LITR 5734: Colonial & Postcolonial Literature

Sample Student Final Exam 2005

Michael Russo

12/07/05

LITR 5734 Evaluations and Reflections:

Refinement Reading Vs. Exploratory Reading,

and “Where Do We Go From Here?”

in Studies of Colonial / Postcolonial Literature

     I’ve never been too comfortable with the traditional tendency in academics to categorize works of fiction as either literature or escapist; the reason for my discomfort finds its source in a general philosophy that the works of human beings seldom fit neatly into previously-defined compartments, no matter how strong we might desire to make order out of the immense chorus of ideas, philosophies, emotions, fancies and conspiracies that populate the pages of artistic expression.  Yet despite my discomfort with this kind of classification, I do have to admit that the act of reading certain kinds of fiction in pursuit of insight or enlightenment is greatly different than the act of reading other kinds of fiction for the sole purpose of amusement.  I do believe that these different reading acts are not mutually exclusive, and it is certainly possible both to read good “literature” purely for enjoyment and to occasionally find enlightenment or knowledge in the pages of a largely “escapist” musing.  Both entertainment and enlightenment can also, occasionally, be found in a single reading.  But by “enlightenment,” what exactly do I mean?  For me, finding enlightenment in the pages of a novel, for example, usually comes in the form of a better understanding of the human condition.  Seeing through the eyes of another is an opportunity to test one’s own life philosophies and, as is often the case, make philosophical adjustments where necessary. 

     Yet just as reading an “escapist” work for pleasure is a different act than reading “literature” for knowledge or enlightenment, so too is the act of reading viewpoints on the familiar different than the act of reading viewpoints on the unfamiliar.  So putting aside my discomfort with classifications, and including all disclaimers about sliding scales and the possibility for scenarios that defy categories, I will give the classification practice a whirl myself in order to point out what I believe is one of the greatest strengths of our recently completed class on colonial and postcolonial fiction: the ability to practice both “refinement” reading” and “exploratory” reading in one setting, while holding the two up against each other for comparison and scrutiny.  With that said, an explanation is in order.  There is certainly great value in reading the ideas and thoughts of people who are not profoundly different than oneself; this exercise, which I call “refinement reading,” is useful primarily because it allows the reader to focus on exploring subtle differences in human viewpoints and philosophies on topics that are both familiar and comfortable.  Yet there is great value too in the practice of understanding, or even attempting to understand, the viewpoints of those people who are most unlike oneself, and who bring with them radically different ideas about the world; this type of reading I call “exploratory reading” because it brings the opportunity for exposure to ideas entirely outside of the reader’s previously existing world view.

     That brings us to colonial and postcolonial fiction, the focus of this essay. 

     The average American reader, educated in American schools, generally comes into contact with the literature of the Western world.  This education in Western fiction might very well include colonial literature, including several texts used in our course: Heart of Darkness, A Passage to India, and Robinson Crusoe (had it not been a casualty of Hurricane Rita).  The first two, and I am assuming the third, tell stories from the viewpoints of Western thinkers.  These texts present the people of colonized lands as something other or different than the understood world shared by the author and the expected audience.  Little effort is given to look much beyond the exterior of foreign cultures, or to find enlightenment or knowledge from the philosophies of the colonized peoples who occupy these novels.  Forster makes perhaps a minimal effort before settling on the easy answer: it wasn’t meant to be.  Conrad shows sympathy for the Africans in his story, but fails miserably to offer the reader any uniquely African wisdom or philosophy that might challenge the boundaries of Western thought and offer understanding of an African way of living.  The advantage to a Western audience of reading these texts lies not in exploring the unfamiliar, but rather in refining one’s views on the familiar.  Conrad’s audience would have been largely familiar with British colonial efforts in Africa, but possibly not familiar with Conrad’s specific arguments against these activities.  By reading Heart of Darkness, the Western reader is challenged to defend colonialism in Africa despite Conrad’s objections, or else join him in condemning it.  None of Conrad’s arguments present radically new ideas to the Western reader, but his specific ideas could potentially result in a refinement of the reader’s previous viewpoints.   Conrad simply said things in a way that previous writers had not.  No doubt Conrad intended any refinement carried out by readers to be in a direction opposed to colonialism in Africa, yet it should be pointed out that refinement could move in the direction opposite of the intended effect – a reader could be exposed to Conrad’s arguments only to use them in better fortifying his or her own arguments in favor of colonial efforts in Africa.  Back to our class in particular, our colonial texts provided us with an opportunity to further practice the act of refinement reading.  The texts also were useful in another way, which I will address a little later.

