Most of us know the parents or grandparents we come from. But we go back and back, forever; we go back all of us to the very beginning; in our blood and bone and brain we carry the memories of thousands of beings. … We cannot understand all the traits we have inherited. Sometimes we can be strangers to ourselves …¹

In the Minerva edition of A Way in the World, the text is subtitled “A Sequence”.² This terminology implies something more ambiguous than either “a history” or “a novel” or “an autobiography”. It highlights the book's fusion—or corruption—of these given genres, and points up the way the text confuses their established relative associations with hard definitions of fact and fiction. “A sequence” also implies something both more and less fragmented than either “a history” or “a novel” or “an autobiography”. The term suggests a number of separate, internally coherent anecdotes, as well as a formation of stories feeding into and out of one another to generate more diverse and open, half-hidden and slowly-revealed connections; a greater density of linkages than the sequencing offered by a straight history, novel or autobiography. There is, then, a kind of structural tension within the book between the integrity of each story and the interpretative possibilities offered by its position against and within other parts of the text. The resolution of this structural tension is tied to the text's concern with the relative and shifting violability and inviolability of history-telling and fictional narration. This resolution, however, is not located in a politics of post-modern “play”, but in a heavier scrutiny of the politics of diaspora bound within a fraught diasporic poetics. The relativity and open construction of the narratives within the text may be investigated in terms of Paul Gilroy's negotiation and ultimately implicit collapsing of the (closed, teleological, linear) politics of diasporic “identity” as construed in opposition to the (open, anti-teleological, spatially networked) politics of diasporic “identification”.

Against definitions and projections of diaspora grounded in a teleological mythologizing of, yearning back to and programme for accessing a lost homeland,³ diaspora theorists such as Gilroy, Vijay Mishra, James Clifford and Stuart Hall work towards a politics of diaspora framed by a profound distrust of the regressive and millenarian politics of geographical restoration and cultural compensation. Against an idea of reclaiming a given consciousness always already constructed back in a mythical moment in time, Gilroy rejects a linear notion of history and offers instead an idea of “fragile communicative relationships across time and space that are the basis not of diaspora identities but of diaspora identifications”.⁴ The shift here seems to be deconstructive. Positing “identity” in opposition to “identification”, Gilroy indicates that through spatial shifting centreless networks of identification, a constant affirmative dynamic placement, displacement and replacement—formation and reformation—of diaspora identity occurs. As Hall, working out of a similarly anti-teleological descriptive/prescriptive position, puts it, “[d]iaspora identities … are constantly producing and reproducing themselves anew”.⁵

In his article “Bordering Naipaul: Indenture History and Diasporic Poetics”, Mishra suggests that within Naipaul's work, “[t]he diasporic experience, the life of the diasporic individual, is seen as a parenthesis, as a bracket, a series of incidentals before and after which the substantive narrative of empires and peoples … gets written down”.⁶ Without interrogating the validity of this statement in relation to Naipaul's earlier works, A Way in the World may be understood as providing a sense of history which operates precisely against this point of analysis. The big moments of Empire and the famous figures of exploration and revolution with which the book is concerned are themselves bracketed or parenthesized. They are spun out of and complexly wind back into the seemingly obscure, contingent figure and location of Leonard Side, Parry's funeral parlour, Port of Spain, Trinidad. In clamping the text together with the apparently random story of Leonard Side—it is only in the very last sentence of the text that his linkage to the cosmopolitan narratives becomes clear—Naipaul not only makes a straight point about the spatial and temporal scope of empire, but suggests that the telos or beginning of history is not always elsewhere, but is always anywhere; that there are surprisingly few degrees of separation between the seemingly random or peripheral and the seemingly central movements of big history; that there are, in other words, always continuities in apparent discontinuities. So to adapt Homi Bhabha's description of “postcolonial” or “world” literature as a literature of “freak displacements”, A Way in the World may be described as a writing of “freak placements”.⁷ Generating an anti-teleological diasporic perspective, the text plays with unusual genealogies; with understanding a curious, submerged “chain” (a word that Naipaul uses a lot in the text) of men, from the “historical” figures—Columbus and Raleigh and Miranda—to the “fictional” diasporic black-activists—Lebrun and Blair. Placing their stories against one another, shifting between the centuries from the early colonial wars to the recent era of decolonizations, Naipaul compresses their ancestry, disrupts a linear sense of temporality and positions them as political-emotional sons of fathers and grandsons of grandfathers. In understanding the ideas of romance and of personal power which drives these men, Naipaul identifies an eschatological genealogy through their common commitment to and ultimate betrayal by causes which all trace back to a pseudo-religious offering and seeking of redemption. So in an odd twist, through this textual structuring of his characters without/across/against a linear sense of time, Naipaul denies his characters the millennial, epochal sense of history and histrionic identity—the very form of their genealogical relationship—and thereby constructs his postcolonial figures as enactments of Hall's recognition of the complicity of a backward looking teleological conception of diaspora with hegemonizing, “Western” forms of ethnicity, identity and modes of historicization.⁸

