressed. He’s aware there was another thief next to Jesus.
The second bandit was not on Calvary as a decoration, or to center the cross of Jesus so there was symmetry.
He was there because some bandits have no desire for redemption, right to the end. That’s how life is.
Such discernment may make Fr. Frechette seem unsympathetic to those in the party of hope. His realism, though, shouldn’t be mixed up with Law-and-Order-ism. Frechette doesn’t excuse criminals at the top of Haiti’s shaky hierarchy; he just knows irredeemables among underdogs tend to pose more immediate threats to the island’s poor folk.
Gun men who run the streets of Port au Prince have been making life perilous for everyone there over the last year. (That Miami Herald article was spot on.) In a recent note Fr Frechette detailed how barricades manned by gangsters have disrupted daily life. Staffers at his hospital have taken to using an ambulance to help get water trucks through those barricades, enabling deliveries to allied institutions and desperate people (“one of whom I heard say today, ‘I thought hunger was bad. I would much rather be hungry for food than for water.’”)
Hard guys without boundaries test Frechette. He’s not afraid to “show his teeth” —per a Creole proverb. (Just ask that thief with the beautiful piece of plywood.) Yet he’s aware a healer can’t be consumed by anger (or despair). Frechette looks for uplift in unobvious spots. He recently bumped into blithe spirits as he was operating on victims of gun violence in a city clinic…
While we were nearly finished stabilizing these victims, the bullets that had been flying were receding to another area, and suddenly two ten year old girls appeared, flying hand-made kites. The said to me, “look how high we got them! Come and take the string and feel the tug!”
I thought to myself “this is surreal, like the twilight zone.”
But since we were nearly ready to leave, and Raphael could easily finish, I thought, “I would like to try the kite out.”
The kite soared in the heavens. The girls giggled and laughed. I remembered how Jesus looked at such children. The kingdom of heaven is made of children like these. If earth is grim, raise your eyes, and try to touch the heavens, even if with a kite. This is the kind of spirit that gets you to heaven. That’s how God sees it. This was their therapy and hope, to enjoy every little bit of life that you can.
Let them fly kites? Nope. Frechette doesn’t settle for intimations of heaven. His unquiet mind is usually honing in on the next real step his comrades might take to better lives in the here and now. His St. Luke Foundation—largely run by Haitians at this point—has created a school system and range of entrepreneurial economic programs. His politics have been getting more radical. Riots in Port au Prince recently moved him to propose a major social intervention: “I would lower the prices of everything by half.” But if you’re looking for a full-on revolutionary, Frechette’s not your man: “I shed very fast the idea that I could change the world.” The caps as well as the itals in the credo below are his own:
“You must organize for a better life, but you CANNOT kill to do so. You must speak out for your rights, for needed change, but you CANNOT speak hatred and lies. You must build a better tomorrow for yourself, your family, your country, but you CANNOT do it by destroying the property of others.”
He finds more to love in Mother Teresa’s legacy than in liberation theology. Catholic lore and rituals will always mean infinitely more to him than Marxism (or Mayday). But he’s not a dogmatic sort. His faith is informed by historical truth. His tolerance and rational approach to spiritual life are apparent in his reflections on Haiti’s black Atlantic religion:
Religions have always played contradictory roles in society. Some aspects are liberating and life-giving. Others are enslaving and destructive. Christianity has dealt some death-blows in her long and very human history. So has Voodoo. But Christianity is a religion that lives in the public eye, with identifiable authorities who must take responsibility for her activity in society. Voodoo lives in the shadows, ever secretive, with never anyone to hold responsible. Christianity must continually restate her purpose and goals, ever refined by public challenge. Superstitions become replaced by convincing descriptions of mystery, and the demands of mystery on us. Maybe one day Voodoo will be forced into this most necessary dynamic.
III
Frechette’s own personality presents a mystery. I wish someone would write a convincing description of how he grew up from suburbia. I’m ready for an American existentialist Saint Frechette—or the good twin of Patrick French’s biography of Naipaul?—though the modest protagonist won’t be much help to any author.[2]
And there’s a larger problem. The language needed to make a great soul live on the page may have been lost. (Frechette’s own writing has plenty of virtues but it’s deflective on this front.) One critic, the late Benjamin DeMott, tried to teach us about that loss as he mulled over the pale do-gooder (without “a stable, knowable, interior core”) who is the point-of-view character in Naipaul’s novel Guerillas (1975).[3]
DeMott was sparked by the scene where this character, Roche—a white South African exile out to “help the poor” on a Caribbean island—is pressed by a radio interviewer intent on finding the center of the ex-pat’s commitment. When Roche evades his questions, the interviewer grows harsher, providing a sneak peak at now familiar critiques of virtue-signaling. The radio man proposes Roche’s engagement has nothing behind it but the desire to “make a gesture.” Insultingly, he asserts that Roche is actually the servant of The Selfish—that he is a safety valve, a means by which the complacent and the uncaring can avoid confronting their own guilt. Roche never offers much of a come-back. His aim, he insists, is simply to do a “job of work.”
