A BEND IN THE RIVER is at once Naipaul’s bleakest and most powerful work.1 It explores how individuals who have been forced into making wrenching choices at a time of political crisis find ways to turn adversity to personal advantage. A central aim of this chapter is to explore how Salim, the novel’s protagonist, discovers the tools and acquires the will to take decisions that enable him to survive in a period of social turmoil in postcolonial Africa. These features distinguish Bend from the more detached narration of “In a Free State,” in which Naipaul portrayed individuals as passively acted upon by abstract social forces.
Before discussing how Salim acquires the tools to describe his situation adequately, it is necessary to provide some context. The events in Bend are set against the backdrop of civil unrest in the Congo during the1960s, immediately after the nation gained its independence from Belgium.2 The novel begins with the narrator, Salim, a young Indian Muslim man, making the brutal decision to abandon his family home on the east coast of Africa for a town in Central Africa, where he plans to start afresh.
Salim belongs to a family of Indian Muslim traders who have lived on the African coast for generations. They are part of a community that has retained its language and customs and keeps its distance from local African communities. Salim’s family of traders once flourished in the region, notably during the period of waning Arab dominance and rising European rule, from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century. But the future looks uncertain in the era of decolonization. Unlike his other family members, Salim is convinced that political independence, which will soon sweep across Africa—black majority rule replacing white colonial rule—will have an adverse effect on minority communities like his:
If the insecurity I felt about our position on the coast was due to my temperament, then little occurred to calm me down. Events in this part of Africa began to move fast. To the north there was a bloody rebellion of an upcountry tribe which the British seemed unable to put down; and there were explosions of disobedience and rage in other places as well.3
Convinced that there is no future for him on the coast, Salim packs his belongings and leaves his family. Driving for several days, he reaches a town in Central Africa, possibly Kisangani, located at a bend in the Congo River. Salim has bought a dry goods shop in this town from his mentor and family friend, Nazruddin, who has advised him that there is an opportunity to make money there.
Although Salim is a shopkeeper whose education was cut short, he is intelligent and perceptive. His first words in the novel, which is narrated from his point of view, are those of a realist: “The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.”4 Salim believes he must always stay one step ahead of the volatile conditions of the region, and he must therefore learn how to grasp and describe the world with accuracy and without sentimentality.
Reflecting on these matters, one day he discovers something striking about how the colonial authority has described aspects of his childhood world:
Small things can start us off in new ways of thinking, and I was started off by the postage stamps of our area. The British administration gave us beautiful stamps. These stamps depicted local scenes and local things; there was one called ‘Arab Dhow.’ It was as though, in those stamps, a foreigner had said, ‘This is what is most striking about this place.’ Without that stamp of the dhow I might have taken the dhows for granted. As it was, I learned to look at them. Whenever I saw them tied up at the waterfront I thought of them as something peculiar to our region, quaint, something the foreigner would remark on, something not quite modern, and certainly nothing like the liners and cargo ships that berthed in our own modern docks.
So from an early age I developed the habit of looking, detaching myself from a familiar scene and trying to consider it as from a distance.5
“As it was, I learned to look at them.” Salim learns to “detach” himself from familiar ways of looking and attach himself to an alien and self-conscious way of constituting his everyday surroundings. By learning to look with the eyes of the foreigner, Salim discovers a style of representation that gives him a new idea of agency. He grasps that the foreigner has made the barely noticed dhow into an emblem of the place. Salim intuits that the image on the stamp is not a description of a preexisting reality so much as a way of constituting reality in a new way. The epiphany of the stamp empowers Salim, giving him an insight into the style of representation to which those in power have access. If indeed, as Salim says, the world is what it is, the truth of that reality—how it is described and understood—is an effect of its representation. This insight into the way representation plays a role in constituting reality teaches him the way of seeing adopted by history’s agents—even as it decisively alienates him from his own people, in whose manners and minds “little had changed.”6
Readers may have noticed that the image on the stamp resembles what the critic Edward Said, in a groundbreaking study, denounced as “orientalist” representation.7 Said and Naipaul put forward their differing analyses of the same representational operation within a year of each other: Said’s Orientalism was published in 1978 and Naipaul’s Bend in 1979. Remarkably, even though Said wrote several (mostly negative) essays on Naipaul’s work in the 1980s, and even discussed Bend, he never mentioned the interesting resonances between his and Naipaul’s engagement with the nature of (Western) representation.
