Ⅱ. The Tradition of Exile and Post-colonial Perspective of Exile
…there floated the debris of the soul, broken memories, sloughed-off selves, severed mother-tongues, violated privacies, untranslatable jokes, extinguished futures, lost loves, the forgotten meaning of hollow, booming words, land, belonging, home.
Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses
The “exile” tradition, which has been continuously affecting the themes of modern literature, can be traced back to the Greek epic Odyssey, in which the hero,
Odysseus, irritated Olympic gods on his way home from Trojan War, and as a nemesis, was cast into exile from his homeland, Ithaca. During the wandering and roaming,
he never gave up the idea of going back to Ithaca because he regarded the image and meaning of home as stable and immutable. Penelope and Telemachus, his beloved wife and son, together with the palace they inhabited constructed the world as a whole and meaningful entity. These “adventures” in his journey and seven long years of tarry with Calypso
1left not a slightest inscription on the image of home on his mind.
The only thing he had to do to restore his former identity as the king of Ithaca was, after pacifying gods’ wrath, simply to kill all those insolent suitors who clustered in his palace and refused to leave. Thenceforward the beloved Penelope would be as faithful and Telemachus as brave and affectionate as if there were no interceptions between these long years. All the traces were retrieved intact and all the people and feelings were as immutable as before, except for the episodic death of the old dog.
Lukács brilliantly observes:
“The soul goes out to seek adventure; it lives through adventures, but it does
1 In Greek Myths, Calypso is a daughter of Atlas. She received Odysseus in shipwreck.
Odyssus had two sons with her. At his departure, she was inconsolable.
not know the real torment of seeking and the real danger of finding; such a soul never stakes itself; it does not yet know that it can lose itself, it never thinks of having to look for itself. Such an age is the age of epic” (30, italics mine).
The epic hero in exile has nothing to lose because he himself and the world around him is one, no matter what happens, nothing would add to or reduce the epic hero’s identity. According to Bakhtin,
2the world of epic is closed and self-sufficient, not like the world in the modern age. In the epic age, the process of exile has nothing to do at all about self-searching and quest for identity because no matter how tough those “adventures” are in the process of exile, it is simply some kind of reassurance of peace between gods and human beings and the navigation is always engaged in a sealed paradigm of time and space. Lukács also acclaims with yearning: “Happy are those ages…The world is wide and yet like a home…the world and the self never become permanent strangers to one another…There is not yet any interiority, for there is not yet any exterior, any ‘otherness’ for the soul” (29-30 italic mine).
However, time has been marching relentlessly forward and through the drastic change of Industrial Revolution and the following capitalism and large-scale
production, the world is no longer the way it used to be. Through objectified social intercourse, human beings have been alienated from the world they inhabit and infected with modernistic acedia. Albert Camus
3declares: “In a universe that is
2 In his essay “Epic and Novel,” M. M. Bakhtin maintains that “The epic world is an utterly finished thing . . . It is completed, conclusive, and immutable, as a fact, an idea and a value” (17).
Here he clearly points out the chronotope of epic is stable, without process. All the acts refer to the temporally valorized epic past whose outstanding feature is absolute conclusiveness and closeness.
3 Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1955) 86. The concept is further developed in his famous novel The Outsider (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1946). Camus himself, like the protagonist, Meursault, is an Algerian. They are not French colonials, but citizens of France domiciled in North Africa. They are placed in the traditional Mediterranean culture while hardly partaking of it. The feeling as displaced exiles, adding to the existentialistic “ennui” which results from prevailing modernism, becomes keener and makes them “strangers” and “outsiders” to the world they live in.
suddenly deprived of illusion and of light, man feels a stranger. He is an irremediable exile.” In his existentialistic perspective, Albert Camus points out human’s helplessness and alienation in this objectified world, each man is essentially alone and must find his own way in the meaningless world. In this wake of
breakdown of traditional assumptions many writers had come to share a sense of absurdity of man’s situation, a sense of “the divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting.” Eugene Ionesco in an essay on Kafka also noted, “Cut off his religious, metaphysical, and transcendental roots, man is lost . . ..”
4Therefore, human beings are set into a desperate exile which aspire for an eternal and permanent image of “home” that is unlikely to be attained. Nevertheless, being exiles is not simply an abstract and metaphysical phenomenon; it is a cultural issue as well. Those
countries which went through Industrial Revolution and were instructed by capitalism had plunged into mass production and managed to explore the so-called “world market” and dumped their surplus goods to those countries overseas and from which, at the same time, vulturously plundered more cheap raw materials to keep their business running. These exploits were notoriously achieved by colonial activity, which was often accompanied with military, economic, and cultural invasions.
Through the long lapse of colonialism, the persecuted races are mostly now
emancipated. However, the consequences of mass immigration and slave trade and miscegenation have gradually emerged since the beginning of the century.