His silence and evasions suggest he’s little more than a shadow—an unfinished man—which leaves Naipaul’s novel (per DeMott) “without adequate human focus.” But the void in Guerillas “signifies more in the end than a mere novelistic failure at characterization…”
The reason Peter Roche is shadow, not substance, the reason neither he nor we can touch his commitment, is that the necessary terms for the dramatization of that commitment are no longer utterable. Like many other writers on political subjects nowadays, V.S. Naipaul has been victimized by the withering away of the language of altruism; convention dictates that the selflessly giving political man must present as an enigma, must declare himself inexplicable, must discover no expressible reason for his being. Incapable of naming his ”virtue,” he stands before his own decency in puzzlement and ultimately vanishes as a person, devoured by profound—and profoundly inexpressible—embarrassment.
DeMott was right to notice that Guerillas—the first of Naipaul’s novels to make a splash in America—signified a diminished sense of possibility over here. But the critic may have been too forbearing toward Naipaul’s best-selling assault on the idea of altruism. Naipaul is probably better seen not as a victim of post-60s hangovers, but as an architect of a soon-to-be hegemonic anti-heroic shtick. (More than a generation on, “Love Among the Ruins'” high ambivalence about the efficacy of Frechette’s projects testified to the weight of consensual pessimism Naipaul helped concretize.)[4]
IV
I don’t mean to imply Guerillas’ goodies-be-gone attitude was timed to coincide with a right-wing swing or that Naipaul could’ve belayed his anti-social push. Episodes in A House for Mr. Biswas centered on Anand—the scholarship boy whose experience mirrored the author’s—indicate Naipaul’s unbleeding heart became part of his make-up in his youth. Naipaul told how Anand got locked on being one of the “strong ones.”
His satirical sense kept him aloof. At first this was only a pose, and imitation of his father. But satire led to contempt and at Shorthills contempt, quick, deep, inclusive, became part of his nature. It led to inadequacies, to self-awareness and a lasting loneliness. But it made him unassailable.
That prideful line is undercut by an anti-anti-heroic sequence that’s dead on hard-hearted contempt. Naipaul has Anand and the rest of the children from the extended family pile into the broken down car that takes them to school. A door is slammed and his sister Savi puts up a shriek and a moan…
The children, always breathless and bad-tempered when the car was stationary, shouted for the car to drive off. But someone cried. “Quick! Open the door. Her hand.”
Anand laughed. No one joined him. The car emptied and he saw Savi sitting on the wet rabbit grass of the verge. He could not bear to look at her hand.
Shama and Mr. Biswas and some of the sisters came out to the road.
Myna said, “Anand laugh, Pa.”
Mr. Biswas slapped Anand hard.
V
I’d’ve liked to cuff Naipaul after I read the marriage scene at the end of his last novel, Magic Seeds (2004), which is meant to stink in your nostrils. Just as the mixed race couple is about to exchange vows, one of the children they’ve had out of wedlock farts loudly. Which becomes an excuse for Naipaul, in his anecdotage, to offer up a hysterical fantasy of smelly p.c. rigidity: “…The guests lined up correctly on this matter: the dark people thought the dark child” had done it; “the fair people thought it was the fair child.” Taki stuff.
I’ll allow the stench from that passage killed any impulse I had to re-read Naipaul’s work for years. But, as Naipaul himself knew, his books were bigger than his biases. He was humbled and stirred by the realization his creations were beyond his control. A Way in the World is suffused with Naipaul’s awareness his writing would be read differently before and after his death. That teasing mix of autobiography, alt history and fiction amounted to an epitaph for himself as Rhonda Cobham-Sander has pointed out. In her view, Naipaul’s overriding concern in A Way in the World is with the tension between “the act of reading” and his way of being on and off the page. Cobham-Sander’s interpretation of Naipaul’s untransparent testament jumps off with a wonderfully subtle bit of literary detective work. She highlights lines of verse Naipaul squeezed in between A Way in the World’s front matter and table of contents
And year by year our memory fades
From all the circle of the hills.