Early in the text, the author-narrator “writes” an “unwritten story”, the telling of which he prefaces with the qualification that he is “partly working it out for the first time” within the text (p. 45). This overtly-fictional, overtly-prototypal story is of a revolutionary—only referred to as “the narrator”—travelling through an unnamed South American country. The vague, generic revolution in which he is involved is described as finding ideal cover for its agents in the Christian mission-stations of the hinterland. The narrator writes:

The disguise is almost perfect. Both groups have the same kind of dedication; both talk about racial brotherhood; both talk about the wastefulness of the rich and the exploitation of the poor; and both deal in the same stern idea of imminent punishment and justice.

(pp. 49-50)

This linking of religious and political fervour is insistently re-established throughout the text. The passionate mood of “imminent punishment and justice” attaches similarly to revolutionary figures and movements of inter-racial brotherhood and racial purity within the text; to the figures and causes which begin with an abstract idea of racial freedom and devolve into a simplified, or purified, politics of racial righteousness (p. 50).

Writing of Lebrun, an articulate and inspiring Marxist revolutionary, the narrator describes the political renaissance of the man's old age—his reincarnation as “the hidden black-prophet of the century”—as “against the whole life of revolution he had lived; against the ‘political resolution’ he had come to years before …” (p. 130). The narrator himself, however, slips into a subtle parodic use of the language of revolution to suggest a rhetorical continuum between Lebrun's old and new political selves. While his new political character is described as involving a shift against “the universality in which he had shed the burdens of race and shame”, Lebrun is also, in the same passage, described as offering “something higher and more universal” in his new commitment to a politics of racial purity; where he had once been “the man of principle, the man of the true revolution”, he had now became “the man of true African or black redemption, the man of principle there”. The vision Lebrun offers now, of “latent pure revolution”, is described as “the same” as the vision offered by his other, earlier political self; it is only by degrees less mystical, more cathartic, offering a greater redemption (pp. 130-1). Lebrun's very act of betrayal is portrayed as a logical rhetorical extension and heightening of his old political self: it is with “subtle addition” only, and not through any absolute reversal, that he has reached his new position (p. 130). Naipaul ultimately indicates that in the corruption of the purity of his resolution, Lebrun achieves a greater purity of effect; that in the corruption of his principles, he is achieving what seems to be a greater principled truth. In interrogating to the point of collapse the binary opposition between purity and impurity, principle and corruption, Naipaul reveals a profound distrust in the absolute narrative of racial vindication, of the promise of a renewed and renewing purity through the reclamation of a (mythologically) pristine ethnicity and homeland. However, while Lebrun is a rhetorical figure—“an impresario of revolution”—he is not reduced to a simple language effect (p. 107). Naipaul carefully, even tenderly, understands Lebrun as both shaped by the shaming and brutalization of the African diasporic experience; and as shaping a brutal and shaming politics. His political shift—figured by the narrator as a betrayal of “the inscription to me, as to a fellow humanist, in the copy of The Second Struggle [Lebrun's book, given to the narrator years before]”—is directly linked to the justification of the anti-humanist expulsion of the Asian peoples of East Africa during the regimes of Nyerere and Amin: “He never spoke against a black racial regime. He presented Asian dispossession in Amin's Uganda and Nyerere's Tanzania as an aspect of class warfare” (p. 130). Exemplifying Hall's thesis, the narrative of absolute reclamation against the dispersals of the movements of empire becomes a brutalizing hegemonic reality which in fact continues rather than ruptures the Empire's cycles of displacement.