Colonialism has peopled the world with exiles, whether through the forcible enslavement or through the subtler forms of provincialism such as the case in
Yugoslavia and Rwanda. In the extensive and multiple worlds of modern cities and barren villages, with the help of rapid transportation, we are apt to become nomads,
4 In “The Theory of the Novel,” Georg Lukács also deplores the “transcendental homelessness.”
He also maintains, quoting Novalis, “Philosophy is really homesickness, it is the urge to be at home everywhere” (29).
migrants across a system that is too vast for us, but in which we are fully involved in those motley cultures that are totally different from that of our own. When the focus is adjusted from modernism to the late post-colonialism, the interpretations of exile are no longer limited in the metaphysical level; it comes to life with fresh and bones.
Ian Chambers asserts: “The migrant’s sense of being rootless, of living between worlds, between a lost past and a non-integrated present, is perhaps the most fitting metaphor of this (post)modernism” (27) The colonial as exile mirrors a universal condition in the present-day world. In The Pleasures of Exile, George Lamming writes, “To be a colonial is to be in a state of exile. And the exile is always colonial by circumstances” (229). It is this state of exile—of dislocation and alienation—that consists of prevailing postcolonial experience. Gordon Rohlehr also puts it: “The colonial man has become an icon of the displaced modern man” (52). As long as a dislocated individual remains at odds with both the world he has left behind and the world he has adopted, he remains spiritually and intellectually an exile. Salman Rushdie’s vision of migrants also properly reflects the trapped situation of exile in Shame:
All migrants leave their pasts behind, although some try to pack it into bundles and boxes—but on the journey something seeps out of the treasure mementoes and old photographs, until even their owners fail to recognize them, because it is the fate of migrants to be stripped of history, to stand naked amidst the scorn of strangers…(63)
Entangled ethnicities and the phenomena of hybridty plus overlapped borders,
whether of nations or races, make the world around us appear more complicated, and the location of living amid it become more and more ambiguous (or in Homi
Bhabha’s word, ambivalent). Edward Said has observed:
The exile knows that in a secular and contingent world, homes are always
provisional. Borders and barriers that enclose us within the safety of familiar territory can also become prisons, are often defended beyond reason or necessity. Exiles cross borders, break barriers of thought and experience.
5The geographical and metaphysical definitions of exile are closely related and together they construct a genealogy of modernistic exile. One cannot possibly be geographical displaced and meanwhile feel ontologically at home. And vice versa, there is no one who is “transcendental homeless”
can find any places that meet his demand to accommodate himself. The physical and geographical displacement embodies the mystified trope of
“ontological homelessness” and thus launches a search for a relocation of the impasse of the homeless men.
In his novels Naipaul has put forward the most prominent dilemma in this post-colonial landscape: the dilemma of home and identity as well as the
psychological and political aspects of alienation. His vision of the world is unique for its exposition of the very corruption of consciousness, which he does with a Swiftian wit and energy. His later novels are especially concerned with the aftermath of migration, which becomes a major disequilibrium, creating large-scale restlessness, stasis, and futility in the globalized world. Naipaul suggests that beyond the superficies of their modern styles, there is nothing that can bind the New World people together: “on power and the consolidation of passing power we wasted our energies, until the bigger truth came: that in a society like ours, fragmented,
inorganic, no link between man and the landscape, a society not held together by common interest, there was no true internal source of power, and that no power was real, which did not come from the outside” (MM 206). Like the tormented West
5 Edward Said, “Mind of Writer: Reflections on Life in Exile,” Harper’s September (1984): 54.
Indian exile in “Tell Me Who to Kill” of In a Free State, he recognizes that “the mystery land is theirs, the stranger is you” (79). His portrayals very often tend to be representative of the predicament of the universal modern man.
A. The Privilege and Limit of Exile
To be a stranger in a strange land, to be lost, is perhaps a condition typical of contemporary life. Exile, as well as migration, is a process of becoming, in between origins and destinations. Being an exile means to continually find oneself involved in a conversation in which different identities are recognized, exchanged, and mixed, but do not vanish. Here differences function not necessarily as barriers but rather as signals of complexity. Although exile begins with a split, it carries the possibility for new exchanges and connectedness: the understanding of one’s self, culture, and society through the lens of other persons, cultures, and societies. Exile can lead to an awakening to heterogeneity and the basic connection between self and others.
What is the advantage of being an exile? It might be the gifted detached observation that can clearly see others and their relation between us. Descartes equates exile, being a stranger among others, with personal liberty. “One foot in one country, the other foot in another,” he writes, “I find my situation very agreeable in that I am free”
(qtd. Weiss, On the Margins 7). Because the exile is culturally different from the
others among whom he lives, he can define himself more sharply against the foil of
strangeness. The 2000 Nobel Prize laureate, Gao Xingjian claimed “I am not sad to
be in exile. It has been a renaissance to me.” Edward Said also provides a similar
point of view: “Yet when I say ‘exile’ I do not mean something sad or deprived. On
the contrary belonging, as it were, to both sides of the imperial divide enable you to
understand them more easily… as if I belonged to more than one history and more
than one group” (Culture and Imperialism xxvii). Exile also offers significant
creative possibilities. The exile exercises, potentially, what Tzvetan Todorov calls an “exotopy,”
6a vision from the outside through which he or she can see those what are inside. This “ontological deracination” paradoxically offers what Todorov terms the “epistemological privilege” of being an exile and wanderer. Creative detachment promotes a wider view of man and his destiny as it rises above common emotions, nostalgic memories, and mimetic aspiration.
