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LITR / CRCL 5734: Colonial &
Postcolonial Literature Jennifer
Thurik LITR
5734 Journal I
signed up for Post-Colonial studies because I wanted to learn more about the
literature and society after the American colonies was settled. Imagine my surprise when I reviewed the readings for the
course and discovered that I was reading about Africa, India, and the Caribbean.
I was not looking forward to this class, but I was pleasantly surprised
by how much I learned and how interesting the topics were.
While reading all of the texts that were assigned, I became interested in
the voice of women in post-colonial society.
I observed how similar women from other societies and time periods were
treated when compared to American women. Women
really struggled to have their voices heard.
Here were these native women from Africa, India, and the Caribbean whose
lives were overturned when England colonized them.
They are dealing with the same issues that I am dealing with and all of
the women before me dealt with. Where
is our voice in the world? How do
women get heard? Who listens
anyway? These are all questions
that I was asking as I began the reading for this class.
That is what I decided to focus on in my research journal.
I began my research journal by first researching the idea behind
Post-Colonialism. I searched the
web and found two really interesting sights that helped me grasp the ideals
behind this period of time. Next, I wanted to focus on two essays from the PCSR
that shed some light on finding the woman’s voice in poco literature.
One essay was discussed within context of a presentation and the other
was an additional article that I found which helped me understand the search for
a feminine voice in literature. At
this point in my journal, the author of
The God of Small Things intrigued me, so I wanted to do further research on
her and discover some criticism over her first novel.
When I signed up for this class, I was surprised to learn that
Post-Colonial Literature was not about Western American Issues.
I was expecting to read about the founding of America, Christopher
Columbus, Ben Franklin, and the Declaration of Independence.
I was therefore, very surprised to discover the true topics of
discussion. In preparing for this
class then, I looked on the web to find out more information.
One site that I found very useful was at the website located at www.emery.edu/ENGLISH/Bahri/Intro.html.
This site is a great location to get background information on what
post-colonialism really is. The
actual definition that is given is an adjective that “relates to or becoming
the time following the establishment of independence in a colony.”
A looser definition is “the period of life after the departure of the
imperial power that concerns those in the field, but that before independence as
well.”
Not only is there a definition of post-colonization, but there are also
several key terms that we use in class that exist and are explained within this
website; words like orientalism and hybridization are examples.
This could be useful to someone who may not fully comprehend what those
terms mean. There are also listings
of numerous authors with provided links for the viewer to learn more about the
writings during that time period. Aesthetically,
this site is very easy to read and navigate through. It is visually appealing and well organized.
It raises questions, but gives little answers.
This is beneficial for web researchers to have insight to colonial issues
and prod them to go further into detail. It
is a good website to start from for anyone who needs information about these
topics.
The emery website is beneficial for a beginning researcher to understand
key concepts to post-colonialism and colonialism; however, to get a greater
grasp on this concept, one needs to go into greater detail.
The website that I am able to get the most information out of is located
at www.landlow.stg.brown.edu/post/misc/postov.html.
This site shows a world map with highlighted areas that show which
aspects of the country dealt with post-colonial issues.
This is a nice visual because it not only shows which areas of the
country were effected, but it also allows the viewer to focus on whatever areas
interest him or her. Underneath the
map, there are nineteen boxed that provide links to specific parts of the
country, authors, political issues, religion, themes, and other issues that
arise when researching this topic. Many
links take you to another set of boxes that can further narrow your study so
that you are looking at exactly what you are interested in.
Once you find what you’re looking for, you are sent to articles by
individuals that explain ideas further. All
of these links help you navigate through the information that you need.
This site is very user friendly and easy to navigate through.
Many of the articles have other links to related topics of interest.
One problem I did experience is that sometimes it was difficult to return
back to the home page if I was following the path of various links.
This was frustrating to me as I was navigating, but the quality of
information is very beneficial to any individual who is researching information
on post-colonial literature.
After reviewing the websites, I am ready to look into what people had to
say, specifically what women thought, so I jumped into the Post-Colonial
Studies Reader, which is filled
with articles and stories from all kinds of individuals who have had contact
with issues relating to colonialism. A
class discussion led by Carolyn Richard over an article by Kirsten Peterson
called “Problems of a Feminist Approach to African Literature” examined an
African woman’s struggle to have her voice heard by mainstream culture.
African societies, as well as societies around the world, are
predominately patriarchal in nature. Particularly
in Africa, this heightens the difference in gender roles because men are the
ones who are in control of society and its functions.
They control the African woman’s authorship and inhibit her voice being
heard through literature. The
article brings up issues that women are not paid as well as male authors; they
don’t have the access to publishers that males do; there are few resources
available to African women in general. This
was an issue brought up in the class discussion.
It was debated that this was a fact that African women had to deal with.
