LITR 5831 Colonial & Postcolonial Literature

Lecture Notes

Things Fall Apart (first half)

> reasons for flipping

students in post-Civil Rights USA tended to superimpose our experience and sensitivities to racism on African experience--yes to black and white races, and histories overlap, but different

putting Things Fall Apart & Heart of Darkness later in semester

but why flip order?

partly to avoid inevitable structure that colonialism was always evil and wrong, followed by triumphal postcolonialism

I'm sympathetic to this progression, and more true than not--but not whole truth

problems: self-righteousness--as though we wouldn't have acted like the colonists if we'd been alive then--are aesthetically satisfying but averse to learning

danger of simply reversing good guy-bad guy; compare American Indians in 20c

Instructor's questions:

How many read before? For which courses? What lessons, themes, emphases?

When does this story occur? Where in Colonial-Postcolonial sequence? (pre-colonial?)

Missionaries?--monotheism and monoculture?

read with Levi-Strauss obituary?

Chinua Achebe, b. 16 November 1930, in village of Ogidi, Eastern Nigeria; father a catechist for Church Missionary Society, in whose village school Achebe was first educated; Government College at Unuahia; University College at Ibadan, 1948-1953.  1957 attended British Broadcasting Corporation Staff School.  Talks Producer for Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation.

When Biafra declared its independence from Nigeria in 1967 (and with outbreak of Civil War), Achebe traveled widely in quest for help for Biafran cause.

Chinua Achebe, "Named for Victoria, Queen of England"

What about African people qualifies as “traditional?"

(How is Mr. Kurtz modern?)

What attractions and risks to tradition?

What developments in novel form?

Most traditional part of world? relate to women's oppression

What is the novel's charm?

How does novel manage both western reader and representation of Africa?

How does the novel achieve tragic depth or texture instead of just National Geographic picturesque?

Problem: multicultural literature typically embraces or advocates tolerance for "other" of traditional cultures

intersubjectivity of their positions or norms grants that, if we'd grown up thus, we'd behave thus

However, what if other cultures  practice what western civilization regards as repressions > atrocities

genital mutilation / female circumcision in sections of Africa

denial of equal education

time orientation:

M. M. Bakhtin, “Epic and Novel”

[Bakhtin's argument is that the novel is the great genre of modernity b/c both involve constant change or redevelopment]

3 the novel is the sole genre that continues to develop, that is as yet uncompleted.

7 The novel is the only developing genre and therefore it reflects more deeply, more essentially, more sensitively and rapidly, reality itself in the process of its unfolding. Only that which is itself developing can comprehend development as a process.

30 Through contact with the present, an object is attracted to the incomplete process of a world-in-the-making and is stamped with the seal of inconclusiveness.

39 . . . a genre that structures itself in a zone of direct contact with developing reality.

40 Such a reorientation [the concept of a future] occurred for the first time during the Renaissance. In that era, the present (that is, a reality that was contemporaneous) for the first time began to sense itself not only as an incomplete continuation of the past but as something like a new and heroic beginning. To reinterpret reality on the level of the contemporary present now meant not only to degrade, but to raise reality into a new and heroic sphere. It was in the Renaissance that the present first began to feel with great clarity and awareness an incomparably closer proximity and kinship to the future than to the past.

traditional cultures: models of present social behavior based on past: What did our parents do?

revolutionary cultures: future vision guides behavior: What are the hip, cutting-edge, culture leaders doing? (implication: get with program or get left)

language & literacy: spoken traditions > writing, records, accounting, scriptures

Ong, Walter J.  Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word  (London: Routledge, 1982)  

7 Of the some 3000 languages spoken that exist today only some 78 have a literature

9 Human beings in primary oral cultures, those untouched by writing in any form, learn a great deal and possess and practice great wisdom, but they do not `study.'

