garden trampled: Or, the liquidation of African culture in V.S. Naipaul's A Bend in the River, The

College Literature, Oct 1996 by Wise, Christopher

The views of Indar, which are later adopted by the narrator, Salim, form the principal theme of A Bend In The River Given the cataclysmic changes ushered in by the colonization and industrialization of Africa, the past must be utterly annihilated if a new and better African culture is to emerge. Whereas Achebe seeks in Things Fall Apart to synthesize traditional and modern culture, Naipaul is much more pessimistic about the value of precolonial religious and community life in the modern context, specifically tribal and Indo-Muslim lifestyles in Central and East Africa.13 Though breathtakingly cynical, and far from adequately developed, Naipaul's neo-modernist prescriptions for the ills of postcolonial Africa may actually be more realistic than the pre-revolutionary prescriptions once offered by Achebe in Things Fall Apart.l4 This is in part because Naipaul's pessimism regarding the future of pre-colonial African culture is connected to his intuitive cynicism regarding the historical inevitability of reification itself, or of the extent of the commodity form's penetration into the daily lives of modem Africans.

For Naipaul, the reification or "objectification" of material reality in modern Africa concurs with the advent of both alienated and historical consciousness, a process aptly illustrated in the early pages of A Bend in the River when the narrator Salim muses over how an ordinary British postage stamp enabled him to detach himself from his local surroundings and consider them "as from a distance":

Small things can start us off in new ways of thinking, and I was started off by the postage stamps of our area. The British administration gave us beautiful stamps. These stamps depicted local scenes and local things; there was one called "Arab Dhow." It was as though, in those stamps, a foreigner had said, "This is what is most striking about this place." Without that stamp of the dhow I might have taken the dhows for granted. As it was, I learned to look at them (15).

The reification of Salim's material culture is in this sense prior to his own development as alienated or modernist monad, or even the homeless Hegelian-Lukacsian hero of the novel of realism, and it is also prior to his feelings of cultural inferiority as colonialist or manichean subject. In the following paragraph, Salim also tells us that "from an early age [he] developed the habit of looking, detaching [himself] from a familiar scene and trying to consider it from a distance" (15). Even more to the point, Salim adds, "It was from this habit of looking that the idea came to me that as a community we had fallen behind. And that was the beginning of my insecurity" (15-16).

For Salim, then, the British colonization of East Africa indirectly (but also irrevocably) alters the very coordinates or basic structures of his psychic perception.l5 First, physical objects like the Arab dhow are weirdly estranged from their immediate surroundings: they are experienced as reified things that are interpellated into a Cartesian, spatial, and grid-like universe, utterly inconsistent with previous or traditional systems of reference and understanding.l6 The immediate consequence for Salim is that the path is now cleared for the estrangement of the self as well: he now experiences his own lived body as an estranged object or material thing. In other words, Naipaul implies that, for Salim, alienated monadic consciousness is a direct result of reification's encroachment into the realm of the ontological.17