LITR / CRCL 5734: Colonial & Postcolonial Literature

Sample Student Final Exam 2003

Krisann Muskievicz
LITR 5734 2003 final

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were. Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee...  (John Donne, Mediation 17)

Donne’s prophetic prose speaks to the modern dilemmas posed by the colonial concepts of empire and the emergence of post-colonial nations.  As commonwealths become countries, they retain pre-colonial and post-colonial traits, creating hybridized cultures.  But what does it mean to be a hybrid?  In the study of colonial and post-colonial literature, why is the voice of the hybrid important? 

A person who considers himself or herself a hybrid usually has a background representing at least two different cultures.  Additionally, in the study of colonial and post-colonial literature, the term often applies more specifically to someone’s whose background reflects indigenous and colonizing heritages.  However, if no man is an island unto himself, as Donne indicates, the interconnected history we share in our increasingly globalized community produces a world culture of hybrids.  The references to hybridity in colonial and post-colonial literature emphasize our involvement in mankind and empower us with a reminder of our adaptability to change. 

Hybridity, like its definition, is not one thing exclusive of another, all good or all bad, one viewpoint or another, but a productive blend of influences resulting in circumstances to be viewed differently by different participants.  Homi K. Bhabha, in “Signs Taken for Wonders,” states, “Hybridity is the sign of the productivity of colonial power, its shifting forces and fixities; it is the name for the strategic reversal of the process of domination through disavowal…It displays the necessary deformation and displacement of all sites of discrimination and dominion” (34).  Hybridity provides a method of transition from colonial to post-colonial eras.

This transition is represented in the literature of the colonizers and the colonized, but the hybrid writer, like Derek Walcott, is in a unique position.  Kumkum Sangari, in “The Politics of the Possible,” explains: “The hybrid writer is already open to two worlds and is constructed within the national and international, political and cultural systems of colonialism and neocolonialism.  To be hybrid is to understand and question as well as to represent the pressure of such historical placement” (144).  Derek Walcott addresses the transitional nature of hybridity an invokes Donne’s Meditation 17 in “Ruins of a Great House.”  It is appropriate for Walcott to reference Donne as a statement about his own hybridity.  Hybridity is the language by which we reconcile contradictory histories and realize that we are all part of our shared humanity.

In “Ruins of a Great House,” Walcott also wrestles with the devastation of empire and the lasting influence of the colonizers, knowing that he shares his heritage with the colonizers.  Jennifer Thurik, of the 2001 class, considers Walcott’s treatment of colonization’s lasting imprint on nature through his reference to colonial agriculture.  Thurik notes that the Spaniards introduced limes to the East Indies and “only later did they migrate to the West Indies to become a prosperous crop. Walcott doesn’t seem to remember for certain if that was the original crop; perhaps this represents his forgetting his own history because he is adopting England’s ideas and cultural aspects.”  This is a possibility, and it may more so be a comment on the intermingled perceptions of the hybrid writer.  Walcott can rightfully stake a claim to different, often contradictory, versions of history and to highlight an instance of forgetting is to highlight the confusion and inner contradiction of a hybrid writer.

The perspective of hybridity is not voiced solely by hybrid writers, however.  The voice of the colonizers lends important insight to the culture of empire and provides important background in examining the resulting hybridized community.  First world authors writing during the reign of the empire seem to portray colonized populations as pliable and willing to accept the gifts of culture.  Though this may be frustrating for post-colonial readers, the viewpoint is important and the impact of the colonizers’ domination is far reaching for those who later consider themselves hybrids.

For example, Daniel Defoe, in The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, offers a main character who seems to be born for empire.  Robinson Crusoe takes to the sea on a slave gathering expedition, and though he is shipwrecked, he manages to make a slave of the first human he encounters on the deserted island.  In fact, upon meeting the man Crusoe would name Friday, Crusoe assumes him immediately as a slave.  Crusoe does save Friday’s life, but Crusoe unabashedly sees Friday’s gratitude as a submission to servitude.  Defoe writes, “At length he came close to me, and then he kneeled down again, kissed the ground, and laid his head upon the ground, and taking me by the foot, set my foot upon his head: this, it seems, was in token of swearing to be my slave for ever” (198).  Crusoe’s domestication of nature and animals extends to another human at this point, as Crusoe assigns Friday his name:  “I made him know his name should be Friday, which was the day I saved his life…I likewise taught him to say Master and let him know that was to be my name” (200). 