Till from the garden and the wild
A fresh association blow,
And year by year the landscape grow
Familiar to the stranger’s child.
Naipaul sampled those lines from Tennyson’s “In Memoriam,” recasting them to underscore how little he would matter to readers in the fullness of time. Per Cobham-Sander:
He appropriates the unnamed poet’s landscape with scant regard for its original associations. For a start he divides the citation among two pages, positioning the first two lines—“And year by year our memory fades/From all the circle of the hills”—on the front of one page, while placing the remaining four lines on the back of the page, where a reader anxious to get on with the “real” story may easily overlook them. This fracturing isolates the sentiments expressed in the first two lines—about the fading of the writer’s self—from the promise of recuperation contained in the next four lines, which describe the fresh associations that future generations may yet bring to the writer’s book or his landscape. Seen as two separate statements, both portions of this epigraph become statements of loss. On the front pages, the memory of the speaker’s friend “fades from the all the circle of the hills.” Turn over the pages and the meanings the poet thought he’d inscribed indelibly on the landscape disappears, replaced by the fresh association of a stranger’s child…
Cobham-Sander is just getting warmed up [5]—I commend her interpretation of A Way in the World, which is a critical tour de force. But forgive me if I’m fixed on Naipaul’s invocation of that “stranger’s child.” It reminds me of my own son’s first time through A House for Mr. Biswas. He read it just last year (after Naipaul died). His all in response chimed with that of another reader who noted how the book “over its great and complex length, shelters the one who reads it.”[6] But, even more to Cobham-Sander’s point, my son brought his own associations to Naipaul’s landscapes and facts of feeling.
VI
The child probably had more to give back to the book than this stranger had when I first read it. My son knows from within how much his African mother wants a home of her own. He’s felt the force of her longing and how it flows out of her experience as the first daughter in a family where her father and his four wives would have twenty more children. Her own mother would end up retreating to the compound owned and maintained by her mother—a paragon of African rural enterprise—whose home became a haven for independent women in and around her family. When my son made his last visit to Senegal a couple years ago, it took only a day or two before he felt at ease inside that compound, with its swept rooms that opened out on the rectangular yard where family and friends sipped café Touba before the sun got too hot or gathered for sweet tea in the evening. Looking back on his time there, it was apparent to him why the compound, even without the mango tree that once stood in the center of the yard, served as his mother’s template for living—a humane construct that melded nature and culture, freedom and security, privacy and community. No doubt, my son’s sense of that place (and his mother’s fealty to it) enhanced his responsiveness to imperatives in Naipaul’s House.
Who knows if Naipaul himself would’ve sympathized with my son’s add-ons to his creation? Naipaul had to leave Trinidad to become “a writer, that noble thing” and he often seemed to look down on those stuck on going home again. OTOH, there are scenes in Naipaul’s oeuvre where his people are alive to what an expat loses in transition:
You know you are born in a place and grow up there. You get to know the trees and the plants. You will never know any other trees and plants like that. You grow up watching a guava tree, say. You know that browny-green bark peeling like old paint. You try to climb that tree. You know that after you climb that tree, the bark gets smooth—smooth and so slippery you can’t get a grip on it. You get that ticklish feeling in your foot. Nobody has to teach you what the guava is. You go away. You ask “what is that tree?” Somebody will tell you. “An elm,” you see another tree. Somebody will tell you, “That is an Oak.” Good, you know them. But it isn’t the same.
