Word: blacking
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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This was the line of march: first bright Lutupen, the Samburu guide, with his spear and tribal finery, the yellow-and-black-bead cords crisscrossed on his chest, the tops of his ears sprouting the bead horns that gave the Samburu warrior, Toad thought, an air of medieval imp. Toad admired Lutupen's sense of style. Lutupen had slipped a trapezoid of broken mirror under his bead headband for decoration, so that he now had a kind of third eye, a window in the center of his forehead that flashed as he slipped along through the forest...
...died of a heart attack three years ago at the age of 40 that "anxiety was his truest feeling." Apprehension also comes with the territory. Naipaul was born an outsider 56 years ago in the British colony of Trinidad. A member of neither the white ruling class nor the black majority, he was part of the island's large, self-contained Indian community. As a child, he lived a Hindu village life in the country. In Port- of-Spain during World War II, he experienced a polyglot street life that included the language of American G.I.s. Later, as a scholarship...
...recently returned to India to gather material for his third book on the subcontinent, and things could be going more smoothly. A recent election in the southern state of Tamil Nadu has been disruptive. Madras' main streets are filled with festive tides of celebrators waving the red-and-black banners of the victorious Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam Party. Naipaul is trying to sort out the issues, which include the historic antagonism of South Indians toward traditional Brahman power. Eventually, he will decipher the complexities of culture and politics on paper, but for the moment, he says pointedly...
...tour of the new liberal Dixie. In texture and tone, the work is a departure for Naipaul. "I was not interested in what I thought; I was interested in what the people thought," he says. Working up to 14 hours a day, Naipaul roamed the old Confederacy talking to black intellectuals, redneck philosophers, white-collar workers and auto-factory hands now employed by the Japanese. The result is a book of scenes and voices and, of course, a layering of past and present. The South's agricultural and religious roots, its history of slavery, and the evolution of its race...
...road, Naipaul operates largely through honed instinct, avoiding official sources and searching for the obscure informant and off-center incident. Asked why he did not interview Reuben Greenberg, the black Jewish police chief of Charleston, S.C., Naipaul grimaces and says simply, "Too obvious." An ironic comment, considering that Naipaul, also a self-made man of many parts, is now widely considered to be England's greatest living writer. His own faceted history parallels the breakup of colonialism and mass migrations. Of London in the 1950s he says, "I had found myself at the beginning of a great movement of peoples...