LITR 5734: Colonial & Postcolonial Literature

Sample Student Midterm 2005

Beth Cordell  

October 3, 2005

Subjected to Colonialism:  Fighting Back with Prose and Poetry

The dream of reason had produced its monster: a prodigy of the wrong age

And colour.

                                                             Derek Walcott  “The Divided Child”

330 If the art of poetry, as a utopian philosophy of genres, gives rise to the conception of a purely poetic, extrahistorical language, a language far removed from the petty rounds of everyday life, a language of the gods—then it must be said that the art of prose is close to a conception of languages as historically concrete and living things.

                                                                        Mikhail Bakhtin, Four Essays

Several years ago in a women’s literature class  I encountered Isak Dinesen’s Out of Africa. The gist of the class was to explore the writings of Cristina  Rossetti, Aphra Behn, Alice Walker, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Virginia Woolf, et al in the context of women writing about the culture they happened to find themselves in.  What is curious in retrospect is the fact we studied the first sentence of Out of Africa, “I once had a farm in Africa.:” as:  I, a woman, once had a farm (intersection of woman and land) in Africa.  I remember thinking how sympathetic, and she was, the Baroness was in referring to the natives.  I realize now that Dinesen has come to be known as a writer of colonial literature, and the natives were simply a part of nature in the dichotomy delineated in poststructuralist terminology, nature/culture.  During this same class, we were to read Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. I was horrified upon learning the Victorian male thinkers had written hundreds of scholarly works on the inferiority of women.  In a long talk given to an assembled group, Woolf concludes with the idea that men gained their strength by deflating women and if they didn’t, “they would not be able to conquer worlds, civilize natives…”(Woolf 150). Did not my idol, Virginia Woolf see that not only women but indigenous peoples were diminished if not ignored by the thinkers of the day? In fact, they were defined as though by a god.

Fast forward to a few years ago and the reading of a collection of essays on the writing of Gabriel Garcia-Marquez’ One Hundred Years of Solitude assembled by Harold Bloom.  It was here that I first encountered the terms colonial and postcolonial. These were heady and thought-provoking discussions.  Garcia Marquez’ country, Colombia, had been colonized by Spain originally, later colonized again by The United States in the form of a banana company which completely took over the towns, education, etc. and although Garcia Marquez fell in love with the written word, he, unlike Derek Walcott, refused to become fluent in English and continued to write his books to be translated from Spanish to English.  These were interesting concepts, and in fact helped to spark a renewed interest in literary studies.  The essays went so far as to explain how one woman character represented the uncolonized Colombian, sensual, earthy and how another character represented the colonized woman. This was all very fascinating. And of course, the novel rewrites and redeems the history of that country using magic realism (a method also utilized by AmosTutuola, I was to find out later) as a technique to give the reader a fresh perspective on the culture. The terms colonial and postcolonial were discussed but not in terms of a dialogue.

My interest was sparked.  I decided to return to college and lo and behold a class on colonial –postcolonial studies was being offered.  Everything in the class is a dialogue, from the  course website which offers hypertextual references and “research (which) is encouraged through vicarious learning, opening the doors to a wealth of knowledge and well-rounded individuals” a fact pointed out by Curtisha Wallace in her essay, to the seminar style in which the class is conducted. We students, I have observed, seem to be learning exponentially week by week. The method is not one person imparting knowledge to a passive audience; it is everyone in dialogue with each other and the texts.

This idea of one source of knowledge is a very important one in the understanding of colonial  and postcolonial literature.  I mentioned Woolf’s analysis of her condition in Victorian England as a place to begin to understand how countries, races, and another gender came to be seen as an Other.  The Other as the object of the oppressor’s gaze. How did all of this happen and, what does this have to do with colonial and postcolonial literature? According to the entry in the John Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism handout, the theorist Edward Said is credited with the central text in Postcolonial Culture Studies, his book, Orientalism. According to the handout,

 “While Said could still deplore that the literary establishment had declared the serious study of imperialism off limits, the 1980s established the centrality of the colonialist debate with its focus on how imperialism affected the colonies and how the former colonies then wrote back in an attempt to correct Western views.”

The Guide also quotes Benita Parry as stating, “The labour of producing a counter-discourse displacing imperialism’s dominative system of knowledge rests with those engaged in developing a critique from outside its cultural hegemony.”

