V.S. Naipaul quotations, from In a Free State (1971)


Compiled by Doctor Terence Rajivan Edward. Note: I don't wish to endorse V.S. Naipaul's views or those of the characters, lacking sufficient experience or scholarship, apart from somewhat concerning nervous breakdown.


There were no Asiatics in the bar: the liberations it offered were only for black and white.
p.5


There was silence between the two men. Then, without moving his hand or changing his expression, the Zulu spat in Bobby's face.
p.8


In the capital the Zulu was a solitary, without employment, living on a small dole from an American foundation. In this part of Africa the Americans – or simply Americans – supported everything.
p.9


The Union Club had been founded by some Indians in colonial days as a multi-racial club; it was the only club in the capital that admitted Africans. After independence the Indian founders had been deported, the club seized and turned into a hotel for tourists.
p.14


'You wouldn't believe you were in Africa,' Linda said, 'It's so much like England here.'
'It's a little grander than the England I know.'
…
He said, 'Of course they didn't allow Africans to live here.'
'They had their servants, Bobby.'
'Servants, yes.' She caught him unprepared. He hadn't expected her to be so provocative so early. He said, with the other grim satisfaction of a man prophesying the racial holocaust, "I suppose that is why someone like John Mubende-Mbarata has refused to move out of the native quarter.'
…
Linda said, 'When Johnny M. began, he was a good primitive painter and we all loved his paintings of his family's lovely ribby cattle. But he churned out so many of those he got to be a little better than primitive. Now he's only bad.'
p.17


Do you remember that American from the foundation who came out to encourage us to keep statistics or something? I took him out for a drive one day, and as soon as we were out of the town he was terrified. He kept on asking, "Where's the Congo? Is that the Congo?" He was absolutely terrified all the time."
p.19


Already he and Linda had become travelers together, sensitive to the sights, finding conversation in everything.
p.19




He said, calmly, 'I had a breakdown at Oxford.'
He had spoken too calmly. Linda remained bright. 'I've long wanted to ask someone who had one. Exactly what is a breakdown?'
It was something he had defined more than once. But he pretended to fumble for the words. 'A breakdown. It's like watching yourself die. Well, not die. It's like watching yourself become a ghost.'
P.20 Yes, after they medicate you!


…he said, solemnly again, 'Africa saved my life.' As though it was a complete statement, explaining everything: as though he was at once punishing and forgiving all who misunderstood him.
p.21


'Helicopters don't have much of a range. It's almost the only thing I learned in the Air Force.'
p.22


"I say, awfully stuffy here, with all these wogs, what?"
P23, imitation of English people


'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. It doesn't alter the fact they need food and schools and hospitals. People who don't want to serve have no business here.'
P23


What is it our Duchess says?
…'You mean Doris Marshall?'
'I bend over "black-wards". Isn't that what she says?'
p.23


"When I was steddying ittykit in Suffafrica-"'
P.24, imitation of South African accident


'There's a splendid thing I read by Somerset Maugham somewhere. He's not much admired now, I know. But he said that if you wanted only the best and held out for it, really held out, you usually got it.'
p.24-25.


'If I weren't English I think I would like to be Masai. So tall, those women. So elegant.'
'How very Kenya-settler. The romantic blacks are the backward ones.'
p.25


'Martin says they are the worst drivers.'
'Whenever you see a Mercedes in the middle of the road you can be sure it's an Asian at the wheel. I can't stand those shops. They don't sell the Africans a pack of cigarettes. They sell them just one or two cigarettes at a time. They make a fortune out of the Africans.'
p.27


That's my favourite hill on this drive. It looks as though some giant hand had clawed down the side.
p. 35


The pavilion had not been built to last. It was a structure such as an army might put up and leave behind.
p.37




'That's a nice shirt you're wearing, Bobby,' Carter said…
And Bobby knew he had already been described to Carter by Linda.
P.39




'I love lavender. Is that effeminate of me?'
…'I wouldn't say effeminate. I would say old-fashioned'
p. 44


'When I was in West Africa,' Linda said, 'everyone was always saying what rotten colonialists we were and how good the French were. And when you crossed the border it looked true. You saw all those black men just like ours sitting on the roadside eating French bread and drinking red wine and wearing those funny little French berets.'
p.46


"I'm not going to get myself killed simply because I'm too nice to be rude to Africans."
p.50


'I've never got on with people who talk about things like the smell of Africa,' Bobby said. 'It's like people who talk about well, the Masai.'
p.52


'Sammy, of course, doesn't know a microphone from a doorknob.'
p.53


While he examined Bobby's driving permit his lips and tongue played together, and he held his elbows tight against his sides, giving his paunch a slight life from time to time.
p.54


