A Turn in the South

Naipaul seeks to know about the South through a connection with his own experiences. There is an element of inductive reasoning in his writing in which he finds southerners as extra-religious based on his informants, both black and white, who seemingly confirm this hypothesis. Of course, there is a danger in how he renders an understanding of the South—we are to trust his sources, assume the sample is varied and valid, as well as have faith in the complete nature of the information provided.

Each point raises cause for concern, but I don’t think Naipaul was trying to make sweeping generalizations with his writing as much as provide a different bias. Naipaul makes no attempt to hide his experiences as a boy in Trinidad, his education show more in England, or his Indian heritage. In fact, it seems that these aspects of his character may enrich his commentary. There was also an obvious attempt to let narratives and their possible meaning occur as naturally as they could under the given circumstances. He states that “travel of the sort I was doing, travel on a theme, depends on accidents: the books read on the journey, the people met." The assumption is that Naipaul was simply allowing his informants to represent themselves. Who he chose to interview, what he may have asked them, and what he hoped to find exists in tension with what these people actually said. Assuming they were accurately quoted, I believe they were diverse enough to convince the reader that Naipaul avoided one select group over another. Black radicals, jaded politicians, whimsical writers, fundamentalist Christians, yuppie businessmen, iconoclastic ideologues, and other characters speak in concert to provide an understanding, while incomplete, of particular southern mentalities. Even more surprisingly, Naipaul admits when certain people were rude to him, uninteresting or uninterested, surprisingly likable, or downright elusive, which allows the reader to intimate his biases and decipher the information accordingly.

This approach to rendering the South may be the only reasonable way to do so because to understand the South is to negotiate the different conflicting voices all speaking with supposed authority. Naipaul leaves us without an epilogue or conclusion, but can we blame him? The book is a gestalt, as is the South. There is no monolithic South and no single group has the privilege to singularly express southern identity. Any major conclusions would have inevitably been an attempt to synthesize the material into a cohesive understanding of southern identity, but that is simply not the point of the book.

Globalism, while never directly addressed, is omnipresent in the book. Naipaul draws historical parallels and connections with his birthplace of Trinidad—one informant even professes that his family at one time had a legal claim to the island. In another passage, Naipaul insinuates continuity between swept yards in the South, Trinidad, and even Japan, which to him represent the shared cultural values of order and cleanliness. Interviewees also express concern, excitement, and everything in between regarding the emerging global industrialization that is occurring in the South. Immigration, slavery, and global capitalism are all directly discussed by both the author and his informants, but no single understanding of how the South has interacted with the rest of the world is presented. In a way, the global/local intersection is implied more than it is ever stated in the book. Many of the informants seem to have an awareness of how they are perceived by the world, but most of them seem oblivious to how the world has shaped them.

At one point, Naipaul observes an “almost Indian obsession of the South with religion, the idea of life beyond the senses." This line struck me because it not only illustrates his preoccupation with southern religious life, but it draws a direct connection between his culture and the culture he is observing. It is in sentences like this that Naipaul reveals an emotional involvement with his subject. The religiosity of the South seems omnipresent to him as he speaks to each person about their experiences and opinions of the region. Honestly, it’s possible that many of his informants may have been posturing for the author, but this proves his point regardless. Whether genuine or not, it seems that most of those he spoke with felt the need to address religion to some extent as a factor in southern identity. The pioneer mentality is another reoccurring theme, but religious obsession is shown as a shared feature across all social levels. His quote also compared southern religiosity with Indian religiosity, which seems to provide a means for Naipaul to better understand and empathize with his subjects. I think the “obsession with religion” he found is better understood as an ongoing negotiation with a historical institution. Southerners are forced to define themselves within or against religious institutions because of their prominent role in Southern social life. Many of his informants most likely spoke about religion because they assume it is something with which they are expected to define themselves against. show less

Reading Naipaul always reminds me how well my background and upbrining predict the course of my life. Naipul, by contrast, is a marvel of self-creation.

Naipaul does a fair job of taking us through the South of the US in the late 1980s. Seeking out a broad spectrum of blacks and whites he takes us geographically and issue wise through the whole region. The effect, however, is not to take us not too far from our own cliched views and stereotypes. There is broadness of subject but not enough depth. When Naipaul refers back to his native Trinidad and brings up and compares the slave and black experience there with the South we then get some interesting fresh insights. The South may be too large, complex, and unsettled a subject for anyone, not alone, for someone just passing through. Having only read the novel A Bend in the River from this author's many other works, I can only guess that show more his strength is in his fictional works and there he is a master.

Quotes: (page 29) “A lawyer I met said that, to understand, it was necessary to remember that 120 years ago or so there had been slavery. For poor white people race was their identity. Someone well off could walk away from that issue could find another cause for self-esteem; but it wasn't that easy for a man with little money or education, without race he would lose his idea of who he was.
I spoke about my weekend with Howard and Hetty. Hetty had a strong idea of her racial and family identity, and yet she also had a high regard for Mr. Bowen, whom she considered a good man. Did that mean anything? The lawyer thought not. Southern white people would do anything for black families with whom they had a relationship, but that attitude stopped there; it wasn't extended to blacks in general.”

(page 66) “He told me about the initials. African Methodist Episcopalian. The church had had it's two hundredth anniversary that year, he said. African? Did it have something to do with Africa? No. It had been established by an ex-slave, Richard Allen, when he found that he was shut out of the white churches. And that was Bob Waymer's theme; the solidarity that had come to black people from being shut out, the necessity that had driven them to found their own institutions---and the breakdown that had occurred with the ending of segregation.”

