A man from another hemisphere

There was a time in my life when I read for the sake of entertainment.  To pass time that otherwise stood still.  Those were the days before television and the internet when I read "popular" fiction that was almost always at least a decade old because in the small town where I lived it took a while for the outside world to reach.

I certainly was entertained.  Whether they were about spies working on behalf of Her Majesty, or criminals of various types, or simply concocted outlandish tales, I was amused and entertained.

But, none of those books left me any wiser.  They even contributed to the rot within.

It was towards the end of my teenage years that I turned to a different kind of fiction.  Books that helped me understand the human condition.  And me.  And how I fit into the larger story of humanity.  These books were not entertainment.  Often they required me to pay attention and think.  To think about what I read, to think about the world, and to think about myself.

In those early years of reading to understand, the authors were mostly Europeans and Americans.  The world described by the Russians and the British and the Americans was one that I had to visualize in my mind.  They were unlike anything that I was familiar with.  In those tales, the air was not hot and humid, the soil was not dusty, monsoons did not dictate lives, the clothes were different and so were everything else.

But, what united me the reader, the characters, and the writer, was simply that we were all humans.  Humans who eventually died.  And before death happens, we laugh, we cry, we fight, we eat, we dream, we fail, we succeed, we love, we marry, we travel, we worry, we are human.

Yet, there was always an urge to find and read stories that were more relatable.  Stories about brown people.  By brown people.  Brown people in their original lands.  Brown people in alien lands.  Brown people writing about brown people like me who left their original lands and are now somewhere else.  A somewhere else that once upon a time existed only in our imaginations that were created by authors who were Europeans and Americans.

I recently picked up a work by a brown man.  A brown whose people left their old homes. To a new place far away.  And then he moved again.  To a place of whites.  To a place that was familiar because of the whites who came to the land of brown peoples.

It has been only a few pages.  But, I can see, again, why I was drawn to his work.  He helps me understand myself, with lines like this:

That idea of ruin and dereliction, of out-of-placeness, was something I felt about myself: a man from another hemisphere, another background, coming to rest in middle life in the cottage of a half-neglected estate […] with few connections to the present […] I felt that my presence in that old valley was part of something like an upheaval, a change in the course of the history of the country.

None of the white authors that I read spoke so personally to me.

The citation for the Nobel Prize for Literature to him included this:

Prize motivation: "for having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories."

I am confident that I will understand more about myself and the human condition through V.S. Naipaul's The Enigma of Arrival.