Exile means being neither entirely at one with the new setting, nor fully disencumbered of the old; beset with half-involvements and half-detachments; nostalgic and sentimental yet equally a consummate mimic or secret outcast. Being adept at survival becomes the imperative, with the dangers of getting too comfortable and secure constituting a threat constantly to be guarded against.
Salim, the main character of V.S. Naipaul’s novel “A Bend in the River,” is an affecting instance of the modern intellectual in exile: an East African Muslim of Indian origin, he has left the coast and journeyed into the interior, where he survives precariously in a new state modelled on Mobutu’s Zaire. Naipaul portrays Salim’s life at a ‘bend in the river’ as a no-man’s-land, to which hail the European intellectual advisers (who succeed the idealistic missionaries of colonial times), as well as the assorted mercenaries, profiteers, and other Third World drifters in whose ambience Salim is forced to live, gradually forfeiting his property and integrity in the mounting confusion.
As the novel unravels, the natives themselves have become exiles in their own country, so preposterous and erratic are the whims of the ruler, Big Man, a symbol of all post-colonial regimes.
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