The Enigma of Arrival

"I had given myself a past, and a romance of the past. One of the loose ends in my mind had vanished; a little chasm filled. And though something like Haitian anarchy seemed to threaten my little island, and though physically I no longer belonged to the place, yet the romance by which I had attached it to the rest of the world continued to be possessed by me as much as the imaginative worlds of my other, fictional books."

Naipaul's The Enigma of Arrival is an autobiographical tome on the cycle of life, migration, and change. Set in the English countryside, while the narrator, representing Naipaul, is renting a cottage, walking, and writing, the text comments on the seasons, the gradual changes or decline of the manor, life and social relations in England, and explorations of the narrator's journey, a process of returns or flights, both literal and metaphorical. 

The novel reminds one of The Enigma of the Return  by Dany Laferrière in that both feature a shared fixation on movement to and from the Caribbean. While Trinidad is only of many areas in which Naipaul returns to in his fiction, here his childhood and "second childhood" in his Wiltshire cottage leave room for thought on Naipaul's shifting identity, self-perception as an international or "metropolitan" writer, and the Trinidad which has become more imaginary than real for him. Just as his time in the countryside, appreciating the history and natural splendor of the area, eventually comes to an end, Naipaul's journey continues in interesting ways as we are introduced to the infirm landlord, the Phillipses, who manage, the gardener, and other characters in the book progress, age, die. 

There is no such thing as an immutable world, and the decay of the landlord's estate in England is mirrored by the shocking changes in Naipaul's Trinidad, where the old Indian villages of the countryside have disappeared while Caribbean immigrants, shantytowns, an oil boom, independence, and racial politics transform Naipaul. The enigma of arrival, indeed! Whether traveling to New York and England for the first time, ruminating on his experiences in other Caribbean locales, or describing his image of Africa and India, the mysteries of the world evolve, and the greatest of mysteries, humanity, changes with generations. Naipaul's return to Trinidad for his younger sister's cremation rituals, provides an excellent conclusion to this theme. 

One of the more intriguing aspects of this novel is the image of Trinidad and the Caribbean, a region in which Naipaul begins to understand its greater role in world history just as he loses it due to no longer being part of the changed Trinidad. When first leaving it in 1950 for Oxford, he describes in great detail seeing the island from the sky for the first time, seeing it as much more than a small colonial outpost where his half-education through abstraction was something to escape. He even feels some connection with an Afro-Trinidadian man on the plane, and an African-American en route to Europe on the ship from New York. His colonial roots, his uprooting from India and the Caribbean, connects him with the African-American on the ship who refuses to be placed in Naipaul's quarters to avoid being ghettoized or segregated based on race. One sees from incidents like these, a shared desire on Naipaul's part to escape being pigeonholed or segregated because of his race, in his desire to become a metropolitan writer. 

Yet, one also detects some regional kinship with the Trinidadian, with the travels in Belize, his stops in Puerto Rico, Jamaica, Barbados, and Anguilla. By connecting the history of Trinidad to the early European conquest of the region, the French fleeing the Haitian and French Revolutions to Trinidad in the 19th century. Here, one finds a troubling view of the Haitian Revolution as an example of black revolt or revolution rooted in anger and turning away from the world, not trying to improve it. He compares this complex, 19th century event with Black Power in Trinidad, two distinct historical events, yet sees it all as part of the general 'plantation colony' heritage of the Caribbean. Its an interesting perspective, but not exactly historically accurate, though one sees where Naipaul is going with that assertion. The Trinidad of his youth, the one he returns to by the novel's end, is no longer for him. Much like Ralph Singh in The Mimic Men or other characters in Naipaul's fiction, the narrator is uprooted from his Asiatic or Hindu origins as well as the Caribbean, while England is also a site of change or rootlessness in its own ways, as exemplified by the gradual decay of the manor.

There is much more to be said about this work, which I shall return to in future posts about the author. A stronger comparative work on its commonalities with "The Enigma of the Return" for instance, would be fascinating reading for how both authors approach their respective origins, or the Caribbean. Impressively, it manages to, while delving into great detail about the estates, the colors, shapes, seasonal variety, and inhabitants of the English countryside, connect history, colonialism, identity, travel, and blur the lines between fact and fiction. The description of the Hindu rituals, pundit cousin, and death of Sati are quite moving, too. 

Favorite Quotes

"That final trip to the pub served no cause except that of life; yet he made it appear an act of heroism; poetical." (48)

"These ideas of a world in decay, a world subject to constant change, and of the shortness of human life, made many things bearable." (23)

"I had thought that because of my insecure past--peasant India, colonial Trinidad, my own family circumstances, the colonial smallness that didn't consort with the grandeur of my ambition, my uprooting of myself for a writing career, my coming to England with so little, and the very little I still had to fall back on--I had thought that because of this I had been given an especially tender or raw sense of an unaccommodating world" (92).

"Yet I was also ashamed that, with all my aspirations, and all that I had put into this adventure, this was all that people saw in me---so far from the way I thought of myself, so far from what I wanted for myself. And it was shame, too, that made me keep my eyes closed while they were in the cabin" (126).

"Two hundred years on, another Haiti was preparing, I thought: a wish to destroy a world judged corrupt and too full of pain, to turn one's back on it, rather than to improve it" (161).

"The story had become more personal: my journey, the writer's journey, the writer defined by his writing discoveries, his ways of seeing, rather than by his personal adventures, writer and man separate at the beginning of the journey and coming together again in a second life just before the end" (344).

"Men need history; it helps them to have an idea of who they are. But history, like sanctity, can reside in the heart; it is enough that there is something there" (353).