Politics of Empathy in V.S. Naipaul's A Turn in the South

Abstract

Taking into mind the idea that trauma is the delayed response to an unexpected or overwhelming violent event or events that are not fully graspedas they occur, but return in repeated flashbacks, nightmares, and other repetitive phenomena especially in the events like the Holocaust, other genocides, terrorism, slavery, aspects of colonialism etc, V.S. Naipaul’sA Turn in the Southis manifestation of his trauma. His early experience in Trinidad has a link to the South. The plight of community and racial politics of Trinidad which he witnessed being an indenture labours of Indian bacskground can be traced back in the life of Afro-American who were living in American South. All these things have created a empathy in the psyche of Naipaul but his empathy, though he thinks is for Southerner, is not only for people of South but for himself because his own traumatic experience makes him to relate Trinidad with South.