A Nobel Laureate attacks another Nobel Laureate through his poem

Derek Walcott is a Nobel prize winning poet. V.A.Naipaul is a Nobel prize winning novelist. Walcott has been heaping insults on Naipaul for years. Now in a fresh spate of attack he slammed Naipaul in a poem that mocked the Indian-origin author as a ‘mangoose’

Mr.Walcott composed the poem ‘The Mangoose’ and read it at the Calabash literary festival in Jamaica. But before reading it to an audience, he said that he was going to be ‘nasty’, the ‘Daily Telegraph’ reported.

Walcott read out the opening lines of the poetry, ‘I have been bitten.I must avoid infection. Or else I will be as dead as Naipaul’s fiction’

Infact, Walcott had expressed his anger, at what he sees as Naipaul’s rejection of his Caribbean heritage in order to gain acceptance from the British literary establishment.In particular Walcott was outraged by the fact that though Naipaul’s ancestors were Indian labourers who moved to Trinidad in the 19 th century, thanked only Britain and India in his Nobel acceptance speech, but not the country of his birth.

The poem’s title refers to an animal that was imported from India under the British empire.As Walcott puts it, ‘the mangoose takes its orders from the Raj.’

Walcott through his poem also attacks Naipaul’s later novels, ‘Half a life’ and ‘Magic Seeds’ commenting the plots of the novels as forced, prose sedate and silly, the anti-hero is a prick named Willie and also wondered and expressed his disbelief that they emanated from the same author who wrote his nobel winning novel ‘A House for Mr.Biswas.’

In the poem there is also a coded reference about the essay of Naipaul published in the year 2007, which praised Walcott.

However, both Walcott and Naipaul refused to comment on the poem.

Though Naipaul is silent at present, but as pointed out by Naipaul’s biographer Patrick French that Naipaul may lash out at him sometime and will settle all his accounts.