There are some good passages in this, but on the whole Naipaul is exceedingly dismissive of black nationalisms, quite racist at times, and ungenerous to the countries he travels to. He's miserable the whole time and only says anything of value in passages that are few and far between, apart from the occasional poignant or telling anecdote.

This is hard to get into but it is definitely a valuable, eye-opening read.

Naipaul 's travel writing started with this volume and his skills as a narrator of landscape are evident especially in his description of Guyana. Has a good feel for ethnic and social structure in the Trinidad chapter and his intense dislike and prejudice against ordinary people still shocking. The writing is of high quality.

A decent cross-section of observations of the Caribbean region in the (global) post-colonial era.

A blistering investigation into the psychosis of the post-Colonial West Indies. I thought the stuff about Naipaul’s own island of Trinidad was stronger than much of the rest, but apart from that I’m still working through my larger thoughts on Naipaul. I know you’re all waiting with baited breath, just hold out another week please.

Written in 1960, it's one of VS's earlier works but his ability shines as he captures a culture through a few conversations. It is a fascinating view of a number of neighbouring countries shaped by their relevant imperialistic backgrounds, the impact of slavery and the state of the economy. There is a mixture of writing quality, depth and insights but it does give a little insight into life in the early 60s for five Caribbean nations.

Controversial, but very well written. Really related to some of his observations, though they are admittedly cruel. But it seems to me that sometimes only those who live in First World countries can afford to scarecrow Naipaul for saying *some* of the things he did - from their relative safety, they might not understand the weight of emotions and criticism that one might feel for one's own corrupt and/or exploited country.

Naipaul certainly has a gift for seamlessly weaving several vignettes together. Despite his writing skill, I was left disappointed in this travelogue. His neo-colonialist political views and occasional racist sentiments turned this story quite bitter. Coupled with Naipaul's rampant pessimism, this book reads more like a highly biased account of one man's feelings toward a homeland he abandoned.
I would cautiously recommend the book to those that like to critically read a text and compare it to other accounts of the Caribbean. I am by no means disappointed that I read it; however, I am left feeling like I need to read another author's account of the same cultures.

I always tell folks who haven’t read Naipaul the same thing: Just begin, and you’ll find yourself drawn slowly but surely into a reading experience you’ll seldom have had before. The meticulous construction, the mental rhythm, of Naipaul’s prose has always taken my breath away: How does someone write like this? That is, take ideas of such depth and complexity and make them not just lucid, but lucid in all that complexity.



This, I think is the miracle of Naipaul. You may not agree with his portrayal, but his portrayal is not lazy.



The Middle Passage is, like much of Naipaul, laden with a lot more meaning that it lets on. His clear, almost cruel analysis of life on the islands is difficult to read at times, but it’s fascinating all the way through. I especially loved his account of Surinam and Martinique, and perhaps a look at life on the islands now would be something a lot of people would be interested in.

More and more, when I don't know what to read next, I default to something by Naipaul that I haven't read yet. I have not gone wrong yet.

I wrote an essay on this book, and here was the thesis: "Naipaul visits six Caribbean cultures – Trinidad, British Guiana, Surinam, Martinique, and Jamaica – in different stages of decolonization. He writes as a 20th-century goldilocks picking apart the inherent flaws in post-colonial society, only without the “just right” moments. Instead, Naipaul prophesies the downfall of all post-colonial Caribbean islands, and in the case of Martinique specifically, the French axiom “liberté, egalité, et fraternité” falls apart piece by piece: (1) liberty becomes impossible as Martiniquais will always be dependent on the French, (2) inequality reigns in a society where Martiniquais can never be truly French, and (3) fraternity between citizens is unattainable in a society built upon social division. Therefore, using Naipaul (and a little bit of De Beauvoir) to understand the contemporary situation in Martinique, François-Noël Buffet’s exhortation for dialogue, responsibility, and peace is futile. Martinique will inevitably descend into chaos because the post-colonial society was inherently broken in its construction; any attempts at unity in “Frenchness” wind up revealing the De Beauvoirian “otherness” rooted in the Martiniquais mentality."


Some quotes below:

“It was a cramping of his style; but in the West Indies, as in the upper reaches of society, you must be absolutely sure of your company before you speak: you never know who is what or, more important, who is related to what” (9).