Edward Said writes (in the handout entitled  “Orientalism”) “the world is divided into the Orient and the Occident.” In other words, the East and West.  We have come to think of the Orient as near Europe or outside of Europe, chiefly  as Asian or Indian nationalities.  It really isn’t a place; it is a philosophy.  In broadest terms, the Orient would seem to include every country or race, men and women not considered Western or European. Quoting Said,

Orientalism can be discussed and analyzed as the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient—dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it:  in short, Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.

I cannot think of a stronger statement to explain the stance taken by the West to define in fact manage the rest of the world.  This notion of superiority, of the defining of other cultures in such a way as to contrast them and us, of settling other countries and dominating and defining them is evident in Joseph Conrad’s  Heart of Darkness.   The narrative representational mode of the novel is this Eurocentric view—an author-god controlling the story.  In contrast and in answer to this narrow viewpoint, we have Chinua Achebe’s novel, Things Fall Apart which gives previously (by Conrad) inadequately defined, less than fully human and deemed Other a voice.  This dialogue from the marginalized Other decenters the narrow viewpoint of the colonialist perspective and is Achebe’s method of having the “tribal culture fight its way back into history”(Literary theory handout).  Derek Walcott, a poet who continues to, in the words of Seamus Heaney, “immortalize the Caribbean” is a product of colonialism and postcolonialism who holds two opposing worlds in his mind and is a “hybrid construction” according to note 304 from Bakhtin’s The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. To read Heart of Darkness against Things Fall Apart is to ascertain a more accurate historical truth by reading between the texts.  This betweenness or intertextuality “signals the death of a Romantic notion of what Barthes calls the ‘author-God’ or the author as origin of all textual meaning” (Literary Encyclopedia:  Intertextuality). If Derek Walcott represents the hybrid form of these two approaches, then he is somewhat removed from total immersion in both and is considered “extrahistorical” (according to item 330 in Bakhtin’s Four Essays).

One of the first thoughts that Conrad allows Marlow, the narrator of his novella, Heart of Darkness to utter as he prepares for another seafaring journey is that a “casual stroll or a casual spree on shore suffices to unfold for him the secret of a whole continent, and generally he finds the secret not worth knowing” (Conrad 292). Marlow is a narrator within a narrative, a doubly removed author-god imparting to an audience his view of Africa at the time this novella was written. For an entire continent to be dismissed as not worthy of knowing, a peculiar mindset had to be in place. The Icon Dictionary of Postmodernism in an article called the” Enlightenment Project” states

This gave rise to the dream of a world radically improved, ordered, engineered, mastered. The idea of the improvement of the human race, and of moral progress was born.  The desire to master Nature developed into the dream of master of society, and of history.

Terry DeHay writing “A Colonial Perspective” states unequivocally that “the Enlightenment project provided the rationale for colonialism and created the ‘colonial subject’ and the ‘situating of the subject’.  He adds “the Project privileged reason and rationality, mind and reason conquer superstition, control nature”. This idea to control, to order, to situate the subject harkens back to what Edward Said referred to in Orientalism, “dominating and restructuring the Orient.  Anything other than the Eurocentric viewpoint is probably not worth knowing, only mastered and controlled.  By the mid-twentieth century the Caribbean would produce a perfect hybrid of the colonial/postcolonial milieu which was the West Indies in the form of Derek Walcott who would be able to state:  “The dream of reason produced a monster/a prodigy of the wrong age and colour.” (Another Life,  Part I “Divided Child”). Walcott would agonize over his inability to belong even to St. Lucia peopled by his ancestors.  He was still seen as an Other.

 This phenomenon created a perspective or gaze with which the Other was seen and defined.  In some instances, an entire race was not seen as capable of human complexity (an idea which will be remedied in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart) which renders them subhuman.  From her essay entitled “Identity Crisis” April Davis who examined the oppressor’s dilemma in a story by George Orwell entitled, “Killing an Elephant” writes,

Perhaps Orwell’s fear of humiliation is symbolic of the imperialist fear of a loss of control…if an oppressor truly thinks the natives subhuman then why would he care what they think in the first place? This is an interesting paradox, which lends itself to the idea of dehumanization as a personal defense mechanism.  While there is no doubt about the idea of racial superiority on the part of the white oppressors, their belief that the natives are entirely subhuman may be a flimsy cover used to perpetuate the white man’s idea of his own separate superior identity and justify the exploitation of the oppressed.

