Melissa Hollman

What Colonial and Postcolonial Literature Has Taught Me

            When I enrolled in this course I knew very little about colonial and postcolonial studies.  As the end of the semester is approaching I feel more confident in my knowledge of the struggles and triumphs of colonized people.  I also have a greater understanding of postcolonialism and American ignorance of this subject.  One of the things that I enjoyed most about the course was the use of different genres to explore the material. I found the use of various forms of media to be an approachable way to delve into a subject that I was unfamiliar with.  I felt that by reading a novel combined with web reviews and film clips helped to give me a better understanding of the material than a text alone.  As other students mentioned in class, I found the maps that coincided with lectures to be helpful for providing some geographical and historical background for the text.  It helped me when I was reading to have an idea and a picture of the places being referred to in the novel making the story easier to follow.  The maps allowed me to better follow along on the journey that the class made from the Caribbean, to India, and Africa.

            The first half of the class focused on Caribbean literature and in my midterm I acknowledged that I was guilty of the American idea of thinking of the Caribbean solely as a vacation destination.  I feel that my ignorance like that of others is due to the lack of knowledge about the Caribbean and I can now say that after taking this course the word Caribbean brings about so many thoughts and ideas that vacation destination is one of the last things that I think about.  When I think of Caribbean literature I automatically think of Jamaica Kincaid.  When reading A Small Place I began to develop an understanding of the effects of colonialism.  Kincaid’s description of postcolonial Antigua is a place that no longer feels like home to her.  Kincaid describes how the Europeans forced their culture on the Antiguans until little was left of Antigua that did not reflect European influence.

            When reading Kincaid’s Lucy I felt that if I had not known the author I could have guessed it was Kincaid due to the tone of the narrative.  I thought that the anger that Kincaid projects in A Small Place is mirrored by Lucy’s character.  I also found it interesting that the character of Lucy is somewhat autobiographical of Kincaid.  In reading an interview with Kincaid by Allan Vorda I discovered that Kincaid had a falling out with her mother and moved to New York just as Lucy did.  After learning of the relationship between Kincaid and the character of Lucy I found the novel to be even more interesting because I knew that it had some basis of truth in the midst of the fiction.  I found Lucy’s journey to assimilate to American culture and to make a place for herself as a way to better understand American ignorance to colonialism which is the focus of course objective 3. 

            Lucy’s trip from her homeland to America is similar to Jasmine’s journey from India to America in Bharati Mukherjee’s novel.  Lucy and Jasmine’s stories relate to course objective 1b as both characters are migrating to the United States though for very different reasons.  Shortly after Jasmine arrives in America she must begin trying to fit in.  I thought that Jasmine’s (Jazzy’s) transformation by Lillian is a great example of how appearance emphasizes a person’s culture and creates the distinction of the self and other.  Lillian made sure that Jazzy wore American clothes and walked American so she would look like she belonged.  I found Jasmine’s many identities to be one of the most interesting themes of the novel. Each identity has a name, such as Jazzy, as if she were a completely different person at each of these stages in her life. 

            I greatly enjoyed Lucy and Jasmine because I felt that they were the novels I could most easily relate to, not only because they are novels about women, but because they are more recent works.  I agree with the comment that Cory Owens made in her 2008 final exam when she said that she felt that Jasmine was easier to relate to because it is a modern text, much of which takes place in America.  Because the U.S. is the setting for the majority of these novels it was easier for me to relate to the story rather than a setting that takes place in a foreign land that makes references to places or cultural practices that I am not familiar with.

            In my journey to better understand other cultures from a colonial-postcolonial perspective I decided to research culture through food.  The types of food we eat tell a lot about who we are and where we come from so I thought exploring food would be an interesting way to learn about the traditional practices of other societies.  For my first research post I explored the effects of colonialism on Caribbean cuisine.  Through my research I learned about the staple items that make up Caribbean cuisine.  I discovered that the native people of the Caribbean, the Carib, Arawak, and Taino Indians, acquired their food by hunting, fishing, and growing foods native to the islands.  The Indians also had particular ways that they prepared and cooked their food.  I then learned how these traditions changed when Europeans invaded the islands.  In some ways colonization helped to improve the ways in which the Indians obtained their foods.  The colonizers implemented new farming methods which produced larger harvests and introduced new foods, spices, and cooking methods to the traditional Caribbean cuisine which improved and enhanced Caribbean dishes.

            For my second posting I chose to stay with the theme of food but decided to relate food to the literature of the course. I first looked at the way food is used for comfort in Lucy.  In the novel Lucy not only finds comfort in the traditional food of her homeland but finds comfort in remembering that she loved the food more when her grandmother made it.  I used this idea to also show the self-other relationship between Lucy and Mariah by referring to Mariah’s ways of cooking being foreign and undesirable to Lucy.

            I continued exploring the theme of comfort food by looking at African-American Cuisine and relating this to Things Fall Apart.  I referenced the importance of food in the novel to emphasize gender roles and the use of food for religious and traditional celebration such as the “Feast of the New Yam.”  I then learned how colonialism affected traditional African Cuisine as a result of African slaves being brought to America.  When Africans began to incorporate American staples into their dishes African-American Cuisine was born.  From this new cuisine particular foods were considered to be comfort food but were given the name soul food as a way to describe the way that these foods provided emotional comfort.

            I feel that my research of multicultural cuisines helped me to develop a better understanding of the cultures that we were reading about in the course and is a subject that I plan to continue to explore on my own.  I plan to use food as an additional way to introduce myself to cultures and plan to try to take on the challenge of making some of the traditional recipes that I have found in my own kitchen.  This course has taught me how to discover other cultures through different sources such as literature, film, and poetry. Through this experience I have also become more aware of my preconceived ideas about unfamiliar places.  I now have a better understanding of the importance of colonial and postcolonial studies because it is something that is never ending.  The world is continually changing and one culture continues to influence the other either directly or indirectly.

Vorda, Allan. “An Interview with Jamaica Kincaid.” Mississippi Review 24.3 (1996): 49-76.