“The West Indian, knowing only the values of money and race, is lost as soon as he steps out of his society onto one with more complex criteria” (13).

“As England receded, people prepared more actively for the West Indies. They formed colour groups, race groups, territory groups, money groups. The West Indies being what they are, no group was fixed; one man could belong to all” (13).

“For nothing was created in the British West Indies, no civilization as in Spanish America, no great revolution as in Haiti or the American colonies. There were only plantations, prosperity, decline, neglect: the size of the islands called for nothing else…a society without standards, without noble aspirations, nourished by greed and cruelty” (19-20).

Thesis: “How can the history of this West Indian futility be written? What tone shall the historian adopt? Shall he be as academic as Sir Alan Burns, protesting from time to time at some brutality, and setting West Indian brutality in the context of European brutality? Shall he, like Salvador de Madariaga, weigh one set of brutalities against another, and conclude that one has not been described in all its foulness and that this is unfair to Spain? Shall he, like the West Indian historians, who can only now begin to face their history, be icily detached and tell the story of the slave trade as if it were just another aspect of mercantilism? The history of the islands can never be satisfactorily told. Brutality is not the only difficulty. History is built around achievement and creation; and nothing was created in the West Indies” (20).

“The earth here was shaped like a woman’s breast, with the terrestrial paradise at the top of the nipple. The fresh water in the Gulf of Paria flowed down from the paradise which, because of its situation, could not be approached in a ship and certainly not without the permission of God” (31)

“The way was choked with emigrants, many of the Indians who had flown from British Guiana” (32).

“I had never examined this fear of Trinidad. I had never wished to. In my novels I had only expressed this fear; and it is only now, at the moment of writing, that I am able to attempt to examine it. I knew Trinidad to be unimportant, uncreative, cynical. The only professions were those of law and medicine, because there was no need for any other; and the most successful people were commission agents, bank managers, and members of the distributive trades. Power was recognized, but dignity was allowed to no one. Every person of eminence was held to be crooked and contemptible. We lived in a society which denied itself heroes. It was a place where the stories were never stories of success but of failure: brilliant men, scholarship winners, who had died young, gone mad, or taken to drink; cricketers of promise whose careers had been ruined by disagreements with the authorities. It was also a place where a recurring word of abuse was ‘conceited,’ an expression of the resentment felt of anyone who possessed unusual skills. Such skills were not required by a society and were never called upon to be efficient. And such people had to be cut down to size or, to use the Trinidad expression, be made to “boil down.” Generosity - the admiration of equal for equal, was therefore unknown; it was the quality I knew only from books and found only in England. For talent, a futility, the Trinidadian substituted intrigue; and in the exercise of this, in small things as well as large, he became a master. Admiration he did have: for boys who did well at school, such academic success, separate from everyday life, giving self-respect to the community as a whole without threatening it in any way; for scholarship winners until they became conceited; for racehorses. And for cricketers. Cricket has always been more than a game in Trinidad. In a society which demanded no skills and offered no rewards to merit, cricket was the only activity which permitted a man to grow to his full stature and to be measured against international standards…his race, education, wealth did not matter. We had no scientists, engineers, explorers, soldiers, or poets. The cricketer was our only hero-figure” (35).

“Though we knew that something was wrong with our society, we made no attempt to assess it. Trinidad was too unimportant and we could never be convinced of the value of reading the history of a place which was, as everyone said, only a dot on the map of the world. Our interest was all in the world outside, the remoter the better; Australia was more important than Venezuela, which we could see on a clear day. Our own strange past was buried and no one cared to dig it up. This gave us a strange time-sense. The England of 1914 was the England of yesterday; the Trinidad of 1914 belonged to the dark ages” (36).

