820 Naipaul, V. s.
we believed that change was coming to our part of
Africa, we couldn’t have done our business.” This
argues a fate-bound but not entirely pessimistic
worldview. The individual will of the characters
can transcend external conditions, to restore their
faith in basic humanity and the rejection of ethi-
cal nihilism. Hence, Salim befriends Zabeth, the
African tradeswoman, who becomes his most loyal
and sometimes only customer. Zabeth brings her
young son Ferdinand from the bush to be educated
by Salim. In troubled times, Ferdinand shelters in
Salim’s house; it is a protection he acknowledges
and returns. When violence strikes the town again,
Salim’s servant Metty betrays him to the police
because Salim has given his money away to other
people, not understanding that Ali, too, wants
money. Ferdinand, who now occupies an important
position close to the new president, risks his career
and possibly his life to rescue Salim from jail.
Ferdinand urges Salim to finally acknowledge
that there is nothing left for him in the town, and
that he must leave while he is alive and free. He has
not been harmed in jail, not because he is innocent,
but because it simply “hasn’t occurred” to his jailers
to beat him up. Ferdinand tells Salim that “The bush
runs itself. But there is no place to go,” acknowledg-
ing the faceless barbarity in the human soul that
they both recognize and accept as their overruling
reality. Therefore, Ferdinand advises him to take the
chance fate is offering him: “. . . they’ll take you in
again. And I won’t always be here to get you out . . .
Forget everything and go.” As Salim escapes from
the town on the last steamer, he also escapes the
fate to which he was ready to resign himself. An
inexorable, predestined force has led to the devasta-
tion of his life in this little African town. Yet human
civility, like that of Ferdinand, and the basic decency
of man to man have made for his redemption from
that fated reality and rendered the constant threat of
chaos and anarchy bearable.
Divya Saksena
Hope in A Bend in the River
V. S. Naipaul’s own quest for identity, his 1979
novel A Bend in the River, explores the personal and
collective alienation experienced in new nations
struggling to integrate their native and Western-
colonial heritages. The novel uses its internalized
view of the hopes and aspirations of one man—an
Indian who, in the turmoil of Third World his-
tory, has set up business in an isolated but river-
commerce-dependent town in a newly independent
country in Africa. The hope that echoes through the
novel derives from Salim’s observation of events in
his little town, which becomes a microcosm of the
nation, and postcolonial Africa, as a whole. Through
Salim, Naipaul depicts a place caught between its
hope of integrating with the modern Western world
and its reliance on its own deeply rooted history and
traditions.
Amid all the turmoil of a troubled nation emerg-
ing from imperial colonial rule and struggling to
define itself, the question arises: What is there to
hope for? Early in the novel, Salim is subject to fatal-
ism: “We simply lived; we did what was expected
of us. What we had seen the previous generation
do. We never asked why.” The oppressive sense of
stagnation is reinforced: “The assumption seemed
to be that things would continue, that marriages
would continue to be arranged between approved
parties, that trade and business would go on, that
Africa would be for us as it had been,” suggesting an
inherent loss or absence of hope for change in the
future. Indeed, Salim’s hopes are largely founded on
the status quo being maintained so that his business
and trade may flourish.
At the beginning, conscious that he wants
change and that he is poised on the brink of a social
cataclysm, Salim is unable, or unwilling, to fully
articulate his desire for something new or differ-
ent to happen. Instead, he develops the “habit of
looking, detaching myself from a familiar scene and
trying to consider it from a distance.” The resulting
objectivity makes him realize how hopelessly stag-
nant his community has become, acknowledging,
“And that was the beginning of my insecurity.” To
alleviate this sense of insecurity in a world that is
fast becoming destabilized, Salim becomes involved
in the Domain, a modern enclave where the presi-
dent of the country entertains useful foreigners and
technical professionals, “who had a high idea of the
new Africa.” In this superficially advanced and “civi-
lized” arena, he is initially euphoric at the vision of
life integrated with the outside world. The Domain