Finding the Centre

I was born in Baltimore. I've always struggled with the question "Where are you from?", but I suppose it all started for me there. My grandparents lived in Bel Air and Severna Park. In Severna Park, they'd been Marylanders for generations. My great-grandfather built yachts for Presidents when Baltimore was still one of the great boatyards of the world. My grandfather who married his daughter was a bit of an upstart: his father was of older stock but his mother was a first generation American who parents had fled Bismarck's impostition of the Zollverein across hitherto independent German states in a time when Deutschland referred to a region rather than a country.

In Severna Park my grandparents kept a servant, Willie May. She was probably called negro, colored and black over the course of her life, but I just knew her as part of the family. The most resiliant part of her legacy over the years has been her chicken recipe, which my own wife (who never met Willie May) has even prepared. There's something inherently African about the chicken in a strange way. Even though it's origins are in Southeast Asia, the chicken became a basic meat staple after history started being recorded in most places. The Old Testement doesn't mention the bird once, but it figures prominantly at the start of the new. Chickens and their bones also feature in many a Carribean Voodoo ritual descended from African magical traditions.

V. S. Naipaul's Finding the Centre is a familiarly American tale, in the same vein as Mark Twain methinks. His description of exploring his immigrant hertitage as an East Indian who grew up in the West Indies is incredibly familiar to me and probably any other American, North or South, who has delved into genealogy. So many cultures thrown together in a mish mash over the course of history. Alexander Hamilton too was a product of the British Caribbean. Like one can really understand the difference between the Spanish culture and the Germanic contribution in those few scenes of Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory when the protaganist finds himself on a homestead in Mexico.

It's easy to forget the African component to what makes us Americans. So many Africans were brought here as slaves and stripped of their identity and their culture. But, nevertheless, those things persisted. Ideas are hard to kill. I still remember visiting Salem, Massachusetts with young Alora & Brittan and watching a reënactment of the witch trials. The role of Africans and their ideas about magic were pivotal in seducing those young girls to betray their elders.

Naipaul's ancestry was Indian, but, like myself, he was several generations removed from the immigration event. He grew up in Trinidad and the "Prologue to an Autobiography" explores how he learned about his past as a child and then in several stages of his adulthood. Much like I visited the obelisk raised to my ancestor Hallvard Graatop, Naipaul explored the archives of the newspaper in Trinidad his father wrote for and delved into the story of where his family came from in India. Persuit of one's past ever teaches us about ourselves.

The second half of Naipaul's book explores the slow failure of a former French African colony. While Naipaul gives us no Hindi he is more than happy to pepper this section with French. Echos of the British Raj and 1066 in a single book! It is fascinating to see him repeatedly perplexed that Africans count him as a European despite his dark skin similar to theirs. As if Indo-european was some culturally appropriative fiction. Also fascinating is his empathy for fellow Caribbeans whose naivité was exploited by the Africans. One really gets a sense that America has made something new out of the black people as well as the white.

While he's been an author on my to read list for some time now, I didn't realize how much I'd relate to Naipaul. In Severna Park the room I used to stay in had a National Geographic map of the Caribbean on the wall. For me at the time it was all Crusoe and Blackbeard. I've since seen the coast of Honduras and studied many of the islands. But Naipaul's writing adds a familiarity. I'll definitely be seeking out more of his work and I hope his fiction is as good.