Abstract

NAPOLI, Diana. The Loss of El Dorado. V. S. Naipaul.Translated byMarlene Lelo de Larrea. Hist. graf [online]. 2018, n.51, pp.323-344. ISSN 1405-0927.

Through an analysis of The loss of El Dorado, the author intends to show how V. S. Naipaul (a writer in some ways very controversial) narrated the colonial device in his native island, Trinidad, on the border between literature and historiographical research, relying on a large amount of archival documents. In this Trinidad that emerges from archives, where events occurred that were not simply cruel or unspeakable, but irreproducible in the voice of the colonizers, the colonized, the natives and then the slaves, are the great absentees. Their presence is only that of death. The voice and the words of the indigenous, of his words are not heard or translated. Yet the colonized, the subaltern, speaks: he speaks through the body that, tortured, whipped, quartered, swollen with poison, becomes for him the only possible instrument to tell his story

Keywords : Naipaul; colonialism; exile; Trinidad.