LITR / CRCL 5734: Colonial & Postcolonial Literature

Sample Student Midterm 2003

Charley R. A. Bevill
Literature 5734
Professor Craig White
09 June 2003

Pages Across the Sargasso Sea:

A Student’s View of Colonial and Post- Colonial Literature

illuminated pages

need not contain

any copy-right

on history

Felix Mnthali, “Letter to a Feminist Friend”

When I decided to pursue a graduate degree in Literature, my advisor suggested that I take courses that would include my specific interests in literature. Shakespeare and American Literature were the areas that sparked in me in enthusiasm for the written word. Although I had several literature courses as an undergraduate, my exposure to “Other Worlds” had been limited. My thought was to stick to what I knew.

Upon review of the course schedule, I saw Colonial and Post Colonial Literature was being offered. I felt the course would be right up my alley. I assumed this class would encompass the time period before and immediately after the American Revolutionary War. Obviously, I had not looked at the description in the course catalog.

Imagine my surprise when I went to the campus bookstore and saw the then eight books to be covered in the course. Daniel Defoe’s Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India: both of these novels I recognized immediately as having nothing to do with American history. There, at the afore mentioned time, I quickly read a couple of Derek Walcott’s poems from Collected Poems, 1948-1984, also on the required reading list. Though beautiful in their own right, I could see there was an agenda in them that I knew nothing about. The question that came to my mind was, “What was I thinking?”

Small in scale by comparison, my assumptions about this course were akin to the attitudes of the European powers that colonized much of the world. The colonizer’s idea of story was essentially about the Self. With an imperialistic point of view, I expected the voice I was to hear to be my own, or at least that of my own kind. Although colonial novels portray a fictionalized Other, they reflect the society of the colonizing nation from which the author hails, thereby inflicting these societal standards upon the Other. In Colonial literature, the colonizer’s voice reflects the societal norms and constraints of the time. “Yet there is a reluctance to allow that political, institutional, and ideological constraints act in the same manner on the individual author,” even among authors (Said 191).

In Heart of Darkness, the first text covered in the course, Joseph Conrad writes for the colonizer, in this case, Great Britain. The colonizer is given voice through Marlow, the novel’s teller of yarns. Marlow describes his travels through the Congo as dark and unsettling. Unable to understand the native languages or traditions, Marlow tells his companions the natives’ voices were “[…] strings of amazing words that resembled no sounds of human language, and the deep murmurs of the crowd, interrupted suddenly, were like the responses of some satanic litany” (66). In this context, Conrad is not concerned with the natives’ voices: Peoples he never expected to read his manuscript. First published in 1899, Heart of Darkness would have had an audience like Conrad: white men.

Marlow’s description of his arrival at Kurtz’s camp also appears to be inflammatory. “[… I]ts first result was to make me throw my head back as if before a blow […] They would have been even more impressive, those heads on the stakes, if their faces had not been turned to the house. […] But the wilderness had found [Kurtz] out early, and had taken on him a terrible vengeance for the fantastic invasion” (57). Conrad’s description of the heads on stakes is a disturbing one. The inclusion shows a darker, misunderstood aspect of the native culture. To diminish Kurtz’s participation in the taking of heads, Conrad blames the wilderness, i.e. Africa for the behavior of Kurtz, thereby saving face for the colonizer.

In the article, “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness,” Chinua Achebe vehemently responds to the voice of Marlow and the lack there of for the natives. Achebe calls Conrad “[…] a thoroughgoing racist. That this simple truth is glossed over in criticisms of his work is due to the fact that white racism against Africa is such a normal way of thinking that its manifestations go completely unremarked” (257). However, in Achebe’s novel, Things Fall Apart, there is also the taking of heads. “In Umuofia’s latest war [Okonkwo] was the first to bring home a human head. That was his fifth head; and he was not an old man yet. On great occasions such as the funeral of a village celebrity he drank his palm-wine from his first human head” (10). The colonized’s voice reflects the natives’ cultural issues. This description taken out of context could also be disturbing, but when shown to be a part of the Ibo culture, only done in battle, the event here and in Heart of Darkness takes on a different connotation.

Reading Heart of Darkness alone I could see Achebe’s grievance with Conrad. However, with Things Fall Apart as part of the curriculum, I can see the social structure in place at this time in history as well as the colonized people’s traditional culture. It is easy to recognize the flaws in Achebe’s main character Okonkwo. Perhaps Conrad chooses Marlow as the voice in Heart of Darkness so that Conrad can demonstrate the flawed thinking of the colonizer. Although it appears that Marlow is the narrator of the story, there is another voice relaying Marlow’s yarn. Is it the voice of Conrad who along with his shipmates has become “tolerant of each other’s yarns—and even convictions” (1)? Marlow himself comments on colonialism, stating that colonialism is not something you would want to look deeply into.

The culture wars that arise between the colonizer and the colonized precipitated the literature that emerged during the post-colonial period. In “First Things First: Problems of a Feminist Approach to African Literature,” Kristen Holtst Petersen writes that “An important impetus behind the wave of African writing which started in the ‘60s was the desire to show both the outside world and African youth that the African past was orderly, dignified and complex and altogether a worthy heritage” (253).  Chinua Achebe wrote for both. He wanted the native as well as the colonizer to hear the stories of his native culture, to, as quoted from “The Post-Colonial Studies Reader” by Dale Marie Taylor in her student presentation, ‘counteract the cultural claims of the colonizers’ (469)” (2). However, to express this to the African youth and the outside world, the voice of the colonized had to be expressed through the colonizer’s language. This brought about what the “Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literary Theory,” calls ‘hybridization’ through which indigenous traditions combine with imperial remnants to create something newly post-colonial in a language […]” as well as culture (156).

Hybridization is a major concept of post-colonial writing. In Derek Walcott’s “A Far Cry from Africa,” we can see how this hybridization affects the author:

I who am poisoned with the blood of both,

Where shall I turn, divided to the vein?

[…] how choose

Between this Africa and the English tongue I love?

Betray them both, or give back what they give? (18)

As a hybrid, Walcott embodies the best and worst of both worlds. However, many times the hybrid is lost between the two worlds, belonging to neither.

In teaching the colonial and post-colonial texts together, the course becomes not only a study of classic literature but also a view of the socio-cultural environment of the region. In studying the colonial text together with the post-colonial text, the student receives a cosmopolitan understanding and enlightened appreciation of each text individually. A dialogue is created between the texts and together the two texts seem to breathe life into each other, creating something new.