A Bend in the River
Weathers, Winston
Another tide of world history A BEND IN THE RIVER V. S. Naipaul Knopf, $8.95, 278 pp. Winston Weathers N AIPAUL'S latest novel is an ironically genteel first-person narration about a world...
...But will Salim actually manage to leave his Africa, his interior place, his heart of darkness...
...Some inexorable force is loose in the country, in the world...
...As a young Indian merchant in this broken town, Salim represents civilization for people who have just had the surface of civilization ripped away and wait anxiously for some new order...
...The only event that seems to penetrate Salim's "order and continuity" is the murder of Father Huismans, the Belgian headmaster of the Lycee...
...We have come, Naipaul says, to another tide of world history, a turning generated by the most frequently mentioned emotion in the novel: rage...
...And the economic boom is over...
...The colonialists have been thrown out, but now there are things to be settled among the natives, and a second rebellion begins that Salim watches as though it were being played on television...
...All a part of the Big Man's campaign to build an Africa that will contradict the very civilization these white intellectuals represent...
...A great area of land is cleared away, a polytechnic institute is built with concrete buildings, wide paved streets, street lights, air conditioning, European amenities...
...It all has to do with money, wealth, the lack of wealth, the having, the not having...
...Salim learns that those who have sucked parasitically upon this economic body have had no other life save that of money and now have no place left to run...
...Salim returns to Africa to sell his store, salvage what assets he can, perhaps pick up some final illegal money by dealing in forbidden gold and ivory—then escape...
...A death like that makes us question everything," Salim says, "but regardless of the deaths around us we continue to be flesh and blood and mind, and we cannot stay with that questioning mood for long...
...Then a third uprising of the bush against the government ignites...
...Sensing that all is not well with his own hybrid misplaced culture, he accepts an offer from a fellow Indian to buy a store in the new interior nation where commerce and trading will inevitably develop and where an industrious person may stake out a profitable existence...
...On a brief trip to London to consult there with old friends in the Indian community, Salim learns from Nazruddin, who sold him the store in the first place and moved on to Uganda, Canada, England, that there is now—at the end of the twentieth century—a price to be paid for some vast economic-social error underlying the working of the modern world...
...What Salim does not see is that all is not well with the emerging nation...
...Salim, the protagonist, a dispassionate witness of the darkening world around him, makes the mistake of thinking that his own objectivity and reasonableness will protect him from the worst events, that his own cynical awareness will serve as talisman against the reality of vulgar, horrible experiences...
...There will be executions...
...Finishing A Bend in the River, we realize that Africa is metaphor for something larger...
...As the killing takes place, gun shots in the streets, Salim rationalizes it as the sound of "order and continuity...
...Her son will go to the Lycee, the reopened Catholic school...
...The priest's decapitated body is found in a dugout that "drifted down the main river until it caught against the bank in a tangle of water hyacinths...
...The Big Man sends more soldiers into the territory as the secret guerrilla organizations begin to tear down the statues of Madonna and Child in protest against the politically-inspired "new religion...
...Violence...
...His decent life—afternoons playing squash, expensive car, an easy veneering of daily problems with a few extra francs here and there—borders on collapse...
...Zabeth wants her boy to be something, to learn what it takes to escape the jungle...
...Everyone wants to make his money and run away But where...
...Full of youth and vague ambition, Salim drives across Africa in his Peugeot...
...Most grandiose of all is the project called "The Domain" just outside the town...
...And the Big Man, in a final terrorism, cracks down on all foreigners and Salim is arrested when his secreted gold and ivory are discovered...
...We're being killed...
...He finds the "town at the bend in the river," where his store is located, scarcely recovered from the revolution, still in social and economic shock, lying like a terrible wasteland along the river's edge, with most of its European culture destroyed...
...Salim takes pride in playing "the game" that the new nation requires: the methodical bribing of government officials...
...and it was oddly comforting, ike the sounds of rain in the night...
...Actually, they serve a devious public-relations purpose as the dictator imposes upon the nation his own cult of the African Madonna (modeled after his own mother), the cult of the Pure and True Africa...
...Like a forest fire that goes underground and burns unseen along the roots of trees .. . Commonweal: 318 a rage against metal, machinery, wires, everything that was not of the forest and Africa . . . the rage . . . of simple men tearing at metal with their hands," — the rage that at last catches up with Salim, sweeps him without possessions or faith, down the river, into the coming void...