This article also deals with issues of double colonization of African
women. They had imperial ideologies
as well as patriarchal ideologies subjected upon them.
The question raised in class was whether African American women faced the
same issues as African women did. After
much discussion, the class predominately agreed that while there are common
issues that are raised by both groups of women, the culture they are brought up
in greatly contributes to distinct differences.
This was also supported in Peterson’s article when she tells of a time
she was speaking at a conference and noticed a discussion over a similar
question. Western African women and
Easter African women had to decide which battle to fight first, equality for
women, or the fight against cultural imperialism.
This is ingrained in the different cultures these women are raised in.
I thought Peterson’s article handled the issue very well.
She illustrated this dilemma by using Achebe’s book Things
Fall Apart to reinforce the struggle that African women face, and women in
general, in getting their voice heard when patriarchal influences keep women in
a one-down position.
Because the article by Peterson intrigued me, I decided to look at an
article by Sara Suleri entitled Woman Skin
Deep Feminism and the Postcolonial Condition.
Suleri also poses the question of which comes first, gender or race?
From here she examines several authors who have written articles, essays,
and narratives which express conditions of the female from different
perspectives. Suleri’s argument
is that this form of realism exists in a Eurocentric and patriarchal environment
and it is the job of the radical feminist to provide an alternative perspective.
She then goes to a criticism of Talking
Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black and how it was just a way for
African-American Femenism to seek legitimization. The local voice is substituted and the expense of a real
discourse between the condition of postcolonialism and the question of gender
and race. Suleri says that the book
is talking to itself, not talking back. She
then goes into the story of The Hudood Ordinances that reinforces what little
rights women had in postcolonial times. They opened the boundaries for what could be called rape.
In one account, a fifteen-year old girl was raped after her father died.
A trial followed against the perpetrator.
He offered no defense or excuse; however, based on her testimony, she was
found guilty of fornication under the ordinances and was sentenced to twenty
public lashes. The real victims are
women and children who had no access to legal counsel and no knowledge of their
human rights. Suleri blames the
United States for allowing these ordinances to be passed and enforced the way
they were because the US supported the military regime during the liberation of
Afghanistan. Though I don’t know
how much impact the US had on the established those ordinances, Suleri’s point
is that it is difficult to define what the postcolonial woman really said.
Upon completion of the PCSR
book, I wanted to look at a female writer who was part of this poco world.
I decided to focus on Roy. In
Post-Colonialism, writers are faced with the acquirement of a new language and a
societal change from what they had previously been exposed to.
Most poco writers who become successful are very brilliant at merging
their first culture with their second. Arundhati
Roy is an example of this successful writer.
She combined her experiences of growing up in India, with a story line
that crossed caste boundaries when she wrote The
God of Small Things. Roy
was born on November 24, 1961 in India. Her
mother, Mary Roy was a Christian from Kerala.
Roy has difficulty talking about her father who was a Bengali Hindu tea
planter because she has never known him. Her
mother raised her in Aymanam where she was educated in the Corpus Christi School
her mother founded. Here, Arundhati
was able to learn and develop her literary and intellectual abilities where she
was free from the rules prescribed by a formal education.
Even today, children who are educated in her mother’s school follow
untraditional educational curriculums. Roy
left home at the age of sixteen with her mother’s wishes.
She often thanks her mother for loving her enough to let her go.
Roy lived in community of arranged marriages and because of her mother,
she was able to escape that fate. When
she left her home, she went to Delhi where she lived with a squatter’s group
in a tin room. For money, she sold
empty beer bottles. This life
continued for six years at which point, she enrolled in the Delhi School of
Architecture where she met and married Gerard Da Cunha.
They didn’t particularly enjoy architecture school, so they went to the
beach to be flower children. They
stayed there for seven months selling cake to tourists.
Their marriage lasted four years. After
getting divorced, Roy decided to sell her ring to earn money to leave when she
took a job at the National Institute of Urban Affairs.
While riding a bicycle to and from work, she was noticed by a producer
who hired her to play a “tribal bimbo.”
Roy took the job mainly out of curiosity. She
was just getting started when she was offered a scholarship to go to Italy for
eight months to study restoration of monuments.
This was a turning point for Roy since it was here that she learned she
loved to write. She met her future
husband Krishen in Italy and they decided to write a twenty-six-episode
television epic called Banyan Tree. They were paid, but were only able to get enough footage for
three or four episodes before it was cancelled by ITV.
This experience did pay off for Roy though because it connected her to
Bhaskar Ghose who financed her screenplay which was later made into a movie
called In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones
which was about her experiences as an architecture student in an Indian
university. After this experience,
she wrote Electric Moon in 1992.
It wasn’t a success though because Roy did not know enough about cinema
to make the movie that she envisioned. Upon
the failure of this movie, she wrote for herself to help her cope with the
mindful events in her life. It was
later published with her wishes, though it was not written for public
consumption. Her next piece of
writing was a critique of Shekar Kapur’s celebrated film Bandit Queen.