Questioning and ultimately imploding narratives of purity, reclamation and redemption, A Way in the World is engaged in an interrogation of—to again pick up Gilroy's terminology—the privileging of “roots” against the legitimation of “routes”;⁹ the valuing of an idea of uncontaminated completion against the signification of fragmentations and trajectories. Figured and refigured within the various narrative strands of the text as a questioning of the opposition between seemingly “whole” societies and transitive, routed and rerouted peoples, Naipaul's text implicitly denies the possibility of a positively loaded definition of diaspora. Like Clifford, Naipaul pursues a negative definition of diaspora against ideas of indigenous and national identities; and, concomitantly, pursues a reflexive partial definition of apparently discrete indigenous and national consciousnesses. The centrality of these problematic definitions within the text is pointed up in the epigraph, which itself gestures towards Clifford's question and qualification: “How long does it take to become indigenous? Lines too strictly drawn between original inhabitants … and subsequent immigrants risk ahistoricism”:¹⁰

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

In the “unwritten”, prototypal story at the beginning of the text, Naipaul seems to offer a template—an almost absolute imagining—of indigenous consciousness when he describes the people of the forest who the unnamed fictional narrator encounters:

They are very far away, these people who can see everything in the forest, who have so many talents, and have perfected so much in their isolation. They are beyond reach. They are further away than any group the narrator has known … Everywhere else, in Asia, Europe north and south, Africa, tribes and peoples have been in collision since the beginning of time. These people, after the migration of their ancestors from Asia, have become people entirely of themselves, without resilience or the talent to adapt. Once their world was broken into, they lost their wholeness.

(p. 56)

While the passage concentrates on the paradoxical vulnerability that accompanies “wholeness”—with its implications of inviolability—and traces the brief, archetypal story of loss which has come to characterize indigenous situations, the aspect of the passage which the text subsequently picks up and plays through is the idea of beginning in migration; of a seeming absolute wholeness beginning in fragmentation; of roots always tracing back to routes. This linkage of the indigenous peoples of the Americas to the Indians of the subcontinent becomes, in other narrative strands of the texts, an ironic deployment of “Indian” which ultimately operates to re-route the term itself.

In one of the “autobiographical” sections of the text, Naipaul writes of a fishing village in the South Americas:

Once aboriginal Indians were masters of these waters. They no longer existed; and that knowledge of currents and tides had passed to their successors. On the south-westernmost point of the long Trinidad peninsula that almost ran into the river estuary there had been an aboriginal port or anchoring place … There was still a fishing village there … Many of the fishermen of Cedros were Asian Indians, descendants of agricultural people from the Gangetic plain. In less than a hundred years the geography of their new home had remade these Asian Indian people of Cedros, touched them with old aboriginal aptitudes, and given them sea skills which their landlocked ancestors had never had.

(p. 217)

Perceiving a gradual shifting from the diasporic into the indigenous—a hybridizing of a diasporic sense of community with an indigenous relationship to land—Naipaul lends a subtle twisted paradoxical truth to the very unsubtle colonial naming of the indigenous peoples of the Americas as “Indian”. Over the page, this brief anecdote is lent further nuance through its juxtaposition with the story of Manuel Sorzono, the Trinidadian Asian Indian Venezuelan who enacts a concomitant shifting—and tension—between diasporic and nationalist constructions of self.

