By intuition alone

Now near the end of his work, the Nobel prize winner reflects on his early childhood in Trinidad
February 20, 2002

Everything of value about me is in my books. I am the sum of my books. Each book stands on what has gone before, and grows out of it. I feel that at any stage of my career it could have been said that the last book contained all the others.

It has been like this because of my background. My background is at once exceedingly simple and exceedingly confused. I was born in Trinidad. It is a small island in the mouth of the great Orinoco river of Venezuela. So Trinidad is not strictly of South America, and not strictly of the Caribbean. It was developed as a plantation colony, and when I was born in 1932 it had a population of about 400,000. Of this, about 150,000 were Indians, Hindus and Muslims, nearly all of peasant origin, and nearly all from the Gangetic plain. This was my small community.

The bulk of this migration from India occurred after 1880. The deal was like this. People indentured themselves for five years to serve on the estates. At the end of this time they were given a piece of land, perhaps five acres, or a passage back to India. In 1917, because of agitation by Gandhi and others, the indenture system was abolished. Perhaps because of this the pledge of land or repatriation was dishonoured for many of the later arrivals. These people were absolutely destitute. They slept in the streets of Port of Spain, the capital. When I was a child I saw them. I suppose I didn't know they were destitute and they made no impression on me. This was part of the cruelty of the plantation colony.

I was born in a small country town called Chaguanas, two or three miles inland from the Gulf of Paria. Chaguanas was a strange name, in spelling and pronunciation, and many of the Indian people-they were in the majority in the area-preferred to call it by the Indian caste name of Chauhan. I was 34 when I found out about the name of my birthplace. I was living in London, having been in England for 16 years. I was writing my ninth book, a history of Trinidad; a human history, trying to re-create people and their stories. I used to go to the British Museum to read the Spanish documents about the region. These documents-recovered from the Spanish archives-were copied out for the British government in the 1890s at the time of a boundary dispute with Venezuela. The documents begin in 1530 and end with the disappearance of the Spanish empire.

I was reading about the foolish search for El Dorado, and the murderous interloping of the English hero, Sir Walter Raleigh. In 1595 he raided Trinidad, killed all the Spaniards he could, and went up the Orinoco looking for El Dorado. He found nothing, but when he went back to England he said he had. He had a piece of gold and some sand to show. He said he had hacked the gold out of a cliff on the bank of the Orinoco. The Royal Mint described the sand he asked them to assay as worthless, and other people said that he had bought the gold beforehand from North Africa. He then published a book to prove his point, and for four centuries people have believed that Raleigh had found something.

Then, as sometimes happens with confidence men, Raleigh was caught by his own fantasies. Twenty-one years later, old and ill, he was let out of prison to find the gold mines he said he had discovered. In this fraudulent venture his son died. The father, for the sake of his reputation, for the sake of his lies, had sent his son to his death. Raleigh, full of grief, with nothing left to live for, went back to London to be executed.

The story should have ended there. But Spanish memories were long-no doubt because their imperial correspondence was so slow: it might take up to two years for a letter from Trinidad to be read in Spain. Eight years afterwards, the Spaniards of Trinidad and Guiana were still settling their scores with the Gulf Indians. One day in the British Museum, I read a letter from the king of Spain to the governor of Trinidad. It was dated 12th October 1625.

"I asked you," the king wrote, "to give me some information about a certain nation of Indians called Chaguanes, who you say number above one thousand, and are of such bad disposition that it was they who led the English when they captured the town. Their crime hasn't been punished because forces were not available for this purpose and because the Indians acknowledge no master save their own will. You have decided to give them a punishment. Follow the rules I have given you; and let me know how you get on."

What the governor did, I don't know. I could find no further reference to the Chaguanes in the documents. What is true is that the little tribe of over a thousand-who would have been living on both sides of the Gulf of Paria-disappeared so completely that no one in the town of Chaguanas or Chauhan knew anything about them. The thought came to me in the Museum that I was the first person since 1625 to whom that letter of the king of Spain had a meaning. A disappearance, and then the silence of centuries.

We lived on the Chaguanes' land. Every day in term-time I walked from my grandmother's house, past the two or three main road stores, the Chinese parlour, the Jubilee Theatre, and the high-smelling little Portuguese factory that made cheap blue soap and cheap yellow soap in long bars that were put out to dry and harden in the mornings. Every day I walked past these eternal-seeming things to the Chaguanas government school. Beyond the school was sugar-cane, estate land, going up to the Gulf of Paria. The people who had been dispossessed would have had their own kind of agriculture, their own calendar, their own codes, their own sacred sites. They would have understood the Orinoco-fed currents in the Gulf of Paria. Their skills and everything else about them had been obliterated.