            They learn by apprenticeship . . . by discipleship . . . by listening, by repeating what they hear, by mastering proverbs and ways of combining and recombining them . . . not by study in the strict sense

oral / traditional culture in Things Fall Apart

7 proverbs + elders

10 Ogbuefi Ezeugo was a powerful orator . . . white head, white beard

"Yaa!"

20 ritual / ceremony + proverb

31 cultural memory

34 folk tales, local flavor

53 mother’s stories

Uncle Remus and the Wonderful Tar-Baby Story

Question: How do these spoken traditions reinforce other aspects of traditional culture?

novel as narrator + dialogue

narrator as central, controlling, authoritative voice (though this can be undercut, esp. with first-person narrator of "unreliable" variety)

characters' dialogue: variety of viewpoint, expression, dialect

dialogue 

Bakhtin on novel: "a genre that structures itself in a zone of direct contact with developing reality."

How does the novel maintain control or stabilize all the new material that enters through the many voices of its characters?

Novels are extremely variable and adaptable in form, but a pattern observable in some early national novelists and historical novelists; e. g.,

Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832), Waverly novels of early 1800s, Rob Roy, Ivanhoe

James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851), Leatherstocking Tales, incl. The Last of the Mohicans

maybe Tolstoy in War and Peace, Faulkner in The Hamlet

narrator: neutral-sounding, official, schooled or bureaucratic voice; even tone (plus or minus "omniscience"); gives context, explains situation

characters: language is colorful, extravagant; figurative speech (contrast with bureaucratic grayness and lack of figuration; also context or lack of context--characters' speech wouldn't make sense out of context provided by narrator)

example: Things Fall Apart, 112-113

conclusion or outcome:

the different voices of the narrator (narrative) and characters (dialogue) may be differently distanced

compare in Heart of Darkness the scene where Marlow overhears the conversation between the station manager and his uncle--intimacy or internality of moment collapses distance between narrator and characters' dialogue

the narrator may represent "modern culture": literate, universal, everything in larger context

the characters may represent "traditional culture": localized, eccentric, colorful but limited

tradition / modernity discussion

What about African people qualifies as “traditional?"

What attractions and risks to tradition?

How do these risks define the plot crisis concerning Okonkwo’s adopted son?

How does a traditional culture manage change?

adoption of Ikemefuna:

traditional cultures do not "convert" as much as they adopt

Instead of trying to make all the earth in their image, make the variety of earth conform to one system . . . .

a traditional culture "absorbs" change, so that the new becomes part of tradition rather than disrupting or upending it

tradition and modernity in Things Fall Apart

66-7 Obierika provides middle position

69 law of land must be obeyed

Ob: "don't know how we got that law"

124 nothing like this had ever happened

133 elder = knowledge

143 [revolutionary religion]

144 not my father; 145 all sons of God

152 school = read & write

forsakes parents = blessed

Next class: look for passages where the white men's entry is associated with upending of tradition, introduction of events without precedent

notes on women from Things Fall Apart

13 fear of himself, lest he should be found to resemble his father

father agbala, not only another name for a woman . . a man who had taken no title

23 women's crops, man's crop

28 To show affection was a sign of weakness

29 Week of Peace, year Okonkwo broke the peace

punished, as was the custom, by Ezeani, the priest of the earth goddess

Nwoye's mother lies to minimize Ojiugo's thoughtlessness

beat her very heavily

37 women’s art

43 desire to conquer and subdue cf desire for woman

44 "boy's job"  Okonkwo specially fond of Ezinma

45 working, solvent man like a god

53 mother’s stories

64 "She should have been a boy."

68 strong man + woman (O doubts)

75 as silly as all women's stories--cf53 masculine stories

87 the ceremony was for men

89-9 villages, 9 sons of 1st father [cf founding fathers]

109 [woman's viewpoint]

110 woman's ceremony + male-identified women

113, 11-12 medicine = old woman

117  good wife = 9 sons

153 a woman for a son