In Said’s analysis, the image of the dhow on the stamp illustrates how the colonial authorities represent the “East” as a place that is frozen in time. Because of its associations with preindustrial or exotic forms of transportation, the dhow is made to symbolize an unchanging and backward place. In Said’s view, the person looking at the image of the dhow unconsciously projects such associations onto the people or region represented by the stamp. Through this representational move, Said argues, the East is stripped of its history and context and made into the opposite of the dynamic West. Because the stamp is produced by the colonial authority in East Africa, the image of the dhow also conveys the subliminal message that Western imperialism is both a modernizing project that aims to uplift its subjects and a custodial one that preserves the traditions and cultural heritage of its subjects, as emblematized by the dhow.
For Said, representation does not just describe a place but stamps it with an alien essence or identity. Salim, as we will see, also explores this idea in Bend. For the moment, however, as a person who is trying to improve his position at a time of unrest, Salim’s aim is to extract as much knowledge as he can from the meager resources at his disposal. Therefore, he is not interested in criticizing orientalist representation but seeks instead to learn how to manipulate its rules for his own ends. In doing so, he hopes to graduate from being one of history’s victims to becoming one of its agents. This is why Salim does not regard the image of the stamp merely as an instrument of colonial domination but also as an invaluable portal of access to the tools by which he may become an agent of knowledge in his own right.
Hence, even though Salim is conscious of the position of “exteriority” from which such representations are executed, he refuses the oppositional terms in which Said frames his critique. Instead, Salim intuits that he must first be able to understand and reproduce the structure of “orientalist” representation in order then to be able to scrutinize its duplicitous operations from within its terms. To his mind, there is no other way for him to become an historical agent. Just as there is no “outside” to the global order, there is no viable alternative to the objectified representation of the dhow.
This insight engenders in Salim a more worldly understanding of the nature of this style of representation. He becomes aware of the ironic and self-serving uses to which moral and historical “truths” are put in modern societies:8
If it was Europe that gave us on the coast some idea of our history, it was Europe, I feel, that also introduced us to the lie. Those of us who had been in that part of Africa before the Europeans had never lied about ourselves. Not because we were more moral. We didn’t lie because we never assessed ourselves and didn’t think there was anything for us to lie about; we were people who simply did what we did. But the Europeans could do one thing and say something quite different; and they could act in this way because they had an idea of what they owed to their civilization. It was their great advantage over us. The Europeans wanted gold and slaves, like everybody else; but at the same time they wanted statues put up to themselves as people who had done good things for the slaves. Being an intelligent and energetic people, and at the peak of their powers, they could express both sides of their civilization; and they got both the slaves and the statues.9
What Said negatively labels as “orientalist,” then, Salim regards as a representational technique he must learn to deploy if he is to gain control over the ways in which meanings are produced and values are conferred in the modern era. Even though orientalist representation exoticizes or reifies, Salim intuits that it also reveals the indispensable cognitive framework and representation schema he may learn to manipulate in order to produce an adequate representation of the world.
As a consequence, Salim discovers a way of reflecting on the intellectual limitations of his own formation. He recalls a story that his grandfather, a trader in colonial times, once told about how he had participated in the slave trade:
I remember hearing from my grandfather that he had once shipped a boatful of slaves as a cargo of rubber. He couldn’t tell me when he had done this. It was just there in his memory, floating around, without date or other association, as an unusual event in an uneventful life. He didn’t tell it as a piece of wickedness or trickery or as a joke; he just told it as something unusual that he had done—not shipping the slaves, but describing them as rubber. And without my own memory of the old man’s story I suppose that would have been a piece of history lost forever. I believe, from my later reading, that the idea of rubber would have occurred to my grandfather at the time, before the First World War, when rubber became big business—and later a big scandal—in central Africa. So that facts are known to me which remained hidden or uninteresting to my grandfather.10
To the outsider, Salim’s grandfather’s lack of remorse for his slave-trading activity may suggest cruelty or indifference. But Salim treats it as an example of his grandfather’s unthinking conformity to the rules of his group and an indication, more broadly, of the conformity of other African men to the rules of their group. These different local groups facilitated or participated in the “secret slavery that continued on the coast until the other day.”11 Because he was entirely at peace with the morality of his actions, Salim’s grandfather focused his story on the way he had outsmarted the colonial authorities by passing the slaves off as rubber.