...They feel they're losing the place they can run back to...
...I will keep the police busy...
...Don't tell anyone...
...I was a foreigner, and Englishspeaking as well, someone from whom Ferdinand could learn manners and the ways of the outside world...
...Salim's store is intact, but smells of rats and dung, all its merchandise gone...
...The dictator has consolidated his power, economic boom follows...
...Winston Weathers N AIPAUL'S latest novel is an ironically genteel first-person narration about a world in terror and turmoil collapsing into apocalypse and the going under...
...Who doubts it when a western-style supermarket opens...
...So Salim submits to the euphoric aftermath of the second rebellion...
...Nothing has any meaning...
...And when Salim asks about Ferdinand's own health: "We're all going to hell...
...A Bend in the River is, on the surface, a novel about Africa between 1963 and 1977...
...But without money he is nothing...
...Salim does go, making his escape on the steamer, chugging down the river in the dark of the night...
...Some of the foreign merchants begin to flee the country...
...Throughout the novel, from the safety of his own accommodating center, Salim notes the rage of the African people: "It was unnerving, the depth of that African rage, the wish to destroy, regardless of consequences...
...But Salim has seen enough of better things to realize that "The Domain" is all "shoddy grandeur," simply a cheap cosmetic...
...23 May 1980: 319...
...Salim watches as the country's dictator-president, the Big Man, sends a garrison of imported white mercenaries to assassinate local military officers...
...One African woman, Zabeth, brings her son Ferdinand to see him...
...Salim observes, yet cannot be diverted from his expertise of keeping one's cool and staying out of other people's business...
...That is what is driving people mad...
...The Big Man is making a New Africa...
...Ferdinand, who already feels a part of the new Africa, becomes a student there...
...It will be necessary to start from scratch...
...Who doubts it when one of Salim's fellow Indians gets the Bigburger franchise...
...the daily gratuities in order to "play" inside this developing place...
...The Big Man imports European and American faculty, hangs them up for display in his cardboard university just as his own large photograph is hung in every building throughout the country...
...Salim is taken before the new commissioner of the town, the boy Ferdinand now grown up, sitting small and sad in the government building beneath the portrait of the dictator...
...For both Africans and non-Africans, Salim is the outside person most recently arrived who can demonstrate values, tastes, perceptions that supposedly have some meaning...
...Raymond, the aging history professor, an "authority" on Africa, and his young wife Yvette, give little dinner parties with Joan Baez records on the phonograph, with all sorts of intellectual discussions and barefoot dancing going on...
...But the Big Man and the newly organized Liberation Army are now in a final contest between those contrary notions as to how a new nation is to be made: by some central power imposing a grand design upon the people or by the ignorant masses who will have to work their way through a thousand years of history to catch up with the modern technological world...
...Symposia and colloquia take place...
...Salim wonders what he can do— homeless as he really is, where can he go...
...Nazruddin says, "All over the 'world money is in flight...
...Among the Africans themselves there are old political grudges—between the people of the bush and the people of the central government...
...Growing up on the east coast of Africa, member of the affluent Indian community, Salim, a Muslim, seems the typical contemporary man (no matter what nationality or religion): he is pessimistic, insecure, materialistic, at loose ends, "without the religious sense of my family...
...Collapse threatens...
...Such rage...
...Some parts of the town remain—the native sections, the river docks, a hotel, a few stores—yet the town is basically rubbish and ruin...
...Salim is, of course, just such a man— growing up in economic security, making a pleasant living off native Africans, never committing his life to anything, devoting himself to an endless round of economic improvement, all under the rubric of the "decent and civilized life...
...This guerrilla murder suggests to Salim that civilizations are 23 May 1980:317 easy to tear down but not easy to build up...
...A new nation has come into being in the African interior following a war of independence...
...The Big Man will use this "institute" as the training ground for his new breed of African government workers: young men molded to make the regime succeed...
...And Salim realizes, "She wanted me to keep an eye on him . . . take him under my protection...
...People have scraped the world clean . . . and now they want to run from the dreadful places where they've made their money and find some nice safe country...
...Ferdinand tells Salim, "You must go . . . there's a steamer on Tuesday...
...The Big Man plans to visit the town...
Vol. 107 • May 1980 • No. 10
