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Salims Fearful (A)Symmetry: Bhabhian Mimicry, Ambivalence and In-Betweeness in V.S.

NaipaulsA Bend in the River, by Ral J. Vzquez Vlez

The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow

themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.

Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul,A Bend in the River.

In his essay Bhabhas Notion of Mimicry and Ambivalence in V.S. NaipaulsA Bend

in the River, Sanjiv Kumar reads the titular novel from a perspective influenced by Homi

Bhabhas The Location of Culture, a seminal study of the transformations and interpolations that

postcolonial subjects undergo within their societies and epochs. Having defined mimicry as the

imitation of one species by another, Kumar elaborates by adding definitionsborrowed from

English dictionaries: mimicry consists of a close resemblance, in colour, form, or behaviour of

one organism to another or to some object in its environment, which is used to disguise or

conceal the organism from predators (Kumar 119). Kumar also links practices of modern

warfare to this concept: to practice mimicry means to disguise troops, ships, guns, etc., to

conceal them from the enemy by using paints, nets, or leaves arranged in patterns that allow

the camouflaged person to merge with his or her background (Kumar 119).

Mimicry permits weaker organisms to become lost in their immediate backdrop to

escape stronger or faster predators; moreover, it allows the camouflaged organism to become

practically invisible. The mimicking subject not only avoids being devoured by more powerful

persons, institutions, circumstances, etc., by merging into an amorphous scenery: shielded from

the sight of others, the subject can approach those who threaten his life, status or progress and

attack them by surprise, crippling or killing them in the literal and figurative sense of the words.

This applies to postcolonial subjects to the extent that the former wish to thrive rather than

merely survive within their adoptive societies, and might explain why Salim, the protagonist and

narrator ofABR, left his East Indian Muslim familys compound to take possession of a small

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shop within a newly independent African country. Salim wants more than to simply escape the

uncontrollable waves of violent change that are sure to swallow relatively wealthy migrs

following independence and postcolonization of many African nations: he desires to free himself

of unpredictable social transformations, arbitrary exercises of political power (colonial or

otherwise) and his familys centurial tendency of creating small, closed societies within larger,

more diverse societies. Salim wishes to be trapped by nothing and no one, so he merges with his

immediate societal landscape to escape the destruction visited upon his fellow expatriates by

African rebels, and to carve a niche for himself by securing positions of wealth and power

outside of his familys influence.

Bhabha indicates one way Salim could accomplish this by establishing a connection

between mimicry and camouflage made by Jacques Lacan in The Line and the Light:

Mimicry reveals something in so far as it is distinct from what might be called an

itself that is behind. The effect of mimicry is camouflage... it is not a question of

harmonizing with the background, but against a mottled background, of becoming

mottled---exactly like the technique of camouflage practiced in human warfare (Lacan

99; quot. in Bhabha 85).

In postcolonial contexts, the practice of mimicry does not entail becoming one with a

background or disappearing into a mishmash of peoples, cultures, histories, stories, etc. Here,

mimicry becomes a series of personal and generalized conceits which allow postcolonial subjects

to permeate or seep through societies and social contexts which have more or less broken away

from an older order of things. Doing this, however, leaves the subject open to be permeated and

seeped through himself by the very society within which he struggles to survive and get ahead;

politics, institutions, structures and other people infiltrate the subject and compromise his ability

to root himself in a particular culture, societal or familial background. This happens in

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accordance to the degree in which the subject is influenced (willingly or otherwise) by society

and other people within it and the former has severed all ties with past and self.

According to Bhabha, this mimicry and camouflage result in colonial ambivalence;

Kumar adds that the colonizer becomes a snake in the grass who speaks in a forked tongue and

produces mimetic representations that are little more than unsettling imitations stemming from

a desire on the part of postcolonial subjects to severe the ties with self in order to move

towards other (Kumar 119). These imitations are unsettling because they are neither one thing

nor the other; postcolonial subjects engage in mimicry and transform into someone and

something that is no longer a native, a person belonging to a people or nation which exercises

sovereignty over itself with relatively little to no intervention of stronger foreign powers. These

men, women and children are not perfect replicas of the colonizer, regardless of whether they

wish to be so or not: similar to what occurs to Ferdinand inABR, postcolonial subjects may

assume the clothing, styles and tastes of the metropolis, but can never become full equals of

the role models they choose as paradigms. Such situations create disjunctives that split these

subjects not in two, but in three: they have veered so much from their birth cultures and practices

that they become unable to fully reincorporate into them; they are also not one with the ruling

powers because they cannot iron out that essential otherness that makes them different from the

colonizer and their fellow colonized. The end result is a displaced subject that does not know

who or what he is, being the synthesis of a clash between several theses and antitheses, which

yields everything but the desired result.

This ambivalence gives birth to postcolonial in-betweenness, a state of remaining stuck in

a threshold or liminal way of being one can never fully abandon. Such in-betweenness affects

the discourse, ethos and ontology of colonizers and colonized alike, as evinced by Salims

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making a pilgrimage to, a ambivalence that according to Kumar destabilizes its claim for

narcissistic authority through... repetitious slippage, excess or difference (Kumar 119).

InABR, colonizer and colonized alike turn into amphisbaenas, monsters that go both

ways and thus never become one thing or the other. These hybrids are eternally cut in half;

their divided pieces keep tearing themselves into more parts until there is next to nothing left of

them. Postcolonial subjects risk turning far too mottled for their own good: their minds and

bodies become mingled and watery to excess, and so they can never learn to assume forms

they might be comfortable with. Having lost all shape and direction, they earn the wrath of both

the Roman and African God, denied that solid liquidness that characterizes the slippery snake.

Monday, November 3rd, 2014

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Works Cited

Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. 4. Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of

Colonial Discourse. London: Routledge, 1994. 85-92.

Kumar, Sanjiv. Bhabhas Notion of Mimicry and Ambivalence in V.S. NaipaulsA Bend in

the River. Researchers World: Journal of Arts, Science & Commerce2.4. October 2011. 118-

122 [Online].

Naipaul, V.S. A Bend in the River. One: The Second Rebellion. New York: Vintage, 1989. 1-

84.