The vision of exile holds new possibilities for seeing and understanding.
However, it has its limit and therefore appears to some susceptible and problematic.
In the first place, an outsider or a stranger is generally not acquainted with the domestic affairs with its entangled historical and geographical relationship and ignorant about the imbroglio of traditions and modernization. And thus he tends to oversimplify the situation and offers some irritating points of view. It is something that echoes what Rushdie writes in the novel Shame:
Outsider! Trespasser! You have no right to this subject! … Poacher!
Pirate! We reject your authority. We know you with your foreign language wrapped around you like a flag: speaking about you in your forked tongue.
7(28, italics original)
In the second place, it is impossible for an exile to discard absolutely the cultural heritage of his homeland and when he arrives at other places, it is improbable for him to throw them away and observes with an impartial attitude. Therefore, the exile’s experience of strangeness can result in non-seeing, or seeing only through the blinders
6 The word “exotopy” is Tzvetan Todorov’s coinage to match M. M. Bakhtin’s coinage of a term that signifies “outsideness.” Todorov explains: the second aspect of creative activity is named by Bakhtin with a new Russian coinage: vnenakhodimost, literally “finding oneself outside.” See Tzvetan Todorov, Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogic Principle, trans. Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1984).
7 “Forked tongue” is a very frequently seen symbol in Rushdie’s novels. It not only means illegitimate and unauthentic “language” but it also implies racial “hybridity.” Take Rushdie for example, one end of the tongue is Indian ancestry, and the other end is British colonial impact on India which occupy contrapuntal positions of identity but can never be torn apart.
of one’s preconceptions. The exile carries with him, in his mind, his past and the city from which he escaped physically but can never escape psychologically and emotionally. As in an interview on his novel The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie pointed out the dilemma of exile (or migrant) in the hybridized world:
But most of the time, people will ask me—will ask anyone like me—are you Indian? Pakistani? English?
What is being expressed is a discomfort with a plural identity. And what I am saying to you—saying in the novel—is that we have got to terms with this. We are increasingly becoming a world of migrants, made up of bits and fragments from here, there. We are here. And we have never really left anywhere we have been.
8These two perceptions seem to circumscribe all exile’s works with ontological and epistemological limits, and in fact, Naipaul is most
frequently criticized on these two aspects: being an outsider and judging others according to his British (or mandarin, in Rob Nixon’s words) standard and experience. However, far from tainting exiles’ reputation;
instead, he offers a brand new exile vision to this postcolonial world. His exile vision and political stance would be discussed here.
1. Exile Vision of Naipaul
Naipaul, as an exile writer without home, enjoys a unique position. Once he described himself: “Because one doesn’t have a side, doesn’t have a country, doesn’t have a community: one is entirely an individual” (Naipaul 31). He can at one and the same time be a prophet, soothsayer, and doom watcher and tell unpalatable truths.
8 Gerald Marzorati, “Salman Rushdie: Fiction’s embattled infidel,” in Parade, June 1989. This is a monthly published from Bombay. The article is reproduced from the New York Times, but does not give its publication date.
His eagle-on-the-crags look, as Saul Bellow puts it, is able to see through the creeds, cultures, and countries—the postcolonial societies—and strips them of their
pretentious and defensive mechanisms by means of irony and prophecy. He insists he is merely “seeing ourselves as other see us” and in so doing seeing into “the heart of the matters.” For an exile life endows him with a certain alienated majesty and thus enable him to maintain the balance between artistic distance and humane
commitment. But for him the sense of strangeness has been as much a blessing as a burden, offering the protection of a kind of “free state.” This is also what Homi Bhabha attributes to Naipaul the “autonomy of art” (The Location of Culture 107).
His sight is sharp and his criticisms are unsparingly harsh, not simply cynical, nor sycophantically optimistic. Naiapul does it all with an understanding that goes beyond anger and a clarity that goes beyond any rhetoric. He is wont to placing strangers in strange lands and watching them from a coldly detached distance, making reality dramatizing itself through a meticulous observation of the detail and the
pattern of experience. With this writing strategy, occasionally he speaks behind the exile character and expresses himself and occasionally he steps aside and criticizes the character vehemently. This self-reflexive characteristic makes his texts a perpetual mutual dialogue between the world and his identity and this accumulated experience make his work more profound and closer to life.
