Two Essays, Two Islands:
A Review of V.S. Naipaul's
The Writer and the World

October 5, 2006

Two essays from The Writer and the World treat two Caribbean islands: St. Kitts and Anguilla. The islands lie close to one another, but their populations responded in remarkably different ways to their place at an the edge of the modern world. Together, they can be see as an example of the inevitable failure of any attempt to gain independence from the modern world.

St. Kitts is an island led by a charismatic folk-leader. Naipaul sketches his biography:

His fame came early, as an organizer of the sugar workers; a thirteen-week strike in 1948 is part of the island's folk-lore. But Bradshaw's plantation victories mean less today to the young. They do not wish to work on the plantations. They look for "development"—and they mean tourism—on their own island. [74]

The leader of a populist rebellion in the end becomes vulnerable to the next generation's populist rebellion:

Like many folk leaders, he never moved far beyond his first inspiration. It is also true that, like many folk leaders, he is responsible for the hope and the restlessness by which he is now, at the age of fifty-one, rejected. [75]

The political challenge to his rule is led by a man named Herbert, holder of a Ph.D. But his is just one more patriarchal vision of leadership. The "papa" becomes a "doctor."

What is crucial in Naipaul's description of politics on St. Kitts is the meaninglessness of political discourse. It is an island of history.. where the remnants of a colonial town still remain for all to see.. but those remains are important only as a prop for protest. As soon as papa starts losing, he introduces the message of "Black Power." But the complexities of that position are lost as the message is disseminated on the island, and Naipaul notes:

It can now be heard that Bradshaw, for all the English aspirations of his past, is a full blooded Ashanti. Herbert is visibly mulatto. [81]

The protests about the colonial past.. the slogans of Black Power.. these are veils for a population that is willing to put aside the real issues that face them and get lost in words.. and the basest kind of racial resentment. This seems to define one wrong turn that a culture can take: to give in to the temptation of resentment and protest.. these being the tools of empty leaders.

Anguilla is a totally different case, as presented by Naipaul. If St. Kitts is the island led by a popular folk leader, then Anguilla is the pastoral republic. History is not visibly present.. there are no relic structures from the colonial past.. and so there is no ground for the popular leader to stoke resentment. Naipaul highlights the local confusion about the history of the island:

About the arrival of the Negroes there is some confusion. Many know they were imported as slaves. But one young man was sure they were here before the shipwreck. Another felt they had come a year or two after. He didn't know how or why. "I forget that part." The past does not count. [84]

There could be advantages to living without a past, and one might be the chance to develop a tiny but prosperous independent community. It seems even that a certain professor Leopold Kohr saw this in Anguilla:

Kohr has long promoted the theory of the happy small society... In 1958 Kohr addressed the Welsh Nationalist Party that wants Wales to break away England... Kohr feels that small communities are "more viable economically than large powers," and he thought Anguilla "the ideal testing ground." [90]

But, of course, the actual story that Naipaul traces is not at all a pretty pastoral story of a small culture prospering outside the influence of world powers. It is rather a humorous sketch of the petty greed that erupts as soon as independence becomes a fact:

Responsibility, acquiring lusts and fears now balancing the old certitude, had brought dissensions, the breaking up of that sense of isolation and community which was the point of independence. [91]

By dismissing the hopes of both St. Kitts and Anguilla, Naipaul makes an even larger point—one that is entirely characteristic of him: he denies the ability of any culture to cut itself off from the mainstream of the modern world. Whether the avenue is popular protest for historical wrongs, or an attempt to live in happy isolation.. both mark a way to fall from the cultural responsibility of engagement with the modern world. Naipaul, who with his own Caribbean island background has felt the allure of both routes, is ever intent on holding up for criticism any attempt to fall from engagement.