In a Free State Compendium

Interesting Passages

She was careful now to hold her shirt up to keep it from covering Bobby’s head; and she was also careful to stay still, not to disturb him (150).

This moment was a perfect example of Naipaul’s talent in using subtle, quiet gestures to signal deeper emotions or forces, like the tip of an iceberg implicating the whole of it beneath the ocean.  He does this frequently in “In a Free State,” especially during the driving scenes.  There is so much tenderness in the kiss and so much reciprocation in the way Linda holds her shirt up above his head.

“It’s funny,” Linda whispered, “how you can forget the houses and feel that the lake hasn’t even been discovered.” / “I don’t know what you mean by discovered,” Bobby said, not whispering. “The people here knew about it all the time” (187).

Brilliant.  I feel like the dialogue here is pointing toward part of Naipaul’s larger purpose in writing this book . . . the things he’s trying to show us about colonialism, and especially the way we think of the colonized places, which is often selfishly, as if they wouldn’t exist or be significant without our involvement. 

New Words

ague - a fit of fever or shivering or shaking chills, accompanied by malaise, pains in the bones and joints, etc

Dialogue

Washington is not Bombay (16, 23)

“This isn’t Bombay.  Nobody looks at you when you walk down the street.  Nobody cares what you do” (50).

I noticed this statement being repeated several times in the second piece, and thought maybe it was a little redundant, but perhaps intentionally so . . . to draw attention to Sahib’s paranoia about moving to America which, to him, seemed another world completely. 

“I’m not here to tell them how to run their country.  There’s been too much of that.  What sort of government the Africans choose to have is none of my business (115).

“Perhaps in a place like this there isn’t any news.  Sammy Kisenyi can put out the Lord’s Prayer every day and call it the news” . . . “If you put it like that, perhaps there isn’t news anywhere” (141).

“You go out driving with Sammy Kisenyi, making educated conversation, and you see a naked savage with a penis one foot long.  You pretend you’ve seen nothing (218).

Such an absurd thing to say.  I laughed at this, but was also piqued by the insight.  The juxtaposition of civilized conversation and indigenous, unashamed nudity.

“Do we?  Do we?  What brand do we use?  Hot Girl, Cool Girl, Fresh Girl?  Girl-Fresh?  You’re nothing.   You’re nothing but a rotting cunt” (220).

Characterization I appreciated/would like to employ

It was as though, over the years, he had developed this way of swiftly explaining himself to himself, reducing his life to names and numbers.  When the names and numbers had been recited he had no more to say (4).

. . . bringing his knees together as though he is carrying a little box of cakes on them (55).

The blood run up and down my veins, and my arms start hurting inside, as though inside them is wire and the wire is being pulled (69).

Not long after I move in I make a joke about putting a tiny lady’s hand mirror right in the centre of the wall over the fireplace.  Now Dayo is here to appreciate that joke (78).

So to some extent Americans have remained to me, as people not quite real, as people temporarily absent from television (28).

. . . letting the cigarette hand drop from his mouth like a man who don’t care.  He is not sprawling to show off.  He is like a man who break his back in truth.  It is the face of a tired, foolish boy.  It is the face of someone lost (90).

I would like him to smoke the best cigarettes in the world (91).

This was my favorite moment of the “Tell me Who to Kill” piece.  Having an older brother myself, I was moved by this thought, which is about something very unsentimental, and yet is full of sentiment. 

His red eyes stared; his nostrils widened and his long, thin face quivered.  He sniffed; his pulled-in lips flapped open.  With a snort, and with swift little stamps of his right foot, he began to laugh (239).

Naipaul did this a lot in the final piece, describing the natives on animalistic terms, and I wondered if there was something to that.

A whore in Africa was a boy who wanted more than five shillings; any boy who wanted more than five was dealing only in money, and was wrong (106).

Wonderful Imagery

I could look down and see that whole village in the damp flat lands, the lumpy little pitch road, black between the green sugarcane, the ditches with the tall grass, the thatched huts, water in the yellow yards after rain, and the rusty roof of that one concrete house rotting (63).

The rain thinned.  The sky lifted.  The road shone in a silver light (138).

Somewhere up there they’ve taken off their nice new clothes and they’re dancing naked and holding hands and eating dung (163).

. . . half a dozen small domestic animals stood together silhouetted against the sky, but two turned out to be naked children.  Dull-eyed, disfigured with mud, they stood where they were and watched the car pass (205).