Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul

A former hero of the South African resistance and his English mistress arrrive on a troubled Caribbean island, where their involvement with a young mulatto revolutionary leader leads to violence

Guerrillas

Marion

"When everybody wants to fight there's nothing to fight for. Everybody wants to fight his own little war, everybody is a guerrilla.'

She said, ‘Do you always make love in your Mao-shirt?’

She lived in the midst of change, repetitive and sterile; it did not disguise the fact of the greater impermanence. But she was privileged: she told herself that once a day. Security was the basis of her privilege. Yet she saw, with a satiric eye, the people around her as accumulators, concerned about dead rituals and dead forms, unmindful of the approaching catas trophe. She saw the girls who were her friends as empty vessels, waiting to be filled by men, who in time appeared their name echoing and re-echoing in conversation, Roger and Mark and John, as empty as the girls. But Roger and Mark and John could have been models for the men to whom she had once given herself, and in whom she had seen extraordinary qualities. Out of this contradiction between what she did and said and what she felt, out of this knowledge of her own security and her vision of decay, of a world running down she moved from one crisis to another.

This is a rather curious book while it’s set in a fictional Caribbean country most likely Trinidad , Naipaul country of birth it could be any British settler colony in Africa. I was struck by the similarities in the lives of settlers and natives in he’s account of Trinidad and those in say where I live in South Africa, Naipaul's Trinidad in Guerillas is a land of green suburbs with clean air where settlers drink English tea, lounge on hammocks, have uniformed live-in domestic workers and gardeners and the natives live in dusty ghettos squeezed together, have to travel long distance for work and are surrounded by constant violence.

This book reminded me so much of Doris Lessing’s “The Grass is singing” because of commentary on human psych and relationships to show the impact of colonialism on both colonizers and the colonized. The white people in Naipaul’s guerrillas are liberals who hate colonialism and oppression but fear the oppressed. The protagonist of the book a white civil rights leader who flees South Africa after torture and fails to adjust to life in London then moving to another settler colony quite tellingly says in the book of the people in Trinidad 

“I loathe all these people. I hate this place”

.  I think it’s also interesting that he was very uncomfortable living in London, seems to me because he missed the psychological boons that come from being white in settler colonies.

I remember reading in a book about post apartheid South Africa about how most white liberals were among the most anxious about the future even those that spent their lives fighting apartheid, some famous liberal writers even left for Australia. In this book too, they live on the edge they carry guns to talk to their gardeners, tip toe around their live in maids, they are all working on moving to Canada, you can feel the anxiety through out Naipaul's text which i think is brilliant. And as always in a society like this women bear the brunt of most of the violence . 

I have read in a few reviews online from Trinidadian scholars that is book is about the failures of the black power movement after independence, unfortunately i do not know much about that history so that is not something I will comment on. Naipaul’s novels are mostly on post colonial societies and he was writing them at a time when there was so much hope, it’s quite fascinating to me how much people hated these books, since they considered him a pessimist.

This is a rather curious book while it’s set in a fictional Caribbean country most likely Trinidad , Naipaul country of birth it could be any British settler colony in Africa. I was struck by the similarities in the lives of settlers and natives in he’s account of Trinidad and those in say where I live in South Africa, Naipaul's Trinidad in Guerillas is a land of green suburbs with clean air where settlers drink English tea, lounge on hammocks, have uniformed live-in domestic workers and gardeners and the natives live in dusty ghettos squeezed together, have to travel long distance for work and are surrounded by constant violence.

This book reminded me so much of Doris Lessing’s “The Grass is singing” because of commentary on human psych and relationships to show the impact of colonialism on both colonizers and the colonized. The white people in Naipaul’s guerrillas are liberals who hate colonialism and oppression but fear the oppressed. The protagonist of the book a white civil rights leader who flees South Africa after torture and fails to adjust to life in London then moving to another settler colony quite tellingly says in the book of the people in Trinidad “I loathe all these people. I hate this place”.  I think it’s also interesting that he was very uncomfortable living in London, seems to me because he missed the psychological boons that come from being white in settler colonies.

I remember reading in a book about post apartheid South Africa about how most white liberals were among the most anxious about the future even those that spent their lives fighting apartheid, some famous liberal writers even left for Australia. In this book too, they live on the edge they carry guns to talk to their gardeners, tip toe around their live in maids, they are all working on moving to Canada, you can feel the anxiety through out Naipaul's text which i think is brilliant. And as always in a society like this women bear the brunt of most of the violence . 

I have read in a few reviews online from Trinidadian scholars that is book is about the failures of the black power movement after independence, unfortunately i do not know much about that history so that is not something I will comment on. Naipaul’s novels are mostly on post colonial societies and he was writing them at a time when there was so much hope, it’s quite fascinating to me how much people hated these books, since they considered him a pessimist.

Guerrillas

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