“Everyone was an individual, fighting for his place in the community. Yet“I had tried hard to feel Interest in the Americans as a whole, but had failed. I couldn't read their faces; I couldn't understand their language, and I could never gauge at what level communication was possible. among more complex peoples there are certain individuals who have the power to transmit to you their sense of defeat and purposelessness: emotional parasites who flourish by draining you of the Vitality you preserve with difficulty. the amerindians had this effect on me” (101)

“‘You Guianese are the slowest people I have ever met.’ you alone are affected by these words; the waitress simply stare and you go out into the white light trembling with anger, so lacing yourself with the words of abuse which have just left into your mind. inhospitable, reactionary and lethargic except when predatory: these were the words… the malarial sluggishness of the Guianese is known throughout the Caribbean and is recognized even in British Guiana” (117)

“ slavery, the land, the latifundia, bookers, indenture, the colonial system, malaria: all these have helped to make a society that is at once revolutionary and intensely reactionary, and have made the Guianese what he is: slow, solon, independent through deceptively yielding, proud of his particular corner of guyana, and sensitive to any criticism he does not utter himself. when the Guianese face goes blank in the eyes are fixed on you, you know that receptivity has seized and that you are going to be told what the speaker believes you want to hear… it isn't lying; it is only an expression of distrust, one of guiennese's conditioned reflexes” (120)

“ that the government is elected does not matter; the people require it to be as paternalistic as before, if a little more benevolently; and a popular government must respond. ‘The people’ have learned their power, and The Sensation is still so new that every new voter regards himself as a pressure group. In this way the people– not the politicians' abstraction, but the people who wish to beg, bribe and Bully because this is the way they got things in the past – in this way the people are a threat to the responsible government and a threat, finally, to their own leaders. it is part of the colonial legacy” (121)

“Racial antagonisms, endlessly acting and reacting upon one another, and encouraged by the cynical buffoons who form so large apart of the politically ambiguous in every population, are building up pressures which might easily overwhelm the leaders of both sides and overwhelm the country semicolon through British guiana, because of its physical size and the isolation of its communities, can better withstand disturbance than Trinidad” (135)

“ The West Indian Colonial situation is unique because the west indies, and all the racial and social complexity, are so completely a creation of Empire that the withdrawal of Empire is almost without meaning. In such a situation nationalism is the only revitalizing force” (142)
“Although since emancipation Christianity has asserted itself and has in many ways rescued the colonial society from utter corruption, it has not lost its racial associations, its association with power and Prestige and progress. the Ministers of god, like the senior administrators of the Civil service, we're expected to be white; it is only of late that the white collars of church and Civil Service have begun to set off a certain nigrescence. this driving towards the now accommodating faith of an unaccommodating race has inevitably created deep psychological disturbances. it has confirmed the colonial in his role as imitator, the traveler who never arrives” (161)

“ In Suriname Holland is Europe; Holland is the center of the world. even America recedes…. with Dutch realism the surinamers have avoided racial Collision Not By ignoring group differences but by openly acknowledging them” (168)

“ with no inflammatory political issues, no acute racial problem, and with the Dutch government contributing to thirds of the money ( 1/3 gift, one third loan) for the development of the country, a nationalism would seem unlikely and perverse growth. but a nationalism has arisen which is unsettling the established order, proving that the objection to colonialism in the West Indies is not only economic or political or, as many believe, simply racial. colonialism distorts the identity of the subject people, and the Negro in particular is bewildered and irritable. Racial equality in a simulation are attractive but only underline the loss, since to accept simulation is in a way to accept a permanent inferiority. nationalism and suriname, feeding on no racial or economic resentments, is the profoundest anti-colonial movement in the west indies. it is an idealist movement, and a rather sad one, for shows has imprisoning for the West Indian his Colonial culture is. europe, the Suriname nationalist says, is to be rejected as the sole source of enlightenment; Africa and Asia are to be brought in as well” (169)

the colonial cultural ideal has pronounced bad consequences for the individual. it is in fact an unattainable ideal… a few exceptional people… come to great achievements, but thereby lose their nationality” (173)

“ So many things in these West Indian territories, I now began to see, speak of slavery. there is slavery in the vegetation. in the sugarcane, brought by Columbus on the second voyage when, to Queen Isabella's fury, he proposed the enslavement of the amerindians. in the breadfruit, cheap slave food, 300 trees of which were taken to St Vincent by Captain Bligh in 1793 and sold for a thousand pounds” (189)

“ In the forest the bush negro reorganized his life on the African pattern; tried to reformed, tribal territories demarcated. the bush negro never married outside his tribe or race and was proud of his pure African descent: it marked him as a descendant of free men. settled along the rivers, he developed his outstanding River skills. isolated from the world, he remembered his African skills of carving, song and dance; he remembered his African religions. he developed his language; in the far interior it became africanized” (191)

