LITR 5734: Colonial & Postcolonial Literature

Sample Student Final Exams 2008

Essay 2: Compose a dialogue between our four novels since the midterm. (Objectives 1, 2, and 3 + others)

Dawlat Yassin

Human Relationships and Individual Identity

It is natural for humans to have the best kind of relationships with whom they   have something in common. People identify with those who have the same political ideas, religious or ethical values. They usually identify themselves in opposition to others who lack their values, or who adopts values or beliefs that conflict with theirs. In colonial and post colonial literature, human relationships depend highly on whom the characters identify themselves with, in opposition to the “other” who is different in one way or another.

In his novel A Passage to India, E. M. Forster makes use of the dialogue technique to introduce one of the main themes in the novel; the relationship between Indian and English. A group of Indian friends discuss “whether or not it is possible to be friends with an Englishman”. (7)This statement is loaded with their identification of themselves and the others on the basis of one’s homeland or country. Throughout the novel, this group of people sticks to their way of identifying the self as Indian in opposition to the other, the English. One character differentiates himself from the group by trying to bring people from two different cultures together. Dr. Aziz  is the one who trespasses the identification barriers in a failing attempt at hybridism. Dr. Aziz’s accidental meeting with Mrs. Moore in the mosque starts a relationship of love and respect. This relationship between Dr. Aziz and Mrs. Moore is based on common understanding between both sides to be open minded and tolerant, and to relay on emotions in their relationships with people.(research posting) These characteristics differentiate both Aziz and Mrs. Moore each from his/her own countrymen.  Later on, Miss Quested and Mr. Fielding join this trend of tolerance and open- mindedness but they remain different in relying on logic rather than emotions in relation to people. However, this very characteristic will be behind many misunderstandings between them, especially Fielding and Aziz. Aziz and his English friends build their friendship on an elevated idea of open-mindedness. Once they get closer, this idea proves not workable in India while it is under British colonization. They split in a very awkward manner.

When Miss Quested accuses Aziz of attempted rape, she is supported by the whole English community. Only Mrs. Moore and Mr. Fielding do not join the rest of the English community in Miss Quested’s support. Mrs. Moore believes in Aziz’s innocence but does nothing, while Fielding sticks to his ideals and supports Aziz whom he believes to be innocent. This attitude of Fielding exiles him from the English community and draws him towards the native Indians. Throughout the novel, he proves to be brave and consistent in building his relations and identifying himself with people according to his own values. Unexpectedly, the friendship between Aziz and Fielding undergoes a big crisis when Aziz shuns the friendship on basis of false suspicions. Despite the final union between Aziz and Fielding, their relationship is doomed to be cut short, not on personal and human terms, but on big national issues. Fielding sacrifices the English community in India for his values of tolerance and justice and supports Aziz, while the later sacrifices his job and his English friends for his awakened nationalism. If the Aziz- Fielding friendship is to be maintained, both persons have to be equal; a condition that can never be fulfilled while one’s country is colonized and exploited by the other’s. This very issue surpasses all love and religion in its effects on human relations, or at least in the British- Indian relations embodied by Aziz and Fielding.(my second research posting). Finally Aziz is drawn towards native Hindus and avoids any contact with the English. He pushes his attempt at hybridism away and sticks to his pure national identity.

The story of India continues in A Train to Pakistan, where the English are no more part of the identifying equation of the self and the other. In the first page we know about “communal riots, precipitated by reports of the proposed division of the country into Hindu India and Moslem Pakistan”(Singh 1) Now we discover how mistaken Dr. Aziz is when he tells Fielding: “India shall be a nation! No foreigners of any sort! Hindu and Moslem and Sikh and all shall be one…we shall drive every blasted Englishman into the sea, and then we shall be friends”( Forster 361). In his text dialogue presentation in Spring 2008, Larry Stanley was right in saying: “What Aziz didn’t realize was that once England was gone there would be little or no help. The Indian people would be on their own, facing several religious groups vying for control”. Aziz is also mistaken when he tells Fielding, “we may hate one another, but we hate you most”. (Forster 361) Aziz, and possibly many Indians, are under the illusion that Indian national identity can unite different religious groups in the country, but the chaos and disorder that follow the English withdrawal prove the opposite. Events in a train to Pakistan show how lacking unity the Indian national identity is.

Unlike Aziz who attempts at hybridism, fails and back off, Iqbal remains imprisoned within his hybrid identity.  On the train, he categorizes himself, and is categorized by the passengers as educated. Although “Iqbal [does not] not comment”(Singh 38) when he is asked whether he is educated, the book that he carries is an adequate answer.  “the book [has] gone around the compartment for scrutiny. They had all looked at him. He was educated, therefore belonged to a different class. He was a babu”.(Singh 39)

While he is in Mano Majra, Iqbal keeps aloof from the villagers in his style of eating, sleeping and thinking. He is raised and educated on the British ways and lived sometimes in England. His national identity remains blurry, for he fails be part of the Indian culture. He justifies all his strange ways as those of the “city dwellers”. He identifies himself as “a city dweller” at the time he is trying to promote his political views among villagers.  Unaware of this distinction, he stays in Mano Majra and leaves it as a stranger without being able to have any real communication with its people. Again, Aziz, clings to nationalism in identifying with his countrymen, and succeeds in living in a Hindus community, while Iqbal remains lost within his hybrid identity till the end of the novel.

