The Emergency of Trinidad

Abstract

Lunacy and servility: they remain the ingredients of the Negro character. I wonder why this isn't written about, why the Negro writers continue to be sentimental about themselves.-V.S. Naipaul, in a letter to Diana Athillnobel laureate sir vidiadhar surajprasad naipaul is identified here as a primary agent in the unwitting and paradoxical reproduction of a necrosanct1 and disruptive Afro-Caribbean figure, a 'sacred man (homo sacer), to use Giorgio Agamben's widely utilised term.2 Through his anti-black formulas of exclusion, repulsion and negation, he has traced a black subject who stands anterior to the originative formulation of sovereign power in the colonising West and now marks the limit of late colonial3 sovereign power in Trinidad. colonially mimetic travelogues, histories, novels and journalistic excursions instantiate Trinidad's current colonial governmental sensibilities; it is in accordance with this same racial discourse that Trinidad understands its 'black' filicidal crime, structures an internal colony, and finds itself in a chronic emergency and normative state of exception.The distasteful and ironic course of ultimately sacrilising4 work has been recognised at every milestone in the emergence of Afro-Trinidadian and Afro-Caribbean intellectual and literary independence. George Lamming pointed out how the superciliousness of contemptuous postures has continued the colonial practice of hiding Afro-West Indian subjects from their history as well as from a future.5 Kamau Braithwaite kindly asked Naipaul to turn from his disdainful examination of the Negro to the plight of Indo-Trinidadians.6 Derek Walcott identified the scrofula at work in writing. Scrofula is the diseasing colonial process that produced the nasty little which require that we avert our eyes in order not to see Naipaul's repulsion toward Negroes. Walcott poignantly asked, How long would his sneers against blacks be tolerated if they were being made against Jews?7 In 2002, Caribbean Quarterly had the prescience to include the discerning and critical editorial by journalist John Maxwell, War Is at My Black Skin. Maxwell recognised in anti-Negro, anti-African insults and in his express malice the agenda of a second-hand soul: Naipaul. . . has made it his mission to explain to the Anglo Saxon world the painful deficiencies of the lesser breeds, so granting absolution to those who may have felt guilt about mistreating the masses of humanity without laws.8Having overcome, as many did not, the seduction of self-recognition in depreciation termed sad-facts, sad-truth, bitter-pill and plain truth, Selwyn Cudjoe initiated the more sustained critiques of anti-black aggression and tacitly recognised the Negro subject being discharged and discharging itself in the debasing discourse by which it was being constituted.9 Distinct among hallucinatory operations is the palliative that island blacks dangerous only to themselves.10 Naipaul, Cudjoe wrote in Resistance and Caribbean Literature, produces grotesque, caricatured representations of blacks as skeleton[s] upon which to hang his antiquated notions.11 Cudjoe recognised that any totem, transom or crucifix adorned or created in this way is already, in the most anterior sense of the term, sacred.Naipaul makes a formula or idiom of his anti-Afro-Caribbean racism and deploys it against the resistive identities and practices in other emergent/former colonies.12 Lamming, Walcott and Braithwaite are then joined in common cause by the likes of Edward Said, who recognised Naipaul as a witness for the Orientalist anti-Islamic prosecution. Homi Bhabha linked his onetime mentor to the intellectual chain of colonial writers that include Kipling, Forester and Orwell, writers who were repeating rather than re-presenting, marginalising rather than accounting for, the monumentality of a history. …