CARIBBEAN literature has many similarities with African literature in that both have a shared history of colonial subjugation. One of the common threads in both Caribbean and African literature is the exploration of cultural alienation, social decay, emasculation of men by the system and a perpetual sense of escapism as illustrated by V.S Naipaul in Miguel Street.

Miguel Street is a dramatisation of life in the slums of Port of Spain in Trinidad.
The story is narrated by someone who seemed to have left the Caribbean country and is looking back with a sarcastic tone and has the awareness of the dreary and desperateness that characterise the inhabitants of Miguel Street.

The story set-up and plot is very unconventional. Each chapter is a characterisation of a character in Miguel Street.
Their traits and personalities broadly reflect the social malaise inherent in Miguel Street and Trinidad.

In the end, it is only the narrator who meaningfully escapes after securing a scholarship to study in England while the rest of his compatriots continue with their miserable lives in a Trinidad society that imprisons their creativity and a sense of belonging.
There is the general longing for purity and dread of defilement that has come out of a seemingly bottomless past.

Without exception the behaviour of people in Miguel Street is indicative of individuals in constant search of a defining identity and perspective, dread their existence and yearn for something more meaningful and rewarding.

Just like most of his texts, Naipaul explores rootlessness and estrangement and there is a pervading sense of non-attachment to society, place or race. Even the narrator who meaningfully escapes to England, he grows up divided between two sharply opposed worlds and into a consciousness that he cannot adapt to as both are fully imported as neither was native to Trinidad.

Unlike George Lamming in In The Castle of My Skin, Naipaul believes that Caribbean societies are ‘barren’ societies- all products of the residual effects of colonialism and slavery.
Miguel Street is a product of history, which dates back to 1930s when there was political agitation in the West Indies leading the British Colonial Office in 1944 to announce a policy leading towards self-government, the abolition of the Crown Colony Administration and the adoption of adult suffrage.

Thus Trinidad in the 1940s is a society emerging from a repressive past, a past of slavery, colonialism and degradation. Themes in the book are thus derived from the social racial and political environment of the West Indies in a state of transition from colonial to dominion status. The themes tend to reflect the problems arising from this transitional phase.
The story deals with the problem of social adjustment within a society only becoming conscious of itself. The prospects of nationhood and independence seem to have called forth the desire for self-definition and an independent cultural life. Each character undergoes a period of epiphany exposing the gulf between fantasy and real life experience. It seems the colonial’s only mode of existence is fantasy, which is best equipped to handle the world of emptiness.

Reality has receded from the characters’ daily experience as they fill the emptiness with fantasies.
Living in fantasy becomes an act of submission to an unreal identity and the characters are always in a perpetual state of escape.
The characters are invested with a built in scepticism and self-denigration which typify the internalisation or received colonial prejudices as highlighted by Frantz Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks and the Wretched of the Earth.

The education that the inhabitants of Miguel Street receive is a manifestation of the negative aspects of colonialism.
The success in education is in reality success according to the terms of established by the coloniser, for by the time the colonial subject has gone through the colonial education system, he/she would have internalised the values of the so-called mother country.

The paradoxical nature of education is that while it offers hope of escaping from the trap of poverty, one cannot fully acquire it without rejecting of abandoning one’s culture and traditions.

Typical of post-slavery Afro-American societies, it seems women are the ones that bear the brunt of raising children while the duty of men is simply to sire them.
A good example is Laura, who the narrator describes as having a world record of having eight children from different fathers all of whom are ever absent.
Broken families are a norm as exemplified by Toni who runs away with someone’s wife simply to make their lives more exciting and fulfilling.

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