Her piece was very controversial and it landed her in court.
At the resolution of the case, she decided to return to a quiet private
life with her husband. She took a job as an aerobics instructor while she was
writing her new novel. Roy claims
that no one knew she was writing a novel, not even her husband. Roy
had just received a computer and was learning how to use it when she started
writing The God of Small Things.
In fact, she says that she didn’t even realize she was writing a book.
It took her five years to complete it, but the first seven months were
simply playing around with all of the computer features.
The inspiration for the book was an image of a sky blue Plymouth that is
stuck at a railroad crossing with twins sitting inside it watching a Marxist
procession parading around them, not a specific character or story or plot like
most authors begin with. Roy
believes that fiction writing is a way of seeing and making sense of the world
around us. Her fiction comes from a
mix of imagination and experience. This
belief makes it difficult to answer a very common question about the
autobiographical nature of the novel. She
writes what she knows and what she has experienced in life with embellishments
and exaggerations dispersed throughout the pages.
Roy says that she writes from within. When
asked about the title of her novel, she said that it was the last thing that she
put to the paper. She didn’t give
it much thought until the novel was completed and she realized that these
children hold onto the smallest of things because that’s all they can control.
Roy looks back and realizes that God is a big thing that has a large
amount of control. It’s ironic
that God worries about the small things that affect the children.
It boils down to the premise that the twins don’t buy into the ideal of
a society with adult boundaries. Those
are big things that don’t affect them. She
does not follow literary rules like many other writers; instead, she writes a
book like she would design a building. She
starts at some point in the story, then goes forwards and backward always
maintaining an intricate balance within the structure.
She doesn’t put a great deal of attention into the language that she
uses throughout her story. She uses language graphically and places words and paragraphs
onto a page that are appealing to the eye.
Her language is broken and whimsical.
It’s playfully fused together or torn apart. Particularly when the children are the ones speaking.
She never re-writes a sentence because writing and thinking are so
intertwined that you can’t return back to the original image.
In fact, Roy says that she probably only re-wrote two pages in the entire
novel. Roy
also breaks the rules structurally by giving the whole story in the first
chapter, though the reader doesn’t know it.
The structural design was important to the story because it wasn’t
about what was happening to the characters, but rather how what was happening
affected the characters. The story
is very “Pulp-Fictionalized” in that the end of the actual book is the
middle of the story being told. This
works well for the story because the reader is allowed to see that the events
that happened were terrible, but the fact that they did happen is incredible and
worthy to the characters (www.britannica.com/arundhatiroy.html). The
God of Small Things
is Roy’s debut novel. A book
review by Erik Spanberg at www.creativeloafing.com
says that this novel offers the reader a compelling plot with wonderful elements
of mystery and a dazzling use of language.
For people who enjoy linear stories, this novel would be very frustrating
because Roy tosses aside conventional story telling methods and creates her own
language by capitalizing random words, breaking other words up, and combining
words together. Spanberg says that
Roy has a great eye for detail and a handle on the use of prose.
She uses careful references to earlier scenes and images that have the
reader hurriedly scouring the book for the alliterative allegories.
Before her novel was published domestically in May of 1997, her book was
already being considered for the Booker Prize and other literary honors.
When he asked Roy why she was so successful, she responded that it was
because she was irresponsible. When
her book was published, she was glad for the lack of attention it received in
America because things were tense in India.
My journey through post-colonialism really opened my eyes to how
connected everyone is, no matter what part of the country they are from.
Super countries like England and America think their way of operating is
the way everyone should operate, so we send troops to get train other countries
in our ways. However, the people
that are colonized deal with the same issues as the colonizers except that now
they have to learn a new language and a new way to live.
How do they cope once England leaves?
America was in that situation. We
left them to start new. Mistakes
were made and new things were created. Now
we feel like we need to spread our knowledge to others, so we go into third
world countries under the blanket of protecting the civil rights of others.
Is it any of our business though? If
a country has Huhood Ordinances, does that effect any country other than theirs?
Looking
back through this journal, I have realized that women from all countries face
oppression. Most societies are
patriarchal in nature and this leads to males making rules.
It doesn’t matter what race or ethnicity the people are, measures are
in place to keep women in their place and keep their voice from being heard.
In Roy’s case, she is being sued for obscenity in India because of the
incestual nature of the twin’s relationship.
This need to control a woman’s voice is a patriarchal trait. Suleri and Peterson both mentioned that women struggle with
interior battles of fighting gender or race.
Post-colonialism contributes to this identity crisis because gender
issues are pushed aside and race is the defining factor when colonozing.
By
researching what post-colonialism is and looking at articles and authors who
were raised in the poco environment, we can get an incredible insight to the
dilemmas that the colonized people had to go through.
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