A Bend in the River Study Guide

V. S. Naipaul was a Trinidadian-born writer and essayist, one of the most notable contributors to the literature of the Caribbean diaspora and considered by many to be one of the greatest novelists of the modern era. Naipaul’s grandparents were Hindu Indians who had immigrated to Trinidad and Tobago as indentured servants on plantations during the 1880s. His father, Seepersad Naipaul, was an English-language journalist for the Trinidad Guardian, and Naipaul credits him for his love of writing and literature. Naipaul attended the Queen’s Royal College secondary school in Trinidad, where he received a government grant to get his education abroad. In 1950 he enrolled at Oxford, where he met his eventual wife and career-long editor, Patricia Anne Hale. Naipaul settled in England but continued to write about Trinidad and the greater diaspora. While his first books were satirical accounts of life in the Caribbean (The Mystic Masseur (1957), The Suffrage of Elvira (1958), Miguel Street (1959)), his fourth novel A House for Mr. Biswas (1961) was a much more serious work about the diaspora and won him his first major acclaim. Notably amongst his many awards, Naipaul received the Booker Prize for his short fiction in 1971, and was honored with the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001. Despite the undisputed quality of Naipaul’s prose, he has received plenty of criticism in academic spaces for his pessimistic view of post-colonial futures for previously colonized nations, often accused of being a “neo-colonialist” or “cosmopolitan” writer.

The decolonization of Africa was a long and gradual process of political events, with the last African country to officially declare independence, Namibia, only doing so as recently as 1990. Loosely, the continent’s decolonization spans the mid-1950s until about 1975, but one could also point to Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt agreeing to the Atlantic Charter, with its goals for post-WWII global politics centering around the right to sovereignty and independence for all countries. This coincided with cadres of educated African elites pushing for politics of self-determination, leading the initial struggles for African nationalism—figures like Jomo Kenyatta, Kwame Nkhrumah, Julius Nyerere, and many others. The colonial governments, many of which were crippled by post-war debts, gave way to sovereign states over the next two decades. The process was full of violence and political turmoil, marked by revolutions and rebellions, often evoked or directly referenced in A Bend in the River. While the interior central-African country in which the novel takes place is unnamed and fictional, its story parallels the histories of states such as the Congo (then Zaïre) which gained its independence officially in 1960. The Big Man draws strong parallels with Mobutu Sese Seko, the Congolese dictator who gained power in 1967, whose government was highly totalitarian and defined by a cult of personality and radical nationalism that sought to exorcise all remaining colonial influence from the country.

The most often-drawn comparison to A Bend in the River is Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and for good reason. Though released in 1902 (first as serial chapters in magazines in 1899), Conrad’s novella also takes place in a central African country from the perspective of a foreign merchant and criticizes European colonial rule of Africa, with large thematic resonances likewise drawn from the bush, the great river, and the parallels between “savage” and “civilized” society. Naipaul, however, has been criticized for “neo-colonialist” sentiments encoded into his pessimistic portrayal of a post-colonial future. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, published in 1958, is notable for its pre-colonial portrayal of Nigeria and for the nuance and complexity of its native narrator, , contrasting with previous portrayals marked by savagery or mysticism. Chinua’s work paved the way for writers like Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche, whose novel Half a Yellow Sun (2006) also explores post-colonial identity prior to the Nigerian civil war through five connected yet distinct racial and socio-political perspectives. In the greater canon of literature from the Caribbean diaspora, novels like Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John explore themes of the lingering effects of colonialism on post-colonial society. One can even look as recently as Junot Diaz’s The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, a novel that also explores diasporic placelessness and cycles of time, to find the continued lineage of Naipaul’s work.