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Chapter 7
Themes
and Colors
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
Indar invites Salim to a dinner party in The Domain, hosted by a prominent couple he is friends with: Yvette and Raymond. Indar describes Raymond as “the Big Man’s white man,” deeply knowledgeable about the country and history in general. Yvette greets them at the door and Salim feels a new and confusing attraction toward the woman. Her black silk blouse and slacks lend her an air of unreachability and sophistication, and Salim notes she is in her late 20s, like Salim, and almost 30 years younger than her husband. Salim notices that all of the European-style furniture has been removed from the interior and replaced with traditional African cushions and mats—to this end, Yvette makes an ironic comment about the President’s idea of Europe. The walls, likewise, are decorated by African tapestries, masks, and spears.
The people of the Domain’s performative engagement in African culture is epitomized by the redecoration of Raymond and Yvette’s house. To the foreign—often White—academics, scholars, and politicians, the “Africa of words” is a topic, a pursuit, or a fascination more than a physical space and culture to be engaged in. On the other hand, the President’s attempts to design the Domain after European cities belies his real desire to make Africa into something more European or cosmopolitan. In this case, the masks symbolize the ownership or coopting of a symbol or culture to legitimize an agenda. It is especially important for Raymond, “the Big Man’s white Man,” to project a connection to Africa as a sign of loyalty to the President’s ideals.
Active
Themes
Salim is intrigued by the party’s atmosphere, particularly the liberated femininity and self-determination of the women in the space. Salim realizes he has only know women in subservience, in the context of brothels and when they have been paid for, and begins to feel those satisfactions were hardly satisfactions at all. Immediately he begins to yearn for this more balanced, sophisticated relationality, marveling at how the men and women dance with one another for mutual pleasure. He is particularly moved by the Joan Baez record that comes on, “Barbara Allen,” which seems to awaken a repressed part of himself full of “loss, homesickness, and grief,” a part that “longed for love.” After inquiring about Baez’s story, Salim recognizes the central tension of her music, an irony where someone sings softly about great injustice.
In Yvette, Salim encounters a new form of femininity that he associates with the elevated, civilized space of the Domain. How the women at the party perform their relationship to themselves and to the men around them—equal, balanced, and modern—is representative of the sophistication Salim often fears he lacks, and is therefore seductive to him on multiple levels. Salim’s eyes are opened to relationships that are not just transactional, but in fact mutually beneficial, which is his first inkling of the web of relationships and influence within the political world. The operating tension of Joan Baez’s music is, in a way, symbolic of the subtlety and power of the space.
Active
Themes
Raymond emerges from his office later on to join the party. His aura of depressive toil and intelligence subtly pulls all attention toward him. Raymond laments that his studies reveal to him that finding the real truth of something is an impossible task. The party-goers protest, offering him support that with persistence anything is possible, but Raymond insists that as a historian, he knows better than most how much is lost, and how much history goes unrecorded. Indar makes a comment about another scholar who had published a paper on a rebellion on the continent, and how people are turning to Africa to make “the fast academic buck.”
Active
Themes
At this point, Indar finally introduces Salim to Raymond, and urges him to tell the story of how he met the President. Raymond explains that he worked at a college in the country’s capital during the colonial period. At one point, an older African woman who worked as a hotel maid came to him worried for her son: he was depressed and had left school. Raymond was impressed by the woman and her dignity and agreed to help her. When Raymond met her son, he was blown away by his brilliance and empathy. The son suffered because of the world that required his mother to face such constant humiliation, and saw no way out. Raymond, after listening to him, had encouraged the boy to become practical about his politics by joining the Defense Force, which would provide him real skills and show him what forces and structures truly make up the country.
Active
Themes
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Raymond goes on to praise all the President has done during his time in office, particularly with regard to his disciplining of the military and the peace he has created. He also celebrates the freedom of ideas that he believes the president has allowed. To this end, Raymond notes how, through his depiction in the widely spread photograph wearing “African costume,” The Big Man has created a sense of pride and connection with the African people for being a part of something larger, citing his army uniform in the Defense Force and his mother’s maid outfit. Raymond recalls a student bristling at a remark he made about the photographs in class, and when Raymond inquired as to what he felt when he saw the photo, the student responded, “I also consider it a photo of myself.” “It takes an African to rule Africa,” Raymond claims.
Raymond explains he is currently working on a collection of the President’s speeches which would chart the development of his political philosophy over time. Raymond believes, if done properly, such a book could become a “handbook for true revolution throughout the continent.” At the core of the President’s outlook and being, Raymond senses that same young man he met, wounded by the humiliations of his mother. Raymond feels this makes him pious and empathetic, noting how he has uplifted the bush and its culture. Most leaders in Africa have sought to level the bush and build skyscrapers, following a European modernity, but Raymond believes “this man wants to build a shrine.”
Ending what has essentially turned into a speech of his own, Raymond insists he must return to his work. But before he does so, he once again laments the various hardships of writing, particularly in writing history. When compared to Theodore Mommsen, the great German scholar whose history of the Romans charts a great empire, Raymond has no guarantees the history of Africa will be as worthy, as its history is still being written. He ends by imparting “we can only carry on,” strangely echoing Mahesh’s sentiments but in a vastly different context. Indar asks Salim if he knows Raymond’s work, and when he admits he doesn’t, Indar says that is the tragedy of the continent, that “the great men of Africa are not known,” thereby including all of them in the greater narrative of Africa, despite not being African themselves.
Active
Themes
After leaving the party, Salim and Indar discuss everything Raymond said. Indar agrees with the multiplicity of the President’s identity, noting how he is so many different Africans at once. He is able to straddle seeming opposites—the old ways and the new, the chieftain and the everyman, conservatism and revolution—by folding it all into this greater African identity for which he is the one symbol. They walk down to the river and listen to the rapids, and Indar notes how seductive the idea of a “Europe in Africa” is, but feels it is probably an illusion. He points to Raymond having no real sway over the President as he pretends to, and his presence in The Domain being more performance than anything else. Salim’s mind remains on the embrace he shared with Yvette at his departure, the shape of her posture, and the sound of Joan Baez’s voice.
