In ‘A Map to the Door of No Return’ Dionne Brand reads VS Naipaul as a sorrowfully spiteful narrator, full of the despair of exile
, VS Naipaul wrote, “Yet always the obvious is overwhelming. One is a traveller and as soon as the dread of a particular district has been lessened by familiarity, it is time to move on again, through vast tracts which will never become familiar, which will sadden and the urge to escape will return.”, it is an essay about travelling in India called “In the Middle of the Journey”. These two sentences occur among many mis-sightings of India and Indians that Naipaul describes in his book.
When Naipaul travels to India … he is making the return trip across the Kala Pani … the Sargasso … the middle passage … the door: “Vast tracts which will never become familiar, which will sadden.” They will never become familiar because two generations have missed their shape, more than one hundred years have passed since his family has been there.
The wound of forced exile generations ago is made more acute by indifference, by forgetfulness. No one in India remembers him or the experience he represents. Yet he carries within him this particularly accursed ancestral memory and this crushing dislocation of the self that the landscape does not solve.
Fear is repeated so many times in his essay, Naipaul in fact admits that the “despair lies more with the observer than with the people”.Though his admission is an attempt to be superior, his language … betrays someone trying to get a grasp of himself; trying to grasp something unfathomable, not in a landscape or in the regularity of abject poverty or slovenly wealth, but in oneself, in one’s connection to anything.
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