“...It was extraordinary to me that some of the newspapers could have found good words for the butchery on the coast. But people are like that about places in which they aren't really interested and where they don't have to live...People who had grown feeble had been physically destroyed. That in Africa, was not new; it was oldest law of the land” (29). There are ways to be banal, dismissive, and trite about human tragedies, and the distance that empowers us to say, with cheerful ease, “dead” over “passed away” is that which allows imperialism to dominate and mold a national ideology. Furthermore, from my own distinctly American perspective, it is logical that I should find works such as Grass’ The Tin Drum, or Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude more gripping, of greater literary merit, and more masterfully told than Naipaul’s A Bend in the River, or Pamuk’s My Name is Red; the “Western” strains -- the World War II backdrop of Drum, the nihilist metaphysic of Solitude -- are the touchstones of contemporary American and European thought, and our education within what in many ways is still an Orientalist system conditions us to treat Naipaul’s, Mahfouz’s, and Pamuk’s masterpieces as material designed to keep Sparknotes afloat.
Of River’s many flat, devastatingly aphoristic lines, the declaration that “in Africa...[tragedy] was the oldest law of the land” only adds to our American feeling of alienation from the text, especially in regards to how the Western presence which normally acts as our safeguard and sense of security within an “Eastern” Western narrative (see Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians), is ghostlike in Naipaul’s work. How are we to feel about our own culture if our security in reading a non-European-American’s novel is derived from the fact that we are represented as the imperialist, cruel, conquering people history has shown us to be?
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