Salim believes that had his grandfather been taught to activate the perspective embodied by the stamp, he would have been able to arrive at a more self-critical or detached assessment of his part in the slave trade, not least by accessing the wider discussions taking place at the end of the nineteenth century. Under those circumstances, it could be argued, Salim’s grandfather would have been capable of justifying his actions or expressing remorse for them. But because his grandfather had not, in Salim’s words, “learned to look,” he could not reflect upon his actions in a manner consonant with the discursive norms of Europe’s “lies.” For, as Salim wryly notes, Belgium’s King Leopold used humanitarian rhetoric as cover for the mass violence his agents perpetrated in the Congo: “When the Europeans were dealing in one kind of rubber, my grandfather could still occasionally deal in another.”12
Salim is a practical businessman whose objectives at the start of the novel are straightforwardly unsentimental: first, to avoid becoming one of history’s casualties, and second, to join the ranks of history’s victors. Thus, even though he expresses a moral objection to the slave trade, Salim is less exercised by its immorality than by the fact that his grandfather’s account reveals a structural flaw in his community’s ability to adapt to the changed times. In a different vein, Salim worries that black African leaders who deploy anticolonial language are, in his view, inattentive to the ways such rhetoric—given its historical provenance—is inextricably linked to Europe’s lies: “I feared the lies—black men assuming the lies of white men.”13
The lesson of the stamp in Bend opens into a complex reflection on the postcolonial subject’s historical predicament in the era of independence. It also points to some of the entangled ways of thinking they must rely upon to navigate the challenges of the modern period. It is therefore ironic that when Salim, who has never lived outside of the east coast of Africa, trains himself to study his surroundings in a dispassionate and critical way, he is mistakenly “assigned an ideological whiteness” by critics who declare that it is inconsistent with postcolonial approaches to the past.14
As Salim trains himself to critically scrutinize self-regarding European characters like Father Huismans, he also appraises young African characters like Ferdinand, the lycée student whose mother Zabeth leaves under Salim’s supervision. When Ferdinand repeats Pan-Africanist talking points about how “the world outside was going down and Africa was rising,” Salim detachedly describes Ferdinand as an historical type:
When I pushed [Ferdinand] past the stage where he could repeat bits of what he had heard at the lycée, I found that the ideas of the school discussion had in his mind become jumbled and simplified. Ideas of the past were confused with ideas of the present. In his lycée blazer, Ferdinand saw himself as evolved and important, as in the colonial days. At the same time he saw himself as a new man of Africa, and important for that reason. Out of this staggering idea of his own importance, he had reduced Africa to himself; and the future of Africa was nothing more than the job he might do later on.15
Characters in Bend are not treated as unthinking or impervious to change. In one of the most interesting developments in the novel, Ferdinand confounds Salim’s gloomy prediction by maturing into an empathetic, thoughtful, and responsible high-ranking government official. Not only does Ferdinand develop into a more humane person that the emotionally stunted Salim, the idealism of his early years evolves into practical wisdom and honesty.
