Audio By Vocalize
In 2001, the panel of the Albert Nobel Committee announced Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul as winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. The announcement touched off a storm. Many accused the Nobel Committee of endorsing the seemingly contemptuous attitude the controversial author seemed to harbour for his country of origin, Trinidad and Tobago, as seen in his work.
V.S Naipaul, who went to University of Oxford in 1950 on a Trinidad government scholarship and later became a British citizen, once told an Indian newspaper he did not consider himself Indian because, according to him, “they do not understand literature there.”
So, when the announcement came, even Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka, whom Naipaul had earlier dismissed after Soyinka won the Nobel Prize in 1986, recalled Naipaul’s infamous remark that the Swedish Academy was “pissing on literature from a great height.” So, why was much of the literary world so opposed to V.S Naipaul’s coronation as a Nobel laureate? In much of his work, he casts what the reader may perceive as broken societies.
In Miguel Street, he casts the education system in the world of his setting as a place steeped in uncertainty and guesswork. One of his characters, Elias, sits a national examination in one part of the country and when he fails, he tries to sit the same in another part of the country. He likens passing an exam to taking part in a lottery from various corners of a country and when Elias finally passes, he attacks those who come to break the good news.