“The colonial attitude which rejects as barbarous all that does not issue from the white mother country” (175)

“ I was glad to leave Coronie, for more than lazy negroes, it held the full desolation that came to those who made the middle passage” (197)

“None has gone as far as some of these West Indian islands, which, in the name of tourism, are selling themselves into a new slavery. the elite of the islands, whose pleasures, revealingly, are tourist’s pleasures, ask no more than to be permitted to mix with the white tourists, and the governments make feeble stipulations about the colour bar” 198

“Martinique is France. arriving from trinidad, you feel you have crossed and not the Caribbean but the English Channel” (199)

“ they are black, but they are Frenchmen” (200)

Vous faites les nuances quote on 200

“ More than England to the British West Indian or even Holland to the surinamer, France is the mother country to the Martinique one. the highest positions are open to him in france; it is a cause for pride, and not surprised, that a French West Indian represents an important French town in the National Assembly and was for some time the Constitutional successor to president de gaulle” (201)

“It is a significant tribute to Frances management of her empire… that her distant territory should consider this ( assimilation as departments into the Metropole) to be the highest compliment and benefit they could receive” (203)

“ in spite of all that has been said about French color blindness, race has always been important in Martinique… Trinidad is more Humane and allows people who look reasonably white to pass as white. Humane is perhaps not the right word” (204)

“ if the French have exported their civilization to Martinique, they have also exported their social structure” (205)

“ all cannot be white, but all can aspire to frenchness, and in frenchness all are equal” (206)

“ Martinique is poor, the middle class Martinique ones say. scarcely any development is possible, for no Martinique when industry could compete with a French one; and without her connection with France Martinique would be lost” (207)

“ the Caribbean has been described as Europe's other sea the Mediterranean of the new world. it was a Mediterranean which summoned up every dark human instinct without the complimentary impulses towards nobility and beauty of older lands, a Mediterranean were civilization turns sat, perverting those it attracted and if one considers this sea, which the tourist now in livens with his fantastic uniform, as a wasteful consumer of men through more than three centuries – the Aboriginal population of some Millions wiped out; the insatiable plantations: 300,000 slaves taken to suriname, which today has a negro population of 90,000; the interminable Wars: 40,000 British soldiers dead between 1794 and 1796 alone, and another 40,000 discharged as unfit – it would seem that simply to have survived in the West Indies is to have triumphed” (212)

“And wherever you look you see the surrounding Kingston hills, one of the beauties of the island: freshening now into green after rain, blurred in the evening light, the folds as soft as those on animal skin. against such a view lay a dead mule, it's teeth bare, it's belly swollen and taught. it had been there for 2 days; a broomstick had been playfully stuck in its anus” (225)

“ race– in the sense of black against brown, yellow and white, in that order- is the most important issue in Jamaica today. the hypocrisy which permitted the middle class Brown Jamaican to speak of racial Harmony while carefully maintaining the shade distinctions that preserved its privilege is at last provoking anger and creating a thoroughly black racism which could conceivably turn the island into another Haiti” (228)

“ For 7 months I had been traveling through territories which, unimportant except to themselves, and faced with every sort of problem, we're exhausting the energies in Petty power and squabbles in the maintaining of the petty prejudices of petty societies. I had seen how deep and nearly every West indian, high and low were the prejudices of race; how often these prejudices were rooted in self-contempt; and how much important action they prompted. everyone spoke of nation and nationalism but no one was willing to surrender the Privileges or even the separateness of his group. nowhere, except perhaps in British guiana, was there any binding philosophy: there were only competing sectional interests. with an absence of feeling of community, there was an absence of pride, and there was even cynicism” (241)

“ In the west indies, with its large middle class and it's abundance of talent, the protest leader is in anachronism, and a dangerous anachronism. for the Edna educated masses, quick to respond to racial stirrings and childishly pleased with destructive gestures, the protest leader will always be a hero” (241)

“ the paternalism of colonial rule will have been replaced by the jungle politics of rewards and revenge, the textbook conditions for chaos” (241)