There’s another dreamy passage in Naipaul’s The Mimic Men about a utopian Caribbean morning—the narrator places himself in a deep valley where the sun comes up late. He’s up early, riding the grounds of a cocoa estate, before coming back to a perfect breakfast:
…fresh morning cocoa mingling its smell with old wood. The true cocoa such as Montezuma and his court drank. Not the powder from which all virtue has fled; but the cocoa made from roasted beans, pounded to paste, imbued with spices and dried in the sun, releasing all its flavors in simmering milk. Cocoa and pawpaw and fried plantains, freshly baked bread and avocadoes; all served on a tablecloth of spotless white…the glassware catching some sparkle of light through ferns and that fine wire netting which, barely visible, kept out tropical insects, while permitting a view…[7]
Naipaul found a peak moment in a Caribbean morning; John Chernoff—the “counterpart” whose work I’ll take up in the last section of this essay—gives you keys to the evening in West Africa:
The afternoon sun is setting, and as evening approaches, the dusty air has become golden with diffused light. Strolling back through the town, you see groups of men gathering for the evening prayers on cemented verandas beside the houses of maalams, the local Islamic scholars. Some of the men are seated quietly as they count their prayer beads; others are washing their feet and hands, using a bit of water to clean their faces, nostrils and mouths. Traffic on the street has reduced. You branch down a lane to walk through the corridors between the houses. In one section of the town, the houses are still in the traditional style of architecture, a collection of thatched-roof rooms linked by shoulder-height walls. You are impressed by the soft contours and human scale of the buildings. You hear only the quiet sound of children’s laughter and adult’s voices; there is no shouting, there are no noisy televisions or stereos, and only the rumble of a last distant truck going home reminds you that you are in a town and not a village. You reach your hotel, bathe, and come out again for another stroll just after the sun has set, always around six o’clock in this tropical land. People are grouped in threes and fours around bowls of food, conversing quietly as they eat their evening meal. At night, none of the ugliness of the town is visible. Everything jagged is smoothed out. Small kerosene lanterns illuminate the tables of the street vendors, and the moonlight is enough for those who have finished their meals and are leaning against the walls of their houses with their sitting friends. The stars are uncountable. From the far distance, later into the still night, the muffled sound of drumming can sometimes be heard, its source obscured by the breezes that carry it…[8]
I passed on Chernoff’s evocations of Africa’s dusk-to-dark emanations to my son before he took his last trip to his mother’s land. He picked up quick on (what Chernoff calls) “the peacefulness of Savannah cultures in the evenings.” One night, lifted by exalting breezes, he climbed up on the roof of the compound. Later, he jotted down a few lines in his vacation day-book:
Lights in the dark
For the first time
I could see
Lights
Stars
Africa’s dust and desert
Dissipated
The air was clean
Calm
Free
Such highs would have seemed unnatural to Naipaul who tended to find “black Africa” uncongenial. Chernoff loved the place(s) as you can tell from his night song. Yet the two travelers’ angles on what they bumped into in-country aren’t always antithetical. I’ll begin the final installment of this essay by focusing on a moment when Naipaul got into an African groove…
Notes
1 Even that clueless hustler who ends up an M.B.E. in The Mystic Masseur isn’t a “vertical invader” out of a Tory nightmare. (Or Gore Vidal’s.) Naipaul’s comedy is, at once, intimate and expansive. The joke’s on everyone.
2 If you’ll ante up serious $ for St. Luke Foundation, Fr. Frechette may be willing to allow others to talk him up…. http://www.opusprize.org/father-richard-frechette
3 “Lost Words, Lost Heroes,” Benjamin DeMott, Saturday Review, Nov. 1976.
4 Labash’s title may hint at Naipaul’s doomy influence. It surely alludes to Walker Percy’s novel of the same name but it could also refer to Naipaul’s kid brother-novelist Shiva’s Love and Death in a Hot Country.
5 Cobham-Sander goes on:
Even a careful reader might miss the epigraph’s final travesty. In Tennyson’s original poem, memorializing his dead friend, Arthur Hallam, the two lines from the end of Canto CI that Naipaul cites first actually come after the next four lines that he cites. Reversing the order allows Naipaul to excise the first two lines from Canto CI’s closing quatrain that read: “As year by year, the laborer tills/His wonted glebe, or lops the blade.” Archaic words like glebe and wonted would have been considered quaint even when Tennyson used them. They signal the poet’s nostalgia for a rustic innocence associated with an imaginary pre-industrial England. Naipaul thus excises all references to a landscape that depend on cultural knowledge he does not share. At the same time, by placing the lines about the stranger’s child at the end of the citation, instead of at the beginning, he gives the interloper the last world, denying the speaker in Tennyson’s poem even that echo of a fading memory that would’ve lingered had the citation ended where Tennyson’s Canto ends with the lines: “And year by year our memory fades / From all the circle of the hills.”
6 Teju Cole in The Guardian, Feb. 2016.
7 Naipaul’s vision gets twisted by his seigneurial bent. His mimic man looks back in longing to a time when workers on that fantastic Caribbean plantation were simply “laborers” not “the people.” The reactionary note in his cocoa rhapsody reminds me my wife and kin’s café Touba is imbued with a spice of resistance—anisette-ish, peppery “jahr.” Café Touba’s recipe was brought back to Senegal (from the Gambia) early in the 20th C. by Amadou Bamba—a non-violent resistor who was exiled for years by French colonial rulers, though he eventually ended up winning his struggle to establish a syncretic Sufi order. Bamba’s sect, the Mourides, remain a powerful cultural presence in Senegal today.
I wonder if a sip of café Touba would’ve made Naipaul retch. I bet Chernoff would dig it.