2. Political (In)correctness
If Way to a Better there be/It exacts a full look at the Worst Thomas Hardy “In Tenebris”
Being a “virtuoso of the negative,” as Eugene Goodheart puts it, Naipaul’s
cold-eyed contempt with which he encounters one and all obviously has not won him
many friends. Political destabilization follows the same pattern in his novels: racial
strife among the principle ethic factions, demagogy, backwardness, bleak vision and exploitation of non-white minority groups (McSweeney 183). Readers may find the utter absence of ingratiation quite irresistible. He is most frequently criticized as
“politically incorrect” and although in an interview Naipaul refuted the charge of selling out his cultures (too many as none) and of being colonialist and creating colonial discourse, his achievement and reputation as a writer still remain an issue of controversy. And according to the past criticism, Naipaul’s winning Nobel Prize may be regarded as an “unfriendly gesture” that in a degree is to be taken as a consolidation and endorsement of Eurocentrism and thence intensify the racial oppositions, especially on the part of the Third World people who are customarily to be the objects of his tongue-lashings and vituperation. In the reading on Naipaul’s travelogues, London Calling: V. S. Naipaul, Postcolonial Mandarin, Rob Nixon downgrades Naipaul as a writer of “arrogance and bigotry” who takes disguise of impartiality but appeals to the Western values. Some others strive to restore his reputation by getting him out of the ideological quagmire. Graham Huggan suggests that the reading of Naipaul’s works should “steer[s] clear of critical partisanship, and of the rhetorical overkill that makes Naipaul’s work into homage to metropolitan Europe, and Naipaul himself into an unambiguous champion of Western imperialism”
(205 italics mine). Peter Hughes also points out that “so many people have misperceived what Naipaul is up to; they appear to have confused a catalyst with a cause, or the herald with the (often grim) challenge he brings” (206). Likewise, Joshi also precisely assesses it, his taunt is the “probe of surgeon: the intention is to heal, not to hurt” (191).
There is no denying that everyone is prejudiced and Naipaul, of course, is no
exception. Consequently any attempts to charge Naipaul with his failure to be an
impartial judge would miss the point and are apt to, paradoxically, reading his works
with prejudice, because he need not and also cannot be impartial. Moreover, Eugene Goodheart suggests that “more important than the particular prejudices is the freedom to be prejudiced and the power to express it” (“Mandarin Sensibility” 246).
Naipaul’s admirable comment on Trollop, “that unapologetic display of outrageous prejudice” clearly shows his dauntlessness of being regarded as prejudiced. The freedom “denied by the democratic ethos of congeniality” and boldness unafraid of irritating others enable Naipaul to observe the ideological landscapes of the
developing nations with his “prejudiced clear-sightedness.” Therefore, his contributions to the ways in which the “new” societies of the former colonial world can be understood are groundbreaking and original. It would be less meaningful to ask under what motives did he determine to record the wretchedness than to demand what respects of visions he has offered us and to what extent did he represent it faithfully. The most important point here is not to ideologize Naipaul’s works under political censorship but to examine how many facts he forces us to see. Although his distaste for his homeland, whether Trinidad or India it may be, is so clearly and repeatedly expressed without reserve, this should not be wavered as a conviction against him. His objects of criticism are worldwide and regardless of race. He declares that “Political gamesmanship” leaves him cold, and that “honesty” is his only
“ideology” if there is any. “I’m not fighting a racial war;” he declares, “the people ban me over there are fighting a racial war” (Naipaul 84). His basic conception and attitude to the chaos and backwardness is expressed clearly in an interview: “There is an inward reason. We must look internally for the reason. It is not enough to blame external forces and say the clock and the cannon, and so on. That has always been my attitude. That is the source of it. We must examine ourselves, examine our own weakness” (Tejpal). It is clear that Naipaul has always been and has
become progressively more aware of this aspect of the predicament of the ex-colonies.
As he says about Indians, “They demand so little of themselves. They are colonials, in a perpetual colonial situation. They have too many lovers of India loving them for their wretchedness and their misery and their slave and their wish to keep others trapped.” (Naipaul 89-90). To Naipaul, self-forgiveness amounts to telling oneself it’s all right to be sick. Some things in the Third World should not be forgiven, he believes. They should be diagnosed and cured, like an illness. He takes pains to overlook nothing, to forget nothing and to forgive nothing. The harsh verdict, clearly rendered, is Naipaul’s way of exorcising a myth. Likewise in the case of Africa, where “In a Free State” and A Bend in the River were set, Axelle Kabou, a Cameron economist, strongly opposed the myth that has been long adhered to: Africa is poor because it was exploited. In fact, Africa is reluctant to develop herself on her own simply because of wounded pride. The “Black Continent” has to stop deceiving self and others, and has to stop continuing to attribute her poverty and tribulation to colonialism and “the West.” It is only an excuse. On his journey to Pakistan, he met a young man: “He was so demoralized by the British and the people here were so demoralized that they haven’t been able to do anything in this backward state. I thought it was a very bad thing to say. I thought it was a shallow thing to say.” In many Third World countries, so many funds, time, energy, and ability are squandered;
plans, organizations, slogans, and motives ambiguous and uncertain. Instead of
exerting themselves to catch up with others, people in the Third World resorts to
begging and extorting their former colonizers. Like Ferdinand in A Bend in the
River who asks Salim to send him to America to study, or the blacks in In a Free State
who asks for a lift in the taxi on the road, they take it for granted that these Westerners
should be penitent and they themselves deserve the favor. Salim opposes the idea,
because he thinks that “the more you help, the more they want of you.” “Why do
you think I have obligation to you? What have you done for me? His attitude was
that I owed him something simply because I seemed willing to help” (BR 72). The source of the malaise is known –what he concerns himself with is the actual state of mismanagement, inefficiency and cultural and intellectual parasitism that he finds in these places. “They are colonials,” Naipaul said, “in a type of perpetual colonial situation” and do very little to get themselves out of it. As Chandra B. Joshi puts it convincingly,
One may call him biased, but it cannot be denied that self-criticism and an awareness of one’s shortcomings are much better a way of tackling the problems facing these societies rather than indulging in the passing satisfaction of pointing an accusing finger at the former colonial powers.