…raised his hat. The hair on which the hat sat so lightly was extravagantly of the English style, scraped together in a high springy mound on one side, with a wide, low parting on the other side.
p.55


When Linda came back, Bobby went silent. Self-possessed, hard to read behind her dark glasses, she stood at the edge of the asphalted yard, looking across the road to the hills and the mountains.
p. 61


"It's pathetic."
If she uses that word again, Bobby thought, I'll hit her.
p. 61 Oh no…


"Who's your boss-man?... The old Asian trick of remote control."
p.63


Native shirt swinging, crooking his right arm, pulling back his open palm, Bobby advanced on the small African.
The African was making no effort to dodge the blow. There was only expectation in his glittering eye.
p. 64


Bobby said, "And now I've destroyed his pathetic little dignity."
p.67


"I've been through this so often with my houseboys. You lose a dozen tins of powdered milk, and you tick them off. There is the most terrible scene, and you start walking about your own house on tiptoe., You expect a suicide at least, but in the quarters they are having a high old time. They've called in all their friends and they are killing themselves with laughter.'
        'We misinterpret their laughter,' Bobby said, his hand playing with the great lever.
'That may well be. It's embarrassment or disapproval or something like that. Sammy Kisenyi was telling me. And some European probably told him. But I feel that some of it is good old-fashioned laughter.'
p.68


"But the most terrifying thing is how quickly you can adapt to having your whole life written off. At first I used to say, "I'm going to get better next week." Then it was next month. Then it was next year."
p.71


'I suppose I vaguely felt when I came here that they would be hostile because I was white and English and because of South Africa and things like that.'
'They don't care about South Africa.'
'That's just it. This extreme sophistication. They just laugh.'
p.79


'I suppose what I like about ordinary Africans is that with them there's none of this testing. They take you just as you are.'
p.80


'As Martin says, the only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves.'
p.81




"You've been reading too much of Conrad. I hate that book, don't you?"
p. 82


"All at once Bobby's excitement died down. He felt he had destroyed the mood of confession and friendship and had lost Linda. He had spoken too much; in the morning he would be full of regret; Linda would be another of those people from whom he would have to hide. He set his face, the silent man."
p.83


"The roofs of some villas had broken down. One verandah roof, of corrugated iron, was hanging like a bird's spread wing."
p.89


…A bright silver object shone on the bare bedside table: a bit of foil, a sachet torn open by clumsy fingers. It wasn't shampoo. It was vaginal deodorant with an appalling name.
        The slut, Bobby thought, the slut.
p.101


The only thing you can say for the Belgian is that he knows a good bottle of burgundy.
p.102


The Walloons should be the fat ones, but they are rather thin and refined. The Flemings should be thin, but they are fat.
p.103


The Africans have eyes. They can see. The African's very funny that way. You can drive him hard for weeks on end. But one day he'll gallop away with you.'
p.103




Linda said, "He was awfully polite."
"Oh yes, all very polite. But he comes to put me in my place you know."
p.104


'And what are you going to see, Peter?'
…He said, 'I can't remember, sir.'
'That's the African for you,' the colonel said.
pp.105-106


'I don't remember.'
'You're a liar.'
'I like you, sir.'
'What about the boy who was locked in the refrigerator?'
'That was somewhere else.'
'So you remember that.'
'I never talk about these things, sir.'
'The whippings? There was a lot of that. What about the crops you weren't allowed to grow? You remember that? You say you like me.'
'I hate you, sir.'
'Of course you hate me, and I know you hate me. Last week you killed that South African. Old, helpless. Didn't you? Live here for twenty years. Married one of your women.'
'Thief kill him, sir.'
pp.108-109


'Who do you hate more? The Indian or me?'
'I hate the Indian.'
'You are ungrateful. Who do you hate more? The Indian or me?'
'I will always hate you, sir.'
'Don't you forget it. Your hate will keep me alive. One night, Peter, you will knock on my door-'
'I won't behave like the South African, Peter. When you say, "Good evening, sir," I won't say, "Why it's Peter, my own boy. Come in, Peter. Have some tea. How are you? How's your family?" There'll be no cups of tea. I won't behave like that. I'll be waiting. I'll say, "It's Peter. Peter hates me." And you won't come past that door. I'll kill you. I'll shoot you dead."
p.110


'That's Peter, although you wouldn't believe it. Do you know what they're saying? It sounds as though they're having the most fantastic argument, but they're saying nothing. They're like birds when it comes to chattering…'
p. 111


'These people don't know how lucky they are... If the Europeans had come here fifty years earlier, they would have been hunted down like game and exterminated. Twenty, thirty years later – well. The Arabs would have got here first, and they would all have been roped up and driven down to the coast and sold. That's Africa. They'll king the king all right. They'll decimate his tribe before this is over…"
pp. 112-3