(page 106) “He was concerned, even obsessed, as his father had been by the superficial destruction of the South---the highways, the fast-food chains---and pained by the alienation of some of the plantations to people and firms from the outside.
The past was a dream of purity, the past as a cause for grief, the past as religion: it is the very prompting of the Shias of Islam to nobility and sacrifice, the dream of the good time of the Prophet and the first four caliphs, before greed and ambition destroyed the newly saved world. It was the very prompting of the Confederate Memorial in Columbia. And that very special Southern past, and cause, could be made pure only if it was removed from the squalor of the race issue.”

(page 227) “In the colonial days of the British West Indies-for about a hundred years after the abolition of slavery-the black people had no heroes. They began to get heroes very late, and these heroes were sportsmen, cricketeers mainly. No other kind of hero was possible in that limited society. But then, when a political life developed, towards the end of the colonial period, West Indian blacks acquired leaders, union men in many cases, who then became political leaders and later, in independence, prime ministers. For these early leaders who were their very own, West Indian blacks had more than adulation. They wished these leaders to represent them, and more than in a parliamentary way. They wished their leaders( who had started as poor as everybody else) to be rich (by whatever means) and powerful and glorious. The glory of the black leader became the glory of his people. The leader lived (or lived it up) on behalf of his people; and the people lived through their leader. Ordinary ideas of morality and propriety did not apply. A leader wasn't required to be modest and correct; those were the virtues of another world. A leader was a black man with a responsibility: to be grand, larger than life, for the sake of all blacks. The idea of the leader-which caused such havoc in the West Indies-has changed in recent times, but it is still there.
Something like this black political adulation seemed to be at the back of the Presley cult. It was strange-to me- that music should have carried so much of a people's emotional needs.”

book published 1989 show less

It's bound to be intriguing when an opinionated intellectual from foreign parts does a book about your native land, and so it is in this case. Naipaul occasionally shines in his interviews, but at other times he just fails to connect. I don't worship at the shrine of college football, but anyone who thinks that the University of Alabama's cross-state rival is Alabama State has obviously not been paying attention. There's at least as much "Naipaul" as "South" in this book, which doesn't seem to have been the author's intention. But it's worth your time anyway, especially if you live here.

A rather dry and monotonous account of the author's travels in the deep south, the so called bible belt. A dull landscape occasionally enlivened by interesting anecdotes like the piece about Elvis.

This book was a slow read for me. At times, I felt like I was trudging through it.

The author sometimes uses phrases and sayings that may be common in England or Trinidad. But these phrases and sayings are awkward and almost out of place when used to describe the American South.

Some reviews dubbed this book as an "even handed," almost objective look at the South by an outsider. But I thought the author frequently applied his experiences and values from a similarly agrarian former slave society, Trinidad. This made for great insight and comparisons but not the "even handed" approach described by some reviewers.

I did enjoy the last chapter about Chapel Hill and tobacco road, where I thought the author was at his best: so descriptive you show more can smell the tobacco, feel the scorching sun, and see the red earth. One interesting technique he used was interweaving the work of a local poet, describing childhood on a tobacco farm. show less

http://www.verspagen.nl/modules.php?name=Reviews&rop=showcontent&id=10

I started reading Naipaul's travel books with Beyond Belief, i.e., one of the later ones. Now I read A Turn in the South, which I picked up in a translated Dutch version called Het Diepe Zuiden (lit.: The Deep South). I must say that I was a bit dissapointed, but I must hasten to add that this is probably because of the very poor translation (by Tinke Davids). So, let's back that up with some examples:

1. On p. 207 of my version (Pandora pocket), which is near to the end of chapter 4 (Tuskegee), we find a sentence that says "En niemand (...) kon mij verzekeren dat de universiteit zich een faculteit kon veroorloven voor dat schitterende ruimtevaartgebouw". This is show more where Naipaul comments on the grant that Tuskegee received for a new building for areospace research, wondering whether they can afford to also hire researchers to work in it. In the original English, he must have used the word "faculty", which means the research and teaching staff (i.e., people) of the university, but which could also refer to an organisational part (like "department" or "school") of the university ("Faculty of Aerospace"). In Dutch, our word "Faculteit" only refers to this latter meaning of "Faculty", and we do not use the word in reference to researchers or teachers. The translator started from this, and seems unaware of the other (English) meaning of the word. This leads to a rather strange sentence in Dutch... The correct translation would have read something like "En niemand (...) kon mij verzekeren dat de universiteit zich de onderzoekers kon veroorloven voor dat schitterende ruimtevaartgebouw".

2. As a translation of the term "shotgun houses", the translator consistently uses "schietgeweer". I did not know the term shotgun house, but it is explained nicely on http://bywater.org/Arch/shotgun.htm. Now, "schiet" (shot or shoot) "geweer" (gun) is (again) a rather literal translation, but it sounds awfully silly in Dutch. It's the kind of term that (in the days when I was young) 5-year old boys would use to refer to their toy, and which a grown-up would smilingly recognize as a pleonasm (which gun can you fire without a shot?). The English accepts shotgun as correct vocabulary, but this does not mean you should translate it litterally. If the term was used to refer to the actual weapon, "jachtgeweer" (lit.: rifle used for hunting) would have been a better translation, but in the context of the houses, I feel that just "geweer" (lit.: rifle or gun) would have been fine ("geweerhuizen") possibly with a footnote explaining the term along the lines of the above weblink.

These are just examples, the whole translation has an atmosphere of clumsiness and artificial language constructions. A Dutchman for whom this would be the introduction to Naipaul, would be unable to appreciate the natural fluency of the language I know from Beyond Belief. Naipaul is truly a great author, exactly for his style of writing, which is convincing because of the natural fluency it has. Although this is lost in this translation, I enjoyed this book, for the creativity and often surprising insights of its author. When I find the opportunity and time, I will re-read it in English. show less