Half-World

By R.Z. Sheppard

THE RETURN OF EVA PERON, WITH THE KILLINGS IN TRINIDAD by V.S. Naipaul Knopf; 228 pages; $10

With this collection of essays, V.S.

Naipaul blows his cover as Joseph Conrad's secret agent to the abandoned worlds of imperialism. Naipaul was born in Trinidad of Hindu descent and, like Teodor Jozef Konrad Korzeniowski, made England his home. Like Conrad, Naipaul writes of social upheaval, solitude, madness and evil, but as they apply to the colonized, not the colonizers. And he is merciless.

On black power fronts in Africa and the Caribbean: "Racial redemption is as irrelevant for the Negro as for everybody else. It obscures the problems of a small independent country with a lopsided economy, the problems of a fully 'consumer' society that is yet technologically untrained and without the intellectual means to comprehend the deficiency."

On white, middle-class groupies of Third World revolution: "The people who wish themselves on societies more fragile than their own, all those people who in the end do no more than celebrate their own security."

On Argentina, before, during and after Juan and Eva Peron: "There is no history in Argentina. There are no archives; there are only graffiti and polemics and school lessons. Schoolchildren in white dust coats are regularly taken round the Cabildo building in the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires to see the relics of the War of Independence. The event is glorious; it stands in isolation; it is not related, in the textbooks or in the popular mind, to what immediately followed: the loss of law, the seeking out of the enemy, endless civil wars, gangster rule."

On Joseph Mobutu as Africa's stylish nihilist: "Mobutism simplifies the world, the concept of responsibility and the state, and simplifies people. Zaire's accession to power and glory has been made to appear so easy; the plundering of the inherited Belgian state has been so easy, the confiscations and nationalizations, the distribution of big shadow jobs. Creativity itself now begins to appear as something that might be looted, brought into being by decree."

These and other equally withering opinions were written in the early '70s when, between novels, Naipaul visited Trinidad, Zaire, Argentina and Uruguay. The resulting essays are partly coroner's reports on would-be redeemers, partly sources for settings and personality traits that Naipaul later used in his novels. Zaire's Mobutu, with his brew of futurism and ancestor worship, is clearly the model for the remote leader of the Central African nation described in A Bend in the River (1979). The confused longings and demagogy of Michael de Freitas, a Trinidadian cult leader who was hanged for murder in 1975, are reflected in Guerrillas (1975). There are touches of pathos in the studiously detached account of De Freitas' career as a contemporary Emperor Jones. The problems of fitting the ritual masks of modernism over Africa's colonial scars are treated with impatient sympathy. But in Argentina, Naipaul seems to walk on a decaying planet where a succession of carnivores feed on a gullible mass and a demoralized middle class. It is a place where the grotesque is made to seem normal. In 1972 the inflation rate is 60% a year and rising; urban guerrillas kidnap and rob at will; the Ford Falcons of the secret police snatch people off the streets of Buenos Aires as pedestrians go about their business. Peron returns, as does the embalmed body of Eva, "the blond hair as rich as in the time of health."

Naipaul looks out over the fertile pampas and sees degeneration and illusion. Even Argentina's most famous citizen, Jorge Luis Borges, "a great writer, a sweet and melancholy poet," is seen as clinging to a bogus past of noble battles fought for the establishment of the fatherland. Meanwhile, the sons and daughters of settlers from England and the Continent live behind the fac,ade of European culture and are slowly brutalized.

Naipaul obviously reveres the institutions of European culture and is deeply disturbed when he finds them mimicked. His is the fierce attachment of the immigrant, the brilliant Trinidad-born Indian who left his small island to become a British literary star. Out of that background he has forged his strange and isolated role: the writer of society with no society to call his own.

--:R.Z. Sheppard

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