Opposition Leader: Sir Vidia’s work was an inspiration
(Trinidad Express) Opposition leader Kamla Persad-Bissessar has extended condolences to the family of global literary icon, Sir Vidiadhar Surujprasad (VS) Naipaul.
Naipaul, 85, died at his home in London on Saturday.
In a statement, PersadBissessar said that tributes will be poured from around the world by some of the greatest contemporary literary and to a lesser extent, political figures would be a testament to Naipaul’s unparalleled greatness as a writer.
She said Naipaul’s work redefined the craft of literature and reinvented the art of nonfiction writing to reflect the turbulent historical era that he was born into.
However, she said for Trinidadians, Naipaul holds an even more special place, having been born and raised here and having dedicated his early and undoubtedly greatest works of fiction to the nation that shaped his aspirations, sensibilities, consciousness and lifelong desires in every possible way.
Persad-Bissessar said Naipaul’s work is especially dear to her given that his writings was inspiring and uplifting.
She said: “for people of my generation, the children of the post-Colonial society that was Trinidad and Tobago, a society and people struggling to find and assume our identity after centuries of being ruled as marginal addendums to a social, economic and political framework that previously treated us as merely tolerated outcasts, Sir Vidia’s work was inspiring and uplifting.
Like so many of my local and regional contemporaries, I would have been raised on books from Europe and England which described and deified people, cultures and civilizations that essentially reflected all that I could never be, until, as teenager and young adult I read Miguel Street, The Mystic Masseur and A House for Mr. Biswas.
And it was in these works, still so dear and personal to me, as they also are undoubtedly to many other of my countrymen and women, that Sir Vidia’s greatest contribution to my country and the world became not only clear, but inspiring in the greatest possible way.
For it was in these works that he made our society, our everyday working class people, who, until then, barely got recognized as worthy, into the literary heroes that ranked with the greatest characters and societies of every other renowned English writer to date.
To read our dialect, or idiosyncrasies, our paradoxes, our flaws, our beauty, our struggles, our lessons and our indelible richness of humanity portrayed so frankly, so unashamedly, so proudly and so intellectually in a Naipaul literary piece gave me personally a sense of pride and belonging, a sense of worth in a global and regional society, something that no other writer had previously given and to date, no other writer has produced to a prolific reader as myself.”
Naipaul was born in 1932 to journalist Seepersad Naipaul and Droapatie Capildeo at Lion House in Chaguanas.