A Bend in the River

by

V. S. Naipaul

Raymond is an academic and historian, previously the right-hand man to the President, who lives in the State’s Domain with his wife Yvette. When Indar first brings Salim to a party thrown by the couple, Indar tells him that Raymond is “the Big Man’s white man,” sent to watch over the development of the Domain, and currently at work on a history of the country for mass publication. Raymond was the President’s professor when he was young and helped pull him out of a depression around the state of the world and his mother’s mistreatment by urging him to get practical about his politics and join the Defense Force. As a result, Raymond became one of the President’s most trusted advisors. Before long, Salim learns that Raymond has fallen out of favor with the President, having been used and dropped to explain away some of the problems his regime has caused. But due to the President being the locus for all power in the country, Raymond has no choice but to remain loyal to him. Raymond wants to work on a history of the country, but it gains no traction in the capital, so he turns his attention to a collection of the President’s speeches. The book of speeches is published, but edited down into a leaflet of Maximes and spread as propaganda. During his affair with Yvette, Salim reads some of Raymond’s published articles and is struck by how detached from actual reality they are, bogged down in academic speculation and offering little of real substance. In this way, Raymond is representative of Europe’s fading influence on Africa, as well as the hollow promises of the President and the Domain.

Raymond Quotes in A Bend in the River

The A Bend in the River quotes below are all either spoken by Raymond or refer to Raymond . For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Power, Freedom, and Identity Theme Icon
).
Chapter 8  Quotes

Not all the songs were like “Barbara Allen.” Some were modern, about war and injustice and oppression and nuclear destruction. But always in between there were the older, sweeter melodies. These were the ones I waited for, but in the end the voice linked the two kinds of song, linked the maidens and lovers and sad deaths of bygone times with the people of today who were oppressed and about to die. It was make-believe—I never doubted that. You couldn’t listen to sweet songs about injustice unless you expected justice and received it much of the time. You couldn’t sing songs about the end of the world unless—like the other people in that room… African mats on the floor and African hangings on the wall and spears and masks—you felt that the world was going on and you were safe in it.

Related Characters: Salim (speaker), Raymond , Yvette
Related Symbols: Masks and Costumes
Page Number: 128
Explanation and Analysis:

“Yvette goes on about the boys’ uniforms. But that’s the army background, and the mother’s hotel background […] The boys in the Domain have to wear theirs. And it isn’t a colonial uniform—that’s the point. In fact, everybody nowadays who wears a uniform has to understand that. Everyone in uniform has to feel that he has a personal contract with the President. And try to get the boys out of that uniform. You won’t succeed […] We have all these photographs of him in African costume nowadays […] I raised the issue with him one day in the capital […] he said ‘Five years ago, Raymond, I would have agreed with you […] But times have changed. The people now have peace. They want something else. So they no longer see a photograph of a solider. They see a photograph of an African. And that isn’t a picture of me, Raymond. It is a picture of all Africans.’”

Related Characters: Raymond (speaker), Salim , The President / The Big Man , Yvette
Related Symbols: Masks and Costumes
Page Number: 134
Explanation and Analysis:

“Such a work, if adequately prepared, might well become the handbook for a true revolution throughout the continent. Always you can catch that quality of the young man’s despair […] Always you have that feeling that the damage can never perhaps be undone. Always there is that note, for those with the ears to hear it, of the young man grieving for the humiliations of his mother, the hotel maid […] I don’t think people know that earlier this year he and his entire government made a pilgrimage to the village of that woman of Africa […] Can you imagine the humiliations of an African hotel maid in colonial times? No amount of piety can make up for that. But piety is all we have to offer.” “Or we can forget,” Indar said. “We can trample the past.” Raymond said, “That is what most of the leaders of Africa do. They want to build skyscrapers in the bush. This man wants to build a shrine.”