Dr Kenneth Boulding: “ population grows unchecked, doubling every 25 years. immigration cannot keep pace and in any case skims off the cream of the people. Farms are subdivided and subdivided until the country produces far more people than it can take and the people crowd into huge City slums where there is large scale unemployment. Education collapses under the strain of poverty and the flood of children. superstition and ignorance increase, along with pride. self-government means that every pressure group has to be placated, and there is less and less discrimination between high and low quality products whether bananas or people. This ends in a famine, and insurrection. The regiment shoots down the mob and establishes a military dictatorship. for an Investments and Gifts dry up; the islands are left just do in their own misery and the world in effect draws a cordon sanitaire around them. That the road to ruin is a real road, and a distressingly wide and available one, is shown by the example of some nearby Islands which have gone a long way down it” (242)

I discovered V. S. Naipaul when I read one work by Rabindranath Tagore about a decade ago. While Tagore was the only person from India to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, Naipaul shared the honor with him with respect to descent. Although Naipaul hailed from Trinidad and Tobago, he was nevertheless influenced by India and was racially Indian.
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This was my first book from him, however. I can’t even say I discovered him with this book, as his best books appeared on local bookstores on occasion: I just didn’t want to read an Indian novelist at those times, because they tended toward sprawling, familial epics that I simply did not want to deal with. (I have read Tagore and Amitav Ghosh, and I loved both authors: I just wasn’t in the mood to read Indian literature whenever I found copies of Naipaul’s works.)

I know I am committing an offense when I generalize writers by their race. However, in my experience, common themes are often shared by writers from the same country, and I wasn’t in the mood for epic family dramas.

My mind hasn’t changed. The Middle Passage is, after all, a travelogue and not a novel. I still don’t intend to read more Naipaul in the near future. Obtaining the book was actually just making the most of an opportunity: after I traded in a few of my self-help books for store credit in an Australian bookstore, I chose this book by Naipaul from the vintage section as the one I would most likely read. (I honestly preferred The Cloister and the Hearth, but I already have a copy, and there were few better choices.)

The book was, unsurprisingly, insightful. It was the first time I have read of “the middle passage” as a phrase, and learned that it was actually part of the slave trade prevalent during the past centuries: Africans were transported into America, but quite a few ended up in the Caribbean. The countries that were subsequently visited and disinterred by Naipaul were colonies or former colonies of the prominent imperialists at the time the book was written. These countries included Trinidad (Naipaul’s own homeland), British Guiana (now Guyana), Suriname, and Martinique. Jamaica was also lightly discussed.

Today, all except Martinique are independent nations. What links them is that each of the nations possesses a dominant culture impressed upon by colonization: Trinidad and Tobago was Spanish for 300 years; Guyana was a British colony; Suriname a Dutch one; and Martinique remains to be French. Each of the colonies possesses character from the dominant imperial power of the past: Trinidad is similar to the Philippines in that it had been full of “crab mentality,” but was also racially tolerant, as we are in the Philippines. Guyana, on the other hand, had been predominantly underdeveloped, and yet still looked to Britain for guidance. Suriname was more accepting, due to the Dutch heritage of being more civil with their colonies, while Martinique was quite attached to France and Frenchhood, even down to racial differences within the colony. In all his portraits, Naipaul is cynical, but highly nuanced: he praises when praise is deserved, and scathes when it is needed, too.

As one progresses through the travelogue, however, one cannot help but realize that the identity of one’s country cannot be divorced from its colonial past. The same problems can be found with Trinidad and the Philippines. Naipaul’s conclusion, voicing out the “road to ruin” of the small society from a certain Dr. Boulding, is particularly haunting as it is what happens with my country today:

“Population grows unchecked, doubling every twenty-five years. Emigration cannot keep pace and in any case skims off the cream of the people. Farms are sub-divided and sub-divided until the country produces far more people than it can take and the people crowd into huge city slums where there is large-scale unemployment. Education collapses under the strain of poverty and the flood of children. Superstition and ignorance increase, along with pride. Self-government means that every pressure group has to be placated, and there is less and less discrimination between high and low quality products whether bananas or people. This ends in a famine, an insurrection. The regiment shoots down the mob and establishes a military dictatorship. Foreign investments and gifts dry up; the islands are left to stew in their own misery and the world in effect draws a cordon sanitaire around them. That the road to ruin is a real road, and a distressingly wide and available one, is shown by the example of some nearby islands which have gone a long way down it.”

That’s happening to us right now.