Abstract
“Africa was my home, had been the home of my family for centuries. But we came from the east coast, and that made the difference. The coast was not truly African. It was an Arab-Indian-Persian-Portuguese place, and we who lived there were really people of the Indian Ocean.”1 This statement by Salim, the ruminative narrator of Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul’s A Bend in the River (1979), illustrates why he and his community feel that they possess a civilization but no country. But for Salim, this civilization is in disrepair and decline and cannot be salvaged because it fails to take stock of itself. Naipaul’s novel unsettles the conventional wisdom that there are lessons to be learned from the reservoir of history. A Bend in the River is obtrusively antinostalgic and refuses to enshrine a past that it holds responsible for the death of Afro-Indian civilization. Salim’s narrative, then, is neither a condemnation of Afro-Indian civilization, nor a warning to it, but an autopsy.
The fault lines of exile and diaspora always run deep, and we are always from elsewhere, and from elsewhere before that.
—Andre Aciman
Africa has no future.
—V. S. Naipaul (Shortly after the publication of A Bend in the River in an interview with Elizabeth Hardwick)
To be ignorant of the past is to remain as a child.
—Cicero
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Notes
V.S. Naipaul, A Bend in the River (New York: Vintage, 1979), 10.
Pratap Bhanu Mehta, “Naipaul and the Burdens of History,” in V. S. Naipaul: An Anthology of Recent Criticism, ed. Purabi Panwar. Delhi: Pencraft International, 2003. 44.
V. S. Naipaul, “‘The Last Lion’: Interview with Ahmed Rashid,” in Conversations with V. S. Naipaul, ed. Feroza Jussawalla (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997).
V. S. Naipaul, Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions among the Converted Peoples (New York: Vintage, 1999), xi.
R. N. Sarkar’s Islam Related Naipaul (New Delhi: Sarup and Sons, 2006).
Edward Said, “Intellectuals in the Post-Colonial World,” Salmagundi 70–71 (Spring-Summer 1986): 53.
Helen Hayward, The Enigma of V.S. Naipaul (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 184.
Ranu Samantrai, “Claiming the Burden: Naipaul’s Africa.” Research in African Literatures 31, no. 1 (Spring 2000): 50–62.
Chinua Achebe, “The African Writer and the English Language,” in The Routledge Language and Cultural Theory Reader, eds. Lucy Burke, Tony Crowley, and Alan Girvin (London: Routledge, 2000), 427.
Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey(New York: Barnes and Noble Classics, 1818/2005), 33.
M. G. Vassanji, The Gunny Sack (Oxford: Heinemann, 1989), 228.
Peter Kalliney, “Eastern African Fiction and Globalization,” in Teaching the African Novel, ed. Gaurav Desai (New York: MLA, 2009), 264.
Martin Genetsch’s study Texture and Identity: The Fiction of M. G. Vassanji, Neil Bissoondath, and Rohinton Mistry (Toronto: TSAR, 2007)
Jonathon Glassman, “Slower Than a Massacre: The Multiple Origins of Racial Thought in Colonial Africa” American Historical Review 109, no. 3 (June 2004): 720–54.
M. G. Vassanji, The Book of Secrets (New York: Picador, 1994), 4.
Peter Novick’s That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 27–28.
Theodore H. von Lue’s Leopold Ranke: The Formative Years (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1950).
Leopold von Ranke’s The Secret of World History: Selected Writings on the Art and Science of History, ed. and trans. Roger Wines (New York: Fordham University Press, 1981).
M. G. Vassanji, The In-Between World of Vikram Lall (Toronto: Doubleday Canada, 2003), 395.
Amin Malak, “Ambivalent Affiliations and the Postcolonial Condition: The Fiction of M. G. Vassanji,” World Literature Today 67, no. 2 (Spring 1993): 277–82.
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© 2011 Emad Mirmotahari
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Mirmotahari, E. (2011). “Men with Civilizations but Without Countries”. In: Islam in the Eastern African Novel. Literatures and Cultures of the Islamic World. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230119291_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230119291_5
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