The world is always in movement. People have everywhere at some time been dispossessed. I suppose I was shocked by this discovery in 1967 about my birthplace because I had never had any idea about it. But that was the way most of us lived in the agricultural colony-blindly. There was no plot by the authorities to keep us in our darkness. It was simply that the knowledge wasn't there. That kind of knowledge about the Chaguanes would not have been considered important, and it would not have been easy to recover. They were a small tribe of aboriginal Indians. Such people-on the mainland, in what was called British Guiana-were known to us, and were a kind of joke. People who were loud and ill-behaved were known, to all groups in Trinidad, I think, as warrahoons. I used to think it was a made-up word, suggesting wildness. It was only when I began to travel in Venezuela, in my forties, that I understood that it was the name of a large aboriginal tribe there.

There was a vague story when I was a child-and to me now it is an unbearably affecting story-that at certain times aboriginal people came across in canoes from the mainland, walked through the forest in the south of the island, and at a certain spot picked some kind of fruit or made some kind of offering, and then went back across the Gulf of Paria to the sodden estuary of the Orinoco. The rite must have been of enormous importance to have survived the upheavals of 400 years, and the extinction of the aborigines in Trinidad. I can't remember anyone inquiring about this rite. Now the memory is lost; and that sacred site, if it existed, has become common ground.

What was past was past. I suppose that was the general attitude. And we Indians, immigrants from Asia, had that attitude to the island. We lived for the most part ritualised lives and were not yet capable of self-assessment, which is where learning begins. Half of us on this land of the Chaguanes were pretending-perhaps not pretending, perhaps only feeling, never formulating it as an idea-that we had brought a kind of India with us, as it were, which we could unroll like a carpet on the flat land.

My grandmother's house in Chaguanas was in two parts. The front part, of bricks and plaster, was painted white. It was like a kind of Indian house, with a grand balustraded terrace on the upper floor, and a prayer-room on the floor above that. It was ambitious in its decorative detail, with lotus capitals on pillars and sculptures of Hindu deities, done by people working only from a memory of things in India. In Trinidad it was an oddity. At the back of this house, and joined to it by an upper bridge room, was a timber building in the French Caribbean style. The entrance gate was at the side, between the two houses. It was a tall gate of corrugated iron. It made for a fierce kind of privacy.

So as a child I had a sense of two worlds, the world outside that tall corrugated-iron gate, and the world at home-or the world of my grandmother's house. It was a remnant of our caste sense, the thing that excluded and shut out. In Trinidad, where as new arrivals we were a disadvantaged community, that excluding idea was a kind of protection; it enabled us to live in our own way, according to our own rules, to live in our own fading India. It made for an extraordinary self-centredness. We looked inwards; we lived out our days; the world outside existed in a kind of darkness; we inquired about nothing.

There was a Muslim shop next door. The little loggia of my grandmother's shop ended against his blank wall. The man's name was Mian. That was all that we knew of him and his family. I suppose we must have seen him, but I have no mental picture now. We knew nothing of Muslims. This idea of strangeness, of the thing to be kept outside, extended even to other Hindus. For example, we ate rice in the middle of the day, and wheat in the evenings. There were some extraordinary people who reversed this natural order and ate rice in the evenings. I thought of these people as strangers. I must have been under seven then, because when I was seven this life of my grandmother's house in Chaguanas came to an end for me. We moved to the capital, and then to the hills to the northwest.

But the habits of mind engendered by this shut-in and shutting-out life lingered for quite a while. If it were not for the short stories my father wrote, I would have known almost nothing about the general life of our Indian community. Those stories gave me more than knowledge. They gave me a kind of solidity. They gave me something to stand on in the world. I cannot imagine what my mental picture would have been without those stories.

I was just old enough to have some idea of the Indian epics, the Ramayana in particular. The children who came five years or so after me in our extended family didn't have this luck. No one taught us Hindi. Sometimes someone wrote out the alphabet for us to learn, and that was that; we were expected to do the rest ourselves. So, as English penetrated, we began to lose our language. My grandmother's house was full of religion-there were many ceremonies and readings, some of which went on for days. But no one explained or translated for us who could no longer follow the language. So our ancestral faith receded, became mysterious, not pertinent to our daily life.

