Walcott VS Naipaul

Extracts from Derek Walcott's The Mongoose - a searing attack on VS Naipaul at the Calabash

Naipaul / Walcott Feud

War of words: Nobel Prize-winner Derek Walcott, right, has continued a literary feud with Naipaul, left, in verse

So the old mongoose, still making good money

Is a burnt out comic, predictable, unfunny

The joy of supplements, his minstrel act

Delighting editors endorsing facts

Over fiction, tearing colleagues and betters

To pieces in the name of English letters

The feathers fly, the snow comes drifting down

The mongoose keeps its class act as a clown

It can do cartwheels of exaggeration

Mostly it snivels, proud of being Asian

Of being attached to nothing, race or nation

It would be just as if a corpse took pride in its decay

After its gift had died and off the page its biles exude the stench

of envy, "la pourriture" in French

cursed its first breath for being Trinidadian

then wrote the same piece for the English Guardian

Once he liked humans, how long ago this was

The mongoose wrote "A House for Mr Biswas"

This is a transcript taken from Derek Walcott's reading and while we've made every effort to report it accurately, the original may not look like this in terms of layout, punctuation etc.

3 comments

Joanne Goldstein's picture

It is well within the rights of anyone to make a complaint that they feel is worthy of discussion. What truly determines the conversational value of a topic is whether or not anyone responds to it. In essence, it is only my response (and future responses) that validate your words here projekty rodinnych domov. If no one reads and no one cares, then you might as well have been speaking to yourself.

Andrew Chapman's picture

This is quite a good article. Many new questions emerge to the surface, all you need do is to read further information about the issues. Only then one can form a final view on a particular subject. Otherwise everything is seen only in the dimension of cum more black and white. The natural logic of evaluating things before they were properly cognitively processed is a horrible mistake, made by those less intelligent. People should not throw away their common aquaparky sense easily. Anything and everything deserves appropriate time for making judgements.

JayMendez's picture

Subservient Naipul, he likes acting independent, being arrogant, that he is, he's tool, I loved this poem. "Mostly it snivels, proud of being Asian Of being attached to nothing, race or nation" could not agree more. This guys falsely writes about his desire for longing "Indian" experiences his recent writings prove he has no need for any experiences. Naipul is closed-minded and cold. How this guy could be a writer, I don't know.

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