Related Characters: Indar (speaker), Raymond (speaker), Salim , The President / The Big Man
Page Number: 136
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 11 Quotes

A race riot in the capital in the 1930s—that ought to have been a strong story […] hysteria and terror in the African cités. But Raymond wasn’t interested in that side. He didn’t give the impression that he had talked to any of the people involved […] He stuck with the newspapers; he seemed to want to show that he had read them all and had worked out the precise political shade of each. His subject was an event in Africa, but he might have been writing about Europe or a place he had never been. His article about the missionaries and the ransomed slaves was also full of quotations, not from newspapers, but from the mission’s archives in Europe. The subject wasn’t new to me. At school on the coast we were taught about European expansion as though it had been no more than a defeat of the Arabs and their slave trading ways. We thought of that as English-school stuff; we didn’t mind. History was something dead and gone […] and we didn’t pay too much attention to it.

Related Characters: Salim (speaker), Raymond
Page Number: 181
Explanation and Analysis:
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A Bend in the River PDF

Raymond Quotes in A Bend in the River

The A Bend in the River quotes below are all either spoken by Raymond or refer to Raymond . For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Power, Freedom, and Identity Theme Icon
).
Chapter 8  Quotes

Not all the songs were like “Barbara Allen.” Some were modern, about war and injustice and oppression and nuclear destruction. But always in between there were the older, sweeter melodies. These were the ones I waited for, but in the end the voice linked the two kinds of song, linked the maidens and lovers and sad deaths of bygone times with the people of today who were oppressed and about to die. It was make-believe—I never doubted that. You couldn’t listen to sweet songs about injustice unless you expected justice and received it much of the time. You couldn’t sing songs about the end of the world unless—like the other people in that room… African mats on the floor and African hangings on the wall and spears and masks—you felt that the world was going on and you were safe in it.

Related Characters: Salim (speaker), Raymond , Yvette
Related Symbols: Masks and Costumes
Page Number: 128
Explanation and Analysis:

“Yvette goes on about the boys’ uniforms. But that’s the army background, and the mother’s hotel background […] The boys in the Domain have to wear theirs. And it isn’t a colonial uniform—that’s the point. In fact, everybody nowadays who wears a uniform has to understand that. Everyone in uniform has to feel that he has a personal contract with the President. And try to get the boys out of that uniform. You won’t succeed […] We have all these photographs of him in African costume nowadays […] I raised the issue with him one day in the capital […] he said ‘Five years ago, Raymond, I would have agreed with you […] But times have changed. The people now have peace. They want something else. So they no longer see a photograph of a solider. They see a photograph of an African. And that isn’t a picture of me, Raymond. It is a picture of all Africans.’”

Related Characters: Raymond (speaker), Salim , The President / The Big Man , Yvette
Related Symbols: Masks and Costumes
Page Number: 134
Explanation and Analysis:

“Such a work, if adequately prepared, might well become the handbook for a true revolution throughout the continent. Always you can catch that quality of the young man’s despair […] Always you have that feeling that the damage can never perhaps be undone. Always there is that note, for those with the ears to hear it, of the young man grieving for the humiliations of his mother, the hotel maid […] I don’t think people know that earlier this year he and his entire government made a pilgrimage to the village of that woman of Africa […] Can you imagine the humiliations of an African hotel maid in colonial times? No amount of piety can make up for that. But piety is all we have to offer.” “Or we can forget,” Indar said. “We can trample the past.” Raymond said, “That is what most of the leaders of Africa do. They want to build skyscrapers in the bush. This man wants to build a shrine.”

Related Characters: Indar (speaker), Raymond (speaker), Salim , The President / The Big Man
Page Number: 136
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 11 Quotes

A race riot in the capital in the 1930s—that ought to have been a strong story […] hysteria and terror in the African cités. But Raymond wasn’t interested in that side. He didn’t give the impression that he had talked to any of the people involved […] He stuck with the newspapers; he seemed to want to show that he had read them all and had worked out the precise political shade of each. His subject was an event in Africa, but he might have been writing about Europe or a place he had never been. His article about the missionaries and the ransomed slaves was also full of quotations, not from newspapers, but from the mission’s archives in Europe. The subject wasn’t new to me. At school on the coast we were taught about European expansion as though it had been no more than a defeat of the Arabs and their slave trading ways. We thought of that as English-school stuff; we didn’t mind. History was something dead and gone […] and we didn’t pay too much attention to it.

Related Characters: Salim (speaker), Raymond
Page Number: 181
Explanation and Analysis: