Miguel Street by V. S. Naipaul

A stranger could drive through Miguel Street and just say 'Slum!' because he could see no more.  But we, who lived there, saw our street as a world, where everybody was quite different from everybody else.  Man-man was mad; George was stupid; Big Foot was a bully; Hat was an adventurer; Popo was a philosopher; and Morgan was our comedian.

In the vignette "The Mechanical Genius," the narrator of V. S. Naipaul's Miguel Street offers a brief sketch of his Uncle Bhakcu.  Bhakcu isn't quite a mechanical genius, though he fancies himself one.  Most of the time when he slides beneath an automobile he's trying to fix a problem that isn't there, and when he slides back out he's made things a little bit worse.  But he has a little more knowledge than his nephew, or most people, so that gives him a kind of relative prestige, even when the mechanic called in to fix his mistakes looks up angrily and says, "When you have all sort of ignorant people messing about with a engine the white people build with their own hands, what the hell else you expect?"  At which point Bhakcu winks at his nephew and says, "I think is the carburettor."

Though the characters whose lives make up the vignettes in Miguel Street are all different from one another, they are all, in a sense, like Bhakcu.  For Morgan, it's not cars but the homemade fireworks he makes that are his pride.  For Edward, it's ties he paints by hand, for Popo it is carpentry, for Titus Hoyt, it is a tutelary knowledge of letters and law.  Their gifts and passions are minor things, on an absolute scale, but they're not any more minor, I'd reckon, than those of people in small communities all the world round.  And yet there is a kind of common knowledge, often flouted but not denied, that such things are better left to whites--to English colonials, to American soldiers.  A lot of the obituaries for Naipaul, who died this week, talk about this big theme: the way that colonialism creates stunted societies and stunted people.  Bhakcu really does screw up the cars, and Titus Hoyt is the kind of person who brings "Volume 2 of the Everyman edition of Tennyson" as a gift, not knowing or willing to see just how incomplete the present is.

That makes Miguel Street sound rather cruel.  A lot of the humor is predicated on the pretensions of the residents of Miguel Street, just as the joke is ultimately on the proud protagonist of A House for Mr. Biswas.  But the stories seem to be to be full of empathy for the Miguel Street Club, who are presumably versions of the same folks that Naipaul knew growing up in Trinidad and who formed his first knowledge of the world.  Their pride is touching, not tragic, and perhaps the saddest error they make is assuming that the English and the Americans are any better than they are--that the biggest difference between Bhakcu and the (possibly) white engineers who designed his car is their inherent aptitude, and not a system of marginalization on a worldwide scale:

To hear Edward talk, you felt that America was a gigantic country inhabited by giants.  They lived in enormous houses and they drove the biggest cars in the world.

Edward used to say, 'Look at Miguel Street.  In America you think they have streets so narrow?  In America this street could pass for a sidewalk.'

Naipaul died too late.  If he'd passed away five, maybe ten years earlier, his savage treatment of his wife and mistress might have been minimized in his obituaries, but that's not the way the world leans anymore, much for the better.  It might have been easier to forget he once said that women can't write fiction, which just goes to show how sometimes only very intelligent people can make claims of such gross stupidity.  Nearly all of the vignettes in Miguel Street are about men, with the exception of one, "The Maternal Instinct," about a woman who has eight children by seven men, named Laura.  Laura's story, situated between tragedy and comedy, is not so different from those of the men, but it emphasizes how few female voices are really heard throughout the novel.  Nearly all of the men beat their wives, and the wives themselves are often used to provide a sitcommy kind of humor about nagging and henpecking.

Miguel Street doesn't extend the same empathetic eye toward the women of the Miguel Street, which is probably to say that the young Naipaul didn't pay enough attention to the women of the street where he grew up.  (He spent the rest of his life not giving women enough attention, or the wrong kind.)  But take it as it is: Miguel Street is, among other things, a story about growing up in a kind of masculine crucible, an instruction in how to be a man.  I loved the story "The Coward," about the street bully, Big Foot, who makes the narrator promise not to divulge his secret--that he once cried after cutting his foot on a shard of glass in the street--only to reveal it himself, after losing badly to a white American soldier in a highly publicized boxing match.  Big Foot is so embarrassed he has to leave Miguel Street--so many people do in these stories; for many of them life in Trinidad is so transitory--but the story itself suggests that Big Foot has been done dirty by some force larger than Miguel Street, something tied up with masculinity as well as colonialism and anti-blackness.

Miguel Street is very funny, even when it's very sad.  There's the story of the boy Elias, who takes and fails the Cambridge admittance exam several times, only to admit it is the "English and litritcher" and the "poultry" that have done him in.  I also liked the image of Eddoes, the rubbish collector, whose need to be seen as clean drives him to walk around all day with a toothbrush in his mouth.

In the end, the narrator--no doubt not far removed from Naipaul himself--leaves Miguel Street to go to England.  He leaves not just for a better life, but because it's become apparent to him that Bhakcu is not a mechanical genius, that the dreams of the people around him seem small and futile.  Walking out to the plane he sees his own shadow as "a dancing dwarf" on the tarmac, a painful image of what the real Naipaul seems to have felt about his own place in the world as a colonial subject.  He inflicted as much cruelty as he observed--James Wood calls him the "Wounder" as well as the "Wounded"--but what he observed he did so with a powerful vision and a bittersweet humor.