From a youth, growing up at Vreed-en-Hoop and going to school at Main Street and then Saints, I read a lot. In my time at Saints, I remember poping the British Council Library with my friend Stanley Greaves, and my delight with reading intensified after I migrated to Canada. In fact, when it comes to solitary pursuits, my two favourite things are reading and playing the acoustic guitar, and if you press me hard I think I would be inclined to give reading the edge.
having said that, I am often struck by how readily we accept, and even proclaim as mantra, something a famous writer or famous person said. I am particularly put off when some prominent individual delivering a speech, launches into copious quotations from this or that writer, to buttress the point or the case they are making. You want to say, “Forget about the other guys; I want to hear what you have to say.”
Furthermore – and this is my main point – there are many people who seem to delight on repeating some absurd comment from this or that famous person, and when confronted for the remark, their defence is that it came from this famous person – writer, athlete, singer, actor, politician, religious leader, etc. To borrow from our calypso legend, “If Sparrow say so, is so.”
Some of these famous persons in fact are often pretty unpleasant people, leading rather sordid lives – Dylan Thomas and Lawrence Durrell come to mind – and are actually individuals you wouldn’t want to associate with. Why are we then regurgitating their opinions on this or that as some sort of model for us to follow, and sometimes asking their opinion on subjects they know nothing about? I recall seeing the writer Salmon Rushdie, interviewed by some nitwit on one of these location television broadcasts in the USA, where he was asked his opinion on the best restaurant in the town, and Rushdie, to his credit, said, “I don’t eat out that much.” and walked away. He was right. He’s a superb writer, but he may well be a terrible judge of good food.
Understand I am not talking about controversial or outlandish ideas; I’m talking about the absolute drivel that some writers deliver that is then given value simply because of the source. The renowned author Vidia Naipaul, for example, is constantly getting Caribbean people up in arms over one reference or another which proves on reasonable examination to be nonsense, but is taken as mantra because “da is wha’ Naipaul say, boy.” Naipaul in fact has admitted that he will occasionally make these statements, aimed at generating exposure in the media – which of course he gets.
Certainly, the man is capable of using language brilliantly, and has a deep enquiring mind, but he has also repeatedly demonstrated that he can be a clunes, so why do we make the leap that whatever issues from him is bible? Are we not able to think for ourselves, and when Naipaul says rubbish to consign it to the rubbish bin? Instead, the media picks up these oddities, and I have heard long debates on regional television and print media as we contort ourselves over some bit of flippance from Vidia. We should be ignoring the comments in the first place, instead of displaying verbal diarrhoea over them. It’s Vidia’s opinion. He’s entitled to voice it. But we seem to give an ordinate sanctity to the statement, simply because of the source.
Apart from the famous “nothing of value was ever created in the Caribbean” outburst that inflamed the St. Lucian poet Derek Walcott and so many of us, here are some other Naipaulian gems:
On the French: “French is now of no account, no consequence, a language spoken by some black people and some Arabs.”
On the English: “England is a country of second-rate people – bum politicians, scruffy writers, and crooked aristocrats.”
An interviewer asked him what was the future for Africa: “Africa has no future.”
Also: “Africa is an obscene continent of second-rate people. Second-rate whites with second-rate ambitions who are prepared, as in South Africa, to indulge in the obscenity of disciplining Africans.” He also described the Dutch as “a nation of potato eaters” and dismissed Trinidadians as “a collection of drum beaters”.
On dancing: “I’ve never danced. I’d be ashamed of it. It is something out of the jungle. It’s undignified.”
On Indian women: “The red dot on the forehead means her head is empty.”
He told the writer Paul Theroux: “To me, one of the ugliest sights on earth is a pregnant woman.”
Naipaul is an easy target because he says all these outlandish things – some say intentionally to draw attention to himself and his work – but he is not alone in providing these shock quotes and we react to such things as mountains instead of the molehills most them are.
Writers are mortals. Obviously, they create works of beauty and insight, and can present captivating views of the human spirit, of the vagaries of life, of the machinations of love; writers reveal things. But they are also human beings who can say stupid things, for one reason or another, and people reading what they say should be able to differentiate between the corn and the husk. When something inane is written or uttered, whatever the source, don’t get worked up about it. Simply consign it to the rubbish bin.