In this way, Ferdinand symbolizes the immense potential of the country’s educated youth. Ferdinand is educated first at the local lycée and later in the polytechnic created by the president. He is able to turn his early views in a productive direction because of the state scholarship he receives. For a brief period, it appears that the education system is creating informed citizens and promising leaders. Reflecting on Ferdinand’s development, Salim acknowledges that a new beginning has been made in the Domain, the place where the new polytechnic is located. Salim’s analysis offers another instance of how the lies—the “hoaxes” of the colonial past and the postcolonial present—nevertheless offer possibilities for the young of the new nation. In this way, the skeptical Salim is able to keep faith with the progress of the postcolonial nation:
The Domain, with its shoddy grandeur, was a hoax. Neither the President who had called it into being nor the foreigners who had made a fortune building it had faith in what they were creating. But had there been greater faith before?…Yet that earlier hoax had helped to make men of the country in a certain way; and men would also be made by this new hoax. Ferdinand took the polytechnic seriously; it was going to lead him to an administrative cadetship and eventually to a position of authority. To him the Domain was fine, as it should be. He was as glamorous to himself at the Polytechnic as he had been at the lycée. To him the world was getting newer…. For me that same world was drab, without possibilities.16
Despite his patronizing attitude, which is partly the result of his feeling of inadequacy, Salim recognizes that young men like Ferdinand have the intelligence and determination to help build an informed and stable society. Looking at Ferdinand’s composure and his integrity, he also recognizes that the postcolonial state’s investment in education has begun to bear fruit very quickly.
If the stamp episode illustrated how colonized peoples could discover the preconditions of an agency that was not defined primarily by its opposition to colonialism, Ferdinand’s development indicates how such agency might become universalized in postcolonial society. Salim realizes this even as he grows aware that he has probably arrived at the limits of his own development. “Ferdinand, starting from nothing, had with one step made himself free, and was ready to race ahead of us.”17 For all his misgivings, then, Salim begins to affirm and feel proud of the institutions that are coming into being in his new home in Central Africa.
However, Salim’s optimism proves short-lived. Ferdinand is prevented from realizing his potential as a government official because the fragile peace established by the authoritarian state does not hold. As a result, he is unable to provide the country with the leadership it urgently needs. Like Ferdinand, the country becomes a victim of internal disunity. The repeated armed uprisings and the failure of state-run institutions lead to the president (also known as the Big Man) consolidating power in his own hands.
The Big Man conducts a Mao-style purge in which he disbands the Youth Guard, a group he had once sponsored as the spiritual guardians of the nationalist ideology. In a populist move to shore up his power, he also encourages ordinary people to turn against the party members who have taken too independent or elitist a line by criticizing him. These actions result in a period of instability from which the country never recovers. By the final section of the novel, copper prices have collapsed, state institutions have been weakened, and a new armed movement aimed at overthrowing the Big Man has begun in earnest. Government officials and police officers, sensing that the state might collapse, squeeze ordinary people for bribes—they have to plan ahead, after all. The sense of insecurity becomes all-pervasive. As state officials grow increasingly predatory, it becomes impossible for anyone to think about anything except their own survival. Naipaul’s portrait of the fraying psychological states of Salim and Ferdinand unfolds alongside the undermining of the country’s institutions.
One of the strengths of Bend is its attention to contextualizing details, not least the manner in which historical possibilities ebb and flow and how rapidly individual agency can be overwhelmed by the volatile shifts of postcolonial politics. Many of the challenges facing the postcolonial society can be traced to the predatory practices of the colonial period. It is interesting to see that Naipaul treats with neutrality, and does not censure, the constraints under which the admittedly Machiavellian president must work in order to forge a nation out of an ethnically fractured territory.
In response to a regional uprising, the president vows to transform the army into a truly national institution, now drawing from all the tribes, not just the tribe that, having once worked for slavers that terrorized local Africans, formed the core of the colonial army. He brutally dissolves the old army and has many soldiers killed; then he recruits soldiers from different tribes and regions. In this way, the army is transformed into an institution that is more diverse and therefore more representative of the different groups that compose the newly independent nation. However, this welcome shake-up has the untoward effect of placing even more power in the hands of the president. As the autonomy of the different regions is gradually undermined in an effort to create a unified national identity, the central authority’s power also expands unchecked.
