Leah Guillory

December11, 2009

An Ambivalent Colonial / Post - Colonial Experience

            If I am being honest, this has been, to a great extent, an enormously painful journey in colonial and post-colonial intellectual expansion. That is not to say that I have not enjoyed the trip despite the fact that it has, naturally, required me to endure some tough literary terrain - which I indeed expect since Dr. White is the professor showing us the way. Nevertheless, I wasn’t expecting the terrain to be, at times, so emotionally treacherous.

            To begin, we started our journey with Lucy introducing us to her incessant psychological Ambivalence with being in America which is clear seeing that she “smile[s] with her mouth turned down at the corners (4). Lucy’s mixed feelings is shown in her relationship with Mariah who she seems to, at once, adore and deplore due to the fact that Mariah, a personification of colonial oppression, sees “beautiful flowers”  while Lucy sees “sorrow and bitterness.“ Lucy’s world view, far removed from Mariah’s, triggers  in her the need to question, what she sees as, Mariah’s ubiquitous idiocy, and thus she angrily asks: “ How does a person get that way?’

            Reading texts in a Bakhtinian Dialogic way, where texts carry a continuous conversational exchange, we then moved on to Robinson Crusoe, which I had never read before although many students had since it’s quite common to have already  read this problematic text. Crusoe’s involvement in the slave trade in a way that was simply for economic gain allowed me to, for the first, view the issue of slavery in a remarkably less angry and if I may add, Ambivalent way that I usually tend to view it. Arguably, Crusoe was merely a participant so that he could improve his station in life that he was dissatisfied with. He did not treat his man Friday with any of the usual disturbing deplorable methods that we see written in history books. For the first in my life, I was able to view the issue of slavery from a merely logical economic perspective.

            Our next postcolonial adventure took us to Jasmine and Train To Pakistan, two texts that deal with  conflict in India. In one Wednesday night class, Jasmine caused Sarah to view Jasmine as “flighty” while Allen seem upset that she “just up and left with Bud’s baby.” In response to Sarah’s statement, I raised the question that whether it’s inherently clear to move if you’re a post-colonial protagonist; that is to say, Jasmine shows up that if your motive is a pursuit for self-empowerment, then perhaps you’re likely pursue an assortment of personality transformations.

            Education is also an important theme in both texts.  In Train, an innocent  villager explains his fate: “Education is for the educated people who fought for it. We were slaves of the English, now we will be slaves of the educated Indians - or the Pakistanis” (48). Jasmine, on the other hand, will be nobody’s slave.

            Our Journey ends with Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Conrad’s Heart of Darkness both of which seemed intent on taking us on our darkest and most painful journey with two characters dying at the end, one self -inflicted and one inevitable outdone by the darkness, Okonkwo and Kurtz who are enormously complex, both likable, both terrible. When Okonkwo murders Ikemefuna, despite that fact that he didn’t want to seem weak to the others, I thought I would never recover, crying several days accompanied with my confused reaction to Kurtz who goes mad after pledging himself to the total pursuit of evil and corruption. Kurtz’s “Exterminate the brutes!” shows the way a white man can exploit the helpless savage.

A course Colonial / Post-Colonial Studies is not an easy journey to partake in. I  found myself becoming sadder and sadder by the text, not to mention, entertaining thoughts of suicide myself, affected viscerally by these literary realities. I am very glad that I stuck with the journey, though I still mourn for Okonkwo, pray for Lucy and applaud Jasmine.

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