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For decades, V.S. Naipaul has played the part of sassy gay friend to the Third World. (Never mind that he’s actually straight). He’ll come swishing into some post-colonial backwater, give the place the once over, and then start in with the home truths: your society is sick, your economy is a joke and your government is a horror show. And I don’t know what they told you at the store, but those jeans make your ass look ginormous.
Naipaul is a writer of many virtues, but cultural sensitivity is not one of them. Wherever he goes, he can be counted on to find something incredibly tactless to say:
On India: The absurdity of India can be total. It appears to ridicule analysis. It takes the onlooker beyond anger and despair to neutrality.
On Argentina: ...an artificial, fragmented colonial society, made deficient and bogus by its myths.
On a group of black American women serving as missionaries in the Ivory Coast:
They were ill-favoured, many of them unusually fat, their grossness like a form of self-abuse, some hideously bewigged, some dumpling-legged in short, wide, flowered skirts. They were like women brought together by a common physical despair.
So is Naipaul a hater? Indubitably. Should this worry you? That depends on your politics. But before you go putting him on your personal Index Librorum Prohibitorum, I’d just point out that half the writers worth reading are haters in some respect, from Christopher Hitchens all the way back to Yahweh himself. You know who’s not a hater? Deepak Chopra. Make your own decision.
Naipaul is a writer of many virtues, but cultural sensitivity is not one of them. Wherever he goes, he can be counted on to find something incredibly tactless to say:
On India: The absurdity of India can be total. It appears to ridicule analysis. It takes the onlooker beyond anger and despair to neutrality.
On Argentina: ...an artificial, fragmented colonial society, made deficient and bogus by its myths.
On a group of black American women serving as missionaries in the Ivory Coast:
They were ill-favoured, many of them unusually fat, their grossness like a form of self-abuse, some hideously bewigged, some dumpling-legged in short, wide, flowered skirts. They were like women brought together by a common physical despair.
So is Naipaul a hater? Indubitably. Should this worry you? That depends on your politics. But before you go putting him on your personal Index Librorum Prohibitorum, I’d just point out that half the writers worth reading are haters in some respect, from Christopher Hitchens all the way back to Yahweh himself. You know who’s not a hater? Deepak Chopra. Make your own decision.
