Empire of Unreality

Shiva Naipaul (1945–1985) was the author of three novels and two books of mordant dispatches from places where civilization has the most tenuous hold, including Dar es Salaam, Lusaka, the Kenyan bush and Nairobi, the jungles and capital city of Guyana, and not least San Francisco. Born to Indian parents in Trinidad, and polished to a gloss at Oxford, he did not live long enough—a heart attack at forty—to rival in achievement his elder brother, the Nobel laureate V. S. Naipaul. But what he wrote during his too brief time, especially his thoughtful travelogues, stands among some of the best reportage from the wastes of the late twentieth century, with that of Ryszard Kapuscinski, Joan Didion, and of course his brother.

If the legendary actor Will Rogers, who said he’d never met a man he didn’t like, can still be seen as a quintessential American, then Shiva Naipaul, who on the published evidence never met anyone he did like, represents Naipaul Nation at its best, ever on the lookout for stupidity, viciousness, cruelty, and folly, and never at a loss for subject matter. The despicable and the detestable abound in the territory he chooses to cover, and his great theme is the contortion of human beings into grotesque or antic shapes by the absence of reality, or the pervasiveness of unreality.

Witness a characteristic encounter from North of South: An African Journey (1978). Listening to a young Tanzanian intellectual expound on the imperialists’ “many tricks” as against communist Chinese selfless righteousness, in phrases pounded home by rote that the speaker didn’t even understand, Naipaul arrives at a summary judgment and brings down the ax: “What did I think? That words must be taken at their face value? That they have meanings which should be taken seriously? Had I not learned, after all this time, that nothing in Africa had meaning? That nothing could be taken seriously?” 

Too emphatic, too encompassing, too brutal? Naipaul’s reaction is probably all that and more—but it is also the honest appraisal of a serious man insulted and injured by the flimflam of the East African intelligentsia, who had led their countrymen into perilous deeps of misery and mindlessness and had not the least notion how to climb up and out. (One particular insult was the widespread hatred that black Africans felt for the Indians among them, who were resented for their excessive prosperity, their daughters’ disinclination to sleep with black men, and of course their general demeanor, a quality that never fails to arouse racist ire. This insult became violent injury as the 1970s saw the malignancy triumphant of Idi Amin, who expelled the Asians, as the Indians were called, from Uganda—a country Naipaul did not venture into. There was poison enough in the charged atmosphere where he did go.) The masses may almost be forgiven their ignorance and confusion; it is the select few who must be held to account. And Naipaul does that, commonly with severity but sometimes with deadpan drollery, and always with lethal precision.

In Journey to Nowhere: A New World Tragedy, originally published in 1980, long out of print, and just reissued in paperback by the new Outsider Editions, Naipaul presses his onslaught against the contaminating seductiveness of a master idea, and an especially bad one, which changes those who believe in it and upends the way of life of entire peoples: “the idea that the language of religion could be transformed into the language of politics.” The Anglophone Caribbean nations—among which he includes Guyana, on the northeast coast of the South American continent—came to know themselves as part of the Third World upon their emancipation from colonial rule. Their enlightenment “is, to some degree, a psychological process: a quasi-religious conversion. It is, at bottom, a mode of being, a state of mind. That state of mind spreads like an infection and begins, after a while, to create its own political, social, and personal realities, stimulated by the vocabulary of resentment and racial self-assertion.” 

From the president at the top—Forbes Burnham, who had begun governance in 1964 as a moderate democrat installed by the CIA and gone over several years later to blazing socialism and permanent personal rule—to the immiserated black masses at the bottom, world-altering vanguard Guyana with its economic invalidism and public disorder saw 50,000 out of a population of 800,000 leave the country in short order. The large Indian contingent, feeling the boot on their neck under the new Black Power consciousness and its inept regime, took significant part in the exodus.

“Such was the country in which the People’s Temple made its home.” The new religious movement was headed by the Rev. Jim Jones, whose celebrated faith healing extended to resurrection of the dead, and whose perfervid socialist entrancement held Stalin in particular esteem. The flamboyant preacher had an authoritative transmigratory pedigree: In previous incarnations he had been the Pharaoh Ikhnaton, the Buddha, Jesus Christ, and Vladimir Lenin. He expected to be adored.

Jones was a white man from small-town Indiana on a mission to save urban black Americans from their intolerable condition. Naipaul is not unsympathetic to the persistent black plight: “Some of the black sections of Indianapolis bring you back to the Third World . . . the decaying cabins and row houses; the rutted, unswept roads; listless blacks sitting out on collapsed front porches; half-naked children playing in dust and dirt; young men with matted hair standing on street corners, drinking from bottles encased in paper bags, shouting at you as you go by.” Such was the country from which the congregation of the People’s Temple was fleeing. 

But this particular messiah was not the answer to their woes. Jones led his flock from Indianapolis to Redwood Valley to San Francisco to the Guyanese jungle, where some nine hundred residents of Jonestown would make the place forever notorious with their mass suicide in 1978, drinking the Kool-Aid (actually the bargain brand Fla-Vor-Aid) laced with cyanide, on the compassionate orders of their demonically charismatic Maximum Leader. 

For he was saving them all from a monstrous fate at the hands of the truly evil. “Jones had tortured his black followers with nightmare visions of imminent fascist takeover and genocidal doom. . . . But he had not invented those nightmares. . . . For years, ‘fascism’ and ‘genocide’ were words on the lips of nearly every black thinker and agitator.” The sworn enemies of black people and their most overheated champions, Naipaul admonishes, were mirror images of each other. “Both arise from a similar torment: an intolerably aggravated race consciousness.” 

Being a race man on either side of the obsession implicates one in spiritual degeneracy and deadly confusion. Wanting his direst fantasies to be true, Jones could not tell where his love of black people ended and his hatred of them began. “Behind the images of genocidal doom so relentlessly evoked by the Temple’s propagandists there shines through the wish-fulfilling glow of flaming crosses. The Temple was the disease it claimed to be fighting. In that lay its most hopeless corruption.”

Image courtesy of The Jonestown Institute. Image cropped.