Naipaul and The Traditions Of Travel

Abstract One can flesh out the notion of Naipaul’s “almost genetic” uprootedness by arguing that, as almost all the indigenous peoples of the Caribbean were exterminated by European colonists and as contemporary Caribbeans are therefore descended from introduced populations, the inhabitants of the region are deracines pur sang. In these terms, the displacement of Naipaul and other Antillean writers to England (most concentratedly in the 1950s), can be read as a response, several generations later, to the extraordinary violence of that ancestral exile that entailed suffering the middle passage or, in the case of Naipaul’s forebears, crossing the kala pani (black water) as they were shipped out from India to Trinidad as indentured laborers.