The president initiates grand projects such as the polytechnic, which he hopes will serve as a training ground for an elite who will promote the ideals of Pan-Africanism, which is something of an obsession for him. The Big Man’s dreams are anything but small. He is portrayed not as a rapacious plunderer, but rather as a man who aspires to become a moral leader on the continent, even though the underdeveloped state of the economy suggests that the nation’s resources might be put to more practical and less ostentatious use: “The message of the Domain was simple. Under the rule of our new President the miracle had occurred: Africans had become modern men who built in concrete and glass and sat in cushioned chairs covered in imitation velvet.”18
During the early years of promise, it appears that the country is doing very well. It seems destined to become a model for the entire continent, proof of the way decolonization would bring about economic justice and social progress to the long-exploited people of the country. The war in Vietnam leads to a prolonged rise in the price of raw materials such as copper, which is produced in the country, which in turns brings wealth and spending power to ordinary workers, even as they pay for expensive projects like the Domain that contribute to the education and training of elites.
Fueled by the copper boom, the country advances to the forefront of the new Africa. It appears that the president is devoted to building institutions and to the creation of a national identity. To keep the Soviet Union at bay, Western aid and personnel pour in for the president’s projects.19 In this buoyant context, Indar, Salim’s Oxford-trained family friend from Zanzibar, visits Congo as the leader of a Western nongovernmental organization aimed at bringing European educators to teach in the country. “Unless we can get them thinking, and give them real ideas instead of just politics and principles, these young men will keep our world in turmoil for the next half century.”20 It is as part of this broader neocolonial project that young men like Ferdinand are being trained for modernity. Despite himself, Salim cannot conceal his pride and astonishment at what the country has accomplished:
Those young men [in the Polytechnic] had sharp minds and spoke wonderfully—and in French, not the patois. They had developed fast. Just a few years before, Ferdinand had been incapable of grasping the idea of Africa. That wasn’t so now. The magazines about African affairs—even the semi-bogus, subsidized ones from Europe—and the newspapers, though censored, had spread new ideas, knowledge, new attitudes.21
Salim sees that the students are fascinated by what his Indian friend from the coast has to say about his travels to other parts of Africa and treat him as “one of them.”22
However, it soon becomes evident that little has been done to address the backward state of the economy. Salim observes that when “the Chinese or Taiwanese didn’t turn up to till the land of the new model African farm [on the Domain]; the six tractors that some foreign government had given remained in a neat line in the open and rusted, and the grass grew high about them.”23 These are symptoms of a “combined and uneven development.”24 The commodities boom brought a fake development to Salim’s town, enriching a few while leaving most people as poor as before. During this period, a group of non-African middlemen and merchants, not local Africans, make a quick profit. This group is uncreative and lacking in technical knowledge.25 Salim’s friend Mahesh obtains a franchise to open an American-style Bigburger restaurant, with its imported machinery, plastic seating, and air-conditioning. As if on cue, the newly rich African elite shows up to patronize the shop, and Mahesh becomes very successful. When the copper boom ends as abruptly as it began, Mahesh is forced to close down Bigburger. By this time, he has taken all his profits out of the country.
With middlemen dominating the local economy, the development that takes place is superficial. Not many people are lifted out of poverty. Dispositions have not been transformed by the rapid modernization. The local Africans—such as Ildephonse, who manages the Bigburger franchise—affect interest in their work when the boss is present, but when left on their own, Salim observes, they become vacant and indifferent. This is a peasantry inducted too quickly into a disorienting process that only superficially resembles the historical transition to capitalism in the European context. When European and American scholars, formed by a different history, arrive at the Domain, they speak of the future in a language that is not attuned to the needs of ordinary Africans. Academics, such as the Belgian historian Raymond, are brought in to deliver lectures and teach classes to prepare African civil servants for positions of leadership. Their talk is high-minded; they focus on grand themes of history and political theory and the most recent debates in anthropology. But they do not attend to the situation on the ground. Naipaul paints a richly nuanced picture of the emerging society. There are some real achievements—individuals of substance like Ferdinand are produced—but the broader social challenges are immense.
