A Bend in the River

by V.S. Naipaul

I don’t think you understand, Salim. And it isn’t an easy thing to understand. It isn’t that there’s no right and wrong here. There’s no right.”

You so quickly get used to peace. It is like being well—you take it for granted, and forget that when you were ill, to be well again had seemed everything.

Popo was “baby.” Metty had a baby somewhere in the town, and the baby was sick. Metty had a whole life out there, separate from his life with me in the flat, separate from his bringing me coffee in the mornings, separate from the shop.

too, breaking out of old ways, had discovered solitude and the melancholy which is at the basis of religion. Religion turns that melancholy into uplifting fear and hope. But I had rejected the ways and comforts of religion; I couldn’t turn to them again, just like that. That melancholy about the world remained something I had to put up with on my own.

On the Domain they had their own way of talking about people and events; they were in touch with the world. To be with them was to have a sense of adventure.

Gold—how could it alter the man, who was only an African? But we wanted gold ourselves; and we regularly paid tribute to the Africans who wore gold.

Like other people in the town, I believed that degree courses had been scaled down or altered for Africans.

Was there a truth outside men? Didn’t men make the truth for themselves?

And so my satisfactions had only been brothel satisfactions, which hadn’t been satisfactions at all. I felt they had taken me further and further away from the true life of the senses and I feared they had made me incapable of that life.

Beautiful feet, and their whiteness was wonderful against the black of her slacks.

You couldn’t listen to sweet songs about injustice unless you expected justice and received it much of the time. You couldn’t sing songs about the end of the world unless—like the other people in that room, so beautiful with such simple things: African mats on the floor and African hangings on the wall and spears and masks—you felt that the world was going on and you were safe in it. How easy it was, in that room, to make those assumptions!

And what is most remarkable is that it’s been done without coercion, and entirely with the consent of the people.

Indar said, “That’s the tragedy of the place. The great men of Africa are not known.”

When I read in the paper that it was an unpublicized pilgrimage,

We believe because that way everything becomes simpler and makes more sense. We don’t believe—well, because of this.” And Indar waved at the fishermen’s village, the bush, the moonlit river.

I saw and understood so little that even at the end of my time at the university I could distinguish buildings only by their size, and I was hardly aware of the passing of the seasons.

And this is where I suppose life ends for most people, who stiffen in the attitudes they adopt to make themselves suitable for the jobs and lives that other people have laid out for them.

Everyone had surrendered his manhood, or a part of it, to those leaders. Everyone willingly made himself smaller the better to exalt those leaders.

began to understand at the same time 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 of isolation, anachronistic and stupid and very feeble. I belonged to myself alone.

For someone like me there was only one civilization and one place—London, or a place like it. Every other kind of life was make-believe. Home—what for? To hide? To bow to our great men?

We have nothing. We solace ourselves with that idea of the great men of our tribe, the Gandhi and the Nehru, and we castrate ourselves. ‘Here, take my manhood and invest it for me. Take my manhood and be a greater ...

After all, we make ourselves according to the ideas we have of our possibilities.

It is stupid to talk of the Americans. They are not a tribe, as you might think from the outside. They’re all individuals fighting to make their way, trying as hard as you or me not to sink.

My wish—which must have been like the wish of the people in London he had told me about, who had made room for him—was to clear away the aggressiveness and the depression that choked the tenderness I knew was there.

the rituals and taboos of nomads, which, transferred to the palace of a sultan or a maharaja, become the traditions of an aristocracy.

“You live your life. A stranger appears. He is an encumbrance.”

It became a brute physical act, an act almost of labour; and as it developed it became full of deliberate brutality.

So friendly, and yet in the end always without friends.

At school on the coast we were taught about European expansion in our area as though it had been no more than a defeat of the Arabs and their slave-trading ways.

My wish for an adventure with Yvette was a wish to be taken up to the skies, to be removed from the life I had—the dullness, the pointless tension, “the situation of the country.”

“Girls who do what I did should consider the wife a man has discarded or worn out, and know they are not going to do much better.

He broke with Raymond when he decided that he didn’t need him, that in the new direction he was taking the white man was an embarrassment to him

He needs a model in everything, and I believe he heard that de Gaulle used to send personal regards to the wives of his political enemies.

But because we felt our lives to be fluid we all felt isolated, and we no longer felt accountable to anyone or anything.

We lived better where we were, with servants and swimming pools, luxuries that only millionaires had in those other places.

Africa, going back to its old ways with modern tools, was going to be a difficult place for some time.

“Citoyens-citoyennes, monkey smart. Monkey smart like shit. Monkey can talk. You didn’t know that? Well, I tell you now. Monkey can talk, but he keep it quiet. Monkey know that if he talk in front of man, man going to catch him and beat him and make him work. Make him carry load in hot sun. Make him paddle boat. Citoyens! Citoyennes! We will teach these people to be like monkey. We will send them to the bush and let them work their arse off.”

It was a printed leaflet and had obviously been folded and unfolded many times. It was headlined “The Ancestors Shriek,” and was issued by something called the Liberation Army.

We have forgotten the TRUTHFUL LAWS. We of the LIBERATION ARMY have received no education. We do not print books and make speeches. We only know the TRUTH,

Two or three people were killed every night. But, strangely, it all began to seem far away.

The businessman who came in from the capital by air or by the steamer and put up at the van der Weyden, and went to the better-known restaurants and nightclubs and asked no questions, would not have guessed that the town was in a state of insurrection, that the insurrection had its leaders and—though their names were known only in their own districts—its martyrs.

“Strange, reading those diaries. In those days you used to scratch yourself to see whether you bled.”

My life with Yvette depended on the health and optimism of all three of us.

She was hit so hard and so often about the face, even through raised, protecting arms, that she staggered back and allowed herself to fall on the floor.

Men lived to acquire experience; the quality of the experience was immaterial; pleasure and pain—and above all, pain—had no meaning; to possess pain was as meaningless as to chase pleasure.

I was in Africa one day; I was in Europe the next morning. It was more than travelling fast. It was like being in two places at once.

When I was a child Europe ruled my world.

that always struck me as strange, that the birds didn’t mind being there.

That was the mood in which I left London and Kareisha, to go back to Africa, to wind up there, realise as much as I could of what I had. And make a fresh start somewhere else.

Théotime, moving quickly from a simple confidence in his role to an understanding of his helplessness, wanted you to pretend that he was another kind of man.