(25)
As a matter of fact, because Naipaul himself refuses to condescend or indulge in a romanticism that begins by sympathizing with the oppressed and ends by exalting their values, he is apt to be classified as a neo-colonialist is They also overlook the point that the critic V. S. Prichett has raised about Naipaul’s work: “One does not ask a novelist to be absolutely true to life, in the sense of social or racial record; one asks him to be true to his design.” In this aspect, Naipaul is absolutely true. He does not yarn for imperialism: “I feel no nostalgia for the miserable security of the old ways. That is not my point…Men cannot unlearn what they have learned” (Naipaul 46), he said, and he exerts to be a trumpeter to blast them awake as he had declared in 1962 that “Living in a borrowed culture, the West Indian, more than most, needs writers to tell him who he is and where he stands” (MP 68). The ceaseless potential of “dialogue” within this vast and changing discursive field necessarily includes the so-called First World as scenes of reciprocity and contestation as well as participation.
Naipaul’s well-known affinity with an English tradition, therefore, is not a betrayal of
his origins, but a discovery of one possibility, or even one aspect, of the inevitability
of Caribbean and postcolonial literature. Not simply physically free, he also seeks to liberate his mind from the quagmire of postcolonial chaos and strives to be a
peripatetic observer.
B. The Casualties of Freedom
Like Salim, the first-person narrator in A Bend in the River, Naipaul has consistently adopted a non-involved and non-engaged attitude toward the place he goes, as he said that he tries “to occupy the middle ground, between absorption in life and soaring above the cares of the earth” (BR 23). Fawzia Mustafa also observes
that“the political action of A Bend in the River, against which the characters are pitted, is only presented as series of brutal but tangential development witnessed but not
participated in by the protagonist, Salim” (142 italics mine). Salim always keeps Nazruddin’s words in mind as a motto: “You can always get into those places. What is hard is to get out. That is a private fight. Everybody has to find his own way”
(BR 4). Salim, an exile as well as Naipaul, strives to keep a detached distance in this small town but only to find in the end that beyond the rhetoric of decolonization, everybody is involved and nobody is spared. In the newly “emancipated” country, Everybody is actually entrapped in a “universal guerrilladom” as Jimmy in Guerrilla, one of Naipaul’s novels, says: “When every body wants to fight, there’s nothing to fight for. Everybody wants to fight his own little war, everybody is a guerrilla” (82).
As Philips Langran points out, “Naipaul explores the confusion of racial, cultural, and political loyalties that is the universal legacy of colonialism, his insistence on
individual responsibility and intellectual striving becomes absolute” (132). A sense
of the “encroaching disorder,” and the congruent corruption of colonizers and
colonized cultivate and intensify his “philosophy of belonging only to oneself”(REP
28) which he highlights as the key to the art of survival in that chaotic post-colonial world. This is also in line with the narrator’s declaration in the beginning of A Bend in the River, “The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to
become nothing, have no place in it” (BR 3). The postcolonial world is no less cruel, even more wretched than it was before. This is discouraging, but this is real.
Naipaul urges his readers to face the naked fact by revealing the hapless situations in which his novels’ characters endure, and he also demand those Third World country people have to, first of all, depend upon themselves rather than on ideology, or the ideas of race resurrection and nationalism.
Instead of lamenting his rootlesness, Salim in A Bend in the River celebrates it
as a symbol of freedom at first and reaps the fruits of it: “Like the slave far from home, I became anxious to arrive. The keener the discouragements of the journey, the
keener I was to press on and embrace my new life” (BR 5). He perfectly realizes that there is no turning back; even the future is tough, he has to carry on. At the beginning of the novel, Salim recounts, in retrospect, his journey from an East Africa coastal hybridized community (“an Arab-Indian-Persian-Portuguese place”) to a town at the “bend in the river” of a central African country where he reopens the shop of a friend and counsel, Nazruddin, and trying to secure his position in the world. But in the end, he is forced to flee the anarchic country before he loses his freedom, even his life.