When the author-narrator first sees Sorzono, he takes him for an “out-and-out Venezuelan, a coastal mestizo, a product of a racial mixture that had started with the Spanish settlement, someone who had known only his own landscape and limited language and his own way of life, and was cut off from everything else” (p. 219). Upon seeing the jars of Trinidad Indian pickles in his bag, however, he reconsiders his first assessment:

Had I misread him, then? Was he, after all, an Asian Indian from Trinidad with ideas and assumptions I could intuit—and not the Venezuelan stranger I had taken him for? … He could be one thing or the other: it depended on what you thought he was.

(p. 219)

What he is becomes a question both of how Sorzano is constructed by the narrator's own ancestral history and experience as well as how Sorzano chooses to construct/reveal himself. He reveals his common Indian Trinidadian identity surreptitiously to Naipaul, but at the airport in Venezuela, he carries a national passport and passes through immigration quickly (p. 221, p. 235). Identity, then, flows into shifting identifications beyond Gilroy's use of the term: Sorzano can choose to present, or produce, himself as rooted between the Spanish colonial enterprise and the aboriginal peoples and lands of Venezuela; or routed between the English colonial enterprise and the aboriginal peoples and lands of Trinidad. The point is that the degrees of separation between the two have rapidly and oddly reduced over time; the differential is minimal, mellifluous and ultimately, within a national paradigm, subversively erasable. The author-narrator concludes that “there would be no ambiguities about [his children]; they would be the kind of Venezuelan I had in the beginning taken their father for” (p. 223). They would, in other words, complete the idea of a Venezuelan national. And in recognising this, Naipaul comprehends the inevitable hybridity, or routedness, of national identity; the flow between the travelling narratives of diaspora and the grounding mythologies of nation. So through two seemingly peripheral, seemingly “freak” anecdotes of the displacement and placement of Asian Indians within the South Americas, Naipaul constructs a history of the diasporic Indian which works itself into an involved political position/set of identifications between indigenous and national identities; a position which perhaps most crucially works itself out in the final section of the text, “Coming Home”.

In “Coming Home”, Naipaul writes of an East African nation—probably Nyerere's Tanzania—which is “full of a special hate” for the Indian communities who, “as elsewhere in East Africa … made a closed group”. He writes:

There would have been ancient connections between the coast and India. It was an East African pilot who showed Vasco da Gama the way to India. The Victorian explorer Speke even published a map, said to be based on old Hindu texts, giving Sanskrit names for the rivers, lakes and mountains of Uganda. There would have been an Indian element in the mixed Swahili culture of the coast. But people didn't carry this kind of history in their heads; and the Asian community that was hated was the more recent one that had come over and settled in the half century or so of British rule.

(pp. 348-9)

Again, Naipaul comprehends historical continuities in perceived discontinuities, routes beyond roots, hybridity beyond “whole” communities, in order to debunk the mythological, epochal sense of—or betrayal of—history justifying an exclusionist racial politics. From a critique of Lebrun's diasporic metaphysics of a “pure” homeland, the text becomes a critique of the very brute implications of a “pure”/racialist government in national power. A Way in the World becomes an indictment of the falsely clarifying narratives of “authenticity” and racial power which he understands as characterizing many of the recent government of the Caribbean, South Americas, South Asia and Africa. In a typically bleak ending, Naipaul indicates—as he does in so many of his texts—his appalled sense of futility about the possibility of a break in this racialist-nationalist, anti-historicizing, “frenzied” (a favourite term) cycling of history. Ending the book with the story of the murder of Blair—an international economic aide killed because of his refusal to comply with an anti-Indian, racist programme masquerading as socialist reform—ultimately suggests both Naipaul's insistence on the need for more “freak” histories to be “carried around in people's heads” and his despair of that happening. However, when this insistence is translated into an insistence on the political position of the text—as the very enactment of this necessary reclamation of a more complex historical sense—it is important to recognise that the simplistic frenzy which leads to the murder of Blair is countered by a political point, bound up in the agonized position of the author himself within the text, which doesn't translate into a concomitantly simplistic indictment of racial passion or diasporic racial identification itself.