Defining the self and the other in terms of education comes to face Iqbal in a very explicit manner when the lambarder classifies Indians as educated and uneducated. This kind of identity puts Iqbal as the ‘other”, the educated in opposition to the uneducated villagers of Mano Majra. The lambardar foresees that if India is to be Independent from England, the relation between the educated and uneducated Indians will be that of Master-slave relationship. He prefers the previous stage of colonization and his so-called slavery to the British because “at least there was security”. ( Singh 49)

In his colonial novel Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe presents us with a Parent- child relationship. The same kind of relationship is also dealt with in the post colonial novel, Lucy by Jamaica Kincaid. The way Crusoe and Lucy define themselves and their assertion of their individualism highly affects their relationships with others. Despite the fact that Robinson Crusoe is a colonial figure while Lucy is a colonized one, both assert their individuality and seclude themselves psychologically and then physically from their societies. Crusoe and Lucy rebel against the situation of life they were born into, commit filial disobedience and live spiritual isolation that comes later to banish them into a physical one. 

Both Robinson Crusoe and Lucy leave their original societies and seek a desired identity somewhere else. Robinson Cruse is not satisfied with the economic situation his father brings him into. He wants to rise economically and build his own fortune. He disobeys his father, leave to sea and goes through many hardships, but he never give up. Under slavery to a Moorish master, Crusoe is an equal to the boy Xury. Robinson Crusoe and Xury run away from their master and help each other escaping slavery.  Once he becomes free, Crusoe identifies himself as Xury’s superior, and gives himself the right to sell the boy into slavery! Instead of becoming a helpful and compassionate friend of Xury, Crusoe manifests his colonial identity in selling the boy into slavery.

 Exiled on a deserted island, Crusoe finds refuge in religion. However, religion is not enough, for humans are social beings. He starts yearning for a companion to converse with. The surprise is that when this companion becomes available, Crusoe fails to identify with him as an equal, though different, human being.  Again, Crusoe enslaves the Man Friday after saving his life. He never ask Friday about his name, but imposes one on him. Crusoe denies Friday any culture and declared his old religion as false. In her final test for summer 2003, April Davis wrote:

However, perhaps his greater motivation is to justify his belief in the superiority of self. By attempting to elevate Friday from his nonwhite status, Crusoe falls into the mentality of civilizing the savage.  Crusoe has no illusions about actually raising Friday to an equal level because he is not interested in creating an equal, but validating the superiority of his own identity.

Robinson Crusoe shows inability to have or keep a human relationship, even with his own parents. He refuses his middle class status and aspires to a higher one on account of human relationships.

Like Crusoe, Lucy refuses her present situation, and travels overseas in search of a place to be reborn again with her desired identity. Robison Crusoe succeeds in gaining wealth and spiritual relief, but Lucy fails her attempted escape. Leaving the society where she is born does not solve her problematic identity, nor can it get her out of her psychological exile. In her homeland, Lucy yearns to leave, and once she leaves; she starts yearning to her old situation. The “other” in Lucy’s mind is her mother who wants Lucy to be a copy of her. Despite the fact that she is physically too far from her motherland, the ghost of her mother’s model haunts her mind until she realizes that she is “not like [her] mother but she is[her] mother”. Lucy is never satisfied with any kind of human relationship. The more she gets close to people the more she refrains from fulfilling the relationship. When she moves to live with her friend Peggy, she started to lose interest in the whole thing. Even in her sexual relationships, Lucy remains exiled from her partners.

As a matter of fact, Lucy rebels against the colonized situation. She does not want to be betrayed or victimized by anybody, rather she wants to experience the colonizer’s role; the one who takes decisions to start and to end a relationship. This is shown especially in her sexual attachments. She does not give her heart completely; she is never in love. Lucy is always reserved in her relations because of the fear of being betrayed. She no longer fits either in the colonized’s or the colonizer’s culture.

Her hybrid identity estranged her from her mother and her mother’s culture. Once she   finds herself where she always wishes to be, she discovers that she does not fit. Lucy is comparable to Iqbal from A Train to Pakistan, for both are colonized figures trapped in a state of hybridism and remain isolated from the beginning to the end of the novels.

In conclusion, main characters in colonial and postcolonial literature especially those from colonized countries undergo a psychological strife in identifying with other characters and having sound and healthy relationships. The dilemma of hybrid identity has played a big role in bringing people together or pulling them apart. Despite all confusion resulting from identity hybridism, it remains beneficial to be exposed to more than one culture.