In his Booker Prize winner In a Free State, Naipaul (un)consciously employs a pun “state,” which implicitly raises the important issue in post-colonial study: the relationship between “political state” and “psychological state.” The former “state”
refers to a “country,” may it be a Western country or a Third World country after
emancipation, and the latter refers to the psychological condition of floating and
anxiety. Associated with the themes of rootlessness, disillusion, fantasy, and the
dystopian vision is the problem of freedom in the modern world, which is Naipaul’s main theme in In a Free State. In a Free State defines modern freedom as a ruinous exile; it is the freedom from restraints imposed by one’s native society—and also in the sense of being unanchored and drifting. Fawzia Mustafa suggests that Naipaul
“expose[s] the absence of freedom by demystifying the myths surrounding
misperceptions that one must be elsewhere to be ‘free’” (115). Naipaul declares that
“everyone in it[Africa] was far from home,” and everyone in this book is also a victim of his own freedom. He examines in In a Free State the individual colonial subject outside the context of his social-historical reality. The freedom one was searching for is not there; it was over, and it had been false. The past could not be ignored; the exile carried it within he himself. “If there was a place for him, it was one that had already been hollowed out by time, by everything he had lived through, however imperfect, makeshift and cheating” (HB 316). The author of In a Free State is just such an exile, free of the constraints of home but painfully aware of the price of such freedom (Gurr 9). They want to attach themselves to other civilizations, with other drives, because their own have failed them. But these people only succeed in becoming aliens with no sense of who they are or why they have come.
In a Free State consists of three short stories—“One out of Many,” “Tell Me Who to
Kill” and “In a Free State”—enclosed by a personal prologue and an epilogue. In
these three stories, Naipaul delved into the coherent theme: the psychological state of
disorder in freedom and loneliness as exiles because they approach another culture
with egotism, with their own past and prejudice. As a result, all of them fail to find a
meaningful identity in strange lands. The first two stories are about people who
come from the Third World countries to metropolitan countries. The third is about
English people who go to Africa, in search of some sort of personal fulfillment, and
are lost. All of them will be discussed respectively.
1. From Periphery to Center
In “One Out of Many,” it is the first person narrative by an Indian domestic from Bombay who has been brought to Washington by his diplomat employer. The title refers to the slogan of multi-racial of post-colonial nations: “Out of many, one nation.” and it is actually an irony that reveals the inevitable issue of mingling of races. On the flight to Washington, Santosh, a domestic Indian who was used to the living in Bombay, jittered about in his narrow seat and made such a faux pas. He chewed betel nuts and drank wine with no idea that he should pay. Finally, alcohol along with betel juice blending, plus the flight sickness made him throw up all over his bundles. “Nightmare,” he thought, “I wanted only to be off the plane and to be in the open again” (25). He was seized by a fit of claustrophobia: “I was forever enclosed”(26-27), and longed to get into an open space, to be free. Santosh has left India, but he carries India with him, inside him culturally. He is entrenched in one civilization but absorbing another. He is its mental prisoner. His freedom in Washington brings nothing but confusion to him, followed by worries and loss of self-respect. Facing the life of metropolitan, he recoiled with fear, a kind of
agoraphobia: “Now I was glad I had so little of Washington to cope with,” (35) and felt satisfied and safe in his small cupboard: “…feel protected and hidden. I slept well” (29). But at the same time, he knew perfectly that “I understood I was a prisoner. I accepted this and adjusted” (32). Santosh finds his freedom burdensome, he yearns to be able to surrender responsibility. Out of sheer
desperation, he deserted his employer and joined Priya, an Indian running a restaurant.
He was materially much better off—a room of his own and a salary more than ten
times what his employer had once given him. But “it was worse than being in the
apartment, because now the responsibility was mine and mine alone. I had decided
to be free, to act for myself” (47). As it goes Santosh “baffled and terrified, groping around in this utterly alien, indifferent city,” we can also hear and see, as a kind of permanent irremediable backcloth to his isolation and the conflagration of racial violence. After arriving in Washington, his employer warned him: “We are not among friends, remember” (29), and later his second Sahib, Priya also laments the difficulty of participating in American society: “If you can’t beat them, join them. I join them. They are still beating me” (42). To make things worse, Santosh keenly felt the hostility and the indifference from the folks from India. Under pressure of being free in a foreign country, “the Indians I had seen on the streets of Washington pretended they hadn’t seen me; they made me feel that they didn’t like the
competition of my presence or didn’t want me to start asking them difficult questions”
(41). Santosh’s Indian boss, Priya, preferred to hire Mexicans rather than his fellow countrymen because he thought those ungrateful Indians didn’t deserve good
treatment: “…you fix up their papers and everything, green card and everything.
And then? Then they run away” (43). The grudge he felt from both his fellow countrymen and Americans and the riotous arson resulted from racial conflicts had plunged Santosh into a state of agitated fear, and he claimed: “I have enemies” (54).
To seek some comforts, he had a hubshi (black) woman as a lover, which was against
his caste rules back in India. Finally, he accepted Priya’s suggestion: “Marry the
hubshi. That will automatically make you a citizen. Then you will be a free
man…You will have the whole world before you” (54, 57 italic mine). But the price
is dear because before he could start his new life in America, he had to discard his
whole world behind him. To survive in an alien world, Santosh had to leave behind
all his traditions and ethnicity and while deserting his “wife and children in the hills at
home,” he also violated the Hindu rule of caste purity. The relentless objectivity
made him realize the impossibility of going home: “I knew it wasn’t possible for me
to return to Bombay to the sort of job I had and the life I had lived” (41). The freedom is actually a bane, not a boon. Abandoned and alone, he could only experience a sense of alienation, loss, placelessness, and void. The story ends on a note of despair: “All that freedom has brought me is the knowledge that I have a face and a body, that I must feed this body and clothe this body for a certain number of years. Then it will be over” (58). The liberation of the colonized subject becomes meaningless once it becomes clear, as is suggested by the above lines, that freedom is reduced to the mere fulfillment of one’s physical needs.
