Mimic Men In-Class Exercise--Excerpts from Naipaul's travel narrative of the Caribbean, The Middle Passage (1962)

Your first challenge, before you can begin thinking about your passage's relationship to the themes, characters, and/or events of The Mimic Men, is to make sure you understand what Naipaul is scorning or complaining about. I've included some suggested glosses in parentheses:

Excerpt #1 (the "squalor," cynicism, and fickleness of popular politics in postwar Trinidad):
Nationalism was impossible in Trinidad.  In the colonial society every man had to be for himself; every man had to grasp whatever dignity and power he was allowed....To understand this is to understand the squalor of the politics that came to Trinidad in 1946 when, after no popular agitation, universal suffrage was declared....The new politics were reserved for the enterprising, who had seen their prodigious commercial possibilities.  There were no parties, only individuals.  Corruption, not unexpected, aroused only amusement and even mild approval: Trinidad has always admired the 'sharp character' who, like the sixteenth-century picaroon of Spanish literature, survives and triumphs by his wits in a place where it is felt that all eminence is arrived at by crookedness....

This was an ugly world, where the picaroon hero...was beaten almost to death when found out, and had therefore to get in his blows first whenever possible; where the weak were humiliated; where the powerful never appeared and were beyond reach; where no one was allowed any dignity and everyone had to impose himself; an uncreative society, where war was the only profession.  (72-3)

Excerpt #2 (Trinidadians' propensity to look to America as its cultural standard of reference, even as they decry the British cultural imperialism under which they suffered during the colonial era):
Trinidad considers itself, and is acknowledged by the other West Indian territories to be, modern.  It has night clubs, restaurants, air-conditioned bars, supermarkets, soda fountains, drive-in cinemas and a drive-in bank.  But modernity in Trinidad means a little more.  It means a constant alertness, a willingness to change, a readiness to accept anything which films, magazines and comic strips appear to indicate as American.  Beauty queens and fashion parades are modern.  Modernity might also lie in a name like Lois--pronounced Loys in Trinidad--which came to the island in the 1940s through Lois Lane, the heroine of the American Superman comic strip.  Simple radio is not modern.  Commercial radio is: when I ws a boy not to know the latest commercial jingle was to be primitive....

Modernity in Trinidad, then, turns out to be the extreme susceptibility of people who are unsure of themselves and, having no taste or style of their own, are eager for instruction.  (46-7)

To the Trinidad mind...no absurdity attaches to the pretence of being American in Trinidad; and while much energy has been spent in the campaign against Wordsworth ["because daffodils are not flowers Trinidad schoolchildren know"], no one has spoken out against the fantasy which Trinidadians live out every day of their lives.  (65)

Excerpt #3 (what he sees as the "dead end" of race-based cultural nationalism and "protest literature," à la the African-American "Black Arts Movement" of the 1960s):
Living in a borrowed culture, the West Indian, more than most, needs writers to tell him who he is and where he stands.  Here the West Indian writers have failed.  Most have so far only reflected and flattered the prejudices of their race or colour groups....

The involvement of the Negro with the white world is one of the limitations of West Indian writing, as it is the destruction of American Negro writing.  The American Negro's subject is his blackness.  This cannot be the basis of any serious literature, and it has happened again and again that once the American Negro has made his statement, his profitable protest, he has nothing to say.  With two or three exceptions, the West Indian writer has so far avoided the American Negro type of protest writing, but his aims have been equally propagandist:  to win acceptance for his group. (68-9)

For the uneducated masses, quick to respond to racial stirrings and childishly pleased with destructive gestures, the protest leader will always be a hero.  The West Indies will never have a shortage of such leaders, and the danger of mob rule and authoritarianism will never cease to be real.  The paternalism of colonial rule will have been replaced by the jungle politics of rewards and revenge, the text-book conditions for chaos.  (231)

Excerpt #4 (the need for an artist who can deflate, rather than flatter, the narcicsssm of the West Indian middle class):
The insecure wish to be heroically portrayed.  Irony and satire, which might help more, are not acceptable....The Trinidadian expects his novels...to have a detergent purpose, and it is largely for this reason that there are complaints about the scarcity of writing about what is called the middle class.

In fact there is a good deal of West Indian writing about the middle class, but the people tend to be so indistinguishable from white and are indeed so often genuinely white that the middle class cannot recognize itself.  It is not easy to write about the middle class.  The most exquisite gifts of irony and perhaps malice would be required to keep the characters from slipping into an unremarkable mid-Atlantic whiteness.  They would have to be treated as real people with real problems and responsibilities and affections--and this has been done--but they would also have to be treated as people whose lives have been corrupted by a fantasy which is their cross.  Whether an honest exploration of this will ever be attempted is doubtful.  The gifts required, of subtlety and brutality, can grow only out of a mature literature.... (68-9)

Excerpt #5 (his profound disregard for Trinidadian popular culture):
...Trinidad was and remains a materialist immigrant society, continually growing and changing, never settling into any pattern, always retaining the atmosphere of the camp....All this has combined to give it its special character, its ebullience and irresponsibility.  And more:  a tolerance which is more than tolerance:  an indifference to virtue as well as to vice....[It] was this...which now, on my return, assaulted me....

Port-of-Spain is the noisiest city in the world....[T]he radios and the rediffusion sets do the talking, the singing, the jingling; the steel bands do the booming and the banging....In restaurants...[s]tunned, temples throbbing, you champ and chew, concentrating on the working of your jaw muscles.  In a private home...[i]f there are more than three, dancing will begin.  Sweat-sweat-dance-dance-sweat.  Loud, loud, louder....Jump-jump-sweat-sweat-jump....

...All through the night the dogs will go on, in a thousand inextricably snarled barking relays, rising and falling, from street to street and back again, from one end of the city to another.  And you will wonder how you stood it for eighteen years, and whether it was always like this.  (54-6)