If we consider Crusoe as a colonizer and Friday as the colonized, Friday becomes a type of hybrid.  Crusoe changes Friday’s religion, teaches him a new language, and forces him to wear clothing.  Friday’s choices are limited in that he either faces death at the hand of an enemy nation or he submits to Crusoe’s directives and is able to live.  Therefore, Friday retains his previous name, religion, language, and customs as part of his personal history, but they are blended with Crusoe’s first world teachings.  Friday is still who he is before he was renamed Friday and he references his new knowledge to his previous life experiences.  Probably to Crusoe’s dismay, Friday’s mind is not washed clean the minute he encounters Crusoe.  In Crusoe’s perception, Friday is thankful for all he learns, abandoning all the wrongs he knew before he was saved.  The compromise between these viewpoints is hybridization and adaptation.

Another work representing the first world perspective is E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India.  In this novel, Forster’s Dr. Aziz seems to willingly embrace the British presence in India.  However, by the end, Aziz displays another outcome of hybridity – bitter anger. 

Aziz is surrounded by the British, as Forster describes: “The roads, named after victorious generals and intersecting at right angles, were symbolic of the net Great Britain had thrown over India.  He felt caught in their meshes” (13).  Initially, though engulfed by the British, Aziz coexists with the colonizers and attempts to cooperate with the commonwealth rule.  Aziz even invites his English friends for an excursion to the Marabar Caves, so they can experience the real India, and he is proud:  “The expedition was a success, and it was Indian; an obscure young man had been allowed to show courtesy to visitors from another country, which is what all Indians long to do – even cynics like Mahmoud Ali – but they never have the chance” (157).  This chance, however, jeopardizes Aziz’s future as Miss Quested accuses him of impropriety during the outing.

In the effort to embrace hybridity, Aziz is punished.  Though Miss Quested retracts her accusation against Dr. Aziz, the trial process permanently affects Aziz and plants the seeds of his bitterness against the English. Aziz’s transformation can be seen through a comparison of two of his comments.  Before Miss Quested’s episode at the caves, Aziz says to Fielding, “Oh, kick you (the English) out?  Why should I trouble over that dirty job?  Leave it to the politicians ….No, when I was a student I got excited over your damned countrymen, certainly; but if they’ll let me get on with my profession and not be too rude to me officially, I really don’t ask for more” (177).  But after the trial, again speaking to Fielding, Aziz sneers, “The approval of you compatriots no longer interests me, I have become anti-British, and ought to have done so sooner, it would have saved me numerous misfortunes” (279).  The British influence transforms Aziz and his experience with hybridity causes him to bitterly reject the colonizing influence he initially tolerated, if not welcomed.

Forster differs from Defoe in the representation of the colonizers and the effects of hybridity.  Defoe paints a heroic portrait of Crusoe as a colonizer, but Forster examines the cultural ravages of empire.  Powerfully, Forster’s Aziz states, “Down with the English anyhow.  That’s certain.  Clear out, you fellows, double quick, I say.  … If I don’t make you go, Ahmed will, Karim will, if it’s fifty-five hundred years we shall get rid of you, yes, we shall drive every blasted English-man into the sea…” (361).  One can hardly imagine Defoe’s Friday spitting such a charged warning.  The opportunity to contrast these differing views of colonization reveals both the eager and repulsed reactions of colonized individuals facing hybridity.  Though Friday and Aziz both embrace new world influences, their outcomes are not the same.  The fact that both perspectives are represented by first world writers emphasizes the transitional nature of hybridity.

            The question of pliability is raised by Defoe and Forster, but challenged by post-colonial writers like Jamaica Kincaid and Arundhati Roy.  These authors focus on the permanence of indigenous culture and the resonance of tradition.  One of the complications of hybridity is the struggle between colonial and native cultures, sometimes resulting in an “either / or” situation.  By posing sets of choices that seem to be limited to one frustrating choice or another, Kincaid and Roy tune readers to the complications of hybridity in post-colonial life.

For example, in Lucy, Kinkaid’s main character makes a choice to leave her colonized home of Antigua and go to America.  Dendy Farrar, on the 2003 class website, describes Lucy’s dilemma: “Lucy is given the invitation to choose between self-torment at home and violence of an alien metropolis and she refuses to accept these are the only two choices.”   Lucy seems to think there must be another choice in addition to staying and suffering or going and dying from danger and abandonment.  Lucy chooses this third, and difficult, option realizing that wherever she goes, she brings her past with her.

Lucy has a complicated relationship with a past she cannot escape.  Lucy states, “(My) presence on the island – my ancestral history – was the result of a foul deed… I disliked the descendants of the Britons for being unbeautiful, for not cooking food well, for wearing ugly clothes, for not liking to really dance, and for not liking real music” (135-6).  As a result of the slave trade, her people arrive in Antigua and are controlled by the British.  Her hybridity is interesting because her people were born in their native land and forcibly transported, and she does not feel at home where she is born and she willingly transports herself. 

