The Middle Passage Critical Essays

The Middle Passage is a highly personal book in which West Indian society is observed and assessed by a native who candidly announces his biases. Naipaul’s return to Trinidad is characterized as a confrontation with his youthful fears and wish to escape, feelings which were expressed but not examined in his earlier books. Not surprisingly, his reactions to Trinidad have not changed, but now, for the first time, he brings his considerable writing talents to a deliberate and factual analysis of the society which so perturbs him. Some critics have seen in Naipaul’s book a distorted picture of the West Indies based on a careful selection of details designed to justify the author’s own neurosis. Perhaps Naipaul anticipated this reaction and sought to obviate it by using quotations from a variety of writers, especially from earlier periods, to corroborate his observations.

Naipaul takes the title of his book from the name for the route traveled by the slaves as they were transported from Africa to the colonies of the New World. He also applies the term to the voyage taken by the present-day West Indians flooding into England, testimony to the failure and “futility of the West Indian adventure.” Naipaul begins his section on Trinidad with quotations from Thomas Mann and Tacitus which reveal universal aspects of the profound psychological and cultural dislocation wrought by slavery and colonialism; there is also the implication that Naipaul sees West Indians as being in a confused state of transition, cut off from their ancestral roots yet without the confidence or resources to forge an identity independent of their former colonial masters. With the collapse of the plantation economy, the imperial powers have abandoned the region to its poverty and petty provincial concerns. The development of tourism, the result of economic necessity, has been accompanied by increasing foreign ownership and the raising of land prices beyond local means; the social and racial relationships between white visitors and black servants perpetuate old and unhealthy patterns. In Naipaul’s opinion, tourism in the West Indies has led to dispossession and a new, self-imposed, slavery.

Naipaul, like Froude, does not see West Indians as possessing a culture of their own; instead they are living in what another writer, approvingly quoted by Naipaul, has called “a client culture and a client economy.” During slavery, the culturally bereft Africans could only imitate what they understood of the ways and values of their masters, whites who were usually remote in every way from the best that Europe had to offer. Naipaul...