Chinua Achebe took issue with Conrad’s view of Africa as a “continent with a secret not worth knowing” and added a psychological dimension. Achebe writes in his article, “An Image of Africa:  Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness”:

Conrad did not originate the image of Africa which we find in this book.  It was and is the dominant image of Africa in the Western imagination…For reasons which can certainly use close psychological inquiry, the West seems to suffer deep anxieties about the precariousness of its civilization and to have a need for constant reassurance by comparison with Africa. Africa is a carrier onto whom the master unloads his physical and moral deformities so that he may go forward, erect and immaculate.

My contention is that those who dominate by virtue of their power position have designated the dominated country, race and gender witnessed from their superior stance as inferior.  Virginia Woolf mused on this subject,

 Writing in A Room of One’s Own  her theory that men (in her case British white males) needed supreme confidence to go out and conquer worlds.  One of the most riveting quotes, in my opinion, ever written was composed by Woolf when she wrote, “Woman have existed for centuries as a mirror in which men may see themselves as twice their natural size.”  She goes on to speak about the hundreds of books written during the Victorian period on the inferiority of women theorizing a splitting off of all qualities that would take away from man’s ability to conquer and situating them in women so that he would remain supremely confident. This psychological trick is exactly what Achebe is talking about.  Women and Africa have been referred to historically as dark, mysterious, something to be conquered and controlled.  

Chinua Achebe wrote Things Fall Apart  in 1958 to humanize his history, to bring the complexity of tribal culture and its people in from the margin and placed center stage.  According to the John Hopkins Literary Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism handout this book was instrumental in a movement toward an African postcolonial perspective.  Conrad’s novella was basically narrative with dialogue only modestly used for effect and none that was comprehensible given to the natives.  The tribal culture was complex with customs, values and spirituality.  There was an entire complex system of cultural signs just in the use of a drum.

Okonkwo had just blown out the palm-oil lamp and stretched himself on his bamboo bed when he heard the ogene of the town crier piercing the still night air. Gome, gome, gome, gome boomed the hollow metal. Then the crier gave his message, and at the end of it beat his instrument again.  And this was the message. Every man of Umuofia was asked to gather at the market place tomorrow morning.  Okonkwo wondered what was amiss, for he knew certainly that something was amiss.  He had discerned a clear overtone of tragedy in the crier’s voice, and even now he could still hear it as it grew dimmer and dimmer in the distance” (Achebe 9).

Even though there is some question as to Achebe’s complacency toward the treatment of women in the novel, the great achievement is the depth of the characters.  The issue of the subjugation of the native women is not one which could be addressed if the novel was to depict tribal culture in perhaps the nineteenth century (which would correspond with the time of Heart of Darkness). This was not a matrilineal society, and women would not have been allowed to question the patriarchy at that time.  All of that would come later.

The crowning achievement of Things Fall Apart can be determined once again by a theory purported by Bakhtin:

One of the basic internal themes of the novel (in his discussion of novel as an outgrowth of epic which in my opinion precedes the narrative stance and tells us what a novel can do) is precisely the theme of the hero’s inadequacy to his fate or his situation.  The individual is either greater than his fate, or less than his condition as a man.  He cannot become once and for all a clerk, a landowner, a merchant, a fiancé, a jealous lover, a father, and so forth…There always remains in him unrealized potential and unrealized demands.

Another Life is Derek Walcott’s autobiography written in Four Parts each signifying a poem in the collection. In this book, Walcott delineates in beautiful, painterly poetic language his world, the Caribbean.  It is about the discovery of his interest in art and how that changed his life.  I have mentioned how Walcott deemed himself a monster created out of the dream of reason ( Collected Poems 145), he describes in “Homage to Gregorias” his appropriation of his colonial heritage:

I had entered the house of literature as a houseboy

Filched as the slum child stole,

As the young slave appropriated

Those heirlooms temptingly left

With the Victorian homilies of Noli tangere.

This is my body. Drink.

This is my wine. (page 219)

Almost as a sacrament Walcott takes his colonial history into his own body.

Colonial literature was written in a narrative perspective by those representing imperialism, controlling our view of that world.  Postcolonial literature gives the oppressed a voice so that we may possess a more balanced idea of history.  A true hybrid of the two worlds, as Derek Walcott remains, steps back and creates an entirely new perspective on history.