A bend in the river

INTRODUCTION BY ELIZABETH HARDWICK

Salim, the narrator of _A Bend in the River__, is a young man from an Indian family of traders long resident on the coast of Central Africa, perhaps in what is now known as Zaire. The young man's placement in the world is part of the dramatic structure and vision of the novel. "Africa was my home, had been the home of my family for centuries. But we came from the east coast and that made a difference. The coast was not truly Africa. It was an Arab-Indian-Persian-Portuguese place, and we who lived there were really people of the Indian Ocean." In the novel, Salim has left the coast to make his way in the interior, there to take on a small trading shop of this and that, sundries, sold to the natives. The place is "a bend in the river"; it is Africa. There are other Indian families in the town, but the displacement of Salim is to some degree a part of the displacement of the country. The time is post-colonial, the time of Independence. The Europeans have withdrawn or been forced to withdraw, and the scene is one of chaos, violent change, warring tribes, ignorance, isolation, poverty, and a lack of preparation for the modern world they have entered, or partially assumed as a sort of decoration. The blind assurance of the colonial administration, with its rules, its commercial exploitation of the available resources, its avenues and handsome houses and clubs for the pleasure of the foreign settlers, has given way to the blinding conflagrations in so many of the newly independent states. Here the power is currently in the hands of the President, a tribal warrior threatened by the ambitions of other warriors of other tribes. _A Bend in the River__ is a story of historical upheaval and social breakdown. The collision of cultures in India, Islam, Africa, South America, and the Caribbean inform the extraordinary scope of Naipaul's creative imagination in fiction and in his books of travel about the world, journeys so angular and personal they cannot be classified as travel books. He was born in Trinidad in 1932, born into a Hindu family that had come generations back as indentured servants from the subcontinent of India to a tropical island in the Caribbean, where Hindus were a minority. Perhaps the shape of his vision owes something to his own placement in the world--something, but not everything, since he is a writer of great intellectual curiosity, deep culture, and the most serious kind of literary ambition. From Trinidad he made his way to Oxford and has lived in England since then, all the while producing some twenty-two volumes. His work gives the sense that to him the art of writing is a vocation, a sort of sanctified calling rather than a career. The biographical facts come to mind because there is a Savonarola tonality sometimes in Naipaul's eloquence about the damage of sentimentality and false hopes. In _A Bend in the River__, the creeping, suffocating corruption and destructiveness that accompany the tribal coming into power or plotting for power, the instability of arrangements, the unappeased crowds of long-suffering natives descending upon the town: all of this is the landscape in which the novel proceeds. There are Indian traders and proprietors of one business or another, a white European couple, an old Belgian priest of long residence, Africans seeking opportunity. The novel is an undertaking of some risk and out of the risk Naipaul has fashioned a work of intense imaginative force. The President: "The President I had seen only in photographs--first in army uniform, then in the stylish short-sleeved jacket and cravat, and then in his leopard-skin chief's cap and his carved stick, emblem of his chieftaincy...." The myth-making of the President will consume the new nation as he consolidates his power, his wealth, his grandiose expenditures in a mini-city to be called the Domain, and in the elevation of his biography with statues to his mother, who had been a maid in a colonial hotel. "As an African, he was building a new town on the site of what had been a rich European suburb--but what he was building was meant to be grander.... He was creating modern Africa. He was creating a miracle that would astound the rest of the world." One of the characters in the book is Father Huismans, a Belgian priest, who has with a tireless obsession made a museum collection of native masks and carvings, information on native religions, and also scattered relics of the colonial presence. Father Huismans goes about digging and searching with a sort of nai've industry. He appears quite indifferent to the drastic alterations brought about by the new government; he looks upon it as the flow of time in a mood of This too will pass. Nevertheless, he is brutally killed on one of his expeditions. The collection--"the richest product of the forest"--is left to deteriorate and to suffer the pillaging of an American admirer of primitive art. The Africans considered, or were told to consider, the collection of masks and carvings an affront to their religion. Salim is an interesting _first-person__ narrator, and he oars his way through the shark-infested waters of that structural choice without showing undue exertion to keep afloat. He is sensitive, observant, of a somewhat melancholy inclination, a pessimism he does not attribute to to a Hindu "conviction about the vanity of all human endeavour." Instead his pessimism is not a result of religion, but of his "seeking to occupy the middle ground, between absorption in life and soaring above the cares of the earth." Nevertheless, he gets around, dines out, has an affair, plays squash at the Hellenic Club. "Canvas shoes, shorts, racket, towel around my neck--it was like old times on the coast." At the opening of the story, Zabeth, a native woman from one of the fishing villages, comes to Salim's shop to buy articles she will take back to sell to the natives, thereby making her living as a _marchande__. Salim admires the energy that gets her back and forth on the river and agrees, with a sigh, when she asks him to take on her son, Ferdinand, to place him in the lyc�in the town and by education to rescue him from the "bush." ("Bush"--a term throughout that signifies not only vegetation but also the backwardness and primitive conditions and the primitive psychology perhaps of those cut off from the accommodations necessary for life in the towns and cities.) Ferdinand will finish the lyc� go on to the polytech, and advance to an administrative position in the capital, where the President reigns. So Ferdinand is the new Africa, or the new African. He has escaped, but his progress is unsteady because the President and his troops are brutal and capricious; he who has risen can be cut down. When, later, Salim sees Ferdinand in the capital, he does not find a young man puffed up with pride and position but someone "shrunken, and characterless.... These men, who depended on the President's favour for everything, were bundles of nerves. The great power they exercised went with a constant fear of being destroyed. And they were unstable, half dead." Yvette, Belgian, and Raymond, English, are a couple who have parties, play Joan Baez on the gramophone, dance until the early morning, and so on. It is with Yvette that Salim will have an affair, a sort of alliance of bored colonials far from home, diverting, but not overwhelming. Raymond is an academic, an Africanist, writing his book while living on the scene as a specialist. He is a rather humble person, a sincere, liberal-minded collector of material from printed sources duly noted in footnotes. There is a comical aspect to his industry and to the position he reaches in the new Africa. Some time back, while teaching in a college in the capital, he had been visited by a striving African mother, the hotel maid who will later be canonized by the revolution. The mother visits Raymond for advice about the future of her son, very much in the way Salim had been called to "rescue" Ferdinand. Raymond meets with the son and tells him to forget law and the professions and instead to join the Defence Force. The son will become the President and Raymond will be his adviser, his White Man, as it were. Raymond is the voice of sincere hope for the country, for freedom, home rule, accommodation of the treacherous obstacles an exploited, ignorant nation will face. About the President he says: "He's a truly remarkable man. I don't think we give him credit for what he has done. He's disciplined the army and brought peace to this land of many peoples." In the end, everything is overwhelmed, crushed by civic chaos. The President's power is challenged and the reprisals are bloody. He has no use now for his White Man, and when Salim goes by their house, Raymond and Yvette have gone. It is occupied by an African. His own store is confiscated, and he is arrested for--pessimist that he has been--storing gold and ivory against disaster. Ferdinand, harassed himself, is still in a position to get Salim released and to insist that he leave the country. So the Indian storekeeper from the coast has lived his time in a bend in the river and now must retrace the steps of his passage. Salim manages to get away on a steamer, the vessel of the advanced world, while desperate people hanging on to a river barge with the hope of escape are swamped. "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 steamer started up again and moved without lights down the river, away from the scene 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." The novel ends in darkness. It is a haunting creation, rich with incident and human bafflement, played out in an immense detail of landscape rendered with a poignant brillance.