Author: V S Naipaul
Publisher: Picador India
Year: 2001
Language: English
Pages: 242
ISBN/UPC (if available): 033048706x
Description
The Middle Passage catches the Caribbean world at a critical moment; a world by turn sad, earnest and hilarious - indeed, a perfect subject for the understanding and comedy of the great writer V S Naipaul.
This book is a brilliant exposition of five colonial societies - Trinidad, British Guiana, Surinam, Martinique and Jamaica by the celebrated writer V S Naipaul. He undertook the Caribbean journey at the invitation , in 1960, of Dr Eric Williams, the first Prime Minister of independent Trinidad, the author's birth place.
At that time the plantation colonies of the region were formed, culturally, in the image of the metropolis. Racial and political assertions had yet to catch up with them in various ways.
In Trinidad, African racialism found itself at odds with old colonial mimicry: forty years on, the racial issue will not be between black and white but between black and Asian.
Guyana was Marxist but with the same racial divisions: forty years on, the country will be so ruined that a newspaper will be regarded almost as a luxury.
In Surinam, a movement was afoot to replace the Dutch language with a pidgin English called talkie-talkie; Forty years on, that racial sentiment will have led to military dictatorship and an exodus of the locals to Holland. Whereas Martinique, defying geography, saw itself as France.
And in Jamaica, such rejectionism took the form of Rastafarianism - which, absurdly, turn out to have been the invention of Italian black propaganda during the Abyssinian War of the 1930s.
The Middle Passage catches this poor topsy-turvy world at a critical moment: a world by turns sad, earnest and hilarious - indeed, a perfect subject for the understanding and comedy of the celebrated writer V S Naipaul,
Contents
Map
Forward to this Edition
Middle Passage
Trinidad
British Guiana
Surinam
Martinique
On to Jamaica