Salim’s own ability to view the world with disinterest and skepticism also begins to fray because of the attachment he forms to the cultivated Europeans and their seductive view of human possibility. From the point of view of the excluded majority of Africans, there is something unreal, even surreal, about the world of the Domain, where many of the expatriate academics who teach in the local polytechnic reside. Salim is very conscious of this because he lives in the town, where the Africans and the Greek and Italian middlemen mock these newly arrived people. Although Salim is aware that the expatriates live in a bubble, writing and discoursing about “Africa” despite being socially disconnected from local life, he becomes attracted to their vision of the world. This turns out to be the first step toward his undoing.
At a dinner party at Raymond’s home in the expatriate preserve of the Domain, Salim is deeply moved by a Joan Baez song. As he contemplates the tasteful decor of “African mats on the floor and the African hangings on the wall and spears and masks,”26 he cannot help surrendering to the noble and beautiful sentiments expressed in the song, even though he is aware that they are drawn from a world quite alien to the one he inhabits. “It was make-believe—I never doubted that. You couldn’t listen to sweet songs about injustice unless you expected justice and received it much of the time.”27 Despite his skepticism, however, Salim finds himself succumbing completely to the inviting mood set by the song: “It was better to share the companionship of that pretence, to feel that in that room we all lived beautifully and bravely with injustice and imminent death and consoled ourselves with love. Even before the songs ended I felt I had found the kind of life I wanted; I never wanted to be ordinary again.”28
Salim’s assessment of the Domain recalls his earlier allusion to the lies of white men, but he now feels that a life devoted solely to the cultivation of a clear-eyed vision of human reality would be savorless. Even though Salim knows that the sentiments expressed in the Joan Baez songs falsify his reality, they imbue his life with a meaning he finds both intoxicating and exhilarating.
This scene serves as a turning point in Salim’s development. It accounts for his new relationship to the lie: “The Domain was a hoax…it was always reassuring to return to the town I knew, to get away from that Africa of words and ideas as it existed on the Domain (and from which, often, Africans were physically absent). But the Domain, and the glory and the social excitements of the life there, always called me back.”29
There is pathos and irony in this turn of events. The lie had earlier stood for Salim’s touchstone in his navigation of reality; now the lie gradually begins to take the place of that reality. Whereas the lesson of the stamp had liberated Salim from his tradition and enabled him to study his surroundings objectively, his time with the expatriates in the Domain has transformed him into the self-deceiving seeker of a beautiful if unattainable vision of social possibility. Salim’s statement “you expected justice and received it much of the time” loses its ironic connotation.30
Salim had begun his story with a grip on the fact that, for a man of his background, the world must be embraced for “what it is.” This was the only way he stood a chance of ever making good and not be “nothing.” But despite his awareness that the order in which he must survive is nothing like the worlds poeticized by Joan Baez, he now finds that he cannot live without the longings opened up by the lie, which has become preferable to the drudgery of his business at the bend in the river. Salim’s search for truth now becomes intertwined with his need for beautiful lies with which he can support himself. This development coincides with the fading of his earlier sense of purpose and ambition. He finds in the Domain an illusion that will sustain him in his dispirited state. Thus, although Salim calls the Domain a hoax, he longs to return each time he is back in his run-down apartment in the town. Salim’s affair with Yvette, Raymond’s young Belgian wife, has everything to do with his absorption in the lie: Yvette fulfills Salim’s desire to be “lifted” from his circumstances.
However, such willed self-deception results in misunderstandings. In a shockingly violent scene, Salim turns on Yvette and beats her viciously when she makes the mistake of teasing him as if he were her equal. After the two share an intimate moment in Salim’s apartment, Yvette playfully asks Salim if he has African prostitutes hidden in his bedroom. Yvette was affecting the role of the jealous wife. This innocent joke misfires; it jolts Salim into a realization that they are, objectively speaking, not equals. In truth, he has as little claim to the world that Yvette comes from as he does to the powerful emotions elicited by Joan Baez’s song. The affair with Yvette has, in fact, been a panacea for his insecurity. Exposed in this way, Salim explodes with rage, violently beating and sexually humiliating Yvette.
