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1 Manias and Messiahs Man-man and the Madness of Miguel Street In a reverse of the traditional scholarship route, in 1960 V. S. Naipaul returned to Trinidad from England on a three-month government -sponsored scholarship. The stipulated three months stretched beyond a year as Naipaul, at the suggestion of then premier Eric Williams , undertook the project of a book-length essay on the Caribbean. The resulting publication, The Middle Passage, chronicles Naipaul’s visits to five Caribbean countries: Trinidad, British Guiana, Surinam, Martinique, and Jamaica. It begins, however, with a recounting of his voyage (via ship) from England to Trinidad, and some of the narrative in the first chapter concerns the madmen on board. First, there are the two men who are so deranged as to require keepers; they are mostly kept hidden and thus are the subjects of conversation rather than observation. The two men are black—in the specific racial terminology of the Caribbean—and are being returned to their islands with white guardians, all paid for by the British government. An elderly eccentric black woman and a “tall, handsome Negro [who] had had some mental trouble in England” are also being returned to the West Indies at England ’s expense.1 This last character provides some excitement for the passengers when the ship arrives in the West Indies and begins making stops at various islands. On these stops, the ship takes on passengers for its return trip to England, mixing those few passengers “cruising” the Caribbean or returning to an island later on the itinerary with the new emigrants. This mixing requires the erection of physical barriers to enforce the class divides on the ship, barriers that were previously ignored. The “tall, handsome Negro,” who has been used to strolling the decks for hours, creates a scene by breaking the newly erected barriers. Several crew members attempt to re-erect the barriers, only to have the 24 Manias and Messiahs man break them again. Ultimately, a loud commotion brings the various passengers to watch as he “walk[s] measuredly round the deck, breaking barriers, his calm stride unrelated to his hysterical words, which carr[y] across the ship.”2 The man is eventually subdued with an injection and caged below, presumably where the black madmen are being stowed. Thus begins Naipaul’s return journey to the Caribbean, where the rigid hierarchies of race and class were palpably colonial at the very time the region was moving toward self-rule. As evident even in the microcosm of the ship’s “society,” resistance to these hierarchies was frequently performative and marked as mad. In the book, Naipaul later judges his representation of such resistance to be “romantic about the healing power, in such a culture, of political or racial assertion,” though The Middle Passage is more often than not read as presenting a pessimistic perspective of the region.3 Taken as a whole, the book is an uneven mixture of Naipaul’s initial “romantic” optimism with his persistent criticism about Trinidad and the Caribbean. This contradictory combination also underlies his early fictional work. In this chapter, I examine the connections between this ambivalent view of a soon-to-be-sovereign Caribbean and Naipaul’s representations of resistance as minor neurotic manifestations and outright “mental trouble” in Miguel Street. It may seem strange to begin my exploration of representations of insanity in Caribbean literature with Miguel Street, because of both the author’s reputation and the text’s disrepute. In his Nobel Prize biography, V. S. Naipaul’s country is listed as Great Britain, although his birthplace is noted as Trinidad . He is both praised and excoriated as a writer from everywhere and from nowhere. Derek Walcott writes in a 1987 review of Naipaul: “Despite his horror of being claimed, we West Indians are proud of Naipaul, and that is his enigmatic fate as well, that he should be so cherished by those he despises.”4 I find Walcott’s approach useful, even decades later, since it allows for a “claiming” of Naipaul for the Caribbean literary canon without undecidable debates about subject or subject position. At the time Naipaul published Miguel Street, however, these debates were not yet heated. As Naipaul continued to produce an unusually large body of work, critics began to separate his writings into phases, and Naipaul himself began to speak of his work in these terms. In a 1974 interview with Ian Hamilton, Naipaul describes his early work as concerned with a “great...

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