LITR 5734: Colonial & Postcolonial Literature

Sample Student Final Exam 2005

Georgeann Ward

5 December 2005

Essay 1:  Challenges and Rewards of Colonial and Post-Colonial Literature

In Jasmine, Mukherjee summarizes my own biggest challenge in studying  Colonial and Post-Colonial Literature.  Through Jasmine’s analysis of Mother Ripplemeyer, I came to understand how uncomfortable I am with the unknown and how difficult it is for me to believe in things that I have never seen.  Jasmine says:

Mother Ripplemeyer tells me her Depression stories.  In the beginning, I thought we could trade some world-class poverty stories, but mine make her uncomfortable. . . . She can’t begin to picture a village in Punjab.  She doesn’t mind my stories about New York and Florida because she’s been to Florida many times and seen enough pictures of New York.  I have to be careful about these stories.  I have to be careful about nearly everything I say.  (Mukherjee, 16)

For me, the most difficult aspect of this course was digesting the unbelievable atrocities experienced in other cultures.  Admittedly “American” in my thinking—maybe even to a fault, considering that I cheered for Jasmine to abandon her crippled partner for a younger, healthier man—I have to make a great effort to go beyond my isolationist and nationalistic comfort zone.  In America, we are made to believe that anyone who works hard and makes the right decisions can lead a safe, comfortable lifestyle, and even as we travel throughout the states, as far as a person can drive, every big city looks exactly like Houston with the same stores, restaurants, and road signs.   In stark contrast, in the literature that we read this semester, we were transported to the Third World, where people live primitively and operate in the subsistence mode, struggling daily to secure the basic necessities. Scenes that haunt me include:  Achebe’s description of the tribal practice of abandoning twin babies, Singh’s portraits of a gang rape and a father executing his own wife and children during the Partition, and Mukherjee’s depiction of the Khalsa Lions’ terrorist murders of Masterji and Prakash. In the cultures we have studied, poverty, rape, murder, and even genocide are so commonplace that authors like Achebe, Mukherjee, and Singh describe these horrors in a tone that is simple and matter-of-fact.

Even though I have had many courses and experiences with multi-cultural literature, the historical and religious background to the texts we read really had an impact on me this semester, and I was impressed by all of the information that we were exposed to on the Internet.  As a result, I gained confidence to begin personal dialogues with two of my own students, a Hindu woman from India and a Muslim man from Kuwait.  I looked at them in a new light after reading Jasmine and Train to Pakistan, and I wanted to find out more about their cultures.  Maybe not surprisingly, the young woman, Usha, was reluctant to share much about her homeland (even in writing assignments for the class I teach), and I wondered if her reluctance to discuss India mirrored Jasmine’s choices in conversation with Mother Ripplemeyer.  The young man, Mohammad, also shared little about his homeland, but instead was visibly Americanized through the course of the semester, cutting his long hair into a short and stylish fashion.  When I asked him questions about his religion, he answered so diplomatically and in such an open-minded fashion that it was hard for me to believe that other Muslims murdered hundreds of thousands of Hindus (and vice-versa) over religious differences during the Partition of India.  With both Usha and Mohammad, however, I had to wonder if they tailored their answers to my questions because they could sense how naively American I am.  I hope not.

Similarly, after reading Heart of Darkness and Things Fall Apart, I was inspired to see the recent film, The Constant Gardener, with Ralph Fiennes and Rachel Weisz.  This film showed the deplorable state of affairs in present-day Africa, complete with shack-filled cities teaming with starving and sickly people and corrupt politicians willing to sacrifice these people to profit big business.  In the film, a giant drug company offers free immunizations to the natives in exchange for the natives’ (unknown) participation in a potentially lethal drug trial.  When Rachel Weisz’s character attempts to expose the company’s actions, she is killed.  Although fictitious, the film made me realize that even today, a different form of colonialism is taking place in which companies go into Third World countries, exploit the people to increase profits, and then leave conditions sometimes worse then they were before the companies came. 

This class was one of the most interesting I have ever taken, and it opened my eyes to how unique our lives are in the United States, yet how willfully ignorant we can be.  I hope that it will continue to inspire me to find out more about the world and then make human connections based on what I have learned.