The second story “Tell Me Who to Kill” makes the settings back to familiar Naipaul territory—the West Indies and the disorientated Indian community there.
The first person narrative in dialect effectively projects the confused state of mind of
the protagonist. He is a West Indian who flees his barren hometown and works in
London to earn money to support the study of his “bright” brother, Dayo, and later he
opens an Indian roti-and-curry shop of his own. After going through the business
failure due to malicious sabotage of racial “young English louts” and learning his
brother has “turned foolish” and actually squandered around at the expanse of his
slavery work, he breaks down and gives himself away. Unable to understand his
situation, seeking to place blame on someone and unable to identify the enemy, he is
left only with aimless hate. He continuously feels as on a ship without a rudder, and
must go in whichever direction the flow of life takes him. As he makes a trip on bus
to attend his brother’s wedding with a white girl, he realizes that the freedom and a
promised future are only illusions: “I don’t know what bus we will take when we get
to the station, or what other train, what street we will walk down, what gate we will
go through, and what door we will open into what room” (60). Coming from a rural
Trinidad town where deprivation, illiterateness, and despair pervade, the protagonist,
who bears no name in this story and is simply mentioned as Dayo’s brother, resolves
to devote his life to the development of his younger brother, Dayo. This
self-effacement of narrator is something unpardonable because, as Naipaul makes it clear, self-denial and the contentment of being a part of someone else’s existence is nothing but slavery and self-imprisonment. In the free state, England, he is not free at all. “Like a man in blinkers,” he works eagerly and blindly, regardless of “these things and people I never did see,” naively thinking that “the money make[sic] me strong…make[sic] me feel the London is mine” (86-87). His work and life in London centers on Dayo: “I feel I could kill anyone who makes him suffer. I don’t care about myself. I have no life” (61). As Naipaul asserts in the beginning of A Bend in the River: The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow
themselves to become nothing, have no place in it” (3 italic mine). He first abandons his responsibility and places it on Dayo, and after collapse he puts it on Frank, his mental hospital guardian. He feels relived to surrender his duty to others, and at the same time, he gives away his “identity” as well. Working “like a man in blinkers” in this “free” country, a helpless anxiety arises in his mind: “Since I came to this country that is something I can’t do. I can’t see where I am going. I can only wait to see what is going to turn up” (60). An acute sense of alienation—not belonging
anywhere—is at the root of his neurosis. As Naipaul points out in the interview with Adrian Rowe-Evans:
One must make a pattern of one’s observations, one’s daily distress; one’s daily knowledge of homelessness, placelessness; one’s lack of
representation in the world; one’s lack of status. These, for me, are not
just ideas; when I talk about being an exile or a refuge I’m not just using a
metaphor; I’m speaking literally. If daily one lives with this, then daily one
has to incorporate the experience into something bigger. Because one
doesn’t have a side, doesn’t have a country, doesn’t have a community; one
is entirely an individual. A person in this position risks going mad; I have seen it happen to others. (31 italics mine)
The narrator is trapped in a postcolonial paranoia as he cries out at the end of the story:
“O God, show me the enemy. Once you find out who the enemy is, you can kill him.
But these people here confused me. Who hurt me? Who spoil my life? Tell me who to beat back? …Tell me who to kill” (102). He still doesn’t realize the enemy is himself; his misplaced and misled desire. The enemy is the past, “of slavery and colonial neglect and a society uneducated from top to bottom; the enemy is the
smallness of the islands and the absence of resources” (OB 271). “The life is over.
I am like a man who is giving up. I come with nothing. I have nothing, I will leave with nothing,” after finding out that Dayo is deceiving him about his study, the
narrator bursts out: “All the afternoon as I walk I feel like a free man. I scorn every thing I see” (96 italic mine). The freedom leads to illusion and disappointment and the subsequent dementia, and this madness parallels with death, a kind of life in death.
The narrator has made up his mind in the end: “Because it was my idea after my trouble that no body should know, that the message should go back home that I was dead. And for all this time I am the dead man” (102). In explaining the
metropolitan-centered development of colonial identity formations, Naipaul let his heroes wallow in the harsh reality and unable to wrest themselves from the persecution of historical determinism.
