Aaron Schneider

The Way Things Really Were

                In reading numerous final exam postings from previous semesters, I was struck by Corey Owen’s 2008 posting titled “What I Thought I Knew”.  Having had the pleasure of seeing Corey present her thesis on Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine during our 2009 Colonial-Post Colonial Literature course, I was intrigued by what she might potentially have to say.  Upon reading her essay, I discovered many of my own thoughts captured in her words.  At the very least, this semester has taught me how much I do not know about the world in which I live.

                Coming into this course, I had very little exposure to Colonial and Post Colonial Literature other than Rudyard Kipling’s short story “The Man Who Would Be King”.  Even in teaching the story for two years in my 7^th grade classroom, I (like a true colonizer) focused more on Peachey Carnehan and Daniel Dravot’s changing relationship than I did the victims of their colonial conquests.  During this semester, I was able to see, for the first time, just how insolent and naïve the mind of an American can be when discussing America’s relationship with other nations.  Having the luxury of discussing Kipling’s short story in our Colonial-Post Colonial course, while at the same time reading it in my 7^th grade classroom, has given me the opportunity to introduce the colonizer/colonized relationship to my students; the results have been astounding.  The conversations generated by students in regards to the relationships between race and class were something I never expected to have happened.  I must admit that I had my doubts about the relevance of this course to my middle school classroom instruction, but implementing what I am learning in graduate class in my everyday classroom has assured me that I am doing something more than adding a diploma to my wall: I am learning how to encourage my students to interpret and discuss literature at a higher level.

                Like most Americans, I believed (before this course) that the colonizer/colonized relationship tended to stay within the confines of two colors: white and black.  Perhaps because America has focused on these two colors too much in the context of its own history, I could not see too far outside the boundaries of my own country.  Through my two research posts this semester, I have been able to remove the blinders and discover how the discussion of colonization extends to all colors, races, countries, and classes.  My first research post focused primarily on the Latino character of Esteban Trueba in Isabel Allende’s 1982 novel The House of the Spirits.  In my research, I came to understand that while Anglo Europeans and Americans spent much time in Africa and the Caribbean colonizing African nations, Latinos were using their own form of colonization to establish social class systems among their own people.  It was interesting to see the dynamics of how Latinos used the feudal system to establish hierarchy and dictatorship in its own lands, imposing a form of colonization among its own people. 

In my second posting, I explored the role of missionaries in the history of colonization based on Don Richardson’s Peace Child and Chingua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart.  As a teacher in a Christian school, I have found it difficult for me to come to grips with the possibility that missionaries in Africa played a major role in colonization.  Objective three for the course (accounting for Americans difficulties with colonial and post colonial discourse) took on a whole new meaning as I was forced to analyze the issue not only as an American, but also as a “missionary” in my own right.  I came to discover that, while America has largely been ignorant in imposing its religious beliefs on third world nations (i.e. the missionaries invading the Ibo villages of Africa in Things Fall Apart) some missionaries used cultural adaptation to share the message of the gospel of Christ (as found in Don Richardson’s Peace Child).

                In exploring colonization across race and class, I came to discover an entirely different relationship than expected: the self and other.  At the beginning of the course, I viewed each of these aspects for what I thought they were; I viewed the colonizer as having the identity of “self”, while the colonized was identified solely as the “other”.  As the course progressed, I began to discover that the possibility of humanizing interaction could take place between the “self” and the “other” in the form of dialogue.  Through the conversations and actions of Crusoe and Friday in Defoe’s novel Robinson Crusoe, as well as those between Lucy and Mariah in Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy, I came to see true feeling and emotion expressed between both the colonizer and the colonized.  For brief periods of time, a genuine form of love was developed and, through this love, I was able to see the colonizer as something more than just a villain.  After I came to this conclusion, I was then able to create a humanizing experience between both the colonizer and the colonized.  The colonizer and colonized had more in common than I previously anticipated based on the principle that “any concept or doctrine applies to all persons and /or things for all times and in all situations” (universalism). 

                My biggest form of growth in the course came namely in the analysis of the terms “tradition” and “modernity”.  In seeing colonial and post colonial texts come into dialogue with each other in the context of the same country, I was able to better draw parallels between both tradition and modernity.  In each of the texts explored throughout the course, we come to find intertextuality through the themes of modernity and tradition.  By pairing Robinson Crusoe and Lucy, we see two very modern characters leaving their homelands to explore other nations, but at various times, still resorting back to their traditional upbringings throughout the course of their journeys.  The same can be said for the character of Jugga in Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan and the character of Jasmine in Bharati Mukherjee’s novel of the same name.  Jugga is traditional enough to be loyal to his people and their customs, but just modern enough to push the limits and cross racial boundaries in engaging in a relationship with a Muslim woman.  Jasmine goes through many modern “cleansings”, which are symbolized by her taking numerous names throughout the novel.  Jasmine upholds her traditional values in the sense that she feels obligated to stay loyal to Bud as he becomes an invalid, but in the end, her modernity causes her to take flight to California with Taylor and Duff in the pursuit of the “American Dream”.  We see the exploration of modernity and tradition revealed in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart as Okonkwo disowns his father (disrespect of the elderly and the tribal bond of family) and embraces the responsibility for his family’s well-being.  After embracing this modernity, he resorts back to tradition to bridge the gap in the generational continuity that was created by his father.  Marlow brings the modernity of the white man to primitive Africa in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness thus creating another collision of the modern and traditional themes.

                Through each aspect of this course, I was constantly brought into confrontation with the truth that America IS a colonizing nation.  While I find it difficult to claim association with the condescending, dehumanizing aspects of colonization, the old cliché of “the truth hurts” reminds me that colonization and America’s part in its history is real.  Without discussion and research, however, individuals can never come to know the true origins of the persecution faced by countless races and cultures around the world.  It is refreshing to be able to “enlighten” my students about simple colonial-post colonial truths, such as “black does not necessarily constitute an “African American”.  Perhaps it would be naïve of me to say, but three months ago I would have had a tendency to agree with my students because I did not know any better, or because I didn’t know enough about colonization and immigration to make the proper correction.  The exploration of so many different cultures spanning multiple continents has helped me to perceive other places on the globe as humanizing.  I have always known the basic geographical truths about India, Africa, and the Caribbean, but I have never known them as more than a country found on the Asian continent, the “dark continent”, and a great tourist attraction.  After taking this course, world literature has taken on a whole new meaning from both a literary and historical stand-point.  Now that I can fully accept the responsibility of understanding where my nation stands in the context of history as a colonizer, I can share “what I thought I knew” with my students in the way it really was and is.