Lucy, in a possible exercise of third wave movement, moves to New York.  After working as an au-pair and wrestling to emerge from a traditional daughter role, Lucy moves into her first apartment.  Lucy asserts, 

The next day I woke up in a new bed, and it was my own. I had bought it with my money.  The roof over my head was my own – that is, as long as I could afford to pay the rent for it.  The curtains at my windows had loud, showy flowers printed on them; I had chosen this pattern over a calico that the lady in the cloth store had recommended.  It did look vulgar in this climate, but it would have been just right in the climate I came from.  (144)

Lucy takes an “either / or” situation and creates her own option.  She is haunted by her past, sometimes runs from it, and sometimes surrounds herself with it.  Kincaid voices the complicated perspective of the hybrid and offers a character who seeks solutions and adaptations.

Roy’s The God of Small Things also poses a series of “either/or” situations.  For example, Baby Kochamma considers the young twins, Rahel and Estha, as “Half-Hindu Hybrids whom no self-respecting Syrian Christian would ever marry” (43).   Either the children are pure or they are tarnished.  But the children, according to Mammachi, are cursed by more than hybridity:   

Chacko said that  Estha and Rahel were indecently healthy.  And so was Sophie Mol.  He said it was because they didn’t suffer from Inbreeding like most Syrian Christians.  And Parsis.  Mammachi said that what her grandchildren suffered from was far worse than Inbreeding.  She meant having parents who were divorced.  As though these were the only choices available to people:  Inbreeding or Divorce.  (59)

Inbreeding and divorce become another set of limited choices, and Rahel fulfills the prophecy with her own divorce. 

Likewise, Sophie Mol personifies the “curse” of hybridity.  She comes to India and dies, possibly representing a purity never to be restored.  High hopes surround Sophie Mol’s homecoming and a hope for some sort of restoration is projected upon her. She is angelic entering the airport terminal:  “Her pale skin was the color of beach sand.  But her hatted hair was beautiful, deep red-brown.  And yes (oh yes!) she had Pappachi’s nose waiting inside hers.  An Imperial Entomologist’s nose-within-a-nose.  A moth lover’s nose.  She carried her Made-in-England go-go bag that she loved” (137).   Sophie Mol’s stay in India would be brief, as she seems to die of simply being there.  Culturally, Sophie Mol is made in England and going back to India is possibly a type of trespass or a warning that purity cannot be imitated.

Rahel struggles with the limited choices she perceives and Roy addresses post-colonial life through Rahel’s independent nature.  Both Kincaid and Roy create characters who witness the struggle between tradition and modern post-colonial life, and both authors offer characters who reach no defined solutions.  The focus is the transitional process of adaptation.

Whether writing from the perspective of a hybrid writer, a colonial era writer, or a post-colonial writer, the common thread of hybridity is our human ability to adapt.  This theme is applicable still, and possibly more so, in our modern world.  Homi K. Bhabha, in “Cultural Diversity and Cultural Differences,” discusses a “Third Space” in which we embrace hybridity as a foundation for dialogue and progress: “And by exploring this hybridity, this ‘Third Space’, we may elude the politics of polarity and emerge as the others of ourselves” (209).   This statement is applicable to America as a specific case.  It would seem that we are all (somewhat) hybrids - few of us are from here or immune to the influences of those who came here.  We are intertextualized products of all that has preceded us.  The study of diverse perspectives creates humanity, community, and empathy.  The study of colonial and post-colonial literature is one forum for the type of discussion.

Works Cited

in addition to course texts

Bhabha, Homi K.  “Cultural Diversity and Cultural Differences.”  The Post-Colonial

Studies Reader.  Ed. Ashcroft, Bill, Griffiths, Gareth, and Tiffin, Helen.  London,

1995.  206-209.

Bhabha, Homi, K.  “Signs Taken for Wonders.”  The Post-Colonial Studies Reader.  Ed.

Ashcroft, Bill, Griffiths, Gareth, and Tiffin, Helen.  London, 1995.  29-35.

Donne, John.  Mediation 17.  Norton Anthology of English Literature. Fifth edition.

W.W.Norton, 1962. Vol.1., 1107.

Sangari, Kumkum. “The Politics of the Possible.”  The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. 

Ed. Ashcroft, Bill, Griffiths, Gareth, and Tiffin, Helen.  London, 1995.  143-147.

Work Log

6/30/03

12:00 – 1:00 p.m., 1:30-4:00 p.m.