“Being in the strange places with inadequate mentality” is the common plight of
Santosh and Dayo’s brother. Through Naipaul’s critical perspective, the reasons of
their misfortune are different and are exposed respectively. Indar, an Indian African
in A Bend in the River, expresses clearly: “our civilization had been our prison” (BR
211). Santosh, coming from too old a civilization, India, carries a heavy load of
heritage burden. In his subconsciousness he cannot leave it behind when he
physically leaves Bombay. The dress he chooses is a metaphor of his vacillation between two different cultures. He agitatedly buys a green suit and hat of Western design, but he feels he has sinned against his Brahmin belief: “When I considered all that cloth and all the tailoring I was proposing to adorn my simple body with, that body that needed so little, I felt I was asking to be destroyed” (FS 36). Without thinking size and fit, he buys the suit ashamedly and runs out as if in flight. But the suit ends up being locked in the cupboard, “I couldn’t bring myself to wear the suit out of door” (36). He still refuses to join in American life: “the view remained foreign and I never felt that the apartment was real…Americans have remained to me, as people not quite real” (36-37). One day, in his employer’s apartment, “The urge came upon me to dress as I might have done in my village on a religious occasion…I draped this [dhoti] around my waist and between my legs, lit incense sticks, sat down crosslegged…That made me happy; I decided to fast” (39). Through occluding himself to a cultural shell performing religious rite, he resists American life outside.
But he also knows it is impossible to resume the job and the life in Bombay. He fails to accustom himself in American life because he subconsciously refuses to do so.
Being scared and alone, he neither timely grasps opportunity in the first place nor actively participates in the community affairs afterwards. Instead of assimilating American ways of life, he chooses to be isolated within the Brahmin elements.
Eventually, he loses both of them. Therefore, he deplores “I was a free man; I had lost my freedom” (49). Opposite to Priya’s prediction, Santosh will not only be at odds with the new world before him, but also had been ostracized from the whole old world behind.
Before coming to England, Dayo’s brother has unknowingly made himsef a
slave: a slave to his talented brother, Dayo, and a slave to the hope of his desperate
family on an obscene island. He relinquishes his own ideals and lays all the
responsibilities upon his younger brother, Dayo. He feels like making more and more money and this is to him his part of the mission. He neglects the fact that he himself is an independent subject too, and anyone who fails to take care of himself can seldom take care of others. “It is not my life. I feel as I feel on the ship” (80), he confessed, and liked and enjoyed the tiredness, he buries himself in studious work because the physical tiredness in some degree exempts him from thinking and
contacting with the outside world. This is another kind of colonial, in Naipaul understanding, because anyone downgrades himself and fails to take his
responsibilities does not deserve the “freedom” he has been searching. Even if he is physically free, he is confined in his own prison. Naipaul is relentless to those who ruin their own freedom because their deeds seem to consolidate those ex-colonizers’
gloating remark: Freedom and liberty is something that colonized do not deserve and should not have been granted from the very beginning. By taunting exposure, Naipaul urges the Third World people to see the fact: their responsibility has never been removed from them even by simply attributing faults to colonizers’ evildoings;
quite the contrary, their responsibility is more austere than before because of their subaltern status in society and economy. The only way is to face it bravely and take it resolvedly.
2. From Center to Periphery
“In a Free State” is a concentrated study of another related postcolonial
migratory trajectory. The two protagonists, Bobby, a mildly idealistic British exile
expert, and Linda, a disaffected British exile wife, represent instead the attitudinal
chaos unleashed within the colonialist mentality as it tries to deal with the first stage
of decolonization. In this stage, the natives who have taken the government into
their own hands and the former ruling race that has lost its power both lack the
preparedness to this new situation. The country is independent only in name, for “it was still a colonial city, with a colonial glamour. Everyone in it is far from home”
(104). It is a foreign land not only for Westerners but also for those Africans
because “Africa here is a décor,” and “dependence, civilization appeared to have been granted” only under West glamour. During their sojourn, Bobby and Linda are made to encounter the external turbulence. The problem of personal freedom, identity, and modern exile are set against the escape from disorder to the Southern Collectorate, where, against all expectations, no satisfying answer can be offered a for their wretched condition either. The setting of “In a Free State” is placed in a chaotic Africa country, in which a civil war explodes, and the president sends his army against the king, who belongs to different tribe. This little newly independent country was ravished by civil conflicts.
9As Carter, a driver they encounters on the road, comments: “That’s what African armies are for, they are intended only for civilian use” (134). In this novella, two different attitudes to those backward and chaotic Third World countries are introduced and presented in a dramatic way.
Bobby, the Afrophile, is conceited about his open mind and liberal thoughts which, however, cannot bear the harsh tests of reality and are simply a disguise of vain and Eurocentric superiority. When he says that “Africa saved my life” (116) or “My life is here” (126), he considers only about himself; he allocates Africa a character in his life simply out of a unilateral psychological projection. Chandra B. Joshi clearly points out: “That his liberalism is little more than self-indulgence is clear from the
9 Never named in his story, this country is likely to be Uganda. In 1966, five years before the publication of the book, the first prime minister of independent Uganda, Apollo Milton Obote expelled the president, Kabaka Frederick Muteesa II, the king of Buganda tribe in the ex-colonial period, out of the capital. Obote subsequently designated himself as president and, like the description in the novella, hunted the king with “helicopters.” Perpetual coups and unrest of similar nature, which Naipaul is used to frowning upon, also flourished in Kenya, Rwanda, Burundi, and Zaire. What he did not foresee is that the situation afterward turned out to be a tragic holocaust: General Idi Amin came to power and under his terror sovereign millions of people were slaughtered and numberless Asians were expelled from the country.