We made no inquiries about India or about the families people had left behind. When our ways of thinking had changed, and we wished to know, it was too late. I know nothing of the people on my father's side; I know only that some of them came from Nepal. Two years ago a kind Nepalese who liked my name sent me a copy of some pages from an 1872 gazetteer-like British work about India, Hindu Castes and Tribes as Represented in Benares. The pages listed-among a multitude of names-those groups of Nepalese in the holy city of Banaras who carried the name Naipal. That is all that I have.

Away from this world of my grandmother's house, where we ate rice in the middle of the day and wheat in the evenings, there was the great unknown-in this island of only 400,000 people. There were the African or African-derived people who were the majority. They were policemen; they were teachers. One of them was my very first teacher at the Chaguanas government school; I remembered her with adoration for years. There was the capital, where soon we would have to go for education and jobs; where we would settle permanently, among strangers. There were the white people, not all of them English; and the Portuguese and the Chinese, at one time also immigrants like us. And, more mysterious than these, were the people we called Spanish, 'pagnols, mixed people of warm brown complexions who came from the Spanish time, before the island was detached from Venezuela and the Spanish empire-a time beyond my child's comprehension.

To give you this idea of my background, I have had to call on knowledge and ideas that came to me much later, principally from my writing. As a child I knew almost nothing beyond what I had picked up in my grandmother's house. All children, I suppose, come into the world like that, not knowing who they are. But for the French child, say, that knowledge is waiting. That knowledge will be around them. It will come indirectly from the conversation of their elders. It will be in the newspapers and on the radio. At school the work of generations of scholars, scaled down for school texts, will provide some idea of France and the French.

In Trinidad, bright boy though I was, I was surrounded by areas of darkness. School elucidated nothing for me. I was crammed with facts and formulas. Everything had to be learned by heart; everything was abstract for me. Again, I do not believe there was a plan or plot to make our courses like that. What we were getting was standard school learning. In another setting it would have made sense. But with my limited social background, it was hard for me imaginatively to enter into other societies. I loved the idea of books, but I found it hard to read them. I got on best with things like Andersen and Aesop, timeless, placeless, not excluding. When at last in the sixth form I got to like some of our literature texts-Moli?re, Cyrano de Bergerac-I suppose it was because they had the quality of the fairytale.

When I became a writer, those areas of darkness around me as a child became my subjects. The land; the aborigines; the new world; the colony; the history; India; the Muslim world, to which I also felt myself related; Africa; and then England, where I was doing my writing. That was what I meant when I said that my books stand one on the other, and that I am the sum of my books. That was what I meant when I said that my background, the source and prompting of my work, was at once exceedingly simple and exceedingly complicated. You will have seen how simple it was in the country town of Chaguanas. And you will understand how complicated it was for me as a writer. Especially in the beginning, when the literary models I had-the models given me by what I can only call my false learning-dealt with entirely different societies. But perhaps you might feel that the material was so rich it would have been no trouble to get started and to go on. What I have said about the background, however, comes from the knowledge I acquired with my writing. The pattern in my work has only become clear in the last two months or so. Passages from old books were read to me, and I saw the connections. Until then the greatest trouble for me was to describe my writing to people, to say what I had done.

I was an intuitive writer, and remain so, when I am nearly at the end. I never had a plan. I followed no system. I worked intuitively. My aim every time was to do a book, to create something that would be easy and interesting to read. At every stage I could only work within my knowledge, sensibility, talent and worldview. Those things developed book by book. I had to do the books I did because there were no books about those subjects to give me what I wanted. I had to clear up my world, elucidate it, for myself.

I had to go to the documents in the British Museum and elsewhere, to get the true feel of the history of the colony. I had to travel to India because there was no one to tell me what the India my grandparents had come from was like. There was the writing of Nehru and Gandhi; and strangely it was Gandhi with his South African experience who gave me more, but not enough. There was Kipling; there were British-Indian writers like John Masters; there were romances by women writers. The few Indian writers who had come up at that time were middle-class people, town-dwellers; they didn't know the India we came from.