Yvette inadvertently reminds Salim of what he has always known—that whereas she and her husband Raymond are protected by their “strong” European passports, Salim is a member of a local, unprotected minority. Salim screams as he beats Yvette for innocently teasing him, as if he were a white man, about the imaginary African women: “Do you think I’m Raymond?”31
Distracted by the personal relationships he forms in the Domain, Salim is caught unawares when the political situation suddenly changes. In an effort to shore up its base, the government arbitrarily “nationalizes” Salim’s shop and gifts it to a local African party member. Unlike his fellow businessmen Noimon and Mahesh, who have moved much of their wealth abroad in anticipation of a day like this, Salim ironically falls victim to the very sentimentality he had confidently dismissed in the first words of the novel. By the end of the novel, he is left with nothing and has, in his own eyes, been reduced to nothing.
A Bend in the River offers a portrait of the slow and gradual way in which the social institutions of a newly independent nation are undermined and begin to fall apart after an initial period of promise sustained by a boom in commodity prices. The postcolonial state is unable to consolidate its gains or create the impersonal institutions that the society needs for its longer-term flourishing.
There are no “good” or “bad” characters in Bend. Everything is regarded in historical light. The president’s choices are hemmed in by forces he cannot control. He is depicted as a corrupt leader, to be sure, but the reader is given to understand that he cannot be fully blamed for the fact that his effort to unify the fractured nation by autocratic means ended up exacerbating those fractures.32 On a personal level, Salim feels no anger when a desperate family servant, Metty, betrays him to the police.
The novel describes the complex connections between different parts of society. The reader grasps how the disparate histories of ordinary people, expatriates of different classes, the African townsfolk, the new class of officials, the middlemen communities, the old Indian families on the coast are all part of a single social constellation, the individual parts of which cannot be viewed in isolation.
In the same way, the oscillations between periods of peace and unrest in the emerging nation, as well the dread and mixed motives felt by ordinary people caught between warring factions, are explored with great power. These qualities make Bend one of the greatest works of postcolonial literary realism. “The literary practice of every true realist [writer],” Georg Lukács writes, “demonstrates the importance of the overall objective social context and the insistence on all-round knowledge required to do it justice.” Even where the “surface of social reality may exhibit ‘subversive tendencies,’ ” Lukács adds, “it is important to see it as a factor in this [social] totality, and not magnify it into the sole emotional and intellectual reality.”33 Naipaul writes in the spirit of realism as Lukács understands it: he is interested far more in situating the story of individuals’ lives within their historical context than in assigning praise or blame.
Near the end of the novel, Salim is thrown in jail for being unable to pay an exorbitant bribe. Salim is saved by his old friend Ferdinand, who, as a high-ranking official, now returns the kindness Salim once extended to him. Salim is freed, but Ferdinand describes the wider condition of the society as a large jail in which everyone has become vulnerable: “It’s bad for everybody…we’re all going to hell, and every man knows it in his bones. We’re being killed. Nothing has any meaning. That is why everyone is so frantic. Everyone wants to make his money and run away. But where? That is what is driving people mad. They feel they’re losing the place they can run back to.”34 What are the places that people can “run back to”? Psychologically, if not in actuality, this is the only escape that the novel provides in its conclusion.
Writing about an individual from a community of “traders and merchants in the Indian Ocean for centuries,” Naipaul has woven together stories drawn from diverse histories and geographies. But Bend is also one of the first novels to describe an aspect of global civilization that has largely remained invisible: it concludes, as In a Free State began, with a vision of displaced peoples at times of political upheaval. This is the world of refugees who, like the moths in the final scene of the novel, flit across the television screens of Western viewers.
As a novelist, Naipaul deals not with what Lukács, in Theory of the Novel, famously called “transcendental homelessness,” but with homelessness as such. By turning Salim into a refugee at the end of the novel, Naipaul transforms this figure from a statistic into a being with a history, a life rich with possibility, characterized by ambition and energy, before his hopes are shattered by forces beyond his control.
