We Ain't Got No Home: A Review of A Bend in the River by V.S. Naipaul

September 6, 2006

Perhaps there are two ways to deal with region in a work of fiction: generational or panoramic. The generational novel (think Marquez' Hundred Years of Solitude) portrays a family over the course of time. Almost inevitably the generational approach turns into an opportunity to tell the history of a region through the particularities of a family. A Bend in the River by V.S. Naipaul (1979) is an example of the panoramic approach. We get a tour of the different social layers of a region, that region being an unnamed town at a bend in the river.. somewhere in the interior of Africa. The main character, Salim, an African-Indian-Muslim merchant whose family had been established on the African coast, burrows into his new African town and through his eyes we meet all classes of people. This panoramic approach is ideal for sketching the quicksilver changes of identity.. not in recalling the continuities that build strong generational identities.

A repeated theme is the need for characters to adapt their identities to the new world appearing in front of them. This is most conspicuous in the case of Indar, a friend of Salim from a coastal town where they grew up, who escapes political turmoil by going to school London. He casts about for an identity and a place in the modern world, growing angry, but finally:

I began to understand.. that my anguish about being a man adrift was false, that for me that dream of home and security was nothing more than a dream or isolation, anachronistic and stupid and very feeble. I belonged to myself alone. I was going to surrender my manhood to nobody. For me there was only one civilization and one place—London, or a place like it. [151-2]

The choice, then, is between a retreat to some kind of "home" or an acceptance of the modern world and its possibilities.

This is the choice not only for someone with a "complicated" identity (like an African-Indian-Muslim merchant), but for everyone. It had seemed through the novel that the tribal African was the only person with a home to return to.. but then at the end even that is gone, as the young African official Ferdinand explains:

"...I began to think I wanted to be a child again, to forget books and everything connected with books. The bush runs itself. But there is no place to go to. I've been on tour in the villages. It's a nightmare. All these airfields the man has built, the foreign companies have built—nowhere is safe now." [272]

The generational version of a region embodies the history of a particular region, but the panoramic version of a region is available for wider application. Naipaul keeps his city at a bend in the river anonymous.. partly to keep away from telling the story of any particular place.. which in turn allows for this as a work to describe the peculiar stress felt by the majority of human beings in our globalizing world. When the main character Salim gets to London, he finds a crowd of people in his same situation:

I was one of the crowd. Koreans, Filipinos, people from Hong Kong and Taiwan, South Africans, Italians, Greeks, South Americans, Argentines, Colombians, Venezuelans, Bolivians, a lot of black people who've cleaned out places you've never heard of, Chinese from everywhere. All of them are on the run. They are frightened of the fire. You musn't think it's only Africa people are running from. [234]

By this parallel, the city at the bend in the river becomes a version of the world, everyone everywhere trying to adjust to the new reality coming down the line. This is expansion is also why I think Naipaul is such a valuable writer. His concern is to contemplate the world, and to portray it carefully, but then to hammer out a way of living in the modern world.. not just for people who live in one particular place, but for people allover the world. He is a contemplator of the inner life of our globe.

How should we live? His wisdom is in the very first line of the novel:

The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it. [3]

The lines are mystifying, but the novel goes on to provide some clarity. "The world is what it is"—i.e. there is no place of retreat, no home to dream about. "Men.. who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it"—i.e. people who just drift or dream find themselves left out of the new world. The key is to act.. to create something out of life in this new world:

There could be no going back; there was nothing to go back to. We had become what the world outside had made us; we had to live in the world as it existed... Get rid of that idea of the past; make the dream-like scenes of loss ordinary. [244]