In the fictional/autobiographical meeting between Blair and Naipaul, Blair tells a story “against” himself; about his irritation with an Asian couple who, because they didn't speak English, kept him waiting in line for a ticket in a New York subway-station while the clerk tried to understand where they wanted to go. His comment to the man in front of him—“What's the matter with that damned Jap?”—is an illustration of his point that “[w]e [are] all tribalists and racialists … we could all easily fall into that kind of behaviour, if we thought we could get away with it” (p. 364). Naipaul is moved by the story:

This was a story to tell us where he had got to; it was an offering … it was like a statement, made without excuse or apology, that after the passion of his politics he could now be another kind of man, ready for new relationships. … He expected his racial passion to be understood; he didn't think he had to explain it. That was impressive; it made me think afresh of his lost community in the blighted cocoa woods. …

(p. 365)

The reference is to the isolated, all black community in Trinidad—another problematic idea of a “whole” society explored within the text—which Blair was born into and from which he arrived in Port of Spain, where Naipaul first met him twenty-five years earlier. Naipaul's sympathy for Blair, his acceptance of his “offering”, signifies a certain relief in the author-narrator against his expectation that Blair would bring with him an unnuanced commitment to the simplistic black racial politics of Trinidad within which Blair's career had begun and which “meant anti-Indian politics and constant anti-Indian agitation”:

Though I was no longer living in Trinidad, I was affected. … The politics that supported Blair's career were more than politics to me, and I didn't like to think of him coming here, to this African country which thought of itself as revolutionary, to unsettle things further. … The local Asian community, with a sense of clan and caste far stronger than anything we knew in Trinidad, never saw me as one of themselves, and I had found ways, as a man on my own, of detaching myself from the racial undercurrents of the place. I felt that with Blair here all that was going to change.

(p. 355)

Naipaul's wariness may be explained in terms of the tension between his identification as diasporic and his identity as an exile. The passage gestures towards the particular shifting quality of his deracination; his particular angst, which is ultimately grounded in the same—or at least a parallel—vigilant and exhausting negotiation between racial commitment and principled disengagement that Blair offers and Naipaul is so relieved to accept.

In seeking to define diaspora against a series of semi-oppositional terms, Clifford suggests that “it involves dwelling, maintaining communities … and in this it is different from exile, with its frequently individualistic focus …”.¹¹ While Naipaul is most famously mythologized in terms of exile—and most famously privileges this idea of himself—the “vision” which he insists it is imperative for a writer “to impose on the world”¹² is, according to Mishra, often a “diasporic allegory”.¹³ He argues that whenever Naipaul engages with situations of the “old” Indian diaspora—peoples with a similar ancestry and history of indenture to himself—the author enacts, or allegorizes, David Spurr's understanding of the problematic of the postcolonial diasporic writer as a kind of twisted re-enactment of the colonial/Hegelian master/slave dialectic of difference and identity. That is, the insistence on “radical difference … as a way of legitimising their own position in the colonial community” (as authority, or as a detached authorial figure “imposing a vision”) and the insistence on identity, which in the colonial/Hegelian sense is a “moral and philosophical precondition for the civilising mission”¹⁴ (the ordering of a perceived chaos), but which in Naipaul also becomes an almost unwilled but moral urge towards “identification” of a common sense of disjuncture and agony around the idea of home (or despair of the ordering of a felt chaos). Against readings of Naipaul which incorporate him—some admiringly, but most angrily or dismissively—into the “great English tradition” by characterizing the quality of his deracination simply in terms of exile, Mishra points to Naipaul's “neurosis”: “the signs of schizophrenia verging on madness as a consequence of displacement … the diasporic nerves constantly on edge, the rawness exploding into paranoia”.¹⁵ In A Way in the World, this schizophrenia—this saving angst—is manifest in the tension between the expression of his paranoia of involvement in the racial problems of the East African nation and the constant figuring of the author within, and as an intersection between, the various stories of the text.