When that Indian need was satisfied, others became apparent: Africa, South America, the Muslim world. The aim has always been to fill out my world picture, and the purpose comes from my childhood: to make me more at ease with myself. Kind people have written asking me to go and write about Germany, say, or China. But there is much good writing already about those places; I am willing to depend there on the writing that exists. Those subjects are for other people. Those were not the areas of darkness I felt about me as a child. So, just as there is a development in my work, a development in narrative skill, knowledge and sensibility, so there is a kind of unity, a focus, though I might appear to be going in many directions.

When I began, I had no idea of the way ahead. I wished only to do a book. I was trying to write in England, where I stayed on after my years at university, and it seemed to me that my experience was very thin, was not truly the stuff of books. I could find in no book anything that came near my background. The young French or English person who wished to write would have found any number of models to set him on his way. I had none. My father's stories about our Indian community belonged to the past. My world was quite different. It was more urban, more mixed. The simple physical details of the chaotic life of our extended family-sleeping spaces, eating times, the sheer number of people-seemed impossible to handle. There was too much to be explained, both about my home life and about the world outside. At the same time there was also too much about us-our own ancestry and history-that I didn't know.

At last one day there came to me the idea of starting with the Port of Spain street to which we had moved from Chaguanas. There was no corrugated-iron gate shutting out the world there. The life of the street was open to me. It was an intense pleasure for me to observe it from the verandah. This was what I began to write about. I wished to write fast, to avoid too much self-questioning, and so I simplified. I suppressed the child-narrator's background. I ignored the racial and social complexities of the street. I explained nothing. I stayed at ground level, so to speak. I presented people as they appeared on the street. I wrote a story a day. The first stories were very short. I was worried about the material lasting long enough. But then the writing did its magic. The material began to present itself from many sources. The stories became longer; they couldn't be written in a day. Then the inspiration, which at one stage had seemed easy, rolling me along, came to an end. But a book had been written and I had in my own mind become a writer.

The distance between the writer and his material grew with the two later books; the vision was wider. Then intuition led me to a large book about our family life. During this book my ambition grew. But when it was over I felt I had done all that I could do with my island material. No matter how much I meditated on it, no further fiction would come.

Accident, then, rescued me. I became a traveller. I travelled in the Caribbean region and understood much more about the colonial set-up of which I had been part. I went to India, my ancestral land, for a year; it was a journey that broke my life in two. The books that I wrote about these two journeys took me to new realms of emotion, gave me a worldview I had never had, extended me technically. I was able in the fiction that then came to me to take in England as well as the Caribbean-and how hard that was to do. I was able also to take in all the racial groups of the island, which I had never before been able to do.

This new fiction was about colonial shame and fantasy-a book, in fact, about how the powerless lie about themselves, and lie to themselves, since it is their only resource. The book was called The Mimic Men. It was not about mimics. It was about colonial men mimicking the condition of manhood, men who had grown to distrust everything about themselves. Some pages of this book were read to me the other day-I hadn't looked at it for 30 years-and it occurred to me that I had been writing about colonial schizophrenia. I hadn't thought of it like that. I had never used abstract words to describe any writing purpose of mine. If I had, I would never have been able to do the book. The book was done intuitively, and only out of close observation.

I have done this little survey of the early part of my career to try to show the stages by which, in just ten years, my birthplace had altered or developed in my writing: from the comedy of street life to a study of a kind of widespread schizophrenia. What was simple had become complicated.

Both fiction and the travel-book form have given me my way of looking; for me all literary forms are equally valuable. It came to me, for instance, when I set out to write my third book about India-26 years after the first-that what was most important about a travel book were the people the writer travelled among. The people had to define themselves. A simple idea, but it required a new kind of book; it called for a new way of travelling. It was the very method I used later when I went, for the second time, into the Muslim world.

I have always moved by intuition alone. I have no system, literary or political. I have no guiding political idea. I think that probably lies with my ancestry. The Indian writer R K Narayan, who died last year, had no political idea. My father, who wrote his stories in a very dark time, and for no reward, had no political idea. Perhaps it is because we have been far from authority for many centuries. It gives us a special point of view. I feel we are more inclined to see the humour and pity of things.

I am near the end of my work now. I am glad to have done what I have done, glad creatively to have pushed myself as far as I could go. Because of the intuitive way in which I have written, and also because of the baffling nature of my material, every book has come as a blessing. Every book has amazed me; up to the moment of writing I never knew it was there. But the greatest miracle for me was getting started. I feel-and the anxiety is still vivid to me-that I might easily have failed before I began.