     It would be the postcolonial texts then that would offer our chance to practice exploratory reading.  Each and every one of our chosen postcolonial texts told stories from the viewpoints of people from colonized cultures; the authors of these stories, however, are all Western educated and seem to intend their stories primarily for a Western audience.  In other words, we did not tread too far off the Western path, as we did not tackle any texts intended purely for a colonized culture.  Our chosen authors, then, are in the position to offer a unique service to their readers, and to our class specifically; knowing common gaps in Western understandings of colonized countries, they seem to have an agenda – to expose the limits of traditional Western thought and undermine philosophies that make it easier for a dominant culture to look the other way during the exploitation of a colonized culture.  The most obvious example of this disruptive approach can be found in Lucy; the protagonist in this case seems to spend the bulk of her time in our minds critiquing American sensibilities and comparing them to her own.  Could the American reader, without the viewpoint offered by Lucy, ever come to view the daffodil as a symbol of oppression and exploitation?  Achebe too challenges Western sensibilities, even if his approach is less radical – through Things Fall Apart, Achebe provides the African context that is missing from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, making it less likely that his readers could subsequently view Africans in the animalistic terms offered by Conrad’s prose.  In Jasmine, we are shown how an American immigrant might be made to feel like an outsider simply by the way she is received by others; while Jasmine is very accepting and even commending of American life, she is constantly reinventing herself to fit the expectations of those around her.  Du too must absorb the comments of well-intended Americans who just can’t see the big picture and how their comments can sting when they intend to sooth.  Where the colonial writer generally offers a contribution to the existing cultural dialogue, the postcolonial writer tries to strike up a new dialogue with the Western world.  The discovery of this new dialogue is not always accomplished through the traditional study of Western literature, so the willingness to examine this dialogue on its own terms is the primary advantage of our course.

     Yet simply accepting the dialogue offered by the postcolonial writers wasn’t exactly our end goal either.  Instead, our goal was to take two separate dialogues – one mostly familiar (colonial), the other less familiar (postcolonial), and see where we might go next.  Our understanding of the issues surrounding colonialism was certainly enhanced by the inclusion of both colonial and postcolonial texts, but did we really determine where to go from here?  I’m not sure that we did as a class, but perhaps some of us did on a more individual level.  There have been a number of ideas I have been contemplating inspired largely by our colonial and postcolonial studies.  While colonialism as practiced by European powers in the 1800’s and 1900’s might be largely a force of the past, has the colonial mindset that made it possible really vanished too?  I don’t think that it has; colonial thought has simply been refined, creating a “new colonialism” mindset, moving into territory that includes globalization and multi-national corporations. 

     The desire for cheap labor and inexpensive resources exists today just as it did yesterday.  Since so much of postcolonial thought focuses on ethnicity, will it have done its job in preparing future generations for a new colonial push that does not focus exclusively on specific locales and ethnicities but instead seeks cheap labor in a spattering of very different settings? I don’t believe that it has.  In fact, the postcolonial writers offered in our course have done a very poor job as a group at getting to the heart of the problem, which is at the root of the human condition: as social animals, we both rely on each other for survival, and compete with each other over limited resources – and this truth leads to the exploitation of workers.  Ethnicity isn’t the end issue, but rather it’s a tool used by the colonizer to reassure its own culture that exploiting one group of people will not lead to their own exploitation in subsequent years.  The white American might look the other way during the exploitation of black Africans simply because he believes that he himself is safe from being similarly exploited so long as the attention is on people who are clearly different from him in some demonstrable way.  But what happens when the exploiters stop targeting certain ethic groups exclusively and instead turn within, choosing to “colonize” people of their own ethnicity, or citizens of their own country?  How can one resist exploitation that isn’t so easy to define or identify?  One race exploiting another makes resistance an easier proposition; intra-exploitation, so to speak, is a much trickier proposition for resistance.  What seems to make sense would be to take at least some of the focus of postcolonial studies off of race and ethnicity and instead put it on issues such as labor and production, and even issues like land ownership and natural resources. To do that is to get straight to the heart of colonial thinking, and to be in a better position to resist it when it reemerges in some new form.  While some of the materials on our course website’s Research Links page does start think in this way, including the New York Times article “A Passage from India,” which deals with the outsourcing of previously American jobs to India, none of this emerging dialogue was present in the literature used in our studies, and we did not look hard at whether the constant emphasis on race does exactly what the colonizers possibly intended it to do – distract from a deeper understanding of the problem.  I think that perhaps former student Kayla Logan, who wrote about the treatment of religion in colonial and postcolonial texts, was also concerned with the tools used by colonizers to protect their interests in colonized lands, even if, in the case of religion, it is often used almost subconsciously as a means for overlooking or excusing colonial activities and allowing them to continue.  Just as Kayla rightly drew attention to the way in which the colonizers would use religion in forming their colonial identity, so too is raced used in a similar manner to take scrutiny off of the very practical but less sensational motivations, namely financial motivations, that are the driving force of colonial activities of the past and the present.

Suddenly Irrelevant: Tragic Traditionalists in Postcolonial Literature

     Often in postcolonial texts there is a dialogue between traditionalist and modernist attitudes; and the result is seldom good news for the traditionalist. In the novels Things Fall Apart, Jasmine and Lucy, characters who represent a traditional culture suffer and fail precisely because of their inability to adapt as the world around them mercilessly moves on to new modes of living.  While that is usually good news for the modernist, in the case of Lucy, modernists too are found inadequate, the resulting question being whether or not to scrap the whole darn system and start over on the strength of the lessons of the past.  Yet it seems clear that postcolonial writers, even Kincaid, are unanimous in their dire warning that stubborn allegiance to a newly irrelevant past, no matter how great that past might have been, is a path to tragic consequences.

