Homelessness as Diaspora Aesthetics: A Post-colonial Reading of V.S. Naipaul's The Enigma of Arrival

Abstract

Naipaul's autobiographical novel, The Enigma of Arrival illustrates the culturally displaced, alienated and homeless people's experience. His writing expresses ambivalence of exile and the problem of an outsider, a feature of his own experience as an Indian in the West Indies, West Indian in England and a wandering intellectual in a post-colonial world. The narrator of the novel wishes to make his identity in the colonizer's land in which he is never successful. He says that he belongs nowhere; this 'pseudo-global identity' can best be regarded as his nostalgia for his root culture. Therefore, a home can ultimately never be more than the books he writes. He strongly determines that he is not an English, nor a Trinidadian, nor an Indian but he is how own man. It is his philosophy of life that in the changing world he belongs to many places, and there are many things that go to make his ideas who he is.