Log Time:  10:45-12:00 A.M., Sunday, December 04

Essay 2:  From Colonization to Globalization:  The Changing Roles of Women

            Read as a series of snapshots in the progression of colonialism, post-colonialism, and globalization (Jennifer Fregia, 15 November 2005), the novels A Passage to India, Train to Pakistan, Jasmine, and Lucy also highlight the progression of women’s liberation throughout the twentieth century. 

            Beginning with A Passage to India, readers experience colonization through the critical voice of E.M. Forster.  Through this comedy of manners, Forster makes fools of the English officers who are stationed in India, showing their self-importance, bigotry, and cruelty, but he depicts his female characters as even worse.  In her 2003 final, “Feminine Colonialism:  The Civilizing Influence of Women,” Rosalyn Mack asserts that colonial and post-colonial literature highlights two types of women, civilizer and destroyer.  She writes, “What really begins to emerge is the idea of women as either upholding the social, political, and cultural order or acting outside of it, usually to the detriment of the female and those surrounding her.”    In A Passage, the women whose husbands are stationed in India, such as Mrs. Turton or Mrs. Callender, uphold their own false idea of political and social order, treating the natives in the worst possible way.  These women rely on the perceived inferiority of the Indians to make themselves feel more important and validate their own station.  Similarly, Ms. Quested starts along that track, accusing Aziz of sexual misconduct, even when she fears her own imagination is to blame.  Mrs. Moore, on the other hand, begins to realize the meaninglessness of social constructs and is cast away from Chandrapore.  Through these examples, Forster shows that women in this time had no positive voice in the political and social scene.   

            Likewise, in Train to Pakistan, female characters are used almost exclusively to highlight the vulnerability of post-colonial India during the Partition Riots.  The women who stand out in this texts include:  Lala Ram Lal’s wife, who begs for her husband’s life and wails after his death, Jugga’s mother, who knows she is completely helpless to change the fate that her son has created for himself, Nooran, who becomes pregnant with an illegitimate, mixed child, and is sent away with no hope for her future, and the women described at the end of the novel, including Sundari, who is gang raped and handed her husband’s amputated penis, and Sunder Singh’s wife, who watches her children’s murders and then is executed by her own husband in a moment of complete despair.  These examples show the vulnerability and chaos left in India when the patriarchal order of the British government was removed from the country, and it also shows the insignificant political role of women at that time.

In the same way, Walcott depicts in his poetry the destruction of his native islands by the colonizers and the void left when the colonizers are removed.  One especially poignant illustration is in his Chapter 21, read by Samantha McDonald on November 29.  In this poem, Walcott vividly describes the complete destruction imposed on his friend Gregorias’ Caribbean island by a modernizing force.  Once the First World companies have drained the island of its resources and abandon it, all that is left is rusty debris.   In the progression of this semester’s literature, Walcott’s poem falls between the post-colonial Train to Pakistan and the global Lucy or Jasmine. 

            By the time readers experience Jasmine and Lucy, the effects of globalization and the American Feminist Movement had begun to take hold, and the women of these novels enjoy a much stronger self.  Both Jasmine and Lucy abandon their mothers and strike out against all that is traditional in their lives.  These two characters are able to leave their homelands behind and create new lives for themselves outside of the order that was forced upon their mothers.  Jasmine sheds her given name, Jyote, and creates multiple selves throughout the novel, adapting to American society in a way that transcends hybridization and becomes “genetic,” in her words.  Lucy, too, completely rejects the gender role forced upon her by her mother, negating everything that she is meant to represent, and ultimately recognizing the void left when the patriarchal order is removed.

             Mirroring the historical transition of women as second-class, voiceless beings to unruly, radical feminists, to equal, valid individuals, the novels  A Passage to India, Train to Pakistan, Jasmine,  and Lucy show the progression of the forced patriarchal order of colonialism and its disregard for women, to the chaos and violence left when that order is removed, to the rebuilding that must occur in the aftermath. 

Log Time:  10:00 A.M. to 12:20 P.M., Monday, December 05