     Things Fall Apart offers perhaps the best clear-cut example of the traditionalist who refuses to adapt his viewpoints even as the changing world makes him obsolete.  Okonkwo, ashamed of his father’s inability to find traditional success in his village, buys fully into traditional arguments on what makes an admirable man in Umuofia; these traits then form the basis of Okonkwo’s identity.  Physical strength, dedication to hard work, and deference to the traditional village power structure are examples of these traits, all possessed by Okonkwo, all areas where he excels amongst his peers.  But Okonkwo’s reverence of tradition makes it impossible for him to find value in his eldest son, whose strengths are different than Okonkwo’s strengths, and whose abilities are not valued by the traditional community.  In fact, the treatment by traditionalists of the village outcasts opens the door for foreign Christian missionaries, who in turn open the door for British colonial rule.  Offended by the behavior of the British, and his son’s embracement of Christianity, Okonkwo eventually comes to the conclusion that he would rather die fighting than give up on the entrenched values and philosophies that have served him so well up until the arrival of the foreigners.  Yet for most of the villagers, the instinct to survive supersedes any desire to expel the foreigners; Okonkwo is left on his own, the last purist and a threat to the colonizers, and when faced with a choice between adapting and death, he chooses death.

     In Jasmine, Darrel offers an opportunity for us to ask what happens when an unwilling traditionalist is denied the opportunity to adapt because the people around him refuse to allow it.  Darrel lives in a traditional farming community and has stepped into the shoes of his deceased father, who like Okonkwo was respected for his ability to do things the “right” way.  Yet Darrel is not like Okonkwo; he sees that times are changing, and he tries to adapt by morphing his family’s traditional farm into something modern and relevant.  Although Darrel is ultimately unsuccessful in his plans to adapt, leading to his death, at least some of the blame of his failure has to be directed to the residents of his community who, for sentimental reasons, can’t get behind Darrel’s golf course vision – or more specifically, Bud’s refusal to provide Darrel with the financial support he needs to take a shot at finding a productive place in a modern world.  It might be excusable for a bank comfortable with the traditional farming business to pass on something more experimental like a golf course, and purely on an “acceptable risk” basis, but it seems clear that Bud’s reluctance to assist Darrel lies less in good business sense and more in nostalgia for a dying way of life; traditionalist urgings defeat Darrel, just as they defeated Okonkwo, but in Darrel’s case the urgings were not his own.

     Things get a bit more complicated in Lucy, where we are shown a protagonist who is not satisfied with either the traditionalist or the modernist viewpoints.  In this story, the obvious choice for champion of traditional values is Lucy’s mother, who abandons her independent identity in favor of the life of a traditional mother and housewife.  But that lifestyle ultimately backfires, leaving her in desperate financial peril when her husband dies and leaves behind only debt.  And while Mariah’s “hippie” sensibilities might at first make her seem like a modernist, through the eyes of Lucy she becomes something more akin to a tragic traditionalist – refusing to let go of her vision for a perfect life with her husband Lewis until reality becomes too terrible to ignore.  In the setting of this novel, presumably the 1990’s, the ideals championed by popular youth culture of the 1960’s is already showing its inability to find relevancy in an increasingly mercenary and cynical modern world.  Lewis, once the hippie rebel who ran off with Mariah to form a family in spite of their parents’ wishes, has turned predictably to the pursuit of money; in a way, he has adapted to the modern culture – but one has to wonder whether that willingness to adapt has really done much for improving the quality of his life.  It is nonetheless his willingness to adapt, to seek a new set of circumstances, which shatters Mariah’s more traditional “hippie” approach to living. 

     The traditionalist needs the cooperation of others in order to maintain his or her grip on traditional ways of living.  Okonkwo never had the cooperation of his son, and loses the cooperation of his village, making the only way of living acceptable to him no longer an option.  In a reversal of that scenario, Darrel wants to adapt but can’t get the cooperation he needs because of Bud’s traditional nostalgia.  Mariah opts for a marriage that one could describe as traditional in a certain sense, but her partner effectively opts out when his values and priorities change.  The weakness inherent in staunchly traditionalist thinkers then is that they don’t allow for change, yet they cannot prevent change either.

     Walcott, on the other hand, is very aware of the impossibility if sustaining an ideal state; for the traditionalist, the “old way” of living is the ideal, and any change can only be unwelcome.  Yet once any state of living is achieved, its continuation cannot last long enough for those who desire it.  The state of peace, for example, as envisioned in Walcott’s poem “The Season of Phantasmal Peace,” lasts merely for “one moment, like the pause between dusk and darkness.”  Where Walcott tries to find contentment in the fact that a state of peace was achieved at all, a traditionalist would generally not be as gracious over the loss of his or her preferred state of living.

     One message that seems to come then from all of our postcolonial writers is that change is inevitable; wishing for a return to the past is an impossibility, so learning to find a new way to live – whether that means assimilating with a new culture or clearing the ground for something new – is the sole option for those of us who wish to stay relevant and, hopefully, even find success.