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Summary
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in A Bend in the River, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Power, Freedom, and Identity
Racism and Diasporic Identity
Postcolonialism and Perpetual Unrest
The City vs. the Bush
Layers of the Past
Summary
Analysis
Salim, an East Indian man living on the Eastern coast of Africa, purchases a shop from his friend Nazruddin, a trader and businessman. The shop is located at “the bend in the great river,” in an unnamed country in the interior of Africa that has recently gained its independence. Due to local unrest following independence, Nazruddin sold the shop for cheap. Driving through bush and constant checkpoints, Salim worries about leaving civilization behind but also feels increasingly committed to his new life.
The location for which the novel gets its name is a town located in an interior central-African country. The country itself is fictional, but bears significant historical resemblance to the region now known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Immediately, readers are introduced to the uncertainty and unrest that underscore the events of the novel, and the environment of this newly independent country, as both the motivation for Nazruddin’s leaving and Salim’s journey. Salim is also traveling deeper and deeper into the bush, physically, and by extension mentally, cutting him off from his old life on the coast and rooting him in his new one.
Themes
When Salim arrives at the town, it is barely more than a ruin and mostly deserted. The shop has been looted but is otherwise intact. Other foreigners and traders also wait for business to begin anew. Peace holds and slowly people begin to trickle into the town again.
The town Salim finds is mostly ruined, and in its ghost-town state, the lines are blurred between past and present, as well as between city and bush. Salim makes a new life amongst the ruins of the many lives that came before him. In some ways the town retains certain metropolitan qualities—the dress of the foreigners, certain customs—but the spartan reality of their current existence in the town places them on the same level and a similar survival-first mindset as the villagers in the bush.
Themes
Salim’s first regular customer is an African trader, a marchande, named Zabeth who provides supplies for her local fishing community, a village almost 60 miles away. She is illiterate and distrusting of institutions like banks, but Salim finds her a shrewd businesswoman. At first she treks by land, but as the steamers begin to move down the river again, Zabeth, like many others, begins latching her boat onto the steamer with ropes in order to be towed to other towns. The practice is dangerous but generally accepted.
Zabeth’s various characterizing contradictions illustrate many of the reciprocal interactions between city and bush that define the Africa of the novel. Her distrust of banks combined with business acumen, for one, confuses certain preconceptions of Salim’s—that someone could lack education or conventional economic practices but still engage productively within the economy of the place. Likewise, the hitching of the makeshift dugout boats onto the colonial steamer—dangerous, yet accepted—is characteristic of the ways in which the town straddles both worlds.
Themes
Salim is particularly struck by Zabeth and the other women of her village travelling home at night. At night, Salim feels as if the ancient bush could swallow him up back in time. He marvels at the nature of Zabeth’s journeys, leaving the security of the deep forest to bring home tools and inventions of the present.
Salim’s marveling is inflected with his own respect and jealousy for the rooted nature of Zabeth’s connection to her home and history. He has also left the security of his home but does not plan to return, and soon enough has no home to return to. In a place like the bush, buzzing with its own antiquity and connection to the past, Salim feels afraid, unmoored, and awash.
Themes
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Zabeth, Salim notes, is different from the smaller, much darker-skinned people of the region. She is large, with coppery skin and a striking and unpleasant odor. Metty, the half-African servant who grew up in Salim’s family’s home and traveled to the town after him, later explains to Salim that Zabeth is a magician. She uses ointments to protect herself and ward people off. Salim comes to view her as powerful: a prophetess. In this way her charm works on him too.
Salim is highly aware of race and ethnicity, a fascination that is rooted in personal insecurity as well as the social importance of fidelity to one’s ethnicity that Salim experiences throughout the novel. Zabeth’s power, in this case seen by many as pseudo-magical, comes from her performance of her identity. She accentuates the striking and uncommon aspects of her appearance with ointments and affect, and thereby exercises power. By perceiving this aspect of her identity, Salim feels her “charm” work on him as well, showing the connection between identity performance and personal power or freedom.
Themes