'Once or twice he brought his wife. The ugliest woman you ever saw. Like a wrinkled and very happy old ape.'
p. 113


She gave a comic shiver, as though shivering at more than the cold.
p.115, a comic shiver


The anger stayed with him and was like courage. And it was as if the dogs responded to his anger. They began to keep to the edge of the lane; they began to fall  behind.
p.118


Again he felt that she was involving him in a neutral marital intimacy. And though he half wanted the company, he was perverse. He set his face, as though he had been especially affronted by what had happened downstairs, turned away from Linda and without a word pushed his door open.
p. 125


Sitting up in bed, looking at the inflamed African face coming nearer to his, he saw it invaded by such blank and mindless rage that his own anger vanished in terror, terror at something he sensed to be beyond his control, beyond his reason…. And as soon as Carolus began to walk to the door Bobby understood that Carolus was only 'fresh from the bush'; and Bobby knew that he had misread the boy's face, had seen things in it that were not there.
p.127


Timothy, his smell sharp in the light morning air, offered the breakfast card… With every friendly flick of his rag he released a little more of his smell.
p.131


Bobby looked at Carolus and then stated into space, demonstrating his capacity for sternness, even in the colonel's company Carolus became quite stupid and heavy with fright.
p.135, emotions


'Carolus,' the colonel said, irritation breaking into his voice for the first time that morning, 'this cup is absolutely filthy.'
p.136


'The colonel was shell-shocked in the Great War. He told me. He said that if anyone scolded him he became unconscious. Scolded, that was the word he used. Then he said he pulled himself together.'
p.141


Bobby edged forward past the fearful wreck. He saw a white Volkswagen; he stopped again. Like a hundred white Volkswagens; like the Volkswagen of yesterday; but the man who came around from behind it was not white and short, but black, tall, solidly made. Not the blackness or the stature of Africa; there was about his hard features and warm complexion something that suggested other bloods, another continent, another language… He spoke with the unmistakeable accent of the American Negro.
p. 149


'The king was just a London playboy. He impressed a lot of people over there. But I'm sorry to say he was a very foolish man.'
'That's what everybody says. And I suppose that's why I didn't believe it. I thought it was too foolish to be true. All that Oxford accent and London talk. I thought it was an act.'
p.151, the king of an African country


'They sent Jimmy Ruhengiri to meet us at the airport. For forty miles I had to make conversation with Jimmy. The conversation you make with the educated ones. Like playing chess with yourself: you make all the moves.'
P155, conversation with educated types


'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. You see two naked boys painted white running about the public highway, and you don't talk about it. Sammy Kisenyi reads a paper on broadcasting at the conference. He's lifted whole paragraphs from T.S. Eliot, of all people. You say nothing about it, you can't say anything about it. Outside you encourage and encourage. In the compound you talk and talk. Everybody just lies and lies and lies.'
p.156, plagiarism!!


'Of course, we read a lot, don't we? We mustn't let our minds grow rusty, among the savages.'
p.156


'There were so many like you, Linda. We mustn't let our minds grow rusty. We are among savages and we need our cultural activities. We are among these very dirty savages and we must remind ourselves that we have this loveliness. Do we use our vaginal deodorant daily?'
'This is ridiculous.'
'Do we Do we? What brand do we use? Hot Girl, Cool Girl, French Girl? Girl-Fresh? You're nothing. You're nothing but a rotting cunt. There are millions like you, millions, and there will be millions more…
End of p157




'Minutes later, aware all the time of the declining sun, the black shadows of trees, the empty fields, the empty car, the roar of the engine and the wind, he began to have the sense of nightmare, The colonel and the hotel, the soldier beside the wide riverbed, the white boys breaking out into the road like heraldic animals and running in slow, silent motion, Linda on the road: the pictures were clear, they had a sequences, but they were like things imagined.
        He needed to be calmer. Acknowledging the need, he became calmer. The sense of nightmare was reduced to a memory of his own violence and foreboding of danger.
p.159


And now the highway opened up, and for miles ahead was as straight as a Roman road, swinging from hill to hill.
P167, Roman road simile


Soon they could see the low, sprawling modern building, glass and coloured concrete as bright as beads, that the Americans had built in the bush as a gift to the new country. It had been intended as a school, and symbolically it straddled the king's territory and the president's. It had been visited but never used; there had been neither pupils nor teachers; it had remained empty.
p.168
 


Lukew drew the curtains and said in his heavy, drunken voice, 'Blue Dress out in garden this morning.' This was one of their private jokes, about a compound wife, an American and a newcomer, who for several weeks had appeared to wear the blue dress.
p.181