In a 1994 interview with Aamer Hussein, Naipaul explains: “When I first began to write, I very soon felt the need to identify who the writer was, who was doing his travelling in the world, who was doing his observation of London or wherever. You couldn't suppress yourself.”¹⁶ At one level, Naipaul is pointing to an aesthetic imperative, the necessity of a non-fictional form to experiences which, in another interview, he describes as “too particular” to be rendered fictional.¹⁷ At another level, however, he is pointing to the sometimes paradoxical nature of the increasingly complex, increasingly “open” structuring of his “fictional” texts. In “Michael X and the Black Power Killings in Trinidad”, he writes “[a]n autobiography can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies: it reveals the writer totally”.¹⁸

In A Way in the World, Naipaul's need to identify himself becomes a complex positioning of himself within a hybrid of genres—“autobiography”, “history”, “the novel”—which is a conjuncture of both the particularities of his experiences and ancestral history and the revelations of fictionality. Recognizing himself as part of the genealogy of his characters, he gestures towards himself as a freak placement—both fictionally and historically contingent—connecting Leonard Side to Blair, to Lebrun and back to Miranda and Raleigh. Yet this contingency makes him, within the logic of his own text, central to the histories he is telling; his own narrative is, as part of the routes of empire making and breaking, irrepressible. He is necessarily, personally, particularly involved. So while the fusion and defusion of genres and highlighting of the authorial voice within the text generates an element of post-modern “play” which privileges story-telling—at one point the narrator simply comments that “[w]e all inhabit constructs of the world”—it doesn't validate that play as an ultimate political point in itself (p. 154). It is the generation of a diasporic poetics through the uncomfortable and discomforting location of the author between his individualistic sense of rootlessness and his identifications within and across Indian community routes—between his willed disengagement and insuppressible engagement—that the political emphasis of the novel is ultimately located.

Notes

1. V. S. Naipaul, A Way in the World, London: Minerva, 1994, p. 9. Subsequent references are to this edition and will be cited by page number in the text.

2. The North American version (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1994) defines the text as “a novel” on the title page.

3. See William Safran, “Diasporas in Modern Societies: Myths of Homeland and Return”, Diaspora, 1 (1991), 83-99.

4. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, London: Verso, 1993, p. 276.

5. Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora”, Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, ed. Jonathan Rutherford, London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990, p. 235.

6. Vijay Mishra, “(B)ordering Naipaul: Indenture History and Diasporic Poetics”, Diaspora, 5 (1996), 225.

7. Homi Bhabha, “The World and the Home”, Social Text, 10 (1992), 146.

8. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora”, p. 235.

9. Black Atlantic, p. 190.

10. James Clifford, “Diasporas”, Cultural Anthropology, 9 (1994), 309.

11. Ibid., p. 308.

12. V. S. Naipaul, “The Documentary Heresy”, Twentieth Century, Winter (1964-1965), 107.

13. “(B)ordering Naipaul”, p. 192.

14. Ibid., p. 193.

15. Ibid., pp. 224-25.

16. V. S. Naipaul, Interview with Aamer Hussein, Times Literary Supplement, 2 Sep. 1994, 3-4.

17. V. S. Naipaul, Interview with Ronald Bryden, The Listener, 22 Mar. 1973, 367.

18. V. S. Naipaul, “Michael X and the Black Power Killings in Trinidad”, The Return of Eva Peron, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980, p. 67.