As the civil war rages on, and the rebels close in on the town at the bend in the river, Salim is reduced to trying to leave with a suitcase in his hand. He barely gets away in time, and he leaves with the knowledge that he has abandoned his servant Metty, a mixed race man from the East African coast, to an uncertain fate. Salim manages to scrape together the last of his savings to buy a ticket on a steamer that departs just as the rebel army enters the town.
Salim is in a passenger cabin, but roughly lashed by a single rope to the steamer is a barge filled with many poor people, all of whom are equally desperate to escape the town. Exposed to the elements, the locals hope that the steamer will take them away to relative safety. As the rebels enter the scene, and as shots are fired, the narration grows chaotic, as if miming the events described. This lack of clarity only heightens the feeling of suspense and terror.
By this point, the narration has imperceptibly switched from first-person to third-person. The reader is taken out of an exclusive concern with Salim’s fate to an equally urgent wish to know what will become of those poor people on the barge. When the rebels board the steamer, at first they are fought off. The panicked crew severs the rope to the barge, fearing that the barge will slow their escape, making them more vulnerable to the bullets of the rebel forces.
At first, the people on the barge do not realize it has been cut adrift. The steamer pulls away. In the final paragraph of the novel, Naipaul inserts a brilliant visual image of moths, at once sepulchral and ethereal, that appear for an instant, apparently frozen in the steamer’s searchlight:
At the time what we saw was the steamer searchlight, playing on the riverbank, playing on the passenger barge, which had snapped loose and was drifting at an angle through the water hyacinths at the edge of the river. The searchlight lit up the barge passengers, who, behind bars and wire guards, as yet scarcely seemed to understand that they were adrift. Then there were gunshots. The searchlight was turned off; the barge was no longer to be seen. The steamer started up again and moved without lights down the river, away from the area of battle. The air would have been full of moths and flying insects. The searchlight, while it was on, had shown thousands, white in the white light.35
Naipaul’s prose is effective precisely because it describes the suspenseful episode in language that is devoid of emotion. He leaves it to the reader to imagine the heartrending scene of terror and desolation for the people abandoned by the steamer. In this way, the invisible poor are effectively bodied forth and given features, even if only for a fleeting moment. Like the ephemeral moths drawn to the light or the images of refugees in the media, it is suggested, they will soon vanish from the reader’s consciousness.
Different aspects of his own character can be found in Ferdinand, Metty, Salim, and Indar, particularly in the ways they learn, or fail to learn, to build upon the perspective of the stamp—something that Naipaul himself was only beginning to do as a consequence of becoming more aware of postcolonial reality. In his essay “Conrad’s Darkness” (1974), published before he began working on Bend, he observed:
To be a colonial was to know a kind of security; it was to inhabit a fixed world. And I suppose that in my fantasy I had seen myself coming to England as some purely literary region, where, untrammeled by the accidents of history or background, I could make a romantic career for myself as a writer. But in the new world I felt that ground move below me. The new politics, the curious reliance of men on institutions they were yet working to undermine, the simplicity of beliefs and the hideous simplicity of actions, the corruption of causes, half-made societies doomed to remain half-made: these were the things that began to preoccupy me.36
Bend does not portray postcolonial African societies in the negative light that such a bald statement might suggest. The process of writing the novel had apparently led him to a more complex attitude. He focuses instead on a nuanced exploration of the way individuals such as Salim attempt to acquire the tools that enable them to “see the general aspect of things.”37 The distinct vision of modernity symbolized in Ferdinand (as opposed to the Big Man) reflects Naipaul’s own attentiveness to how the actions of principled African intellectuals or officials were tragically overwhelmed by circumstances.
A Bend in the River is a searing novel. It also marks the culmination of the second phase of Naipaul’s career. Just as Naipaul felt compelled to explore new ways of looking and feeling after A House for Mr Biswas, in the decade after Bend’s publication his work took yet another turn. In the 1980s, ambiguity and interpretive open-endedness came to play a more prominent role in his writings.38 Naipaul also began to experiment more with mixed genres, blending autobiography and history with fiction to explore how people who had been formed by historically challenging or debilitating pasts evolve their own diverse languages to reflect upon that formation.