Written by Kate Phillips
V.S. Naipul’s A Bend in the River follows Salim, an Indian man raised on the east coast of Africa. He makes the decision to move to a newly independent country in central Africa in order to find a stable life as a shopkeeper and, less explicitly, to escape a life of ignorance. He becomes immersed in educating himself. His main goal being to predict future troubles – revolutions, wars, economic crises – and, in doing so, create a safe life for himself. However, a safe life is less what he reaches for as opposed to an educated life; besides books, he scours the lives of those around him, both those who welcome modernization and those who view safety in tradition, for information about himself and his country, which Naipul leaves unnamed.
Salim’s attempt to predict what will happen in his new country of residence is based solely on the actions and crafted speeches of the President, as well as what Salim views as the uneducated, fantastical whims of those younger than him or the slower, ignorant, reused stories of his elders. His attempt at prediction proves to be a Sisyphus-like struggle against the tide of media, façade, and oversimplified pattern.
The book, at times, seems to contradict itself: history is deemed frustratingly slippery, impossible to predict and only fully understood in the form of skepticism cast to the past. And yet Naipul consistently includes anecdotes of bits of history and makes sure to provide timelines and geographical descriptions to contextualize the events – the immigration of Indian peoples, the fall of European rule, the fights to integrate culturally separated communities – that Salim experiences and questions. Naipul dedicates major plot points to exploring the importance of education, class differences, and women’s economic autonomy. The book seems to point to history – both the history that has happened and is happening – as something that is a critical life force pulsing behind each person, each conflict, and is in some way accessible beyond Salim’s and our own frustration in attempts to categorize and contextualize it.
Salim watches as his country’s economy grows, with the influx of European goods such as ice cream and coffee machines as evidence. However, he also frets about the political health of his country, a health that is doctored by people like the President who are trying to balance distinct local traditions, cultural integration, and Western modernization differently depending on their public and private personas and duties. This sense of dislocation, the country’s constant questioning of whether to place its future, loyalties, money, and spirit into the hands of its array of communities, its insisted collective history of a people united against the West, is mirrored in Salim’s own mind. He questions his loyalties to the wife he was promised, to the modern woman with whom he falls in love, to his country of origin (India), to his childhood home (an unnamed country on the east African coast), or his new one (an unnamed country in central Africa). Everything – himself, his country, each place he visits, the looming West – seems to be floating beyond comprehension and simultaneously only comprehended in the context of constant flux and disassociation. How does one judge when a place is improving? And how does one defend improvement when the air whispers of collapse, colonization, and captivity? How do you lead a life of prediction without falling into paranoia? How do you defend leaving before the revolution starts and the guns are fired?
Confusion is the prominent theme in the book, and yet Naipul’s insistence on educating oneself and discerning history’s patterns seems to act as a source of comfort for a man like Salim to use in his search. Perhaps Naipul’s claim is this: the search to fully understand the effects of colonization is important in itself. It does not have to abandon frustrations and confusion in order to retain its importance.
And if predicting patterns, understanding the past, locating yourself or your country in larger contexts is futile, the necessity lies in the attempt. Futility, frustration, confusion – these are all realistic, expected, perhaps inescapable. But any progress dies when you let others define that progress for you. Salim must question Africa for himself – this questioning is his precious autonomy, one that cannot fall into the hands of the West. Throughout the book, Salim attempts to teach this lesson to a rural boy sent to the town for school. Read, he tells him. Be honest in your studies and go to school. Listen to your teachers and also question what you hear. Do not assume something is better – this country, its economy, this town – because it seems better in the moment.
This maze to comprehension is also mirrored in Africa’s geography. The river that one must cross to make Salim’s journey at the beginning of the book, from the east coast to central Africa, seems to hold history in its mud. The history of the battles along this river is mentioned alongside descriptions of its economic importance in ushering cargo and people like Salim across the continent. And, of course, the river acts as a shelter, a transport back in time, to communities that were perhaps the least touched by the European settlers. Beyond the bend in the river, the reader enters the communities that Salim considers both cynically and nostalgically as a sort of false footing, a blueprint for an impossible future birthed from places where colonialism did not find its way: “But Africa was big. The bush muffled the sound of murder, and the muddy rivers and lakes washed the blood away”.
Image Credit: “‘A Bend in the River’, 1979” by nathanh100 is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
Retrospect Journal 