A stranger could drive through Miguel Street and just say ‘Slum!’ because he could see no more. But to its residents this corner of Trinidad’s capital is a complete world, where everybody is quite different from everybody else.
MY THOUGHTS:
This is one of the English syllabus texts from my distant past which I'm revisiting decades down the track.
It's essentially a bunch of linked short stories about a slummy section of Trinidad around the WW2 era called Miguel Street. There's a nostalgic narrator who never names himself, but takes turns shining the spotlight on different personalities who carved an impression on him in his boyhood. Each story is like a cameo or sketch of a person from his past. He was just a kid who didn't judge or pretend to understand much about the adult world, but simply reported how different people's conduct made him feel, and left it to his readers to form psychological insights or figure out how things really stood.
The residents of Miguel Street are living a rough old lifestyle with a collective knowledge that they're generally regarded as the world's riffraff, yet try to make the best of it. The author Naipaul evidently managed to achieve success with his writing, but acknowledges through his characters that being born somewhere like Miguel Street (or Trinidad in general) is a giant handicap from the very start. He uses his unprecedented soapbox as a published author to highlight several of his peers who weren't so fortunate. Even though this is written as fiction, I can't help asking, 'Is it really though?' So many characters are larger than life, I wouldn't be surprised if they were real people and Naipaul himself was the young narrator.
Some of them are super poignant. I can't forget Elias, the boy with the abusive family profile who decides to become a doctor, yet finds the exams are skewed against people with his background, no matter how hard he studies. (We felt it wasn't fair, making a boy like Elias do litritcher and poultry.) Or Bolo, the disillusioned barber who's been let down by so many scams in the media, he refuses to believe the news when he wins the sweepstakes for real.
Others try to raise their status through any paltry means possible, such as Eddoes, the spic-and-span rubbish cart driver who boasts about the VIPs whose garbage he collects. There is also B. Wordsworth, an aspiring poet who impresses our young narrator by doing everything as if it were some church rite, and aims to write the greatest poem in the world at the rate of one line per month. Although he misses his twenty-two year deadline, the intention is there. When you can't achieve your fondest dreams because the world appears to be pitted against you, you can at least extend your own creativity as far as you can. This makes for some characters and events as colourful as the tropical fruit that appears abundantly throughout these pages.
Their colonial background is reflected in their language. Everyone speaks with a local patois which tries to observe the rules of formal English but never quite pulls it off. Everything from proper tenses to accurate syntax is really jumbled, with quite a cool result. It's intriguing that these people at that time period adopted the British dialect rather than stick to whatever Caribbean and Creole speech was also current. Perhaps they had no choice. Yet they express facts in matter-of-fact ways which English never would. A prime example is, 'A girl is making baby for me,' which occurs several times throughout these stories. (A quick internet search reveals that it's now regarded as a dialect in its own right, called Trinidadian English.)
Some aspects of the story make me really sad. First is the fact that every resident of Miguel Street generally agrees that life in Trinidad is bound to turn a person bad. This encompasses everything from excessive drinking and chain smoking to domestic violence, murder and other crime. It may well be true, owing to the invisible but powerful handicap everyone faced when it came to pursuing genuine ambitions. Naipaul writes his case really well. Our boy narrator admits candidly that he was heading in the same direction, because the Trinidad atmosphere is just so oppressive, he felt he couldn't help it. Sound characters such as Titus Hoyt the tutor, or B. Wordsworth the poet suggest that not every citizen resorts to making life miserable for others, but that tendency is a major theme of the book.
All the wife beating leaves a sober impression! Even the kindly role models and 'good' characters believe that it's sensible for a man to keep his spouse in line with physical beatings every so often, as long as they don't make a habit of it. Sadly, these male characters, who know full well they are victims of racism, resort to sexism of the worst kind to alleviate their own frustration. To be a woman living in Miguel Street must have been the worst misfortune, although some of the female characters Naipaul presents had plenty of spirit and force of their own, including the protagonist's mother, who brought up her son with a harsh hand and never hesitated to strike him.
On the whole, V.S. Naipaul has written a cultural eye-opener that highlights the best and worst of the human spirit. Perhaps the best summing up line is this one. 'A stranger could drive through Miguel Street and just say, "slum" because he could see no more. But we who lived there saw our street as a world where everybody was quite different from everybody else.' I wouldn't mind reading more of Naipaul's work in the future.
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